epsifund

🧵 SaaS Capital's 2026 benchmark: 1,000+ private B2B SaaS companies. The headline most people miss: → ACV doesn't correlate with growth. → NRR does. Top quartile NRR grows 173% above median. → Median growth: 22% (down from 25%). Bootstrapped: 20%. Equity-backed: 25%. Translation: the retention motion is the dominant lever on per-merchant revenue. But new installs aren't vanity either — for Shopify apps specifically, installs are the App Store ranking engine. Stop acquiring and the ranking drops. Organic discovery dies. Death spiral in 6–12 months. The right frame is two compounding flywheels: → NRR → plan upgrades + cross-sell → margin that funds the install motion → Installs → ranking → organic discovery → more installs Both motions need capital. The bootstrapped-vs-equity-backed gap (20% vs 25%) is the gap between founders who can fund both flywheels and those who can't. We're EpsiFund. We fund and operate Shopify apps. RBF is our core product — non-dilutive capital for both the retention + expansion motion AND the install motion. This is the lens we underwrite every deal with. Building in the Shopify app ecosystem? Door's open. #Shopify #Ecommerce #SaaS

Same shape of business. Opposite financial lives. SaaS Capital's 2026 benchmark (1,000+ private SaaS respondents) maps two spending profiles that look identical on a chart and feel completely different on a P&L. Bootstrapped: 96% of ARR. Profitable. Discipline as a survival skill. Equity-backed: 101% of ARR. Half losing money. Growth as a survival skill. The 5-point gap isn't where most founders expect. The biggest line that scales with funding isn't R&D (+56%) or marketing (+100%) — it's G&A at +64%. Board meetings. Audit prep. Investor reporting. The infrastructure of accountability. Bootstrap founders have G&A = 0 because they ARE the G&A. Equity-backed founders trade a chunk of their calendar for a chunk of their upside. That's the hidden tax of capital. At EpsiFund we underwrite to this. When Shopify-app founders tell us what they'd actually spend capital on, it's almost always R&D (platform transitions), customer success (App Store retention), or marketing (paid-auction game). Never G&A. Our data corroborates SaaS Capital's, line for line.

Not long now - if you are in London on the day - please join our Shopify Community lunch in the hear of London City: luma.com/ilz0uwl2

Every SaaS dashboard has the same number: LTV = ARPU ÷ churn. Looks clean. Median prediction error: 2.4%. Reassuring, right? Then ChartMogul went and stress-tested it across 35,512 customer cohorts from 3,331 companies. Their finding: 28.3% of all cohorts have a prediction error >50% in either direction. Half overestimate by 50%+. Half underestimate by 50%+. The formula has two inputs. It fails in two places: → ARPA is inflated by years of upgrades from existing customers. New customers haven't done that yet. → Cohorts don't churn at the company average. Trial-to-paid converters ≠ enterprise buyers. These two errors partially cancel each other. That's why the median looks fine. The median is hiding two systematic problems — each disqualifying on its own. ChartMogul's report prompted us to pull our own cohort data at EpsiFund. Same finding: → Individual cohort forecasts in our portfolio: routinely 10–20% off → Aggregated 9–12 month forecasts: within ~2% of actuals. Our 16-month cumulative projection: $335,384. Actual: $341,841. 1.93% deviation. Forecast accuracy is a volume game, not a precision game. For founders: stop trying to predict any single cohort. For investors: ask for the cohort curves, not the LTV number. Full breakdown with our portfolio data ↓ medium.com/@team_epsi/why-sa…

📢 Shopify community lunch - some spots are still available but they're going fast 🏎💨 🗓️Thursday, 8 October 2026 · 12:00–14:00 📍Origin City — in the heart of London 🥂 Pre-lunch drinks from 11:45 Sign up: luma.com/ilz0uwl2

Hurry up - grab your spot at Shopify Community Lunch 👉🏼 luma.com/ilz0uwl2 🗓️Thursday, 8 October 2026 · 12:00–14:00 📍Origin City — in the heart of London 🥂 Pre-lunch drinks from 11:45 It's a great tradition and we're bringing it back thanks to our sponsors: @TSupportHeroes @Hookdeck @capitaliply @DiscountKit

@Shopify bringing in @tailwindcss touches on something we think about a lot at @epsifund - how software businesses turn the value they create into revenue. Tailwind’s adoption grew, but the commercial business behind it struggled. As developers turned to AI for help, fewer visited the documentation where they would discover its paid products. The framework remained useful. The route from usage to revenue became weaker. Shopify can make those economics work differently. Supporting Tailwind can pay off through better products and better tools for merchants, without relying on selling templates. For those of us building, funding and acquiring Shopify apps, there’s a question here worth asking: When AI helps more people use your product, what makes that translate into revenue for your business? We see plenty of opportunity in AI. This deal is also a reminder to look closely at how the businesses behind the software get paid.

SAVE THE DATE 📆 8 October 12:00pm 🕛 London 📍 👨‍🍳 something’s cooking in London… 👀 At Epsifund, we’re bringing the Shopify community together around a table again. It’s becoming a bit of an annual tradition, and one we’re very happy to keep. Great food, informal chats, Shopify app founders, agencies, investors and lovely people. This year, we’re doing lunch ahead of Craft + Work. Last year, the wonderful @heymantle helped make it happen (special thanks to @l8r_graham and @blairbeckwith who supported us). This year, some great people are stepping up to sponsor our little gathering… but we’ll save those names for the next announcement 🤫 There might be a few special guests joining us too. Psst. More details soon. Come hungry.