E28: Making tough decisions with Tomer Tagrin

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On this episode of The SaaS Operators, Tomer Tagrin, CEO of Yotpo, joined us to talk about strategic focus, AI in commerce, and what it actually takes to transform a large product company.

The strategic shift: from broad suite to a sharper edge

Yotpo walked away from products that were growing but not great. Email and SMS had traction, but the team was not confident they would be best in class there. Regulations and costs were shifting. The vision for autonomous marketing required foundations they could not build in parallel. So they cut and refocused.

What they leaned into:

• Reviews as the center of gravity. In an LLM first world, how reviews are written, read, and surfaced is changing. Yotpo wants to lead that shift.
• Loyalty with unfinished upside. Behavior, not points. Real omni capabilities across online and retail.
• LLM discoverability and agentic commerce. Make brands legible to AI. Treat agents as a revenue channel, not a demo.

Inside Yotpo this required a mental reset. New operating model. Reworked finance, marketing, CSM, sales. Millions of lines of code. A big ship turning.

Sunsetting products without burning trust

Most founders never shut down a product with real usage. Yotpo did. Think thousands of tasks. Customer comms. Partner selection. Data migrations. Sequencing around BFCM. They kept people on payroll whose only job was smooth migrations. Agencies were looped in. Customers saw the intent. It went better than planned because the plan was obsessive and customer first.

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Lesson: if you ever sunset, spend most of your energy on the customer journey, not the announcement.

Yotpo Labs: letting zero to one breathe

Tomer is a builder. To protect focus in the core business, Yotpo created a small autonomous group that reports to him. Different rules. No ceremony. Move from idea to thing. They acqui hired a small CDP team, gave them budget and space, and are shipping a net new AI product in a non existing category. The 50 million ARR product lines run on OKRs. Labs runs on momentum.

Founder mode vs hired CEO

We talked about the courage to delete ARR to reorient the company. That is easier when the founder says I have nothing to lose. Harder when your job is to preserve a spreadsheet. The answer depends on incentives and time horizon. Boards matter. Yotpo’s investors gave the team space to make hard moves.

Shopify is massive. Commerce is bigger.

Shopify DTC in the US dominates the conversation because it is the most innovative ecosystem. It also creates a funhouse mirror. Many buyers operate outside that bubble. Many brands are multi channel. Europe is fragmented. Retail is messy. BigCommerce and Woo still win deals. If you only build for Shopify, you face more competition, tighter pricing, and lower margins as you scale.

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For SaaS founders: getting to 10 million inside Shopify is possible. Pushing beyond often requires looking outside. Same product quality. Different pricing power. Different go to market.

The new face of reviews

Reviews are becoming content and distribution, not just social proof.

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What Yotpo is building and testing:

• Video reviews to ads. Turn UGC into performance assets without wrecking page speed.
• Smart prompts for better reviews. AI guided capture that yields high quality text that converts and is discoverable by LLMs.
• A reviews agent on PDPs. Ask a question and get an answer rooted in your own review corpus.
• Translation, summarization, insights at scale. Enterprise grade coverage across many countries and languages.

Bigger idea: make your brand legible to agents. If AI is where the journey starts, your reviews are both your training data and your ranking signal.

Past 10 million ARR: operating like a grown up

None of the stages are easy. Zero to one is hard. One to ten is hard. Every stage is a new dark room. As Yotpo grew, they fell in love with the mechanics of go to market and had to relearn depth in product and process. This year they went deeper on OKRs and pushed goal clarity to the edge of the org.

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To scale people with the company, give leaders mentors and advisors. Tolerate mistakes. Do not tolerate stagnation.

Perspective from the hardest thing

Tomer has faced cancer twice. They even paused an IPO. That experience sharpened his priorities.

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What matters now: kids and spouse, health, and helping people at Yotpo grow and get liquidity. He wants top performers to become wealthy. He wants the company to be a platform for good. Work is serious, but it is not life and death. Keep perspective.

My takeaways for SaaS operators

• Focus is a capability. You earn it with migrations, partners, and detailed plans that protect customers.
• Pick bets that compound in the new interface. Reviews and loyalty are central when agents mediate discovery and purchase.
• Separate zero to one from fifty to one hundred. Give the startup inside your company a different metabolic rate.
• Align incentives before transformation. If the room rewards caution, you will not ship courage.
• Shopify is a great beachhead. The world is the market. Plan for both.
• Use AI to increase review quality, not just volume. Make your brand legible to machines without losing the human voice.
• Teach your team to love the process. Then give them mentors so they can survive each dark room.

If you are building in commerce SaaS, this is the moment to do the hard thing. Trim scope. Bet on reviews, loyalty, and agents. Protect your customers through the change. Keep your perspective intact.