Andrew Le and Tu Pham acquired Edit Order, a distressed Shopify app with a terrible reputation, for just 2x revenue in 2015. Ten years later, they've transformed it into Cleverific, a multi-million dollar order editing powerhouse.
Also available on YouTube: youtu.be/gGdS45JY2Yo
Andrew Le and Tu Pham acquired Edit Order, a distressed Shopify app with a terrible reputation, for just 2x revenue in 2015. Ten years later, they've transformed it into Cleverific—a multi-million dollar order editing powerhouse.
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Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you instead of your competitors. And 45,000 stores already use it, and it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to get swim. com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com This is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster, and today, my friends, we are going to talk uh about the a real life story of acquiring and turning a Shopify app around. Because certainly within the Shopify ecosystem of partners and merchants, I think there's a lot of the grass is always greener, right? I had a Shopify agency. My first thought, I should build an app. And certainly we see merchants who start agencies and agencies who start stores and you know merchants and agencies who start apps, right? We're all really we all want to play in everyone else's sandbox. And so uh I have been lucky to get to know the current owners of Cleverific the Order Editing app. I'm sure you have heard the ads for Cleverific. You know, I I take great pride in my ad reads, um, as they have been gracious enough to sponsor the show this year. And, you know, I I want to hear the story. I want to know, you know, as someone who develops apps, you know, what I can learn and take away from it. And then just, you know, that that general experience and of course you know what has made this app successful. So let's start with uh introductions. I've got Andrew Lee and Tufam. Uh who are you guys? Introduce yourselves.
Andrew Le
I'm Andrew, co-founder and I'm the lead developer and technical guy at Cleforific. So two and I started uh together uh I think in 2009. Uh we started on a nonprofit project together. Um, and then very quickly found out that we worked really well together. Um and over the next couple of years, we worked on freelance projects together, two has a deep background in the fashion industry. Um, and so we ended up working on e-commerce sites. um and also kind of medical e-commerce sites for um some pretty big companies. Um and after a while we said you know what like maybe we should just start a company together. Right. And that's when Clever Efic was first incorporated. We incorporated around like 2012, but we didn't come on to edit order and having an app in the Shopify ecosystem until around 2015.
Kurt Elster
We've got two folks who have discovered they work well together, which is harder than you'd think. You know, a lot of people like being solo founders. I have a business partner. I like it. Two, let's hear your experience.
Tu Pham
To Fam, co-founder, and I head up marketing and design were clever. Andrew is not the first developer. To I worked with. I had to say adios to many others before, you know, finding someone that worked really well. We worked really well together. on projects where we were um separate consultants. So what that means is, you know, I have a business that is valuable to me. Andrew had a business that was valuable to him. And so we really relied on each other to build great products um and trust that that person would deliver. So that's really how we started.
Kurt Elster
What happens that you decide Hey, we should just go get a Shopify app. Because it all of everything here I've heard e-commerce, I've heard online store. At no point have I heard app come up.
Andrew Le
He Yeah, yeah. So you might be surprised there, but we had, you know, just like anybody else, you know, we had a long list of client work that we were doing. You know, at the time uh we were doing work for uh Johnson and Johnson. I had work for American Airlines and American Express. um through like another client. Um and then we also did work for various fashion brands that are in and around the Santa Barbara area. And we had all these ideas about, hey, we're gonna build an app and also it so that we could eventually get out of client services. Right. It's it's kind of a dream. Recurring revenue, subscriptions, the whole thing, right?
Kurt Elster
And then we just want to why not keep working with your name dropping Fortune 100 companies and then like desperately trying to get away from them, it sounds like
Andrew Le
Yeah, you know what? What ended up being the case is that we're we're very like we're such product people. We just love product and we love like tinkering on, you know, making like the thing that we love better.
Tu Pham
we kind of agreed on still to this day and early on was at some point in time when you build for such big companies, you kind of start to want to build a team. And we always wanted to keep it small um and control our own destiny. uh I would say. And so as you work and you kind of build a name and and you realize that some of the next projects that you need to work on, you know, we can't be separate like partners anymore. And we probably need to figure out how to build a team together and I don't like that didn't sound appealing to either of us.
Kurt Elster
But it was obvious to you that you should develop a business partnership.
Tu Pham
I think we we did just want to keep working on things together. Absolutely. We didn't really know exactly what shape or form that was, but we were like, this is working well. It's successful. Why not do something with it?
