This email is a continuation of the previous one. You can read it by clicking here

I have to say that this week was insane. Many things happened with many wins.

If you're new to this newsletter, my name is Mat De Sousa and in these emails I will share my journey, wins, failures and learnings with you.

When I started 5 years ago we didn't have a lot of content around Shopify Apps. And the Shopify Documentation wasn't as good as today.

I struggled. It was hard to know how to build and grow an app. As you can see by yourself, I first failed with 3 apps.

And today I have 1 mission:

I want to be the guy I wanted to meet when I started.

What's going on?

My perfect process to start a Shopify App

I wrote a thread on July 11th. And I broke Twitter with it.

In this thread I shared my process on how I build a new Shopify App. Of course this thread is a smaller version of how I do it, I didn't have enough character and it would take me days to write it.

1750 likes, 260 RT, 44 comments as I'm speaking. To be honest I had a bit of help. Tobi, Shopify's CEO retweeted it. And with 260,000 followers, it's like putting a rocket on the tweet.

And this tweet brought a lot of new followers and new subscribers but I'll keep the numbers for the "Wins" section of this email...

If I have to break down this thread into smaller pieces. I would go like this:

• Find a need by talking to merchants (Communities, Events, etc)

• Validate your idea with them. Don't assume they will want what you're building. Validate each step.

• Build an MVP. Keep it simple. You want Shopify Approval process to be quick and you want to test your idea asap

• Onboard your first users with the people you talked to. Stay unlisted

• Improve the app with them

• Track your data with Mixpanel and improve your assets (Shopify App Listing, images, etc)

• Grow

Remember the 1-factor for a successful Shopify App: Customer Support!

App installs are slowing downs

As I told you last week, we had crazy growth for Q2. But Q3 isn't as good. It's summer.

People are slower, take vacations and wait for Q4. So don't worry If you're getting fewer installs like me, it's market law! Take this time to prepare your Q4 too.

Prepare your best features and everything you want to launch before Q4 so that people will be interested in your app whenever you launch.

What I'm working on?

The Magical Checklist

I told you last week that I wanted to release the Magical Checklist for customer support. Or how I personally manage my customer support. But I had more work than expected so I didn't release it.

It will be released this week! It's free and a simple checklist to help you automate and delegate your support.

And even if you don't want to delegate, since support is vital for a Shopify app, this list will help you manage it!

WideBundle dashboard

We're still working on the new dashboard and will hopefully launch it at the end of the month. As always I'm sharing it with my users WHILE building to ensure they like it.

And as always we're not building just because we want to. We took this decision based on data.

We want to lower the time it takes for a user to onboard (currently around 7:30) to take time to the aha moment faster.

We also look at this update's churn rate and activation rate. And we take the feedback from our users to understand where the friction is.

Apps Partnerships

I'm not the one working on it. Nico from my team is killing it! The goal here is to do partnerships with other interesting apps to do integration and co-marketing to increase the number of installs and trust.

We're doing even more partnerships so if you have an app almost the same size as WideBundle, feel free to send an email to Nico: [email protected]

Wins of the week

We have a lot of wins this week! Let's start!

Tobi is following me on Twitter

It's a Shopify App Dev dream. To be followed by Tobi. If you don't know him, he's the CEO of Shopify.

500 subscribers to this newsletter

We made it! I like this number!

500 people are following this newsletter! Thank you for that! It encourages me to create good content!

Let's go together!

$30,000 MRR on WideBundle and WideReview combined

We did it! That was a goal I wanted to reach before August. We did it 1.5 months before.

It was Q2, but we're in Q3 now and we'll probably lose some customers, get fewer installs, etc...

But anyway, we made it!

Tutorial of the week

How do you improve your Shopify App Listing?

The 1st thing to do is add Google Analytics, so if you haven't done it yet, do it now!

You can't improve your listing if you don't know the impact your changes will have.

By putting Google Analytics you'll be able to track everything: keywords people typed, conversion rate on your listing, countries people are coming from, etc...

What is important?

You should give attention to these elements in the same order:

Title > Tagline > Featured Image/Video > Key benefits > Screenshots > Description

This order is important for the priority of the keywords but also for the way people look at a listing.

They will first see the title of your product and the tagline. You want to put your most important keywords because they have a bigger priority in the listing for the ranking.

And if you have a keyword in the title and the tagline you don't need to put it elsewhere. Shopify algorithm doesn't check if your keyword appears many times.

For the Featured Image/Video you want to show your product if you have an element on the storefront. Show how your product appears and show the value.

In the title you can't have only keywords, Shopify doesn't allow it. Put your app name. One trick is to have a keyword in your name, ex: WideBundle

In the tagline you should explain what your app does. The problem is that the keywords are too important here so every app adds only keywords.

For the key benefits, add something your competitors don't have especially if you have a new app. You need to tell people why they must choose your app over others. They'll probably compare.

For the screenshots, the merchants need to see how your app appears, what they'll get and don't forget to add mobile screenshots if your app has an element on the storefront. Merchants want to know how the app will appear on customers' mobile.

Add 1-2 sentences in the description to explain what your app is about with the benefits.

Add the features you have and attach a benefit to each feature. Why is it important for the merchants?

Add your competitive advantages

Add the benefits again.

Improving the listing

Using your google analytics, check if you have a good conversion rate (number of people who clicked on the "get app button" after opening your listing).

I personally have an almost 40% conversion rate, but it depends on the niche. If you can get to 20% it's great. And obviously, the more reviews you have, the more trust you'll get, so your conversion rate will be better.

One of the things to do with Google Analytics is to track the keywords people used to find your app.

Usually you'll find 1 or 2 installs from a specific keyword that you didn't even think about. You'll be able to check your position on this keyword. And you might find that you don't have a good position because you're not using this keyword in your listing. Feel free to add it there.

To improve the conversion rate, I change one piece at a time and monitor for over a week to know the impact.

That's it for this week!

Hope you liked this email. If you did, feel free to forward it to someone who will benefit from it.

See you next week,

Mat