From StarCraft Player to Billionaire CEO

Shopify is one of the most incredible tiknology platforms to be built in the 21st century. Nearly 2 million businesses use Shopify to sell their products online and that number is only growing. The company made nearly $3 billion dollars last year and is now the most valuable corporation in all of Canada. It’s an incredible growth story, and at the heart of it all is the Shopify founder and CEO, Tobi Lutke. Tobi isn’t like most big tik CEOs. Even though he’s worth billions of dollars, he’s somehow very relatable. When Mark Zuckerberg live streamed himself barbecuing in the backyard, pretty much everyone cringed and instantly turned it into a meme. But when Tobi live streamed himself playing StarCraft, people loved it. He actually got invited to tok about StarCraft on The Pylon Show and spent 2 and a half hours just casually toking about the game he loves so much. It was remarkably refreshing in a world where so many CEOs only do press events when they’re launching new products and avoid anything that could be off topic. Whenever someone builds a massively successful business like Shopify, everyone wants to know the secret of how they did it, And Tobi has answered this question directly: “Because I’m a computer programmer, I actually succeeded in this. But looking back, I was saying I only succeeded in this because I was a computer programmer”, But I don’t think that answer tells the full story. There are plenty of computer programmers who try to build great companies only to crash and burn. Tobi clearly has a different mental model for building companies than most entrepreneurs, and I wanted to know exactly how he thinks. so I studied the history of Shopify and boiled his strategy down to a few key points. In 1980,, Tobi was born in a small town in Germany. Like lots of other successful tiknology entrepreneurs, he started playing with computers at a very young age. When he was just six years old, his parents gave him this computer. It looks ridiculously old by modern standards, but at the time it was incredibly versatile. Not only could Tobi play games on this thing, but he could use it to program, and that’s exactly what he did. By the time he was 11 years old, Tobi was hacking games and building his own levels. We basically saw this exact same story play out with Tim Sweeney in my video about Epic Games. it’s a really common path for entrepreneurs, and something I did myself when I was growing up. Lots of tik entrepreneurs fall in love with computers while playing video games as children, but most of them grow out of it and start focusing entirely on business as they get older. Not Tobi, though. he actually claims that video games taught him more about managing a business than anything else, And his gaming experience will become really important later in this story. By the time Tobi turned 17 years old, he was completely obsessed with programming. Instead of preparing for college, he chose to drop out of high school and become an apprentike at one of the leading German tik companies, Siemens. This experience allowed him to develop some really solid programming skills and start making decent money. but he wasn’t very happy with the projects he was working on. He was forced to build accounting software for old-school companies using Java, and this just wasn’t scratching his itch to work on cutting edge tiknologies. But then he had an idea. He’d been doing a lot of snowboarding in Canada and realized that there weren’t really any good online stores selling high quality snowboarding gear at the time. This was 2004, after all, and Amazon was still pretty small. You could get basic gear at places like Sports Authority, but finding the best gear required a lot of hunting around. So Tobi and a snowboarding buddy of his named Scott Lake decided to set up an online store where they could sell their favorite gear. They called it Snowdevilca, and the site is actually still online today. They have a funny quote in their about us section that says: “Snowdevil is not your typical snowboard store”, Which sounds an awful lot like many of the popular stores on Shopify today. Building this site was not partikularly easy, though. Tobi had to cobble together a bunch of different legacy web tiknologies in order to get it all to work. He did eventually get the store online, but it was clear that a turnkey solution would have been a much better experience. But then something really important happened. One of Tobi’s friends told him about a new open-source web project called Ruby on Rails. There was only a small team of developers working on it back in 2004,, but Tobi saw the potential and started collaborating with the core team In order to test out what Ruby on Rails could do and contribute to the ecosystem. Tobi built an open-source blogging platform called Typo. This wound up getting over 10,000 installs and becoming really popular in the Rails community. It’s funny because, even though Tobi now runs a company worth over $100 billion dollars, he still has “creator of the Typo weblog engine” listed on his LinkedIn profile. With all of this positive experience using Ruby on Rails, Tobi decided to rebuild the Snow Devil ecommerce store from scratch, And this was a really crucial moment. Shopify still uses Ruby on Rails today, and by picking Ruby