my Shopify app Kaching Bundles is currently making me $4.5 million a year and we spend almost zero dollars on marketing how does this guy make over $4 million a year without spending thousands of dollars on marketing well the answer is something you probably wouldn't expect all of our growth is coming either from or Eric started his journey as a designer making just $2 an hour then he stumbled onto an opportunity that would change his life forever i think there's still a lot of opportunity building in platforms and I'm personally researching i spent over an hour talking to Aricos about all his different Shopify apps and how anybody can start building these things from scratch and good news he shared everything including how to find platform specific ideas to build how to run an async team with 90% margin and the unique marketing strategy that helped him grow to $4.5 million a year in just two years all right let's get into it i'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story welcome Ericos welcome to the channel tell me about who you are and what business that you built hi guys so my name is Ericas i'm from Lithuania originally currently living in Paris and I'm a designer turned entrepreneur building Shopify apps together with my co-founder and we're currently at 4.5 million annual recurring revenue what's really cool about our business is that we're 90% profitable okay if you could give me a little bit of a breakdown of apps that you built so currently we have uh five apps in total our first app in the discount category was Kaching Bundles and we scaled it to around 400k monthly recurring revenue currently uh then we launched Kaching post purchase upsell after that we launched Kaching pop-up upsell and right now few weeks ago we launched Kaching uh card drawer upsell all of these apps are in the discount category serving customers that want to increase their average order value within Shopify since our launch in 2022 August we already made more than 400 million in additional revenue for all of the merchants that are using our apps that's awesome in building these businesses what have you learned what is the big opportunity on building apps on platforms the thing I noticed about the app developers is that there's like solo developers indie hackers and I thought that they lack great user experience all of their apps are kind of technical and a bit complex for for regular users and the other type of apps was VCbacked or like huge corporations the user experience were uh was great but the problem about them was that they actually move pretty slow if if there's a feature lacking it would take probably months or or maybe even a year to launch something new so that's how I kind of knew that there is an opportunity for me to be in that ecosystem and to try to beat all of those solid developers i wasn't sure that I will be able to compete with high bigger companies backed up by VCs and so on like a year or two years after doing Shopify apps I realized that it's possible to compete with them as well okay let's go a bit into your backstory here what did you do before entrepreneurship and what got you into building stuff yeah so right after finishing my school I joined a local web design agency and I started working for $2 per hour since day one I was always thinking how can I 10x my earnings and uh I quickly I realized that if I want to earn more I have to work like for myself i I I have to start freelancing so that's what I did in 2016 or 2015 I guess 3 to 4 years later while I was still freelancing I was building products on the side i had a client a startup who needed a landing page so what I was doing I was just browsing the internet and looking for inspiration and that's how I stumbled upon Shopify partners page i bookmarked it and later on when I looked into it I saw uh a section which said that top 25% Shopify app developers are making almost 300k a year and in my eyes it was like oh my god it's it's huge because what I was making with my freelance work was was much less having all of the experience in Shopify I knew how how those apps were and that's how I realized that I have to build something myself in the ecosystem cool okay the Shopify app opportunity how did you find this idea and generally how do you think about finding ideas when I was thinking of what do I want to build in the Shopify app marketplace I I already had three main criteria so first one was it has to be pretty easy to build i have to build it in like couple of months no more than that the second criteria was pretty broad market i wanted to build something that could be useful for any Shopify store because it would be a lot easier to market it and I could use all of my clients that use Shopify and so on the first criteria was I needed low competition so that's my main my main setup how how I differentiate good ideas versus bad ideas nice so on the topic of uh good ideas and bad ideas let's talk about validation how do you know when your idea is validated and what has that looked like for your apps before before building it I tried to validate it with basically talking to users you know I joined various Discord communities of drop shippers i joined e-commerce Facebook groups i posted various Facebook posts in in those groups and one of the posts where I I had a screenshot of my not yet published app it was just a design and it kind of blew up there was more than 100 likes and a lot of comments asking you know where can I don't download this app because they thought that it's already live so that was