Shopify Builder Sundays

Thanks to the reminder from Neilda Gagné and Wenting Yong, I presented at Shopify #BuilderSundays today.

Honestly, I hadn’t planned to demo because the brand new architecture version of Joe Speaking wasn’t ready yet. After thinking for a while, I accepted the initiative and started preparing last night with Claude Code. (I felt guilty so that’s why I wore my PsyDuck hat!)

I treated it as a chance to update on Joe Speaking. And so far, it’s better than I expected. After the alpha release, in 37 days (including my 4-week vacation!):

• 286 sign-up users
• - 65 active users
• - 24 paid users
• - 36.9% paid conversion rate

All from organic traffic during a soft launch. No paid promotion. That’s incredible to me.

As I shared today, before moving to a bigger promotion campaign, the bottleneck is still stability, especially the live conversation feature. I know most of my users chose my app because of it. That’s what I’ve been working on for the past 2 weeks after returning to Ottawa. Unfortunately, even though I used the best models available, I couldn’t ship it yet. But I learned a lot from these failed attempts. I’m hoping to deliver it with Claude Code next week so I can finally focus more on distribution, like Mohamed Hatem DIABI has told me multiple times.

I believe Joe Speaking is a live example of using AI to solve your own problems in a niche domain that generic tools can’t match. Anna Gordiyevska also demoed how she built a watch app to record moments for her two babies! The real value of these technologies isn’t just efficiency. It’s letting us do things we simply couldn’t have done before.

(It was also great to finally meet David Wen in person. It really is a small world.)

This was also my third time attending Shopify #BuilderSundays. Thank you Shopify. It’s great to meet builders here in Ottawa. I hope this becomes a regular event so we can keep the community going and encourage more local builders.

By the way, Damian Polan and AGI Ventures Canada are preparing for the Hacker Cottage Weekend lakeside this summer! Looking forward to it. How will the world look in 158 days. 😁

Original post from LinkedIn: