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Jack makes progress on both product and marketing for TranslateCI, and Bjorn plans goals for 2022.
Two bootstrappers building SaaS apps on Shopify, sharing their experiences along the way. TBX is a weekly podcast by Jack Kowalski of NeatShift and Bjorn Forsberg of FORSBERG+two.
Bjorn Forsberg 0:15
All right. Welcome to episode three of season two of the bootstrap Experience podcast. Jack, how are you go? Great, man. How are you? Yeah, not too bad. Just getting into the new year.
Jack Kowalsky 0:25
Yeah. Happy New Year.
Bjorn Forsberg 0:26
Yeah, same. Yeah. It's always a bit of a strange time over Christmas. And New Year's like, this year is much better, because I can actually check out from work a little bit more than usual. But it's always a quiet time for apps and things. So it's a bit nerve wracking at the same time as you're taking time off the year sort of resets from now.
Jack Kowalsky 0:44
Yeah, my year is actually started out kind of crazy, because there's a couple of sponsorships I've talked about before went live like January 1. So I've been getting new signups. It's been really cool. But I'm also in that phase, you know, where it's like, I have so few customers, like you get an email. It's like, Hey, does your thing do this? Absolutely. Then I stay up till 3am making it do that thing.
Bjorn Forsberg 1:05
But that's the real fun part of creating new products as well. Right?
Jack Kowalsky 1:08
It is cool. Yeah. I love like the early adopter people. Like I remember those with the Shopify app. Like it's so cool. Like they're so invested in it, and like understanding the great people to work with in the beginning.
Bjorn Forsberg 1:20
Yeah. And they seem to seek you out almost sometimes. Right? Like, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I remember from the beginning of mine, as well, though, some people that were just instrumental in pointing it into the right direction, and using a lot of their time to help us
Jack Kowalsky 1:33
out. Absolutely, yeah. And it's new enough to like, I remember, like, a couple years into the Shopify app, it's like, I would kind of hear repeated ideas over and over again, that like, I didn't implement for like a specific reason, you know, and it's like, but now it's like, everything's cool. I'm like, Oh, this is a great idea, you know, and like, it's actually like, exciting to get that kind of feedback. And like, actually, really improve translates. Yeah,
Bjorn Forsberg 1:57
yeah, that sounds like fun. I kind of miss having a new app. I've had a new product. So yeah, I guess you're also a bit freer, because you don't have to be so tied to an API in the same way that a Shopify app might be right?
Jack Kowalsky 2:10
For sure. Yeah, I do use some API's. But what's nice is like, I've had like a couple of reliability issues here and there. And like, it's actually really cool. I can just swap out an API for something
Bjorn Forsberg 2:20
else. You're not tied to or you're not married to something in the same way. Yeah.
Jack Kowalsky 2:24
So I've been working like we talked about adding machine translations to translate CI, and I've started working on that. And that's really cool. If there's like 10 Good API's out there that do this. So it's like really cool. I can kind of swap them support more languages by supporting different API's and things like that.
Bjorn Forsberg 2:40
Okay. And the API is compatible, or is it? Like if say they're going to use the Google Translation API? Are they just like an adapter in some cases for multiple other API's? Or is it a service on its own? Yeah,
Jack Kowalsky 2:52
it's a service on its own. But I actually a couple months ago, I found there's a guy named Steve King, who has been putting out just really great content around level API's and interacting with API's and that kind of stuff. So it actually helped me a ton when building translate so that I've got this sort of really nice Adapter pattern for the API's, I can swap them out pretty easily. And I'll just kind of works. Yeah.
Bjorn Forsberg 3:19
Yeah. All right. I'll check that out. Because that's always been something I've wanted to be better at is to make things more pluggable. Right, instead of sort of marrying yourself as like tightly to one particular implementation, right.
Jack Kowalsky 3:32
Yeah, that's how I've always done it before just completely coupled with whatever I'm using. And now it's not quite that way anymore, which is cool. Yeah.
Bjorn Forsberg 3:39
Nice. Yeah. So you create your own adapter, I guess. adapter layer. Yeah. Okay. Nice. And then the sponsorships is? How many new ones did you get out there?
