Joining Go App Studio on Shopify

Before

The term 'passive income' seemed tarnished by crypto-dudes and those guys in adverts on Instagram; standing in front of their cool sports car, telling me how they had made £800 overnight with just 5 simple trading steps and that I should DM them to find out how. I wasn't interested in stock trading or fancy sports cars, but being able to make money as you sleep was something to consider.

My career before this had consisted solely of active income; I worked, and only when I worked, I got paid. There was nothing inherently wrong with this; I was making an okay income, producing great work, and networking between clients and co-workers as I progressed. But it was 2021; there were opportunities out there, not so far from reach, that meant a far better lifestyle and work-life balance.

A New Year: 2022

It was New Year's Day, I had just finished a 3-month contract with Kyan. I was planning out what I would like to aim toward for the year:

• I wanted to dedicate some time away from client work to rebuild my website (the site you're on right now)
• I wanted to create a product or piece of work that people could purchase or subscribe to. (passive income)
• I wanted assets that would allow me to avoid any career repercussions when moving to America. (other than an active income job)

Risky business

I was predominantly thinking of getting into Shopify Theme Development. This would entail building a theme in Shopify; navigations, headers, heroes, accordions, footers, etc.. all of which I'd built dozens upon dozens of in the past (and only been paid once for).

Undoubtedly, it would be a large investment of my time with no immediate reward. Possibly, no reward whatsoever. But potentially, the best decision I'd ever make in my career. There was so much uncertainty, unpredictability, and unreliability - it's no wonder most people sit in the same comfortable 9-5 all week! I had questions that could be answered by nothing but the future.

Fate

My first boss (from 5 years ago), Gaz, had become a friend I cherished greatly. He was having issues with his laptop battery - I had mine fixed about 6 months beforehand, so I referred him to the same person I went to. We agreed that as he waited for the work to be completed on his laptop, we would meet up for a coffee in town.

At the cafe, I word-vomited over Gaz with my current headspace and ideas. It became apparent he was of a similar mindset - he had made a start on a new project with an old colleague of ours named Maxi; an excellent back-end PHP developer. He went on to describe the product "Go Gift Cards" simply as a Shopify app that enhanced the default gift card giving-and-receiving experience, and that there was next to zero competition at the time.

It was early days but they had the faith, brains, and back-end skillset to get the product functioning enough to start charging users. It didn't look particularly well, but it functioned. Gaz explained that a large portion of his time is spent on customer support. If I were to join, I would need to help Gaz with customer support on top of taking care of the entire front-end. There were no promises made; Gaz would need to speak to Maxi first.

February

I joined the #go-apps Slack channel the day after the initial chat over coffee. I thanked Maxi personally - they had both lowered their shares for me to join, on the project he had already put a lot of time into, no less. They told me the app needed the popular component library "Polaris" implemented. The app had been built with custom CSS and, despite their efforts, it didn't look like it was part of Shopify, which is vital when conveying a sense of credibility and trustworthiness in an app.

I spent 2-3 weeks learning the app, speaking to customers, and working on getting Polaris implemented on the Admin side of the app. The entire admin side was built in Svelte, which I learnt (a little bit) as I refactored it to JSX / React.

June, Present

Five months later, we have 103 stores using the app. In total, it has accumulated about $4500; roughly ~$700 per month. We could have a lot more, but we had a major user retention issue - about 2 months of immediate uninstalls from new users - that we have only just fixed! These were quite disheartening times, but we are looking a lot better now; uninstalls are extremely rare.

We have adapted as we've grown; making sure to prioritise existing users' feature requests over our own ideals. It has been steady progress - this is not an immediate 'quick win' success story, nor did I expect it to be.

Future

In a week or so, we are deploying an often-requested Customization feature, which will certainly keep us up to date with our competitors - who have millions in funding - and hopefully gain new users when investing our earnings into marketing.

Hopefully, when I write an update post on this app it will be at 200 stores.