Omer Kaplan, founder of ZyG, says scaling an e-commerce brand tenfold is far harder than opening a store on Shopify or Amazon, and ZyG sells that as an outcome service run by AI agents.
ZyG Score requires brands to sell at least $1m a year with a $40 average order value, then spends about $10,000 of media over seven days testing real users.
ZyG plans to sponsor 500 high-potential companies and charges a 12 to 15 percent revenue fee that Kaplan calls a cost saving versus in-house teams.
ZyG Bets AI Agents Can Scale E-commerce Brands Tenfold
ZyG bets that AI agents can run the full scaling job for e-commerce brands that already have a good product. Opening a store is easy, but growing tenfold means mastering many fragmented functions at once. ZyG replaces agencies and tools with one agent-run service paid as a share of revenue, and it uses a scored test to pick brands that can scale.
Takeaways
Scaling, not launching, is the hard part. Shopify and Amazon make opening a store easy. Scale means a tenfold jump, from a few million dollars to 50 or 100m. Brands fail through poor product bets, such as saturated markets or declining categories, and through fragmented execution.
ZyG sells an outcome run by AI agents. Connected agents take on a brand's whole scale challenge and replace its agencies and its internal marketing and creative teams. ZyG only accepts companies it believes can grow tenfold, aiming to take brands from 5m to 50m dollars in a couple of years.
Execution is fragmented across many functions. A brand must make its store, data infrastructure, conversion optimisation, email, SMS, customer support and inventory forecasting work together. ZyG's single dashboard replaces seven or eight tools, such as Shopify, Klaviyo, Gorgias and Triple Whale, and adds a twelve-month budget plan.
Pricing is a percentage of revenue. ZyG charges 12 to 15 percent of client revenue. Kaplan argues this saves money compared with doing the work in-house. It onboards companies it expects to reach at least 2.5 lifetime value to CAC at scale.
ZyG wants to replace luck with a playbook. Kaplan says great consumer brands often succeeded through luck. ZyG adds structure and process around good products, and helps with user acquisition financing or investment. Most brands use AI only to be more effective, so they need a partner to use it transformationally.
Founders should find their superpower. Kaplan calls it almost unfair to expect one entrepreneur to handle product, brand, growth and tech together. AI makes it more urgent to crystallise the one thing you do better than anyone. A great product has no shortcuts.
How ZyG Score works
A brand must sell at least 1m dollars a year with a 40 dollar average order value. It completes an intake and a ten-minute agentic onboarding form.
Within a couple of hours ZyG produces a ZyGNAL opportunity assessment. Agents research paid and open sources, competitors and ZyG's own benchmarks.
Brands that pass move to a second phase. ZyG builds a store, creatives and landing pages, then spends about 10,000 dollars of media over seven days on real users.
Tap a name to go there · tap a line to see why they are linked
On this episode 2
Show 1
ZyG scores the result. A predicted lifetime value to CAC ratio above two is a good sign, and it also weighs whether results came from one creative or many and how widely ads spread.
ZyG plans to sponsor the 500 highest-potential companies, funded partly by its 118m dollars raised. It has run about 100 marketability tests and expects 10 to 20 percent of entrants to become scale partners.
Kaplan's predictions
AI will let smaller companies become significant, as many indie developers did with his previous company.
Media costs will keep rising, so most companies will become retention led.
ZyG Score will become the de facto benchmark, with dozens of brands grown 10x or 20x within a year.
In a year, shopping agents such as Manus will mostly serve early adopters, about 2 to 3 percent of e-commerce. Adoption of 40 percent could come later.
Agents will buy from agents, starting with commodities such as diapers, while people keep browsing for products they love.