PositionBird

I'm Sydney, a solo founder. My first Shopify app was StatusBird, which tells a store the moment it goes down. Small, useful, boring in a good way. Last month I launched the second one, PositionBird, and I want to lay out the bet because I'm not sure it's right.

The problem: shoppers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude what to buy. The AI names two or three stores. Everyone else is invisible, and some merchants are worse than invisible, because the AI is telling people their shop is closed or a scam. Merchants can't see any of this.

The catch: by the time I shipped, there were already about 13 "AI visibility" apps on the Shopify App Store. So I'm not first, and I decided not to pretend to be.

What I'm betting on instead:

1. Honesty as the feature. Every competitor's page says "fix wrong AI answers." That's not true for engines that answer from training data. My copy says so, and I publish the full methodology, including the parts that make the product look less magical. Hash-stamped evidence for every answer. My guess is merchants have been burned enough by SEO tools to notice.

2. Price. Free, $19, $49, $79. Deliberately under everyone. Solo founder, no sales team, the app has to sell itself from the listing.

3. A free scan with no signup as the whole top of the funnel. Run it on your store, see who the AI recommends instead of you, then decide.

What I'd love from this community:

- If you sell on Shopify, run the free scan and tell me if the result matched what you expected. Wrong results are the most useful thing you can send me.

- If you've launched into a crowded category before, did "the honest one" ever actually win, or is that a story founders tell themselves?

positionbird.io if you want to poke at it. Happy to answer anything about the stack, the API costs (querying five AI engines with web search is not cheap), or the Shopify review process.