How we found THE idea!

I want to share how we found our idea — the things we did right (maybe?). I had a solid founding team and tech background. What we needed was an idea. We did a bunch of side projects and hackathons. Made an iOS app that created animated videos of people's trip photos. We made a web app for movie recommendations that could find movies for some creative genres such as love at first sight and horror in the woods. And a few more. But we wanted to work on something to which we could commit our next ten years. We weren't looking for a small side hustle or a hobby project.

The only clue we had was that we were interested in the e-commerce industry, especially Shopify. As an engineer and product builder, I had a great urge to start building the second an idea popped into my head. After seeing enough startups making the same mistake of building a product first and then trying to fit it into a problem statement, I decided not to do that.

Therefore, I decided to heed the golden advice and speak to my customers, except I didn't know who to talk to or what to talk about. I did not even know enough people in the e-commerce space. The first step was to be where my customers were. I joined Facebook groups, slack communities, subreddits, and LinkedIn groups focused on e-commerce, Shopify, dropshipping, etc. But the starting point was Clubhouse rooms. It used to be a rage at that time (December 2020 - January 2021). I regularly started attending the rooms where several online store owners would ask the organizers about their challenges and doubts. This was a golden chance for me to hear what people were complaining about. I knew that was where the opportunity would come from. At this point, we had 0 ideas about what we were going to build.

I attended countless such rooms for the next month. Several questions were being asked to those clubhouse room admins, but the most common concerns were the same.
1/ My Facebook ads are not doing good
2/ How do I grow further as my sales have plateaued

And the most common answers were also the same:
1/ Spend more on FB ads and focus on a smaller niche
2/ Try Google ads, YouTube ads, Pinterest, etc.

After listening to the almost same questions and answers for months, a few things were clear to me:
1/ Ads were getting costlier and online stores were paying more for getting new customers
2/ The magic key to all their problems was increasing ad spending.

The math didn't match. Suppose a business is spending more money acquiring new customers, and it is not in their control to lower the cost of getting new customers. In that case, the only thing they can do is make more money from those already acquired customers. This is not rocket science. It was an obvious conclusion. So, I wondered why all of these people had not tried it already.

Now, I entered the next phase of market research. I sent DM to several store owners on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to speak to them directly. It took quite a while, and I hired a virtual assistant to help my outreach. I also drove to several Shopify stores near my place in North Carolina. After a lot of effort, I had over 50 conversations with online store owners, and I observed the following:
1/ Most haven't cared to focus on customer retention but would like to.
2/ A small number of them tried but found it too cumbersome to come up with their retention strategy.
3/ A very small number of people (< 10%) felt they are doing great and need not focus on retention.

At this point, I knew what I was going to solve. I wanted to help e-commerce business owners improve their customer retention. It was clear to me that improving retention is not an easy problem. It required a deep dive and understanding of a store's customer data. Understanding who their best and worst customers were. What do they buy and when? How much do they spend? It wasn't an easy feat, and not every business had the resources or technical know-how to develop their retention strategy. This was when the Data Scientist in me kicked in and led to building ShopAgain.

I'll write another day on how we built ShopAgain, but for this article, the only message I want to drive is that we did not know what we wanted to build. But we chose to stay close to our customers, hear them, and speak to them. That's how it started.