Kurt Elster
The you know, I knew my I knew I wanted to have my Paul Rita, my existing business partner, as a business partner because we worked well on, you know, some straightforward Shopify projects. And I just thought he was funny. I was like, man, this guy is funny. You know, when you have to work with someone all the time, like you have to have that interpersonal relationship, ideally. Uh, I think it helps. You know, you you two seem to have a good rapport. Have you noticed this?
Andrew Le
Yeah, we we do. And my favorite thing probably um I think since early on is that I'm like a pun cracker. And I just love the grimace that two makes when I hit like a really solid punt. So that's always been that's always been really good there
Kurt Elster
Two, how bad are his dad jokes? I think they're punishing. I said, how bad are his dad jokes? And then he hit me with one.
Tu Pham
I mean his dad jokes are so bad that you think he has ten kids, but he doesn't. He has none.
Kurt Elster
When did you find the were you in involved in the Shopify app ecosystem when you found Edit Order Order Edit? What was it called originally?
Andrew Le
So it was called Edit Order originally. Does what it says on the box, right? It edits orders, and this was at a time when in Shopify it wasn't even possible. Dead in order. Right. You had to do all these workarounds. If you were to tweet at Toby directly, he would say, Yeah, just cancel the order and tell the customer to create a new one. Right. Um, but everybody knows that, you know, for customers, it's hard enough to get them to hit the checkout button the first time. Right. You're gonna ask them to do it one more time, right? Once you have that sale, you want to be able to service the customer in every way possible to get them through to the end of that train. Right. Or even through to the next step. Um, and telling them to, hey, you know what, stop everything, start over, it was kind of a no-go, right? So we work with a couple of companies where that was a problem. Um and this was in, I think, the shoe industry uh with a with a shoe brand that two worked with um and that I was brought in uh to kind of basically rebuild their uh Shopify or their their shop e-commerce systems from the ground up. Uh we chose Shopify for that. Um and you know at some point we had been working on both client work and then also on our own app ideas for a little while here. And I caught on to um a couple of key people who I'm I'm still in this ecosystem of bootstrap founders called MicroCon. Oh yeah, MicroConf. Yeah, yeah, with like Rob Walling. And so I started listening to his podcast. Um and then there was another guy who was early on in the Rails space. um kind of big in uh I don't know like email marketing for a while. Um his name is Patrick McKenzie. And I was listening to eleven. Yeah, yeah, Patty Eleven. I buy him I try to buy him breakfast every single year because I see him at Microcroft and I'm like, you changed my life, buddy. Um and so He was talking about what hi his the sale of his app. So he had built an app called Appointment Reminders at the time and then went to go, you know, sell it because he wanted to get out. Um and was talking about how good of an experience he had with um FEI with uh Thomas Schnell. Uh just on a whim, I started, you know, just cruising around there. Um at the same time, Rob Walling. with MicroConf and uh I think the podcast is called Starts or the Rest of Us, was talking about his stair step approach. Right. And as product people, with You know, we always assumed that, you know, if we're going to build a product or we're going to have a product, it needs to be a product that we built ourselves with our own hands that was like whole hog like kind of imagine from our brains and then put into code. Right. Um but you know Rob opened my eyes to that you didn't have to do it that way, that you could stair-step, you could acquire a business. And his story is that he acquired a couple of small businesses first. couple of small apps and then parlayed that eventually with the learnings that he had there and everything to uh he ended up founding drip which was uh ended up being a very big email marketing company. All right.
Kurt Elster
I still use Drip to this day. Probably not the right tool necessarily for what I'm doing, but it absolutely works.
Andrew Le
Yeah, yeah. And it's it's still pretty it's it's pretty dang good. You know, we use it to this day as well. Um so Um and at this point, or at that point, we said, you know, I was cruising around for it, uh, and you know, I had all these things kind of swirling around in my head. And then I came on to the opportunity for edit order. I saw it on FEI's site. And I went back to two. I said, two, this could be a really good opportunity. Right. It's already got revenue. You know, um there's a there's an app store uh that you know that we're already all familiar with. Um it's in the e-commerce space, it's on Shopify, and we know that stuff like the back of our hands at this point.
Kurt Elster
To this dad joke maniac comes to you and says, hey, we should buy a Shopify app because I heard about it on a podcast.
Andrew Le
Like, what?
Kurt Elster
What was your reaction here?
Tu Pham
Up a time. Because it had revenue. This is one of the key things. It made it made it like a an easier yes And to be able to carve time because we had gone back and forth about creating a product together. And you know, that first step is the hardest step, right? And then with no revenue coming in, we feel like, oh, this had the bones for us to just get in and work on something together right away. And that was more important than waiting another few years for the right idea or the right something else.
Kurt Elster
And so I just said, but I Is it too forward to ask what it cost?
