We built Shopify themes to $20k/month. Now we have to pivot.
We have been building Shopify themes for the last few years, mostly through the Shopify Theme Store.
For a while, that business worked better than I expected. Our themes were doing around $10k-$20k/month, and the model felt fairly straightforward: build a good theme, get it approved, keep improving it, and let the marketplace handle a lot of the discovery.
That is an oversimplification, of course. Theme work is not passive. You still have to design the thing, support it, maintain it, write documentation, make demos, deal with edge cases, and keep up with Shopify changes.
But the Theme Store gives you something extremely valuable: people are already there to buy a theme.
That sounds obvious, but I do not think I fully appreciated it until we started trying to sell outside of it.
Inside the Theme Store, the category is already understood. The buyer knows what a theme is. They are actively comparing options. They trust Shopify as the place they are buying from. The store also creates a clear buying path, a legitimacy signal, and a reason for merchants to believe the product will work.
That trust layer matters.
The problem is that the marketplace is getting more crowded. There are more theme companies, more polished demos, and more options in nearly every category. Sales have been slowing for us, and it has made the dependency more obvious.
We still believe in Shopify themes. We are still launching more of them. But we are also trying to build a business that is not entirely dependent on one marketplace listing performing well.
That is part of why we launched Slab outside the Shopify Theme Store.
Slab is our new Shopify theme from Brickspace Lab. The goal is to make it feel less like a fixed demo you customize around, and more like a flexible storefront foundation for merchants, developers, and agencies. We want people to be able to build a store that feels custom without turning every project into a fully custom theme.
We are also testing a different pricing model. Slab is $25/month, billed annually. Once you have the theme, you can keep using it for life. You only need to stay subscribed if you want ongoing updates. We are also making it free for developers who apply, because we want more technical Shopify builders using it, testing it, and helping us figure out where it should go next.
The product direction makes sense to me.
The distribution is the hard part.
When you sell a theme outside the marketplace, you have to answer questions the marketplace normally absorbs for you.
Why should someone trust this theme if it is not in the Theme Store? How do they know it will be maintained? What happens with updates? Is the license legitimate? Is support real? Why should they buy from us directly instead of choosing one of the hundreds of options already listed on Shopify?
None of those are impossible questions, but you have to answer them deliberately. A marketplace compresses the sales process. Direct distribution stretches it back out.
That is what we are feeling now.
With Slab, we are trying to build the missing pieces around the product: better demos, more presets, more documentation, short product videos, founder-led posts, developer access, and clearer pages explaining how the theme works.
We are also building around it. Theme Skill is our open-source attempt to make AI-assisted Shopify page building more practical by giving tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex better theme context. Catalog is our design reference library for Shopify and ecommerce stores. The broader idea is that references, themes, presets, and AI-assisted implementation should sit closer together.
That is the long-term thesis.
The shorter-term reality is that we are learning how to earn attention for something the marketplace used to help people find.
That has been the biggest lesson so far. Building for a marketplace teaches you a lot about product quality, support, category constraints, and competition. It does not automatically teach you how to build an audience, create demand, or make people care before they are already shopping.
We are trying to build that muscle now.
I am curious if anyone here has made a similar transition from marketplace-first to direct distribution.
If you have, what actually worked? Content, SEO, YouTube, partnerships, affiliates, developer community, paid ads, something else?
The part that resonates is that the Theme Store was quietly doing your demand generation, category education, and trust signaling, and now all three are on you. Selling direct is less a pricing problem than a "who already wants this and why" problem.
A couple of things that tend to help when you leave a marketplace. First, capture intent before the sale, not after. A simple email capture on the Slab page (even just "get notified when we ship X") gives you a direct channel you own, which is the thing the marketplace never let you keep. Second, the free-developer cohort you are onboarding is your best research asset right now. Instead of waiting for them to volunteer feedback, ask each one a couple of structured questions when they apply: what they are building, what made them look outside the Theme Store, what would make them recommend it. That turns "helping us figure out where it should go" into answers you can actually read and segment.
Full disclosure, I build a small tool for exactly that kind of email capture and onboarding-question flow (Lighthouse.build), so I am biased. But you do not need it to start. A form and a spreadsheet get you most of the way. The point is owning the direct relationship and the why, since that is the muscle the marketplace let you skip. Good luck with Slab.
