Welcome to the first Brainstorms Deep Dive Monday!

I mentioned this idea in a Thursday issue a few weeks ago and got a lot of great feedback.

Today, we’re going a little deeper into the “why” behind this idea, crunching some numbers, and outlining an easy way to find your first customers.

Let’s dive in..

🧠 An Email Collecting Shopify App

Emails are worth their weight in gold. As someone with a newsletter, I know this better than most.

Emails carve an express lane straight into your customers’ inbox. There’s no risk of Facebook banning your account, TikTok throttling your reach, or Twitter (still have a hard time calling it X) suspending your account indefinitely.

In the marketing world, emails rule supreme. That’s why brands pay a premium to collect them.

Don’t believe me? Take those cheeky discount-spinner wheels, for example.

Spin the wheel, win a prize, and poof! Your email magically belongs to them.

One of these apps, Wheelify, is making an estimated $20,000/month in revenue. That’s a quarter million dollars a year, folks. 

Today, I’ve got an idea that’ll make this spinner look like a thing of the past.

This week, we’re exploring a Shopify App that allows brands to unlock customers' emails in a whole new way.

So what’s the big idea?

Here’s the pitch - for every $1 spent on building an email list, a brand will get ~$36 back on avg. (source) That means:

1. Dumb brands aren’t collecting customer emails at all

2. Average brands have a sign up form someone on their site, but don’t push it

3. Smart brands are using tools like Wheelify to collect emails

4. Genius brands are building custom tools to get more emails

I stumbled on a genius brand doing just that. A little company you may have heard of: Nike. Take a look.

They’ve started gating content that only members/subscribers can see, but they aren’t the only ones doing this. Here’s a screenshot from the Fabletics website.

One thing I know is that if the big brands are doing this now, everyone will be doing it very soon. 

The problem? I couldn’t find any Shopify apps that make it easy for stores to do this.

Shopify Apps by the Numbers:

On the surface, this might seem so niche that it’s not worth your time. But let’s see what it would take to get to $10K/month in revenue.

Pricing: I’d keep the pricing simple:

• Lite Verison: $10 for 1,000 emails collected

• Plus Verison: $15 for 5,000 emails Collected

• Premium Verison: $50 for 50,000 emails collected

Costs: Like most SaaS, Shopify Apps have little costs:

• App Build Costs: I’m not a developer, but I’d be shocked if it cost more than $5-10K to build this. (or free, if you’re a developer yourself). There are plenty of places to find good Shopify app developers.

• Shopify App Store: Shopify takes a 20% cut of all revenue on their platform

  • Dev program discounts allow you to make your first $1M without the Shopify Tax.

• Marketing: This is a big one, and we’ll explore it further below

You know me, I like simple math. At $10/month, we’d need 1,000 signed up. That’s just for our Lite Plan.

There are over 4M active Shopify stores - so your odds aren’t looking too shabby.

How to Execute

I’ll be the first to admit that creating a successful Shopify app isn’t easy. The app store is VERY crowded, so we’ll need to stand out to make this work.

Get your first 10 customers

Here’s the strategy: We’re going to find 10 perfect customers for our product and give it to them for free. In exchange, they’ll allow us to write case studies on them and shout us out on their socials.

Let’s find our customers:

1. Find Early Adopters: We’re going to use BuildWith to find 100-500 Shopify stores that already using email capture tools.

   • I searched for Wheelio and got 4,000 sites that are using that tool.

2. Stats to look for: We’re looking for customers who:

   • Have $500,000+ in rev.

   • Have medium-high traffic

   • Spend more than $5,000 on tech 

Next, we’ll send them an email, LinkedIn message, and Twitter message like this
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Subject: Feedback on how {their store name} collects email

Hey {first name},

I saw you’re building {site name}, I love {something personal about the site}.

I don’t know if you saw this, but there’s a new trend in Ecom around collecting customer emails—Nike and Fabeltics are popularizing it. They gate content unless a customer gives their email (see images attached). 

I’ve built a new tool that allows you to collect emails just like them! 

I’ll give it to you for free - all I ask is that you allow me to do a case study on you if it works. Just say yes, and I’ll send over more details.

Best,

PS Ecom owners see a 3,600% ROI on email marketing.

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You can run this email campaign to attract your first 10-15 customers, obtain case studies, and build momentum.

Then tweak the ending (stop offering it for free), and continue the email campaign to scale to your first 100-1,000 customers!

In summary, here’s why you should pursue this: 

1. Emails = $$$: Email marketing continues to be one of the most profitable channels. This is especially critical as brands become more data-conscious and seek to own their customer relationships more directly.

2. Low startup costs: Given the low estimated development cost ($5,000) and simple pricing model, the app can quickly become profitable and sustainably scale.

3. Huge Market: With over 4 million active Shopify stores, there’s no shortage of potential customers.

That’s it for the first deep dive. Let me know what you think!

And if you want to build this business, reply to this email. I’d love to brainstorm some product ideas and growth hacks with you.

— Andrew ✌️