Andrew Le
Ooh, do we remember what it cost? I I actually I I I do I do want to say I do remember what it cost and um I I'm not 100% sure what it is, but compared to today's valuations, especially if you're talking about like 2021, early 2022 valuations there. We got it for kind of a song, right? So if you're looking at around 10K MRR there, you know, that's like 120K ARR. We got it for about 2x revenue. All right, so our multiple is 2x.
Kurt Elster
Not that's quite reasonable.
Andrew Le
Yeah, it's it's it's it's actually almost free if you think about it, right? If you were selling the same app for today, you're probably gonna expect somewhere between three to five X. Right. Yeah. Um, you know, so and especially and if you bought it in 2021, uh, you know, after crawlite 10x, right?
Kurt Elster
So yeah, that yeah, 2021, that pricing, it would like five X would be a steal. You know, today two and a half X would be would be really good. You know 2x, yeah, quite extraordinary. Um, okay, good deal. You know, like yeah, it it it's a lot of money to come up with, um, especially like bootstrapping, you know, but also not impossible. Oh, it it feels like a risk, but then it's got, you know, revenue coming in. So what's the process of of buying the app like? You know, dude, you're using a business broker which improves things. And but there's still due diligence, negotiating, you know, the actual handoff. What's that experience like? Like we did a did
Andrew Le
some pretty quick legwork on it and we closed on it actually fairly quickly. Um and you know, at that price point, FEI kind of, you know, generally they want you to close pretty quickly on that. You know, if you're talking about a seven circ figure acquisition, that's gonna that's the type of thing that takes like six months. Right. But for this, we I think we closed within about 30 days or so. Um, we both had we both were able to buy well we were able to buy it um almost a hundred percent cash on hand and then we had a seller's note um for I think maybe about 70k is that sound right too um that we paid off with about a year
Kurt Elster
So a seller, it was partially seller financed.
Andrew Le
Yeah, partially seller financed. Um so but that was only about maybe seventy seventy thousand dollars on that. You know, so if you're, you know, if anybody out there is thinking about acquiring an app, there are a lot of financing options. There's a lot of options that you can potentially negotiate. We ended up talking to the the founder through the broker um and then put in a uh like a letter of intent. on that um after we were able to get some of the financials, uh we looked through the financials and basically reconciled or make sure like everything matched up. Um and then also looked at some of the key figures on there. Um when we were checking that out, it was of course MRR. Um is that yeah, is that actually coming in? Is that does that align with the bank statements? Right. Um because Otherwise, you know, like otherwise something's fishy's going on there, right? Um what are the actual costs, um, the operating costs and operating expenses of running the thing? And then
Tu Pham
The obvious thing also was you look taking a deep dive into the code.
Andrew Le
Yeah, I I took a little bit of d uh a dive into the code. Um at the time it was built in PHP. Um, you know, I had been a long time PHP developer, but I'd never wanted to work in PHP ever again. Uh because I both since yeah since 2007. I'd been an early Rails developer too. So I was part of that kind of initial round of people who were like, you know, uh being refugees from PHP and going into Rails, right? Um and by 2015, like like if if I didn't have to touch it again or if I didn't even have to look at PHP again, it would be too soon. Right. And so, um, but there we were acquiring a PHP app, right? Um, and so, you know, it it was fine. I could get through it just fine. But then we re- eventually rewrote it entirely into Rails within the next two years or so
Kurt Elster
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Andrew Le
Yeah, in the as far as the purchase was concerned, um the transaction went through just fine. However uh within a about the first week or so, we ended up having like a six hour outage. And it was it turned out to the k the problem turned out to be that During the handoff, we were handed off one, we were handed off the GCP accounts, the Google uh cloud platform accounts. And There was one that said that it had everything in it. Right. And we updated the billing information for that. But the other one we weren't aware of at all or that it had any production systems on it. And that did not get the billing information updated. And so that ended up getting turned off. And I said. Oh my God, what is going on here? And um after about six hours, we're able to figure that out and get that updated and then everything back online.