The reframe that helped me when I hit a similar ceiling on a tiny indie app: separate "the product is mature" from "the channel is saturating." Sounds like you have the first thing solved — themes at $20k/mo through the store is real product-market fit. What's actually crowded is the discovery channel, not the demand for good themes. So the pivot question may not be "what next thing do we build" but "what owned channel can carry the buyer trust the marketplace used to give us for free." Agencies, niche communities, or a single high-trust partner often do that without changing the core product at all.
Pivoting from a $20k/mo product is brutal. Was it Shopify changing the theme rules or marketplace saturation? The "platform decides your fate" risk is what scares me about building on Meta/WhatsApp.
I think it is mostly market saturation in the theme store.
Saturation + platform dependency is a brutal combo — you're competing on a marketplace whose rules can change overnight. Are you pivoting off-Shopify entirely, or to a different wedge within the ecosystem?
Pivots are where a lot of agencies earn their keep — the initial build tends to be cleaner when there's a real constraint (like starting over). What direction are you leaning for the pivot? If it's moving toward SaaS or a custom tool, happy to share what the build-to-launch timeline looks like from our side.
This really resonates with me. I've sold on a few different marketplaces and you're absolutely right that building in a marketplace teaches you product quality but not distribution. The trust factor is huge when you go direct, and I think your approach of building an ecosystem around Slab is smart. Have you considered building in public as a way to establish that trust before the full launch?
The dependency inversion you're describing has the same shape as regulatory risk for physical businesses.
A restaurant, a healthcare practice, a contractor — they're one legislative change away from needing to retool their operations overnight. The problem isn't that the rules change. It's that they find out from their accountant six months after the relevant bill cleared committee.
Your situation is the platform version of that: Shopify's ecosystem was an asset until it changed the terms. The skill you built (themes, support, documentation) transferred fine. The distribution didn't.
Building a tool for the legislative side of this: you pick the categories that affect your business, it monitors federal bills in Congress and alerts you when something relevant moves. Same core insight — the dependency kills you, not the change itself.
Early access at billwatch-landing.vercel.app if it's relevant to any of your future ventures.
The trust point you’re describing is exactly why marketplace dependency is so dangerous — you don’t realize how much of the sales job Shopify was doing for you until you have to do it yourself.
One parallel I keep seeing with SaaS businesses: the channel that got you to traction almost never scales you past it. The marketplace gave you product-market fit validation, which is genuinely valuable. But the next stage is building a distribution layer you actually own.
For what it’s worth, the agency angle seems like your fastest path. Agencies already have merchant trust, they need flexible foundations for client work, and they evaluate tools differently than solo merchants — they’re buying time and margin, not features. You’re not asking them to trust a theme they’ve never heard of; you’re asking them to try a tool that makes their projects easier.
I’m building a SaaS valuation tool and going through a similar “now figure out distribution from scratch” phase. Curious whether the developer-first angle with Theme Skill is already bringing in agency inquiries, or still early.
The trust gap is real, but it usually collapses to one sentence the page either answers or dodges: "what happens to my store in 18 months if you stop maintaining this." Inside the Store, Shopify silently answers that. Outside, your page has to.
Most direct theme sites bury the answer in a FAQ. Put it in the hero, named, with a number. Something like "we ship a Slab update every X weeks, here is the public changelog since launch." Not a badge, not a promise, a count. That single proof beats five testimonials because it addresses the exact reflex that makes a merchant hesitate. Subscription pricing makes this question more urgent, not less, so answer it before they ask it silently and leave.
Thomas, this hits home. I’m currently transitioning from building internal Shopify infrastructure to releasing it as a standalone asset. The 'trust' point is the most underrated aspect of leaving the marketplace. I've realized that outside the Store, I'm not just selling an engine; I'm selling an 'agency multiplier' that saves their devs 60+ hours of custom work per client. Making that value proposition the 'Hero' of your site—rather than just the features—seems to be the only way to replace that 'marketplace trust.' Curious, are you seeing better conversion from the developers finding you via your AI tools versus cold traffic?
Your point about marketplaces teaching you product quality but not audience building really hits home. I've been selling on marketplaces for a while now and that same realization happened to me recently. The subscription model sounds smart for reducing that one time payment friction. Have you considered building in public around your existing customer base to create some initial momentum for Slab?
This is a massive psychological shift, Thomas. Moving from a marketplace where you compete on features to direct distribution where you compete on attention is brutal. Inside the Theme Store, Shopify handles the trust. Outside of it, your main job is manufacturing that trust from scratch.
Trying to convince a solo merchant to buy an off-marketplace theme on a monthly subscription is playing on hard mode. They want the safety of Shopify.
