The Challenge

The team behind Frequently Bought Together and Also Bought started with a clear destination in mind: Shopify has enormous potential for developers, and they needed to investigate how to make the most of it. Founded in 2017 by a mathematician and an engineer, the company entered the Shopify ecosystem seeking a niche where technical precision could translate into value. The early work started with seasonal apps - festive overlays, small utilities, tools built around specific moments in the merchant calendar.

It was only after spending real time inside that ecosystem that something became apparent.

There were no recommendation apps that actually worked well. Merchants had no reliable way to surface related products, drive cross-sells, or build intelligent upselling logic. The tools that existed fell short.

That was not a problem they had set out to solve. It was an opportunity they spotted from the inside.

"Merchants needed an effective way to increase their sales through smarter product suggestions," and no one had built it properly yet.

That observation became the foundation of everything that followed. What started as a two-person operation grew steadily around it. By 2019, the team had reached nearly 30 professionals, many of whom are still there today.

The Solution

Frequently Bought Together and Also Bought were built to fill it.

What set them apart from the start was not simplicity but robustness and flexibility. Using solid, robust code to design flexible and versatile tools.

As the apps launched and evolved, they stood out because of the depth of features on offer, giving merchants the ability to adapt the tools to their specific needs. And all of those features were fully optimised to ensure the best possible performance.

That discipline produced results. The team became the first within the Shop Circle group to earn 'Built for Shopify' status across their entire catalogue of seven apps, meeting Shopify's highest standards for speed, security, and user experience, not for one product, but for all of them.

The company also built around a people-first structure from early on. A flexible work model gave the team room to work sustainably. Investment in training, technical resources, and team cohesion meant that the people who joined in the last few years largely stayed.

Code Black Belt Team, 2025

The Sale

As the company matured, the founders found themselves doing less of what they actually enjoyed. More meetings. More administrative communication. More management overhead. Less code.

They had started the company with a straightforward intention: to build a profitable business on their own terms, write clean and optimised code, and create a work philosophy that suited them. Over time, that reality had shifted.

To fully adapt to Shopify's needs, they had to change their role from developers to managers. And that was not what they had signed up for.

The acquisition by Shop Circle in 2023 gave the founders a way back to writing code the way they liked, away from the operational weight the business had accumulated. This transition allowed them to move on to their next professional chapters, leaving the business with the broader infrastructure from Shop Circle needed to grow, without disrupting the way the team worked.

The transition was designed to preserve what was already working. The team retained its own management structure, its own internal leadership, and full operational independence over developers, systems engineers, and support staff. Shop Circle provides support in specific areas, marketing, legal, and design, without interfering with the product and technical decisions that define the company's work

The founders stepped aside. The team stepped forward.

The Future

The catalogue now includes seven 'Built for Shopify' apps, all built to meet Shopify's requirements as they evolve. The next phase is focused on AI, not as an added feature, but as a layer embedded into how the products operate. An AI-driven support system is already running, with strong resolution rates. The team is now working through how the same logic can be applied across the full product catalogue. The execution is evolving. The excellence remains.