Jack Kowalsky 3:48
There's three right now. So there's a blog newsletter and a podcast. And yeah, I'll go in pretty well, like we talked about before. Like, I can't really track the podcast, but I have so little traffic. I'm like, Cool. Anything not coming from the newsletter in the box? Probably the podcast.
Bjorn Forsberg 4:03
Yeah, right. I've never done sort of sponsorships. And maybe it's something I should look into more but what kind of price range without giving away the exact numbers that you pay? Is it like 1000s of dollars? Or is it hundreds of dollars? Or?
Jack Kowalsky 4:14
No? It's yeah, it's in the hundreds of dollars range. They're not gigantic. I'm not sponsoring, you know, the Tim Ferriss podcast or anything. But that's what's really cool is like, I can find these super niche publications or whatever. And they're pretty cheap, because they don't go to a ton of people but people they go to are like, super interested in what I'm doing.
Bjorn Forsberg 4:31
Yeah, I guess is like highly targeted. Advertising innocence. Right.
Jack Kowalsky 4:34
Yeah. So like the signup rate from is crazy high from visitors. Yeah, it's like around 12% At last luck, which is yeah, that's nuts.
Bjorn Forsberg 4:44
Yeah, if you could push that out, and you get 12% clicking through and installing, right?
Jack Kowalsky 4:48
Yeah. Unfortunately, not a ton of them are turning into customers just yet, but I'm working on that. But even just the signup is so cool.
Bjorn Forsberg 4:56
Like you're saying you're still working on some of the other features that people might be interested in. Right. So I think you keep at it, as long as you can see some growth in there.
Jack Kowalsky 5:05
Absolutely. And it's just like, whatever I start to be like, I'm not getting enough actual customers from this or whatever I realize like how much further I am in this than I was the same time, the Shopify app, like it's crazy. I feel like it's hitting traction much faster. So it's really cool.
Bjorn Forsberg 5:20
Okay, that's nice. Yeah, cuz I remember my first episode 10 years ago, I guess now, but it felt like it was gonna be a long slog, right? Yeah. And I think that's part of my reason that I did well, was just that I kept at it. And that's usually enough. People don't put enough time into new projects. They expect them to be overnight success. But I think it's more fun. Like you're saying, if you get more people to begin with, to keep the motivation up. But yeah,
Jack Kowalsky 5:48
that's a huge thing I guess part of is you see all these success stories you see all the time, like, I grew my app to a million Arr, and six months and stuff like that, and I'm sure that happens. But like, for normal mortals, like us, like it's gonna take a couple years to get somewhere and like, that's okay. And some of it really is just waiting to like, I don't think my marketing got significantly better, you know, in the first couple years of the Shopify app is just, you just kind of need to build up momentum. And that takes time, no matter what you do, I think unless you have a ton of money to throw at it, or something so amazing.
Bjorn Forsberg 6:20
Exactly. And I think that's maybe what we're seeing more of in the Shopify space, at least is people coming in with a bit of a war chest to start on advertising straightaway and things like that. But I think anyone else just sort of bootstrapping it needs to expect it to take a bit longer,
Jack Kowalsky 6:34
which I get. That's tough. It's funny, I need to take that advice myself, because I repeatedly don't start on SEO, because the advice seriously is it takes a year and like a year, like Yeah, I can't wait that long. But I don't know. But I really need to start today. That's actually one of my big goals for ACS, check
Bjorn Forsberg 6:49
out the show notes from last episode. I think I put the link in there, too. They called Contentful. Yeah, I mean, of course, it's probably best if you write it yourself. But if you want to get something up there, it makes sense to have somebody else write it for you, as you focus on features and stuff.
Jack Kowalsky 7:05
I kind of made like a 30 day marketing plan, because I have about 30 days I moved to England. So one of my big goals want to try to do is put out a short YouTube video every day. So I recorded like to put one out and then didn't do anything else with that for a couple weeks, because the New Years and holidays and all that, but I'm back on it one a day,
Bjorn Forsberg 7:24
a guy. I think that's a pretty ambitious target one a day. But I guess it could just be small stuff, right?
