Would you bid for visibility instead of buying ads?

Maker here.

Quick context: with my co-founder we run Moonbundle (60K MRR), a Shopify app.

Marketing a Shopify app is brutal. The app store is a black box, most "best apps" listicles are sponsored without saying it, and you never know what anyone else actually pays to be visible.

Then I saw the outbid trend take off, those sites where people publicly fight over one spot with real bids. And it clicked: that's just the honest version of what we've all been buying blindly.

So I built Ecombid. A leaderboard for the ecom ecosystem where every rank is a public bid, starting at €1. Highest bid is #1, everyone sees what the top spot costs, you keep your spot until someone outbids you. That's the whole product.

What I still don't know is if people would actually pay for this. Maybe seeing the real price of #1 is more scary than reassuring, no idea.

If you've marketed a Shopify app or paid for directory listings before, did it bring real customers? My guess is no, but I'd like to be wrong.