Ran an agency, then started building public Shopify apps too. The economics were unconventional

Hey Independent Hackers of the net,

Long-time lurker, finally posting. I co-run a Shopify agency with my wife Victoria. Before the agency I spent 10+ years at Shopify on the engineering side. Over the last couple of years we've been quietly shipping public apps to the Shopify App Store alongside our client work: JourneyGlow, PriceGlow and StockGlow.

A few things I didn't expect about the app side:

Niche beats generic, by a lot. Each of our apps solves one specific merchant problem. "A widget that maps where a product came from and how it got to your door" sounds narrow, but that's exactly why the merchants who want it find it. The biggest apps in the App Store right now are the most specific ones.

Build velocity matters more than feature depth. We use Gadget.dev as our platform. A custom app build that would take 8 weeks from scratch (handling auth, webhooks, hosting, billing, database) is more like 3–4 weeks on Gadget. As a person who tinkers I used to have more half-finished projects vs production apps, now that ratio has flipped. That difference is what makes the agency + apps combo economically work. We can ship a public app between client engagements.

Agency revenue funds app development. We're not VC-funded. The agency pays the salaries; the apps are the long-term play. If you're solo and considering this path, the agency-funds-apps model is more durable than trying to bootstrap apps cold. They are in the same (or at least adjacent) worlds too, so what I learn doing agency work is useful building apps. Put your Mr Claude to work on the weekends ;-)

App Store discovery is a marketing problem, not a build problem. Once the app is live, you're competing/complaining with thousands of others. We've found that solving a specific, named problem ("JourneyGlow = product origin-to-doorstep transparency") makes paid search work; trying to rank for "best Shopify product page app" doesn't.

Happy to answer questions about: building on Gadget.dev, agency-to-product pivots, surviving the Shopify App Store review, the Scripts-to-Functions migration that's currently eating a lot of Plus merchant calendars, or anything else.

Our agency site is at https://victoriagarland.ca if you want to see what client work looks like alongside the apps.