Building a Shopify App for My Wife

My wife sells jewelry and cactus-leather bags via Shopify.

Her greatest struggle was testing & introducing new products, which means:

Working with a manufacturer to get the products made & branded
Shipping inventory to our warehouse (okay, I could remove the 'ware')
Product photography and edits
List them to the site in hope they will sell
Do some spiffy email campaigns when they don't

It was a headache.

So I got the idea to build a Shopify app that would help merchants like her quickly test new products via a post-purchase upsell. And I thought, 'where are the most products? Amazon!' So why not let them add any Amazon product to test - and earn a commission in the process?

I got to working on the specifications, and requirements, hired a developer on Fiverr, and 3 months and about $2K later, we had an MVP!

It took nearly a dozen times submitting it to Shopify to get it approved, but a few weeks later it was live. My first customer (my wife), subscribed to the paid tier, so I had my first customer on day 1.

About a month went by while I was working on V2, dealing with minor bugs, and just after I submitted V2 a peculiar thing happened. We got our second paying merchant! Then another. And another.

Now, about 3 months after the app went live, we have 35 paying merchants.
ARR has surpassed $4K, and we've done very little in terms of marketing and promotion.

Shopify is an incredible platform to create apps for because there are millions of merchants looking for solutions, and less than 9K solutions (apps) that are live.

Thought I would share my story - we are now working on v3 which will have some major improvements - and I will update in a few months.

Here it is: https://apps.shopify.com/amazon-post-purchase-upsell

Also, I'm looking for distribution partners - this app has a very high conversion rate, and willing to offer good terms for any partners. LMK.

Cheers!
Zack