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independence5 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
applies to

b2b, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

10 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2014-11-01 → 2023-12-06

5 builders who never spoke to each other

Get into the app directory of the platform you plug into

Where your buyers already run a platform, its own store does the acquisition: build the integration that qualifies you for the listing, then work the ranking daily with fast support replies and solicited reviews. Being absent from a store caps adoption no matter what else you do, and a front page placement delivers users you never had to find.

The method

  1. 01

    Get listed in the plugin marketplace of every platform your buyers already use, because being absent from those stores caps adoption no matter how much you raise.

  2. 02

    Build on a marketplace whose own app directory does the customer acquisition for you, and treat your own website as secondary.

  3. 03

    Build the integration that gets you into a host platform's app directory, so their listing does distribution for you.

  4. 04

    Build on a platform whose app directory can feature you. A front page placement in someone else's marketplace delivers users you did not have to find.

  5. 05

    On a marketplace, work the ranking deliberately: answer support mail promptly and actively solicit reviews, since ranking is what feeds you new users daily.

What it returned

  • 459

    459 live installations against 568 thousand for the platform-native rival, with no listing in one major store where a direct competitor had roughly three times the live sites.

  • $27,000

    Bjorn Forsberg's four Shopify apps get their customers mainly through the Shopify App Store rather than forsbergplustwo.com; the business reached $27,000 a month in revenue and $275,000 a year in profit at 85% margins after Shopify's 20% partner cut.

  • 2017

    In March 2017 Slack put Standuply on the front page of its app directory. That took 750 new signups in two weeks, passed 1,000 teams, and kept receiving a steady flow of users from Slack after the feature ended.

  • Storemapper's second first-year growth experiment was building a Shopify integration in order to appear in that platform's app directory

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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