ASR Weekly #24

October 30, 2026

From the founder:

Three new comparison pieces went up this week, and reading them back to back turned up something I didn't expect: the complaints are loud and the churn is tiny. More below.

One ask this week, and it's the only thing I'll ask for. If you know a Shopify brand that would get something out of being in this network, send them your referral link. It pays — $100 for a Plus brand, $50 for everyone else — but the honest reason is that the quality of what you read here depends entirely on who's inside. Every pattern, every review, every project in this email comes from people someone else brought in.

Like this newsletter? Forward this email to another brand operator or app developer!

Welcome to the brand network

These are a few brand operators that joined us this week:

Erion M. — Marketing, United States · Sports & Outdoors · Advanced plan

Ben K. — Owner · Health & Fitness · Advanced plan

Tim B. — Owner, United States · Health & Beauty · Basic plan

Start a project to meet these participants and others like them.

Bring someone in

The network only works because it's full of people who actually run stores. Every stat in the Pattern below, every review behind this week's comparison pieces, every project a researcher posts — all of it exists because someone forwarded this email once.

What you get:

  • $100 — for every Shopify Plus brand you refer

  • $50 — for every other Shopify brand

  • $50 — for every researcher or app team

Paid when they complete their first research session. No cap, no deadline, no leaderboard to climb.

Something you can paste straight into a DM:

Hey — thought of you. It's a research network where Shopify brands get paid $100–$300 for 30–45 minute calls with app teams building tools for stores like yours. You hear what's coming before it ships and get paid for the time. Here's my link: [your link]

How much time goes into chasing fulfillment issues and 3PL claims?
Sales Call · Incentive: $300 · 45 mins - on delayed and missing orders, chasing providers, and what the follow-up actually costs

Feedback wanted on a new AEO/GEO visibility tool
Research Call · Incentive: $150 · 45 mins - on how stores and products get discovered inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity

Brand owners investing in organic traffic, content and SEO/GEO/AEO visibility
Research Call · Incentive: $100 · 30 mins - how brands drive growth through organic channels today, and what they're planning next

Everyone complains. Almost nobody leaves.

Three new comparison pieces went up this week, each built on operator reviews rather than App Store stars:

Read side by side, they tell one story, and it isn't the one the headlines suggest:

  • Price is the universal complaint. It's the single most-cited problem in all three. 38% of Klaviyo reviewers named cost, billing or price rises. 16 of 39 said the same about Gorgias, several describing a bill that grows faster than the business does.

  • Almost nobody actually goes. 10 of 209 have stopped using Klaviyo. One of 39 has left Gorgias. 24 of 27 still run the Yotpo app they reviewed. The gap between "I resent this invoice" and "I have migrated" is enormous.

  • Which makes switching costs the real product. When satisfaction is middling and retention is near total, you're not looking at loyalty. You're looking at how much of the business has been built on top of the thing.

If you're on the app side, that's worth sitting with: your churn risk is smaller than the noise suggests, and your pricing is the thing every single one of your customers is quietly annoyed about.

If you run any of these, your review makes the next one better - add it from the App Stack tab in your account.

Pattern of the week

A supplements brand wrote that Meta is "around 85% of our total new customer volume" — and that acquisition costs are climbing across every channel they use. Their response wasn't to fix the ads. It was to stop leading with them and go after the customers already inside.

Three other submissions said a version of the same thing this week.

You don't have an acquisition problem. You have a concentration problem.

Photo of the week

Source: Instagram @popupbagels

PopUp Bagels opened in Times Square on October 16, at 1501 Broadway. It started in 2020 as a lockdown hobby in Westport, Connecticut — two people who gave up on sourdough because the summer got too hot, handed bagels to friends, and ended up selling a dozen for $38 on pre-order.

The format never changed. You buy them in threes, sixes or twelves, with the cream cheese rotating. Thirteen shops by last year, and now a storefront in Times Square.

Worth remembering while you're deciding what to loosen before Black Friday. The constraint everyone tells you to drop is sometimes the whole brand.

Join our private communities

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See you next week.

Jon and team
— app store research

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