Cloud Hooks

Things were going relatively well, but growth had really slowed down and my forte is definitely in creating. So it made sense to pack it all up and hand the reigns off to someone who could handle growth as well as operations. Cloud Hooks was my first real success as a founder and I look forward to applying the lessons I picked up on whatever comes next!

Pandemic-boosted e-commerce really carried this through for me. Still finding that most customers are free due to my 100-action free tier, but the hope is that they are successful and grow to become paying customers. One thing that is nice, is that they don't have to upgrade their plan once they grow enough, it just happens when they have enough orders or other events flowing through their system. Makes it feel like a bit of a snowball effect.. get more free, new shops on, watch them grow, and be confident that they will become paying customers as it happens.

After a dull few weeks without many new customers (but thankfully without any uninstalls, either), I got a little burst of incoming requests that got me up to 50 active Shopify shops!

Two of these new shops were referred by an active developer affiliate, too, which means they are actively using the product and will likely be billable right away. So far, the affiliate program is paying off beautifully, as fellow developers know what they need and are best able to appreciate the value that Cloud Hooks provides.

Side note: just billed out for $318 for August.. That is up 75% on July :)

Cloud Hooks comes with 100 free actions every month, with each additional action costing $0.01. So when I launched, I didn't actually have a script set up for billing users, as I figured most people trying it out would not make it above 100 actions in a month.

In May and June I had a few shops go over the 100 action mark, but by small enough amounts that I let myself procrastinate. Finally, in June I had some more serious use (~9000 actions / $90) and on July 8th I pulled the trigger and billed for June through Shopify's payment API.

This was an incredibly difficult step for me.

I really enjoy making things, designing, coding, conceptualizing. But logos, marketing pitch, support plans, etc? I just bog down, and usually bail before I have actually finished my product.

Not this time though. With some coaxing from friends who know my tendency to stop and change course, I completed the application and got the joy of seeing my app show up on Shopify's fancy new app store.

After writing another web hook handler for a client, I realized that it took me all day to set up and secure what was, effectively, about 20 lines of code.

Initially, my idea was a UI which would be more like Shopify Flow and allow non-technical users to create extensions. However, this didn't actually solve my original problem and within a week or so I had begun again with the idea of a hosted Javascript solution.