E26: The Bootstrapped Playbook for Dominating the Shopify App Store with PJ Celis

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This episode of The Saas Operators with PJ Celis, founder of Judge.me, is a clean playbook on how to win a platform by aligning to its incentives, not yours. It reframed a lot for me.

The simple idea that powers everything

Judge.me grew to ~$13M ARR, bootstrapped, by optimizing for Shopify the platform, not SaaS best practices.

PJ’s core belief: capitalism should drive prices down. Charge low, create a ton of consumer surplus, and own the distribution channel where that strategy compounds.

On the Shopify App Store, distribution follows a power law. Number one gets a multiple of attention and installs. If the goal is to be number one, you design the whole company around what keeps you there.

Optimize for Shopify’s incentives

What does Shopify want at the top of each category?

• Low cost for merchants
• Great support at scale
• Full compliance
• Broad coverage of use cases across the entire market
• Interoperability instead of a closed suite

Judge.me chose to be the “ideal partner” through that lens. They even buy App Store ads mostly because it benefits Shopify. The result is sustained ranking and free demand. For the first 9.5 years they did no marketing and no sales. Only product and support.

The strategy assumption behind this: platforms try to commoditize their complements. If apps are affordable and excellent, Shopify can capture more value in its own plans and primitives. You win by helping them do that.

Price is the innovation

In a commodity category like reviews, the APIs look similar across vendors. The durable edge is delivering the same (or “good enough”) capability at a much lower price with world class support. That forces a decade of cost discipline, not a decade of feature one-upmanship. The price is the product.

• Flat $15 plans mean you will lose money on some large customers
• But the market share you gain and the ranking you protect are worth more
• Low price creates word of mouth in forums and communities because it feels like “free money” to switch

Pick one go to market and refuse the rest

You cannot simultaneously optimize for App Store discovery and enterprise sales. The price, motion, team structure, and roadmap incentives pull in different directions.

Judge.me chose one motion. No RFPs. No enterprise sales team. No paid social. If a second motion requires different pricing or different storytelling, it erodes the thing that keeps you number one in the store.

Stay narrow to stay first

Staying inside the “reviews” box is part of the value proposition to Shopify. Merchants want to mix and match. Shopify wants an open marketplace, not bundles that trap merchants. Judge.me integrates with everyone and does not chase loyalty or adjacent suite features. That also gives competitors an escape route upmarket, which reduces price wars where Judge.me lives.

Categories still open for a “Judge.me strategy”

PJ’s short list where a low-price, App Store-first approach can still produce an 8-figure outcome:

• Email
• Reviews
• Helpdesk
• Possibly shipping logistics and a few other large primitives

The pattern he watches: things Shopify has built or invested in, but does not treat as a core revenue driver. If Shopify built a basic version, there is demand. If it is not core to Shopify’s P&L, they prefer a great third party to dominate it cheaply.

Bootstrapping is an advantage here

He put in ~8.8K personally before profitability. Being bootstrapped let him make “indirect bets” with long payback that a VC board would never greenlight. You cannot deploy $100M to go faster at this strategy. You can only do more of the same. Focus is the speed multiplier.

Reinvestment over distributions

They grow revenue a bit over 40% with ~10% profit. Almost everything else gets reinvested to protect the number one slot and fund two new “secrets” he is building. He pays himself modestly. Rationale: every marginal profit dollar is taxed anyway, and compounding the moat is a better use of cash.

Defense against the only real threat

The main risk of a low-price winner is internal drift. Bureaucracy expands to fill the surplus. To fight that, PJ tried EOS, then hired a CEO for 10 months. Neither stuck.

The next move is “founder mode” with software-enforced accountability. Daily, simple cadences. Fewer teams. Automated rules. The goal is to remove the need for the founder to only show up as the bad cop. Pace comes from visibility. Quality comes from constraints.

Notes on Shopify’s broader strategy

This came up a lot. If you accept “commoditize complements” as Shopify’s long-run incentive, then:

• Expect pressure toward openness in payments, capital, and other primitives
• Expect App Store winners that keep prices low and support high
• Expect suite vendors to move upmarket to justify higher prices and heavier sales motions

That tension is healthy. Platforms need both ends. High-priced innovators for the edge cases. Low-priced executors for the mainstream. Over time, the mainstream grows.

What I’m taking with me

• Distribution is a power law. Design the company around the channel you can dominate.
• If the platform is your channel, optimize for its utility function, not yours.
• Pick one motion. Refuse everything that breaks it.
• In commodity categories, price and support are the real innovation.
• Simplicity scales better than ambition. Do fewer things so the weakest link does not cap the whole pipe.
• Build systems that keep your org fast when success tries to slow it down.

A founder’s question to close

If you believe your category will commoditize, do you want to be the one compressing the price on your terms, or do you want to be compressed by someone else who designed their whole company to do exactly that?

That’s the clarity PJ brought. And it’s a useful mirror for how the rest of us are playing our games.