Hotbar - Announcement Bar Popups

I finished coming up with the idea for my product, and it was time to build. Great! However, there was just one problem...

The tech stack required to build a Shopify app differed from what I had experience with. I was primarily a PHP/MySQL/HTML+CSS kind of person. However, Shopify app development pretty much dictates that you work with Ruby/NodeJS, and React on the front-end.

So, clearly I had some learning to do!

No problem.

I decided to pick up React first. I had experience in the past with Angular, so it was a breeze for me to pick up. I was quickly able to churn out simple user interfaces using React.

My next challenge was to decide on a back-end framework. Ruby or Node, which one should I choose?

I ended up going with Node. Personally, I believe that it's a more valuable programming language in today's ecosystem.

So I downloaded an open-source GitHub repository that was a boilerplate Shopify app template by ElkFox (HIGHLY recommend!). I spent a few days looking through the code and understanding how it worked.

After I had familiarized myself with the new technology stack, I was ready to take on the development of my new Shopify App venture!

So, I decided it was time to create a Shopify app, but I still didn't know what type of app to build. So what did I do? I looked at other existing apps to see if I could get some inspiration!

Looking through the app store, there are all kinds of wonderful, unique software that other hackers have created. There were so many beautiful, well-polished apps, and they all seemed to accomplish unique things.

My philosophy for coming up with the idea was that I wanted to create something that was unique, but also not so obscure that it'll hardly get discovered. I wanted to create a slight variation on a wildly popular concept. A small twist that could potentially lead to huge growth. With this approach in mind, I began trying to discover the most popular apps to see which I could recreate, while also offering a different spin on.

I had discovered what I was looking for. Announcement bars! They are probably one of the most popular types of apps for Shopify. They're in many of the default Shopify themes, and there has to be 20 or so different announcement bar apps available on the app store. But the thing is, each of these announcement bars have THOUSANDS of reviews! I thought that this was the concept to put my spin on. See, the majority of these apps are simple. They are customizable in color and font, and the announcement text itself is changeable too. Some of them had a button that linked you to a different page on the website. They're useful, and practical.

In my eyes, I had already known what I wanted to build. I wanted to combine modals with announcement bars. So when a user sees the announcement, they'll click on a button to get a popup. This accomplishes two things:

1. Users hate popups. A spammy pop-up is like an annoying salesperson who jumps at you as soon as you enter a store. By hiding a popup behind a button that the user actually clicks on to receive, the conversion rate on the popup goes up SIGNIFICANTLY.

2. Not only is the app that I plan on creating an announcement bar alone, but now it's an announcement bar popup, which makes it much more marketable.

I also believed that this would be a relatively simple app for myself to build. As this was going to be my first independent web app project, I wanted to start with something that was going to be simple, as a way to "test the waters".

So it was decided! I was going to build an announcement bar + popup combination. My initial thoughts were to make the popup customizable too. I wanted to allow the store owners to create many different types of popups, ranging from simple email collection popups, quiz popups, to discount creation popups. I was excited with my idea, and wanted to get started building it immediately! However, I encountered my next challenge soon after...

When I got started creating Hotbar, I didn't really know what I wanted to create, just that I wanted to create something. I had been working as a software developer for close to five years for other companies, but I had always wanted to pursue my own software ventures. During my time spent at the jobs I've worked, I gained a tremendous amount of experience building full-stack web applications.

Eventually, I got to the point where I felt capable enough in my skills to build and release a software application. However, I had no idea what to build! In my past, I had a lot within the eCommerce industry. I've even worked at Magento, which is one of the leading eCommerce vendors in the market today. However, I decided to look into Shopify's app developer program, mostly because they seem to have a very well-structured app store. And from my knowledge, Shopify apps are a big part of what makes Shopify successful. So I decided for my first project, I would build a Shopify app!

Coming up with the idea of what type of Shopify app to build was next. I get into this mental block state when I am trying to come up with something good to build, which is partially why I haven't created anything on my own until now. Well, if you want to figure out what I decided to build, continue reading on the next update!