The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 28 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Isenberg: Islands drove campus growth by gifting 'sold out' designer merch
“And what we did is we created a Shopify store and on islands is website, and it would be a hundred dollars, a 150 dollars for a sweatshirt, 80 dollars for a hat, 70 dollars for a t-shirt. And it all said sold out. So we use that to give to people on college ca…”
Howell: Build Physical Brands as Digital Creation Costs Approach Zero
“The cost of creating digital things is going to zero. There's no friction there. Actually making something physical a brand that you can just like build over time. I think that, I think that's a smart thing to do.”
Greg Isenberg: AI reduces plugin development costs from $500K down to $5K
“That I would have never been able to build two years, three years ago, because it probably would have cost me 500 K million dollars, and I wouldn't know if people actually would use the product because it's like a nicer version of something that's popular and …”
Kerner: Direct phone calls are the best fix for abandoned checkouts
“The best converting fix for abandoned checkout or abandoned cart, they're two different things, is to get a person on the phone.”
Isenberg: Horizontal no-code tools create opportunities for vertical, product-specific solutions
“There are all these no code tools. They're either too limited or too complex. What you need is a product specific tool. Like Shopify is no code e-commerce. Then you would also build no code marketplaces. No code messaging app. No code Instagram.”
AI wrappers survive because platforms like OpenAI must design for average users
“Shopify has to make millions and millions and millions of users happy. So they're designing towards the middle. They're designing towards the average. But if you're building a custom GPT or you're building a quote unquote chat GPT wrapper, you can afford to ma…”
Sharma: Moving Honest from Salesforce to Shopify would boost profitability
“Just moving them to Shopify would actually probably bump up their bottom line a good amount. Just because of the inefficiencies that come with using Salesforce commerce cloud, which is what they currently use.”
Bloom: I will keep buying Shopify even if it falls to $350
“I'm perfectly comfortable just like, you know, buying more and more Shopify as it goes from 6:40 where it is right now to like, it could be at three 50 and I'd still be buying on the way down. Right. Cause I believe it's going to be worth a whole lot more in t…”
Finkelstein: Shopify GMV ranks second behind Amazon in US online retail
“If you pretend we were retailer, we would be the second largest online retailer in America after Amazon.”
Thompson: 90% of DTC Shopify ad traffic goes directly to product pages
“You're running when you're running ads at a product direct consumer on Shopify 90% of the time you're running that directly to the product page of which we need a product. So I need to do that. And so I don't really mess around with the homepage that much. It'…”
Greg Isenberg: High-usage, two-star Shopify plugins are the ultimate startup opportunity
“Find two star Shopify WordPress plugins with high usage. So you want low stars, but high usage. That's like the holy grail. So people care about the space, but the experience sucks.”
Courtney: Shopify and Duolingo mandate AI proficiency for all hires
“Both Shopify and Duolingo came out saying basically all of the employees have to learn all the AI tools, plus they're not going to hire people who don't know how to use the tools anymore. So it's now an entry requirement.”
Isenberg: SaaS giants will acquire ecosystem apps that increase usage
“And the reality is that you build all those things You will be able to sell to HubSpot if you're building a HubSpot, you know, business, or Sage, or Shopify, or whatever it is, right? They're gonna, if you could convince them that people who sign up to your se…”
Kerner: Upwork freelancers can scrape 3M Shopify contacts for $20
“There are people that have Upwork accounts that have built with accounts and 20 bucks and you can have all three million Shopify stores contact info in your inbox.”
Deploying 100,000 programmatic Shopify landing pages increased organic traffic by 10%
“So my friend has this shop, she has like a 10,000 SKUs. And so we're like, all right, this, that Shopify thing I was talking about, let's just like throw up a 100,000 landing pages and see what happens. And we'll do some like auto indexing on the back, just li…”
Isenberg: Founders should build specialized AI applications rather than core platforms
“And I think in the past I would be like, I want to create the Shopify, but now I'm kind of like, no, no, I just want to create the, like the Klaviyo. I want to build the app on top of that.”
Finkelstein optimizes his daily routine to completely eliminate transition time
“I'm trying to optimize my entire life for no no transition time or low transition time. So I either want to be like full on, you know, like Hustling and building our business at Shopify, or I want to be doing things that give me great, you know, great joy, bei…”
Finkelstein reveals Supreme finally migrated its online store to Shopify
“Supreme was one of the stores that I always wanted on Shopify, like, for decades, for, like, as long as I've been in Shopify, I wanted Supreme on, and they came on on January, in January to Shopify”
Finkelstein argues working hard versus working smart is a false dichotomy
“It's a false dichotomy. It's not either you're working hard or working smart. I think there are certain times where you just have to do the work.”
Finkelstein: Support for new entrepreneurs is business coaching, not technical fixes
“Support is, is often, I think, looked at in technology companies and software companies as this tech technology support, but rather when you're talking to entrepreneurs, in many cases, first time entrepreneurs, Often what they need is they just need a voice in…”
Isenberg: Agent mystery shopper audits can evolve into recurring software
“So it's testing whether agents can complete the most important user journeys. So if you think about a user journey, maybe it's a Shopify store, you know, you want to buy a hoodie. If it's a, you know, consulting company, it's booking a consult. If it's an insu…”
Shopify Launched E-Commerce Conversion Simulation Using Synthetic AI Audiences
“A few weeks ago, I think Toby from Shopify launched a feature where it was like, you launch your e-commerce store, but like, Based on synthetic AI audiences, here's how they would perform. Here's how your conversion rate would look like. Here's the products th…”
Isenberg: Founders Should Evaluate App Ecosystems by App-to-User Ratios
“4.6 million users. Which is a whole other framework for thinking about when you want to create software in one of these app ecosystems, look at how many apps are in the ecosystem versus how many users are”
Facebook conversion ads generated craft-niche email leads for under $1 each
“Again, I, all I did was I ran Facebook ads with a conversion event. Like to shop to a Shopify store, right? I'm using the base theme, like the base theme that Shopify provides for this test. And we were getting like less than dollar emails, right?”
Ottawa meetup Fresh Founders produced Shopify, Getaround, and other major startups
“And that actually led to Fresh Founders, which was the group of a number of us that got together every Friday. And we created a tribe of our own of entrepreneurs in a city that is not inherently entrepreneurial. And funny enough, that, that group that we creat…”
Finkelstein: Shopify now powers about 2 million merchant stores
“We now have about two million stores on Shopify”