How to Grow Your Shopify App to 15k+ Installs

Full post on Indie Hackers ~ 'How Pixc Grew to 15k App Installs on Shopify and You Can Too'

Shopify lets you easily start your own eCommerce store to begin selling products online. It’s grown incredibly popular in recent years, powering  over $40 billion in sales through over 500,000 businesses.

Their impressive reach is great for people looking to start an eCommerce business, but what people often overlook the massive ecosystem that has risen up to support these stores through third-party apps. Shopify has their own app store where developers can list software that integrates with Shopify stores to extend functionality or improve sales in some way.

But finding customers for your software can be much harder than building it and requires a completely different set of skills. With Shopify Apps, your software is seen every day in the dedicated App Store by thousands of people.

The Shopify App Store is a fantastic sales channel. While the audience consists of businesses who are always eager to extend the functionality of their store and increase sales, the App Store makes app discovery incredibly easy.

With over 15,000 app Installs, Pixc’s Shopify Apps are amongst the most popular and top-rated on the Shopify App store. Our core product, Retail Ready Photos, integrates directly with our customer’s Shopify store to give them professionally-edited product photos at the click of a button.

We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to launch and grow a successful SaaS product and are excited to share our secrets to how we’ve grown to over 10K installs.

What Should You Focus on Initially?

First, you need to make sure you have identified a problem worth solving. Indie Hackers and other sites across the web have some great Shopify App content about identifying the right problem and creating a solution for it.

But in the early days of development, updates, and launching, you also want to focus on the things that will help scale your product to as many users as possible.

For some, this might mean creating a ton of content and figuring out ways to incentivize user testimonials. But for Pixc, an app that would scale needed to be both:

1. Something stores would love
2. Something easy to use

If you are truly solving a challenging problem that stores are facing, the Shopify App store alone has the potential to drive a large amount of traffic to your listing. Great reviews will also help your app get found and give merchants the confidence to install. That’s why your focus should be on creating a great product that people love to keep using and are happy to recommend.

What Strategies Can Speed up Growth?

When you’re bootstrapping a monthly recurring revenue SaaS product like a Shopify App, you want to be investing in strategies that are going to speed up your growth and increase your revenue quickly.

At Pixc, we discovered that two great strategies, in particular, had a noticeable and recurring impact on our growth.

Building Free Tools

If you’re a developer without a big marketing budget, using your skills to develop free tools that can funnel users towards a paid product can be a really successful growth strategy.

At Pixc, our first free tool was the Photo Resize Shopify App. This free app resizes all of your eCommerce product photos so they display correctly in your store. It checked all the boxes for a scalable product with great potential:

• It was a simple tool. It solved a simple problem with a simple solution.
• It solved a problem for lots of people. We knew only a small portion of the free users would convert to paid customers, but this app was useful for almost every eCommerce store.
• It solved a similar pain point to our core product. Our free product (which resizes images) complements our core service (which performs advanced edits on images) and also lets us utilize our existing strengths and domain knowledge.

From this experience, we also realized there are some things you need to consider when creating your free tool:

• Your costs. Free tools aren’t free to run. Server costs and customer support can quickly eat into your profits, so make sure you have a clear strategy on how you will convert free users to paid.
• Your pricing. We soon discovered that not everyone who uses our free app was interested in our main service. So we began experimenting with how we could create a pricing model around the free app for heavy-users.
• That people judge you on your free content. Having a free tool doesn’t mean you can skimp on the quality. If your free tool doesn’t work as advertised, why would people trust your paid product?

Prioritizing Customer Reviews

On the Shopify App store (and on many other marketplaces), positive reviews can play a significant role in getting your listing seen by more people.

One of the best things you can do when you start is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to leave a positive review.

Make sure you are regularly checking in with customers at key points, such as when they install or when they first use your service. If you’re responsive and your app has solved a pain point, customers will be happy to leave a positive review. If they weren’t happy with the service, it gives you an avenue to talk to them directly to figure out where you can improve.

How Do You Keep Users Coming Back?

The majority of apps listed on the Shopify app store utilize a monthly recurring fee model where merchants install the app and keep it in their store for a monthly fee as opposed to paying for the software up front. Usually, the payments start after a free trial period.

