We realized Shopify loyalty is a long-term game. So we're about to launch another app

A few weeks ago we launched Livy, our loyalty app for Shopify. Along the way we learned something we didn't see coming: loyalty is something only a % of stores actually care about, and it's not one of the first things they solve. We didn't see it coming because we walked into a brand new market with nothing, no friendly merchants, no contacts, no prior customers who could test the app. We started from zero in the Shopify world.

Makes sense once you look at it from the merchant's side. When you open a store you've got a thousand more urgent things to deal with before you even think about retaining customers you don't have yet. Loyalty is a long-term bet, it works great once the install machine and churn stabilize, but to get there you need traffic, installs, a real base of merchants. And that's exactly the bottleneck we were writing about in our last post.

So we started wondering: why not try a different kind of app in the meantime? One that most stores need the moment they open, something that solves a more immediate problem than loyalty. Simple, cheap, quick to install. Also riding the growth Shopify is having right now and the time of year we're in (heading into Black Friday and Christmas).

We haven't decided exactly which app yet, but we do know the criteria: simple, super cheap, built for new stores or ones just taking their first steps.

This is a continuation of what we've been sharing here: ["We got our Shopify app approved in 72 days..."]

Has this happened to anyone else, betting on something long-term and realizing you needed to solve something more immediate first? And a more direct question: if you opened a store today, what's the first thing you'd install, before loyalty?