Built by a Shopify app developer who got tired of flying blind.

Eight years of Shopify

I’m Jahangir. I started EFOLI in 2018 with a single idea: build Shopify apps from Bangladesh that could compete with anything coming out of San Francisco or London. Eight years later, we have five live apps in the Shopify App Store — MultiVariants, DiscountRay, PushBundle, KivoSupport, and EmbedUp — serving thousands of merchants on every continent except Antarctica.

I won’t pretend it’s been easy. Building a global SaaS business from Dhaka means working across timezones that don’t favor you, navigating payment infrastructure that wasn’t designed for South Asian founders, and learning to ship products that would be judged purely on their merit because nobody could place us geographically by accent or hometown. Every milestone we’ve hit at EFOLI has been earned the slow way.

But the work itself — the building, the shipping, the supporting merchants — that part I’ve genuinely loved. Eight years in, I still open Shopify Partner Dashboard most mornings with the same curiosity I had in year one.

What I haven’t loved is what happens after I open it.

The problem nobody was solving

Here’s the thing about running multiple Shopify apps: the data you actually need to make decisions doesn’t live in one place. Some of it is in the Partner Dashboard (installs, revenue, plan changes). Some is in your own app’s database (usage events, feature adoption). Some is in your support tickets (frustrations, feature requests). Some is in your accountant’s spreadsheet (which merchants paid this month). Some is nowhere — it’s in your head, where it slowly fades.

For the first four years of EFOLI, I tried to manage all this in spreadsheets. By year three I was maintaining a “merchant tracker” with 47 columns. It was always a week stale. Every Monday morning, I’d export fresh installs from Partner Dashboard, paste them in, sort by something useful, realize the sort had broken because someone added a column with mixed data types, fix it, lose another twenty minutes, and finally start looking at actual merchants.

It was demoralizing. Not because the work was hard, but because so much of it was ceremony. The signal — which merchants need help right now? — was always buried under the noise.

So I tried tools.

HubSpot was the first stop. Beautiful product, genuinely impressive engineering, completely wrong for our use case. Their pricing model assumes you’re a B2B sales team with a lead funnel. We had thousands of free Shopify installs that we’d love to nurture into paid subscriptions. HubSpot wanted us to pay per contact whether they were active or not. Quick math: 4,000 contacts × Marketing Hub Professional pricing = over $1,000/month before we’d sent a single email. We tried it for six weeks. It hurt to cancel because HubSpot is genuinely well-built — but it just wasn’t built for us.

Customer.io was next. Better data model, more flexible pricing, lovely email composer. But it didn’t understand Shopify’s lifecycle vocabulary. “Install” and “uninstall” weren’t first-class events; they had to be hacked in via custom JSON properties. “Subscription plan” wasn’t a Shopify-aware concept; it was just another field. Every workflow we built had to translate between Shopify’s reality and Customer.io’s data model. It worked, technically. It also broke every time Shopify changed something on the Partner side.

We tried Intercom. Same problem from a different angle. We tried building our own dashboard. We did, three times. Each time it started clean and slowly accreted technical debt until we abandoned it for the next attempt. By 2024, EFOLI had three half-finished internal tools collecting dust in our private GitHub.

Meanwhile, the cost of not having a real merchant CRM kept showing up in tangible ways. A Plus merchant churned and we found out two weeks later. A trial converted at the last minute and we’d never reached out — they probably would have stayed if we had. We’d ship a feature and have no clean way to tell which merchants might benefit. Our weekly digest emails were beautifully designed but rarely opened — because they were generic when they could have been personalized.

It bothered me. It bothered me that this was 2024, the LLM revolution was happening around us, and the most important relationships in our business were being managed in a Google Sheet I was ashamed to show anyone.

The week I gave up

Late 2024. I was preparing the year-end review for EFOLI. I sat down to figure out: of our 8,000 active installs, which ones had churned in the last twelve months and why?

