Mike Eli

@awwstn I’m really rooting for you

The Certifiably Insane Way to Build an AI Agent: 1. choose a category where mistake tolerance is roughly the same as it is in self-driving cars. we chose "email-based scheduling assistant." many people want this product, but they immediately fire him if he screws up an interaction with a prospect, a candidate, or a potential investor 2. you learn that the edge cases are too complex and too frequent to be solvable. ours: managing timezones for people who travel (and change travel plans) constantly. knowing when NOT to respond, when to text the customer on the side to verify something, when to follow up, which sub-calendar to use, when to bend the rules on availability, when we can schedule that one type of call during your commute but not the other type of call. sharing your availabilities without compromising your privacy. and on and on. 3. the product doesn't feel viable, but you don't want to give up. you spend hours in a hot tub in Marin with a friend who makes self-driving cars. you make a plan to do it the way they did: hold the steering wheel. you go home and build a human-in-the-loop platform and hire contractors to serve as a backstop and catch mistakes before they happen (and to help design a map of what a world-class EA would do in every weird scenario). you decide trust is the currency in your category, so it must be the thing you won't compromise on. the product must succeed at any scheduling request, no matter how complicated. 4. you instantly feel an overwhelming market pull. so you keep going, growing that team to 75 people working 24/7 to support the nonstop scheduling needs of your customers. tons of engineering time goes to scaling the human platform instead of building the product. 5. you try to raise a Series A and investors say you are insane. your gross margins are extremely negative. they believe this is a problem worth solving, but they don't believe it is as hard to solve as you say. they want AI, not humans. your competitors put "NO HUMANS IN THE LOOP" on their landing pages to call you out. you keep going. 6. you work day and night building the harness that can meet the quality standard your customers have come to expect. you create a massive synthetic gold dataset. audit it, and clean it, label it. repeat. then, experiments. fine-tuning. RL. ACE. DSPy. sub-agents. sub agents for your sub-agents. rebuild the harness. throw more tokens at the problem. 7. some weeks you make big progress. some weeks your evals climb a single basis point, but that's better than nothing. more experiments. more tokens. john coogan said the hot trend in 2026 will be dogged pursuits. that pushes you to continue the pursuit, doggedly. 8. then, one day, you realize you are scheduling thousands of meetings a day and approaching 50% autopilot with no increase in churn or complaints. you put 150 customers in a full self-driving experiment, and they use the product MORE than they were using it when they had the human backstop. you can really start to let go of the steering wheel. 9. you don't know yet if this was a hill worth climbing, but you are nonetheless stoked that you can see the top. you have created a proprietary map of what to do in a million different situations. nobody else has that map, and the models keep getting better at following maps. your plan was to bet on trust, and your product can be trusted. today was the first day Howie crossed 50% autopilot:

@abdushodmonov @briannjho Only winners are the consumers paying $0 🥶

SpoiledChild is one of the brands under $ODD is running $0 to try and then pay if you keep it. ODD released their earnings this morning and the numbers mirrors what we are seeing in the DTC world. Let me break it down.

@DavisPaipa How should we optimize for this?

New record on Shoptank. $1,350 order. Source: ChatGPT. A merchant's customer asked ChatGPT what to buy, ChatGPT sent them straight to the Shopify store, and they checked out at $1,350. This is the channel nobody is optimizing for yet.

@RomanEcom @robj3d3 I can’t disagree. 😂 looking to visit HK soon.

@ItsMikeEli @robj3d3 Singapore is boring

Dear Hong Kong people, please make your case.

@frydwia Genuine question as a user of Viktor: what would you say the moat is when using Viktor vs. a business building their own Hermes agent within the context of Slack? I’ve been enjoying the product - kudos to you and the team!

Series A -> Monaco

@RomanEcom @robj3d3 Have you been to Singapore? How would you compare both Asian tigers?

1/ Merit based economy 2/ Incredible nature 3/ Close to the action (aka China) for anyone in export / import (aka eCom or making physical products) All the rest you know, low taxes, safe bla bla - Strong culture and community among expats and I think easy to feel at home. If you have kids: Incredible schools

Anyone's cracked static / native ads (on Meta) to VSLs?

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs “Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.” For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics. “We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.” People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable: “The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.” He continues: “Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.” They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something. “We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.” Source: @lennysan (Feb 2025)

@niakjaw Hahahaha amazing 😂

"Ok Claude, now based on the Breakthrough Advertising PDF I shared with you, write a winning ad for my supplement brand"

@RomanEcom @MentorPass Is he technical? What kind of dev does one look for here?