Kurt Elster
You know, I think the at no point have we actually really like laid out the use case, the utility of this app. And it is, I want to share anecdotally, if we have, as an example, a store like uh Tactical Baby Gear, who sells diaper bags, and someone buys a diaper bag. And we as soon as we have the this continuous problem where someone does not buy the accessory items, but our free shipping threshold is a hundred something bucks. And so if it's like, well, I want to buy an accessory item, that's gonna be way less than a hundred. I'm gonna pay shipping. And so customers will buy the bag, and then immediately the customer support gets an email. Hey, I bought this bag. I forgot to add such and such accessory. And I don't want to, you know, reordered pay shipping. Can you just add it? They're like, okay, you know, that's a big pain. That's where your app solves this. On that thank you page, they say, you know, you could put something in there like, hey, you need to change your order, forgot something, you know, messed up the size. That's a common one. Hey, I got so excited about t-shirt. I ordered small, but I'm actually a large. Um and then there's like a a time limit, but within it the person can edit the order and fix this themselves. How cool is that? That's that's the like I've accurately described the primary use case for Clever Effic, right? The business books will tell you you're supposed to have a hundred day plan, right? Like some thesis as to you buy it, and these are the things you're gonna fix and change. Two as as you know as as designer here, you would have gone through this and thought, like, well, these are all the things I hate. This is what I want to change. Like, what was the plan here, you know, to acquire it? And then improve it.
Tu Pham
Oh, well, our first plan for sure was to get it out of PHP. That was like you you heard you heard about it, like, okay, well, we're not gonna build anything else on top of what is here, right? And um I don't remember exactly what the overlap was and how we transitioned our existing customers to Um, I know we did it uh segment by segment, like a hundred, two hundred, three hundred at a time to make sure that everything was going okay. But that took a lot of planning and time and timing. And it I think it took the most part of the first two years we had the app was just to kind of get it over to something that we wanted to build on.
Kurt Elster
We gotta redo the tooling. underneath so that this thing is easier to maintain, you know, faster, less problem prone, potentially cheaper to host, more secure. What what else?
Andrew Le
We knew we uh kind of acquired a little bit of a distress property here. Right. It was starting to get one-star reviews. Um, things were, you know, not always in the best uh uh kind kind of possible case there. Right. And so the first thing that we did is that we sent out an email blast on day one that said, hey. You know, I'm Andrew, this is too, and together we are the new owners of Edit Order and laid out what our plans were. But we had plans around reliability, uh up upgrading its design. Uh two had some very strong design sense on that and uh how kind of things should work. And before, you know, it was basically designed by a developer. Uh and now we had like a really talented professional designer two here. Uh to come fix that up.
Kurt Elster
When you have an app this long and you're you're playing in Shopify Sandbox, right? Like they control whether you get to be in the app store. And you know, that's true for any of us as Shopify app developers. And that gives them the power to such a like to dictate changes to us. Um and They also good or bad, like feature changes happen and they go like look, these are things you have to change to support this feature that's coming down the pipe, you know. You have to th it's this huge platform. You have to think of it as every time they do anything, it is, you know, rebuilding the plane in flight. It's difficult. What's You know, your app really fairly complicated, like a lot more complicated than anything I've done. What's that experience like as, you know, app product people where you get these edicts that are like, all right, here's what you gotta do next. Like, okay.
Andrew Le
As a strategy over the years and and even very early on, because we knew what you know the risk to the platforms were, right? Like the risk to the platform is like Shopify one could just build your stuff, right? And then Uh just, you know, eat basically come by and eat your lunch at any point in time, right? Um the other risk is that some API changes are gonna cause major problems. Or they're going to remove the API that your app maybe just fully depends on, or maybe never build the thing that you want so that you could support some rich use cases. Right. Um we've basically butt up butted up against over ten years every single one of those issues as far as platformers. is concerned. I think as app developers, it's really important for us to develop great relationships with the team at Shopify. And we've always been able to kind of have that even from the very earliest days. Um in that um one open communication um with the dev dev advocates or people on the product team if you can make contact there um and showing up at you know back in the day it was called unite these days it's called additions showing up at there there and talking you know because shopify at the end of the day a lot of the pe like everybody there is actually really open to listening to feedback. I think it's some one something that's very incredible about the culture that they've built there over 10 years and then like expanding to thousands of employees. Right. Um and you know very open to listening to that feedback. But you know The feedback that you'll hear and implement is the helpful feedback, right? And so we try to be as helpful as possible rather than just be someone who's very, very negative and their in their space, right? And that goes all the way down to you know the level of helpful helpfulness. One of the very first bugs that we ran into that was clearly a Shopify issue was like back in 2015 or so, what I did there is I wrote them an R spec test, unit test that proved that it was an issue. I said, hey, just put your keys into here, into this file. Right. If you run this, it'll show you that it'll prove that it's an issue. And then uh it we once you fix the issue, this test will pass. Right. Um, and I think we've been lifelong friends with the person who received that ever since.
Kurt Elster
I mean it's thr it it's tough to find bugs, especially like because oftentimes people encounter the bug. The end user encounters it, goes, what the heck, and then moves on. And you never know. And so for someone to not only document it for you, but go, here's how you test for the condition. you know, and and document it in this really helpful way. Yeah, no, that I could see where they would be delighted with you.
