I just bought a Shopify app

I closed on OrderBump last month. It's a Shopify app that does one-click upsells at checkout — a merchant offers an add-on at the moment of purchase and the customer accepts it without re-entering anything.

I spent most of this year on the other side of a transaction, answering diligence questions about a company I'd built. Doing it in reverse, on a compressed timeline, with my own money, was more instructive than the sale was.

Why this asset#

The thing that made OrderBump interesting wasn't the growth rate. It was who owned it.

The sellers ran a web development agency. The app was an output of that agency, not its purpose — a good product that was nobody's primary job. That's the specific shape I was looking for, and I'd describe it as: a healthy asset owned by people whose attention is elsewhere.

That's different from a distressed asset. Distressed means something is broken and you're betting you can fix it, which requires you to be right about the fix. Neglected means nothing is broken and nobody has been trying, which requires only that you show up. The second bet is much easier to make and much easier to be right about.

What I actually looked at#

Where the installs come from. I've written before that the Shopify app store is a search engine and the ranking is the business. So the first question is whether the traffic is organic app store search, and whether the position is earned by reviews and longevity or propped up by something temporary. If the installs come from the store's own search, that's an asset. If they came from a promotion, a partnership, or the sellers' agency clients, that's a relationship that may not transfer.

Churn by cohort, not in aggregate. Aggregate churn on a merchant product tells you almost nothing, because a chunk of it is merchants going out of business, which is a fact about ecommerce rather than about your product. What matters is whether merchants who are still trading are still paying.

How much of the product is in someone's head. The most common thing you buy without noticing is undocumented context — why a thing was built that way, which merchants are edge cases, what breaks quarterly. That doesn't appear in a data room and it's most of the transition risk.

Which platform layer it sits on. This one I care about more than I used to. A product that uses Shopify's APIs is in a different risk class than a product that depends on a specific hook Shopify happens to expose. Checkout is a place where the platform has strong opinions and an active roadmap. I priced that in. I'd note that I priced it in as a discount, not as a disqualifier, and we'll see whether that was calibrated correctly.

What happens in the first ninety days if I do nothing. The honest baseline. Not the plan, not the upside — what the asset does on its own while I'm learning it. Every acquisition thesis I've heard from other people is about what they'll add. Most of the return is in what was already there continuing to work.

The part that isn't diligence#

I bought this from people I knew from the internet. Not friends exactly — the ecosystem is small enough that if you've been operating in it for a few years, you know who's who and they know you.

That's the actual pipeline. This wasn't a marketplace listing or a broker deal. It was people who'd rather sell to someone they'd heard of, at a price that was fair rather than maximal, because the transaction was also a relationship.

I've been in the Shopify ecosystem since 2018 and running ecommerce since 2009, and the compounding return on that isn't expertise. It's that deals get shown to you. I don't think there's a shortcut and I don't think it's four months of work.

What I'm going to do with it#

Less than people expect. It's a good product that's been under-attended, and my first job is to not break it while I learn what it actually does. The ideas can wait until I've earned an opinion.

Ask me next year whether I held to that.