Reached a milestone: My Slack+Shopify side project now has 3 paying customers, $45 in gross MRR and $15 in profit per month!

I wanted to share a quick milestone about a side project I've been working on and I hope it inspires others to keep building, marketing, and most importantly, iterating:

So, I recently got my third paying customer for my Shopify+Slack app, which is called Shoppy: A Better Slack Bot. Shoppy connects with Shopify stores and sends order notifications and order summaries to Slack. The reason I built it is because other Slack+Shopify apps out there didn't include tracking, tags, and discount information in their alerts, which meant I was spending way more time on reporting versus actually growing the Shopify store I managed.

So I made Shoppy, launched it on /r/shopify, and it went...badly!

Once I had a real user, I discovered a bunch of bugs that I couldn't have figured out if I didn't get a real customer. I emailed that customer, and he thankfully worked with me over 3 days and a bunch of emails. Eventually, we got it working for him, and from there, I started getting more free users.

My first paid customer happened about 2 months after that, but they never really reached out. It was the 2nd paying customer that really took Shoppy to the next level.

They were a massively successful health brand, and they needed the automatic daily, weekly, and monthly order summaries to work. Unfortunately, they had broken, and I didn't really know why the broke. But, this brand upgraded to paid and said they would be happy to pay if I could fix it. I told them I was on my honeymoon, but I would be back in a few days and I would get right on it.

Once I came back, I started gchatting with my point of contact at the brand, and we worked together on getting the notifications to actually send automatically and I added in-Slack slash commands for her (like /shoppy help).

They ended up being my third five-star review, and from there, I was able to get my third paying customer about a week after.

So since launching in late December 2018, here are the milestones I've achieved so far:

🏦 - 57 active shops
💬 - Over 10,000 order notifications sent
💰 - 3 paying customers
💵 - $45 in MRR
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - the average rating for Shoppy

It's not a ton of money, but I'm noticing the time between paying customers is getting shorter and shorter and retention is going up!

I hope this story inspires you to keep building because if I can go from no programming experience to a slightly profitable side project I know you can too! Also, if you manage a Shopify store and use Slack, feel free to try Shoppy out. It's completely free to use, and I'm always looking for more feedback: https://apps.shopify.com/shoppy-a-better-shopify-slack-app-by-emerald-io