During the last few months one company has caught everyone's fancy...it is @Shopify

While in 2020 you maybe hearing of Shopify for the 1st time the truth is it has taken the company 16 years to become an overnight success!

Here is a thread on this wonderful superstar.

First thing first, what exactly does @shopify do? Well yes it is a commerce platform that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products.

However what they really do is fuel entrepreneurship!! Shopify is the heart of the business for the merchants who use it.

Their obsession with serving the merchants possibly comes from how @Shopify was born. Shopify started as a solution to a problem the founders had personally experienced.

In 2004 @tobi a software engineer, decided to pursue a passion and open an online store called Snowdevil (with Scott Lake) to sell snowboards from third parties.

He was dissatisfied with the existing e-commerce products on the market, and so instead decided to build his own

Using the open source web application framework called Ruby on Rails the store was launched in 2004 after two months of development.

While the store managed to turn a profit, what really got folks excited was how they had built the website.

Lütke and Lake saw an opportunity to help other people sell online.

Snowdevil was shelved and attention was diverted on creating a product that would help people build their own online stores.

In 2005, @danielweinand joined the team and by 2006 Lütke, Lake, and Weinand officially launched Shopify as a set of tools merchants could use to build their own sites.

The initial product helped merchants get set up with customizable store templates, track orders in an RSS feed, process payments, upload images, add tags and automate inventory organization.
The focus was on basic but essential features that were needed to run an e-commerce store

Thanks to @Shopify, individuals who had never sold anything online now had tools to set up a successful e-commerce shop.

However what has really made Shopify such a rocket-ship are some of the underlying Principles that it has followed since day 1

1. Be a learner's organization:
@Shopify has grown because of the rapid personal growth of the initial team.

The company wants its employees to be lifelong learners. It has a book bar where employees are encouraged to borrow books from!

2. Default to open internally: @Shopify treats each employee as an adult & shares all the information openly throughout the organization. An intern & a member of the board has access to the same information

3. Be highly aligned loosely coupled: Principle 2 helps @Shopify achieves high alignment by sharing information freely and trusting its people to make the right decisions for the business. This has kept the company nimble and fast

4. Make the important easy and the rest possible: @Shopify determines this through a simple question - Do our customers need this feature most of the time. If the answer is Yes then it is added as a core feature

5. Do not be data driven but data informed: @Shopify believes data is important but not the only input. Context around the data matters!

6. Strong opinions, weakly held: @Shopify recognizes that the world is dynamic & complex and believes in revaluting their decisions whenever new information becomes available

Super excited to see how this Canadian rocket-ship takes on the might of @Amazon

If you want to read more about @Shopify check out the writing of @profgalloway (Shopify is his new darling) or @benthompson - great analysis of the company

If you would like to read a slightly different perspective on @Shopify do take out 10 mins and read this piece by @packyM
https://notboring.substack.com/p/shopify-and-the-hard-thing-about-a05 " what happens when *all* the rebels are armed and competing with each other?"

End of thread <I am not associated with the company but am an outside admirer>