As a side project, I’m developing Substack Tools, a tool suite for both readers and writers that use Substack. Check it out, let me know what you think 🙂

Widebundle, created by solo developer Mat De Sousa, is an app for Shopify that allows shop owners to create offers, bundles and quantity breaks.

It’s 2020 and Mat is in his last year of college. Instead of going for an internship, he decided to build his own company.

He knew e-commerce, he knew to code, and he knew marketing. So he went through a whole bunch of different Facebook groups, trying to see what people were talking about, in hopes to find some inspiration.

And so he did. The next step was to try and validate his idea. He created a mock-up of what he was thinking to build and talked directly to people of interest.

In 2 weeks he had an MVP ready to be released and tested out in the real world. After adding a 14-day free trial, and creating a simple web page for the product, he launched.

15 people installed the app, and that was more than enough to get started. With that user base, he made sure to follow up on every comment, complaint, and request. Fixing bugs and adding features as fast as possible in order to keep people interested.

From that point on, he leveraged his current users with word of mouth growth, he went back to the Facebook groups to spread the word and used affiliates to reach new people. In between all of this, he found the product-market fit, and the rest is history.

Mat has a lot of awesome Twitter threads about how to build and grow a Shopify app. I would recommend following him, and checking them:

Mat De Sousa @DsMatie

I wrote many threads on how to grow a Shopify App. 💰 So I had to make a thread of threads. ✌️ Here we go. The SUPER thread. 👇

March 18th 2022

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Widebundle

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