Jack Kowalsky 7:30
Yeah. Like I think the second video I did is like three minutes long or something like that. It's just sort of a quick bug fix ratio. Neat. Array thing and PHP. Yeah, I think I'll just kind of record my screen as I work and cut out interesting stuff. We'll see what happens.
Bjorn Forsberg 7:43
Yeah, definitely. I mean, send me the link, and I'll put it in the show notes. Perfect. But that's cool. Yeah. So you're moving in a month?
Jack Kowalsky 7:50
Yeah. Yeah. So that's exciting. There's a lot going on with that trying to wrangle everything. But we're getting there.
Bjorn Forsberg 7:57
There you go. I think it'd be great. It's always nice. Just with a change of scenery, sometimes.
Jack Kowalsky 8:01
I know. So excited of you moving in the crazy time of year though. It's funny. We moved to Las Vegas in August. So is 115 degrees when we got here. And I think we'll be getting to England in February when it's about zero degrees.
Bjorn Forsberg 8:13
Yeah, that's fine, too. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess you got to start somewhere. It can only get better from there. It's funny. We were looking to plan the marketing stuff as well. You sort of started on that maybe you want to fill in what your 30 day marketing plan is?
Jack Kowalsky 8:27
Yeah, sure. We've talked about like paid advertising. As far as like social media and Google and that kind of stuff. I kind of generally want to avoid that. But I do want to set up remarketing, because I remember from Shopify, that works, well seems like a quick thing I can do in less than a day and get that going and just kind of set it and forget it. The YouTube stuff. I'm gonna see how that goes. And I would like to at least learn more about SEO and get a plan together. So it's a big piece of it. And that like, I'm not totally sure, I'm going to look for more sponsorships, because those have been working really well. The very first one I did was Laravel news, which that was like amazing. It drove insane amount of signups. And the problem when I did it, though, was like, it was like such an MVP product. At that point. If that sponsorship launch, like the first week I went live, which was too soon. So it didn't do me as good as it could have. So I think I would like to try them again. Maybe in
Bjorn Forsberg 9:20
March. Yeah. Once you feel like you've polished the product a bit more.
Jack Kowalsky 9:24
Yeah. Because the traffic was great. The conversions were great. And then yeah, just the product wasn't quite there yet. Yeah, sure.
Bjorn Forsberg 9:31
I guess it could have been a better result. Yeah, I think that's a good starting plan, right? I mean, just get the basic setup and build it from there.
Jack Kowalsky 9:38
Yeah, I think it'll be good. How about you? What are you thinking about your marketing plans? Yeah, well, we
Bjorn Forsberg 9:42
were actually just my wife and I talked about this over lunch today. We've got our sort of yearly planning meeting next Friday to sort of set goals and you know, sort of plan out okay, what is it we want really get done this year? And then yeah, we sort of started a bit on finding more marketing activities that we could add to what we're already doing and then yeah, it was very similar to your list. But starting, we've got some remarketing going on Google Display ads, but we haven't done anything around Facebook and Instagram or anything there. So I definitely want to get Shopify allow you put the Facebook pixel into the App Store, the listing now will have for a long time, I think I just haven't used it. So I think that's one of the things we really want to get onto. We also want to do an explainer video, or start on the sort of script writing for explainer videos. Yeah, I think we've talked about this before, but I wasn't super happy with some of the ones I did earlier. And that was my fault for not putting more time into the script itself. But just doing them properly this time, and not going for the sort of classic explainer animated style. But using more, you know, real humans and actual video footage with sort of graphical overlays and elements and things
Jack Kowalsky 10:48
you have so much good, like social proof for your apps, like big, like household names and things like that, like I see going up in your Twitter and stuff sometimes, like, even if he could just get something like that into the video, I think it'd be awesome.
Bjorn Forsberg 11:00
Yeah, exactly. I think using social proof better than we are. And I think yeah, like you're saying the videos that I say that are a really good idea just for the hero static image that we have at the moment, and putting in like some as used by or something like that. Obviously, we have to reach out to people and see if we can. But yeah, I think that's going to be interesting to do then doing the explainer videos, then we'll also be talking about we talked about working more on our email flows, and just sort of implementing some of the tougher ones that require a bit more integration with the apps or like a discounting system or stuff like that. Yeah, so that's sort of our main ones. We've already got SEO, well, on the way working on a new website, which we've quite far on, actually. So it's really just finishing that up. Yeah, so I think it's gonna be good. And we've been focusing on the App Store listing quite a bit. I've got set up recurring to week to do where we sort of go over the changes we did last time. And then Okay, was it positive result? negative result? What should our next experiment be? And just did those this week as well?
