#15 - How to build a successful Shopify App 🚀

The vacation is over. I'm back from Portugal.

It was great; I've been able to spend time with my family and take time for myself.

I agree; I didn't work a lot. I only did what was necessary every day.

And damn that was great! Trust me, take some time for yourself when you can. When you come back it's like a boost. You have more energy.

I'm writing this email in a hotel in Bordeaux (south of France). And tomorrow morning I'll go back to Paris.

New dashboard 🔥

Ok, so now that I'm back in France I'm thinking about everything I must do. And the 1st thing is the new dashboard for WideBundle.

If you're new to this newsletter, I've been working on a new dashboard for weeks now. The goal is to increase the acquisition rate, and the conversion rate and lower churn.

To do that we made a lot of calls with our users and thought about what we could change.

Then while building the new dashboard, we got feedback from our users to ensure we were right about what they wanted.

And that's how you should do it too.

And now it's time, we'll release it at the end of the month. We'll add a lot of analytics and track how old and new users react to it.

I hope it'll be good but you never know if something will work until people actually use it right?

But no problem, we'll take feedback, track data and iterate on it.

I just need to translate the dashboard (French, Spanish, German, Italian). Because WideBundle is translated into these 4 languages too and if you want to have your Shopify App listing in different languages, well, your dashboard needs to be translated too!

To give a bit of context: We noticed a year ago that many users were coming from these countries so we doubled down on it. We knew these countries had more potential users and we added their languages. And it worked.

1-star review ⭐️

Today we received a 1-star review on the Shopify App Store and it's always a pain. But let me explain how we deal with it.

It's not always bad; since the user did the worst thing they can do, you have nothing to lose! So let's go for my process.

1) I will first read the review, and check who left it (from my partner dashboard).

2) I will contact Ogi (Customer Support) and ask him if this person contacted me, what his problem was.

• If the user did contact him, Ogi would explain what happened and I will personally review the conversation. Based on that I will contact the merchant directly and try to resolve the issue.

• If the user did not contact him, I will take the phone number available for that store and send the user a message on Whatsapp.

3) Usually my message looks like something like that:

"Hello, I'm Mat, the founder of the app, I saw you left a 1-star review, we're sorry for the experience you faced on our app and we'd like to thank you for the feedback. I saw you had a problem with X, can I look into it?"

If the user has an issue that is not fixed we'll do everything we can to fix it and please him. If the user just doesn't like the app, we'll try to get as much feedback as possible.

If they had an issue I would fix it and then I'll ask this magic sentence:

"What can we do to transform this 1-star review into a 5-star review?"

Remember, never ask directly to change the rating; Shopify doesn't like that!

And usually they will: 1) Tell us what to do 2) Remove the review 3) Transform it into a 5-star review.

(Obviously the last one is the best) Try to go their way even if you disagree with them.

If they say "Your app sucks". Don't reply "No it doesn't". Instead say something like "We know your experience wasn't good and we're trying our best to make the app perfect".

If the user doesn't have an issue but just doesn't like the way your app behaves, the goal is to gather as much feedback as you can because these people are gold!

They don't like your app, they don't have any problem but they still leave a review!

That's your moment, ask many questions, they will usually help you!

That's what happened today, we had this 1-star review. It's still a 1-star review because the user didn't like many things.

Yet it was positive for us! I've talked to the user on Whatsapp and they shared a lot of feedback!

In these situations I try to go deeper into their problem.

And remember something. You get more value from negative feedback than a positive one!

Trip to London 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Shopify Unite is in 20 days (something like that) and I just booked my trip. I'll be there from Sunday 11th to Wednesday 14th.

(Unite is on Monday and Tuesday)

So if you're there, feel free to let me know and it will be great to meet you!

Remember that live events are great for networking, and finding potential partners or clients!

900 subscribers to the newsletter! 🚀

All right, last week we reached 10,000 followers on Twitter. Which is amazing.

But I had another goal: To reach 1000 subscribers to the newsletter!

We reached 900 but we're actually at 977 when I'm writing this tweet!

So hopefully we'll reach it by the end of August.

If I do it by the end of August, I will have reached my goal in 8 months (I wanted to do it in 12).

So thanks for being so many following my content!

But I won't stop there! It's only the beginning.

And it will probably continue with the community 👀

This email is already pretty long so I wanted to keep this tutorial simple. We'll go back to basics.

When people try to build SaaS they want to make it difficult.

They want to find the next hack, know how to craft the perfect landing page, or learn how to gain +1000 users instantly.

But in reality, SaaS businesses (and probably all businesses) are simple:

• You find an audience

• You see a problem they have that is not solved

• You find a solution to that problem

• You create the solution

• You put the solution in front of these people

Now people usually take these steps in the wrong order. They start with the solution, then try to find who needs it.

If you approach it the way I described above, there is no way you can fail.

The only thing is that you need to know where people are when finding your audience.

But everything is linked.

If you found an audience and a problem. It means you know where these people are. Otherwise how would you know they have this problem? Do you get what I mean?

So if you're reading this email and you don't have an app right now, think about it this way:

• Who do I want to help?

• Where are they?

• Go find them and find what problems they have. (talk to them)

• Build the solution

Honestly the hardest part is to know who you want to help and where they are. Then it's easy, you just listen, take notes and build what they want.

One good solution is to choose a niche and write content about it. So that to the question "Where are they?" you can just reply: "In my community"

For example, I'm writing content for Shopify Apps Owners. So I'm building a community in a specific niche.

This niche, like others, has problems. I can now find them, build a solution and put my solution in front of this community!

That's it for today,

See you next week (with 1,000 followers hopefully!)

Bye!

Mat 😁