#28 - Build A Successful Shopify App - How to prepare 2023 & New App Store 🚀

Read time: 3 minutes

Black Friday is coming. Followed by Cyber Monday.

Aka the best days for Shopify merchants. People are giving their best for this moment. They know they can make a lot of money!

And as a Shopify App Founder, you must be prepared to serve them the best. You will see a spike in traffic if you add a widget to stores. Make sure your servers can handle it.

You don't want hundreds of mad users contacting support because everything crashed.

Now there is something else you need to be aware of. For most apps, Q4 and pre-BFCM are incredible. You receive many installations so your energy is at this maximum. You're happy!

But suddenly, post-BFCM, everything changes. You thought you were growing and happy, but now you're losing users.

This is what will happen for many apps.

And it's the same thing every year! I've been through this in 2020 and 2021. I don't think 2022 will be different.

And you'll start to question yourself:

• What did I do wrong?

• Why am I not growing anymore?

• What do I need to change?

And the reason is simple: you can't control the market.

So don't let your emotions take control of you. Use that time to improve your app, improve support and prepare your 2023 objectives.

I won't be surprised. I expect my MRR to go down. And you should do the same.

• There is a high chance that you'll lose users. It will allow you to be prepared mentally.

• If you don't lose users, well you'll be happier than ever!

And now that I know that, I won't be focused on growth (or acquisition) but more on retention.

Remember, for Shopify Apps, the best you can do is improve support to improve retention, reviews, etc.

So for December, we'll focus on support with my team with the following:

• Write more articles in the helpdesk

• Record videos to help people in the helpdesk

• Improve our support processes to save time replying to users

• Fix bugs and UX. Based on feedback.

By focussing on that, what I will take from the end of 2022 won't be "We lose users" but instead "We improved support".

And what's better than knowing you'll be able to handle more users in 2023 thanks to these improvements?

The second thing I'll do is set up goals for 2023.

As we enter 2023, I'll need to know exactly our goals and how we'll achieve them.

This is what I did for 2022.

• You set up 1 specific goal (eg: $20,000 MRR by the end of 2023)

• You set up the sub-goals that you will need to achieve to get the main one (eg: 10 App Partnerships, Reduce churn by 5%, Get 200 paying users per month, Get at least 10 reviews per month)

• You prepare a roadmap for each sub-goal and a time frame (eg: for 10 App Partnerships, we'll prepare all the documents and strategy in 1 month, then we'll try to get 1 partnership every month)

• Then you'll choose in which order you'll work on them

And you'll be ready for 2023 to follow your roadmap and achieve all your goals!

On December 1st we'll have the new Shopify App Store. But many changes are already live.

This is the case for categories for example. And the algorithm also changed a lot these past weeks.

In fact, we went from 3rd to 6th on our most important keyword. But these are the risks when you build something on top of a platform!

We even noticed fewer installs due to this change as you can see 👇

That's why you need to rely on different channels if you don't want your app to die the moment the algorithm changes.

I'll wait for the new Shopify App Store in December to make some tests.

There will probably be many changes because everyone will update the listing and the categories during the first month.