Interlayer
Increase your Ecommerce, Website and Blog traffic in minutes
As a reader I want to read more, complementary content when I visit blogs. As a blogger I want to reach my target audience effortlessly without having to do exhaustive marketing or SEO activities.
The Shopify App officially launched on the Shopify App Store last Saturday!
Within hours it hit the no. 1 position in the "Trending" section and stayed there until yesterday.
Being the no. 1 trending app means a huge spike in traffic. I worked the whole weekend to fix some minor hiccups and keep the server setup up- and running. Turns out there are a lot of real-world use cases I haven't foreseen.
Overall I'm really happy with the outcome. More than 400 merchants are currently using the app.
I already have some plans for future updates but I'll observe and wait a little bit to gather more data and understand what merchants are looking for next.
Today I finally launched the Beta for the Shopify integration 馃コ
I went over to Reddit and Twitter to find some beta tests who are willing to test-drive the app on their stores.
Unfortunately Shopify had some hiccups right before I launched with their Admin panel which caused some issues during the app installation. Luckily enough those were resolved in a timely manner.
Interlayers main goal is to help any website owner, whether she's operating an ecommerce store, a personal website or a blog to reach her target audience effortlessly.
While ambitious, it's too broad of a goal when starting out.
There is the saying that one should start with a niche and I agree with that.
After doing some brainstorming I made the decision to focus on the ecommerce sector first. To further narrow it down I'm focusing on Shopify store owners who want to attract more interested visitors to their store.
Today I published a new, dedicated Shopify-focused landing page here: https://interlayer.io/shopify
After looking deeper into the analytics it was apparent that the current landing page wasn't communicating the products value proposition in a clear and easy to understand manner.
The last days I sat down to create a brand new landing page from scratch. This turned out to be a great exercise as I'm really happy with the outcome.
The new page was just deployed to Netlify and can be found here: https://interlayer.io/
After pondering a little bit more about the idea and the potential solution to the problem I'm trying to solve I decided to set a deadline and implement the solution in no less than 2 weeks.
As many of us do I had many different ideas for features but eventually hat to cut them down to a handful given the aforementioned time constraint.
Given my background in Cloud Computing and Machine Learning I was able to implement the first Prototype in 2 weeks using a Tech stack of Python + PostgreSQL on the backend (Flask, SQLAlchemy, Numpy, NLTK) with a vanilla JavaScript "frontend" (the Widget code).
At the end of the day it took me roughly 3 weeks because I hadn't planned for the Landing Page and the actual deployment.
Getting interested readers to visit your blog and enjoy your content is hard.
Sure, you can play the SEO game but it takes months until you're ranked high enough in search engines such that organic traffic flocks to your website.
As a reader I'm always interested in related, complementary content. Usually I end up with a bunch of tabs I go through after an exhaustive Google search.
As a content producer / blogger I'm interested to get in front of my target audience as easily and quickly as possible.
After thinking a little bit more about it I figured that we can combine both problems into 1 single solution:
A Widget website owners cam embed into their sites which will surface relevant and complementary content to their visitors. Such content can be from the site itself or from other sites using Interlayer.io.
This way I delight my users with relevant, additional recommendations while also getting visitors from other websites who use the Interlayer Widget on their sites.