Last Wednesday night I was staring at Okiela s own dashboard.
Big green number on the screen:  True Profit: $43,750 .
Looked great. Very under control .
But I knew that account had never uploaded a COGS file.
No CSV, no Excel, no template.
Just a raw orders file.
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In the code I was doing what s pretty standard in our space:
if COGS is missing assume 30%.
You see that number everywhere. It sounds reasonable.
But that 30% was being applied to every SKU, every order, every decision for a real founder.
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Some products have 60 70% margin.
Some are basically break even.
Showing one True Profit number on top of that, with no hint it s a guess, felt wrong.
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I imagined a shop owner opening Okiela, seeing $43,750 and thinking:
Let s scale ads.
Let s kill these unprofitable SKUs.
All based on a number I made up.
That night I couldn t sleep. I opened my laptop and thought:
Right now I m shipping a polite lie that everyone accepts. I don t want to be that guy.
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So we pushed our roadmap back almost two weeks to fix ONE thing:
Tell the truth about what the system knows, and what it s only estimating.
Now, if you haven t uploaded COGS:
-The card says  Estimated profit  with an amber badge and a small line saying we assume ~30% COGS.
- Upload your real COGS it flips to  Net profit  (green).
- Reconcile with payouts it becomes  Verified.
The engine didn t change much.
The honesty did.
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Okiela is still far from perfect. But slowing down to stop pretending guessed numbers are true is one decision I feel genuinely good about.
When you look at any dashboard (including mine), one simple question is worth asking:
Is this number measured, or just estimated?
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Thank you, truly <3

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#buildinpublic #analytics #data #shopify #ecommerce #saas #solofounder #okiela

The other day a small DTC founder DM d me:
Revenue looks fine on Shopify, but every month I stare at the numbers and still don t know if I actually made money.
He sent me 2 files:
Shopify Orders CSV
His own COGS spreadsheet (SKU, unit cost)
His routine looked very familiar:
Print Shopify revenue
Open 2 3 Excel files
Manually subtract COGS, ad spend, shipping, random fees
Stay up late, end up with a profit number he doesn t really trust
I asked him to try Okiela the way it is today:
Upload the Shopify Orders CSV
Import his COGS sheet
Add a few big cost buckets (ads, payroll, apps)
Maybe 30 seconds later, the dashboard showed:
The SKUs that are actually paying the bills
Two best sellers that are basically breakeven once all costs are in
A bunch of small fees adding up to a bit over 10% of revenue
He opened the AI chat on the side and asked:
What should I fix first?
The AI didn t give a TED talk.
It just said things like:
These SKUs can handle a small price increase
This one has been unprofitable for 3 months even with decent ROAS
Shipping to these regions is way more expensive than the rest
His reply was: I don t need another shiny dashboard. I just need something that tells me what s feeding me and what s bleeding me.
That s pretty much what Okiela does right now.
Nothing fancy:
Take your Shopify Orders export
Add COGS and a few main costs
Show you SKU level profit and a couple of straightforward moves
The bigger stuff is still in the oven, so I d rather earn trust with this first.
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#buildinpublic #analytics #data #shopify #ecommerce #saas #solofounder #okiela
*(Note: illustrative image)

Over the past few days I ve been shipping critical improvements to Okiela s payment flow via Polar (built on Stripe), so that early users can upgrade from Free Pro ($29/mo) smoothly and I can finally see real, healthy cashflow.

The backend and Polar integration are stable, but since Feb 27 (VN time) several frontend deploys to Vercel have failed. That means a lot of UX and billing fixes are merged in code, but not yet live.

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As a non technical founder, this is a humbling reminder: infrastructure and deployment health are just as important as unit economics and LTV:CAC.

In 2026, this is a very fair question:
If I can just use free ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini to upload my CSV and analyze sales, why do I need Okiela?
*The short answer:
ChatGPT is a brilliant general-purpose tool.
Okiela is a specialist for e-commerce profit analytics.
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A few concrete examples from real Shopify/Lazada/TikTok Shop data:
Okiela already understands the structure of ecommerce exports. You don t have to explain what Lineitem price , Subtotal , or Created At mean every single time. You just upload, wait a few seconds, and you get a proper profit dashboard.

Shopify exports repeat Subtotal/Shipping/Tax on every line of an order. If you simply sum Subtotal , most AI will overcount revenue 2 5x. Okiela hard-codes Shopify logic so these fields are only counted once per order.

Southeast Asian currencies are messy: 1.500.000 is one point five million VND, not 1.5 . Okiela has dedicated logic to correctly parse VND/THB/MYR/PHP formats and avoid subtle but deadly mistakes.

When COGS is missing, Okiela will say N/A upload COGS data , instead of silently treating cost as zero and making you think profit equals revenue.