Six hours in, I gave up. The data was scattered across Partner Dashboard exports, our app database, our Stripe records (for legacy non-Shopify-billed accounts), and notes I’d written in various places. There was no clean way to ask the question “which Plus merchants did we lose, and what was their last interaction?” without manually stitching three CSVs together. I closed my laptop and went to bed angry.

The next morning I started writing what eventually became the AppThrive PRD. Not as a product. As a personal manifesto for what the right tool should do. I wrote about merchant scoring. I wrote about action queues. I wrote about weekly intelligence reports. I wrote about BYO sender, because every time I’d evaluated a tool, the part where they took control of email made me nervous — Resend and SendGrid were already doing this brilliantly, and I didn’t want any product trying to compete with them on infrastructure I’d already built trust into.

I wrote for about three weeks, on and off. By the time I was done, I had a 30-page document that read more like a love letter to a non-existent product than a feature spec.

So I started building it.

Building AppThrive

The first version of AppThrive was ugly. It was a single Next.js app with one job: pull data from EFOLI’s five apps via the Partner API and put it on one page. That’s it. No scoring. No automation. No email. Just here are all your merchants, in one place, sortable and filterable.

That alone changed how I worked. Within two weeks of using even that bare-bones version, I was making different decisions. I was emailing specific Plus merchants who had usage drops, and they were responding gratefully. I was extending trials for indie merchants who clearly needed an extra week. I was catching billing failures within hours instead of days.

So I added scoring. Then I added the daily Action Queue. Then I added BYO email sender (the first integration was Resend, which felt like the right starting point — we already used it for transactional emails at EFOLI). Then I added weekly intelligence reports, which turned out to be the single feature that changed our merchant retention numbers more than anything else.

By early 2026, AppThrive was running EFOLI’s entire merchant operation. Every Monday I cleared my action queue in 20 minutes. Our merchants were getting personalized weekly emails with around 45% open rates. Our trial conversion rate had improved meaningfully. Our churn rate had dropped.

Around then, two things happened that pushed me to make AppThrive public.

First, I had coffee with a fellow Shopify Partner who runs a similar-sized portfolio of apps. He asked what I’d been working on, and I described AppThrive. He went quiet for a long time, then said, “You should sell that. To people like me.”

Second, I started noticing the same complaints in the Shopify Partners Slack and on Indie Hackers. Other developers were stuck in the same place I’d been — running their merchant operations from spreadsheets, paying too much for HubSpot, or building half-finished internal tools they’d eventually abandon.

The decision wasn’t dramatic. It was just honest: if this is useful for me, it’s probably useful for other Shopify app developers. And the only way to find out is to ship it.

Why this name, why this brand

A small detour on the name.

I went through hundreds of candidates. MerchantLoop, MerchantOrbit, MerchantPilot — I came close to picking each of those. They were good names. They captured the feedback-loop architecture of the product, or the ongoing-relationship metaphor, or the “navigate the merchant journey” framing.

But none of them quite said what mattered most.

What I wanted to express is that this is a tool for helping things grow. For helping Shopify apps thrive — meaning: not just survive, not just monetize, but actually flourish. And by extension, helping the merchants who use those apps thrive too. The two are linked. An app thrives when its merchants thrive. That’s the entire thesis.

So: AppThrive.

The name does what the product does. It says the goal directly. There’s no metaphor to decode, no clever wordplay to explain. It’s the most plain-spoken option available, and after eight years of marketing-speak from competitors, plainness felt like the right answer.

The brand follows from that. Warm green for growth. Coral accents for energy. No corporate stock photos, no buzzwords, no enterprise hedging. AppThrive is built by a developer for developers. It should look and sound like that.

EFOLI is the foundation

I want to be clear about how AppThrive relates to EFOLI’s existing apps.

EFOLI isn’t pivoting. We’re not abandoning MultiVariants or DiscountRay or PushBundle to chase AppThrive. The five apps that brought us to this point are the foundation that lets us take this swing. They have committed merchants, ongoing roadmaps, dedicated team capacity, and they’re growing.

