Advising
Shopify App
Founders.

I advise Shopify app founders for a living now, and after enough conversations the same lessons keep surfacing. They are not clever. They are the things experienced founders nod at and first-timers learn the hard way. So I am writing the ones I repeat most, in plain terms.

The reason I can say these with any authority is the seat I sit in. I was an early Shopify employee and built the Partner Program. I co-founded WIN Brands Group, so I have been the merchant that app founders are trying to sell to. And I founded getuptime.co and sold it to Tiny, so I have built and exited a SaaS myself. Employee, partner, merchant. That combination shapes every piece of advice below.

Here are the four lessons, in the order I usually give them.

Why this
advice comes
from this seat.

Most app advice comes from people who have only ever built apps. Mine comes from having been on all three sides of the ecosystem. I have approved partners and watched the program from the inside. I have been the merchant evaluating whether to install your app and whether to keep paying for it. And I have built and sold a product through the same channels you are using now.

That matters because the most common founder mistakes come from missing one of those perspectives. Builders who never operated a store misjudge what merchants actually value. Builders who never worked inside the platform misjudge the Shopify relationship. The lessons below are really just the blind spots I see most often, named.

Merchants
buy outcomes,
not software.

A merchant does not want your app. They want more revenue, fewer abandoned carts, less time on a task they hate, or a problem to stop being a problem. The app is the means. When I was running brands, I never once thought, I would love some more software. I thought, this thing is costing me money or time, who can fix it. That is the buying motion you are selling into.

So lead with the outcome everywhere: your listing, your onboarding, your pricing. Founders fall in love with their feature set and describe the machinery. Merchants skim for the result. The apps that win make the outcome obvious in the first thirty seconds and prove it fast. This shapes how you build too, which I get into in how to build a Shopify app in 2026.

The Shopify
relationship
matters.

Founders treat Shopify like a billing system and a search ranking. It is a partner, and the relationship matters more than they think. The platform decides your distribution, your visibility, and what is in or out of bounds. Founders who engage the partner side seriously, show up, understand the roadmap, build inside the lines, get treated differently than founders who only surface when something breaks.

I built the Partner Program, so I will say this plainly. The platform notices who is a good partner and who is extracting. Your category position, your reviews, your alignment with where Shopify is heading all feed into how much oxygen you get. Treat the relationship as an asset you invest in, not a tax you pay. Founders who ignore this are surprised when a platform shift hurts them and helps a competitor who was paying attention.

Specialize
before you
broaden.

The instinct to build for everyone is the instinct that kills early apps. Founders add features to widen the audience and end up with a product that is fine for many and essential for none. Early on, breadth is a trap. Specialization is what gets you traction, because a narrow app that nails one outcome for one type of merchant is easy to find, easy to choose, and easy to keep.

Pick a sharp wedge. Be the obvious choice for a specific merchant solving a specific problem, and own that completely before you expand. Breadth is something you earn after you have a base that loves you, not a strategy you lead with. The path from that wedge to real revenue is its own discipline, which I walked through in getting from MVP to your first million in ARR.

Your first
100 merchants
are research.

Founders treat their first hundred merchants as revenue and miss that they are the most valuable research they will ever get. Those merchants are telling you, in churn and in support tickets and in the features they ask for, exactly what your product should become. The revenue from a hundred merchants is small. The signal is priceless, and most founders are too busy chasing the next install to listen to it.

So get close to them. Talk to the ones who churn, especially, because churn is the clearest message your product sends. Pay attention to the patterns in why people leave, since that is where your retention problems hide, and retention is what every future buyer will diligence. I put real numbers around healthy and unhealthy retention in Shopify app churn benchmarks. Your first hundred merchants will tell you which side of those numbers you are on, if you let them.

What ties
all four
together.

The thread through every one of these is the same. Stay close to the merchant and the platform, and let both teach you. Outcomes come from understanding what the merchant actually wants. The Shopify relationship comes from respecting the platform you build on. Specialization comes from serving a real merchant deeply instead of an imagined one shallowly. And the first hundred merchants are the loop that keeps you honest about all of it.

None of this is exotic. It is the discipline that separates founders who build a durable app from founders who build a feature and wonder why it stalls. The ones who internalize these early move faster, churn less, and end up with the kind of business a buyer actually wants. The ones who skip them tend to learn the same lessons later, at a higher price, usually in a diligence room when a buyer points at the exact thing they ignored.

If I had to compress all four into a single sentence, it would be this: build for a real merchant, respect the platform that distributes you, win one thing before you win many, and let your earliest customers teach you what to become. Do that and most of the harder problems get easier on their own. Skip it and no amount of features will save you.

These four are the ones I find myself repeating in nearly every advising conversation, because they are the ones that compound. Get them right early and the business gets easier to run, easier to grow, and far easier to sell. Get them wrong and you spend years fixing what a little discipline at the start would have prevented. Stay close to the merchant, respect the platform, win one thing first, and let your earliest users teach you the rest.