assaf shalin

I co-founded Koala Apps in 2018 to answer a question every Shopify seller has and almost nobody could afford to answer: what is my competitor actually doing? The tools are browser-native, and there's a free forever tier on purpose — they should work for someone building their first store.

• flagship

  Koala Inspector

  Reveals any Shopify store's theme, apps and products in one click.

  250,000+ installs

• Theme Detector

  Identifies the Shopify theme powering any storefront, including customizations.

• App Detector

  Surfaces which Shopify apps a store runs — roughly 2,550 revealed weekly.

• Sales Tracker

  Tracks best-sellers and movement over time so you can spot a winning product early.

• Store Analyzer

  Full-store audit: traffic estimates, catalog depth, and ad-campaign activity.

• Skip To Checkout

  Merchant-side app that cuts the cart step and sends buyers straight to checkout.

• Calculators

  Revenue, profit margin, and ROAS/CPA/CAC ad metrics — plus a store-name generator.

Free forever plan. Premium is $22/month, priced so it still works for a first store rather than only for a brand with a research budget.

1. 2018 —

   Koala Apps current

   Co-founder. Shopify competitive-intelligence suite; grew from a one-click theme detector to 250,000+ merchants across 100+ countries.

2. 2020–25

   AppCommerce

   Turned WooCommerce storefronts into native mobile apps — a React Native client, a hosted backend, a WordPress plugin, and a lead crawler feeding Metabase.

3. 2019–22

   DevForce

   My software consultancy — scoping, building and shipping product for other people's teams. The clients ran through here.

   • 2020–21Buildots — frontend for a construction-site annotation system.
   • 2021Verbit — student-facing web app for the transcription and captioning platform.
   • 2020–21ShareIt — sales, product and invoicing services.
   • 2020Ayecka — operator interface for satellite-communications hardware.
4. 2017

   Accelerators Israel

   Built accelerators.co.il — a directory of Israeli startup accelerators, with the admin backend for keeping it current.

5. 2017–18

   Machinads

   Ad-tech venture.

6. 2008–22

   ServPro

   Service-business platform — public site, API, and the internal scraping and tooling behind it.

I'm Israeli. Koala Apps is a browser extension and a handful of Workers, which turns out to be exactly the kind of business you can run from anywhere with decent wifi — so that's what I've done. Land somewhere, find a desk, keep shipping. Greece, Thailand, Spain, Argentina, and a long list of shorter stops. Right now it's Paris.

Nine countries, one laptop. The useful part is that 250,000 merchants in 100+ countries have never once needed to know which timezone their tools were maintained from.

Not products. Just problems I'd rather solve than tolerate.

• Scribarr

  Self-hosted Whisper transcription and AI translation with a web UI, tuned to run on an Intel iGPU home server via OpenVINO.

• The homelab

  A pile of machines whose entire purpose is to make a flat marginally more convenient than a light switch already did. Every service self-hosted, every device talking locally, and a long-running argument with an Intel iGPU about whether it can do inference. It can. Mostly.

• Todoist MCP

  A small MCP server for pushing things into Todoist, because the alternative was opening the app.

• mcp-browser

  CLI research agent that loads MCP servers on the fly, discovers whatever tools they expose, and runs multi-step research with them.

• Invoice tooling

  Green Invoice API client plus Claude Code skills, so the accounting side of running a company mostly files itself.

• Alfred workflows

  Small public utilities: pretty-print clipboard JSON, convert cases, manage supervisor processes, spin up throwaway mail.

Before any of the software paid for itself, most of my time went into a keyboard with 88 keys rather than 104.

• Deus Vult

  Keyboards in Deus Vult, a six-piece metal band out of Israel. One EP, a lot of rehearsal-room hours, and a shared conviction that more notes is more music.

• Cubase, Ableton, a Korg M50

  Two decades of Cubase sessions, Ableton Live for anything that starts life as a loop, and a synth that has its own backup regime. Arrangement, mixing, sound design — the same debugging instinct pointed at a waveform instead of a stack trace.

• Languages

  French because of the current postcode, Spanish because of the last one. Both ongoing, both humbling.

The part that was never a job. It is also the part that came first, and the reason all of the above exists.

1. 2015

   Hackathons

   Two rounds of Hacking Generation Y. At the Israel edition our team finished in the top eight and pitched the final round at Google Campus Tel Aviv — the project was Libify. Later that year, HackGenY eBay at Wix in Namal Tel Aviv: two days against the eBay API that produced ePick, a social shopping app.

2. 2000–06

   Visual Basic

   A kid with a Windows machine and far too much time. A chat client for talking to the next room over the LAN. A program whose entire purpose was shutting down other people's computers on the network. A Who Wants to Be a Millionaire clone, a media player, a torrent tool, and some maths drills for school. All of it given away free, with the source sitting in the folder next to the download — which, twenty-five years later, is still roughly the business model.

github

@AssafShalin

company

koala-apps.io