How we launched a Shopify app and got to 8k ARR

Launching a Shopify app is 100% skill. Getting the app to be profitable and be used by Shopify merchants is 100% work.

Our agency Brickspace Lab (https://brickspacelab.com/) worked with a client on Shopify to build out a custom integration to offer a free gift if customers spent x amount on their products.

We quickly realized that this is something other Shopify merchants would want. I didn't bother doing much market research - I just wanted to build an app and this was the perfect learning experience, to dive in. I saw there were a few other apps already available on the app store, so wanted to come in with a solution that was a bit easier and cheaper.

That's when Freebies was born and developed.

It took about a month to build the application. It was very simple! We launched in the Shopify app store in 2016 and posted to a few Facebook communities. That's it! We didn't do anything else. The app organically grew over the last four years.

Here are a few things I learned:

Having a fairly specific app that solves one thing is great because it has the opportunity to rank high in the Shopify app store when people search that specific term.

Have a plan! I came in with no plan to grow or scale Freebies at all. At the time Freebies was more of an experiment than a business. I had no intention of investing any time to grow or improve the app at all. I was so focused on our agency that Freebies unfortunately was not a priority.

Communication is key! Talking with your customers is extremely valuable. On the plus side, having a buggy app was great because it told us what Shopify merchants expect in an app. Through our conversations, we heard good feedback, which is now being implemented in our new app.

Since launching, I never had time to support or improve the app - it was a side project that was left on the back burner. As the app aged there were more and more bugs popping up. Now it's obsolete so we're working on moving over any remaining users, still on Freebies to our new app - Easypop.