Andrew Le
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. But so moving, you know, but so developing those relationships is very key, I think, especially if you're playing in a space that, you know. uh is very clearly directly in front of I I kind of think of it as like a steamroller um of of platform risk, right? But it's more like the Austin Power steamroller where it's like really slowly. Um and they're eventually going to get to you, but you know, what we think of as far as how we build and how we work with Shopify is something that Toby said actually a good number of years ago now, which is that Shopify wants to build for the 80% use case, right? They want to build the things that are generally useful to all merchants. And where and his vision for where apps come into play in that ecosystem is that last 20% that is very, very personal, very, very operations dependent and almost people dependent. Um, and that's the space that the at that apps to fill in, right? And so what we do is we kind of kind of I think of it as like running uphill. Right. We find like the really difficult, sticky problems that merchants run into. And then we build in the ability to deal with that. Right, because Shopify is gonna build, you know, a certain type of Lego block, right? But if you need a like a type of Lego block that has like some weird connector to it or something like that, um Shopify kind of can't reasonably go in and do that. All right. Um, but we can't, right? And that's where that's the space that we fill. And that way we're I think we're very aligned with um the shop Shopify and the broader ecosystem in general.
Kurt Elster
Having done this for 10 years, how have you seen the the App Store, you know, this ecosystem evolve?
Tu Pham
There's definitely more um apps than there if there were when we started for sure. And you know, it's ever evolving. There's people who come, there's people who grow. Um, and there's people who exit um the app store. And as we uh as we see also AI helping people, we'll we'll see more and more. um apps of like a certain caliber show up and add noise.
Kurt Elster
I would say of a certain caliber. I'm reading between the lines on that one.
Tu Pham
Uh we we've seen, you know, we've seen noise in in the past with just like copycat apps, especially when you're in a space that you're doing well, everyone wants to kind of jump on board. And, you know, we've had We had customers, I don't our our longest um customers have been with us since 2015. They've used the app, they've stayed, um, they've evolved with us uh into what Andrew was saying. You know, they're not gonna be able to get that solution anywhere else because we built a very specific solution for a s a certain set of customers that still to this day will not be able to edit that order any any other type of way. So
Kurt Elster
The I think with any app, you know, when people ask me about it, they're always like, yeah, but isn't the support a nightmare? Like Talk to me about the experience of providing app support. Because acquiring the app really would have been your first direct experience with having to do this.
Tu Pham
Well um I would say that it was um one of the most important things for us we knew from the get go because our first hire was uh besides us was a customer support person. That's how we were doing it. Um we were splitting it. I don't remember if it was like we take Like each week we hand off, like one week I would do it and then the other week Andrew would do it at at the beginning until we hired our first person. Um, and when we hired that first person, we that that seat has never really been empty. And to this day, sometimes we we both rotate into customer service because we value that. so highly. Um it's like one of the core it's not a feature obviously, but it's one of the core tenets of like how we want to build an app. mainly because we also came from the other side being like the agency and the partner, knowing that, hey, you know, partnerships are very important and the reliability of something as we're um as we're using other apps is equally as important. And to this day, some people, even when Shopify added um order editing, they stuck with us because they liked our serve, like customer service better. Like they were using it in a way where they could probably have like taken two or three more steps and revise some workflow and and use Shopify, but they just prefer that they knew if they had any any issue whatsoever that we would respond with a lot of knowledge and relatively quickly.
Kurt Elster
Here's some customer service emails you don't want to wake up to. I was drunk. This was a gift, but we broke up. Wrong color, wrong size, wrong meat. Sound familiar? With Cleverific, you don't have to deal with these anymore. Cleverific gives your customers a self-service portal to edit their own orders. No emails, no back and forth, just simple fixes. Fewer support tickets, faster fulfillment, and happier customers. Peter Manning, New York, slash their order support request by 99%. You can too. Get 50% off. the Cleverific Pro Plan, just forty-nine dollars a month exclusively for the unofficial Shopify podcast listeners. Go to cleverific. com slash unofficial and use promo code Kurt50 Fix the problem before it's a problem. That's cleverific. I want to ask you some questions for Get some advice for other people who are considering this path of acquiring an app. What the you know, number one. What's the biggest mistake you see new developers make? And I'll give you mine first. Are of the apps we've developed, the most successful is you know is Crowdfunder. our Kickstarter style widget that you can add to a product page. At no point did I consider churn rate when I thought we should run with this idea. And it it's such a specialized kind of promotion. It's not something anyone runs continuously. You know, there's a few people who do. It's like their business model. But for the most part, you know, our customers are going to use the app for a couple months, then uninstall it until it's time to run that kind of promo again. Nothing I ever thought about, right? Uh because I didn't know any better. What uh what are the common mistakes you think you see folks make with new apps?
