More than a year later - My side project became something real and has paying customers

Hey, we actually bought a template and customized it ourselves for our needs.
Thanks a lot for the feedback!

Haha, that seems to be something lots of people to have in common, deploying broken forms :-D

And thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely try to cover what we've been doing in terms of marketing, even though we are still trying things and learning a lot.

Hey @ryanam26, thanks! Yeah, I'm open to a chat.

Hey, Thanks a lot!
To be honest, we were very disappointed with even the traffic, not even saying, users, we got from Shopify app store. The problem is that they removed the "New" category and now the new apps are being held deeeep in the search of the store, so the best you can do is have a good text, and keywords coverage in your description, but this doesn't help too because the most important ranking reason is rating, so because we have big players like Privy and Bold in our niche, it's almost impossible to get to the first page of search results on some keywords. So we are exploring other channels now. We wrote some suggestions to the Shopify themselves about this and they seem to understand the problem but aren't doing anything about it really. Also they plan on introduction Ads into the app store, which could be good, but I think it will only make it worse, cause the big players have the money to outbid the small ones.

Hey, thanks a lot! We mostly used cold outreach to find the first users. We had some users register due to the syndication of our blogging efforts too.

Thank you!

Hey, thanks for the insight. We used his cause visitor's is singular - possessive here. But I'm not a native speaker so we'll probably change it to visitors' and their. What do you think?

Hey azarai, I have a small side project which is essentially a form backend for receiving messages, without having to host any server-side code. It's not public yet but I'm trying to understand more about what people do with forms that go to email addresses. What did you end up using?

Yeah, it was a great lesson for me :)
What about Shopify - they really have a lot of requirements for your app to meet their guidelines and since the introduction of the new app store, it's also mandatory that the payment processing for installations from there is going through them. So we had to implement their billing alongside the one we already had (we are using Chargebee). We also had to prepare high-quality assets for them to approve.

What is good is that they gave us a dedicated QA tester which was helping with app insights and even helped us track every single bug in the installation process (again, from the app store). So they made it a lot simpler than it could have been.

Thanks a lot!
What a shame, we made it private instead of unlisted. It should be there now. Thanks again.

Thanks! Yes, it was, but there's even more ahead of us!

Thanks. I'll probably start putting some story together soon and post it on IH.

Just have to decide where I start :))

Thanks a lot! I'll probably start putting down some thoughts about how it was soon.

What would have I done differently if had to start over?
I'm not sure that I have so much overview yet to know what would I to totally different and I think things go in the right direction.
There were small things I would do technologically different from the very beginning (so I wouldn't have to ultimately rewrite code).
For example, I started the project's frontend in Backbone.js long time ago, but it was a dying technology whilst if I had done my research I would have known that Vue.js and React even though very young then, were much better and fresher alternatives.
I love this piece of advice coming from the founders of Trello:

Use things that are going to work great in two years.

I would also love to earlier learn how to procrastinate less.
I would have liked to learn the market sooner. When I started I had another Co-founder whose idea it initially was, and I didn't really bother about diving deep enough in the market/product fit. So when my Co-founder decided to call it quits, it took me a lot of time to make up and understand what I am building.

Hey, I wouldn't call it a success yet, but yes I had a series of small wins. And the more small wins - the bigger the chances of success are.

Would be great to help you with your course. Just sent you an email.