Shopify App Maker Tabarnapp Sells to App Acquirer StayTuned: The Etiquette of "Closing Up Shop" in an App Store

We’ve covered several Shopify app sales on this site already, but Tabarnapp stands out for how unusually thoroughly the “process of closing up shop” is disclosed. The founder shares when he hired a broker, how many offers came in, how many months it took to close, and even the approximate sale price. A business with $1 million in annual revenue and 80% gross margin — the exact steps, timeline, and dollar amount by which it was turned into cash is a rare record you can trace at face value: the final stage of “build it, grow it, sell it.”

The Path to the Sale

Tabarnapp was a development company founded in Quebec, Canada, in 2016 by Derek Morin and Bogdan Radu, building several apps for Shopify merchants. Its flagship, Automatic Discount, automates the creation of a merchant’s discount campaigns. It reached 1,000 paying customers within four months of launch, and by 2022 the business as a whole had crossed $1 million in annual revenue (about ¥150M at ¥150/$1) with an 80% net margin. Over 60,000 stores had cumulatively downloaded the flagship app, with roughly 2,500 recurring-billing customers paying $10–1,000 a month. It was run entirely bootstrapped, with no outside capital.

Morin has described the motive for selling as fear of platform dependency: “There’s no telling when Shopify might absorb the feature and wipe us out.” The decision was to hand off both the thriving business and that very risk to a buyer while things were going well. In late June 2022 they engaged Array Capital, a Switzerland-based SaaS-specialist broker, and had three offers in hand by August. The sale to StayTuned, which specializes in acquiring and growing Shopify apps, closed in November. Less than half a year passed from engaging the broker to closing. The sale price is undisclosed, but it’s been referenced as being in the mid-seven figures, around $4 million (roughly ¥600M), on the podcast Built to Sell Radio.

Closing Up Shop, by the Numbers

Against annual revenue of $1 million, roughly $4 million puts the revenue multiple at about 4x. Factoring in the 80% net margin, that’s roughly 5x on a profit basis, a level that’s unexaggerated but entirely reasonable for a small-scale SaaS.

A Market with Multiple Buyers Changes a Seller’s Negotiating Environment

What deserves attention in this deal is not so much “how much it sold for” as “who it sold to, and how.” Three offers landing within two months of engaging a broker is a function of multiple dedicated app buyers having grown up inside the Shopify world. Beyond StayTuned, roll-up companies like Shop Circle, which acquired Order Tagger, are constantly buying inside the same ecosystem. In a market with only one roll-up player, a seller has no choice but to accept the price offered; in a market with multiple repeat buyers, competitive bidding can occur. For an app of the same size, the multiple you land at can differ based purely on this difference in environment.

The buyer’s economics are rational too. Billing for Shopify apps is standardized through the store, so post-acquisition integration costs (migrating billing systems, re-signing customers) come in near zero. That’s why roll-ups end up with a “buy more, get more efficient” structure, which in turn keeps attracting more buyers. The depth of exit options available to a seller is a byproduct of that cycle.

The App Store as a “Pre-Built Founding Environment”

SaaS built inside an app store comes with all three essentials pre-installed from day one: customer acquisition (in-store search and reviews), billing (store payments), and an exit (roll-ups). Infrastructure that would take years to build from scratch is simply “already there.” The early traction of 1,000 paying customers within four months of launch, and penetration into 60,000 stores, aren’t explainable without the store’s distribution network behind them. Set alongside Jexo in the Atlassian ecosystem, the same pattern holds across stores: grow through the store’s distribution, sell to a store-specialist buyer.

Reading This From the Risk Side

The other side of this case is written right into the very reason for the sale. That the founders let go of an 80%-margin, $1M-revenue business because “there’s no telling when Shopify might wipe us out” is a candid testimony to the instability of the app-store economy. The core feature, automated discounting, could become worthless overnight if the platform ever builds it in natively. The roughly 4x multiple should be read as a price that already priced in that survival risk. An independent SaaS at the same profit level could plausibly command a higher multiple.

One more caveat worth flagging: the primary-source sale price is undisclosed, and the roughly $4 million figure comes from a podcast mention rather than a confirmed source. It’s a useful order-of-magnitude guide, but not a confirmed number.

Conditions for Replication

Three of the moving parts here don’t depend on where you build. An app solving one unmet need inside a store can become a sellable asset within a few years, even for a small team. Using a specialist broker can get the full sale process done in as little as six months. And the depth of your exit options is largely already decided the moment you pick which ecosystem to build in. Shopify can be sold into from Japan as well, and since the model lets you use the store’s distribution network and buyer pool as-is, this route carries relatively few national borders.

At the same time, the existence of micro-SaaS-specialist brokers like Array Capital, and repeat buyers like StayTuned and Shop Circle, depends on the depth of the English-speaking app market. For an app or plugin built entirely for the Japanese-language market alone, you can’t expect the same number of buyers or the same competition for offers. If you’re going after this model, building in an English-speaking store from the start is effectively a precondition.

For what it’s worth, both founders spent a year assisting StayTuned after the sale before launching ReplyChef.app, a new social-media management support tool. Morin has also started writing a book, titled Happy Ending, on the theme of “selling a business within 24 months.” A founder who has been through one exit turning around to build “with a sale in mind from the start”. That, too, is a sign of how mature this ecosystem has become.

Related Reading

• Order Tagger — a sale to another Shopify-world roll-up
• Visual Quiz Builder — a Shopify app sold for $1M with zero ad spend
• Jexo — the same pattern in the Atlassian world