This model is great for the merchants as it allows them to trial a variety of software at a lower price and immediately sees which apps are contributing enough to extra sales to justify the price.

It’s also great for developers because merchants can try their software without a big outlay, and they can have a more predictable month-to-month revenue stream.

But to keep your revenue consistent (and growing), you need to also be thinking about how to keep users coming back. The most important thing is to start with a great product that is well-designed to solve a problem. But there are three things Pixc does that keep customers coming back:

Make Apps Easy to Use

The first thing is to design your product so that it is easy to use. Customers always prefer to be able to solve their own problems quickly, and a well-designed app with good documentation will eliminate any friction points that might make them consider switching to an alternative.

Provide Great Customer Service.

Small software products can often neglect customer service once their business scales past the point of the founder being able to handle all inquiries. Having a remote team can ensure you’ve always got someone available to answer questions and cut down on costs.

Become A Hub of Quality Content.

Pixc has become a hub of great photography and eCommerce related content that keeps our customers engaged and familiar with the kind of knowledge we specialize in. Good content also takes time to create, which can be a barrier for your competitors who may underestimate the value of content marketing.

What Should You Prioritize?

To figure out what we could do better in the future, we asked ourselves: “What would we have prioritized in hindsight?” The two things came up apply to any SaaS business:

1. Requests for specific features, and
2. Accessible pricing

Your first customers are going to be incredibly valuable in providing feedback on these two areas. They’ll soon point out any features that were missing or problems they have with your price point.

You’ll be surprised how receptive people can be to a polite, personal email if you ended up getting those two things wrong. If customers uninstall your app, sending them a quick email to ask them if something was confusing or if the app was missing a feature they needed can result in a surprising number of recovered customers as well as valuable feedback.

On the other hand, you should be wary of trying to accommodate everyone. Attempting to develop every feature is a sure way to negatively impact the quality and quantity of what does get shipped. Instead, take into consideration the features or changes that are most requested or will improve your product the most and work with customers to prioritize them.

Just like with features, you won’t be able to nail your pricing strategy on the first go. There are so many different models that you’ll have to do a bit of experimenting to find the balance that works for you. Keep in mind that there are over 500,000 Shopify stores now, which means there is a huge mix of businesses at varying stage. How you price your app can be an incredibly important distinction between you and your competitors.

What Challenges Do You Need to Overcome?

You’ll face challenges at every step of the way, whether it is design decisions, problems with growth or something else. But at Pixc, there have been four core challenges that most of the readers on Indie Hackers who want to start a SaaS or tech business may also face:

Building a Solid Team.

You need to have the right team members who will take the initiative to do what needs to be done. As CEO, you will not have time to do everything. Consider the advantages and disadvantages of alternative team models, like remote or distributed teams, which give you more flexibility accessing worldwide talent.

Developing Trust.

You need to trust that your team will execute everything to the best of their ability. Nothing destroys a burgeoning business faster than a micromanaging CEO who is constantly questioning the abilities and instincts of the employees he or she worked so hard to get.

Creating Innovative and Functional Tech.

You need both the right tech infrastructure and sharp, resourceful talent to be able to scale a modern eCommerce business smoothly and quickly. Keep up with current trends, and listen to your skilled employees when they tell you what is and isn’t possible to do with your time and resources.

Documenting Your Processes.

The most forward-thinking, practical ideas can still drown if they’re not supported by a solid organizational structure that records what you’re doing as you’re doing it. You might think (understandably) that you don’t have time to write things down because you’re putting out larger fires. But, in the long run, ignoring the opportunity to create clarity and uniformity will only produce massive amounts of wasted time. Document your processes so when you bring on new people, you do not have to repeat yourself.

Getting these four aspects right early on has allowed Pixc to grow as a business and as a team. We have team members on four different continents that work cohesively together thanks to shared values and goals, the trust we have in each other, our ability to use technology to overcome barriers and the documentation of our processes.

Our journey past the 15,000 downloads milestone has been exciting, and it’s been great to be able to share it with the Indie Hackers audience. If you have any questions, feel free to leave us a comment on this article.

If you’re interested in learning more about Pixc, product photography or eCommerce, feel free to check out our blog.