I bootstrapped a Shopify app to 1M ARR in 4 years. Happy to answer any questions.

@robertomorais Hey Roberto! I had only very casually tried Shopify before starting this business. In fact, it was that experience that inspired me to start the business. I had tried some of the low-quality dropshipping apps and felt like I couldn't morally get into selling overpriced/cheap products with unreasonable shipping times. I contacted a few US brands to gauge interest, and then I started building the app. I learned a lot about e-commerce from the experience building the app and talking to our customers, but admittedly still have no direct ecom experience as a merchant :) My initial experience with no-code was pretty similar. There are a lot of no-code website builders, but nothing was really setup to support SaaS companies that wanted to build on no-code for their customer-facing apps. We still have a long way to go, but that's our mission with Frontly. I have a lot of belief in the power of no-code. The vast majority of businesses do not have a super unique user interface and I think too much money is spent / wasted reinventing the wheel. Would love to hear about what you're building with no code and which tools you're liking the best!

@frontlyapp thanks for the extensive reply. At the moment I just tried FlutterFlow, Softr and Carrd. I loved the power of FlutterFlow and the simplicity of Carrd. I built a POC with FlutterFlow for our mobile on Mosaico (an EdTech) and we decide to go through with it. So even with a team of 8 developers it feels worth. I'm interested in trying new no-code tools for my solo projects and It's been great testing than to see with one I like. I have on my queue right now bubble, bildr, dorik and unicorn platform. As a programmer having the option to go custom code on them it's a big difference for me. What do you say is the best use case for Frontly? Can use custom code on it or do have the intention do have that option in the future.

@frontlyapp would you like to speak on a panel at our October 27 - 28th eCom Livestream ‘22? We have 20+ speakers (many doing individual sessions, I.e CoF of Honest Co and LegalZoom, CoF FabFitFun)?

@nostraai my email is dan@ecomlivestream.com

@ofirenglin Thank you! To be honest, I think a lot of it was luck. I take credit for having the idea / launching the app, but from there on, I was pretty much just hacking away and hoping for the best :D In late June 2018 I started talking about it, and started emailing some suppliers to see if anyone was interested in dropshipping within the US with 30%+ margins. Once I got validation there from 2 suppliers I started building the app, and within ~3 months we went live (in mid-October). Because we were part of the Shopify app marketplace, our marketing was all essentially inbound and customer success. I personally did nearly all the support, development and live-bug fixes for almost 2 years, so I feel like that probably helped since I was VERY hands-on with our customers. Because we were bootstrapped, we didn't really have any other choice :D As a technical founder, I learned the value of a marketplace when it works well. Now building my new business NOT in a marketplace and it's super challenging - I'm basically starting all over from scratch 😅.

@frontlyapp Thanks for the detailed answer, sounds like some hard work, very impressive. GL with Frontly🙏

@valilus That is a great question, and one I'm still actively figuring out! At this stage I'm really just aiming to connect with founders in the no-code space to learn more about their experiences and to continue figuring out where we can best fit into the market. I'm not a sales person at all, so that part is yet to be determined!

@alex_epsi Reviews mean everything on Shopify. Unfortunately, Shopify is really strict and won't even remove reviews even if they are clearly fake / from spammers / duplicates from the same person, so you need to be incredibly careful about how you manage users and support. Once we had someone leave a 1-star review saying "I lost my dog" and they wouldn't remove it 😂. One bad review will take you down further than 5 X 5-stars will push you up. Shopify is an amazing opportunity to build a business without directly focusing on marketing, but inbound customer success / help center / support is everything. Otherwise, I think the answers would be specific to each business, but those are my general tips.

@frontlyapp thanks buddy, it’s a hugely helpful and honest answer I think. Indeed, before taking a plunge into a Shopify App business one has to fully acknowledge it’s not just a quiet SaaS journey of building / shipping tech but a lot of hard grind of customer support / relationship management which is clearly a slightly less appealing side of it!