The problem

Alex Massaad and Victoria Garland have always embraced complex problems. When they founded their agency in 2012, their first project had them spending their days at Ottawa's city hall, restoring digital works of art by repairing computer chips and software in aging installations that no one else wanted to touch.

As the business matured and their client portfolio grew, they found their niche building custom Shopify solutions. The team was building Shopify storefronts and designing custom themes that kept a steady stream of clients coming back. Eventually, the agency work was stable enough that Alex chose to quit his job at Shopify and focus on Victoria Garland full time. For a few months, it was smooth sailing.

But there was a glaring gap in their service offering that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Clients didn't just want themes anymore. They wanted custom apps to solve unique business problems that off-the-shelf solutions couldn't address. Although Victoria Garland would never turn down projects, when it came to app development, the math just didn’t add up. Clients couldn’t justify the time and expense that traditional development required.

It wasn't for a lack of knowledge. The team had spent years working on niche issues and dealing with every type of technology. But between the amount of setup, tooling, and maintenance, custom app development required too much time and too many resources for their small team to justify.

Victoria Garland was a team of just five people, three of them working part-time. Victoria, the founder herself, was on maternity leave, which meant Alex was juggling his new childcare responsibilities with an overwhelming amount of agency work. His available coding time had shrunk to just one or two hours per day. Under these constraints, the math simply didn't work.

Just setting up the foundation for a Shopify app would consume four to five months of development time. Between handling OAuth, building out database structures for orders and customer information, managing webhooks, setting up hosting infrastructure, and configuring email systems, the Victoria Garland team would be overwhelmed before they even began building the actual features that would benefit clients.

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"There's a cost to coming into work every day," Alex said. "You've got to be really good at what you do, or really love doing it. And knowing what I know about DevOps, it just wasn't worth it."

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The team had the expertise and creativity to solve complex problems for their clients, but the technical overhead of app development kept them stuck in a loop of theme customization work. They were leaving money on the table and watching opportunities pass by, unable to expand their service offerings to meet client needs.

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"It easily takes four or five months to build out authentication, a database for orders, customer information, and all the emails," Alex explained. "We could technically do it, but it just takes a toll."

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The Solution

The breakthrough came when Alex discovered Gadget, a full-stack development platform designed specifically for building Shopify apps. Initially skeptical, he decided to give it a try after hearing recommendations from colleagues in the Shopify ecosystem. It changed everything.

Gadget provided everything Victoria Garland needed to build Shopify apps. It was everything they were missing, in one integrated platform: a fully-provisioned backend, an auto-generated API, a built-in database with all necessary Shopify models, hosting infrastructure, and even an embedded frontend. Most importantly, it handled the Shopify connection automatically, eliminating weeks of work on OAuth, webhooks, and API integration.

""We wanted to support the existing Shopify community, and by integrating with Gadget, we were able to move so fast," Alex said. 

The impact was immediate. Tasks that previously took weeks were completed in minutes. The first time Alex set up a new Shopify app in Gadget, he had a functional app installed on a store with authentication, database models, and a working Shopify connection in just a few minutes. That same setup would have taken him weeks if he built it from scratch.

The more Alex and his team used Gadget, the more capabilities they discovered, and the faster they could build. The platform's AI assistant became an invaluable tool, particularly for database modifications and debugging TypeScript errors. Having been trained specifically on Gadget's framework, the AI had complete awareness of the application stack, which meant it could make informed engineering decisions that other AI tools couldn't.

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"Gadget AI is incredibly accurate," Alex noted. "Because it's trained on Gadget as a whole, and it has direct access to the app code, it knows everything. Without thinking about it, I can start asking it questions, and it's able to find the exact information I need."

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For Alex, working in short bursts between parenting duties, having an AI assistant that understood the full context of his apps meant he could pick up where he left off without wasting precious time getting reoriented. He developed a hybrid workflow, using Cursor for general feature development but leaning on Gadget's AI specifically for database changes and framework-specific issues.

The platform's auto-scaling infrastructure meant Victoria Garland never had to worry about maintenance, server management, or unexpected traffic spikes. When Shopify updated their APIs, Gadget handled the upgrades automatically. The team could focus entirely on building features that directly benefited their clients rather than wrestling with infrastructure concerns, which is exactly the kind of work Alex actually enjoys doing.