Jack Kowalsky 11:57
With SEO? Are you trying to drive people to your app listing or to your Forsberg to homepage?
Bjorn Forsberg 12:05
Yeah, so we're driving them from the article to the App Store listing. And I think that's partly because our current website doesn't do a good enough job of presenting the apps themselves. So it's like a secondary thing. But the new website should have a lot more information and very similar to the Shopify app store listing in the content and things like that. So whereas the current ones are very text heavy, yeah. So we just tried to make it more a reflection of what you'd find in the app store. If you do find it on our website.
Jack Kowalsky 12:34
I think that makes sense. I always kind of struggled with that. Because you know, Shopify has some crazy domain authority, my website had a negative 15, or something like that, I could never beat anything, really. So I always drove people directly to my app listing. But that's probably not the smart long term play, I guess,
Bjorn Forsberg 12:54
I guess now with Shopify released a new design on the 15th. And I guess it happened, I think the 15th was when we recorded last. So we were sort of going over live for our first look. And I like the new layout, I think visually, it works really well, and the information presented and so forth. But the category design in the app store now is, that's a different topic, I guess. But I'm not a big fan. And I think it'll drive traffic to the top three to six apps in every category and never announce we'll see see troubles. But the thing that I really don't like is that now they've put this other apps you might like on our landing page. And they're not from the same subcategory even. So they are just sort of the top of one of your categories. So say you took marketing category, though, just put the top three or six apps from the marketing category there. Even though your app is generally under a sub category, right, it would make sense to show apps from the same subcategory that you came from, or, anyway, I don't like the idea of driving traffic, paid traffic, especially to other people's listings. So I think we'll be pushing more our own listing on our own website,
Jack Kowalsky 14:02
I saw a post from I think the Shopify product manager today he was in charge of the design is pretty interesting. And he sort of gave an explanation specifically why they put the competitive apps at the bottom of the page. So I get the thinking, basically, as reasoning was the notice through their analytics that people were sort of getting lost at the bottom of the page and have a place to go like when you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the listing. But I feel like they probably could have fixed that and made the developers happier by just putting an install link at the bottom. It's a call to action call to action. Yeah.
Bjorn Forsberg 14:38
Where did you see that post is on Slack? Or it was
Jack Kowalsky 14:40
on Twitter was a little video post? Okay.
Bjorn Forsberg 14:43
Ah off to try and track that down from the Shopify developer team, or Yeah. Okay. I'll find it and put it in the show notes.
Jack Kowalsky 14:51
Yeah, it's super interesting. It was just a quick like two three minute video where they kind of talk through the changes and what they were thinking and it's super interesting. I will say like I looked at the comments in the comments. Overall, we're positive.
Unknown Speaker 15:01
Okay?
Bjorn Forsberg 15:03
Yeah, we all sort of throw our arms up with change, right? Because it's like rocking the boat, and you'd like things to stay. How would you say predictable in a sense, and especially because it was launched at the time when seasonality sort of kicks in for the App Store, end of December and early January's always, like pretty flat in the app store, at least from my apps. And I think, because I have these one time fee apps, I have a pretty good gauge on the amount of traffic coming into the app store because they see a higher traffic than other apps, I think, because they're one time payments. Yeah. So they've always been like a good Canary for me as far as like, Okay, how much traffic are we seeing in the App Store at the moment? Yeah. And so the redesign changes sort of come out at the same time as we're seeing this, and installs kind of go flat during this time, and you don't know. And they're going, you know, they go slightly backwards, or whatever. So it's impossible to say whether it's positive or negative, or anything, right, today's like, at least for us, it's like the first week back after New Year's and everything. And I'm already starting to see some pickup in the installs, at least the graph is going up again, which is nice. So it'd be really interesting to sort of take or wait a month or two, and then take, say, February and hold it up against a different month. Similar timing. Yeah. So as much as I sound like a grumpy old man, sometimes, but I'm not super negative about these changes yet. Because I just want to see more data.
