We sat down with the founder of Exportly, who recently exited his business and sold through us. Before becoming a Shopify app founder, he found himself as a stay-at-home dad, situated in Australia with his wife and children. With a background of 20 years working for various startups and companies in San Francisco—including Macromedia, which was later purchased by Adobe—he began searching for an opportunity to generate monthly cash flow. The opportunity he seized would ultimately lead him to become founder of the Shopify app Exportly—although it was only a part-time gig, at the time.
Finding the Right Idea
He started his side-hustle job search on Upwork, and what he came across sparked the idea that would later be known as Exportly.
“People were looking for an integration between QuickBooks and Shopify. I started building the app and got a couple of customers and positive reviews, and it just grew from there,” he states.
Exportly effectively connects your Shopify Store to your Quickbooks Online Company or your Xero Organization. For every order placed on your store, Exportly will instantly create a Quickbooks Online Salesreceipt or Xero Invoice.
With an overall 5-star rating on the Shopify App Store, reviews credit the app with being simple, easy-to-use and effective. Many users rave about the app’s excellent customer support, and several businesses have shared the ways in which Exportly has benefitted them.
Why Build an App for Shopify?
He ultimately decided to build an app for Shopify when he noticed this market need for a Quickbooks integration with the Shopify platform. “It just seemed like the business model for an app developer on Shopify was pretty straightforward,” he shares.
“At the time, [Shopify was] taking 20% of your monthly revenue. [But] they’ve just changed that recently [so] they’re not taking the 20% unless you’re making over a million dollars,” he goes on to explain. “So that’s a plus for anybody starting out now trying to build an app in the Shopify store.”
As of May 2021, Shopify reported that over 1.7 million businesses use the platform worldwide. The online service partners with sellers and companies to help them streamline their online stores, and Shopify easily lets the seller take payments and ship their products—effectively consolidating the selling experience. Evidently, there are a myriad of benefits to building an app on Shopify.
On average, clients that use the Shopify platform to promote their e-commerce stores download around seven apps from the Shopify App Store. The space is massive and continues to expand with every new app created.
Deciding to Create an App
There is little doubt that building apps can turn into a lucrative business, but that doesn’t mean you should run to create a new app without any forethought. The crucial starting point for any new app is first deciding what its purpose will be. What are your reasons behind building this app, and how is it going to help the merchant or your client?
Once you’ve decided the purpose for your app and are ready to start creating, it’s crucial to conduct market research, learn about your users and choose which platform you’ll develop for. Check out these other helpful tips for building a Shopify app we’ve compiled for additional guidance.
Trying to decide which platform to develop your app for? We took an in-depth look at the pros and cons of developing for four major e-commerce platforms: Shopify, Wix, Amazon and Atlassian.
Deciding to Sell
At its inception, Exportly was just a part-time gig. Still, the Shopify app gathered roughly 50 customers in a couple of years, just by the nature of it being useful and efficient—not due to any huge marketing efforts or scaling tactics. A couple of years later, the app grew to over 100 customers.
In fact, Exportly was a one-man show; the single founder built Exportly from the ground up without hiring anyone else to help him cultivate it. Although many individuals build apps and SaaS businesses with the goal to one day sell, he never had that goal in mind for Exportly.
“I would occasionally get emails from random people about selling, and I would usually ignore them,” he states. But when our team at FE reached out to him about potentially selling, he was intrigued. “When I found out I could sell [Exportly], I thought, ‘that’s a pretty cool idea.’” With the new goal to sell in mind and an understanding of Exportly’s value, he pushed to acquire new customers and boost his monthly revenue.
Advice for Other SaaS Founders
As he worked to grow Exportly and expand his customer base, he placed an emphasis on prioritizing his customers in more ways than one. “You have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try to meet [their] needs,” he asserts.
He aimed to prioritize the customer at every phase of the process—whether they were new to the app or were seasoned users. When new customers came on, he worked to ensure they felt valued and welcomed from the start.
Moreover, he designed Exportly to be easily implemented by users, and he stresses the importance of apps being simple to use. “They sign up for the service and then they don’t have to do a lot of maintenance,” he explains. He consistently prioritized solving his customers’ issues, effectively making the process seamless and providing customers with peace of mind.
By focusing his attention on ensuring his customers were happy at all stages, he was able to gather more positive reviews and ultimately expand Exportly’s success. Evidently, it’s essential to get your customers’ feedback and design your app in a way that is most useful and efficient for them. Doing so increases your likelihood of receiving positive reviews and maintaining long-term customers.
If he decides to create an app again down the road, he says he will focus more on marketing efforts to grow and scale efficiently. Additionally, he says he will look into expanding the onboarding process to effectively introduce the customer to the app in a way that best sets them up for success.
As Shopify and other app developer platforms continue to expand their marketplaces, there may be no better time to address a market need by creating your own app. But before you take advantage of this opportunity without so much as a second thought, it’s crucial to fully understand what purpose your app will serve, what the market looks like and who your ideal customer is.
With a thorough grasp of the market and its customers, you’ll be that much more equipped to meet your users’ needs. And when you make your customers’ convenience and satisfaction the center focus of your app’s development, you’re guaranteed to build something miraculous.