Store Leads

I remember when Quora launched. It had a lot of hype and was the cool kid on the block for quite a while. That was back in 2009. You hardly hear about Quora these days, at least in comparison to the heady days of their launch, but I've find myself on their site at least once a month and I'm always impressed by the quality of their content.

Shortly after launching Store Leads, I answered a question on Quora referring readers to Store Leads. It has turned out to be a surprisingly effective channel. At present, I'm averaging at least 1 signup a day just based on that answer. I haven't invested heavily in promoting Store Leads yet but I'm quite pleased with that return.

I was chatting with someone who works in Marketing and he has had similar experience with Quora. Not all questions get a lot of visibility, but those that do can drive a fair amount of traffic. He also advised looking into their advertising offering. I haven't had a chance to do that yet but my advice to you is: don't overlook Quora in your marketing efforts. They could be an effective low-effort acquisition channel.

I created Store Leads as part of my efforts to promote my own Shopify app.

The idea for Merchant Mail was to provide a lightweight customer support tool by integrating Gmail and Shopify. Merchants could get all the information they needed to respond to customers quickly directly in Gmail. No more app switching and unnecessary searches.

I knew from my time at Square that merchants loved things that saved them time. But I didn't know how much they'd be willing to pay or how many of merchants were on the Shopify platform that also used Gmail. In short, I built Merchant Mail on a hunch and only later started to research the size of the market. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

Enter Store Leads. To answers these questions, I needed to get a better understanding of merchants using the Shopify platform. I started assembling a list of Shopify stores and collecting various public attributes that would be useful for market research. Initially, I hacked together a solution for internal use but it quickly proved useful enough that I decided to turn it into a product.

Based on Store Leads data, I was quickly able to identify the total addressable market size for Merchant Mail. I just had to look at all the Shopify domains that either:

• Used a @gmail.com address for support
• Used G Suite to host email for their entire domain.

It turns out that slightly more than 100,000 Shopify merchants meet that criteria. This was useful validation on my initial hunch. Store Leads also lets me segment these merchants on a variety of dimensions: country, creation date, theme, web ranks (and more) which helps me target my marketing efforts.

Introducing Store Leads, an interactive database of Shopify stores. It was created to help Shopify app developers do market research and competitive analysis.

Store Leads includes public information for over 830,000 live Shopify domains. We include country, creation date, worldwide rank, theme data, redacted contact information (email addresses and social media accounts) and more. You can filter stores on any of these dimensions using our intuitive search interface. Create a free account and have a look for yourself.