Jack Kowalsky 16:23
I think it's tough to because you kind of have misaligned incentives, like an indie developer just starting out versus Shopify, like Shopify wants to give their merchants the absolute best experience. And I know because I released one, I'm sure you have to like those new apps that you want exposure for can be buggy or not the best merchant experience. And it's like, how do you align that with what Shopify wants? I guess is the question. I'm not sure.
Bjorn Forsberg 16:48
Yeah. And I think that's what drives Shopify always right is what's best for the merchant, and not always what's best for the app developer. And I think that's fine. That's how it should be. But some of the design decisions that have been made, make it a lot harder for newer apps, or you know anything about the top six to sort of be surfaced at all, I think that'll be interesting to see over time how that affects, I've got one app that's in the top three, or two apps, but the other two are not. So it'd be quite interesting to see what the difference is in organic installs from the Shopify app store for them. All this being said, I'd say that, like people randomly finding you from a category is generally less than people searching and finding your product. And you know, the redesign hasn't been bad for search, I don't think they're removed the tagline, at least from my current app store listing. So if you do a search, you see the app name and their rating and what categories they're in. But you don't see the tagline. So the explanation of what the app does is no longer showing for me, but I'm not sure if that's an AP test or something else.
Jack Kowalsky 17:47
Yeah, I'm not sure. You know, I feel like I remember someone saying that. And I looked it up. And I saw the tagline. So I think it might be an AP test.
Bjorn Forsberg 17:54
Yeah. Okay, off to incognito, or something. Right? See if I can get the current version. So yeah, App Store redesign the focusing on that, and sort of, I was gung ho on changing keywords and things to try and rank better for specific keywords. And I was actually finding that that was less effective than I was hoping it was going to be. So I've changed some of our back to be more like less keyword II more like sales text or sales copy. And I think that's helped as well. So
Jack Kowalsky 18:21
one thing I noticed was, I could be wrong about this. But my theory at least was, what I noticed was when my top couple of reviews, like once I would appear on the first page included, keywords, which unfortunately can't control but like good keywords that would significantly improved my ranking while they were on the first page. And then when they dropped back, it would go back to wherever it
Bjorn Forsberg 18:41
was. Yeah, I think being on the first page is like key, right? You got to be there.
Jack Kowalsky 18:46
I think they're ranking reviews really high for search keywords.
Bjorn Forsberg 18:51
Yeah. And I think the categories may be slightly less so right, but definitely 100 reviews. And, you know, we're using sassy to sort of keep track of our category. And you can always see plus a certain amount for every review, you get you move up in the leaderboard sort of thing. I love that sexy thing. It's cool. Yeah, they're great. But I find it like it's excellent for your category listings. And then the actual analytics is great for your search listings, using the app listing. So there has been really, so yeah, so that's marketing for us, but obviously, we'll sort of hash it out more next week. We'll take off for the day and go out and have lunch and things and sort of toggle through Are you a goal setter?
Jack Kowalsky 19:26
Not really I've always tried and do that beginning of the year here's everything we do this year but what I found for me I don't know if it's the smart thing to do is like I just kind of show up and work on whatever seems to be the most important that day and I guess make that little bit of progress. Maybe I go faster if I had bigger plan but
Bjorn Forsberg 19:45
I think that's how I've done it for some times but I guess I've always had like an overarching goal, but it's never always been sort of measurable. Like am I on track to hit this or am I just making up a number because I'm no I'm gonna hit that. So, yeah, I'm looking at this smart sort of way. I have SMA RT, it's like an acronym for Yeah. So working out the goal setting that way. Yeah, cuz it has to be measurable and, and I want to make goals small enough that you can see progress. So it's not like in the vehicle. If I have
Jack Kowalsky 20:12
any goals, it's kind of the first quarter goal is to get the 100 installs I need on GitHub to get into their app store. That would be my absolute biggest goal. Yeah.
Bjorn Forsberg 20:24
Yeah. Yeah. And then I guess you need to break that down. So how am I going to do that? Right. That's the fun part, though, right? Because you can start checking them off as you keep moving.
