Two founders, one Shopify app store keyword, and a WhatsApp plugin that reached $29K MRR

Who built it, and what they built

Preetam Nath co-founded SuperLemon with Sankalp Jonna. The two attended the same college but only met afterward while working at the same company, then spent four years trading ideas before quitting their jobs in January 2019 to build a profitable software business on their own terms.

SuperLemon is a plugin that lets Shopify merchants chat with customers and send order-related notifications through WhatsApp. The business runs remote from Bengaluru, India, with two founders and zero employees.

Where the idea came from

Before SuperLemon, Preetam worked at five startups and tried building two of his own — software for restaurants and session recording for mobile apps. Both failed, and the lesson he carried forward was to build something people already want and pay for.

The pair decided to find an audience before picking a product, so they reviewed app marketplaces including Slack, Atlassian, Chrome, GSuite, and Shopify. They chose Shopify partly because Preetam had built a store on it in 2017 and partly because a friend there ran a one-person app earning more than $20k in MRR.

They catalogued hundreds of ideas in a spreadsheet, filtered down to five that fit their constraints, and picked the WhatsApp concept because it felt less generic and full of possibilities. Their criteria: an existing problem people already paid to solve, incumbent apps doing a mediocre job, and potential to reach at least $3k in MRR — enough for both founders to live in Bengaluru.