Developers, don't make the mistake I made — technical depth does not equal customer value - Mistake #2
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.