Jack Kowalsky 20:34
Yeah. So we'll get there. And that's actually that's kind of, you know, even it's not the greatest thing in the world. But you know, the signups I get most people still do connect, like a Git repo or whatever, and kind of take a look around. So like, that's kind of nice, because even if they don't become customers, they still contribute to that install counts that I okay. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah.
Bjorn Forsberg 20:52
Yeah. I guess make that process as pain free as possible. Right.
Jack Kowalsky 20:57
Yeah. You know, what surprised me is because I didn't know people use this. I never have. But it's funny. I launched without Bitbucket support. So I'm like no one. I don't think anyone actually uses it. Everyone uses Bitbucket, it turns out. Oh, wow. Like by far the most popular git repository for my customers.
Bjorn Forsberg 21:14
Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you just need to add any integration for that, or is that? Yeah. Oh,
Jack Kowalsky 21:19
I already did. You already did? Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I had to do that, like week one, because I was getting so many like, Oh, you don't do BitBucket? Guess we're not gonna
Bjorn Forsberg 21:26
pay you. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I guess. What's the other one git lab or something? Right?
Jack Kowalsky 21:30
Yeah, I actually use Git lab. I like Git lab. Okay. I haven't used that. So I'm the only person that I think uses it. At least that's signed up for translate CI, which is kind of funny. Oh, okay. But for me, that was like our number one integration git lab. Yeah,
Bjorn Forsberg 21:44
I want this myself. I guess. I've always just sort of, you know, GitHub has always been on my radar, maybe that's because they're the loudest, but they're also like a Ruby shop so that I've always sort of followed along with them.
Jack Kowalsky 21:55
That's cool. Yeah, it's actually been really cool. I don't know why it took me so long to do. But now that translate CI is hooked up to translate CI, I get to kind of use it several times a week, just pushing new code and getting those translations done and stuff like that. And that's definitely helped me find like some friction points and bugs or whatever. That's been really good.
Bjorn Forsberg 22:14
Oh, nice. Yeah. And I guess to find the UI flow that works for you, right, like, what parts do I find, hey, they should just happen when I do this. So
Jack Kowalsky 22:21
yeah, I have such a high pain tolerance. I've learned like, it's ridiculous. I know. They always say developer should have like a really small pain tolerance. But I'm like, I don't know if some reason I'll spend 10 minutes clicking stuff and do that three times a day and not even realize, like for weeks, like, Oh, this is horrible.
Bjorn Forsberg 22:41
We're very different. In that regard. I think I have generally a pretty low pain tolerance.
Jack Kowalsky 22:45
That's good. I think that's what you're supposed to have.
Bjorn Forsberg 22:49
Yeah, but I think it causes more frustration in your everyday life, if you have a lower pain tolerance, right? Especially if you need to go into like, you know, especially with COVID, and everything else, all these government websites, at least in Denmark to book tests, type stuff.
Jack Kowalsky 23:02
Oh, my God, you should have seen the immigration stuff I had to do. Like, it was just constant paperwork and government websites and like, timeframes that didn't line up like you have to do this before you do this. But you can't do this before. The other thing is, I mean, it was a year of that. I'm so glad to be done.
Bjorn Forsberg 23:18
That's amazing. I guess that may be part of their selection processes. Hey, he made it this far. I want to come. Yeah, it's funny,
Jack Kowalsky 23:27
too, because it was like, it's a bunch of different agencies, like, in different countries to like USA and England. So it's like, you're just on all these different government websites that don't really communicate with each other, even though they're supposed to. And that's wild.
Bjorn Forsberg 23:40
And they're running COBOL design in the back? Yeah,
Jack Kowalsky 23:43
I will say England was pretty advanced is funny, seeing like, SAS products I know, used in their application process. I was like, that's kind of cool. Yeah.
Bjorn Forsberg 23:53
It's funny, because I actually found.gov.uk they have a view component library using the rails view components. Nice. Yeah. So I guess somebody I'm not sure if they use it. I'm sure they don't use it all over the place. But at least somebody decided to build a design system for the.gov.uk code at UK, I guess it's called,
Jack Kowalsky 24:14
they do a lot to like, attract tech people. So I guess maybe they've invested in that pretty heavily. It's kind of cool.
