I built a Shopify app for a niche I don't understand. Here's what happened.
The honest story of launching StaffPing: one paying customer, a pricing mistake, $35 in ads that barely worked, and the lucky ChatGPT citation that brought my only real user.
On March 29, 2026, a Shopify store in Egypt installed a WhatsApp notification app I had launched three days earlier. They uninstalled it within hours. Then they reinstalled it two days later, went straight to the highest plan, and twenty days after that had sent 15,000 WhatsApp pings to people on their team.
That store is 100% of my paying customer base right now. This post is the honest story of how I got here, what I've tried that hasn't worked, and the question I still can't answer.
The prologue: Fasfy
Before StaffPing, there was Fasfy. A Shopify app I built a few years ago that was essentially a connector for Fathom Analytics. I couldn't call it "Fathom Analytics for Shopify" because Fathom's policy is that unofficial tools can't use their name, so I went with Fasfy for search and wrote "FA - Privacy First Analytics" on the listing for the humans who were actually looking for it.
I tried to charge $1. Nobody paid. I tried to earn through Fathom's affiliate program. Didn't work either. So I parked it. Fasfy is still on the Shopify App Store today with about 25 merchants quietly using it. No revenue. No churn. No attention from me.
I mention Fasfy because it's the reason I knew what not to do when I started building StaffPing. I had already spent my "build something and hope people find it" chip. If I was going to try Shopify apps again, I needed to be more deliberate about what I built and who it was for.
Except I wasn't. Not really. You'll see.
How I picked the niche
In early 2026 I wanted to try Shopify apps again. I'm a backend Laravel developer. I like building the parts that do the heavy lifting, not the parts that get styled. I do not enjoy making storefront or theme apps. So I knew whatever I built would live on the operational side of a Shopify store, not the customer-facing side.
What I didn't know was which operational side.
So I did what a lot of builders do in 2026: I asked an AI. I opened ChatGPT and asked it to do extensive research on the Shopify App Store and find underserved categories. I wanted an answer like "here is a category with real demand and weak supply." I got a few candidates back. One of them was Staff Notifications.
I went and looked. There were apps for Slack. Apps for Microsoft Teams. Apps for Telegram. Apps for email with filtering. But when I searched for anything that positioned itself as "WhatsApp for staff," I couldn't find a single listing. Every WhatsApp app on the App Store was about messaging customers. Order confirmations. Abandoned cart recovery. Marketing broadcasts. Not one of them said "this is for your team, not your customers."
That was the gap.
Then I went hunting for evidence that the pain was real. ChatGPT and Claude both surfaced the same handful of community threads. A Shopify community post from a store owner asking how to get WhatsApp alerts when any order is placed. A Reddit thread titled "Order notification on WhatsApp." Another Reddit thread from someone struggling to set up WhatsApp groups for their shop. The most specific one was a thread from a flower shop owner in Phuket who laid out exactly what he wanted: order details sent to his staff WhatsApp group in Thai, so his team could start prepping deliveries the moment a customer ordered.
That was a handful of threads. Not thousands. Not hundreds. A handful. But it was something.
So I made up my mind and started building.
What I built
StaffPing is a Laravel app that listens to Shopify order webhooks and sends WhatsApp messages through Meta's WhatsApp Business API to whoever the merchant has configured. You can filter by order value, shipping country, payment method, product tags. You can route different types of orders to different team members. Every message is a WhatsApp template that Meta has to approve before it can be sent.
I put up staffping.net around the same time. Simple blog, a few posts written with Claude Code and reviewed by me, mostly technical and operational content about Shopify notifications. No grand content strategy. Just something on the internet that existed when someone looked for me.
The app launched on the Shopify App Store on March 26, 2026.
Day 3: the uninstall
On March 29, two Egyptian merchants installed. One of them was a perfume brand. Within hours, they uninstalled. The uninstall feedback in the App Store said:
Limited or missing features
I emailed them and asked what was missing. They replied.
They said the WhatsApp message was missing things they needed to actually do their job. Customer name. Address. Phone number. Payment status. For COD orders they wanted to see the order total. For paid orders they wanted to see "Payment Status: paid" clearly.
