After starting his first app – VLOOKUP Auto-link – as a side project two years ago, Nir Ofir, founder of Jetpack Apps, quit everything else to focus purely on developing monday.com apps. To find out why, we unpick the story of how Nir brought to life his first and most successful app on the monday app marketplace, which has grown into a thriving business. And, we’ll delve into how you can too.
As a quick intro, VLOOKUP Auto-link aims to provide the power of an Excel VLOOKUP using search values between multiple boards to automatically create a link between matching items. It avoids manual item linking and the risk of human error.
As a result, VLOOKUP Auto-link is a best seller on monday.com’s app marketplace. After thousands of installs and hundreds of paying customers, Nir shares his tips for building a thriving app on the monday app marketplace. Keep reading to find out more about the key to Nir’s rapid app marketplace success.
VLOOKUP Auto-Link App: A quick overview
In short, VLOOKUP Auto-link serves as an alternative to monday.com’s Connect Boards feature. It enables anyone to easily connect Boards. Essentially, you can link multiple data sources to any of your boards and never worry about the data integrity of your connected data.
When we asked Nir about how his journey began building the app, Nir said getting started with developing this marketplace app took a bit of time in the beginning:
“It took us some time to create the right experience for customer onboarding, but since then we have literally hundreds of paying customers – and it’s growing every month.”
Likewise, it’s clear to see that the app truly plugs a gap in the market, attracting both small businesses and Fortune 500 companies. Importantly, the success of Nir’s first app inspired him to push himself further and expand his portfolio.
Expanding Nir’s App Portfolio
The goal of many developers is to grow their portfolio over time. Currently, Nir has six apps on monday app marketplace, including Getsign – a document signing software, Extract, Jobflows – A complete HR application tracking system product , TrackMy, and of course, VLOOKUP Auto-link – with more apps in the works.
In fact, Nir has huge ambitions to scale Jetpack Apps to have a major presence on monday marketplace. All with the aim to solve more problems and grow their user base.
But how easy was it for Nir to build on monday.com? Let’s take a look.
Developing an app for the monday app marketplace
Nir says the key to developing apps on monday.com is to create the solution with monday.com customers, and he follows a simple and effective process.
Here’s a quick overview of the process:
- He puts a form on the monday.com community and tells community members what he’s going to build.
- Community members can then sign-up for beta testing – giving Nir an initial group of people that actually look for the solution.
- Nir and his team then work with this beta group to build and refine the solution.
When we asked Nir about his experience of building an app on monday.com, here’s what he said:
“My perspective as an app developer is that monday.com is like a Lego set and there are endless opportunities to build more and more solutions on top of it.”
Indeed, our aim at monday.com is to provide all the information developers need to start building apps. Just like Nir refers to, the monday apps framework allows developers to build new types of building blocks on top of monday.com.
This provides unlimited opportunities for developers and makes the process much quicker and easier, as Nir points out:
“When a developer develops an app for monday, they’ve kind of got 80% of the app already ready. And being able to focus on the 20% actually makes it easier and faster to bring value to the market.”
Nir goes on to say that for an app to launch successfully, it needs to be very simple and to play well with monday.com integrations, automations, and board columns.
Creating Apps for Non-Technical Entrepreneurs
As an interesting side note, Nir professes that he is not a technical person and he’s not a developer. He’s an entrepreneur and a product manager.
In fact, just two years ago, building his first app VLOOKUP Auto-link started as a side project. Then due to the enormous success, just two months ago Nir basically quit doing anything else and focused on building monday.com apps.
His opinion? If you’re an entrepreneur in the digital space and you want to solve people’s business problems, monday.com marketplace is a good place for you to start your business. In his own words: This is something that has huge potential.
Build your own successful monday.com app
If you’re interested in building your own monday.com marketplace app, why not take inspiration from Nir and his team at Jetpack Apps? Follow the footsteps of successful app developers by starting simple, building with customers, and scaling as you go.
Our app development framework provides a set of tools to help you build your app easily, in order to let you focus on what matters. In fact, all you need is a monday account to start building your first app!
If you don’t already have a monday.com account, you can sign up for a free developer account here. Once you have an account, navigate to your avatar menu and then pick the developers section.
You can learn more about how to create and manage your apps here. Or build your first dashboard widget or board view by following our views and widgets Quickstart Guide.
Or for more success stories, take a look at this one to see how a half-day hackathon turned into a thriving business.
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