AppThrive is what EFOLI builds next — in addition to, not instead of. It’s a different product line for a different audience (developers, not merchants), with a different revenue model (SaaS subscriptions through us, not Shopify Billing) and a different growth profile (slower to start, compounds harder).

If anything, AppThrive makes EFOLI’s apps better. We’re using it ourselves daily. Every improvement to AppThrive’s intelligence layer flows directly into how we run our existing apps. Our merchants benefit from us being a better operator.

So: existing EFOLI customers, nothing changes for you. If you use one of our apps and are reading this, the team that built and supports your app is the same team that wakes up every day thinking about your store. AppThrive is parallel work, not a replacement.

What AppThrive is, in one paragraph

AppThrive is a merchant success platform built specifically for Shopify app developers. It connects to your Shopify Partner API and your apps’ own usage data, scores every merchant on five dimensions (health, churn risk, activation, expansion, deliverability), surfaces a daily action queue of who needs your attention today, and orchestrates lifecycle communications through your existing email provider — Resend, SendGrid, Postmark, SES, or Mailgun. We don’t send your email. Your provider does. We just make sure the right message goes to the right merchant at the right moment.

The most distinctive thing AppThrive does is the weekly intelligence report. Every Monday at 9am in each merchant’s local timezone, your merchants get a personalized email from you showing the value your app delivered the previous week — revenue attributed, features used, what to try next. At EFOLI, this drives 45% open rates and meaningful improvements in retention. It’s the feature that changed our business more than any other.

That’s it. No black-box AI promising to “transform” anything. No marketing speak. Just a tool that helps Shopify app developers do the job they’re already doing — better, faster, with less effort.

What we believe

A few things AppThrive operates on that you should know about:

Founder-first. AppThrive is built for solo developers and small teams first. Enterprise features come later, and only if they don’t compromise the indie experience. If you can’t get value as a one-person shop, we’ve failed.

Honest about tradeoffs. When something doesn’t work yet, we’ll tell you. When a competitor does something better, we’ll point you to them. When we make a deliberate design choice, we’ll explain the reasoning. We don’t oversell.

Bring your own everything. Your email provider. Your AI provider. Your analytics tool. AppThrive orchestrates; you keep ownership. Lock-in is a tax on your trust, and we’d rather earn it than enforce it.

Compliance by default. Every email respects suppression lists, frequency caps, quiet hours, and DNC flags automatically. Making bad sending hard and good sending easy is core to the design, not an enterprise add-on.

Made in Dhaka, for everywhere. We believe great software comes from anywhere on Earth. AppThrive is built by a small team in Bangladesh and serves Shopify developers globally. That geographic angle isn’t an accident — it’s a statement.

Where we’re going

AppThrive is in invite-only beta as of April 2026. Our goals for the next twelve months:

• First 100 beta users — Shopify app developers using AppThrive daily, giving honest feedback that shapes the roadmap. (We’re at this stage now.)
• Public launch — by Q3 2026, AppThrive opens to anyone with a Shopify Partner account
• AI-native by default — every action exposed via MCP for Claude/ChatGPT control, so you can run AppThrive from your existing AI workflows
• Beyond email — WhatsApp, SMS, in-app messaging — but always BYO-sender, always orchestrating not transmitting
• The first hire — when AppThrive grows enough to need its own team, we’ll start with a founding engineer

What we’re not doing:

• Raising venture capital
• Building an enterprise sales motion
• Adding features that compromise the indie experience
• Competing with Shopify on anything

Thanks for reading

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re either deeply considering whether to use AppThrive — or you’re researching us before a podcast interview. Either way, thanks.

If you build Shopify apps and you’ve felt any of what I described above, I’d love to talk. The fastest way to reach me is to reply to any AppThrive email — they all reach my inbox. The second-fastest is jahangir@appthrive.io. You can also find me on Twitter/X (@jahangir_efoli) or LinkedIn.

If you don’t build Shopify apps but you know someone who does, a forward would mean a lot. AppThrive grows by word of mouth from people who’ve felt the problem firsthand.

Welcome to AppThrive.

— Jahangir Alam
Dhaka, Bangladesh · April 2026