Another bear case on $SHOP Talked to a founder on @MentorPass yesterday who’s done ~$45M TTM and is projecting $100M+ run rate with an AI-first approach. Duo-channel business: - Native ads - Google Ads Zero Meta. Zero AppLovin. The reason he’s growing so fast? He’s not on Shopify. He runs everything on a Medusa-like headless solution built on Next.js (blanking on the exact name). His rationale was simple: 1/ Seamless plug-and-play with Claude 2/ Can spin up landing pages + localization insanely easily (he launches hundreds of products per month) 3/ Way more iterations, flexibility, and speed vs Shopify Cost wasn’t even the deciding factor (though it’s much cheaper than a full $SHOP stack). This is becoming the new normal. Pretty crazy to watch. If I had the courage I’d switch Linjer tomorrow — our catalog management and especially localization is an absolute nightmare on Shopify compared to what this guy had. But we're growing a lot this year and I don't want to disrupt the train.

@victorcardenas This ad is amazing. Also love slash!

Introducing Slash Global Cards: USD virtual cards built for non US businesses. > Issue virtual cards at scale > Granular spend controls > No US entity required Join the dollar economy today.

@ecommilan Prompt

It took my 12mins to show a guy starting out in ecom how to build a creative ad generator. We took 10 winning ads from his competitors and ran a prompt on them. His agency was charging him $4,200/month for 8 ads. Cancelled them. Now he ships 30 ads a week himself. Comment "PROMPT" for the ad generating prompt.

"You're not winning a subscription box war with Butcher Box—they do $600M/yr." So @chrisorzy did the opposite for ranchers: Whole cow for $7,000. Cold traffic on Facebook. FREE freezer included. "The CAC didn't scale with the cost of the product. I recognized this. No one else did."

@RomanEcom Is ShopPay worth the incrementality?

Had dinner with some sharp D2C founders the other night. One dropped a fascinating bear case on $SHOP: He previously built + sold his own D2C brand. Now he’s rapidly testing a bunch of new ones — all built with Claude + a custom-coded checkout from a Scandinavia-based payments company. CRs are higher and oddly $META CPMs are lower on the non Shopify store. His co-founder is technical, so he can execute on this without worrying too much. I wouldn’t have the guts yet… but with AI moving this fast, maybe in 3-6 months I will. Curious if anyone else is seeing similar custom vs. Shopify gaps. In particular for $META CPMs

CPG / D2C having its moment. Late 2024 I was chatting with an advisor that this time would come, considering how disruptive AI is to software/tech. AI makes running a consumer brand easier but at the same time can’t disrupt physical products… Going to see more activity incoming. 👀

@samanizadiyar @RomanEcom What’s their price range? Looks decent if they can do real time accounting

@RomanEcom Roman — ottit.com can help. Full service bookkeeping firm for e-com, works mostly mid market (+10M), daily Slack comms, etc. DMing

I am looking for a bookkeeper for one of my US entities that can: 1. Do simple General Ledger reconciliation every Monday EOD for T-7 2. File our US taxes for this entity 3. Respond on Slack or email in a timely manner Any recommendations? How much would you pay for the above? ~$20m USD revenue entity

Alpha in eCom is scrolling X and bookmarking posts 😂

@RomanEcom Hey @RomanEcom - how do we apply to join?

Doing the next one this month. Can't wait. This time I'll have a content team and I'll share the agenda ahead of time here on X. Hopefully it will induce enough FOMO for more of my American friends to fly out 15+ hours to the event next year

@niakjaw Over-index on learning creatives. Account structure is secondary.

I wanna pay someone to teach me media buying on Meta. Who do you recommend?

@RomanEcom @Peak21_ How do we get tickets? @RomanEcom

@Peak21_ hosted a 3-day eCommerce get-together for around ~40 founders in Hong Kong last month. The occasion was the famous annual Canton Fair that many D2C founders go to. We had people fly in from the US, Canada, Singapore and all across the globe. The group of founders represented more than $400M of GMV - with mostly bootstrapped founders! Special thanks to @jeffreyclyam our founding investor for helping to arrange and co-host and for the team at Peak 21 pulling this all together last minute. We'll be hosting more events in the future - please leave a comment below if you want to attend the next one :)