About
We've made payroll for a hundred people.
Robby Switzer and Daniel Stafford both grew up working in Alaska, commercial fishing and construction. In 2016 they started Shopanova, a digital marketing agency for Shopify stores. Over the next nine years it worked with more than 600 store owners, generated over $720 million in client revenue, employed over 100 people across its history, and got written up in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance.
Somewhere in that stretch, AI stopped being interesting and started being useful. Not as a topic. As a tool used every day, across the whole company: operations, training, knowledge management, internal tooling, client work, and marketing.
Breakwater came out of watching what happened next. Every company started announcing AI initiatives. Almost none of them could point to a number that moved. The gap wasn't technology. It was that nobody was doing the unglamorous part: finding where a specific business actually loses time, and building something that fixes it.
That's the whole company.
Who you'd be working with
Robby Switzer
Co-founder, technical lead
Robby co-founded Shopanova and leads the technical side, which is how he ended up hands-on with AI early, as a daily tool rather than a talking point. Before that he fished commercially and worked construction in Alaska.
He lives in Alaska with his wife and five kids, and spends his off time outdoors across the state.
Daniel Stafford
Co-founder, engagement lead
Daniel co-founded and runs Shopanova alongside Robby. He came up the same way, commercial fishing and construction in Alaska, before spending nearly a decade helping online businesses grow.
He lives in Alaska with his three kids.
On the name
A breakwater doesn't stop the ocean. It makes a stretch of water calm enough to work in.
That seemed like the right thing to name this. We're not promising to change your industry or remake your company. We're promising that the part of your operation we touch will be calmer and cost you less of your week.
What we won't do
- We won't sell you a tool and call the job done.
- We won't pitch headcount reduction. The work that comes off is the work that never needed a person.
- We won't take work we're not set up for. Regulated healthcare data and ITAR controlled work are not something we're ready for yet, and we'd rather say so on the first call.
- We won't tell you AI will help when it won't. Sometimes the honest answer is not yet, and that answer is worth as much as the other one.
Tell us what's slow.
If something in your operation eats more of the week than it should, that's the conversation.
Start a conversation