my first validation that this product is needed and and yeah it it could be successful if you can build a landing page or something to try get uh get the emails of your customers that's great if you can even charge for it maybe make a pre-order or something that's that's even better because you already know that people will pay money for it all right I got to stop you real quick and zoom out ericos built an insane business 4 million a year on top of the Shopify app store without spending any money on ads and that's maybe the secret building on top of a marketplace you don't need a big audience you don't need to spend money on ads and there's a built-in customer base just waiting for you to solve their problems the only problem with that is that Shopify's developer ecosystem is I'll admit pretty mature in other words that means there's a good amount of competition on the platform so that begs the question what's the next Shopify what's the under the radar marketplace where I think developers should be building right now well one place I think is interesting is the monday.com marketplace we partnered with them on this video because they're putting real energy behind expanding the marketplace investing in the platform supporting developers and actively looking for more builders to help meet their growing customer demand now is the time to get in early and make your mark while it's still easier to stand out they've got over 245,000 customers across over 200 industries and 90% of their enterprise customers use monday.com apps enterprise that's the big bucks what's also cool is they have good APIs clean docs solid SDKs and a team dedicated to helping you grow and make money if this tickles your fancy well with monday.com we put together this free download breaking down a bunch of stats about the opportunity here who their users are and what kind of problems they really need solved and here's a pro tip take some of that info and plug it into your favorite LLM and I bet it will give you some really cool ideas for what to build if you want to download just click the first link in the description fill out the quick form and sign up for your developer account it's all 100% free to get started i'm stoked that we got to partner with monday.com in this video because Aeros is an example of what happens when you build on a marketplace all right let's get back to the interview you're a designer not a developer how do you go about actually building these products what's your process to go from zero to one with a new idea yeah so when I'm when I'm designing things the first thing I look into is competitors if there's already competitors in space uh that's a good thing because you can dig into deeper and and see how they do like see their user experience just go through it and I'm taking notes what I really like about it and what I dislike about it and after that I I have a clear image of how my app could look like so that I could fairly say that it's objectively better than my competitors and to make uh my chance for success higher I have to find a co-founder i think finding a co-founder is is pretty much similar to doing sales because you have to sell someone an idea that you can make a successful business and you just need their help that's what I was trying to do you know I went into a local developer group in Facebook i made a huge post i and I mentioned that you know first of all I have Shopify experience second I'm a great designer with years of experience so I can provide a great user experience which will increase our chance for success third I have all of those clients already using Shopify which we can sell our Shopify app to and with all of those things you know I think I'm increasing my chance for for finding a right fit and and that's basically h how I found my co-founder let's go to the next section here i want to talk about marketing uh how do you go from Shopify app to real users and real paying customers when you are just a new app you have zero users you have nothing you're right at the bottom of the app store listings so I knew that we need to onboard as many users as we can manually so yeah I just I just went to all of the communities i just went to all of my clients all of my friends that are using Shopify and asked them to install our app and try it for themselves i made the app free and this way you can get more installs and of course more installs then convert to to more reviews and of course it drives more revenue then and it helps you know to improve your product further because you get all of this feedback okay I want to dive into some of the dirty details about this reviews thing because I think that this is it's simple it sounds simple but it's actually genius so let's go a little bit deeper into the customer support and review strategy that really did change your business yeah so once we said that it's crucial for us to get those five-star reviews we optimized all of our processes towards it so first of all our product within our product you straight away we just ask for then we have all of these uh monthly emails so every month we're sending a monthly email in which we uh show how much revenue this app brought to you and in that email we also ask for review i think around 95% of our reviews for for our apps come from customer support our customer support is is topnotch all of our customer support agents are really technical so they can dig into your code and and fix things and yeah we provide 24/7 customer support right now nice and now that you have a team you realize