Indieshops

On Wednesday, a thread on the front-page of Hacker News was discussing the lack of quality brands on Amazon - the exact problem we're trying to solve. Seeing an opportunity to show Indieshops to new users, we replied in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20997107.

The idea of Indieshops seemed to resonate with a lot of people, driving ~250 new users to the site, and gathering lots of upvotes. We were especially pleased to see some engaging replies, including the founder of Polyvore ("Bookmarked!").

We didn't expect very much from the comment and wrote it as an afterthought, but it turns out it was our biggest day of user engagement so far! You never know which opportunity will produce results.

After sharing the site with some friends, we realized they immediately clicked on something and left the site. Our bounce rate was pretty high, and there wasn't a lot of returning users. We figured we needed to make Indieshops a little more interactive in order for it to be a more sticky experience.

• We still wanted to keep the shops as the main focus, so we decided to add a preview pane when you click on a store. The idea being, users could "window shop" by browsing the shops from within our site.

• Along with this we added a Mailchimp footer. We are hoping that by building a mailing list we could notify users of the best shops of the week, and get some returning users by changing the model from pull to push.

• A new Shop page was added, so you can share individual shops with a friend. Prior to this, if you saw a shop you wanted to send to someone on Indieshops you'd just send them to the shop's url, and your friend would never get to see Indieshops. With the new Share button in the preview pane, you can share that specific shop within Indieshops with someone.

We'd love it if you could try the new features and let us know what you think!

After some discussions we decided to scale back some of the community features we had developed (likes, collections, login). We wanted to launch with the simplest feature set so users wouldn't get overwhelmed. Along with these changes we implemented a redesign made by Ben. We think it looks great and hope you do too!

It took 3-4 weeks, but we finally got around to building the prototype for Indieshops. We worked mostly nights and weekends, and decided to experiment with two prototypes. I worked on building a prototype with Bubble (bubble.is) while Paul worked on a vanilla JS + Firebase version. We got together, looked at the results and ended up going with Paul's version but Bubble still seems promising especially for mocking out things.

On a friends trip to LA, Ben threw around the idea of a place to discover and browse Shopify stores. We all loved the concept and decided to do start looking for domain names (everyone knows that's how you start a company). We found a fantastic '.co' domain inspired by IndieHackers and ran with it.