Andrew Le
So, you know, churn rate definitely probably the biggest one there, right? Um, if you're buying a like a distressed property, kind of the way that we did it, you know, you could also look at churn rate as part of your negotiating tactic there. If you really think that you have some ideas to kind of reduce that churn rate, right? Generally your benchmark for churn is that you want that below five percent. Right. Below the you know, down below at like two or three percent is even better. Right. Um it's customers are always gonna churn at some point, but you know, down below five percent is great. So if you're up at like 10%, you're basically you're losing half, if not more, of your customers. I forget the exact math is every year, right? So every year you've got to replace half of your entire customer base. And so really, really important to get that number down there. You know, the next thing uh for app developers is to really think about think hard about pricing. Right. Um, and work on changing or updating the pricing model or doing pricing experiments at least once a year so that you can figure out what's the right model that's going to work for your app. Right. Uh Kurt, for for you m for the crowdfunding app, right, you you mentioned that people would churn out after a couple months because it's not the type of thing that you run every Right. Did you end up changing the pricing model um at some point to basically support that or or be more in tune with that kind of behavior?
Kurt Elster
We went we almost doubled the price. It went from it was I think it was 15 a month initially, now it's 25. Because it's like, look, you're just not gonna run it that long. Um yeah. But you know, could we do percentage of revenue? Like that might be a solution to it. Not one I love. Um but there's yeah, there's other solutions. There's other pricing models.
Andrew Le
Right, yeah. Yeah, you could you could think about you know percentage of revenue you could you maybe charge per campaign instead, right? If you're doing a specific campaign that you just to per campaign and have a single price for that. It's like, hey, use it as long as you want, but it's gonna be if you have a six-month campaign, no problem. But here's the price for a campaign. Right. So that's something to think about as well. Right. Um, so you know, iterating on that pricing um and not assuming that a pricing has to be you know, below a certain level or a certain way or that it always has to be good, better, best, right? Um is you know, is something that developers, you know, app developers should really be looking at. And especially if pricing scares you, right? And it probably does, right? Pricing is one of the scariest things that we ever deal with as people who are running a business. Right. Um you don't know if you're pricing right. Uh you don't know you assume everybody else knows what they're doing. New slash nobody else does. Right. We're all we're all winging it.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, no, we're all just winging it.
Andrew Le
Right. Um, and so you just have to experiment to find out what works and what works right. All right. And the first thing that you do is never the gonna be the right thing. But you can you can iterate from there and you know at the end of the day, pricing is a two-way door, right? Where if you make a wrong step, you could actually open up the door and unwind some of that. Right. And it it's it's okay. Right. And one of the reasons that I think you know app developers sh should be paying a lot more attention to pricing is that um it's the biggest lever that you have in your business. All right. And so Two mentioned, you know, a little bit earlier that she was looking at a slide from a launch and 75% of those apps are are no longer with us. Right. The ones that are in the, you know, the some of them have been uh have exited, some of them moved on. The the ones that are in the graveyard, right, are in the graveyard, you know, for various reasons. But one of those reasons, I guarantee you, is that they were never able to create a successful business for themselves. They were never able to get the revenue that translated to them living the lives that they wanted to live, which is the whole reason we want to start a business. Right. And so if you don't get your pricing right, right, then you know you can't have a successful business. And that's actually bad for the entire ecosystem. Right. When merchants come into the app store and see, you know, apps that go in and out of business all the time, apps that, you know, if I install this today, it might not be there tomorrow. That's not a good quality indicator for the app ecosystem. Right. So, but if they come in and they say, hey, like this app's been around for 10 years, right? This app's a great app, it's been around for five years, two years. Right. Um, and those app developers are able to uh make a living and achieve their goals personally, they're gonna have You know, more success, they're gonna stick around longer, they're gonna develop more expertise that can solve more better and more important problems.
Kurt Elster
It's 2009, and I still don't have a Lambo. Not one car where the doors go up, Andrew. What am I doing wrong? Building versus acquiring. You you bought an app. If you had to do it over again, would you build or buy?
