Eighteen months ago, we sold our first-ever product, a Shopify Quiz App (https://apps.shopify.com/perfect-product-finder).

In this blog post, I outline the steps we took towards building a product people love. I hope it’ll give you valuable insights. In case you got any questions feel free to send me an email at c@instant.so

Hope it provides you value. Happy reading :)

Product & Love

The product is the foundation of your company; you need a product that solves a problem and stands out in at least one aspect compared to your competitors (there's no need to reinvent the wheel here;)).

In our case, the real differentiating factor was the UX/UI component. We improved the whole UX/UI of the product on a level our competitor(s) hadn't seen. It’s always best to benchmark with the best of the best, and find an example that inspires you. (e.g., the user experience of the iPhone).

Once you have your MOAT (competitive advantage), it’s time to ship the product and bring it into the hands of your first customers.

Getting your first customers

Boom, you’ve shipped the product, and now the fun begins; getting it into the hands of customers. To acquire our first customers, we started with the following 3 methods divided below by the percentage of time spent on each method.

- Outbound Sales (scrappy and easy way to get started that won’t cost you a dime) (60%)
Use Storeleads or Apollo to acquire contacts
- Weekly marketing newsletter (30%)
This was for people we had reached out to who weren’t interested yet
- Inbound downloads from the Shopify App Store (a small % of merchants will come via this, but a nice channel to start with since it’s free) (10%)

We started with these simple beginnings, but the above combination created our initial traction. Later, content production and distribution across various social media channels became critical. An affiliate program is also recommended, although we didn't implement one with this app.

Customer Support & Reviews

Very important and sometimes underrated. Outstanding customer support (24/7) is crucial. We didn't initially prioritize this, but a negative review stressed its importance. We woke up after publishing our app, and the first negative review was a fact: we were slow in responding, and the customer needed help now. We knew we had to solve this problem.. We did this by being in our inboxes nearly 24/7 :).

Due to the exceptional support we were delivering, we started to receive positive reviews from merchants. It’s not recommended to ask for reviews directly (we learned the hard way, again).

Shopify has a great guide here on this.

Where to sell?

With the basics in place, you can grow to reach the target Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) you've set. In the acquisition/venture capital landscape, you'll only discuss Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR, which is the MRR * 12). Pricing the app is the ARR * multiplier = x (depends a bit on market conditions what this is, but the multiplier figure varies around 4-10x your ARR).

Let's look at an example: you have 50K MRR * 8 = 400K USD potential selling price. I am just giving average numbers in my personal experience, I’ve seen way higher multipliers on acquisitions.

Great, now it’s time to list your app on acquire.com; they even have a special section for Shopify Apps. After listing our app on acquire.com, we received 4-5 information requests daily, primarily because we built something that people love, hence the demand. The rest is history.

Conclusion

Designing, building, shipping, and selling to customers isn’t done in a day; patience is key to building something great. The above may come across as high-level, but these are the fundamentals you need to build something people love. I am sure you’ll figure out the rest.