Mat De Sousa was still an engineering student when he started WideBundle in mid-2020. It was not his first attempt at building for the Shopify ecosystem. Three earlier apps had gone nowhere, and each one taught him something about what merchants actually pay for. WideBundle was the fourth try, and this time he picked a problem that store owners already understood: getting shoppers to buy more in a single order.

Rather than over-engineer the first version, he shipped a basic but working app in about two weeks, focused entirely on the bundling widget that merchants cared about most. That let him put it in front of real store owners quickly and start collecting feedback while the product was still rough. Early users came from Facebook groups full of Shopify sellers, which gave him a direct line to the exact people he was building for.

The bigger growth lever turned out to be the Shopify App Store itself. By optimizing his listing and earning steady reviews, WideBundle climbed to roughly the fourth spot for its most important keyword, all without spending on ads. That organic ranking fed a consistent stream of installs, and a free trial that converted to paid at about 40 percent did the rest. In under a year the app reached $25,134 in monthly recurring revenue with more than 2,000 users, over 1,650 of them paying.

Mat was unusually open about the parts that did not work. Churn sat around 30 percent, and he admitted he never properly fixed it or revisited pricing beyond a single bump from $12.99 to $14.99. The app ran on one flat plan that charged a small merchant the same as a large one, which left money on the table and made the high churn harder to absorb. His honest read: the growth masked the leak for a while, but a churn problem that size eventually caps how big the customer base can get.

The throughline of his story is speed and focus over polish. He validated demand the cheap way, built only the core feature first, and used a marketplace he already understood instead of inventing a new acquisition channel. The failures before WideBundle were not wasted; they were how he learned to spot a problem worth solving inside Shopify.