Bjorn Forsberg 24:20
Yeah. That's nice. It's cool. Yeah. So goal setting is our next task. And then other than that, I think just getting back into the flow of things. It always takes me a little while often you used to sort of go okay, yeah, let's get winding up for the year.
Jack Kowalsky 24:36
Well, so I wanted to ask you advocate is, you know, kind of pretty far along, right. Do you think you're gonna start using it for new apps or anything like that this year? We're just trying to integrate into the existing ones. Yeah, I
Bjorn Forsberg 24:48
think that's we started out building a new app while we were building an app kit, and I think that was a good way to sort of get it up and running and everything. But now I can also feel that hey, I'd like to have my existing same products using apt get as well, just to sort of give them a fresh nap, I guess. But also to bring down my technical debt. I've been doing this for 10 years, it's time to sort of pay off some of that, but at the same time, and a big part of that reason is, they already have like, a few pieces that are not yet inaccurate. So, like I have a referral program. So I'd like to build that in app kit as well. And by moving my existing products over, it sort of forces me to build all the remaining parts of app kit, where we already have like a good example of how the other side of the API works, or, you know, this is how we do it right. Now, let's put it into App kit. So then once I build a new app, then it's already got all this stuff. And you know, app kits kind of ready to build an app, it's at least very, very close now. But it's missing all the past to make it a Forsberg plus two app kit, I guess you could say,
Jack Kowalsky 25:50
just like the branding, that kind of stuff,
Bjorn Forsberg 25:53
no more like all the other parts, like I have a service for our support people so that they can look up a user across all the apps. So they log into like one tool where they can punch in a my shopify.com URL. And then they can see, okay, yeah, this person is using these three apps. And then they can go in and manage certain things for that particular user in the app. It just calls an API in each of the apps to say, right, hey, do you have this particular shop? And then, you know, so makes phone calls and get information back? And then sort of correlates that up? And says, yep, they using these three? So yeah, so I need to add that to app kit. And then there's the referral program that needs to be added tap kit, which is something we've built ourselves as I've built as well, the other small part anyway, which is like bringing them into my suite of products that we run and use to run our app.
Jack Kowalsky 26:42
Makes sense? Have you considered i Sorry, not a week goes by where I don't see a big thing about app developers wanting like a plug and play referral program. Have you ever considered
Unknown Speaker 26:54
releasing something like that? Yeah, I have.
Bjorn Forsberg 26:58
But part of the reason I haven't done it is because it's like a competitive advantage. And no one else has them. Like very few do. So I don't want to make that too easy for other people. And the other one is that I've just sort of built it. So I don't want to have like Stripe, have income coming from there as well as my Shopify side. It just sort of complicates everything a bit more. If I was using Stripe for all my building, it would make it easier, but it'd have to have a pretty high price point for me to want to do it.
Jack Kowalsky 27:24
I kind of considered at one point did a little research for a day or two and popped it against it. But I think that it's something that could make a good SAS business for someone's interested in dealing with sort of the intricacies of it.
Bjorn Forsberg 27:39
Yeah, definitely. And I think, as wrong as it sounds, it's like, I don't think it could become big enough for it to be worth the time investment that I have to put into it.
Jack Kowalsky 27:47
That makes sense. Because there's what like 5000 Shopify developers or something like that. Yeah. And you get a couple 100% of that. Yeah, exactly. Right.
Bjorn Forsberg 27:54
So even if you charge them 100 bucks a month for it, that's an okay business. But compared to if I put in time into my existing apps, or to improve those, that's a totally different business, for me at least. So I think it's a great opportunity for somebody out there. I don't want to do it. But I'm actually pretty proud of how that turned out. And the way that it generates a file that you just load into the PayPal mass payments. Yeah, so it sort of correlates up everything for the last month and then gives you a CSV, you just pull it over. And it's got all the email addresses and the amounts and everything. You confirm the amount, and then bam, it's done.