This was useful feedback. It was also a little humbling. I had shipped an app that couldn't tell a merchant whether the order they were about to fulfill had been paid for, which is maybe the single most important thing an operations person needs to know before they send someone out with a package.
I rewrote the WhatsApp template. Meta approved the new version quickly. I emailed the merchant to let them know.
On March 31, they reinstalled. They picked the $79 plan, which was the highest flat tier I had: 5,000 WhatsApp messages per month.
The pricing mistake
A few days later, another email from the same merchant. The $79 plan wasn't going to be enough. They were a high-volume store, and they were expecting to exceed 5,000 messages every month. Was there a higher plan?
Here is where I have to admit I had not done the homework I should have done before launch.
When I priced StaffPing, I picked numbers that felt reasonable: $79/month for 5,000 messages. That works out to roughly $0.016 per message. I had assumed, without actually checking, that WhatsApp Business API messages cost somewhere around $0.02 across the board and that this would leave me a comfortable margin.
Then I actually looked at Meta's pricing page.
WhatsApp charges per conversation, and the rates vary dramatically by country. Egypt, where my first merchant is based, is $0.0036 per utility conversation. That's cheap, which is lucky for me. But the UK is around $0.022. France is closer to $0.03. Brazil, India, Indonesia all have their own rates. And Meta classifies conversations into marketing, utility, authentication, and service categories, each with different pricing.
If a UK merchant had signed up for my $79/5,000-messages plan, I would have been losing money from day one.
I had built a pricing model on zero research. The first high-volume merchant to hit my system was lucky enough to be in a country where the economics worked in my favor. If they had been anywhere else, I would have shipped a business that couldn't survive its own success.
So I rebuilt pricing from scratch. Usage-based, country-aware. What I charge each merchant now reflects what their traffic actually costs Meta, with a margin on top. An Egyptian merchant pays a rate appropriate to Egypt. A UK merchant would pay a rate appropriate to the UK. Every merchant's pricing scales with their country and their volume, not a flat tier that breaks when the traffic mix changes.
A few things I learned the hard way while building this:
Shopify's AppUsageRecord API only accepts charges to two decimal places. You can't bill someone $0.0036. So I aggregate usage over a day and bill a single rounded total.
Increasing a merchant's monthly usage cap post-creation is possible, but it requires the merchant to re-approve the new cap via a confirmation URL. That's by design on Shopify's side. It means you can't silently scale a merchant's ceiling, you have to bring them back into the flow to agree.
And one surprise that worked in the merchant's favor: Meta gives you a 24-hour free service window. If the recipient of a template message replies to it, every message you send to that recipient in the next 24 hours is free. So merchants whose staff actively respond to pings end up saving money without doing anything. I didn't know this when I launched. I found out while debugging why certain messages weren't showing up in my billing logs.
All of this deserves its own post and I'll write one. For now: usage-based pricing shipped. The merchant moved onto it. They're currently at 14,852 messages this month with 10 days to go, so they'll land somewhere around 22,000 to 23,000. They're scaling without a ceiling.
What I tried next: Shopify App Store ads
With one paying customer, I was now wondering how to get more installs and paying merchants. So I turned toward Shopify App Store ads.
I ran three campaigns.
Campaign 1: App awareness. Launched April 2. Placement: the Staff Notifications category page. Daily budget: $10. Total spend: $2. Impressions: 47. Installs: 0.
Forty-seven impressions in two weeks. The Staff Notifications category page is basically a dead room. The top app in that category has fewer than 35 reviews after nearly a decade of existence. That's not a traffic channel. That's a cemetery.
Campaign 2: Going all in. Launched April 3. Placement: the App Store homepage. Daily budget: $10. Countries: all. Total spend: $25. Impressions: 886. Installs: 2. Cost per install: $12.50. One of the two churned within a few days.
So I spent $25 to get one retained install, and I have no idea if that merchant is even a real user. Global homepage ads cast too wide a net. I restricted the targeting to MENA and adjacent markets (Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Togo). Impressions dropped. Quality didn't obviously improve.
Campaign 3: Search page testing. Launched April 10. Placement: App Store search results. Daily budget: $10. Keywords I thought merchants might be searching for: "admin notifications," "admin whatsapp," "cod alert," "cod notification," "merchant notification," "merchant whatsapp," "order alert," "order notifications," "staff notifications," "staff whatsapp." Total spend: $8. Impressions: 1,658. Installs: 2. Cost per install: $4.
