How We Validated & Grew a Shopify App to $25k/mo in Less Than a Year
This week I'm interviewing Mat. Mat is the founder of WideBundle, a Shopify app for creating product bundles. He managed to grow the app to $25,000/MRR in less than a year. Below are the approaches he used to validate & grow the product.
What’s your background, and what are you working on?
Hey, I’m Mat. I’m 24, I graduated in 2020 (engineering degree) and when I was still a student, I decided to launch a Shopify app called WideBundle to replace my last internship.
My engineering school accepted my suggestion and allowed me to create a company instead of taking that 6-month internship.
And at the end of these 6 months, I had a profitable company and graduated!
What motivated you to get started?
I always liked creating projects, websites, etc. And to create my own company was like a dream since I was a kid. But I also wanted to work in a big tech company, Facebook, Google or something like this.
In 2017, I did a 2-month internship. I had the opportunity to work in a big French aerospace company called “Dassault Aviation”, but didn’t like it. My team was great, but I felt like they could replace me quickly, and that my job was “useless” and I didn’t have any impact.
That’s when I decided that creating my company was my goal.
What went into building the initial product?
Right after my internship in 2017 and my new goal to create a company, I started to look for opportunities and at this moment, dropshipping was trendy. I joined a French Facebook group and started to learn more about e-commerce.
I wasn’t a marketing person, though. I had a technical background, knew how to code and so I did exactly what I knew. I started to help merchants with their Shopify stores on the Facebook group.
The admin of the group liked me, and after months, they even offered me an admin role in the group to help more.
And in 2020, when I was searching for ideas, I noticed that many people wanted an app to create bundles in a way that didn’t exist.
I created a fake photoshop mockup to validate the idea, asking if someone wanted the app. I started getting positive replies.
I contacted every single person who commented. I just wanted to validate the idea. I asked people why they wanted the app, what they’ve tried before, what they didn’t like about current bundle apps, etc.
And when I knew exactly what those people wanted, I started to think about the MVP, the first version of my products that I could ship fast to iterate.
So I started working on the app and released the first version in 1-2 weeks.
How have you attracted users and grown WideBundle?
The first 20 users were easy to attract. They were people that requested this app. I just created something for them.
At first, WideBundle wasn’t even on the Shopify App Store. We grew only with these early users.
And because I had created something that didn’t exist yet, those users shared the app.
They started to talk about our app and because I was focused on the French market, it was easier for me to target my users.
We probably grew to 100+ users only with this approach. We then released the app on the Shopify App Store and I asked my existing users to leave reviews on it.
And because we had many reviews in a short time, we made it to the first page quickly and Shopify started to promote our app on the homepage of the app store.
What made the difference was our support. Since day 1, I have offered top-tier support. I even say that our support is our first feature, because it's true!
You need to understand that by creating a Shopify app, you use the Shopify brand. Shopify wants developers who offer incredible support with the app, and they'll be happy to put you in front of more people if you have great support. That’s the reason why we even asked our users to talk about the support in their reviews.
When you focus on your customers, they will pay you back. When the app was getting more and more traction (when the users started to tell us how much they loved it), we increased the snowball effect by contacting French Influencers.
They had already heard about WideBundle, so it was easy to convert them. And then, word-of-mouth spread and the app store brought us even more users.
As you can see on this screen, from May 2020 to Jul 2020, we focused on improving the app with the few users we had.
We started to see growth when the users talked about about our app. That’s precisely when we decided to contact influencers.
And we saw exponential growth.
To help with growth, we also use Mixpanel, which allows you to track all your data and know what happens if the users are happy using your app. You can also track your conversion rate, etc.
Mixpanel helped us find out what we needed to improve. At first, our conversion rate (free trial to paid users) was low (around 9%), but we increased it to 40% by testing new stuff and monitoring it through Mixpanel.
What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?