Jack Kowalsky 28:29
A very basic referral system I built and it was kind of partially automated and partially manual, but I got it down. And it took me about 20 minutes a month to deal with and it wasn't too bad. But if you're willing to like sit there and deal with some spreadsheets, it's not too difficult to rig something up. That'll work. Yeah, exactly. I
Bjorn Forsberg 28:47
think also, the amount of app developers that it would generate enough for them to make it worth like paying $100 a month for that has to become quite a sizable thing. So it's generally the large app developers that would get a good benefit from it, they probably have a capacity to build something for their products as well. The one thing that it does really well is that it handles multiple apps. And that's what I found really difficult when looking at existing referral solutions is that they hook up a single domain. So it's like one product or whatever, or at least one site, and I've got different domains for each of my products. So just cooking them and all that type of stuff. I couldn't find anything that would do it out of the box.
Jack Kowalsky 29:27
Oh, interesting. Yeah. And follow that. So if refer sends someone to one apps website, but they sign up for a different app, you give them credit for the second app?
Bjorn Forsberg 29:37
No, but it was more like if I want the cookie to happen on this domain, right. So you say right, it's four oddly print.com If they visit they're using this link will cookie them and then when they install will attribute it to them. But if I also want to set up another one that ran on order printer templates.com then most of the referral programs will be like no but you only have one domain, right? That you should be sending people to Oh, I see you're saying Okay, next. Yes. So that widget was designed around a single domain. Anyway, that was at that time, and the whole power part and everything else. But yeah, that'd be we're paying up 1000s of dollars now every month, so it's quite good.
Unknown Speaker 30:13
That's awesome. Yeah, it's grown. It's
Bjorn Forsberg 30:15
grown slowly.
Jack Kowalsky 30:16
Yeah, the agencies are. I mean, I think they're a great marketing tool for apps. And I don't know, if I don't know, maybe they get bombarded constantly. But like, I just kind of like pretty early on for me, I just went through the list and like, cold emailed a lot of them and said, Hey, do you want to check this out? And got enough that it made it worth it? Yeah, right.
Bjorn Forsberg 30:35
I think that's a good tactic, especially if you're doing it like on a personal level, where you're writing it to them and saying, hey, you know, this will be interesting for you guys. And, and not just spamming something out. Right, right,
Jack Kowalsky 30:44
right. So even just salt today, like every once in a while, I think about cold email, and very rarely decide it's a good idea. But like, I just saw this thing today. It's like, if you're not following up seven times, you're leaving money on the table like, oh, never do that one email. I'm done.
Bjorn Forsberg 30:59
Yeah. Yeah, that's it very rarely does a cold email ever work on me. As soon as I start reading it, it's like delete, I'm hovering over the delete button before I even start on the email. So
Jack Kowalsky 31:09
same, and that's why I end up popping out of sending. Cuz I think like Shopify app developers are like a really good audience for translate CI, and it's like, well, I could just email them. But then I'm like, Ah, I got like, probably 10 cold emails a day like that. And they were two sentences long. And I didn't read past the first three words most of the time and had a negative. Like, if I came across that product later, I probably would have us CERCLA sent me the email.
Bjorn Forsberg 31:30
Yeah, exactly. That's how I look at it as well. Hey, yo, this Bama. But I guess somebody is listening to this podcast saying you guys are idiots. Maybe? Yeah, it works really well. And you should do it each to their own. It's just not the way I want to do it.
Jack Kowalsky 31:45
Yeah, I mean, I would love to, it'd be great to, like, reach out to every sharp developer manually and say, Hey, check this out. I think it could be good for you. But like, I can't figure out a way to do that. That makes sense and doesn't come off.
Bjorn Forsberg 31:58
But maybe just needs to be the right copy. I'm sure in six months, we'll be sitting here talking about how you're ready to go. And we'll see. Yeah, interesting. But it's nice. Yeah. Anything else you feel like sharing?
Jack Kowalsky 32:13
For me, I'm all about packing for the next month. So that's all I got going on? That the YouTube videos gonna do it? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Bjorn Forsberg 32:21
Make sure to send me the link and I'll pop it in and everyone should go listen. Oh, go. Wow. Awesome.
Jack Kowalsky 32:26
Cool, man. All right. I'll talk to you soon. All right. See you later.