FounderCrushSuite · Co-founder · Live since 2024
Zero to #2, part-time.
I co-founded CrushSuite, a Shopify app that lets wineries sell inside state shipping law. I own product. Compliance shipped first because it’s the most trust-heavy step, and wine clubs then sold on that trust, with nobody working on it full-time.
Competitors moved the winery somewhere else. We didn’t.
Competitors solved wine compliance with a hosted compliance checkout or an upgrade to Shopify Plus. Our user is a tasting-room manager who moves between our settings and Shopify’s own orders in one sitting. If our half looks like a different product, she is learning two systems.
So we built on Shopify’s own components. Shopify’s admin is one hop deep, index to detail, and our compliance model went deeper: profile, state, rule. We flattened it to fit. That cost us a way to show the structure, and the app never looks foreign inside the merchant’s admin.
Compliance first, because nothing else sells without it.
A state alcohol fee has to reach the buyer as a real line before they pay. Inside Shopify’s checkout that is Plus-only work, so it had to live in the cart, on the merchant’s own storefront, inside themes we would never see. A scan of 986,167 storefronts found more than 36,700 distinct themes.
Compliance shipped first. The wine-club app followed in 2026, on the same approach: the winery’s own storefront and customer account, not a third-party portal.
It could never become anyone’s job, so AI was a requirement.
CrushSuite started with one rule: it could never need full-time effort from anybody building it. AI argued with decisions before anything was built, generated variants against Shopify’s constraints, and built the components in code.
I write, merge and deploy the production code: a React and TypeScript front end, APIs on Supabase and Postgres, and CI on GitHub Actions, with the Shopify, payments and Claude API integrations. I also built the admin, support and AI agent tools the four of us run it on.
The same source produced the help center. I wrote 216 knowledge base articles and the onboarding guide from it. The buyer is a winemaker who will never file a ticket. If the answer isn’t written when she needs it, she leaves.
$10K MRR, 40+ wineries, a 5.0 rating.
From idea to revenue in a year, and #2 in its category on the Shopify App Store.
Mine
- Product direction, and the order things shipped in.
- The call to stay inside Shopify.
- The design of the admin app and the storefront components.
- The 216 knowledge base articles and the onboarding guide.