How do you deal with "Platform risk"?
I have a few SaaS products, all around the Shopify ecosystem.
There's a great benefit to it, as I know the people, the tech, and so on.
However, even if not likely, if for some reason Shopify goes to 0 - I do as well.
Was thinking to develop other products but that almost feels like a waste of time and not a good use of my knowledge.
Anyone else in same situation?
I suggest you should bring the audience from your shopify app to your own website and provide integrations with other platforms as well.
E.g. if you have a upsell app on shopify
Build your own website and app for all the customer signup stuff and add in integration with shopify from your website for products/upsell related stuff and also add integrations with other platforms like wordpress/woocommerce, magento, prestashop.
Get payments on your website rather then Shopify.
This way, your same apps will be available for your customers on different platforms and even if Shopify goes to 0, your customers will switch to other platforms and you will have your app already there and they don't have to do much to switch the platforms
Why does it feel like a waste of time to build for something else? Surely there’s some skill transfer between building Shopify apps and other apps…
Yeah there is of course. But knowing that with the same time and effort I have much better chances to succeed with another Shopify related product, feels like not the best use of time.
Was just wondering how others deal with this situation.
I generally feel that using effort and learning is one of the best uses of time, so I’d never be in your situation. I’d be actively looking for projects that stretch me more.
I can see 2 main forms of platform risk:
You get banned.
They replicate your app as a feature.
I don't think you can help 2 much, but you can help 1 a little by following their rules to a T and build defensively.
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That happened before, and it also happened to me partially.
I do know that Shopify gets a lot of criticism from merchants for having to pay for 3rd party solutions, though,
As a Shopify customer it was always frustrating to me that Shopify didn't do this for certain features that seemed like they obviously belonged in the core product. I always assumed that they were intentionally protecting their app developers.