This year, Gadget launched the first-ever Gadget incubator program. We challenged a handful of ambitious entrepreneurs to build, test, and launch a public app in just 10 weeks. The bootcamp-style program offered developers support and resources to build not only their app, but also their go-to-market plan.
The program finished with 16 entrepreneurs that rose to the challenge, and now have projects to share with the public. Here’s what they built.
Taking on the challenge of competing with Shopify’s built-in Sidekick, one participant decided to build Ailee: an AI copilot to analyze store metrics and offer personalized growth advice. The AI-powered copilot will assess a store and give merchants an overall score, along with suggestions on how to improve. Ailee can generate reports, answer questions, create SEO-friendly content and blogs, and give recommendations on where merchants should focus their sales and marketing efforts.
Install the app: https://ailee.ai
Jim Groenen's journey, from former Chief Product Officer at Growth Tribe to entrepreneur, has merged his expertise in growth marketing with building SaaS applications. His experience in growing e-commerce companies fueled the development of Ailee, a tool that combines these growth frameworks by leveraging the latest AI technology.
Tired of worrying about the maintenance to run his app, the creator of Argo decided to migrate his public app to Gadget’s auto-scaled infrastructure. Argo AI Checkout Upsell integrates directly with the Shopify native checkout, to provide product recommendations using AI to create the highest converting offers, based on the current items in the cart. The app provides cross-sell recommendations on both the storefront and checkout.
Install the app: https://apps.shopify.com/argo-checkout-upsell
Mircea Piturcia is a freelance software developer, passionate about accessibility and performance. He helps clients of all sizes, building accessible and performant online experiences. You will find him blogging and sharing tips and code on his website sections.design.
Shopping for art online can be frustrating for a lot of people. They don’t know how a painting will look in their home, how it will fit in with the decor around it, or if they’ll even like it in their space. Art AR is a Shopify app that allows customers to preview art in their own homes using augmented reality on Android and iOS. Merchants can customize how their art will appear in the AR preview by pairing their paintings, posters, and photos with different frames. By alleviating some of the doubt that often comes with purchasing art, the app has even reduced return rates. 23% of shoppers say they've received items that look different than expected at some point, but with Art AR, customers can see the art in their homes before they make a purchase and know exactly what they're getting. Overall, Art AR is a game-changer for the art industry and allows merchants to give their customers a unique, cutting-edge shopping experience.
Explore the app: https://ArtAr.tech
Walid Chekkouri began his development career in the video game industry, gaining valuable experience and honing his skills, which is how he brings his expertise in 3D visualization to his app. This background is what has allowed him to create a level of realism that sets Art AR apart. He says he’s deeply passionate about the transformative potential of art when intertwined with personalized and interactive media and hopes that his work can one day redefine how art is experienced by everyone.
Caseo is a Shopify app that uses AI to generate alt-text image descriptions, something that has become increasingly necessary when it comes to SEO and has the added benefit of being accessibility-friendly. When a merchant installs Caseo, they can sync all of their product images and the app will quickly identify how many are missing alt-text. Merchants can either update the alt-text for all of their images at once or update them one at a time. To make sure alt-text descriptions are relevant to the product they're describing, Caseo takes the product name into account, and merchants can provide a description of the store for added context.
Install the app: https://apps.shopify.com/caseo-ai-seo-assistant
Parkfield Commerce is a Shopify agency specializing in ecommerce web design, app development, and site optimization. Co-founder Thor Berntsson pitched the idea of Caseo to his development team in the hopes of saving merchants the time and headache of trying to keep up with writing and updating alt-text for thousands of products. Renato Piermarini took the role of lead developer for the project, eager at the chance to learn more about working with AI to build a public Shopify app.
Discount Functions & Offers is a Shopify app that gives merchants complete control over their discount strategies. The app has the option to create every type of discount imaginable, whether merchants want to run a BOGO sale, offer welcome gifts, give away free samples, offer tiered discounts, or anything else. All the discounts can be fully customized based on number of items, or only apply to specific products and customers, and of course, be set as limited time offers.
Get early access: https://beta.shopfunctions.com/
Donna Crawford has worked as a developer for more than 20 years, with a masters degree in software engineering. For years she has specialized in extending Shopify store capabilities for her clients through the use of Scripts, and since the launch of Functions has been able to create more robust solutions available to any merchants rather than just individual clients. She hopes that this public Shopify app will be the first of many.
Foundrify is a specialized Shopify app designed exclusively for font foundries to sell their fonts and families, sub-families, individual styles, or even variable fonts easily. The app provides a platform that gives font creators full control over the types of custom licenses they offer with their fonts, and allows them to sell their families similarly to bundled products. Despite the high cost of the existing channels for type creators, Foundrify was built as a Shopify app as a way to give font creators access to the same secure and stable ecosystem that other small business owners rely on in order to thrive.
