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Jack, a non-technical founder, turned a profit-analytics spreadsheet he built for agency clients into a Shopify app called Profit AI, reaching $30K MRR (app) and just under $40K MRR (combined with services) within about five months of launching in December, with $147,000 total revenue to date — all built using AI coding tools with no prior coding experience.
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What Profit AI does: It’s a Shopify app that gives e-commerce brands an instant profit-and-loss view by pulling in ad spend per channel, sales attributed to those channels, and profit after all costs. For high-spend stores, it also offers ad-spend-to-revenue forecasting. It can generate P&Ls, launch ads, send emails, and build landing pages via AI, and it can be deployed directly from Slack. The app has a free plan with a 30-day free trial of the paid plan; the paid plan dropped from $5,000/month to $800/month after finding few takers at the higher price.
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The origin spreadsheet: Jack’s journey started from years of building accessible, colorful spreadsheets for agency clients to help them make better business decisions — including a P&L page, fixed/variable cost logging, LTV tracking, a ROAS ad analyzer, and a scenario planner. He aimed to make complicated financial tools as simple as possible, in contrast to complex, expensive tools like those Deloitte would charge tens of thousands for.
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How he turned the spreadsheet into an app: He downloaded the spreadsheet as a CSV, uploaded it to Cursor, and prompted “build it,” then iteratively identified what Cursor got wrong and corrected the calculations. The initial build took roughly 3.5–4 months. He emphasizes that today the process would be much faster, and shares a personal example of turning his own finance tracker spreadsheet into an app in about a day using Claude Code.
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Current tech stack: Claude Code (~$200/month on the max plan), Codex in terminal (currently free after a 100% discount), Google Sheets (free), Framer for the website (possibly switching to a Claude-built site), and Instantly for marketing. He notes that AI coding tools with broad integrations now allow you to do a lot from a single prompt.
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Why e-commerce tooling is a strong space: Jack and host Pat Walls discuss that e-commerce SaaS — especially Shopify apps solving specific brand-owner problems like reporting and analytics — is an underrated space. Pat references another founder, Eric Kos, who went from ~$200K/month to over $1M/month with a Shopify plugin. Jack notes that every brand has unique data needs, and once you have data pipelines, you can serve them via simple AI-powered requests through tools like a Slack bot.
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Growth so far: Most of Profit AI’s growth has come from word of mouth and existing relationships, not from a formal marketing launch. The app has 122 users (mostly free), with 38–39 paying customers. Churn is roughly matching new installs (43 uninstalls vs. 47 installs), which Jack acknowledges isn’t ideal but is expected this early.
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Jack’s advice for aspiring founders: “Don’t aim for laziness” — if your goal is to make money doing nothing, you’ll get replaced quickly in this fast-moving market. His practical advice is to just ask Claude (or another AI coding tool) if it can build the thing you’re thinking of, and then stick with it. He’s surprised by how much AI can do from a single prompt when it has the right connections.
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Pat’s closing recommendation: Open Claude Code, connect it to your Google Drive, look at the last 20 spreadsheets you’ve created, and ask it to build one into an app. He frames this as the moment when turning spreadsheets into profitable micro-SaaS products has become genuinely accessible, even for non-technical people.