Search ads are clearly cheaper and more targeted than homepage ads. But 2 installs in 8 days isn't a machine I can feed money into and see growth.
Across all three campaigns: $35 spent, 4 installs, at least one already churned. Net: maybe three real merchants in my universe from paid, one of whom I already know I won't hear from again.
What actually worked, and I didn't even set out to do it
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I asked the merchant how they found the app. I assumed it was either the App Store or maybe one of the ads. Their reply:
We actually found your app through ChatGPT.
That's the whole answer.
They didn't find me through the App Store. They didn't find me through search. They didn't find me through ads. They found me because ChatGPT had indexed one of the blog posts on staffping.net and surfaced it when they asked an AI how to solve their operational problem.
I'm not sure what to do with this yet, which is part of why I'm writing this post. My one paying customer is a paying customer because an AI assistant happened to cite content I wrote mostly as an afterthought. That's not a channel I know how to repeat deliberately. It's a lucky hit that I'd like to turn into a motion, but I don't yet know how.
What I know after 20 days
Here's the full state of StaffPing as of April 18, 2026.
One paying customer. Egyptian perfume brand. Six people configured as recipients on their team, though they usually route to only two at any given time and swap the active recipients four or five times a day by logging into the app. I've asked them if they want a scheduler to automate that rotation. No reply on that yet. 14,852 messages this month. Pro plan, usage-based, trending toward around $100/month in billed usage. Called the app "helpful for our operations" in their own words. Want WhatsApp Groups support, which Meta doesn't expose via the API to new partners yet. Found me through ChatGPT.
One light user. UAE-based store. Installed a few days ago. Six messages in six days. Probably a solo founder, not a team. Not my ICP.
One ghost. Installed day one, never logged back in, never replied to my outreach emails. I have no idea why they installed or why they stopped.
Four paid installs, three retained. From $35 in Shopify App Store ads.
Zero installs from the cold outreach I started this week. LinkedIn DMs to operations leads at Egyptian Shopify stores, with a database I built of active MENA merchants. Too early to judge but nothing yet.
Starting to post on X and LinkedIn. Mostly because a more experienced founder told me I had to, and because posting publicly is a forcing function to write about what I'm learning. I installed X on my phone for this. I did not want to.
That's it. That's the entire state of the business.
The question I can't answer yet
My one paying customer didn't find me by searching for what I built. They found me because an AI had indexed my blog. That's a lucky hit, not a repeatable motion.
The merchant who wakes up tomorrow, realizes their warehouse team missed an order, and opens the Shopify App Store specifically looking for "WhatsApp staff notifications"... I haven't met them yet. I don't know if they exist.
If they do exist, I don't know how they describe the problem to themselves. Do they search "whatsapp order notification shopify"? Do they search "notify team new order"? Do they search something I haven't thought of? I don't know. My search ads surfaced 1,658 impressions across a bag of keywords I guessed at, and two of those became installs. That's not a clear signal either way.
I don't know why my second user sends one message a day while my paying customer sends hundreds. I don't know why the merchant who installed first vanished. I don't know whether the pain I built for is real for a thousand stores, or ten, or just the one I already have.
What I do know is that building an app is the easy part. I'm a backend developer. I can build. Figuring out who it's for, what they call themselves, how they describe what they want, and whether enough of them exist to sustain the product is the hard part. And I'm doing that part in public, because I don't know how else to do it.
If you run operations at a Shopify store
If you run operations at a Shopify store, especially a high-volume one, especially one in MENA or South Asia where WhatsApp is how your team actually communicates, I want to hear from you.
What channel do you use for internal order notifications today? Email? Slack? A team WhatsApp group that someone cobbled together with a personal number? What breaks about it? What would you want a tool like this to do?
Email me: zubairmohsin33@gmail.com. I read every reply. I'm not selling anything in the reply. I'm trying to figure out if what works for one Egyptian perfume brand works for anyone else, and the fastest way to know that is to ask the people doing the actual job.
If you want to try StaffPing, it's on the Shopify App Store.