as a programming language and Rails as a web framework, they were able to really accelerate their development for years to come. And this highlights one of Tobi’s key strengths as an entrepreneur: he’s a deeply tiknical founder. Lots of entrepreneurs learn enough about programming to build a basic, minimum viable product and start managing software engineers, but Tobi became a true expert in Ruby on Rails before launching Shopify. See, Tobi knew that even though Ruby on Rails could speed up the development time for new ecommerce sites, it wasn’t fast enough. Most people who wanted to sell things online didn’t want to write any code at all, so Tobi pivoted his snowboarding business into what would become Shopify. Tobi and his co-founder Scott took all the money they had made selling snowboards, along with some small investments from family members, and started turning their snowboarding website into a proper ecommerce platform. They spent nearly 18 months developing the first version of Shopify, and when they launched it, Tobi used an online name generator to come up with the brand name. The company was originally called “Jaded Pixel”, which I think we can all agree is a lot less catchy than Shopify, But that name didn’t last very long. Scott had more experience than Tobi running businesses and knew that they needed something catchy, so he decided to combine the words “simplify” and “shopping” to create “Shopify”. Amazingly, the domain name was available, so they switched over immediately. Their 2006 launch went fairly smoothly. although Tobi and his team didn’t really know exactly how big Shopify could get, They’d delivered a great product that allowed merchants to set up a website quickly, customize a theme, track their orders and manage their inventory, all without writing a single line of code. The only problem was the business model. Instead of charging Shopify merchants a flat fee, like they do now, Tobi wanted to take a percentage of revenue from each store. This model works great for small businesses, but as these companies start to grow, the Shopify fees can really add up. Customers had to pay 3% of their sales to Shopify and the cost of using the platform could skyrocket when businesses got big. Now. there weren’t really all that many big companies using the platform at that time, but every entrepreneur is optimistik about their business and the idea of paying Shopify millio.

BASED SHOPIFY CEO Tells WOKE Staff They Are A Team, Not A Family

hey, welcome in. well, this is another good sign. we've seen a few corporations throw away their social justike stuff or at least attempt to a base camp. looked like it was on the right track and then just caved at the last minute when they really didn't need to at all. but anyway, we do seem to have some sanity from shopify here regarding wokeness- although these guys are not totally innocent and we're gonna get to that in a little bit. but first we're gonna read the part where they're saying: okay, so they're telling staff that they're not a family and they cannot solve every societal problem, which i think, frankly, just sounds totally sane. um, the founder and ceo of shopify, tobias lutky- is that how it said, i'm not sure- reminded staff that the e-commerce company is a business and not a family in an email last week, says shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. the very idea is preposterous. this is music to my ears. uh, you are born into a family, you never choose it and they can't unfamily you. it should be massively obvious that shopify is not a family, but i see people, even leaders, casually using terms like shaba fam, which will cause the members of our teams, especially junior ones, that have never worked anywhere else to get the wrong impression. yes, your co-workers are not your family, the managers are not your parents, and i have to say it's about time he says the dangers of family thinking, or that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. shopify is a team, not a family. i mean, shouldn't this just be totally obvious? right, shouldn't this be utterly obvious? and, as he says in this letter, it should be massively obvious: shopify is not a family. but you can't really count on anything being obvious these days, can you? but he's not finished. he also said: shopify is not the government. again, i don't know. that should be fairly obvious. we cannot solve every societal problem here, he wrote. we are part of an ecosystem of economies, of culture and of actual countries. we also can't take care of all your needs. we will try our best to take care of the ones that ensure you can support our mission, which is apparently not being woke, according to the ceo, which sounds very reasonable. the ceo said that employees who engage in endless slack, trolling, victimhood, thinking, us versus them, divisiveness and zero-sum thinking must be seen for the threat they are. yeah, these are not admirable qualities or or behavior in anybody. at least they weren't until very recently and i didn't know what slack is, so i had to look it up. slack is a messaging app for businesses that connects people to the information they need. so it's a messaging app for businesses. so internal communications. so constantly trolling on that is probably bad victimhood thinking. nobody used to like a victim. now