Explore the app: https://foundrify.app/
Cringe Studio is a small team of Shopify experts with 10 years of experience in everything ranging from themes, to apps, to headless commerce. The team consists of Stefano Cerelli, Rocco Barbaro, Giovanni Capuano, and Crescenzo D’Alterio, who consider themselves a group of creatives who set out to build a public Shopify app that would give font creators looking to launch their own business a better chance at establishing their brands.
Despite how far generative AI has come in the last year, it still tends to sound robotic and generic when it comes to long-form content, and this isn't helpful for merchants looking to improve their SEO strategy. Hemiro is an AI-powered Amazon product description and blog post generation tool that has been specifically trained to produce long-form, high-quality, non-robotic outputs. It takes a merchant's topical authority into account to create context-rich content based on a store's existing product listings. Everything it generates can be edited and customized by the merchant, and it even does all of the tedious internal linking between blogs automatically (a task every SEO expert loathes). All the content Hemiro produces follows the latest SEO best practices to allow merchants to quickly optimize their listings. It even provides suggestions for new blogs based on trending keywords that are relevant to a store.
Explore the app: https://www.hemiro.com/
Michał Archacki is a software developer with a specialized focus on developing AI and Shopify apps. His background includes experience as a frontend developer and project manager. Transitioning to indie bootstrapping, he now combines his deep understanding of ecommerce challenges with cutting-edge AI technologies to create innovative solutions for merchants.
Opinamos is an open review platform built especially for Latin American Shopify merchants that makes it easy to prompt customers to leave verified public reviews of a store. After making a purchase, Customers are prompted to leave a review of the store on the Opinamos platform. By sending the review request through Shopify after an order is completed, the app can verify the review based on the order details. When a review is submitted, merchants can see the rating, who left the review, and the order that triggered it. Because it's an open review platform, merchants will have a public profile listing where customers can see other reviews, and merchants can embed a widget to display their average rating on their site. Opinamos offers a completely customizable email communication with the logo and banner image. The team has plans to introduce WhatsApp reviews in the near future.
Explore the app: https://apps.shopify.com/opinamos
The co-founders of Opinamos met back in 2019 in Australia while attending a coding bootcamp. After several years of building products together, they focused in on Opinamos in early 2023 and haven’t looked back. With more than 10 years of digital marketing experience and 8+ years in the tech industry, the team is looking forward to continuing to build out Opinamos and build Latin America's review strategy.
Between getting lost in transit and simply being taken off the front porch, packages go missing 260 million times a year in the US. Since this is something that neither the merchant or the customer can control, it always feels like a lose/lose situation; the customer doesn’t get their purchase, while the merchant loses out on product and profit. PackagePal resolves this by giving Shopify merchants an in-house shipping protection solution. The app allows them to customize everything from the copy to the cost of coverage, and includes a built-in dashboard with one-click resolution options, complete with an email notification system. The app works by offering a small upsell on checkout and uses the incremental revenue to cover the cost of lost and stolen packages. It even comes with a portal for customers to submit claims about their missing packages.
Install the app: https://apps.shopify.com/packagepal
Marcus Wood created PackagePal after being frustrated with the lack of accountability of shipping insurance providers. He found that he was never able to get his money back, and he noticed that merchants always seemed to take the hit to their reputation in reviews, despite insurance providers being the ones letting customers down. In an effort to give merchants more control over lost and stolen packages, he created PackagePal.
A common challenge faced by designers is having a no frills way to present their work. Interior designers have different skills than fashion designers, but need a common way to share their work. Currently when they set up their portfolios, they’re often stuck using tools that have been built for graphic and web designers. Pixfol.io is an app that will automatically generate a hosted portfolio for designers regardless of background. Choose a simple templated layout, upload images, then focus on writing your story.
Mike Briggs was a developer who found himself drawn to the world of user experience and design. He found the way he preferred to solve problems was better suited to understanding the big picture, rather than building individual features. He currently works on Gadget’s design team, but still found the time to create Pixfol.io for his fellow designers.
RaffleFire is a Shopify app that gamifies your Shopify store to help increase sales, AOV, and customer loyalty. The app makes it easy for merchants to launch raffles in a few clicks and customize everything about the raffle with a live preview of how the offer will appear to customers. They can set the minimum order value, time limit, number of winners, and prizes can be awarded as either a percentage or total value discount. At the end of a raffle, merchants can select their winners either manually or randomly. RaffleFire even comes with a dashboard to track progress and see the impact on sales, review entries, choose winners, and send emails.
