#11 - How to build a successful Shopify App 🚀

Hey! Welcome to this new email. We have a lot of things to talk about. You and me.

Some good, some not so good.

So what's going on?

Shopify is laying off 1,000 workers 🙁

You probably saw the news that came today.

Almost 1,000 workers (10% of the workforce) are getting laid off and Shopify shares sank more than 16% following the announcement.

Tobi, the CEO, sent a letter explaining this choice and said he took the bet that the e-commerce growth due to covid was going to stay.

He then said:

It's sad for all the people who lost their job.

But I feel like this is "normal". Covid accelerated e-commerce growth and post-covid we're just returning to the numbers we had before.

My article on Business Insider 🎤

I got interviewed for the media "Business Insider" which is amazing!

They made an article on my Shopify App and me

If you're interested to read the article you can click here

Resources list 📃

I wrote a tweet regarding a small list of resources you can use, if you missed it and want to read it 👇

We talked about:

• Dev stack for a Shopify App dev

• Shopify Guidelines

• Providing excellent support

• Tracking your data

• Process to build an app

• Books to read

• All the important threads

New apartment in Paris

I just moved into my new apartment and prepared the office to make videos!

That's something I've been waiting for a long time. I want to start videos for my Shopify Apps to test a new channel.

I also want to do videos for myself, my Twitter account, and perhaps my Youtube channel 👀

I can't wait to start doing more content!

New WideBundle Dashboard

The new dashboard will soon be finished!

We've been working on something huge in the last weeks to improve activation rate, churn, and the number of support tickets.

I can't wait to release it! We already know our customers like it after asking for feedback.

The goal for me after that will be to track data and see if it really improves our metrics. If it doesn't, we'll need to change that and it will probably be complicated!

$29,000 MRR on WideBundle only 💸

If you remember, I recently shared the $30,000 MRR milestone. It was for both WideBundle and WideReview.

I'm happy to say that today, WideBundle reached $29,000 MRR alone!

700 subscribers to the newsletter 🔥

Another big win!

When I started to take Twitter seriously, the goal was 10,000 followers by the end of 2022 and 1,000 subscribers to my newsletter.

We're slowly reaching that goal and I can't be proud enough of that!

Thank you, everyone!

How to grow a SaaS

There is a framework I've been using since I started building SaaS.

It's called the AARRR framework.

A = Acquisition

A = Activation

R = Retention

R = Referral

R = Revenue

This framework explains all the steps in a successful SaaS. And it works the same way for a Shopify App.

Optimize your acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue, and you'll have a perfect SaaS.

Usually, a SaaS is not doing well because of at least one of these elements.

When you're doing something on marketing, it should be related to this framework.

So either you improve your acquisition (getting more installs)

Or you increase your activation (getting more users)

Or your retention (making sure people stay on your app)

Or referral (making sure users invite other people)

Or finally Revenue (making more money with what you already have)

So if you want to improve your SaaS, try to understand which step is broken and work to fix it. Improving your acquisition doesn't make sense if your retention or activation is bad.

And when you truly understand this framework, you're unstoppable. That's all you need for a successful SaaS.

And every successful SaaS out there uses the AARRR framework.

That's it for this email,

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

Mat 😁