UX & market discovery for a Shopify app

Learn how we uncovered that an "app lottery" market was the true cause of a 53% uninstall rate for the 4.9-star-rated app.

About the client

Rapidsearch is a bootstrapped Shopify app with a 4.9-star rating and "Built for Shopify" badge, founded in 2019.

It provides AI-powered search and filtering for 5,000+ merchants and handles 33 million daily queries.

Despite its technical excellence and 400+ five-star reviews, the small team operates in a "hyper-saturated" market, making scaling challenging.

The "same-day" leak

Rapidsearch faced a critical retention gap: 53% of users uninstalled the app on the same day they installed it. Often within minutes.

This "same-day uninstall" rate led to wasted acquisition costs and lost future revenue.

The team didn't know whether the uninstalls were caused by bugs, poor onboarding, or just the way the market works.

Discovery lab

We created a Discovery Lab where we go from idea to insight

Conduct market intelligence to identify untapped opportunities and hidden pain points within your current scaling efforts.
Evaluate technical feasibility for new feature sets to determine whether to improve, rebuild, or replace components.
Validate product-market fit through research and data to align stakeholders on a clear, evidence-based strategic direction.

Learn more

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UX & market discovery

We conducted a deep-dive audit to uncover these blind spots:

‍User interviews: to uncover pains, behaviors, and preferences

‍Expert intelligence: to provide insights and market data from e-commerce specialists

‍UX audit: to analyze the onboarding flow and user experience

Key results

Conducted in-depth UX & market discovery

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Identified "app lottery" market dynamics

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Provided strategic clarity on market limits

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Reduced marketing and acquisition waste

Strategic alignment

The project provided the evidence needed to stop chasing the unfixable same-day uninstall rate.

We uncovered that Rapidsearch operates in an "app lottery" reality, where users randomly choose competing apps and uninstall them after a bad first impression.

While technical sync improvements reduced uninstalls from 53% to 38%, our research delivered a "stop" signal for over-investing in impossible retention goals.