Coco December Update

🧠 The Takeaways

My 3 key takeaways from my year #1 running Coco.

1. I’m more bullish on Europe vs. the US. For the 1st time.

2. Meta’s reign is about to hit its peak.

3. Affordable doesn’t make sense anymore.

+ Coco Nov Update

LBAB! Community - The November Coco Update

November was primetime and we stepped up hitting Coco's best month ever: officially doubling our Rev run rate from when we acquired Coco in Feb. 

Scaling to support sending ~1m messages throughout the month. 

I had 2:30am wake times on Black Friday and Cyber Monday which was brutal, but we made it through. Beating forecast.

Product:

We released Dynamic Discount Codes + and new onboarding, making it easier to connect to WhatsApp.

Growth:

We hit across the board. 

• Rev: 105% to target

• Net New logos: 109% to target

• All while profitable.

Great month for Coco. Giving us the springboard to scale into next year.

Financials:

Strong across the board. We saw Gross Margins decline as our Revenue was a much heavier mix of messaging than normal. But remaining profitable with cashflow in a strong position is setting us up for a strong Dec & 2026.

Now it’s all about crushing December.

Let’s Analyze This Year

After spending 1 month deep in the trenches running and scaling Coco here are my 3 big takeaways for 2026.

1) I’m more bullish on EMEA than the US.

For the first time in my career I’m more bullish on the Shopify ecosystem in Europe than in the US for both Brands and SaaS.

I’ve covered how difficult the US market has been this year at nauseam.

• Tariff uncertainty,

• Inflation

• Consumer confidence plummeting

• Stock market propped up by 10 companies

From all the SaaS bizs I advise + work with + talk to: the US market has been brutal this year. No one wants to invest in new tech. Everyone continues to cut budgets.

But in Europe brands are firing on all cylinders.

• New Brands are launching and scaling left and right.

• New + existing brands are growing across the continent.

• Small brands are doing well and taking market share. 

It doesn’t have the few winners win bigger over hang of the states. 

This is the first year in my career I’m more bullish on European growth over American. Now, It’s a significantly smaller market to start with so we are talking about growth rates not absolute growth, but where momentum builds. Momentum builds.

Takeaway: EMEA is popping while the US is limping along.

2) Everyone is more dependent on Meta.

And I don’t think this trend is reversing. For years I have (and others) been harping about diversifying off of Meta and looking into any channel that could scale. 

I’ve predicted 5 out of the last 2 major channels, which honestly haven’t been that massive.

This is the year I’m throwing in the towel as it seems all major brands have as well and conceding that Meta has 5 more years of utter dominance over Shopify brands budgets.

Unfortunately there just isn’t anything as compelling for brands to invest meaningful (I’m talking about 40%+) of their budget into until they get to 9-10 figs+.

At this point I’m resigned to the reality that everyone is playing Meta’s game.

What concerns me about that?

Meta needs to pay back these insane AI investments. And they don’t have a new “AI biz line”.

The only way I see Ad rates declining is through new inventory. But Meta is struggling to create great WhatsApp ad experiences without ruining the consumer experience. And I can’t imagine a major acquisition gets through regulation.

Expect more improvements to the Ads product powered by these AI investments which means 1 thing. More Expensive Ads.

Takeaway: We’re entering peak Meta monopoly.

3)  The middle exists anymore.

In the States at least. You either sell a quasi-luxury/luxury goods or you’re a Walmart supplier. There’s nothing else anymore.

The top 10% of US households own 70% of the wealth. 

Now Americans are irresponsible spenders. They’ll continue to spend through economic conditions when you think they wouldn’t. But spending or not that doesn't prop up the SMB-eCom economy.

By definition most eCom purchases are discretionary since we don’t sell core food items, housing or healthcare.

When you look at the brands that have exploded over the last 4 years they are the “Way too expensive” version of X.

• Gruns: $40 vitamin gummies

• Skims: $50 Bras

• Dr. Squatch: $6 bars of soap

• Stanley: $40 big water bottle.

• Ridge: $100 men’s wallet.

True Classic is the only biz I could find that is 9-figs+ selling affordable ($16 T-shirts) branding. But they’re more of anomaly than the norm.

And these were brands who hit 9-fig scale before all the challenges of 2025 that are making bizs more expensive to run.

The next major brands to hit massive scale will be the even more expensive versions of everyday items. At higher price.

Takeaway: There’s no such thing as an affordable eCom brand anymore.

Final Thought

That thing that is lurking around the US Consumer corner I’m still gaming out is:

It’s an insanely valuable product and I literally wouldn’t be able to run Coco without it (from both a product and operations perspective).

But is a biz that has $13-20B in Revenue hemorrhaging money really worth $500B?

For context Alphabet has $385B in annual Rev and is with 3.8T? A biz with 29x the Rev (+ profitable) is only worth 7x as much?

Now OpenAI is a private biz (it’s valuation won’t be updated for years), but at this point too much of the stock market’s value (Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, AMD, Broadcomm) is tied to OpenAI confidence.

How far does contagion spread if the market loses faith in OpenAI?

It could still be an incredible biz at a $100B or $300B valuation, but how much of the stock market and economy would collapse if even an unofficial 40-80% markdown swept everyone’s books?

I don’t think it happens because at this point we’re too concentrated at a scale where the government would have to backstop it.

But if it spreads this isn’t just a tech bubble.