And most importantly:
Okiela is not just a chat . It gives you:
1. A shareable dashboard,
2. KPI cards, channel charts, SKU tables,
3. Export to PDF/Excel (Pro),
4. AI chat that runs on top of that structured dataset.
So in my mind:
-Use ChatGPT when you need a super smart general AI.
- Use Okiela when you want fast, reliable, shareable profit insights for your ecommerce store.
You can try the free tier (3 analyses/month, no card) at https://okiela.io and see the difference in the first 30 seconds.
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#buildinpublic #analytics #data #shopify #ecommerce #saas #solofounder #Okiela

It s been 5 days (from 22nd Feb 2026) since Okiela officially went live on Product Hunt.
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Vercel shows 779 visitors, 1,771 page views, 72% bounce rate. Most of the traffic is from Vietnam, with some from the US, Singapore and most people hit the homepage, dashboard and login/signup.
Supabase shows 34 users in the system people who actually clicked Sign up / Log in , not just drive by visits.
Polar reports 15 checkouts between Feb 22 26, with a 33.33% conversion rate  roughly 1 out of 3 visitors who reached checkout completed it.
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For a solo, non coding founder, those are small but very real numbers. They also came with a few hard hits:
- In the first days, checkout was broken. Some people tried to pay and the system simply didn t accept it.
- The Golden Path from landing login first run dashboard upload/demo KPIs/AI upgrade is not truly smooth yet; there are still confusing spots.
- I ve been fixing flows, apologising to anyone who hit issues, and saying thank you to those who stayed patient.
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Still, every time I open the dashboards and see one more user, one more checkout, it feels like another brick laid for Okiela. The bricks are rough, but I ll keep polishing them so that:
- Ecommerce founders don t have to guess their true profit every month;
- Reading profit & pricing doesn t take 30 hours in Excel anymore, but just a few seconds.
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I m genuinely grateful to friends, community members, early users and customers of #Okiela from different groups, Twitter, Facebook who supported, gave feedback and were willing to go through a less than 5 star experience.
I m a Vietnamese solo, non coding founder with an FP&A background. I ll keep showing up and pushing a little bit every day to keep Okiela on the roadmap and hopefully, one day, be able to say: this is a product from Vietnam that serves customers globally.
Thank you for giving Okiela a few minutes of your time, a few clicks, honest feedback and for forgiving the bugs along the way.
https://okiela.io
#buildinpublic #analytics #data #shopify #ecommerce #saas #solofounder #Okiela

Opened Supabase tonight and the API map showed 177 requests in the recent window with one big cluster of ~140 from the US and the rest from Vietnam, Singapore and a few other spots.

----------

For a solo, non coding founder, that s a small but real milestone: Okiela isn t just a local project anymore, real people are touching it from different places.

48 hours after launching Okiela, I had to admit something uncomfortable:
the infra was fine, but the experience wasn t honest enough.
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I m a solo, non coding founder. So I sat down with logs, analytics and a notebook and asked:
If a real Shopify founder lands here today, what exactly do they see, screen by screen?
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A few things became obvious:
- Traffic was okay (close to 200 visitors, mostly Vietnam + US). Testimonials and blog posts were getting real views.
- The Golden Path on paper landing auth first run dashboard upload/demo KPIs/AI upgrade was not what people were actually living.
- The worst part: a couple of users tried to pay several times, and checkout quietly failed because of my billing config.
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*What I ve done in the last 48h:
- Turned Stage 1 into a single, explicit Golden Path and treated everything else as legacy.
- Hid / redirected routes that weren t ready, instead of hoping nobody would click them.
- Tightened billing: better error handling, real end to end tests instead of it works on one click in staging .
- Left Apple Login visible in the UI but decided not to fully enable it until later phases when there s budget and volume to test it properly.
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I'm non-code, but I can still be ruthless about:
- what the logs are telling me,
- where real users drop off,
- and how quickly I own the mistakes.
Over the next couple of weeks I ll keep hardening this Golden Path and sharing the progress openly.
If you run an ecommerce brand and want to see what Okiela looks like while it s still being sharpened (not just the polished marketing page), my inbox is open: daint@okiela.io
https://okiela.io

Quick honest recap from Okiela s solo founder after going live:

Infra held up well: Supabase + Vercel handled close to 20K requests with zero 5xx or DB issues.

Launch week saw 192 visitors (mainly Vietnam + US), exploring homepage dashboard login/signup about/contact.

Hi Product Hunt community,

A week ago, Okiela launched here and finished #29 with 4 upvotes.

Not the fairy tale launch story. But here's what I learned:

Hi Product Hunt community

I'm Dai, and tomorrow (in a few hours actually) I'm launching Okiela - my first product.

5 months ago, I was an FP&A analyst drowning in Excel spreadsheets, spending 4-6 hours manually calculating profit for e-commerce clients.