James Dohm

activate new customers, retain current ones and personalize for everyone two words: Rivo 2025 🫶 @seanfrank @couuor @ridgewallet @9operators

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@iamshaanarora congrats man!

This feels surreal to say. Alia has officially been acquired by Dotdigital. There were a lot of nights I pictured writing this post. [more emotional parts below, but I need to first talk to our customers and partners before anything else] NOTHING will change for our partners and customers. We're not asking anyone to move their ESPs to keep working with Alia. If you have Slack channels with us, those channels will remain and you'll still keep your current CSMs with us. Our same commitment to customer support and customer success for our customers and partners will still be there in full force. We're not done building Alia by any means. Our team and product are staying intact. And we're excited to build and move quickly as we've always done, but now with the resources of a much larger company. - I want to first express gratitude to my co-founding team. Cory, Bill, and Jake have challenged me every single second of this journey and I appreciate it more than they'll ever know. I try to read more and listen to more podcasts so that I can understand what they're saying when they're chatting to eachother at work. I'm forever indebted to them, and I'm excited to keep building with them for a very long time. I'm extremely grateful for the broader Alia team as well. I know that we ask a lot and that we're not the most typical company in many respects, but I'm damn proud of you all and your commitment to the company. I'm very grateful to my family for the unwavering support and all the thoughts and prayers they've been sending since we started this whole thing four years ago. When I asked my parents if I could live with them after college and work full-time on my crazy idea that had no funding or revenue, they didn't hesitate for a second. Living at home with them when our company had no money gave me the chance to ground myself and work as hard as humanly possible. My parents have supported me and given me space when I needed it, and I appreciate them dealing with me when my mood swings based on the revenue growth of the company on a week-to-week basis. I also want to thank my friends for supporting us and caring. I know we can act crazy sometimes about this company and I appreciate you bearing with us. Thank you to Dotdigital for trusting us and our mission. We’re just getting started, and we’re thrilled to build the future side by side. Cory and I first started building Alia four years ago when we were 20 years old, both interns at a bank. Being able to celebrate this with the same person who I've been with since the start is a feeling I can't put into words. Oh, and by the way, we didn't take a dollar of outside funding to build Alia. As I'm holding back tears, I'll conclude with this: I've been posting almost every weekday since January 2024 on LinkedIn and Twitter. And, at least once a week since then, I've dreamt of writing this post and how it'd feel to write it. It feels better than I could've ever imagined.

@Moore Very good take.

After going all in with coding agents, when I open up Figma it’s jarring how slow and clunky the process is. I’ll probably go back to designing in code then using the MCP to translate that back to Figma for design teams that only work in the editor.

Think about it.

Stuart has set the benchmark in the Shopify app space of AI driving code velocity. Feeling ashamed Recharge being only at 55% of code is AI generated lots to learn and improve.

97.5% of all work + relationship problems can be solved by … 1️⃣ Who 2️⃣ Does what 3️⃣ By when And then create a checklist to detail what “does what” actually means. Clear expectations are magical 😍

Rivo ended the year just under $6M ARR (over 100% YoY growth). Here are my top 4 learnings as we scale our bootstrapped startup. I'm afraid to report that most of the generic/boring business advice is usually the answer, if you can do it well and more importantly, consistently. TL;DR - Hire really good people - Build a product people care about - Ship product as fast as possible. - Attempt to support these customers at a maniacal level. 1. Hiring We were able to hire some of the best talent in the industry last year. We'll always look for people to grow into roles but hiring people who have completed our goals before, and are replicating their success here is invaluable. 2. Speed For me, speed is by far the most important factor in business. Across everything. Your business will eventually be disrupted by someone moving consistently faster than you, compounded over the course of many years. Don't let this happen. Shopify are a great example of a company who don't slow down and open the door for anyone else. 3. Never be too lean in support/success We grew really fast in Q2 and didn't have enough headcount to meet demand on the success side. We got spread thin and had a bumpy couple of months. We completely restructured the org, hired an amazing, true head of success and doubled our team. Your brand/reputation is determined by how well people are treated pre and post onboarding. Major focus for us this year. 4. Keep going This shit is hard. Our market had a rocky year. At least once a month I want to quit (for the last 10 years). Every CEO/Founder I know is in the same boat, just keep hammering on if you really believe in what you are building. 2026: Next stop $10M ARR and beyond.

Rivo Fall Editions is now live. 28 meaningful updates across the platform But best of all... WALLET PASSES ARE NOW 100% FREE Let's dig in..

lol - major progress at Rivo today. We have earned a compare page powered by ad spend from a large legacy competitor. All love of course, pretty neat that our tiny bootstrapped startup is causing this much disruption to a company that’s raised over $500M : -) What a time to be relentlessly shipping software as a bootstrapped startup..

Too many entrepreneurs are too focused on scaling profits and not enough on scaling value. The irony is that scaling value is how you get truly wealthy in a sustainable and predictable way.

@0x15f banger site - love the color palette

New website is liveeee -> uselayers.com

@0x15f !!!

MVP = done 🚀🚀

This is the plan to scale past $25M ARR at Rivo, fully bootstrapped. 1. Ship quality product 10x faster than our competition by using agentic workflows. (Emphasis on quality) 2. Charge fair prices and attempt to provide exceptional support. 3. Hire the best people from the industry. 4. Go as big and as fast as we possibly can. Currently re-investing every penny to make this happen. Joining the lads to chat soon..

we had the good fortune of finding a one-pager being used against us by a legacy competitor. some were actually decent feature suggestions tbh, while one was: 4. Maturity: Experience is valuable, because it means we have a diverse network within the eCommerce space, investments from Shopify, exposure to thousands and thousands of brands (so we know what works, and what doesnʼt). 😂😂 all of this to say: Not only have we built all of the useful suggestions on the deck - we've added another 30+ new updates we are dropping in upcoming our Rivo SUMMER EDITIONS 2025. never had this much fun in my life building a business before :-) Notes: I love competition in business, i have zero ill will towards anyone, I play business like a game I am obsessed with, and the open market ultimately decides who wins. No shade here.

@stuartchaney 🎯 This summer editions is going to be fun

Store Credit at Rivo - now powered by @Shopify Store Credit. No workarounds or hacks needed.

insane opportunity to join a cracked engineering team

@stuartchaney locked in for Q3.

added more ARR at Rivo in the last 24 hrs than the entire month of June 2024. scaling SaaS from zero is brutal - spent 3 years losing money and banging my head against the wall. keep going if you believe in what you're building

Marketing Operators E066: DTC Marketers - Where Are You Wasting Your Time? @couuor @codyplof @connorrolain Watch the full episode here 👇

Q2 results at Rivo: - ARR: $4.18M - Growth: +24.65% - Active Subscriptions: 1,777 Good stuff: - Record pipeline already in place for next Q - We hired some of the best people in the industry - AI has completely changed our engineering workflows Not so good stuff: Had our first ever consolidation casualty. Brand was happy but churned to consolidate the same product with another vendor they use for multiple products already. Whether you agree with consolidation or not - we will see this more across ecom SaaS in the very near future, and especially in this economic climate. ------ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER