Why we ship three Shopify apps a week

Most Shopify app studios try to build one big app and get it to ten thousand installs. That is a fine strategy but it is a lot of risk on a single bet.

We take a different approach. Every week we research a new category, ship an app, and let the merchants tell us which ones are worth deepening. The ones that pick up installs and reviews get more features. The ones that do not, we leave alone and move on.

This works for three reasons.

First, the Shopify app store rewards portfolio depth. A studio with ten good apps gets cited more, shows up in more category searches, and builds trust faster than a single-app vendor.

Second, we build on Shopify’s own primitives, which means no database, no email server, no ongoing infrastructure cost per app. The marginal cost of another app is developer time, not cloud bills.

Third, and most importantly, every app has a free tier. We are not trying to extract thirty dollars a month from a small merchant on day one. We are trying to build a long-term relationship, and the first step is giving away the basic version of what our competitors charge for.

The end goal is a portfolio big enough to be interesting to an acquirer. A well-priced small app does around a thousand dollars a month in MRR. Ten of those is real money. Fifty is exit-territory.

We are not there yet, but every week we get closer.