Your real buyers are Shopify agencies and freelancers. For them, Slab isn't just a theme; it's a margin multiplier. If Slab lets them build a "custom-feeling" site in 20 hours instead of 80, you aren’t costing them $25/month—you’re making them thousands of dollars per client. Position Slab as the ultimate developer boilerplate.
You’re already doing this with Catalog and Theme Skill, which is awesome. In direct B2B, free tools drive premium sales.
The dev community is currently obsessed with dialing in local environments for AI tools like Cursor and Claude. Lean into Theme Skill. Drop short, tactical videos or write posts on X showing exactly how an agency dev can use Cursor + Theme Skill to spin up a custom landing page in Slab in under two minutes. Give away the AI context for free, but use Slab as the perfect canvas to showcase it.
You built a great engine; now you just have to build the road.
Thanks for sharing this, Thomas. The marketplace dependency thing really resonates — it's easy to confuse "the marketplace is working" with "our marketing is working" until one day it's not.
On the distribution side: I'd put some chips on SEO for Slab. People searching for Shopify themes are already high intent. Long-tail queries around specific use cases can be surprisingly effective even with low volume per keyword.
Also curious if you've thought about reaching out to Shopify agencies directly. There are tons of agencies building stores for clients who need flexible themes. Could be a faster channel than waiting for organic rankings to build up.
I lived this exact transition in the Microsoft partner ecosystem for almost 20 years at Henson Group. The marketplace (Microsoft AppSource, the partner directory, co-sell pipeline) absorbs trust, category education, and procurement friction. The minute you sell direct, you inherit all three. What worked for us was leaning into founder-led content and case studies, not paid ads. Specifically: long-form product breakdowns from the team who built the thing, real customer logos with concrete outcomes, and a developer-focused channel (open source projects, technical docs, sample repos) that brought builders to us before they were shopping. Your Theme Skill and Catalog assets sound like the right shape for that. The other unlock is partnerships with agencies and freelancers who already have merchant trust. They become the distribution layer the Theme Store used to be.
The real shift here might be reframing "where buyers find us" as "where buyers already arrive with intent to spend." On my solo iOS side project — a lightweight memo tool — I noticed the same thing in miniature: installs from App Store search converted to active use at maybe 4x the rate of installs from a blog backlink, even when the blog drove more raw downloads. The marketplace isn't just a channel; it's the buying-mood. The pivots I've watched succeed rebuilt that "I'm already here to buy" context first — often via an adjacent marketplace or a partner who lends their intent-traffic — rather than recreating the Store experience on a standalone site. Curious which direction you're leaning: adjacent marketplace, partner-channel, or direct-with-content?
This is honestly one of the hardest things to accept as a builder — realizing the thing users care about isn’t always the thing you originally built for
I’ve been experiencing a smaller version of this recently and it completely changed how I position my product
Thanks for sharing your experience
The Shopify theme marketplace dependency risk is real and I don't think it gets talked about enough. When a platform controls your distribution, a policy change or algorithm shift can restructure your entire business overnight.
The fact that you got to $20k/month means you have customers, proof of demand, and a brand. That's the hardest part. The pivot from there is a much better starting position than most founders have.
What direction are you considering?
The trust problem you're describing when leaving the marketplace is real — the marketplace was doing the credibility work silently. One thing that's worked in similar transitions: partnering with Shopify agency owners directly rather than trying to reach merchants cold. Agencies already have trust with their clients and actively need flexible foundations they can white-label.
the built-in demand thing is so real. the store hands you buyer intent + trust for free and you don't really feel it until you're selling cold somewhere else. curious what direction you're pivoting
This is a strong shift, and the trust point is probably the real center of it.
Inside the Shopify Theme Store, Shopify carries a lot of the buyer confidence for you. Outside the marketplace, the product has to carry that confidence itself: brand, demos, docs, update policy, support, developer access, and proof that the theme will not disappear after purchase.
That is why I would be careful not to position Slab only as “a Shopify theme outside the Theme Store.” The stronger angle is a storefront foundation for merchants, developers, and agencies who want something more flexible than a fixed demo but less painful than a custom build.
The naming is worth pressure-testing too. Slab has a nice builder/foundation feel, but for direct distribution, the brand has to do more trust work than it did inside the marketplace. A name like Auryxa .com could give the same product a more polished, premium commerce feel while still leaving room for themes, presets, references, and AI-assisted implementation under one broader brand.
The product direction makes sense. The bigger challenge is making the direct brand feel as trustworthy as the marketplace used to feel.