Shopify App Portfolio Plug in Useful, 37,000 Users, Sold to SureSwift: An App Business Built by "The SEO Guy"

(Dollar-to-yen conversions in this article use roughly ¥150/$1.)

What Happened

Plug in Useful is a portfolio of Shopify apps launched in 2011 by software engineer Daniel Sim. Anchored by “Plug in SEO” for SEO audits and “Plug in Speed,” which compresses JavaScript, CSS, and images to improve page speed, the app suite improves stores’ organic search traffic and display quality. It accumulated 37,000 stores as users and hundreds of thousands of cumulative installs, and in January 2020 it was sold for seven figures in dollars (hundreds of millions of yen) to SureSwift Capital, a firm that specializes in acquiring SaaS businesses. The team was 8 people at the time of sale. It was bootstrapped with no outside funding, and the source, They Got Acquired (TGA), reports that annual growth exceeded 50% every year.

There are two things worth reading closely in this case. One is the founding pattern of an SEO specialist transposing his own domain expertise into app form. The other is the substance of a decision Sim made to sell a business he himself admits “didn’t look like a good decision on paper.” A business that looked better held onto than sold, by the numbers, was sold anyway. Why, and that’s where the real substance of a solo entrepreneur’s exit lives.

Nine Years, Timelined

The Playbook: “My Own Expertise x the Store’s Context”

Sim’s background is as an SEO specialist. He took a job he knew intimately, improving SEO for e-commerce stores, and moved it into the distribution format of a Shopify app. It’s the same “productize the specialist” pattern seen in TopicRanker’s SEO consultant and Podcast Clout’s PR practitioner, combined here with the acquisition power of an app store.

Domain expertise pays off in feature design and equally in “how discoverable the app is inside the store.” An SEO specialist being strong at app store search (ASO) is only natural, the design bakes in a fit between specialty and distribution channel. In fact, the direction of expansion from Plug in SEO to Plug in Speed was itself a lateral move within the same theme, “raise how well the store scores in search”, and an adjacent product that could sell directly into the existing user base. Rather than betting on the hit-or-miss of a single app, breaking one area of expertise into multiple apps is what compounded into 37,000 stores over nine years.

The Math That Said Not Selling Would Have Paid Better

The most candid part of the TGA article is Sim reflecting that the sale “didn’t look like a good decision on paper.” The reasoning was simple arithmetic. Valuations for a SaaS of this size typically run 3–5x SDE (seller’s discretionary earnings), and this company’s valuation sat at the high end of that range. Even so, in his own words, “the business was growing, so if I’d just held on for another two or three years, I could have made more than what I got from the sale.” Add in the guaranteed costs of legal fees, taxes, and time spent on the sale process, with no guarantee the deal even closes, and the rational conclusion, stacked purely on the numbers, is “don’t sell.”

And yet Sim writes that “in my gut, I felt it was time.” The basis for the decision sits outside the financials. In 2019, he hit burnout and received support from a clinical psychologist experienced with founders. He describes the process as: “she helped untangle ‘me’ from the business.” The work of dismantling nine years of self-identification with a growing business sits upstream of the sale. In a solo or small-team business, what determines the timing of a sale isn’t a discount rate. It’s the founder’s own stamina and psychology. A pattern that shows through several of the sale stories this site has covered is confirmed here in the founder’s own words.

The First Negotiation Fell Through

The sale process wasn’t a straight line either. Rather than jumping at an attractive-sounding offer, Sim spent time vetting buyer candidates, to the point that the sale process itself became close to a full-time job. With the first promising buyer candidate, a “material issue” remained unresolved in the deal terms, and when the other side wouldn’t budge, Sim walked away from that negotiation himself.

By contrast, he describes the deal that did close with SureSwift as one where “they listened, worked together with us, and closed a deal that worked for everyone”, a case of walking away from one negotiation and building toward another. A sale negotiation conducted while burned out is exactly the situation where a seller’s psychological desire to “get relief soon” can leave them exposed. The fact that he walked away from a bad deal at least once is evidence that this sale wasn’t a fire sale.

Buyer SureSwift: A “Standing Exit”

Buyer SureSwift Capital was founded in 2015 and has completed over 40 acquisitions of small-to-mid-size SaaS businesses, with MeetEdgar (social media scheduling) and Feedback Panda (feedback tools for online instructors) also under its umbrella. It’s a regular buyer in this size tier alongside saas.group, and its existence enables solo developers to run a division of labor: “build → grow → hand off to a dedicated operator.”

37,000 users is a mid-tier number as Shopify app scale goes, counting free-plan users, but with multiple apps, a foundation of specialist expertise, and steady growth combined, it clears the acquisition bar of a serial buyer like this. Lined up against Jexo, Order Tagger, and this case, a pattern emerges: “owning multiple apps” within an ecosystem reaches a better exit than a single-app developer does.

After the Sale: An 18-Month Gap, and What Came Next

After the sale, Sim took roughly 18 months off. During that time he also received multiple invitations to co-found funded startups and offers from investors, reputation within the ecosystem itself had become an asset. He returned as GM at data-protection SaaS Rewind, taking up an invitation from co-founder and CEO Mike Potter to lead the expansion of the company’s Shopify business. What’s notable is that, in making the decision, he admits, “my self-image as an entrepreneur still carried some bias against taking a job.” Even so, he decided to join based on a long-standing respect for the product and the team, and now says, “with the right boss, you can operate with an entrepreneurial mindset in any role”, while not ruling out founding something again. The Shopify ecosystem expertise stayed with him as a career asset even after selling the business.

Conditions for Replication

Three things generalize from this case: (1) the structure of transposing expertise you already hold in a working job (here, SEO) into an app-based distribution format, (2) the fact that the Shopify app store, as a distribution channel, is open to solo developers on equal terms, (3) the fact that building multiple apps around one specialty leads to a better exit than a single product. Because Shopify apps can be launched from Japan on the same playing field, the distribution side of this is highly replicable.

Some premises differ, though. The level of the sale price is underpinned by the 3–5x SDE going rate for small SaaS in the English-language market and by the existence of standing buyers like SureSwift. There’s no guarantee the same multiple applies to a comparably sized SaaS in Japan. And this case started in 2011, nine years of compounding from a period when the Shopify app store was still relatively uncrowded, so whether the same pace is achievable at today’s competitive density is a separate question. Burnout as the reason for selling is also part of the picture: whether you can keep running for nine straight years is itself part of what needs replicating here.

Related Reading

• Usersnap — saas.group, a standing buyer of the same type
• Jexo — a comparable sale by a developer of multiple apps