$1 Million Dollar Shopify App (With No Marketing)

👉 This visual quiz builder app for Shopify doesn’t look all that special.

Pricing starts at $9/month, there’s a 30-day free trial, and it only has 116 reviews despite there being millions of Shopify stores.

And yet…

With a small team of developers, [founder Raj Karmani] grew the tool to hundreds of customers until selling it for $1 million to Alleyway Capital in September 2022.

Apparently the sale price was “a 4-5x multiple of revenue,” so the app would have been earning $200,000 to $250,000 in annual revenue, or about $19,000 per month 🤑

Sounds like this app was one of many Raj was working on with his team developers and $600,000 raised in venture capital.

But they apparently developed the app with low-code tools and spent nothing on marketing…

Karmani spent zero dollars on sales and marketing, yet the product spread through word of mouth, mainly via the Shopify ecosystem.

I’ve heard said before that a good way to find Shopify app ideas is to look at the low-rated apps created by Shopify themselves.

For example, their free Geolocation app has only a 2.4-star rating. And sure enough, a bunch of premium geolocation apps have sprung up that people seem happy to pay for 🥳

Back to the quiz builder app, and the company that bought it wrote about the acquisition on their own site…

Despite ecommerce going through an adjustment after its torrid growth in 2020-2021, best-in-class SaaS companies helping merchants improve their conversion rates and AOVs in an economic way are continuing to grow rapidly (50%+ annual growth rates). […] We see the opportunity to grow this 50x if we execute well and current conditions persist.

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