We have a single plan, currently at $14.99/month. The pricing is one of the mistakes we made. We only increased our price once when went from $12.99 to $14.99.
We are currently improving this, as we want to offer different plans to earn more per user.
The only way we grew our revenue was by improving the activation phase. We went from a conversion rate (free trial to paid customers) of 9% to 40%.
What are your goals for the future?
We want to create an ecosystem within Shopify. We have already released a new app called WideReview, and we want to create new apps.
Shopify users use 6 apps on average and if they like our first app, they might like the others. That way, we can increase our revenue per user using many apps.
If you had to start over, what would you do differently?
If I had to start over, I would do the same for the initial phase, but I would have added more plans based on the usage since the beginning. Three plans is a good number.
I would have also waited to launch our second app. I didn’t fully delegate WideBundle, and managing 2 apps is hard.
Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The choice to focus on support was my best move. People love great support. It's better have excellent support and an average product than poor support and a great product.
We also created internal tools that allow us to test Shopify stores to help us find issues quickly when a user had a bug. This approach helps us find the problem and fix it faster.
Also, we focused on a specific problem that other bundle apps didn’t focus on. This allowed us to ship the product fast, even if our product wasn’t better than the other apps on the markets.
Where can we go to learn more?
You can try WideBundle here. You can follow me on Twitter: @DsMatie. I'm also on Facebook and on LinkedIn.
Feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments below!
How did you do this? @MatDeSousa
1- We talked to our customers when they contacted the support to understand what they wanted. It allowed us to add features
2- Using Mixpanel I compared users who stayed at the end of the trial to understand what they did that the others didn't
3- Using the information from Mixpanel I was able to set up an onboarding process with the different steps on the homepage. Easier for them to know what to do
4- We tracked the time it took our users from the moment they install to the moment they finish the onboarding. And then by changing the UX we checked if we were able to lower that
5- More Helpdesk articles about the questions we received on support
Worth reading, Darko. Thanks for sharing.
Hey Mat. Great interview! Are most of your users coming from the Shopify App Store nowadays?
Hey! Thanks
We have 25% coming from the Shopify App Store
30% from word of mouth
10% from Youtube with affiliates
6% from Facebook
and the others % are a mix
Thank you Mat - a motivational interview. I would like to get an app developed, is there a way to approach you?
Yup, you can contact me on Facebook or even Twitter (everything is at the end lf the article)
@MatDeSousa
Great interview. Congrats on the great work.
Was curious, what are the different changes you did that brought conversion rate from 9% to 40%? What all worked the best?
Thanks!
1- We talked to our customers when they contacted the support to understand what they wanted. It allowed us to add features
2- Using Mixpanel I compared users who stayed at the end of the trial to understand what they did that the others didn't
3- Using the information from Mixpanel I was able to set up an onboarding process with the different steps on the homepage. Easier for them to know what to do
4- We tracked the time it took our users from the moment they installed to the moment they finished the onboarding. And then by changing the UX we checked if we were able to lower that
5- More Helpdesk articles about the questions we received on support
Thank you for the reply @MatDeSousa. This is very helpful, really appreciate your tips.
Kudos!
Very cool summary of what worked for you. I love your description of the iterative validation process you went through:
And your thinking seems very clear about what will prove effective in maximizing the number of users and revenue (support, multiple related products, pricing tiers). Impressive! I hope you'll use your profits for the well-being of others and yourself.
Thanks! I hope this will inspire people to do the same!
136 comments. That's wild. Curious how many of them replied once you contacted them? Facebook can very easily ghost you once you DM too many people.
Around 50% replied 👍
Sometimes you need to stop because Facebook thinks you're just spamming people, but I just wait for a few hours and keep contacting them
Great read! I'd have two questions:
I spotted the problem just reading different posts and during the previous months I saw 2 posts where people were asking for an app that does it
and saw some posts too on other groups
Sometimes they just share a screenshot of a store with what they want
It took me probably 2 hours to set up something on Photoshop, and if nobody wanted it, it was just 2 hours wasted
Wasn't my first attempt, some posts completely failed, like nobody replied so I just moved one
That makes perfect sense, thank you.
