Comment by donutdan4114 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donutdan4114 | Hacker News Reader

I launched an app for Shopify about a year ago called Custom Fields: https://customfields.bonify.io

Currently it's making about $5,000 / month.

It's been a very interesting process dealing with building the app, marketing it, and dealing with support. The app is $19/mo for regular Shopify stores, and we have about 700+ total customers (only some are paying). We get A LOT of support requests for misc things and have been trying to build up a knowledge base of articles and help guides in our ZenDesk.

We have recently been running into an issue with file hosting storage fees (we allow people to upload files, no additional charge). We have a couple of Shopify stores that are costing us about $70/mo each in file hosting fees (we don't charge them extra).

I absolutely LOVE building apps for 3rd party providers. We don't really market the app, it's found organically in Shopify's app store. The first 8 months were filled with lots of little bugs needing fixing, but that has since slowed down as I've fixed things. At this point, it's a pretty stable application that doesn't require much maintenance, mostly just user support.

I really like what you've done.

> We don't really market the app

Well, what you did _is_ marketing (via integration), it's a great strategy when done well and looks like you did an awesome job.

I've heard it said that marketing is basically doing anything that exposes your product to more people.

Yea, that's why I love 3rd party integrations.. Just need 10 more of them and be raking in $50k/month would be nice :)

Well done! A few years ago I assumed it was way too late to get into selling Shopify apps. I am glad to have been proved wrong, and you have me re-evaluating some newer marketplaces I presume to be mature.

Shopify seems to be booming.. I hope they do, I have some stock in them, and of course, the app. I may end up doing more apps in the future, but their app store is just going to get more flooded, more competition, etc. Sooner the better, gotta get your foot in the door.

BTW That's also a great investment strategy to invest in something you know and understand like that. You're on fire! :)

Very nice! Spread out over many customers that sounds like a pretty stable revenue stream.

Curious though how much support do you provide for $19/mo? Do you get a lot of support requests / emails?

At that price point one customer interaction is more than most tech workers rate for the time spent interacting with it.

We probably get like 20-30 support tickets per month now (we used to get about 50 per month). It can be a drain as neither I, nor my business partner really want to deal with it. We haven't hired anyone to deal with it yet... The issues we get requests on now are more like really technical issues that take a while to debug and write up the solution.

I think 3rd party providers are underrated when it comes to building side income streams.

I think it's the easiest way. Creating your own app or service from scratch, marketing it, and retaining users long-term is nearly impossible (seems like). All of those problems are solved by integrating with a 3rd party.. Granted, that has it's own risks and limitations, but seems worth it for small side projects.

Exactly. Just wondering are there any other third party platforms you are excited about? Recently I was checking - https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/

but can't find how revenue works on there.

Not sure they have launched that yet, but you can charge separately outside of Cloudflare

Congrats. What is the tech stack for developing Shopify apps?

Shopify Apps can be largely just API calls using any language/framework you'd like, or you can use their Embedded App SDK which is more JS-heavy. I built the Custom Fields app with Drupal 8 and PHP 7. I chose that stack because that's what we work with on a daily basis as a web-dev agency.

Thanks, useful info.

Wow good work! How much time do you spend on this a week?

Aside from building out new features, which I'm not in the middle of, I don't spend time on the app. My business partner handles support which is currently around 20-30 tickets per month. This is a side thing for us, we try to just let the app run without playing around with it too much.

Awesome! Could you charge more?

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