still how important this is and I realize that you have like a little bit of a system that where you gamified reviews can you talk more about that so recently I introduced a gamified bonus system to our customer support team and right now we're tracking who gets uh more reviews we have the monthly leaderboard and uh we we have all of these different raffles and actually my favorite B bonus is uh a persuader of the month and what we do is we basically calculate the conversion rate of how many uh times you ask for a review and how many reviews you get and I think it really helps uh those agents bring more reviews and of course incentivizes them because they get bonuses for for each review cool okay okay well let's dive a little bit into monetization pricing and conversion how did you make the first dollar with cashing apps and how did you get those first users when we got our initial reviews when we started ranking for for specific keywords uh that's when we introduced our monetization we introduced a subscription model uh later on we introduced some tiers so like the more you use our product the the the higher price you pay nice and is there a kind of a strategy that you think about now every time you go to launch a new app I always launch it for free because it reduces friction of installs and as soon as I start getting organic installs I grandfather all of the users that already using uh our app so that they wouldn't need to pay and I monetize only the new users and yeah we always uh offer free trial that that also helps and we offer full refunds no question asked because I think the risk of getting onestar review is is is just is just too big that that was awesome uh next question is let's talk about tech stack uh what kind of tools or languages do you use to build and run this business yeah so languages wise I I will not tell much because I'm I'm not technical but uh in our organization we primarily use Slack for for our communication then for our customer support we use intercom then we use uh features.vote for gathering feature uh suggestions so every user can go to that board and suggest a feature or just upvote for other features that they think that we need to implement another tool that we're using is linear uh so we we use it internally for our task management last but not least we use Mantle you have everything Shopify related there you you can set up affiliate partnerships uh you you can see all of the metrics uh all of the funnels uh customer management and so on since day one our uh profitability was around 90% expenses wise we we always try to stay very very lean and and I hope we will stay lean in the future as well cool that's amazing let's move on to the next question more the lifestyle side of things can you give me what the day in the life looks like for you a Shopify app developer making millions of dollars per year uh what does your typical day look like yeah so I get up whenever I get up i I don't set any alarms uh I check my emails uh while still in bed i I scroll some Twitter like probably everyone else in the world when I have my to-do list I always try to diff differentiate like quick wins something that I can do in like up to 30 minutes and all of the other stuff is is is the harder stuff that that I focus on later on i I love the lifestyle i I love what I do and I don't feel like working i I feel like I'm doing something i'm really passionate about which which really helps because I'm you know I'm not counting time at all that's awesome last question that we always ask uh all founders on the starter story channel what advice would you give to someone looking to start their own business and start their own thing online so I think that at start two people are are enough you just have a designer who does all all of the product stuff you have a tech guy and and you're good to go because you will be doing all of the customer support yourself to know that uh what your clients are struggling with and yeah once you start getting more tickets and once you start growing and and and scaling your product then you can start hiring customer support and then you can start you know scaling scaling your team and uh yeah another ad- advice I I could give is probably to hang around other people that are building because uh you know community is is really is really helping because you you get to know people you can learn from their mistakes and uh yeah maybe you can even you know find a co-founder in those communities and and so on that's it thank you uh Ericos for coming on the channel sharing your business that makes millions 90% profit margin is amazing and I can't wait to see you hit 10 million and take it further so thanks for coming on thanks for having me ericos is the perfect example about how a designer and a builder can turn a simple idea into thousands of dollars but that came with knowing the right information for him it was about Shopify and finding the right problem to solve well imagine there was a place that gave you this problems to solve blueprints for building and the marketing strategies that turn simple ideas into million-dollar online businesses that's what we have at Starter Story a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can access this all data backed by real entrepreneurs so if you're serious about building a profitable side project like Aricos head to the link in the description and we will give you 52 micro SASS ideas for free just like Aricos so you can get started on your journey much love and I'll see you in the next one peace