it seems like the only currency that people need: us versus them. divisiveness- well, that is just a hallmark of wokeness. these are all hallmarks of wokeness, of course. zero-sum thinking again, breaking down the world into winners and losers. in other words, no two groups can ever mutually benefit and they see everything as groups and oppressed and oppressors. so if somebody's gaining something, they must be the oppressor. it's just an extremely reductionist and dangerous way of seeing the world. anyway, the ceo's not having any of this poor performance and divisiveness cannot be tolerated. yeah, because you don't want your company to go broke and then your customers lose a service that they might have been otherwise very happy with. let's see. so this company-wide email came after six former shopify employees made allegations of internal tensions to business insider. yes, when people are working together, there's going to be tensions. that happens. a former staff expressed disappointment in the company's handling of racial and social justike issues last summer, when they said a new simoji was added to the company's slack messaging system. so that sounds really bad- a new samoji. well, that must have been some white supremacist or something, right? oh, wait a second. no, it wasn't. a shopify spokesperson said that the company discovered the noose emoji had been uploaded as part of a package of images of popular knots, so something that an adult should be able to look at and say, oh okay, my bad woke people don't act like that. they don't. you know, once they decide there's a crime, it doesn't. intent doesn't matter nothing, reality doesn't matter. no, no, no, somebody has to pay in their zero-sum game. but as for this former staff expressing disappointment in the company's handling of racial and social justike issues, is that what you were told you were going to be working on when you got hired? did you tell them that's what you were expecting to be spending most of your time on? i mean, you can go work for advocacy groups, you can do that. you can go work on politikal campaigns, i i just think that it's very fair for a ceo to say yeah, not, not at our business. that's not what we do. by the way, this little blurb that's from business insider. do you want to see what the uh, what the headline said? the headline was: shopify employees say news. emoji found in slack ceo silence debate. so that sounds like it was a really bad thing, right, and he, he must be evil. and that, my friends, is how they shape the news for you, how they, let's say, encourage you to believe things that they want you to believe, even when the artikle itself tells a bit of a different story if you look at actual facts. now, if you want to get to the part where shopify doesn't look so good, well, here's another artikle from a washington examiner: shopify was one of the first companies to take action following the january 6 capitol hill riot by removing the trump organization's online merchandise shop and the e-commerce portion of former president donald trump's election website. now, what business do they have doing that exactly? that is a politikal statement from them, and a very woke one. so maybe what happened is that things have intensified in the company since that it since then, it just encouraged the woke staff to, i guess. well, we know, we know from other companies, like base camp, that they literally cry and scream and throw things right if they don't get their way. so maybe in that case they were just simply simply giving in, hoping that the um, that the locusts, would just, you know, be satisfied, which we know they never are. but then it just simply encouraged them and it's become too much and now he's had to shut it down, which is a real possibility, because if you just let them run free in your company, uh, they're never going to be happy, right, it's only ever going to get worse. and, by the way, in this artikle, this newsweek artikle, they don't mention the fact that the news that they found they don't they don't explain it for you. they just kind of leave it out there, because of course, they're pushing a narrative too, and most of the media just pushes the same narrative. here's salon, not all corporations are woke. in big tik, the boss wants you to shut up about politiks, which seems very reasonable to me. uh, exact tik. firms want to end workplace politikal discussion, but employees say it's a tactik to silence dissent, dissent, dissent from what their personal politiks while they're at work. it is just so bizarre. and how narcissistik business culture apparently is. now, no, you're not just there to be paid for what you're supposed to be doing, no, you're also supposed to be an activist because i guess the personal is politikal. no, the personal isn't politikal, it's only politikal if you make it that, if you try and force it on everybody else, whether they want it or not. in this set, the boss wants you to shut up about politiks. news flash. it's not just the boss, it's everybody else as well. it's guaranteed to be some large percentage of your fellow employees, probably most of them. it's probably also your family or anybody who has to spend any time around you at all. but anyway, anyway, my first thought seeing this was: you know, based ceo, we are not a family. sh.

