Getting out of the freelancing game by building a $100k+ MRR Shopify app portfolio

Erikas Mališauskas was a successful freelancer who wanted to build something for himself. After a few failed attempts, he had a small success which got acquired. He then used that money to get a portfolio of Shopify apps off the ground.

Now, the Kaching Appz portfolio is bringing in a 6-figure MRR. Here's Erikas on how he did it. 👇

From freelancer to indie hacker

For most of my career, I was quite a successful freelance designer, and I had a design agency as well. Financially, I was doing well, but I really wanted to work on my own products instead of doing client work. I believed that was the way to scale my income indefinitely.

So, since 2018, I’ve been trying to build successful products to replace my clients. Several of my projects failed before I launched my first success in 2021. It was a Shopify app that I scaled to $6.5k MRR and sold for $250k.

I used that experience to launch another app, Kaching Bundle Quantity Breaks, which is currently at a 6-figure MRR. And we’re building more Shopify apps under the Kaching Appz name.

I also have other hobby projects such as my screenshot editor, PimpMySnap.

Coming up with an idea

When I was freelancing, a lot of my clients were doing e-commerce on Shopify, so I got to know the Shopify ecosystem from the inside.

When I stumbled upon the Shopify partners page, I saw an interesting banner stating that the top 25% Shopify app developers earn $272K annually. Having used quite a few Shopify apps myself, I knew I could do better with all of my UX experience.

I dedicated significant time to brainstorming ideas, analyzing the competitive landscape, and researching popular app store search queries. My main criteria were:

1. Development complexity - I wanted a product that could be built quickly so I could launch, test, and iterate rapidly.

2. Target audience size - the solution needed to be scalable, addressing a widespread problem that every store could benefit from, rather than catering to a niche audience of just 30 people.

3. Competition landscape - competing against apps with hundreds of 5-star reviews would be incredibly challenging, so I aimed to find a space with less established competition.

Eventually, I decided I will make a simple app to add icons to a store. Whether it’s product feature icons or store guarantees, I made it easy to create a block with the app and place it anywhere. There were only a couple of apps doing that and both were a bit outdated, with fewer than 30 reviews at the time. 

It seemed like a good opportunity, so I drafted the app's design and found a local tech cofounder who could turn my designs into a working product. We spent a few weeks building a working prototype and launching it in the Shopify app store.

Shopify tech stack

Our Shopify apps have two main parts: an iframe embedded in the Shopify admin for merchants, and a storefront widget integrated right into the shop’s theme for customers. For our Bundles app admin, we started with Ruby on Rails, React, Postgres, and Heroku — mostly because Shopify offered great Rails support at the time, and it fit well with our skillset. These days, we’re moving to Remix and TypeScript for new apps, since that’s now Shopify’s recommended approach.

On the storefront side, we use Svelte. It compiles into a small web component that doesn’t require a runtime, which helps keep load times low — and we can reuse that same component in the admin area for previews. We store all configuration details in Shopify metafields instead of making server calls, which helps maintain speed and reliability. For discounts, we rely on Shopify Functions, which run our TypeScript code millions of times each day on Shopify’s infrastructure. This setup makes it easy to scale to tens of thousands of users without driving up costs, and we never have to worry about Black Friday or other high-traffic surges.

When choosing our tools, we consider what Shopify recommends, whether we can reuse our existing tech, our team’s familiarity with it, and how mature it is. Following these guidelines helps us build apps that are fast, reliable, and fit seamlessly into Shopify’s ecosystem.

Pricing right

All of our apps are subscription based and have a few tiers based on usage/value. We only earn more when our users earn more.

For example, our Basic plan costs $14.99 and it comes with all of the features. Once merchants get $1,000 additional revenue through our app, they’re upgraded to our Scale plan at $29.00. It’s a tremendous 34x return on investment for them. We have merchants making literally millions of dollars with our app paying only $59.99.

I think testing pricing is crucial for any business. I remember one of my friends in eCom told a story about how they increased their pricing by 30% and the conversion rate didn’t change at all. But I hate raising prices “just because you can”, so I always introduce a big new feature before a price increase. I also always grandfather our existing customers in so they never get a price increase.

We’re an extremely lean company. We always keep our profitability at 90%. We still have no office, no in-house employees, no agencies we’re working with.

I think most people start spending more when they earn more, just because they can. Fancy offices, over-hiring, etc. Then, company effectiveness drops, and slowly, you become just another corporation. I hate that. We’re trying to hustle as hard as our first day with $0 MRR.

Growing with a focus on product

Probably the biggest challenge for every indie maker is getting their first users. For us, one thing was a huge success: manual outreach via Facebook groups.

We just shilled our app in dropshipping groups. We gave it out for free. Some of the posts went semi-viral which resulted in our app being one of the most trending apps in the Shopify app store, and that brought us even more installs. We managed to get 1,000 users in the first month.

I learned that doing things that don’t scale is the key in the beginning. We reached out to every user manually, did all the customer support ourselves, and gathered a lot of feedback. That helped us shape our product before introducing monetization.

After all, we're a product-led company with no marketing team. We believe that once you have an initial userbase, you just need to build a great product and make your users happy. Word of mouth will kick in. Our app has been featured by quite a few e-commerce gurus in various videos and courses without us even knowing about it.

We currently get around 15k installs a month. 50% of that comes from word of mouth — we can attribute it to the branded search keyword “kaching”. Another 40% comes from other organic keywords, and 10% comes from affiliate partnerships and ads.

Parting advice

Build what you know

Find a niche you’re comfortable with and build around that. It’s always easier to build for yourself or someone close who you know really well. Market knowledge is a game changer. I don’t think I would have been successful without previous experience in Shopify.

Don't over-research

Don’t overthink researching things and finding a perfect fit. I don’t believe in a “perfect idea”. Instead of spending weeks researching, just give it a try, build an MVP in a few weeks and see how it goes. Even if it’s a failure, you will learn so much more from the process than from the research.

Focus on the customer

Shipping fast and focusing on customer feedback is the key. A few months ago we even introduced a feature suggestion board for every app of ours. Almost all the things that we end up building now come from there.

Bootstrap

If you’re looking for financial freedom, avoid raising money from VCs. You will never be free with a VC over your head. A $10K MRR product could be a life changer for most founders, enabling financial freedom. But no VC firm would be happy with $10K MRR, so they wouldn’t ever let you take the profits. You would be forced to spend everything on growth, raise more money, and then burn that for growth. Bootstrapping makes more sense.

Find a cofounder

One of my mistakes early on was hiring a development contractor instead of having a cofounder. Soon enough, I realized that it’s too hard to manage them. It was too much time and money. So, after a couple of months struggling with the contractor and not launching the app, I found a cofounder. We launched an app with him in just a few weeks and we’re still working together more than four years later.

Read these

I believe that every founder has to read Paul Graham’s essays and Startup Playbook by Sam Altman.

What's next?

My goal is to reach a $1M MRR with KachingAppz. Optimistically, I believe we could hit it before 2026. Our vision is having a portfolio of Shopify apps in the upsell/discount category. All of those apps will be well integrated and cross promoted.

Besides that, I really want to personally run a startup studio where all of my ideas could come to reality. I already have a couple of side projects like PimpMySnap. I’m also building a couple of Webflow apps as we speak. I’m still curious about building stuff, therefore I will continue doing that.

I just need a proper system for this because my personal time is very limited and currently all of the projects I do require a lot of involvement from me.

If you want to follow along, I’m sharing my entrepreneurship journey on my X. There, you will find all my ideas, daily struggles, failures and successes.