The problem

When Liam Fuller, Matiss Jurevics, and Keith Salhani joined a growth accelerator program called Patch, they had just six weeks to come up with a product idea and turn it into a viable business. 

The three co-founders recognized a common friction point among their age group: there was no easy way to shop together online. In the past, when the team had tried to buy from online stores with their friends, the back-and-forth of sharing links, confirming variants, and managing the cart was overly frustrating. Young people were so used to shopping with friends in person, that they wanted to find a way to allow people to coordinate purchases online. 

They wanted to connect this problem to an issue store owners faced as well. So they set out to perform some initial market research and found that 26% of shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were unable to reach the free shipping thresholds. 

With this context, they began crafting a solution that would benefit both stores and shoppers, and landed on the idea for CartShare. The app would allow friends to shop together online by adding products to a shared cart, making it more fun to shop online and even easier to hit free shipping thresholds. For merchants, this would mean increased average order value, fewer cart abandonments, and serve as a variation on referral marketing with incredibly low-cost customer acquisition.

As a young team with varying technical backgrounds, however, they faced significant hurdles in building a full-stack Shopify app. The team's initial attempt to build the app using Heroku left them with a partially complete product that they could only run locally on their laptops. 

Keith, CartShare’s engineering lead and backend development manager, spent two weeks struggling with OAuth implementation alone. They couldn't even demo the dashboard to potential customers because they had never tried building an embedded frontend, something that they needed for their Shopify app.

“At the start, I managed to get something working, but it was really painful.” Keith recalled. “We probably would have given up at some point if we had to deal with building everything from scratch, we stayed on authentication for so long that having to deal with API permissions after would've killed development of the actual app.”

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The solution

Panicked about finishing their app in time to pitch to investors at the end of the program, Liam, Keith, and Matiss began looking for advice within their networks. It was a recommendation from a Shopify employee in Ireland that convinced them to try Gadget. After exploring the platform, they quickly realized it could solve their technical challenges and accelerate their development process.

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With Gadget, we've been able to show customers the whole app, not just screenshots — it's easy, it's live, and it works.
Liam Fuller, Co-founder

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“We looked at what Gadget offered and decided any pros with our setup were outweighed by Gadget.” Keith explained. “So we thought we might as well just switch early on and make development so much faster. The benefits were definitely a lot bigger than trying to fix what we had.” 

All of the complex infrastructure setup, Shopify OAuth, and hosting for their embedded frontend was handled with Gadget out-of-the-box, so the team could focus on building their unique features.

"When we first booted up Gadget, it had everything. On install, everything is just there. You can generate API endpoints and it's just easy. It even handled compliance webhooks for us, something we were previously worrying about when we looked at submitting to the app store." Keith said.

Gadget's built-in Shopify connection eliminated the need to handle OAuth, webhook processing, or database setup. The platform provided them with a fully-provisioned backend, database, and all the necessary models to work with Shopify data. Most importantly, they got an embedded frontend that they could actually demo to potential customers.

The platform's intuitive framework and auto-generated documentation made collaboration easy by streamlining knowledge sharing as they continued to build. Matiss, head of CartShare’s UX/UI particularly appreciated the AI assistant available within the docs that Gadget generated for their app. He said, "The AI system is really handy. I was using it to debug code. It massively helped with debugging and just figuring out what needs to be fixed. It saved us a ton of time."

Despite having limited experience with building APIs, with Gadget it was straightforward to manage multi-tenancy and keep the app secure. Keith said, “I hate infrastructure. Building security, hosting, etc is incredibly boring and time consuming, but with Gadget, it’s not even a worry. I can focus on building actual features.”

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The results

With Gadget handling the infrastructure and technical complexities, the team was able to build and launch CartShare in time for their investor pitch at the end of their six-week program. The app allows shoppers to create shareable carts, coordinate purchases with friends, and track progress toward free shipping thresholds together.

Before switching to Gadget, it took the CartShare team two weeks just to attempt setting up the dashboard, without setting up the databases. But after moving to Gadget, they were able to build their dashboard, on top of a fully operational database, compliance webhooks, and tenancy configured — all within just two days. Since shifting their focus from infrastructure, they’ve accelerated feature development and have been able to prioritize. 

“I don’t even know how much future time we would have spent on maintaining and hosting the infrastructure,” Keith shared. “I would've had to learn OAuth, managing multi-tenancy and permissions, database management, API Key management, compliance webhooks, and more. I can't measure the amount of time and brain power that would've been wasted. But I can say that the code would've been completely unmaintainable and we would've been absolutely cooked without Gadget.”

For Liam, who leads customer outreach and operations for CartShare, finally having an embedded frontend where they could build the app dashboard made all the difference. “It really helped in those initial customer calls. It made us seem a lot more credible, which is something we're always trying to do, especially because we’re such young founders.” He said. "With Gadget, we've been able to show customers the whole app, not just screenshots — it's easy, it's live, and it works."

The CartShare team has already started working with some agencies, and have been rolling out the app to a few early users for feedback. They’ve been in touch with several major Irish brands, and have plans to implement the solution on a live store before Christmas. They’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from both investors and potential customers, with many young shoppers immediately understanding the solution and requesting that they find a way to add it to their favorite stores.

The ability to bootstrap effectively has been crucial to their success, and by using Gadget, they've kept their infrastructure costs low while maintaining the flexibility to scale. This has allowed them to focus more resources on building features and responding to customer feedback instead of managing complex infrastructure.

Looking ahead, the team is working on introducing features like tiered discounts and split payments, where multiple shoppers can authorize their cards for their respective portion of a shared cart. They plan to submit CartShare to the Shopify app store soon, leveraging their early customer success stories to expand through agency partnerships.

"It's been pretty insane," Liam reflects. "We went from trying to message 300-400 stores and nobody responding to us, to now having a proper product. With Gadget, we have an MVP and we're showing it to customers and our calendar is fully booked out for weeks."

For the young team of founders, Gadget has been more than just a development platform—it's been the enabler of their entrepreneurial journey, allowing them to bring their vision to life despite the technical challenges they faced. Their ability to move fast has made all the difference, and the momentum has motivated them to share their journey on social media, where support has been overwhelming. They’ve gotten interest and validation from thousands of people, with one post even catching the attention of Shopify CEO, Tobi Lütke. 

With Gadget, they’re confident in their ability to build something that people are excited to use. As Liam puts it, "CartShare is just such an obvious addition that in a year or two from now, I think everyone will be saying, 'Why wasn't that a feature?'”

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