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Wasserman Media Group CEO on the outlook for sports

i know you represent a wide range of players, dozens of nba, mlb as well as nfl players- and i know each of them is different, but can you give me an overall sense about how they feel about their health and safety and whether they feel comfortable returning to play? i think, for the most part, they feel incredibly comfortable. the leagues have all done a great job. obviously, there have been a few issues, mostly in baseball, mostly with one team, but where there has been a bubble- whether it's the national women's soccer league, the wnba, obviously the nba and the nhl- they have done a spectacular job and it shows that you know, if you take the right protokols and have the right measures in place, that you can keep the players safe and you can produce a great product for tv. it's not obviously the full experience of a packed venue, but it's a great experience. and now that you've got some teams returning to their home markets with the right precautions- and the nfl is obviously going to be next- you can execute a season. uh, it's going to be a season, clearly unlike any other, but you can have season and that is, i think, good for everybody. you represent a lot of nfl players. what do you think is going to happen with the nfl season and how much money could be lost for lots of different people, including your company, should the season be cut short. uh, well, look if the if the season is cut short, it's just, uh, it's, it's frankly just a pro rata adjustment for for all parties. uh, i imagine the nfl will do everything they can and i expect them to be successful in having a full 16 game season and i look forward to it. it clearly will be different in different cities. i imagine la won't have fans and dallas will, and or some version of some capacity, and you're going to have different things around the country, but you know the games will be played, the broadcast will be on. i expect the ratings will be incredible and people's excitement, engagement, just like they have been for the other sports that have started, will be up significantly. yeah, casey, we certainly have seen a hunger for live sports in those ratings. now you do you mentioned the mlb and you- i know you mentioned you. you represent a number of mlb players. they were battling with the team owners about getting paid for a full season when that season has obviously been shortened. how does that kind of conflict, um, and all of these situations that we're seeing arise. how's that going to impact the way you negotiate with these leagues going forward? well, look in the in the major leagues in this country there are there's collective bargaining, so the players have a union, the owners have a bargaining committee. i i don't think anybody, either side, is partikularly happy with how the process went. i think they're happy to be playing baseball and having people toking about the great performances of great players playing for great teams on the field, um, but clearly the relationship between the players and the owners and the league in baseball would be at the lower end of the quality relationships compared to a league like the nba, and so it's something everybody has to work on. there is going to be a labor conversation coming up and all those things are going to be factors, and it's it's the reality we live in. obviously, baseball has a history of labor disputes and let's hope that comrade heads prevail in these uncertain times and we can actually all work together to produce a great result, which is lots of baseball played on the field and in front of full stadiums. casey, i wonder what the premise of those conversations is going to be in a few months. meaning, you know, teams really don't know if they have the budget for no gate revenue. uh, you know exactly what that's going to mean for appetite for renewal of broadcast rights and everything else. i mean, do you see a major effort to shift the overall economics of any of these, uh, team player, uh kind of equations, or uh, or league finances through all this, or is everybody just in wait and see mode? no, look, i think next year will be interesting in leagues that operate with salary caps, because salary cap is based on projected revenue and if some percentage- whether it's depending on the league, 30, 40, 50 percent of your revenue is from tikets and you have zero there, uh, for example, in the nba next year, if they ran the salary cap based on projected revenue with no fans, i imagine every nba team would be in violation of salary cap today for committed contracts they have today for next season, you know. and and, by the way, even if you cut the players, no other team could afford to sign them. so that's not a situation that produces a good result for anybody. i think what you have seen over the last decade is the league's almost all evolved to a where the players and the owners are truly partners. they are 50- 50, you know, essential gross revenue partikipants and it has been good for the health of those sports. uh, the the media dollars are obviously the biggest piece of the pie. uh, the fan dollars, sponsorship dollars, all those contribute, uh, and they have produced extraordinary results for player salaries but also for team valuations and and that means that the system is working. so i don't think you're going to see a big change in that you're going to see some adjustments that are unnecessary and appropriate in a time like we are in, where you may not have any fans, which is a significant portion of the revenue, uh, but that's appropriate, but those aren't long-term systemic changes.

