I'm writing this specifically for other developers and technical founders because this is a mistake I think we're especially prone to making.

I built a fairly deep-tech Shopify product and made a very simple assumption:

If the underlying technology is powerful enough to generate meaningful revenue for merchants, the rest will take care of itself.

It won't.

The product I built is a storefront optimization system that can make different decisions for different shoppers.

For example, a merchant can use it to:

• Showcase high-margin products more aggressively to shoppers who are more likely to spend.
• Show different storefront experiences to different shoppers based on their behavior.
• Prioritize products based on conversion rate, inventory, price, demand, or other business signals.
• Automatically adapt parts of the storefront toward the merchant's actual business goals.

The underlying system is technically quite deep.

There are feeds, signals, affinities, decisioning logic, policies, attribution, and a lot of infrastructure underneath it.

And I made the classic developer mistake:

I thought the math was the hard part.

If the system can influence what a shopper sees, and that influence increases conversion rate, average order value, margin, or another business metric, then the merchant makes more money.

The economics worked.

The potential revenue impact was meaningful.

So I focused heavily on making the system powerful, flexible, and technically sound.

And I completely forgot something:

Shopify merchants give you very little time to earn their attention.

Their questions are much simpler:

“What does this do for my store?”

“How much work is this going to be?”

“How quickly can I see whether it works?”

I was explaining the product like an engineer explaining it to another engineer.

That was my mistake.

How I'm fixing it

I'm now rebuilding the onboarding around the merchant's outcome rather than the technology.

I'm presenting the important information upfront instead of making merchants discover it.I'm stripping away as much technical terminology as possible.

Instead of:“Configure your signals and define your decisioning policy.”

I'm trying to say:“Tell us what you want to sell more of.”

Instead of:“Create an affinity based on shopper behavior.”

I'm trying to say:“Choose which shoppers should see this.”

Instead of explaining the machinery first, I'm showing:

What can this do for your store? And I'm trying to get merchants to the first useful outcome as quickly as possible.

Use the simplest possible words. Show the outcome first. Hide the machinery.

Your customer shouldn't need to understand your technology for your technology to create value for them.

I want to share a mistake I made recently so others can avoid it.

I've built Shopify apps before.

One of my earlier products was a utility that automatically optimizes/compresses a store's images. The problem was incredibly straightforward:

“My store has a lot of images. They're slowing it down. I need to make them smaller without manually doing it.” - That's basically the entire pitch.

Because the problem was so obvious and merchants were already searching for solutions to it, organic traffic started flowing in through the Shopify App Store and search.

Within weeks, I started getting paying customers.

That experience shaped my mental model of Shopify distribution.

I thought: "Build something useful → put it on the App Store → explain the value clearly → Shopify's existing traffic does a meaningful part of the distribution."

Then I built something much more sophisticated.

The new product is essentially a storefront optimization/decisioning platform. It can use store and shopper signals to make decisions about what experiences or products should be shown, and the goal is to optimize the storefront toward business outcomes.

• A merchant could showcase high-margin products more aggressively to shoppers who are likely to spend more.
• They could show different storefront layouts or product experiences to different shoppers based on their behavior.
• They could prioritize products based on things like conversion rate, inventory, price, or recent demand.
• They could change what gets promoted depending on the merchant's actual business objectives. (like clearing dead inventory, promoting newly added products)

Technically, it is significantly more powerful.

And the potential value is much larger.

Done correctly, it can potentially create a meaningful revenue lift for a merchant rather than simply saving them time or solving a narrow operational problem.

But here's the problem:

Nobody wakes up and searches for this product.

A merchant doesn't necessarily know they have a “decisioning” problem.

• They might know their conversion rate isn't great.
• They might know some products sell better than others.
• They might know different shoppers behave differently.
• But they aren't necessarily searching for the underlying technology I'm building.

And even if they find the app, I have to explain:

• what the system actually does
• why it matters to their revenue
• what data it uses
• what decisions it can make
• how it gets integrated into their storefront
• how they configure it
• and eventually, how we prove that it actually generated additional revenue

That is a completely different distribution problem.

I incorrectly assumed that because both products were Shopify apps, the distribution model would be roughly the same.

It isn't.

