#34 - Build A Successful Shopify App - Starting in a crowded market 🚀

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I changed my newsletter tool. GetRevue was shutting down, so I am now trying Substack.

Honestly, I don’t know if this one will be great so we’ll try. I’m more afraid of the deliverability.

So if this email ends up in spam, let me know! And then push the email to your primary inbox.

2023 is here! So I wish you a Happy New Year!

New Year, new objective! I hope you already put on paper where you wanted to be at the end of the year.

I always do it. In 2 steps:

• I review the year with all the things I did and learned. But also the objectives.

• I prepare the next year with the main objective, the sub-objectives, and then the plan to reach them.

This plan is to know where you’re going. And for the year you have to think about your objectives. In the past I used to do 1000 different things because I had no plan, I was just doing what I wanted.

But sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, that will help you reach your objectives.

So if you didn’t do it yet, take 1-2 hours now to review your year and prepare for the next one

My goals for 2023

To reach $60,000 MRR

The first one is simple. We’re currently at $40,500, and I want to reach $60,000 by the end of the year. That’s a +48% growth.

It will be hard, but at least I prepared a plan to reach it that I will share with you during the year.

To reach 30,000 followers on Twitter

This is another goal. I started Twitter seriously on December 2021. One year later I went from 600 to 13,000 followers. The initial goal was 10,000 followers.

Now I want to double that (and even more) and go to 30,000 followers. I don’t have a plan yet for that.

To create a course

That’s the surprise of the year! Many people asked me if I had a course on how to grow a Shopify App. And I didn’t have it because it was not a priority.

Now that I see more clearly where I want to go, I think it’s time for me to pack my knowledge into a cheap course.

I don’t know yet what will be inside but if you have suggestions, feel free to reply to this email!

How to compete with big Shopify Apps

One of the questions I receive a lot of is: Isn’t the space already crowded?

It’s more crowded than when I started WideBundle in 2020 and even more than when I started my first app in 2017.

But being crowded doesn’t mean you can’t make yourself a place in the ecosystem.

Here is how:

Big apps are slowers

More people in the company with more users so all the processes take more time from decision-making to feature implementation. When you start, you’re usually alone or with a co-founder. This is your chance to move fast. Think about a feature, build it, and release it quickly. Your users will also love that! It helped me start and make my users happy

Big apps are less flexible

When you have 30,000 users, you can’t build everything your users ask you. If 1,000 users want X but the other 29,000 want Y, then the app will build Y (obviously).

That is your chance to build what they don’t build. This is even the case with WideBundle. There are features I can’t build because only a few people will benefit from them.

If you go with features other apps couldn’t build, that’s how you’ll enter the market.

You can do things that don’t scale

You can offer custom installation, custom support, custom coding, and everything that takes time. Everything big apps can’t do anymore because they have too many people. You can also go into communities and engage with people yourself.

That’s it for today!

See you next week,Mat