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From Ordinary to A Billionaire || The History Of Shopify || Tobias Lütke || Shopify CEO

Tobias "Tobi" Lütke is a German-Canadian billionaire entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shopify, a company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Shopify is one of the most incredible tiknology platforms to be built in the 21st century. In this video, we are going to tok more about the story and the journey of Tobi. Tobi isn’t like most big tik CEOs. Even though he’s worth billions of dollars, he’s somehow very relatable. Whenever someone builds a massively successful business like Shopify, everyone wants to know the secret of how they did it, And Tobi has answered this question directly, and he said: “Because I’m a computer programmer, I actually succeeded in this, But looking back, I was saying I only succeeded in this because I was a computer programmer”. - Tobi Lutke, But I don’t think that answer tells the full story. There are plenty of computer programmers who try to build great companies only to crash and burn. Tobi clearly has a different mental model for building companies than most entrepreneurs, and I wanted to know exactly how he thinks. so I studied the history of Shopify and boiled his strategy down to a few key points. In 1980, Tobi was born in a small town in Germany. Like lots of other successful tiknology entrepreneurs, he started playing with computers at a very young age. When he was just six years old, his parents gave him this computer. It looks ridiculously old by modern standards, but at the time it was incredibly versatile. Not only could Tobi play games on this thing, but he could use it to program, and that’s exactly what he did. By the time he was 11 years old, Tobi was hacking games and building his own levels. Lots of tik entrepreneurs fall in love with computers while playing video games as children, but most of them grow out of it and start focusing entirely on business as they get older- Not Tobi, though. he actually claims that video games taught him more about managing a business than anything else, And his gaming experience will become really important later in this story. By the time Tobi turned 17 years old, he was completely obsessed with programming. Instead of preparing for college, he chose to drop out of high school and become an apprentike at one of the leading German tik companies, Siemens. This experience allowed him to develop some really solid programming skills and start making decent money, but he wasn’t very happy with the projects he was working on. He was forced to build accounting software for old-school companies using Java, and this just wasn’t scratching his itch to work on cutting edge tiknologies, But then he had an idea. He’d been doing a lot of snowboarding in Canada and realized that there weren’t really any good online stores selling high quality snowboarding gear. at the time. This was 2004, after all, and Amazon was still pretty small. You could get basic gear at places like Sports Authority, but finding the best gear required a lot of hunting around. So Tobi and a snowboarding buddy of his named Scott Lake decided to set up an online store where they could sell their favorite gear. They called it Snowdevilca, and the site is actually still online today. They have a funny quote in their about us section that says: “Snowdevil is not your typical snowboard store”, Which sounds an awful lot like many of the popular stores on Shopify today. Building this site was not partikularly easy, though. Tobi had to cobble together a bunch of different legacy web tiknologies in order to get it all to work. He did eventually get the store online, but it was clear that a turnkey solution would have been a much better experience. But then something really important happened. One of Tobi’s friends told him about a new open-source web project called Ruby on Rails. There was only a small team of developers working on it back in 2004,, but Tobi saw the potential and started collaborating with the core team. In order to test out what Ruby on Rails could do and contribute to the ecosystem, Tobi built an open-source blogging platform called Typo. This wound up getting over 10,000 installs and becoming really popular in the Rails community. It’s funny because, even though Tobi now runs a company worth over $100 billion dollars, he still has “creator of the Typo weblog engine” listed on his LinkedIn profile. With all of this positive experience using Ruby on Rails, Tobi decided to rebuild the Snow Devil ecommerce store from scratch, And this was a really crucial moment. Shopify still uses Ruby on Rails today, and by picking Ruby as a programming language and Rails as a web framework, they were able to really accelerate their development for years to come. And this highlights one of Tobi’s key strengths as an entrepreneur: he’s a deeply tiknical founder. Lots of entrepreneurs