One app to $4K MRR without marketing. Two other apps failed.

TL;DR
Find a real pain to solve; you won't need much marketing effort.

I've been told a million times to "Start with the problem, not the solution".
Still, the only way for me to fully understand that was to succeed with one product and fail with two.

First success

My first Shopify app, RTL Master, was built to address a specific pain - helping Hebrew/Arabic Shopify merchants adjust their storefront layout to a right-to-left layout.
The problem was there. I was living it and spoke with clients about it daily while running my eCommerce agency in Israel.

Since the app launched, I didn't do any marketing but a few posts on FB groups where I knew merchants were hanging.
Since then, the growth has been natural and mostly word-of-mouth. I often see in those groups folks recommending the app to others who are facing the issue. Super simple.

Little I know

Stoked by the success of the app and how it just grows, I was rushed to build more apps. I did the mistake of assuming that Shopify apps are just growing naturally and generating decent income, then, why not build more?

I spent a pretty good time working on 2 new Shopify apps:

• Pine Raffle - App to create raffles in stores
• Easy Lottie - App to implement Lottie animations in the storefront

How did I come up with the ideas? I don't even remember, just felt like these are things people would like to have. I did a very professional validation process of asking myself: "Is it cool to have those apps?" and since I answered yes, I started building.

Pain needs to be painful

I think it's pretty clear already that those apps didn't have the bright future I was planning for them.
There are users and some installs from time to time, but since those are nice-to-have apps, without actively marketing them and convincing merchants they need them, there is not much growth.

I don't say they have no future. They just require much more effort.
Even though developing those apps took much more dev time than developing RTL Master, it doesn't matter; they don't address a pain that is painful enough.

Lesson learned

Now working on my new product, Shoffi (Affiliate platform for Shopify apps), I made sure the pain is real.
It started with me not being able to find a proper solution for our apps, then interviews/chats with many other developers to assure this solution was missing.

Happy that this time I did it by the book. There are already 400 users on the platform, and the feedback is very positive :)

Hopefully, my experiences will save whoever read that some time and frustration 😅