Get early access: https://www.rafflefire.com/
Amr Helal and Abdullah Mohamed have worked together building B2B solutions like IPtrace and CurrencyStack. They’ve always been passionate about creating better and more engaging user experiences, and with RaffleFire, they set out to create an app that would help Shopify merchants build a sense of community. The team brings more than 10 years of experience in development and ecommerce, and they hope to continue to release more Shopify apps in the near future.
Shopify has an image resizing tool that many merchants use to compress their product images, but the process of using it simply isn't sustainable. They download the original image, upload it to the Shopify resizing tool, set it to the correct size, and then download the new version until finally, they can add it to their product listing. Merchants have better things to do than spend all that time resizing their photos. Resizify lets merchants bulk upload their images, then automatically compresses images as needed, or they can connect directly to Google Drive and pull photos directly from there. They also have the option to compress images that are already uploaded to the Store. To give them an idea of the impact the app can have on their store, Resizify also gives merchants a snapshot of how their overall SEO score has changed as a result of the optimization.
Install the app: https://apps.shopify.com/resizify
Tanmay Kejriwal is a part-time Shopify app developer who is obsessed with increasing merchant efficiency. He has shipped 3 public apps, and works with merchants directly on custom solutions for their stores. After seeing how much time his clients wasted just on image resizing, rather than building and rebuilding custom solutions, he decided to create Resizify.
There are hundreds of analytics tools on the market focused on tracking the performance of marketing initiatives, but there are almost no tools that exist to help ecommerce managers understand the health of the store itself. Standard Retail is an operations-focused analytics dashboard that helps merchants optimize for the customer journey that happens after acquisition. Once a customer has made a purchase, there's a lot left to understand. The app tracks all the usual performance metrics like the number of orders and gross sales but also highlights a few more detailed pieces that ecommerce operators want to see, including units sold, refunds, and shipping costs.
Install the app: https://apps.shopify.com/standard
Cameron Smith previously worked as a product manager before trying his hand at development after he realized he wanted to build the dashboard he never had: an analytics tool that would treat his store like a product and understood the intricacies of user behavior. So he took dove head first into the problem to create Standard Retail.
Stitchify is a Shopify app that will bypass Shopify's variant limit by sticthing together multiple product listings into one simple product page. For many merchants, Shopify's limit of 100 variants per product makes managing their store challenging. Stitchify allows merchants to add a tag to any product they want to have grouped together, then creates a dynamic product page that cross-references all of the details for any products that share the same tag. Not only can merchants bypass the default limit, but it's also easier to manage the details for each variant, as they're handled from their own product pages. With Stitchify, merchants end up with a cleaner, easy-to-navigate storefront, and shoppers aren't left confused with partial or incomplete product listings.
Explore the app: https://stitchify.com/
Scratch Labs is an agency specializing in web development within the WordPress and Shopify ecosystems. The team combines technical expertise with a deep understanding of market trends to provide custom apps and solutions to a variety of clients. With Gadget, Scratch Labs was able to quickly scaffold and bootstrap Stitchify, their first public app.
Excited to put Shopify’s new metaobjects to use, the Coders Fail team took on the task of building two simple apps in the 10-week program. The first was an FAQ app, where the questions and answers could be treated as related objects, and the second would make it easy for merchants to display the vendor details for the brands listed in their stores.
Install the app: https://apps.shopify.com/vendor-details-on-metaobjects
Coders.fail was founded by Joda Stößer and Marius Korbmacher with a focus on trying – and failing – as they embrace experimentation and learn everything they can about app development. They began building Shopify apps because they felt there was so much untapped potential that merchants could take advantage of, and they’re excited to continue building as new technologies and features are released.
With the rise in DMCA reports and cloned stores, many Shopify merchants need a way to secure their products, but adding a watermark to every image in Photoshop simply isn't feasible when you have thousands of products. Quik Image Optimizer+Watermark is an embedded Shopify admin app that will add watermarks to any product photos, and optimize store performance by making sure the images are properly compressed and tagged with alt-text. Merchants only need to set their watermark design once, and it will automatically apply to all of the product images they choose.
Install the app: https://apps.shopify.com/one-click-watermark
Ayush Soni is a 19-year-old indie developer who started coding in high school as a freelancer. He found his way into Shopify development when he took on a theme project in 2019. This led him to explore Shopify's app-building community, and he hasn't looked back since.
Congratulations to everyone who successfully and completed the Gadget incubator. All of the projects will remain featured on our Built with Gadget page, and if you want to connect with any of the founders and learn more about how they built their projects, you can find all of them in our community Discord.
