On this episode of saaslife.fm, Sam Schrup and Chris McAleenan talk about customers breaking things and the continuing saga between TextRetailer and Shopify ecosystem.

There’s nothing like customers interacting with your product because sometimes they’ll break it or give you insights on new features, cases, and new things that you need to tackle. Sam already has experience with the text-to-buy concept via TextRetailer, so he has gone from politely asking to begging Shopify for access to the Shop Pay wallet.

Highlights from this Episode:

• PipeTech: Tons of development, lots of progress, big performance improvements.
• Functional Testing: Who should do it and why - developers or actual customers?
• Surprise Deliverable: Sales demo with real customer data to envision using it.
• Why Shopify is very protective of entire checkout process, payment facilitation.
• Approval: Shopify authorizes use cases as sales channels/payment processing.
• Rebuild Hurdle: Initial app rejected because change requirements not met.
• TextRetailer vs. Postscript: One approved and other held to different standards.
• Text-to-Buy: Shopify forcing new concept, takes away TextRetailer’s uniqueness.

Links and Resources:

saaslife.fm

Sam Schrup on Twitter

Chris McAleenan on Twitter

TextRetailer

Textiful

PipeTech Project/Hub

Sewer Jetter

Waterproof Borescope

Adam Neumann (a16z says ‘WeBack’ to WeWork’s Neumann with its biggest check ever)

iPad Stand

Intro music by Monkey Warhol licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).