$27M
Modeled 2027 ARR, up from ~$2.7M in 2025. Projection, never launched.
CASE STUDY · AI + STRATEGY · PRE-PRODUCT
A pre-product AI personalization platform, given a business before it ever shipped.
There was a real idea and no company around it: AI personalization for Shopify Plus. I built what a pre-product idea actually needs before code. The category, the wedge, the pricing, the beta plan, the competitor map, and a modeled ARR curve from about $2.7M to $27M. Then I left before launch. So read this as strategy and category IP, not a track record.
Everything on this page is a modeled projection. The product never launched.
The technology worked. AI personalization for Shopify Plus stores, the kind of engine that reshapes a storefront around who is shopping. Good idea. But an engine is not a company. There was no category to sit in, no wedge to lead with, no pricing anyone had sanity-checked, and no story an investor could underwrite.
That is the gap I was brought in to close. Not to write model weights. To build the thing an idea needs before it can raise money or sign a logo: a reason to exist that a board can nod at.
Most personalization needs history. It watches you, learns you, then adjusts on visit two or five. Which means the first visit, the most expensive traffic a store ever buys, gets the generic storefront. That is the cold-start problem, and it is where the money leaks.
So I pointed the whole company at session zero. Personalize the first visit using signals present before any account exists: source, intent, device, context. Win the buyer on the visit you are already paying for.
The category was never better personalization. It was cold-start conversion, won before the second session ever happens.
That reframe does two things. It gives the product a clean lane no incumbent owns, and it makes the value legible to a CFO in one sentence: more revenue from the traffic you already bought.
None of this was product work. It was the commercial architecture an idea needs to become a fundable company.
The path from zero to first revenue on Shopify Plus. Who to sell, in what order, with what motion, and the sequencing that gets a pre-product company its first reference logos.
How the product captures value. Packaging and tiers tied to the outcome the buyer actually feels, cold-start conversion lift, not a flat seat fee that ignores the win.
A design-partner beta to earn proof before scale, plus a map of where every incumbent sits and why none of them own session zero.
The full ARR model behind the raise. Assumptions, drivers, and a curve a board can interrogate line by line, from about $2.7M to $27M.
This is the centerpiece, and it is a projection. It is the scenario I modeled if the plan executes: session-zero conversion lift compounding into new logos and expansion across the Shopify Plus base. A board can pull every assumption apart. That is the point of building it.
Four numbers carried the story into the room. Each one is modeled. None of them happened.
I did not ship a personalization engine. I did something a pre-product company needs more: I gave a raw idea a category to own, a wedge no incumbent had claimed, a price tied to the win, and a model a board could underwrite. That work outlives my time there. It is portable IP, and it is the part most technical founders skip.
The engine was the easy part. The company was the hard part, and that is the part I built.