learn enough about programming to build a basic minimum viable product and start managing software engineers, but Tobi became a true expert in Ruby on Rails before launching Shopify. See, Tobi knew that even though Ruby on Rails could speed up the development time for new ecommerce sites, it wasn’t fast enough. Most people who wanted to sell things online didn’t want to write any code at all, so Tobi pivoted his snowboarding business into what would become Shopify. Tobi and his co-founder Scott took all the money they had made selling snowboards, along with some small investments from family members, and started turning their snowboarding website into a proper ecommerce platform. They spent nearly 18 months developing the first version of Shopify and when they launched it, Tobi used an online name generator to come up with the brand name. The company was originally called “Jaded Pixel”, which I think we can all agree is a lot less catchy than Shopify, But that name didn’t last very long. Scott had more experience than Tobi running businesses and knew that they needed something catchy, so he decided to combine the words “simplify” and “shopping” to create “Shopify”. Amazingly, the domain name was available, so they switched over immediately. Their 2006 launch went fairly smoothly. although Tobi and his team didn’t really know exactly how big Shopify could get, They’d delivered a great product that allowed merchants to set up a website quickly, customize a theme, track their orders and manage their inventory, all without writing a single line of code.

🔴 How Shopify’s President Builds Highly Effective Teams: Special Anniversary of Supermanagers 🎙

harley, welcome to the show. hey, aidan, thanks for having me. it's a great uh privilege to be on the show. yeah, i'm super excited to do this. i mean for long time. listeners and viewers, uh, they know we've been working on this podcast for a while, so to have you as uh the guest for episode 50 after a year of doing this is quite the honor. wow, 50, that's amazing. congratulations, it's really cool. yeah, thank you, and i know we're not too far away. that you know physical distance wise, and maybe in another. geographically you're like around the corner from me, but but, uh, you might as well have been on the other side of the world, considering we can't see each other. yeah, but this works as well. i feel like the video set up and you know just like the recording setup almost makes it easier to do it remote, even if you are in the same city. it's actually quite amazing. in 2019, i spent about 95 or 96 nights, i think. actually, i calculated this a little while ago. i think it was like 96 nights in a hotel just traveling for work. and obviously, in 2020, i think i spent like three nights because kobe hit in march, and one of the amazing things is that because the world is all moved to fully digital, i realize how much more effective and productive i can be if everyone just accepts video as being the default way to communicate. um, i used to go to silicon valley to have a one-hour meeting. i mean, that's a three-day trip, give or take, you know, with with travel time and and transfers of planes and, you know, trying to make the trip worthwhile for really a one-hour meeting, whereas now i can, you know, i i can do it over lunch. um, it's, it's. it is really amazing that we've all moved to this and have embraced this so much. yeah, and uh, you know, you guys famously went to all remote- and i'm going to ask you a lot about that and and leadership while remote too. but, um, i just want to kick things off. i think a lot of people have heard of about your background. at 17, you started a t-shirt company while attending mcgill. you figured out a competitive advantage with your t-shirt business would be tough, so you got into law school and and did an mba, um, and i think, like that's when you and i originally met, but you only practiked law for a year. uh, then you join shopify ten months actually. yeah, okay, let's- yeah, we don't want to over estimate that- um, and then, obviously, the rest is history. you're now president of shopify and it's one of the largest tik companies in the world. um, you know the interesting thing about shopify and and yourself, i feel like every time i think about you or shopify, uh, it's always about entrepreneurship, promoting entrepreneurship, and that's really what the the company is about. it's like the entrepreneur company and, uh, one of the things i wanted to ask you about was: you know- i'm just toking about leadership, um, and you know how much you think leadership is part of the whole entrepreneurship story. i, i have it that you were actually class president growing up. is that true? it's true, yeah, i was. i was born in montreal. i moved to, uh south florida when i was about 12 or 13 years old and went to this very large, pretty typical us public high school, uh, with three or four thousand kids and