Shopify

“Because if you had done it a year later, the window was over. You couldn't do it.”

“And how do you slow down demand? We did it two ways. We first said, you have to do a demo. You got to talk to me. I want to understand who you are, what you're trying to do and build a relationship. And the second thing we did was we tripled the price. We went…”

“Longer term, these are not great million dollar, multi-million dollar businesses. If that's your aspiration, this is your step one.”

“I sort of somehow doubt that a Shopify plugin will become, will IPO as a billion dollar business.”

“And I've absolutely seen folks build Shopify apps that weren't that differentiated, but they ranked high and so they got decent traction.”

“This is Shopify, Twitter, Facebook. I'm sure there are more that I could pontificate about. I'm naming these because they have Completely decimated companies that we've heard about or that I've invested in.”

“You hear Jordan Gall talk about Shopify coming after Cart Hook, and that's not the first nor the last time that Shopify will do that.”

“Usually actually branching into other platforms is a lot harder than you think. We've seen tiny, I've seen tiny companies and non-tiny companies try to do it, and it can work, but in the majority of cases I've seen it hasn't worked.”

“I'm the founder of a company called Social Snowball, which is an affiliate marketing platform for Shopify brands, and we are mid seven figures of ARR”

“And then I started a company called Rally, which was an e-commerce checkup for everyone outside of Shopify. And that was intended for what was called the headless ecosystem. That didn't quite work. We went toward enterprise. That kind of worked. We got to a fe…”

“And then it ran into a wall named Shopify. So they did not want checkouts to take Payment processing off of their platform, and they ended Carthook's run.”

“We did not even have a Shopify integration, and 15% of our customers were e-commerce.”

“They quoted me like 25 K and they said it would take about three months for them to get the MVP that I wanted like live and approved in the Shopify app store. And I kid you not, that took It took 15 months before I terminated the contract early with them becau…”

“We have about 2700 customers, a bit more, so those are Shopify brands using the platform. We're a full-time team of 24 and we are between five and ten million of ARR.”

“Until you get something live and get people using it and see how fast it grows and see where it plateaus, I think it's going to be really hard to try to answer all these questions because there's just not publicly available data on this topic.”