Store Mapper

Tyler Trinkus quit his job at Bloomberg in 2011 to start a venture-backed startup called Solarlist in the solar energy space. As a non-technical founder with an economics degree, he spent a year failing to find a technical co-founder. Out of necessity, he locked himself in a room for six weeks and taught himself to code using free resources, Rails tutorials, and screencasts. To pay his bills and fund Solarlist, he started freelancing as a Ruby on Rails developer for Shopify merchants—work that would eventually change his trajectory.

While freelancing, Tyler noticed a pattern: within a two-week period, three different clients asked him to build custom store locator functionality for their websites. He realized there was no good SaaS solution—just old, terrible tools gathering dust. Instead of charging each client $2-3K for custom development, Tyler decided to build a reusable product. He boarded a 30-hour flight from San Francisco to Buenos Aires and built the MVP on the plane. When he landed, he emailed his freelance clients. "Within 24 hours, he had a handful of people paying him $5 a month."

The product was intentionally minimal—almost laughably so. It lacked password resets, email receipts, and most features you'd consider standard. But it did exactly what the label promised: embed a store locator on your website. Tyler never planned this to be his main business; Solarlist was still consuming most of his time. "I had 40 hours a week of Solarlist, 40 hours a week of freelancing, and a tiny sliver of time left over" for Store Mapper.

With limited time, Tyler practiced ruthless prioritization. He didn't build email receipts for the first two months—he just emailed customers receipts in Gmail manually. When that stopped being efficient at month three, he finally built the automated feature. This "just-in-time" approach meant he only built what was absolutely necessary, keeping the product lean and his maintenance burden minimal.

The key insight: Tyler obsessively focused on retention over growth. "If you have a leaky bucket, the treadmill is turned up higher and you have to keep pace just to stay in one place." He got to over 100 customers at $7 ARPU in the first 6-9 months, all while Solarlist continued to consume his time.

In 2012, Solarlist failed. Tyler had raised some capital, burned through it, and couldn't raise the millions he needed. With $50,000 in credit card debt and a failed startup, he pivoted entirely to Store Mapper (which was doing about $1,000 MRR) and continued freelancing to pay down debt.

He never spent money on ads or cold outreach. Instead, he latched onto Shopify's explosive growth—a classic "platform parasitism" tactic. First, he got listed in the Shopify App Store, becoming the only store locator app there. Anyone searching found him instantly. Then he trolled the Shopify forums where merchants congregated, being genuinely helpful on threads while his forum signature mentioned Store Mapper. He also set up job board alerts on Upwork/Odesk; whenever someone posted a gig asking a developer to build a store locator, he'd apply for $10 and suggest they use his SaaS instead. "If you get 25 customers that way, it moves the needle for you" at that stage.

But the real growth driver was his obsessive onboarding optimization. Tyler treated customers as attention-deficit and did everything to eliminate friction. He created one-minute screencasts for every step. He tracked who hadn't added locations within 48 hours and auto-sent personalized emails with resources. He'd often just do the work for customers rather than make them figure it out. "You can do it once or twice and you basically get a customer for life."

From $1K MRR to $40K MRR took about five years. The first six months after Solarlist's shutdown, Tyler doubled down on product and pricing. He built tiered plans—a basic $5/month locator, then premium tiers with analytics, insights on where customers searched for his merchants' products, and recommendations for store expansion. This "massively increased average revenue per user."

The biggest growth hack was also the smallest: a single line of code adding a "Powered by Store Mapper" link on every customer's locator. "It was about one line of code and it was definitely the most profitable line of code that I wrote in the entire five years." This created a viral loop—each new customer made it incrementally more likely others would see Store Mapper and sign up.

What didn't work: Tyler tried paid ads and outbound experiments but never found a real "gas pedal for growth." The business had strong product-market fit in a small niche but was limited by a fixed pool of e-commerce merchants searching for store locator software. Instead of forcing growth, Tyler optimized what worked: "We had maybe one or two percent monthly churn. That means you don't really need to juice your signups." With high retention, steady organic traffic, and referrals, the business compounded naturally.

Tyler kept his time allocation lean—never more than 40 hours/week on Store Mapper, often splitting 60 total hours between client work (which paid well) and the product. This wasn't a side project; it was deliberate capital-efficient growth. He avoided freemium (unnecessary for a product clearly saving customers thousands vs. custom dev) and kept prices absurdly low initially, which attracted quality customers who appreciated indie developers.

After five years, Store Mapper reached $40K MRR, entirely bootstrapped and profitable. Tyler eventually sold the business. "I can't say the exact price," he notes, "but I've described it as not exactly sail off into the sunset forever and retire money, but definitely level up money." Enough to put any next venture on the table without worry.

Today, Tyler is a general partner at Earnest Capital, a fund backing bootstrapped founders like himself. He invests in early-stage SaaS with revenue, product-market fit, and founders aligned with sustainable, calm growth—not venture-scale hype. Store Mapper became a case study in the micro-SaaS playbook: find a platform-dependent niche, obsess over retention, optimize onboarding, add features just-in-time, and let compound growth do the work. As Tyler puts it, borrowing from Hemingway: the best way is to stop when you're going good and know what happens next. Then wake up and do it again tomorrow.