Ahsan Munir One person, doing the work you are hiring.
Seven years of Shopify development, stated capacity, and what I do not do.
I build Shopify store experiences — custom themes, redesigns, and the performance and conversion work around them. One person, doing the work you're hiring. There's no account manager between us because there's nobody to manage the account. Behind it, an assistant keeps the standard and the research current — no client work, no code on your store — which is why the list changes when the platform does.
Seven years of this, most of it through referral and Upwork, where the record is public: Top Rated, under my own name, and the reviews say what they say.
The reason this page exists at all is that the position on the front of this site — you shouldn't have to take my word for it — needs a person attached to it. A published standard with no name on it is a document. With a name on it, it's a commitment somebody can be held to , and that's the half that makes it worth publishing.
How I ended up caring about this
I started as a developer who built what was specified. The change came from watching stores I'd built do worse than they should have, and slowly working out that the reason was upstream of the code.
A build is a series of decisions, and most of them look technical. Where the reviews sit. What loads before the buy button. Whether the size guide opens over the thing you're trying to click on a phone. Every one of those is a conversion decision wearing a technical costume , and if the developer treats them as implementation details, they get made by accident.
That's the whole of the shift, and it isn't a philosophy — it's that I started asking what a decision would do to the business, and kept asking after it became inconvenient.
I'll tell you when I think you're wrong
Most developers build what they're asked to build. That's not laziness — it's the reasonable response to being treated as implementation. You send a spec, they build the spec, everyone's expectations are met, and if the thing underperforms it isn't anybody's fault in a way you could point at.
The failure mode that produces is specific and it's expensive. A client asks for something that will cost them conversions — a checkout step that collects data they don't need, a hero that pushes the product below the fold on mobile, an interaction that tests badly. The developer builds it because it was asked for. Six months later the store underperforms, and the reason is in a decision nobody wrote down as a decision.
So I ask why, and when I think a request will cost you money I say so, with whatever data I have. People don't always love it at the time. One agency I work with put it this way in an email to a colleague:
You're the only developer who's ever told me I was wrong — and you were right.
That's the relationship I want, and it's also a filter. If you want a builder who executes the brief exactly, that's a legitimate thing to want and there are good people who do it. I'm not one of them, and it's better that you know that from a page than from a call three weeks in.
Capacity, and what it costs me
two to three projects at a time. Right now, room for one new project starting within the next month.
That number isn't a positioning device, it's arithmetic. The published checks take the time they take, and past three concurrent builds the thing that slips first is the testing — which is precisely the part nobody would notice missing until months later. I'd rather turn work down than ship the version of my work that made the checklist necessary.
The honest cost of that: I turn down projects I'd like to do, and sometimes the timing doesn't work for someone I'd want to work with. If that's you, the checks are published and free and the instruments are public — you can run them yourself, or hand them to whoever's available, and that's a normal outcome rather than a consolation prize. The checks →
What I don't do
Branding, photography, copywriting. I'll tell you when a page is asking for the wrong thing. I won't write it.
Marketing sites that aren't stores. It's adjacent work and I'd be adequate at it, which isn't the standard I'm arguing for on the rest of this site.
Anything on a platform that isn't Shopify. Not a principle — it's that the checks above are Shopify-specific, and on another platform I'd be a competent generalist rather than someone worth hiring for this.
Retainers I haven't sold before, sold as products. I've done ongoing work informally and I haven't packaged it, so I'm not going to put a price on it and pretend it's a product.