Rivo

retention vibes are through the roof

One of my favorite partners in DTC — they move quick, lean in, and truly care about the partnership. Highly recommend Rivo. @stuartchaney congratulations on the innovation. #NotSponsored 😉

Stuart is the saas version of a drop ship demon (this is a complement)

In the last 12 months, product velocity at Rivo has skyrocketed since moving engineering to a 100% agentic AI workflow. To celebrate, here's 100+ meaningful product updates from the past 90 days. Rivo Editions Spring 2026 Highlights:

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368 days later.. after spending 10-12 hrs per week dedicated to the task - we've finally hit 100% agentic coding coverage at Rivo. this is simply measured by the fact that there hasn't been a single line of code manually written in over 3 weeks. Since the start of the year, we've hit new PR records, seen a 70%+ reduction in reported bugs and grown revenue steadily. My top takeaways: - Make your workflows LLM agnostic so you can take them to any provider at any time. - The quality and stability of the models are more important to the end result than we'd like to think. - Context engineering > process engineering. Give it read access to every single tool and employee would have. ----------------- PS .Something big on the way this week..

I've 11xd my PRs merged to production in the last year as CEO & Head of Engineering. AI now writes 95% of all code at Rivo. Surprising takeaway is that reported bugs are down over 70% with the now automated testing and QA agents that run over these PRS.

SaaS companies with a technical CEO who has always shipped code - are massively undervalued right now.

building software in 2026

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.

6 predictions for ecom SaaS in 2026 I've been here for more than 10 years, and have seen more change in the last 12 months than the entire time before it. Here's what I think might be coming up next.. 1). Vendors continue building horizontally. This is already in full swing, and is driven by simple economics of supply and demand. - Cost of building quality product has already plummeted (supply) - TAM is not growing anywhere near the same rate (demand) To grow, and even compete, you need to sell more stuff to the same people - who already know, like, and trust you. I also believe, in general, brands want less vendors, tools, success reps, at consolidated prices. When creating quality software was VERY hard, building more products would lead to a diluted experience. This is no longer true if you've made the jump to agentic coding. 2). The SaaS <> Service merge accelerates. Brands want outcomes, not another tool to figure out and manage their business goals from. eg: Brand installs retention software. If we do not deliver increased LTV, repeat purchase rate, etc, then they will churn. Creating software for someone to use is simply not enough anymore. 3). Bootstrapping becomes the default. This may have already happened tbh, but unless you are a heavy AI play, you will have a hard time raising as it is. 4). Number of enterprise/mid-market vendors declines. The number of SaaS vendors competing for business from brands doing $1M+ GMV will shrink. The fact of the matter is that it has gotten REALLY hard to compete in this market. (the last 3 years, to the last 3 years prior are absolutely night and day). Not complaining, just a fact. Outcomes and humans drive this end of the market. If you are a software business in the AI boom - there are much better ways to make money right now. We've already seen a few pre-PMF vendors disappear overnight.. more will follow. 5). We start moving towards true agentic software - vs someone "using" your app. Shopify Sidekick is early, but shows where things are going. Let's be honest, nobody has the time or wants to log into an app and click buttons. They want outcomes, and someone to hold accountable to drive these. Just like CS software has agents that drive outcomes - we'll start to see this across other verticals. Definitely won't be widespread or ready, but it will start to happen. 6). Agentic coding enters the majority. If your engineering team is still writing code by hand and has not adopted tools like Claude Code, Cursor, etc - you are behind and you will get eaten by your competition using these tools. Opus 4.5 was the turning point here and we have already seen some engineering OG's do a U-turn on this in previous weeks. This will continue to accelerate the supply/demand situation. NOTE: This is from the perspective of my business in the mid-market/enterprise side of ecom saas :)

been a good year 🙏

Rivo BFCM 2025: Top level numbers: - 6,115,254 orders processed - $748,156,878 in sales processed But the most important metric for any SaaS vendor: > 99.99% requests in the green at thousands of requests per second.

Opus 4.5 has taken us to the next level. I can now offload 8-10 Linear tickets at a time with no humans in the loop until after the PR is reviewed in Github. - linear cli - github cli - claude code - cc-sessions - git-worktrees - playwright-mcp The step up in quality is exceptional. Pretty insane to think where this will be 12 months from now..

strap in

have seen a solid 20%+ in reliability of workflows since implementing Claude Skills. Adding this Skill Creator template is a good place to get started.

we’re about to hit 80% of the code being shipped at Rivo coming from agentic coding tools. The major unlock that took us from 50-80% has been the cc-sessions framework by @AgentofToastX for Claude Code. I think we’ll see a major shift towards agentic coding frameworks just like we saw with languages like Ruby on Rails/Django

my experience in what it takes to overcome the biggest SaaS milestone blockers. $0 - $1M ARR: First million is completely a mindset issue. Once you break that, everything else becomes possible. $1 - $5M ARR: Determination to hit your numbers, lazer focused on product and customers. $5M ARR -$10M ARR: Execution and team to scale. I've gotten to $5M before with a team of 8, but it is very hard to scale past here without a killer team in place, scaling operations. *all of these apply at all levels.

the only thing better than a $15 Shopify app is taking one that costs $299 - $999+ and making it $0 forever. we are tanking the wallet pass saas industry today.

we are tanking the wallet pass ecom saas industry our entire wallet pass product is now $0 forever

this is why the future of saas is so scary you have a solo founder, bootstrapping his way AND WINNING vs VC backed companies...