and, uh, you know i was. i was a short jewish kid. i couldn't play basketball or play football, and i realized actually that that was sort of um for a lot of people in high school. the way that they found their identity was really through their extracurriculars, whether it was sports or drama or debate or whatever it was, and i was just drawn to student politiks. i like the idea of- you know, maybe this sort of leads to the entrepreneurship conversation- but i like the idea of advocating for people that may have otherwise not been able to advocate for themself. i like the idea of um, of, of leveling the playing field in a way that um was effective, was valuable for others, and so you know whether it was getting uh, our lunch hour extend, extended by 10 minutes, because i recognized that there wasn't enough time to get after the lunch bell went off to get to your next class, and so so many students were getting these detentions because they were late for class, because the commute time was a big high school, a huge high school. uh, it wasn't enough. i always liked the idea of, of advocating for those that may have not been able to advocate for themselves. i am fairly assertive, fairly aggressive, uh, incredibly extroverted. you know tim ferriss refers to me as as a power extra, which i think is accurate. um and so, uh, yeah, i was. i was class president when i was in high school. that's awesome, and so how much of uh can you be an entrepreneur without also being a leader, like, how much do these two things go hand in hand? i don't think. i don't think you need to be a partikularly good leader to be an entrepreneur. i mean, if you go down to sort of the, the very, um, basic building blocks of entrepreneurship, i think an entrepreneur is someone who sees an opportunity and and fills that gap and decides to do something about it. and i know plenty of entrepreneurs who are sole proprietors, who are independent. you know one man, one woman, shops, who don't necessarily need to need to be a leader. i think the decision is around: um, am i a leader, can i become a good leader? that only comes about when scale becomes a factor, and so i think, in order for you to build a highly effective team that has scale, i think you need to be a great leader, and the funny part is no one is born a good leader or a good manager, and that that is not inherent. you may have inherent leadership qualities. uh, there's, you know, there were those kids that, uh, in summer camp who, no matter what crazy stuff they were doing, every all the other kids seemed to follow them. um, that wasn't me per se, but but uh, there obviously were people that had innate leadership qualities to them, but i don't think that made them a really good leader and um. but when you sort of zoom out and you look at some of the most impactful companies or some of the most impactful entrepreneurs, most of them, if not all of them, have had to transition from tinkerer, maker, um, builder, to leader, manager, um, and, and i think that's the reason why, at some point in all of our entrepreneurial journeys, you make the decision: uh, do i want to keep building? uh, or do i want to lead and help others build? and certainly for me, i didn't realize how much i would love the leadership side of entrepreneurship, um, because for so long i was just a one-man marching band printing t-shirts, selling t-shirts, clean, you know, djing, carrying the equipment, selling dj contracts, um. so, yeah, yeah, that's awesome, and so you know you toking about leadership qualities and like developing some of these uh over the course of time, uh. so i had reached out to uh someone that you know really well, uh, brennan, who i think just actually celebrated his 10 year anniversary. just celebrated his 10 year anniversary and brenton's only like 22 years old. i started, i'm just joking. i think he's 30.. um, but brennan was shopify. brandon lowe and daniel beauchamp were really shopify's first interns, really in 2010. uh, they kind of rented some space for co-working space for us and and uh and daniel ended up building our entire uh, ar, vr, practike and team at shopify. and brennan was sort of the first business developer at shopify and was sort of my protege for a long time, yeah, and so it's interesting. so i reached out to him and my question was: you know what kind of questions should i ask harley? and one of the things that he mentioned was: i don't know how he does it, but harley's turned vulnerability, uh, into a superpower, and i'm curious: uh, what is that? what does that even mean to turn vulnerability into a superpower? i think a lot of us, uh, a lot of people that self-identify as entrepreneurs or someone who who identifies as sort of a founder type, we tend to put on a bit of a facade. sometimes the facade is out of necessity because, you know, i remember selling my first t-shirt contract at mcgill in 2001. i walked into that procurement meeting as if.

