Thread by @jakobgreenfeld

Last week I got the chance to pick Daniel Sim's brain on the opportunities he's seeing related to Shopify apps.

What he shared is pure gold. 👇

The default advice that's shared over and over again is this:

"Search for merchant problems and build an app that solves them"

It's of course great if you can find something that way. But how exactly do you find merchant problems worth solving?

You could reach out and ask a few store owners what problems they're struggling with.

However, there are plenty of pitfalls and asking the right questions is an art in itself.

(Book tip: The Mom Test by @robfitz).

Also for introverts like me, talking to lots of strangers is an extremely energy-draining activity. So this is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

Another possibility is that you start your own Shopify store and then build something for yourself. But if your primary goal is to develop Shopify apps that's a huge detour and even then there's no guarantee you'll encounter a problem worth solving.

So while the default advice is certainly great if you can make it work, it's not as easy as people often make it seem.

Luckily there are lots of other good ways to discover opportunities no-one talks about.

A great way to get started is to look for underserved categories. Here's how you can find them.

Daniel recommends the following trick to find out how popular a given app is.

Once you've found a category, can see a way how you can compete with the big winners and have some understanding why the apps with just a handful of reviews are not as successful, you could be onto a winner.

While categories are interesting, this is not how users usually discover new apps. Instead, like anywhere else, the search bar is king. The majority of apps are discovered on the app store by keyword search, not browsing.

Wouldn't it be great if we knew the most popular keywords merchants are searching for? Daniel shared the following trick to discover those:

Technology is not static. The Shopify platform has a steady flow of changes that affect merchants (e.g. subscriptions and post-purchase upsell APIs).

When something changes or a new thing comes out, the apps that exploit it do well since there aren't many competitors.

To stay ahead of the curve, Daniel recommends the following resources:

- shopify.dev/changelog
- events.shopify.com/partnertownhall
- shopify.dev/concepts/about…

Another strategy he shared is to look for underoptimized popular apps.

The app store has been around for a long time now. There are some apps that have gotten fat and lazy. They've neglected support, features are falling behind, or there are now better ways of doing what they do

You can find them by searching for apps that are slowly but steadily moving down in the "All Apps" rankings.

Other signs to look out for are reviews slowing down, bad reviews accumulating, or a neglected app listing.

Daniel created a database that makes it easy to find underserved subcategories and keywords, underoptimized popular apps, and to understand what's gaining and falling in popularity. But so far he kept all this data for himself.

When he first showed it to me, I was blown away and I'm really happy that I finally managed to convince him to share it with others.

You can get access here.

gumroad.com/l/shopify-app-…

Note that I don't get any form of compensation for writing this. I just genuinely think that Daniel's database is amazing.

Thanks for reading!

Make sure to follow Daniel here on Twitter: @drsim.

And if you enjoyed this thread, you might like my newsletter where I regularly share stuff like this.

opportunities.so