Shopify App Market Research

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.