I bought CocoAI

🧠 The Takeaways

1. For the next 10 yrs Text will be more important than email.

2. International expansion will be more important to Shopify than NA growth.

3. AI built into the core of the biz creates a new breed of biz.

+ How LinkedIn sourced me every angle of this deal.

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LBAB Community - The Power of LinkedIn

For everyone who says posting on LinkedIn is a waste of time.

Consistently posting on LinkedIn over the last 5 years is how I acquired this brand.

I got an off market deal directly from the founders because they saw in my LinkedIn profile that I was acquiring an e-commerce sass business they built the Shopify app.

The LPs that funded this deal also came in through my LinkedIn.

Years ago, after following my content for a while, they wanted to meet and asked me some questions about their biz. We established a relationship and kept in touch.

When I announced I was raising a fund, they signed up for my monthly investor updates.

I can't tell you that either of them ever liked, commented, engaged with any of my content, but as soon as they hit me in the DMs.

All those posts became worth it.

For everyone who thinks posting on LinkedIn is about bragging or wasting your time you couldn't be more wrong.

It's led to most and or all of the biggest deals I've ever had.

Let’s Scale This Biz!

Coco AI is a WhatsApp Marketing App for Shopify brands. If you’re doing north of $250k in Rev and looking to recover more abandoned carts with an AI agent check us out. Cooking up more ways for customers to get in contact now.

Here are the 3 big contrarian bets I’m making to 10x Coco AI in the next 3 years.

1) Text will be bigger than Email

Over the next decade, texting will become more important for Shopify brands than email. I actually made this prediction on my old podcast 3 years ago.

3 reasons why I believe this:

1. Text has 4x the Open Rates of Emails.

2. Text Messages are significantly less work.

3. Text adoption is on the rise, while email deliverability gets harder and harder.

Email is still ol’ reliable. I’m not saying it’s dying, but it isn’t growing.

As brands continue to dump all of their Marketing efforts into Top of funnel creative testing. Automating retention becomes the obvious area to save costs on. Similar to how today CS is the obvious place to save budget.

Since Texts are more effective in money making moments (Automations, Promos, Product launches) the self-reinforcing loop of high Revenue-low effort channel will drive more growth.

In North America Text = SMS.

In the rest of the world (especially Europe, Middle east, ANZ and Africa) Texting = Whatsapp.

Takeaway: Text will become more important than email. Bet on Text.

2) Shopify Euro-Expansion is more important than NA

Over the next decade, Shopify will focus on expanding more into other markets: Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa. Those countries will become more and more important for Shopify's growth than North America.

Shopify crushed the US + Canada markets, probably include UK in that as well. 

For them to continue growing, they need to penetrate the "international" markets where the other eCom platforms: WooCommerce, Prestashop + Magento still have strongholds.

We may have forgotten about the other platforms in America, but in Non-English speaking countries they still hold a considerable market share.

Shopify needs to take those markets to keep growing. We’ll be there to support them with native Text marketing along the way.

Takeaway:  I’m betting big on Non-NA Shopify growth.

3) The biz is built w/ AI from the ground up.

Over the next decade the best bizs will be built by A+ Sr talent powered by an army of AI agents. They’ll just be built different.

This bis is <1 year old, everything in it has AI built in one way or another. It’s a different culture where everything is process and automation driven. Instead of hiring more people, the first thought is can we build more bots.

I've been spending a lot of personal time diving into this and am excited about how we can build the “co-pilot model” for the Go-To-Market.

To rapidly scale a biz like this used to take 25-50 people. I believe we’ll do it with <5.

The cost saving is one piece, but really why I’m so bullish on this strategy is how much faster we’ll move.

Everyone makes the mistake of scaling fast = hiring more. I’ve always found the opposite. The smaller the team the faster they move because they:

1. Get direct market feedback faster

2. Make decisions faster

3. Launch tests faster

Smart people doing less grunt work allows 1-2 key people to ship at 10x the speed of 20.

Takeaway: AI Personal Assistants will 10x our productivity.

Final Thought

I think I’m very early on this last point, but one of my big AI bets is how much faster the world will internationalize. And a key feature I expect to see in all products in 5 years is native automatic translation.

Reddit’s shares have soared since they baked this into their product. Allowing them to rapidly expand into new countries.

The greatest Marketing challenge for Brands expanding into Europe is translating into all of the different languages. The feature that really solidified this acquisition for me was that we already support 96 languages out of the box.

The speed at which brands translate their marketing into multiple languages will have a direct correlation with how quickly they’ll scale, which should correlate with how quickly we do.

I'm gonna be spending a lot of time playing around thinking about the native translation problem. Especially now that I’m going to be marketing to brands who speak a whole bunch of languages that aren’t English.