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if if if you have products um if you have products that have barcodes Amazon is going to be the best number to sell these things and there's nothing you can do like Amazon is The Logical end conclusion of this branch of retail that is the department store right um and no department store will be able to survive against them once they realize that and actually build department stores or just buy all the best price or whatever right so um that's going to happen
Look, Amazon is like, like everyone should study the company. They are like, like absolutely incredible. I again do not think about like, I do not like thinking about who gets which percentage. I think it really messes with people's like actual analysis of what they ought to be doing, especially entrepreneurs, building in space. Amazon is a rival and rivals are there to inspire you to be better.
I'm super pro grade meetings, but like once every couple, uh, year and a half or so, we randomly delete all recurring meetings.
I want Shopify to be a company that, um, is well, first of all, it's really, really, really good, great for crafters.
what does the co-pilot do? It's like, it's, well, hopefully it helps you with courage.
we as a business sit on the same side of the table as like the merchants, the partners, the best thing we can do for Shopify to, um, for our business model is actually make our customers more successful
every single time we shipped something that reduced the friction by a meaningful amount, we actually had more successful business being built.
I think it would be very bad for my company. And I think a lot of my customers, if they would have to fire Shopify, just because their, their customers ask them to provide Amazon buy the prime services. And I just like, so, so it's much better to work with them.
we bootstrapped it, but like, we can't run it in the end. So this is like, it went to Flexport because that's their main quest. And I think that's all totally okay.
I don't want to do, uh, Shopify basics or something like this. That would be totally a side quest for us and I'm big on main quest. So I, I want to keep things.
Shopify prays at the altar of entrepreneurship, of people reaching for independence. And it's really causing entrepreneurship to be a more casual thing rather than this huge decision. Being able to be an entrepreneur in your lunch break, so that you can maybe escape, like a career which you chose for wrong reasons.
the products sold on Shopify are the products people want, not the products people need. And I think this specifically shifts the landscape a little bit. And also the fun thing is it's really good for falsifying bad media narratives because, as always, it's like everyone puts up a chart and says this is the answer. And then we get to dig in one level deeper and actually see what are the constituent parts underneath the chart and everything, the story changes. So we definitely see people react. W
amazon is just a sales channel at the end of the day it's a very good one it's protect like at times it might be the best in the world and for some categories at least
if you have a unique product like that's and go on amazon you soon will not have a unique product
in a company dynamics perspective it's just it would it would compromise the company we are in the way we are solving problems and so clearly the right decision
we did not want to compromise product we see uh so for instance customer support as a product it's like again we meet people very early in my entrepreneurial journey they they often um they are courageous but like um their commitment waivers they they might actually call us to to to ask what's the next task um they uh like they um they they are not sophisticated yet uh like like like they are on the learning journey but they are there's a lot of new things to learn but after they start uh like t
we more than doubled this was like up 6 000 people in two years or something
we had to hire ahead a lot for um the e-commerce um uh explosion that we talked about earlier just like the servers right the the servers should have been had next year or maybe even two years capacity so you're hiring what for a year or two years from now
we actually uh uh just moved everything to like here's your annual income like it's calculated based on um uh you know the grand value like we just like like figured out a heuristic by which we can convert the old system a new system and then everyone got an offer um to uh here is what the new system what your wallet size is and uh for everyone who opted in which was basically everyone now it's like something that every quarter you make a decision and you get the stock options that you choose an
we're a product company we're good at this like all shop photos takes the insane complexity of a world of commerce and makes it usable by by people by hopefully everyone so this is the same problem let let's go build the ux now what do we want from this can can once we own the ux can we actually move agency over and so this is sort of went into this concept of can we just let people choose like because you know sometimes executives coming in said like hey i would actually like yes you're doing 5
i was wrong about this i actually expected this to be a um very very uh long-term a stepping stone event for for e-commerce adoption
for e-commerce and that created a massive massive leap forward in terms of uh you know gmv in in in for our emergence and business for a platform
the company just keeps getting better i think it's best version of that shop ever existed by by by a mile
we build the best software we know how to build
this is one cool thing about shopify like the millions of entrepreneurs we get to speak to
I think this is, like Shopify, fundamentally, is an implementation of these ideas. And we want, like, we want to make sure that people could solve the problem that it was very, very hard to build software that helped small and medium businesses, right?
I got a good pushback of, you know, do we really need to be lots of online stores? Isn't there going to just be sort of one of them? Or like, maybe there's like, like, let's say 10,000 or 40,000 or something. And I think 45 was a number that I got in one rejected rejection letter. Um, there was just no agreement that there was a value in, um, making all like, like making it easy for people to start stores because there was a limited term. And, um, I think that is actually, that was good pushback
what Shopify has attempted and, and with payments, especially, uh, it's just to remove all these barriers and, and, make, make ideally everything happen only once you need to, like once you have a bunch of sales and want to get the money paid out, we, you will then be able to tell us where to send it. And then we can do all the provisioning of the merchant accounts for you.
what we've realized eventually the hypothesis we had is like, every time we make it simpler, what we actually get is just more consumption because the demand was very high, but the ability to overcome the friction along the way, it was, was simply not that well distributed
I think the right idea is that, um, if you're direct to a consumer brand, you need a home base somewhere. Um, and ideally you do this on the open web. Why? Because it's the one place you can actually own like, uh, on the entire internet and the other surface you pay, uh, for the impression or, or you're renting it from someone.
