Huntify

Immediately after launching the platform and providing basic voting functionality, I quickly realized that this was the right path to go. We saw returning users, Shopify App developers loved the idea and this would be a path towards a sustainable business model.

By giving users a platform to comeback to, we would be able to build a community and drive more engagement.

In order to do that , the next two things on my list were to rebrand (needed to get away from Shopify trademark) and to build out the App Detail pages.

Rebranding:

I had mixed feelings on rebranding. I love the name ShopifyHunt, but also realized that if this thing was going to be successful I would need to change it eventually. Shopify has a different mentality around the reuse of their name. For example there are extremely popular Unofficial Facebook Shopify Groups and podcasts. There is a chance that it wouldn't have been an issue, but I found myself spending too much time thinking about it, which was a distraction that I didn't need.

So I decided to bite the bullet and change the name to www.huntify.io (btw this was a name recommendation from another IH user).

In hindsight I am glad I did this now. It was a distraction and ultimately would have been more of a PITA if I had waited.

Shopify App Detail Pages:

These came out great and provided an almost immediate 2X increase in pageviews (Example here: https://huntify.io/shopify_apps/quick-draft-orders). This is due to the ability to share a custom URL and social sharing right from the page. Now all promotion that Huntify offers will drive traffic to the App's custom page.

These pages are going to act as a the foundation for all future improvements. I have a lot of ideas on how to improve these pages.

Some of those are:

• Allow merchants to follow app developers apps
• Chat with followers on App page
• Let app developers send updates to their followers
• Give app developers deeper app analytics (ranking, review changes, etc)

This is a 2 sided community with the obvious chicken-egg issue. My goal was to solve that by getting App Developers listing their apps and then start working on driving merchant traffic. That will be a big next step for me.

Next up for me:

• Automating more operations
• Market more to drive marketing packages ($$$$)
• Spread the word on merchant channels (Reddit, Shopify, Fb Groups)

I wrote the linked post looking for feedback, but consolidating it all here under the same product.

The short of it is that I started with the newsletter which I wrote about here (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/weekly-shopify-app-newsletter/launched-shopify-app-newsletter-landing-page--LpntIZYa9Wbo-SGl69v). From that I saw decent traction and wanted to build something with more of a recurring experience and a community. Initially I had thought I could send out a daily newsletter, as there are at least 3-4 new apps published to the app store every day. That felt too noisy and realistically wasn't going to provide the value that I wanted.

Around the same time as thinking through the next steps, I had listened to the Indiehackers podcast with Mubs of Podhunt and the wheels started turning. I realized I could apply the same Product Hunt concept to the newsletter. So I did and I launched something called Shopify Hunt. I posted about it in the linked article looking for feedback from IH. Most of the feedback I received was positive with the consistently negative feedback being that I would run into issue with the Shopify trademark. This is something that is on my mind and plan to change it.

Next up is driving app developers and merchants to the platform, building out the next set of features and trying to generate some revenue via ads/sponsorships.

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/shopify-users-im-looking-for-feedback-aaaabad76a