First of all, my English is not that great so excuse me if I make any mistakes
I have been recently trying my best to make and run an app I created that detects issues with orders before they are shipped, and it all looked like it’s going to be a piece of cake, making the app took a few months, because I was reading a lot of people complaining that they need something similar.
I have never been really good at marketing, the last 4 years, I made 5 stores, 4 of them never sold a single product, and i ended up with thousands of dollars of ad spend for 1 abandoned cart…
The fifth one was really painful and demotivating & I said, this is it, if it is not working i’m gone and will just focus on my accounting 9 to 5. The fifth shop, that I ran selling projector did $4000-6000 MRR after only a few weeks & I was like ‘‘this is it?’’ it only takes 4 years?
The store is still running, and if i had given up, I would have never got to this point… scaling is a different beast, but at least the cold start days are over.
Believe me, it is painful, it is going to be terrible, you’ll want out, especially if you are financing it with your paycheck like in my case…
this is my first post, so I decided to make it a motivational one as I right now am tackling the same cold start problem with the shopify app I launched, wishing nothing but the best for everyone… Keep going!!
Going from four dead stores to one doing 4 to 6k a month is not a small thing, and the app cold start really is a different problem, not the same one again.
One thing that caught me out. Early on, app store search is close to the whole channel, and search only works for problems merchants already have a name for. People complaining that orders keep going out wrong are describing a symptom. They are not typing “detects issues before shipping” into the search box, because that phrase is yours, not theirs. They type the words they already know, things like order validation, address validation, order editor, fraud check.
So the listing usually has to be built around the nearest term people actually type, even when that term undersells what you built. Pull up the top few apps for the keyword closest to yours and read their title and first two lines. That tells you the vocabulary merchants are arriving with. The search terms field in the partner dashboard is worth spending real time on.
The other channel is the one you already used on the store side, going where merchants describe the problem and answering that specific problem rather than pitching. Slower, but the installs stick around.
What does the closest existing keyword to your app look like right now?
it only takes 4 years?