Andrew Le
Ooh, that's an interesting question. Um, you know, getting started, there's something to be said about buying an app because you could kind of just get started and learn your ropes. here, right? I I do feel like I it's some part of me feels like at this point in time we've developed enough expertise in in, you know, this whole vertical and this whole area that uh we could potentially, you know, we can we have that we have plenty of ideas all the time actually for uh building something new, you know, but um God, I hope we never have to start again um because uh I like what we do, you know, and I want us to be, you know, the uh company that does, you know, you know, what we do with order, uh, with order editing, order management, and the post-purchase lifecycle for the next 10 years as well.
Kurt Elster
Two, do you get as excited about order editing and post-purchase life cycles?
Tu Pham
I um I actually really enjoy this space. And you know, I was thinking about like all the tech spaces that we can be in in the community around like e-commerce, uh especially what what we all do. And we we've seen each other every year and being around this uh community for 10 years, it's it's surprisingly while you know, we we have fatigue. It it hasn't really gotten old. You know, there's always something interesting going on. And you know, you're excited to still build things after 10 years. That's like that's that's saying a lot, right? If you still have ideas over like what you can solve. Um, and I think that that is probably why we're still around, is that there's still things to be solved and interesting things to be solved.
Kurt Elster
It's funny you say that. I Every so often that occurs to me that it's like, you know, I I'm a work dog. I just love to work. You know, you leave a work dog alone in your house, he's gonna get bored, chew up your furniture. That's me, right? I need something to do. And I love that in you know, working in e-commerce, you know, you're essentially you're you're solving complicated problems all the time and seeing you know these very real outcomes whether that's that's revenue or reduced support or you know just just solving a problem and and making somebody thrilled. Um, that I greatly enjoy. And I've seen that sentiment from other uh Shopify ecosystem folks, other Shopify partners like yourself. And so I'm happy to hear it. I like that answer, you know. Like yeah, you Burnout happens, you know, you gotta take breaks, but it's that, you know, being able to have fun with it and having it be rewarding that makes it worthwhile. That's why we keep going. Also, the money doesn't hurt, right? Yeah, I'm guessing that this this worked out fairly well for you.
Andrew Le
Yeah, it's a great it's a great business and a great ecosystem to be in for sure.
Kurt Elster
Okay, uh regrets. If you could do one what give me one thing from each of you that you would do differently today.
Tu Pham
Um I honestly I I would have gotten full time into the business sooner. Like because you're balancing as a consultant and trying to migrate to a product and making sure when you're bootstrapped, you have to make sure that it's funding the life you currently have versus how much of a cut you're gonna make to see this thing grow, you know, all these things as, you know, the last ten years we're trying to decide that um, you know, having the app for ten years I I think I've only been in it full time for five. Um and looking back, it was right before COVID. Um that I I jumped in full time. Um and before that it was part-time and trying to figure out how to make things work. And I I think that we would have gotten further faster if um I had made a jump earlier for sure.
Kurt Elster
I mean, for sure, you're right, but at the same time, it's survivors it's survivorship bias where it because it worked out, you're like, well, I should have done that from day one. Yeah, I mean, if you knew that, sure. But, you know, at the time you were like, okay, you know, I want to keep being able to pay rent in case this doesn't work out. Right, right. Yeah. It's understandable
Andrew Le
Going back to what T was saying there, um, you know, there was a time, you know, at the time uh we acquired uh Edit Order, it was 2015. I was able to go full-time into the business in 2017. Um and that that was a big decision for us for me to kind of transfer over and and go full-time there. Um and then uh two at the time was continuing to be like a 50% business partner in another business. And she did that for another two years. And so 2019 came around and, you know, we're, we're, you know, we had doubled a couple of times. And then this year we weren't going to double again. Oh no. Right. And Um so I said, two, we gotta have a talk. And you know, two and I are we work really well together and in part because we're uh really good at having difficult conversations. That's a skill for sure. I called up two and she was on a those she was on a cross-country trip with her cousin. You called and went to ruin her vacation?
Tu Pham
Oh yeah, like I I was traveling cross-country from New York to LA. Andrew calls me with bad I think in Kansas or Texas, I'm not full order, but it was horrible.
Kurt Elster
Uh we have to talk.
Tu Pham
I'm on vacation. I I'm stuck in a car with bad reception. You got like a couple hours here. So uh yeah, actually that's when I got the got the call that we needed to talk was Bad reception cross country.