Best of all, Gadget's all-in-one approach eliminated the tool fatigue that plagues so many development teams. Everything Alex needed was in one place, from logs to database management to deployment.

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The results

Within months of discovering Gadget, Victoria Garland had completely transformed their business model.

• 50% business revenue comes from building Shopify apps with Gadget
• Development time reduced from 4-5 months to 1 week for complete apps
• 3 public apps launched and maintained with zero infrastructure overhead
• Apps remain live and profitable without requiring ongoing maintenance work
• 1-2 hours of daily coding time now produces production-ready applications

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New revenue stream

Before Gadget, Victoria Garland's business model was straightforward: build Shopify themes, collect project fees, move to the next client. It was sustainable but limited. Custom apps were completely off the table.

Today, custom apps represent half of their business. It's not just about the direct revenue from app installations. The three public apps Victoria Garland launched also function as powerful marketing tools, showcasing capabilities that theme work alone never could. Having apps in the Shopify App Store gives them credibility that opens doors to bigger clients and more complex projects.

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"We wouldn't have pursued custom apps at all without Gadget," Alex said plainly. "Definitely not. I couldn't keep up with the security updates. I couldn't keep up with API changes. Our apps are both born and survive basically because of Gadget."

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The shift has fundamentally changed how Victoria Garland operates. They're no longer just executing on client requests—they're building products that generate recurring revenue and serve multiple merchants simultaneously. It's a completely different business model, and one that wouldn't exist without Gadget eliminating the technical barriers.

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From months to days

The acceleration in development speed has been remarkable. Projects that previously took four to five months for setup alone now take mere minutes. With Gadget, the team can take apps from concept to production in just a few days.

Victoria Garland's first app with Gadget took two months to build and launch. Their second app took under a month. Their third app, JourneyGlow, went from concept to production in one week.

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"By simplifying our code and handling all the Shopify complexity, the apps we've built have faster response times as a result," Alex said. "We can focus on delivering that core value, not the basic infrastructure.”

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TThe team doesn’t need to shy away from complexity. If anything, they embrace it more than ever. Take JourneyGlow, for example. When Victoria Garland initially built a similar feature for one client, they hard-coded everything in HTML. Adding a second product line would have meant another ten hours of manual work, and the client would still need to call them for every update.

But today, the app pulls data from Shopify, integrates with Google Maps APIs to generate interactive journey visualizations, processes geographic coordinates, and displays everything through a custom storefront widget. Without Gadget, building all of that would have required connecting multiple services, managing API rate limits, handling data synchronization, and ensuring everything worked reliably at scale.

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"Gadget handled the Shopify connection instantly," Alex explained. "We could focus entirely on the Google Maps integration and the journey logic. The database, the API endpoints, the webhooks — all of that just worked. We were building the actual product, not spending weeks connecting pipes."

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Building with confidence

In many ways, the biggest impact Gadget has is on the team’s peace of mind. Alex doesn't worry about whether his infrastructure will scale, whether he's following best practices, or whether security updates are being applied. Gadget handles all of that automatically.

This confidence extends to his AI-assisted development workflow. While AI can generate code quickly, having Gadget's proven infrastructure underneath ensures that code will work reliably in production.

"The game has really changed with AI," Alex said. "I can build things I never thought possible. But you still need rock-solid infrastructure underneath it all, and that's where Gadget is essential. Everything needs to work when customers start using it, and Gadget makes sure it always does."

The time savings have freed Alex to take creative risks during warranty periods, adding features as pleasant surprises rather than billable additions. He can say yes to client requests more often, exploring possibilities that would have been too risky or time-consuming before.

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"With Gadget, Victoria Garland is the cream of the crop, because our timeline is fast, our costs are appropriate, and the technology is sound." Alex shared. "So much of our work would be completely impossible without Gadget."

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For Victoria Garland, Gadget unlocked an entirely new dimension of their business, transforming them from a theme-focused agency into a full-service development team capable of handling any client need — all while keeping their team small and their sanity intact.