Seeking CTO for Shopify App

I've just been through the whole cycle of launching, growing and eventually sunsetting a Shopify app over the last couple of months.

The app I wrote was called Interlayer and helped merchants to get more traffic to their stores. It worked well and was even Trending on the Shopify App Store for 3 days.

First off: The Shopify Support team is remarkable. The whole app review process was super smooth and everyone was super helpful and friendly. The only thing I had to update was to add GDPR Webhooks such that Merchants and Customers can request to get their data removed / redacted (I haven't found any article mentioning this so that was a little bit surprising).

Unfortunately I ran into a couple of app related issues along the way:

1. I guess given the goal of my app I attracted a lot of trial users who would install the app and churn after 14 days
2. A lot of Dropshipping stores were using my app which confused my ML algorithm
3. I had some huge stores sending an influx of traffic to my server (My server could handle it but it's something you need to be aware of)
4. Given some shops do promotions you might get traffic spikes
5. The App Store is really saturated and it's tough to compete. A lot of high value apps are free because Agencies are using them to upsell their Agency services from within the app (they basically use the app to promote their services)
6. My hunch is that you'll make the "real" money with Shopify Plus Merchants. However such Merchants have different traffic patterns are are usually looking for individual solutions

As I said, the Shopify team is amazing and it's Platform is really powerful. The bullet points above are just some of the things you need to be aware of when starting to dive deeper into Shopify App development.

BTW Let me know if you're facing any technical issues while working on the Shopify App. There's some OAuth dance you have to do and apparently that's where most people give up. I wrote an implementation in Python / Django and I can extract the OAuth parts if you need access to that and work in Python.

Ping me
Email in my profile

Hi there, I've been working in the ecom space. Built a couple of 6-7 figure ARR businesses previously as the technical and product cofounder.

Would email work for continuing the conversation? My email is in my profile.

Hi @markwagner. Really interesting idea for the app. I am a full-Stack Developer. I just love exploring new things and doing development. I have 3 years of experience in software development and have also launched multiple websites. I would like to contribute to this project. You can know more about me here https://www.linkedin.com/in/paras-sharma-b8835715b/
I would love to hear more about the app and its features.