ECOMMERCE / SHOPIFY APP
VISUAL QUIZ
BUILDER.
We took a single-engineer Shopify app, fixed its bleeding
infrastructure, and grew it into an acquisition.
WHERE WE STARTED
In 2019, Whai Technologies (then operating as AskWhai) had a real product on Shopify and a real problem behind it.
One engineer was holding the entire codebase together. The AWS infrastructure had been built for a company ten times the size — oversized instances, unused services, sprawling architecture. The monthly cloud bill was eating into runway every single month.
The product worked. The economics didn't.
That's the moment Whai brought us in.
WHAT WE DID
The first fix: stop the bleeding
Before we wrote a single new feature, we went after the infrastructure. Mapped what was actually being used. Killed what wasn't. Right-sized the services that were over-provisioned. Restructured the architecture so it matched the business — not the assumptions someone made eighteen months earlier.
The AWS spend dropped significantly. The runway extended. And suddenly there was budget to do the thing that actually matters: build the product out.
The build: one engineer to seven
We grew the technical team from one engineer to seven, including engineering, R&D, and ongoing maintenance. Not a body shop hand-off — an embedded team that lived inside the product alongside Whai's founders.
Over four years we built and shipped:
- — A drag-and-drop quiz builder with branching logic, scoring, sliders, and content slides
- — Deep customization so every quiz could match a brand's design system
- — AI-powered tagging that linked answers to products automatically
- — Integrations with Klaviyo, Omnisend, Shopify, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, Zapier
- — Analytics that told merchants which questions actually moved revenue
- — Multi-language support across 13 languages
The brands that came on board tell you more than the feature list: Function of Beauty. Mario Badescu. CUUP. ZO Skin Health. The Detox Market.
WHERE IT IS NOW
Over our four years on the product, the company grew roughly 5x. Monthly visitors crossed one million. Visual Quiz Builder became one of the highest-rated quiz apps on the Shopify App Store — 4.9 stars, hundreds of merchants using it daily.
In 2023, Alleyway Capital came in to acquire it.
Acquisitions kill products all the time. The acquiring team inherits a codebase nobody on their side wrote, the original team disappears, and within six months the thing is half-broken or being rewritten from scratch.
We made sure that didn't happen here. We worked directly with the Alleyway team through the transition — documentation, infrastructure walkthroughs, architectural decisions explained, edge cases mapped out. A deliberate, structured knowledge transfer across the codebase we'd been living in for four years.
The product is still running today under Alleyway Capital. Still the same engine we built. Still growing.
WHAT THIS PROVES
Most agencies have launches. We have a four-year arc — turnaround, team build, growth, exit — with continuity on the codebase the whole way through.
That's what a long-term tech partnership actually looks like when it works.