The first product had:

Clear problem → existing search intent → organic discovery → install → immediate value

The second has something closer to:

Unrecognized problem → education → trust → conversation → onboarding → configuration → usage → prove revenue impact

And I completely underestimated that difference.

The most painful part is that I initially thought distribution would be one of the easier parts.

I was wrong.

What I'm changing now

I'm no longer treating the Shopify App Store as the primary distribution mechanism for this product.

I'm going much more hands-on.

I'm manually finding merchants.

I'm reaching out to them directly.

I'm trying to get conversations rather than waiting for organic traffic.

I'm offering to manually onboard merchants.

I'm watching where they get confused.

I'm helping them configure the product.

And most importantly, I'm trying to get actual merchants using it so I can demonstrate whether the promised revenue lift is real.

If I can get a merchant to say:

>

that's a much stronger distribution asset than another hundred App Store impressions.

I'm also starting to understand something that confused me before:

Why do so many sophisticated ecommerce products use a higher-touch sales/onboarding model instead of relying purely on marketplace distribution?

Because complexity changes the buying motion.

If your product solves an obvious problem, self-serve can work beautifully.

If your product can potentially generate a significant amount of value but requires the customer to understand why and how it works, you may need to create the understanding yourself.

So my lesson for other founders is:

Don't confuse platform distribution with product distribution.

Just because your product lives on Shopify doesn't mean it will distribute like another Shopify app.

And don't use your experience distributing a simple utility as evidence that a sophisticated SaaS product will have the same acquisition motion.

The problem itself determines a huge part of the distribution strategy.

I got this wrong.

I'm now trying to fix it by moving from:

Maybe eventually the product can become self-serve.

But I think I made the mistake of trying to make it self-serve before I had earned the right to assume it could be.

That's the mistake I'd warn other founders about.

Don't build your distribution model around how your previous product was distributed. Build it around how your customer actually discovers, understands, trusts, and buys the new product.

Will post one more mistake I did in upcoming post.

I've been building a Shopify app for a while and I'm at the point where I need people to actually use it instead of me sitting there convincing myself that everything makes sense.

The app is still pretty rough around the edges. There are definitely things I need to improve, and that's actually what I'm trying to figure out right now.

One thing I'm particularly interested in is how easy it is to understand and get started with.

I'm a developer, so there's always a risk that something feels obvious to me but makes absolutely no sense to someone who isn't technical. I've tried to hide as much of the underlying complexity as possible and keep the experience focused on what merchants actually need to do.

So I'd really like to know:

• Can you understand what the app does without me explaining it?
• Is the onboarding straightforward?
• Are there places where you get stuck or don't know what to do next?
• Does the terminology make sense?
• Does it actually help you get something useful out of your store data?

It's completely free right now. I'm mainly looking for a handful of early beta users who are willing to try it and give me honest feedback.

And if I eventually monetize it, I'll make sure the people who join during this early beta stay free forever.

I'm not expecting the app to be polished yet. In fact, I'd prefer people who are willing to tell me "this makes no sense" or "I expected this to do X" because that's exactly the kind of feedback I'm looking for.

If you're interested, comment here or DM me and I'll send you access.

I'd genuinely appreciate the help.

I've been building a Shopify app for a while and I'm at the point where I need people to actually use it instead of me sitting there convincing myself that everything makes sense.

The app is still pretty rough around the edges. There are definitely things I need to improve, and that's actually what I'm trying to figure out right now.

One thing I'm particularly interested in is how easy it is to understand and get started with.

I'm a developer, so there's always a risk that something feels obvious to me but makes absolutely no sense to someone who isn't technical. I've tried to hide as much of the underlying complexity as possible and keep the experience focused on what merchants actually need to do.

So I'd really like to know:

• Can you understand what the app does without me explaining it?
• Is the onboarding straightforward?
• Are there places where you get stuck or don't know what to do next?
• Does the terminology make sense?
• Does it actually help you get something useful out of your store data?

It's completely free right now. I'm mainly looking for a handful of early beta users who are willing to try it and give me honest feedback.

And if I eventually monetize it, I'll make sure the people who join during this early beta stay free forever.

I'm not expecting the app to be polished yet. In fact, I'd prefer people who are willing to tell me "this makes no sense" or "I expected this to do X" because that's exactly the kind of feedback I'm looking for.

If you're interested, comment here or DM me and I'll send you access.

I'd genuinely appreciate the help.