we're not really competing on that
Amazon has a monopoly on all the products that have barcodes
Amazon Marketplace is going to be one of them
we are competing on background with companies which are very good at this kind of thing like Amazon right so um because that is the big competitor
if if if you have products um if you have products that have barcodes Amazon is going to be the best number to sell these things and there's nothing you can do like Amazon is The Logical end conclusion of this branch of retail that is the department store right um and no department store will be able to survive against them once they realize that and actually build department stores or just buy all the best price or whatever right so um that's going to happen
but why would Apple want to be in the same store as Microsoft and Samsung right then it becomes back to distribution right like and and apple already has its own distribution so that might not be available to Apple anymore and that can control like if you if you if you ever go to like an apple Corner in a Best Buy you know bay control like it's has it's the nicest table in the entire Best Buy is the apple one but the light above it is still a Best Buy light and therefore nothing looks as nice as
I think the Apple Store like like every retailer should like wanted to be more like the Apple Store the second the first Apple Store was out there it was clearly that this was a better idea and again extremely Innovative in that way so I think this is where retail is going
I think thep store is probably even the best example because they a cafe and just you happen to buy the things
once you're ready to like start and grow a business and try to become be successful come to us and we just there's a lot of incentives for us to help you along and and there's a great community of other people who've done it before and uh you know that's and from there you launch your product into all various um channels of how products are sold and and and be help with hopefully with all of them
if you do the first phase on Kickstarter and you get 100,000 emails and you're doing the 2.0 of the product and you want to do a Kickstarter thing and not give 5% to Kickstarter right Shopify pay you pay a monthly flat fee of almost nothing yeah of almost nothing mhm so it' behoove people to do the first one on Kickstarter capture the audience and then do the second one on Shopify
we we have a free theme called kickstand which is essentially continuous of a design of a Kickstarter campaign into like your retail operation because you start with just one one one product which is sort of a subset of what most uh so you can do demand sideway Shopify right now exactly so and and you could on this theme also do the F the the campaign but like there's so much value you get from being a Kickstarter you should go for that because of the marketplace
this is a perfect company at a perfect time perfect this is your last job isn't it exactly I I would love that to be true it's it's just uh everything is fine this this company is not for sale this company is there to try like to become extremely meaningful and and hopefully something that people will remember in 50 years
shopify's Market is making websites that make more money than they cost what's the you know what's the market size for that right yeah so um it's this is a big place and and there needs to be lots of different approaches
we have to this is one example of many many many and you're sort of in the middle of it it's it's it's it's e-commerce is extremely difficult
what Amazon has a monopoly on all the products that have barcodes and what we would like is to have Monopoly on all products that are actually interesting
the hardest part of the job is um how to is is that I don't think like there's no books for how to build a company that fundamentally needs to be able to while following a very ambitious road map um at the same time the core competency of our business needs to be how to thrive in chaos and how to react quicker than anyone else and we are competing on background with companies which are very good at this kind of thing like Amazon right
we have all sorts of unfair advantages because we just have been very very conscious about how to build this business and the position to navigate and and and and our position within the businesses that we are in is um uh powerful
in last month we added like 40 so it's like we added 40 people in a month yeah so like um that's more than that's two per business day
if you have 60,000 paying clients paying an average of $30 or something I mean you've got at least $25 to $50 million in Revenue a year
online retail is is a fairly High success um part of Entrepreneurship and most of them succeed yeah it's maybe not most of them but 50%
for active stores are most of them $100,000 a year a million doll a year I mean averages are like always you know most you know as in any fast growing company a very large percentage of people signed up last month right and it's more than last month and so on so averages is one thing
the company's gone Global you're in how many countries now about 100 countries now
our job is to make it cool right because like I mean as you know like everyone wants to start their own company right now you know everyone used to want to be in a rock band now everyone wants to be an entrepreneur yeah uh and and part of a like what we're trying to um accomplish at Shopify is making it so that um retail and creating your products and then selling them um online uh it becomes as cool as you know maybe starting a tech company
I mean Shopify I think significantly simplifies the process of getting your business started and and and and we are successful when our customers are successful so there's um you know lots of value in US helping helping people along
if department store started like in 1860 under John one maker um and like via Shopify operate on the assumption that the department store is a dead branch of the larger history of of of of retail they they became like I mean it's not never going to go away and it's going to be the right form factor for certain things especially Parish worlds
the cool thing about it is this is the thing that our Merchants spend time on some of our Merchants spend eight hours a day like looking into into sh with admin interface and this is why it needs to be very fast the cool thing is our own interface uses the same IPI that we document and our platform users use so everyone is sitting on the same platform and this is really so building into point of sale would be no big deal for you guys
in 2009 we had to realization of man this e-commerce Market is amazing it's just there we in a cusp of so much new stuff coming
we are growing quickly
Shopify is doing extremely well right now
what we think is one of the things that chifi became really really good at is making what we call secondary markets work... we would like to be this company
opportunities for us to work with the payment gateways and shipping companies because economies of scale matter... we can get better rates for everyone and that means there's potentially some opportunity for us to make money too
our business is focused on hey let's let's make it so that everyone who has products to sell... nothing in their way... that's sort of what we care about
converting from like not not just $5,000 people are you often paying $50,000 a month for their systems... converting to that and on a $170 plan and they they they service much better with that
I usually just tell them they are bad at pricing
it was so clear that that was the way software should be uh sold on the internet
we sort of realized well maybe maybe uh helping other people go through this and building their stores might actually be a better business