Go Gift Cards: August Updates
Hello again
Well! It's been just over a month since my first update on our start-up Shopify App "Go Gift Cards". In that article, 103 stores had installed our app, and its monthly recurring revenue (MRR) was $700.
I rounded off the post with the hope that we would deploy our customization feature and with the ambition that the next update (this one you're reading) would be celebrating 200 stores.
But yesterday, I saw this tweet from Damon Chen that made me think twice about waiting until we got to 200 stores, and perhaps I should be more incremental with a blog post per feature. So here I am!
Updates
We received another 5 star ⭐️ review from a lovely customer we helped get set up.
The app has acquired $5200 in total, with $820 MRR and 125 stores installed - a customer increase of about 20%! :-)
Customization
We deployed our customization features at the beginning of July, which enabled store owners to tailor email and redemption page logos and colors to their brand. It was a heavily requested, make-or-break feature for many stores. During development, we lost a couple of users due to not having it ready, which made us want to finish it faster than ever! Adding this feature was a no-brainer, and with more resources, it would've been done much sooner.
After deploying, remarkably, we didn't have many bugs, we just had more user requests! Store owners loved the feature and kindly gave us a few pointers to make it even better, and we listened!
Maxi's laptop broke
A couple of days after we went live with Customization, Maxi went on holiday to Prague. He said he would be leaving his laptop at Apple to get it fixed. No problem, we thought "Have some nice time off!".
Adjustments
Some stores didn't like the mixed text alignment of the "To" and "From" text. One store was unable to sign off a project as completed until the text on the gift card email could be centered. We agreed it would be far better to add an option for store owners to adjust the alignment of the text themselves, so I implemented the front-end for this setting.
Maxi was now back from his holiday, and another few days had passed with no news from Apple about his laptop, so I added a temporary hotfix for all stores to have centered text. The hotfix remains in place as I'm writing this, making it not-so-temporary! I look forward to being able to complete the back-end work of any feature myself.
In progress
We were still down a third of our workforce, but Gaz and I were holding the fort! I wanted to press on with some new features and improvements like:
- In the gift card receiver email, the price and code sat layered on top of the gift card (like an ordinary gift card IRL). It worked sometimes, but ultimately the code needed to be separated from the gift card itself.
- Adding the Pop up customization settings to the main Admin customization area.
- Adding alternate pre-made gift card images for the customer to select from
- Replacing the image on the right side of the pop-up with a preview of how the redemption page will appear to the receiver.
Before:
After:
Meanwhile, Maxi was not loving life without his Macbook.
What's next?
We will continue to build on the app and support all new and existing customers, even if it means the occasional all-hands-on-desk 9:30PM debugging session.
Marketing
We wanted to advertise the app to more users now that customization was live and the dust had settled. The app was stable, and all the new daily installs were staying. None of us had paid ourselves with any of the money the app had acquired, and instead, we wanted to invest earnings back into the app through paid advertisement and professional video.
Goals by September
We need to:
- Set up a Twitter & Blog to do this bit properly
- Get our advertisements up and running to (hopefully) get more users
- Complete & deploy Pop up Customization + move to Admin from app embed
- Give admins more layout options on emails and the redemption page, starting with text alignment: mixed, left, center, right.
- Allow users to change the store gift card image via 2 or 3 pre-made graphics.
- Allow users to select an animation type for the recipient's card. (Confetti, balloons, fireworks, etc)
- Notify our existing customer base about all of the new additions, and what to expect in the future.
- Add the ability to have multiple gift card products (if Maxi ever gets his computer back)
I will refer back to this list next month and see where we are at. We'll also see how the adverts perform over the next few weeks! Exciting times ahead. We are building!
As we transition these updates to a more professional Go Gift Cards user only email, I will probably keep the updates here less-professional, less customer-facing news and more trials and tribulations of this project.
See you in September (September?! Already?!)
