#39 - Build A Successful Shopify App - Thinking big 🚀

New week. New email!

And I’m back at work. I spent 1 week in the Alps, in France and it was amazing! 🏔⛷

It was also great because, for a whole week, I didn’t touch my computer. My team handled everything! From emails, and marketing to support and code.

And that is absolute freedom! Being able to rely on your team. And you can’t scale if you can’t do it.

But don’t worry if you can’t rely on your team yet. Or if you don’t even have a team for the moment. Because big things take time.

And this is something I want to talk about in this email: Think big, but start small.

When I was studying engineering, I was like 19, I attended a conference with an old man who had built many companies in the past.

And he kept saying that sentence: Think big, but start small.

And I had never understood that sentence truly even if I thought so. And I want to tell you exactly what that means.

Thinking big is having a big vision: I want to build 5 Shopify Apps and make 10 millions a year! Or I want to exit for $1M!

But if you don’t have the other part, which is starting small and immediately wanting to be big, you will be: disappointed and discouraged because you can’t reach your vision!

And that’s exactly what’s holding most people back from reaching that goal.

You know, I sometimes receive messages from people saying: How do I get the first 1,000 users?

And I have to explain that this isn’t the right question. The right question would be: How to get my first user?

You want to have many users, that is your “thinking big”, but you can’t get them without first starting small.

And once you accept and adopt this thinking, you’ll start to do great things.

1) You will accept that sometimes business is boring

2) You will transition from “I want to get it in 1 year” to “I will get it one day” so you won’t be disappointed

3) You will love the journey and not only the destination

And I have an example with Twitter. If you look at my Twitter account you will see 14,000 followers. Which is amazing! And so some people might ask me: How did you get there? How do you get 14,000 followers?

But that’s not the question, the question is: How do you get 1 follower?

Well, my answer is simple: Post 3 tweets.

And if you start small and accept that, you will get your follower. You didn’t get the follower? All right, start again tomorrow.

So keep in mind that you want to reach 10,000 followers but accept that it won’t happen overnight.

To get 14,000 followers I tweeted every day at least once for more than a year! I wrote threads every single week. I engaged with people, added comments, and improved over time. But it didn’t happen overnight.

So to the question, how to get 1 user? The answer can be simple: Write 1 blog post. You didn’t get that user? Fine, start again the next day.

And trust me, if you do it for a year, you’ll get 1,000 users.

Marketing Action of the week

Write 1 blog post on your app’s blog. Do it for at least 3 months.

The blog post doesn’t have to be perfect. Force you to write at least once every day.

You’ll improve your posts during these 3 months and find strategies to share your posts.

See the results in 3 months.

Successes of the week

We reached 14,000 followers! It’s amazing! Thank you for following me on Twitter, where I share how I created my apps daily.

And we also reached 900 members in the Shopify App Founders community! Soon at 1,000 members.

This group grew so fast and I’m so happy because people don’t even need me to create content, share thoughts, etc!

That’s it for this week.

See you next week,

Mat 😁