Andrew Le
Yeah, yeah. And I said too, you know, it's it's either me or him, right? You're gonna have to pick. Um and so uh, you know, we had a we had a lot like a good conversation, like a hard conversation on the phone there. And then, you know, we resolved to that once you get back that we're gonna have. We were one, continue the conversation, but two, she's gonna make moves um to do, you know, what she wanted to do there. And in the end, um, you know, it was about how we were going to support each other's goals, right? And what was her end goal, right? Was her end goal th this other business was a client services, you know, agency style business. there, right? And so the, you know, it made it really easy in that the end goals or the uh the type of work that you do or the vision that you have for the type of company that you want to run and be a part of um is was very different between the two. you right and so all it what it came down to is just two which one do you see yourself in for the next five years Okay. Um, and she saw herself, of course, in Claverific and not in a client services type of business.
Tu Pham
Right. And then also just speaking to that where you think you have um you think you're communicating well and we had we we definitely when we When we acquired edit order, there was some time in the future that we would be working on it full time. Like that was an idea, right? But we never put a timeline in. And that was that was the problem, right? it got to a point where the timeline and what we're actually doing like caused some friction because we never actually say, hey, you know, we have two years or you should be thinking about this in six months, whatever it was. And so We actually had to, after this conversation, we sat down and actually laid out what that timeline looked like. And both agreed to it.
Kurt Elster
The Yeah, that's the funny th thing of you're right. If you don't ha attach a timeline and then it just becomes, well, in the future. The problem is there is always in the future, right? Right. Two years, if I go, we're gonna do it in the future. Two years from now I could still go in the future. The that's a good point about uh you know setting expectations with business partnerships. And a lot of it, you know, that's where the issue comes in was like, what was the expectation? And you know, fortunately, it sounds like you guys are able to communicate and work through that stuff. Um a powerful skill that not a lot of people have, though I I have noticed that like Gen Z is more adept at this. as millennials, uh, not, you know, something we had to learn later in life, I think. Um so what's next for Cleverific?
Tu Pham
Because we are um making changes to orders, we have really good insight into once an order's been placed. And then once it's been fulfilled. And so our goal is to create better touch points in between those for activation as well as um loyalty and just being able to use that space more because surprisingly when you think about like a customer journey and you you have that timeline that we all visualize. Very few people actually mention this time between like placing in the order and fulfillment, right? Where things could go wrong or you could add value or you could have more conversations about the things that are being shipped, right?
Kurt Elster
Um typically this is where we believe we have the most attention. You know, when the customer has placed the order they're most excited. And they're waiting to get the item like there's some anticipation. That's where you really have their undivided attention, briefly.
Tu Pham
Yes. And so we we definitely wanna be more um create more um solutions in that space for algorithmic.
Kurt Elster
I for sure there are opportunities there. If someone wants to solve these order editing problems with Cleverific, where do they go? What do they do? Go to cleverivic.
Andrew Le
com or you can email two or i at any point in time. Uh two is two, the number two. at cleverfic. com. You can reach me at andrew at cleverific. Um and we're basically always around. We talk to everybody. So At cleverivic. com, you're gonna find us and um be able to figure out if this is the right solution for you. Uh The site or what we go through on the site is basically we lay out what we do there and for our uh for the main use cases that you'll find there. Um You know, whether it's editing a shipping address or adding or removing line items from the order, things that customers will do because they changed their minds or their made mistake. Those are things that you're going to want to give customers the opportunity to go in and do themselves without ever having to reach out to your support team. And what we're finding is that not only does it reduce the amount of support that you're going to get from the brand side of things, but it also is going to help you recover margin. from r things that would end up being returns or lost packages that then you have to go make it right.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean that's When I recognize those issues in client stores, I say, hey, you know, there's an easy way to solve this. You know, let let customers edit their own orders. Um No, it it's a great app. You've built something really special and I've really enjoyed hearing the story. I It's chicken soup for for my soul. You know, it gets me re-inspired into into working on and investing resources in our Shopify apps. Andrew Lee, 2Fam, Claverific. Thank you so much. Thanks, Gurt. We really enjoyed it. Crowdfunding campaigns are great. You can add social proof and urgency to your product pre-orders while reducing risk of failure. But with traditional crowdfunding platforms, you're paying high fees and giving away control, all while your campaign is lost in a sea of similar offers. It can be frustrating. That's why we built Crowdfunder. The Shopify app that turns your Shopify product pages into your own independent crowdfunding campaigns. We originally created Crowdfunder for our private clients. And it was so successful, we turned it into an app that anyone can use. Today, merchants using Crowdfunder have raised millions collectively. And With Crowdfunder, you'll enjoy real-time tracking, full campaign control, and direct customer engagement. And it's part of the Built for Shopify program, so you know it's easy to use. So say goodbye to high fees and hello to successful store-based crowdfunding. Start your free trial and transform your Shopify store into a pre-order powerhouse today. Search Crowdfunder in the Shopify App Store to get started.