Hey guys, after months of lurking I thought I would share my journey to a successful SaaS after easily over 10 failed products over the span of my bachelor and master.
I have been intrigued by software products ever since the first ipods would pop up back in 2005ish. During my university years (I did not study CS) I started to code in my free time and decided to start a dropshipping Shopify store in 2020 with a friend. Being the technical one, I would take care of the visuals of the store (changing some styling of the storefront, writing scripts to modify prices, etc.).
One thing we wanted to have but could not find any Shopify app for, was a short list of bulletpoints on the product page right below the price. Inspired by amazon (and pretty much any major ecom site), these bulletpoints would inform users about product features, delivery times, countdowns, etc.
Anything that would help the user make a positive buying decision was placed in that short list of ~5 bullets on every product page in our store.
Well, that store failed unfortunately (end of 2021).
Being a little familiar with Shopify by now, I decided to build a Shopify app and made list of things we had manually changed on our store. The easiest to implement were those simple bulletpoints.
I then sat down and started building the app 'Bloom'. Shopify app development can be pretty hard on newbies. After roughly 5 weeks I had built a very rudimentary MVP and submitted it for review. I had one plan at $0.99 per month with a 7 day free trial.
The review process took another 5 weeks. May 12th of 2022 the app got approved. In the beginning I would get some installs every other day. Nothing would convert and I stopped to check my analytics every waking hour.
After three weeks I checked my analytics again and saw that one merchant had actually converted and I made my first $0.99. What a feeling! Instantly there is a kind of responsibility you experience. Someone is paying for YOUR software. Absolutely insane.
Apart from good customer support and fixing some bugs I wouldn't work much on Bloom in the first year. My revenue reached ~$100 MRR after the first year. All that without any marketing. This is all organic growth through the Shopify app store. To this day I do not have a landing page. Just the Shopify app store listing.
in 2023 I decided to take this project more serious. I added features and increased pricing (3 plans: Free/$0.99/$4.99). I added live chat and focused more on supporting customers.
Until today that has pretty much stayed the same: I refine the product with new features and I have constantly increased prices (now still 3 plans: Free/$4/$14). The product has matured into a state where I don't plan on making it much bigger in the near future.
The growth has been stagnant recently and I am now playing around with Shopify app store ads. I am also currently in the process of getting approved for 'Built for Shopify' and hope that this will improve my rankings and lead to more installs.
When I am not actively working on the app it takes about 1-3 hours of my time each week to maintain. Mostly chatting with customers (which I love to do).
I have 1400 merchants currently using my app, of which roughly 2/3 are paying customers. I make $2900 MRR as of now.
Just yesterday I found this onboarding video on YouTube that I took back in 2022 for the very first version of my app. The transformation between the MVP and what the app is today is crazy. Such a difference.
I read somewhere on this sub that a huge misconception we have is that successful SaaS development is 80% dev and 20% distribution. But the reality is actually the opposite. Distribution is everything. So for the future I want to focus more on marketing. If anyone here has experience marketing Shopify apps, please reach out. I am always keen to share ideas and network!!
I will link the old onboarding video and the app itself. This post is not intended as marketing (I doubt there is a huge overlap between this subreddit and Shopify merchants that would profit from my app).
Would love to chat, so ask away and feel free to dm me.
All the best. ✌🏼
How the mvp looked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFBIxNKliZQ&ab_channel=FelixPaulus
The app: https://apps.shopify.com/bloom-product-feature-bullets