🧠 Takeaways:
We made some big updates. Now filter the Top 100 App report to only $10m+ brands.
Who are in the Top 100 that weren’t before?
Who had the biggest shifts in ranking?
How many brands are there that actually do $10m+/yr.
LBAB Community: AI has taken the first 3 jobs at Coco
We won't hire a PM, UX/UI Designer, or FE Devs. At this point: Claude Cowork + Design + Me is good enough. Let’s break down how we build product at Coco now.
My Claude Process:
- Claude Product Agent Project: Build out the full Spec (User Stories + Requirements)
- Claude Design: Design the Front end (w/ code for Devs to use)
- Upload Specs + Clickable HTML + FE code in JIRA for our FS devs.
Our 5-Step Agentic product process:
1) Claude Product Agent Claude tunrs ideas -> full blown specs.
2) Spec -> Claude Design to finalize UX/UI.
3) Design Hand off Doc + Spec -> JIRA ticket for Devs.
4) Devs input Spec + Handoff into Claude Code.
5) Devs steer Claude code (now writes 95% of our code).
With this process 1 Full Stack Dev is building build features that took months in weeks. Sometimes in days.
Now, I spent 5 years of my career as a PM, and went through technical training in 2015 at General Assembly to become a PM. I’ve essentially just mapped a decade+ of my experience in a couple of projects. I didn’t just vibe code this in a weekend.
All of our Devs are Sr. with 6 years of experience. We can use these system well, because we all did this by hand for a long enough time to know what we’re looking for.
Why we won’t hire those roles.
Does this system do the same quality of work as if we hired a PM, Designer and FE Eng at at $100k/yr salary each? Obviously not.
But is it 70-80% as good for $100/mo.? Absolutely.
And I'm never going back. The hand offs managing 3 more people in a team just isn’t worth it for the incremental 20-30% of value. (This is where the latest crop of AI layoffs will come from).
Honestly the next step is to have my devs replace me. At this point all I’m doing is adding context and prioritizing what feedback I’m hearing from customers + the team. Feeding that to the AI and ripping that info straight to the dev team (w/ guardrails) will accelerate our speed even more.
My job now is context collector across our org. The more I can provide all our agents that content the better they’ll make our teams executing in those roles.
Let’s Analyze the Top 100 Apps ($10m Segment)
There’s a lot more to dive into than I can cover here. so definitely Check out the full report here.
Same interactive dashboard. Now you can filter by by $10m+ Brands as well.
What I always find interesting about comparing the $1m vs. the $10m reports:
Who is and isn’t in each report.
Which vendors are focused on all Shopify brands vs. only the largest.
How complete markets shift by segment
Whether you want to see the biggest players in each category or how big “that” tool actually is, we have it all for you.
Here are some of the highlights.
The apps that moved up rank the most with $10m brands.:
The Category Breakdown:
In the Full Report, dive into…
What are the most common 8.8k brands using?
Who’s rising and falling in each segment?
What markets are completely different by segment? (IE. Analytics)
Final Thought
What most people don’t realize is just how few brands have hit massive scale in the Shopify ecosystem.
Of the 3m Shopify stores on the total platform only:
136k do $1m+ in GMV/yr. (4.5%)
8.8k do $10m+ in GMV/yr (0.2%)
That also means 127k / 136k brands do between $1-10m/yr.
It’s an incredible feat to get a Shopify brand to $1m/yr, but that’s still a small team + some agencies. We’ll look into if there’s any churn data on how many of those stores go out of biz on annual basis.
But from my experience on the Vendor side for the last 7+ years it’s really only until the biz hits $10m that it has some staying power and sticks around.
