I'm a private driver with zero coding background. I just shipped a working Shopify app. Now I need real merchants to break it.
I drive people around for a living. I've never written a line of code in my life. A few months ago I decided I wanted to build something on the internet that actually makes money — not a course, not an idea, an actual small business. I spent a long time just looking for the right problem to solve, mostly failing, until I landed on something boring but real: abandoned cart recovery for small Shopify stores.
Big platforms already do this (Klaviyo, Omnisend, etc.), but they're built for stores that already have marketing budgets and staff. I wanted something dead simple for the tiny stores that don't.
What I built, working with AI tools the whole way (I genuinely could not have done this alone): a Shopify app that watches for abandoned checkouts via webhooks, waits a configurable delay, and automatically emails the customer a link back to their cart. If they order, it marks the cart recovered and stops. If they never gave an email, it just leaves it alone.
It sounds simple, and technically it mostly is — but getting it actually production-ready took real work: proper webhook handling (including duplicate deliveries, which Shopify sends more than you'd expect), a real Postgres database instead of a local file, domain-verified email sending so it doesn't land in spam, and 24/7 hosting instead of my laptop. I tested it end-to-end on my own store multiple times: cart abandoned → wait → email arrives → click → checkout → marked recovered. It works.
What I don't have yet: a single real merchant using it. I've been testing on my own dev store, which only proves it works for me.
So here's my honest ask: if you run a real Shopify store (any size), I'd love to install this for you for free — no credit card, no catch — and just watch closely for a couple of weeks. In exchange I want your honest reaction: does it feel useful, did anything break, would you actually pay for it.
If you've been in a similar spot (non-technical, building with AI, looking for that first real user) I'd also love to hear how you got your first few testers — that's the part I'm least experienced at.
I'm at the same stage — shipped, works end to end, still waiting on the first real user — so read this as data from the same trench, not advice from the summit. What ten days of looking for strangers has actually measured for me: announcements from a brand-new account with no followers got single-digit views each. One genuine comment in an active community thread, where I had something concrete to add, produced my single biggest traffic day — several times what any announcement day managed. And going directly to one specific person who had publicly described the exact problem, and answering them concretely, got small but real attention. None of it has produced my first real user yet, so weight it accordingly — but the pattern was clear enough that I reorganized around it: be where the person with the problem is already talking, rather than announcing. Translated to your product: where do small store owners already complain about abandoned checkouts? Shopify's own community forum and r/shopify carry exactly those threads, and your "free install, I'll watch it closely for two weeks" offer made personally to one merchant who just described the pain will beat any launch post. And your instinct that a dev store only proves it works for you — that applies to distribution too. The only channel data that counts is what strangers actually did.
Going from zero coding background to a working Shopify app is a real jump, respect for actually shipping it. When you say you need merchants to "break it," are you more worried about edge cases in the checkout flow, or more about whether merchants will even understand how to set it up without guidance?
Going from a dev store to wanting a real merchant to use it is a pretty meaningful milestone. Curious what the first real store exposes that your own testing didn't.