How I'd grow Moonship

Moonship (URL) leverages AI to give personalized discounts to eCommerce visitors and increase their chances of making a purchase.

It’s currently available as an app for Shopify stores.

People receive personalized discounts based on factors like demographics, timing, location, on-site behavior and shop information.

The choice not to position Moonship as a popup tool is interesting.

On the one hand, it’s a good choice - eCommerce owners seeing it won’t think, “Oh, look, another popup tool. I don’t need it since I already have one.”

On the other hand, there’s a lot of demand, and their AI differentiator looks powerful enough to get market share in that category.

The way they translated their positioning into their landing page messaging is good, but it could be improved.

For example, the header about increasing revenue by 80% is generic. It feels too good to be true for every single case.

I’d change it to something more realistic, like: “Improve your eCommerce conversion rate with personalized discounts.”

What’s really good is their Shopify app page.

The copy is perfect and even fits in essential details like preventing possible objections (“Exclude products you don’t want to show discounts for”).

Visitors read it and learn everything they need to know.

I’d add an ungated demo above the fold to improve the landing page conversion rate.

They could link to a sample eCommerce shop and display on-screen instructions (for example, browse a few products, then open a product page and close the tab).

That way, visitors could experiment for themselves and see how the product works.

It’d be even cooler to add a real example to their very own Moonship site.

Although they’re not an eCommerce store, even a limited-functionality popup (e.g., displaying an exit intent popup with a special offer) would go a long way.

It would be memorable; experiencing it would be worth a thousand words.

Pro tip: acquisition is vital to growth, but successful businesses are built on retention.

To improve retention, you need to have a deep understanding of why exactly customers cancel their subscriptions. 

Try adding a churn survey in your flow, polling them for the main reason for cancelation.

Moonship’s target audience is eCommerce founders. This is a well-defined audience and a pretty tight group that talks to each other online.

That’s what makes incentivizing word of mouth with a referral program a good idea.

If I’m a store owner and I see good results from the product, I’ll be inclined to mention it to my peers. If I also get 3 months free for doing that, you bet I’ll be even more inclined.

Some eCommerce founders built a small audience over time (email list, podcast, social media, etc.) and can be effectively considered micro-influencers.

I’d give them a free 1-year subscription to Moonship, no strings attached.

The only thing I’d ask for in return would be to talk about the process and the results occasionally on their channels.

Since Moonship is an app, the Shopify app store is a possible distribution channel, especially considering they have a dedicated “Discount Apps” category.

It might take a while for Moonship to become visible organically, so they could consider running ads.

To get more organic visibility in the App Store, Moonship needs to work on two things:

- The app store search engine: primarily driven by keywords (optimize the app name and the listing page)

- The app store recommendations: mainly driven by reviews (ask users for reviews - but not specifically for positive reviews since that’s against the rules)

Shopify keeps growing, so this is a channel worth paying attention to.

They need to put in similar efforts in SEO. Right now, the Moonship site is basically only a landing page.

Their first step should be to create content targeting commercial keywords. For example, researching the most popular Shopify discount apps and creating “alternative to” pages.

Then, move on to go after informational queries. For example, they could write a blog post about increasing your average order value on a Shopify store.

Moonship needs links to get on the first page on Google, but they only have a few at the moment.

I did a bit of analysis, and it turns out they don’t have links because they recently changed their domain name without redirecting the old pages to the new ones.

All the links they had on the old domain are currently wasting away.

Moonship is active on Twitter, and I like what they do there, but they need to step up their activity to see a serious impact.

This means posting at least 1x a day and participating in industry conversations.

When you are a small account and don’t get many impressions, the best way to get noticed is to consistently interact with potential customers by leaving meaningful replies.

I’d also test some Instagram and TikTok ads. That’s where many eCommerce store owners spend time managing their own brand presences.

An angle worth considering could be case studies.

I’d create short 15, 30, and 60-sec videos with examples and metrics of how real stores used Moonship to grow their sales.

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