Shopify Diaries is my progress stair-stepping my way toward a successful software company. Follow along as I grow my Shopify apps into a business.

What apps am I working on? I have four apps covering different stages of the e-commerce customer journey. ReRank SEO brings traffic to the store, Rapid Hover helps products stand out, Detective FAQ removes purchase hesitation, and Fuze Upsell maximizes revenue per customer.

The Apps, Four Years Later

It has now been 4 years since I acquired Detective FAQ and Second Image Hover and a lot has changed but a lot has stayed the same. I have acquired more apps (we’ll cover that in the next post) and names have changed.

I bought these apps with two goals: Learn and Don’t Lose Money. I learned a lot… I still have the apps so I have not lost money, but I did not get the return I was looking for.

We are looking back so we can move forward, there has been a long gap since the acquisition. If I pick up the story where I am now without explanation there may be some confusion.

The Good Parts

Not a lot went well. This has been a learning process for me, and I have been learning a ton. Managing servers, domains, infrastructure, and Shopify. It was all new and has taken time.

Each app has earned just under $5k each so I have been paid back about 2/3 of my original investment. Plus I still have the apps which are worth something. So I have not completely lost but the return is taking longer than anticipated.

The apps have been running smoothly and there has been very little support required. This is great but can lead to a fear of updating because you don’t want to wreck it.

The apps are still running and still earning a little each month. They make more than they cost to run so they can keep going for now.

The Bad Parts

This is the hard section to write because the reality of these apps is they are not what I had hoped for. I expected and hoped I could just go in clean up the apps do some marketing and watch them grow.

The reality is Shopify is a great platform but difficult. If you are not well versed and prepared for the rate at which Shopify moves you will get left behind.

When I purchased the apps Shopify was in a major revision, this may be why the apps were sold. Shopify was moving to a new store theme 2.0 system which looks great but neither of my apps were compatible with the new system. Plus they were adding new ways to integrate apps with their system (API). If that was not enough the server architecture my apps were built with (koa.js) that Shopify supported and maintained were deprecated. This was a lot to handle.

Now none of this is Shopify’s fault they are making their platform better. This is platform risk, I knew it could be an issue. I was not expecting this much so soon.

Along with the Shopify requirements taking its toll the apps are written in Vue.js for the frontend. Vue 2 specifically. Yes, that deprecated Vue. The new version requires a significant rewrite.

Was this a bad purchase?

Now for my personal life, I did not have the time to put into the apps I originally thought I would. Life gets busy with 2 kids under 10 at the time and my wife who runs her own business that makes the actual money.

This has all led to the decline of both apps. Installs are down and revenue is 10% from when I purchased the apps.

So the apps sit outdated and performing poorly because I could not get the time to fix all of the problems with them.

Where Are We Now?

The apps are in rough shape now. Everything is trending down. Shopify continues to change.

But there is hope. The time I thought I would have years ago, I now actually have. Plus I now have the compounding power of AI to speed up my development.

We have more apps and more revenue.

There is a plan to fix these apps and get them growing again. One Step at a Time.

So how did we fare on the goals of Learn and Don’t Lose Money. Well, I have lost money, I learned a lot but maybe not enough of what I needed to. Stay tuned for the next post to see how little I actually learned.

Oh and just for fun Shopify decided, probably correctly, “Second Image Hover” was not a name of an app it was a description of the app. It had to change. So it is now officially “Rapid HoverImage Animations.”