Why we built AppThrive

Eight years. That’s how long EFOLI has been building Shopify apps.

We have five apps in market. MultiVariants. DiscountRay. PushBundle. KivoSupport. EmbedUp. Combined, they serve thousands of merchants across every continent except Antarctica. The business is healthy. The team is small. The work is interesting.

But for eight years, every Monday morning, I’ve had the same problem.

I open the Shopify Partner Dashboard. I see installs went up. I see uninstalls went up. I see MRR moved by some amount. What I don’t see — what I’ve never seen — is which specific merchants need help right now. Which trials are about to convert if I just nudge them. Which paid merchants stopped using the app last week. Which Shopify Plus stores are about to churn because their billing failed twice and nobody noticed.

I’ve tried everything. Spreadsheets. HubSpot. Customer.io. Custom dashboards I built and abandoned six times. They all have the same problem: they’re built for “customers,” and our customer is a merchant. They’re built for “contacts,” and we have thousands of free installs we’d love to nurture but can’t afford to pay $0.30/contact for. They’re built for SaaS lifecycles where churn is “subscription cancelled,” and our churn is “uninstalled” — a totally different signal that arrives via webhook and disappears unless you’re watching.

Last year I started taking notes. What would the right tool actually do?

It would know what a Shopify merchant is. It would understand installs, plans, trials, the whole Shopify lifecycle vocabulary. It would score every merchant — health, churn risk, activation, expansion — using signals from the Partner API and from my apps’ own usage data. It would tell me, every morning, exactly who needs attention today. It would let me send them a personal email through my own Resend account, without me touching SMTP. It would automate the boring stuff (welcome flows, trial endings, dunning) without giving up the personal stuff (the hand-written check-in to a struggling merchant).

And — this is the part I cared about most — it would help me prove value to my merchants every single week. Most apps are invisible. The merchant installed you, you do your job, but they forget you’re there. Then their card declines and they’re gone. What if every Monday morning your merchants got a beautiful email from you, showing exactly how much revenue your app generated for them last week, what features they tried, what features they haven’t tried that might help? That email is the difference between an app that gets uninstalled in a tough month and an app that gets renewed.

So that’s what we built.

AppThrive is the tool I wish had existed two years ago. EFOLI is using it now — every Monday I clear my Action Queue in 20 minutes, and our merchants get weekly reports that get opened 45% of the time. We’re growing again, and the growth feels intentional instead of accidental.

We’re opening it to other Shopify Partners in invite-only beta because we think other developers feel exactly what I felt. If you build Shopify apps and you’ve been Mondaying through the Partner Dashboard wondering what’s actually going on with your merchants, this is for you.

Get an invite from someone who has one. Or join the waitlist and we’ll get you in within a few weeks.

Welcome to AppThrive. Let’s help every Shopify app thrive — yours included.

— Jahangir
Founder & CEO, EFOLI · Dhaka, Bangladesh