First App Launched · Builder’s Console Log 🛠️

First App Launched

Hello BCL Community!

I've done it, I shipped my first app! There was much rejoicing.

With this milestone reached I figured I'd speak to the experience getting to this point. First, I'm not a developer in any sense of the word. My recent background comes in two parts: five years at Shopify in various roles (tech support all the way to team lead), and five years at a Shopify Technology Partner as a project manager (our focus was building connectors to pass data from Shopify to/from ERP, 3PL, etc. systems). In that second role I had the privilege of working alongside an awesome dev team so while I can't code I understand the development process fairly well.

I was an AI naysayer until last July when I decided to actually figure out what it could do (instead of forming an opinion from secondhand info). I bounced around figuring out how it all worked and tested solutions like Cursor alongside different LLMs. Once I started to see what the possibilities were for a non-coder like me I got very excited. This is when I found Corbin's videos which helped immensely in connecting all these AI tools together. His content formed the runway and from there I took off.

There were two objectives I wanted to achieve:

1. Make something I had domain expertise in

2. Provide a solution to a problem I had faced before

After some thought I came up with CSV Shield, an app that validates and fixes errors with Shopify product CSV files (what merchants use to upload products to their stores). In working with merchants over the years I faced CSV file problems constantly. Most of these product files were manually copy/pasted from different data sources leading to formatting and errant data that prevented the file from being uploaded to Shopify.

What CSV Shield does is scan the file and automatically fixes all those issues. Yes, I know this is a very boring app, but it provides immense value to merchants and, much to my surprise, no app like this existed in the Shopify app store. The proto-version of this came out of my time with the tech partner; basically we built this type of logic into all our data connectors to keep data clean. So, I just riffed on that for my app.

The entire build process was done using Cursor and more recently Claude over a month's time. Both worked well overall, but if you're not a coder you do burn through tokens quickly and hit limits fast. I tried to work within the constraints of the Cursor/Claude $20 plans but ultimately switched to the API so I could enable pay-as-you-go just to keep working. In the end I probably spent about $400 (Canadian) to get the app finished. However, I see the cost as an investment at this stage and know how to better use these tools for the next build.

All this to say, if I can do this anyone can. If you want to check out the app page I've included the link below (not an ad, just for reference).

I do have some other observations I'll share in a follow-up post but will leave things here for now. Huge thanks to the community here and Corbin for the shared knowledge that makes this all possible. Build, build, build!

App Link: https://apps.shopify.com/csv-shield (not an ad)

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