Hi all! First-time Shopify app developers here (three of us, background in loyalty programs for brick-and-mortar retail). Our loyalty app got approved on August 5th, 72 days after we started building.
Now we’re facing the real challenge: distribution. What we’ve tried so far:
- Facebook merchant groups → mostly silence, plus several offers of paid installs and paid reviews (declined, we know that’s against Shopify’s policies and it poisons the ranking signal, but the volume of those offers surprised us)
- Cold outreach to local stores → slow, a few conversations
- Reaching out to other app founders → little response
Our working thesis: honest reviews are the engine. Reviews → ranking → organic installs. But it’s chicken-and-egg at zero.
For those who’ve been through the cold-start phase:
- Which channel actually got you your first 10-50 installs?
- At what point did organic App Store traffic become meaningful for you?
- Is pursuing the Built for Shopify badge worth prioritizing this early?
(App for context: Livy Loyalty: Points & Rewards - Loyalty points and cart recovery to boost customer retention | Shopify App Store )
Any hard-earned lessons appreciated.
Hey @Livy_Apps, we have some suggestions here that are a good starting point for all apps: Go-to-market success
My initial thought since you’re coming from a background in loyalty programs for brick and mortar is to lean in to your past clients and see if they would be open to using your app.
Looking at your app listing, I don’t see any mention of this working with the Shopify POS, so exploring integrating using POS extensions could be a valuable addition to your app since you already know that space: About Shopify Point of Sale app extensions
Additionally, if your past clients aren’t on Shopify, you can earn some referral income in the process as well: https://help.shopify.com/en/partners/partner-program/how-to-earn#referrals-and-upgrades
As for Built for Shopify, I would recommend that you build your app to meet all of those requirements from early on. The criteria outlined gives you a good pulse of what merchants expect and are accustomed when using apps. That way, when your app is performing within those specifications, even without the badge, it can help with earning that trust early on.
Thank you Kyle, this is really useful and the POS point lands, because it’s already on our roadmap. Your comment is probably what moves it up.
On Built for Shopify: we did build against those requirements from the start, the app is ready to apply the moment we hit the 50 paid installs and 5 reviews. We monitor performance continuously, though with only 3 merchants using it right now the data is admittedly thin.
One question, if you don’t mind: for a brand-new app with no reviews yet, is there anything on the listing itself that tends to matter more than founders expect? We’re three weeks post-approval, ranking on page one for one Spanish-language search term but nowhere on the English equivalent, so I’m trying to work out how much of that is the listing versus simply not having reviews yet.