Nishe: building the Shopify sales channel behind the fastest landing pages for ads

Nishe is a Toronto startup with a simple pitch: the fastest landing pages for ads. Brands running ads on Meta, TikTok and Google usually send that traffic to a product page, which is built for browsing a store, not for the one product the shopper just saw. Nishe gives each ad its own shoppable page, with the catalog synced from the brand's Shopify store, and hands checkout back to that store.

Nishe is about five years old and has been through a few pivots before landing pages for ads became the core product. Blackbird has been part of Nishe since its inception, and the product has been coded at Blackbird from the start.

Its leadership is lean: two co-founders, the CEO and the CTO. Our dev team works closely with the CTO. Together we chose the tech stack and set the technical direction, and over time built a flexible, fairly complex ecosystem that runs Nishe as a sales channel for Shopify.

The stakes follow from that. An ad landing page has one job: load before the shopper loses interest, then get them to checkout. Every extra kilobyte on a phone costs part of a click the brand has already paid for. And Nishe sits in the revenue path of every campaign, so a page that breaks is a click that can't convert.

• Pages have to load fast. For an ad landing page, load time is the product.
• Checkout stays with the brand. Orders go through the brand's own Shopify checkout and land in its Shopify admin.
• No theme edits. Nishe has to work alongside each store's existing theme and apps.
• A public Shopify app. Listing on the Shopify App Store means passing Shopify's review and continuing to meet its requirements.
• A product that changes direction. The platform had to carry Nishe through a few pivots with a lean team behind it.

We built Nishe's Shopify app, launched it, and took it through Shopify's app review with the Shopify team. That is a different job from building a custom app. A custom (private) app made for a single store doesn't need review. A public app listed on the Shopify App Store does, and Shopify's review is thorough: their team tests the app against Shopify's requirements, from installation and the permissions it asks for to how it handles merchant data, and sends back anything that has to change before it can be listed. Getting through it takes knowing those requirements before writing the code, not after. Nishe is listed on the Shopify App Store.

Nishe reports a significant conversion lift over traditional destination pages. Where brands send ad traffic to a Nishe page instead of a product page, Nishe's measurements show conversion 50% to 150% higher. The platform is live, and we keep building and running it.

1. From inception. We joined Nishe at the start and, with the CTO, chose the stack and the technical direction.

2. The Shopify app. We built the app and sales channel, launched it, and took it through Shopify's app review. It is listed on the Shopify App Store.

3. Through the pivots. As Nishe went through its pivots and landing pages for ads became the core product, the platform grew into the flexible ecosystem it is today.

4. Pages built to load fast. We built Nishe's own landing-page framework and moved pages and backend onto edge workers on AWS CloudFront and Cloudflare.

5. Today. The project is active. We keep building and running the platform with Nishe's CTO.

Nishe's leadership is its two co-founders, the CEO and the CTO. Our dev team works closely with the CTO, as it has since day one.

Who owned what: Nishe owns the product, the business, its relationships with brands and the measurement of their results. Technical direction is shared: the CTO and our team set the stack and architecture together. We build and run the platform: the landing-page framework, the edge backend, and the Shopify app and sales channel.