Hello! 😁

How are you?

Before reading this email, if you’re on Instagram give me a follow: @mat.ds 

I post one reel per day with value!

In today’s newsletter we’re going to see:

• Mat’s Diary

  • A week of skiing in the Alps

  • We reached a new followers milestone

  • This very rude customer we had recently and how we deal with it

  • Going from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 10 (Crisp Event)

• BONUS

  • What I did when I got stuck at $25K per month

Are you ready? 👀

Let’s go!

Mat’s Diary

A week of skiing in the Alps

I took some good time away from my computer.

I am currently in the Alps in France 🗻

At least a minimum: Working in the morning and in the evening and skiing during the day. ⛷️

Here is the view from my apartment.

Skiing is like a SaaS business.

You start by not knowing what to do. If you don’t get the basics, you won’t make it.

As soon as you learn basic stuff, it starts to be easier but you need to practice.

Every day you’ll have different weather. Sometimes you have a big sun and everything is fine, and sometimes you’re in a storm 💨

When you’re skiing, you need to keep your speed and use that momentum. Same as SaaS. 🎿

It’s hard in the beginning, and you need to fall, try again, and fall again until you become a pro.

The only difference is that you have people to push you and motivate you to get up and start again. 🫵

And ultimately you know that you’ll make it. Because you see other “normal” people do it too.

So from the Alps, I am sending you courage to keep going!

We reached a new followers milestone

23,000 followers on X!

Thank you everyone! 23,000 followers is a lot!

I stopped going after followers when I reached 10,000 but it’s still great to celebrate small wins like this one.

I think every Shopify App Founder should have an X account.

• Shopify uses it a lot

• Many merchants on the platform

• Many other Shopify App Founders

And having this account helped me in many ways:

• Easier to get partnerships

• Better relationships with Shopify

• Attract users

This very rude customer we had recently and how we deal with it

Last week we had a very rude customer.

He started to insult our support even though we were doing our best to help him.

He was threatening to leave us a bad review.

If you’re in the Shopify App Business and targeting SMBs you already had one of these users (or you haven't been in the business long)

And in the end, he just said:

Not the kind of messages you like to receive when you’re giving your best.

So, how do we deal with such situations?

First of all, you have to detach yourself emotionally. Just reply like a robot.

And then you have to think about this:

Even if you do get bad reviews, you’ll still make more money than when you didn’t have negative reviews.

This is exactly what I tell my team: “Remember we’re making more money than when we had 0 bad reviews”

And it helps a lot.

Because it means that in 1 or 2 years, this review won’t have any impact.

So just tell yourself, are you there for the long term? If yes, bad reviews won’t matter!

Focus on the customers that love your app and keep growing.

Going from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 10 (Crisp Event)

On Thursday I was invited to a private event in Paris organized by Crisp (the support tool)

It was a small-committee event with a few partners.

During this event I was talking with Antoine (CMO at Crisp) about an interesting concept:

Some people don’t know how to take a business from 0 to 1…

But can easily take a business from 1 to 10.

We came to the conclusion that some people can’t start a business, but perhaps what they should do is partner with someone and help that person grow the business.

From 0 to 1 you need to:

• Talk to people to find problems

• Do things that don’t scale

• Create everything from scratch

• Pivot

• Get users one by one

From 1 to 10 you need to:

• Scale the product

• Hire people

• Make processes

• Structure the business

So, if you can’t start a business, perhaps you should find someone who didn’t and doesn’t know how to scale.

BONUS #1

What I did when I got stuck at $25,000 per month