I tried a similar approach a view months ago. I have to agree with some of the other comments here that it's a bit tricky to find "good" Facebook groups. Especially since Facebook did it's UI facelift it became significantly harder to find something using their group search because everything is geofenced (might be worth to test a VPN). Like for example I can't even find french Shopify groups at all. Do you have any tips on how you usually approach that?
To be honest I didn't have that problem since I focused only on French Market so all the groups were easy to find for me
And sometimes I talk to people and they tell me about another group that is useful, etc
Got it. Thanks again, Mat.
But the thing is, you may have only 2 persons talking about a problem, but it's enough
Most people won't tell others about what they want unless it's already there.
How can I find good quality facebook groups? Most Facebook groups are full of spam posts and selling something.
When you're in a Facebook group you can check how many posts were created in the last month, to see if the group isn't dead
Something else: it's not because people aren't talking that they don't see your post. I mean, the number of comments isn't always that high, but sometimes if you find something valuable, people will reply
I started another app, WideReview, did the things a bit differently and I only add 40 comments, still great to start 👍
What you need is "only" 10 early users
I have researched an idea, but I am not able to find merchants for feedback, do you have any guide on how to know whether an idea has potential to grow?
I don't have a guide
But basically, you need to talk to many different potential users, explain the problem you want to solve and see if they do have it
You can start with a problem directly, like checking discord, twitter, facebook groups or even Shopify forums
And like it's easier to find a problem and then think about an idea to fix the problem
Your average revenue per customer is great and 40% trial conversion is incredible, do you have any key feature in paid plan that gets most people to upgrade?
Also the growth slows a bit around Nov 2020, is it because of any changes in AppStore or a competitor app coming up in same space?
I still want to increase the average value per customers as I add more plans
WideBundle is a bundling app, mostly used for BLack Friday and Christmas so around that time we have less acquisition (people already installed the app and set up everything)
And then it goes up again in January
Now this is the quality content I come here for. Thanks for sharing!
I'm wondering how you found good quality Facebook groups to join in your niche, in my experience most Facebook groups I've found are either dead, or full of spam posts.
No problem!
When you're in a Facebook group you can check how many posts were created in the last month, to see if the group isn't dead
Something else: it's not because people aren't talking that they don't see your post. I mean, the number of comments isn't always that high, but sometimes if you find something valuable, people will reply
I started another app, WideReview, did the things a bit differently and I only add 40 comments, still great to start 👍
What you need is "only" 10 early users
This was a great read! Thanks for sharing.
"The choice to focus on support was my best move. People love great support. It's better have excellent support and an average product than poor support and a great product." This is a great insight!
Was this your first ever business venture? It sounds like you really nailed your process (validating before building, getting lots of feedback, working to make the experience optimal for early adopters)!! Bravo, sir! 👏
It wasn't my first business, but the first successful one
I created a Shopify app back in 2017 but did a lot of mistakes, never had more than 70 users
Created other SaaS projects but still a lot of mistakes
I learned along the way and decide to start from scratch on a new app with everything I knew now!
Thanks for the comment!
Great interview.
Question. Which tool or tools you are using to offer your great support?
We are using Crisp!
Really simple to start, only $97/month and it allows us to get all the messages from Email, Instagram, Live chat, Messenger
We can even set up webhooks
In my case I receive an alert in Slack when there is someone on the support
I also receive alert if someone didn't have a reply, etc
Mixpanel looks cool but is too expensive for us atm. Does anyone know of a cheaper alternative?
Posthog is better. You can Host your own product analytics suite with their open source platform. Its free for Startups.
You can use Mixpanel for free for a year if you're a startup, that's what I did
And we are currently paying around $1200 per year
I don't know if Amplitude is cheaper