The problem
For years, the Craftberry team has worked to build a strong relationship with their clients. They’ve consistently delivered high-quality work, providing Shopify merchants with theme development and customizations. Despite being a small team, their workload was steady, which was both a blessing and a curse.
With all the time they spent supporting existing clients, the agency was stunted in its growth. The team had been building themes for their clients for years, but they wanted to expand their efforts to include more custom app development, giving their clients more flexibility in how they could customize their stores. They found themselves pouring too much time into their backlog of requests or maintaining existing projects, which prevented them from expanding into new services.
The more time they spent on their existing clients, the less time they had to take on full-stack app development. Maintaining any new projects they chose to pursue would also be out of the question. It was a losing effort.
Then Preslav Nikov, founder and CEO at Craftberry, came across Gadget through a LinkedIn post. One of his connections was boasting about how much time Gadget had saved their team, and how easy all the setup was. Skeptical but hopeful, Preslav decided to see if the tool would truly save as much time as it claimed.
The solution
As a first project, Preslav decided to experiment with a low-priority app request from a client, that until now, the team had never found the time to build. The project consisted of creating a fundraiser leaderboard for Bang Cookies that would allow schools to host fundraisers, while students could track how much money they had raised. The app would track and highlight top contributors based on how many cookies they had sold, fostering competition and engagement within each school or district.
“That first project was instantly a success. It was immediately clear that Gadget is really powerful.” Preslav shared. “It just makes it so easy to set up and build an app. It removed the barrier by giving us all the infrastructure and all of the functionalities we’d never had time to build.” Gadget even offered live support and pair programming to help them out when they ran into problems. Suddenly, custom app development was an option for Craftberry and their clients.
Without Gadget, the team only had one developer who was comfortable working with AWS. Because Gadget offered fully hosted infrastructure, including a pre-packaged backend and frontend, the team could completely skip the setup for every custom app. But beyond that, all of the scaling and maintenance was handled for them — something that had been holding them back with their existing clients. And with a built-in Shopify connection, there was no question, this tool would be a game changer.
They began using it for all the projects they hadn’t had a chance to tackle. Preslav says, “Before starting to use Gadget, we didn't do as many private app builds, just because the barrier change was higher. And now with Gadget, it's much easier for us. We’re taking on more projects and solving many more client problems.”
The results
In just a few weeks, the team could see Gadget would be a major contributor to their growth.
More projects
With Gadget, the team was able to finally take on new challenges because it cut their app build time in half. “Projects that previously would have taken us 200 hours were only taking 100 hours. Gadget literally doubled the number of projects we could ship.”
Without Gadget, there was only one developer that could build full-stack infrastructure from scratch. Since Gadget instantly provides a fully connected backend and frontend, suddenly the whole team of developers at Craftberry can dive into custom app development, meaning they have officially expanded their offerings to include app development.
The team is no longer bogged down by a repetitive workload, and the team has grown significantly. According to Preslav, “Since starting to use Gadget, we’ve gone from a team of 10 to a team of 22.”
“There’s just less room for error with Gadget. Because everything was built to work together, there’s a much lower risk that anything will break unexpectedly.” Preslav says. “Gadget is a competitive advantage, especially when it comes to building backend functionalities and apps. It's stable, there are less bugs, less time for QA and troubleshooting. It has totally replaced AWS for our custom apps.”
More revenue
The expansion into app development has directly translated to more clients, and of course, more money. Since introducing app development into their business, Craftberry has seen a huge jump in revenue in just the past year. “Gadget opened up a whole new channel for us, and we’ve seen more than a 30% increase in revenue as a direct result of Gadget projects. Indirectly, there’s been even more.”
Because projects now take half the time to complete, Gadget has also equipped the agency with some additional negotiation power. Craftberry can provide a higher level of service to their clients at a lower cost by charging on a per-project basis. They’ve been able to drop their prices while increasing their margins, which means their clients pay less, while Craftberry still makes more. It’s a win/win all around.
Overall, Gadget has proven to be a game-changer for Craftberry, allowing them to expand their offerings, take on more projects, and achieve significant revenue growth.
About the agency
Craftberry is a Shopify Plus agency that has been working with merchants since 2015. They’ve launched more than 700 projects, including store-wide themes, minor liquid customizations, and full-stack custom Shopify apps. They assist merchants with everything that goes into running a Shopify store, including engineering, design, general strategy, and overall customer experience.
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