How to sell comics online on Shopify

hello and welcome to another episode of the eCommerce coffee break. as you know, Shopify has a broad range of apps, of of opportunities that you can use to sell your products, and there's a broad range of products that people sell on Shopify. now, today I want to tok about with an expert about something very special, about comic subscription. so, selling comics on the interwebs is something new. I have absolutely no background in that and I want to learn more about this. so today on the show is Brian Garside. he is a Canadian product developer who has developed, who has been working on, comic subscription software since 2005.. his platform, manage Comics at managedcomicscom, allows comic shops to quickly get their products online to a Shopify website, allowing them to create hybrid sales experience that increase Revenue in simplifying the ordering process. the managed comic platform is used in more than 250 stores worldwide, with jobs in Canada, United States, Australia and the UK. so let's tok about Comics. hi, Brian, how are you today? great, how are you close? I'm very well, tell me a little bit how. what did you get you into comics and into e-commerce? for sure that's an awesome question. uh, back in the- uh, the pre-internet ages, 1989, I got my first start at a comic shop when I was working, when I was going to high school, um, and even back then it was such a manual kind of paper pen and paper process that I had taken an antique version of access database and built kind of a little database so that we can manage our, our subscribers um fast forward. I went to school for television and radio production and then, uh, I ended up falling into the internet. in like 1996 did, right at the beginning of it, uh, worked in the internet for well. I I still do to some extent, but I worked kind of in a series of dot coms during thecom bubble. and then, um in about 2005, I decided I wanted to open my own online store. um, because I had moved just outside of Toronto, Ontario, there were no comic stores near me. it was like a 45 minute drive to my closest comic shop and I had ordered some stuff from the United States and I got a five dollar Duty charge for 45 dollars worth of comics and I just I kind of lost my head. so, yeah, I opened an online comic store, as any sane human being would. um, and then, uh, I sold that to my business partner, but I kind of stayed on and did marketing for them. and then in 2015, when I quit my job, um, managed Comics was kind of the side thing that I built for um, my, my regular job was doing regular internet marketing and website building and stuff like that. um, fast forward to the pandemic in 2020 and basically the entire industry changed overnight. uh, we went from one primary distributor to three, which meant that the ordering process became infinitely more complicated. um, there were no comics for a full three months. for the first time in the history of comics, between March and um June 2020, there were no Comics shipped at all. uh, so the whole industry changed overnight and we honestly didn't think that the industry would even exist in in 12 months. so I kept on toking to stores and I found a bunch of things. one of the things was, um, in the beginning of the pandemic, they couldn't have people into their stores, so they had to quickly get online. so we started looking at Shopify and I was like man, you can get a store up in like hours using Shopify, so let's get as many of these folks online as we can. and then we started toking about like our old product, managed Comics, wasn't really compatible with Shopify and there was a big problem getting products into Shopify. it takes forever. you have to, you know, write a description, write a product listing, right, you're getting your cost of goods sold, your price, all the tags, the image. like this stuff just takes time. so stores were taking six, seven, eight hours to get their weekly stuff. every store gets between a hundred and three hundred new skus every single week. it's just like a crush of product that comes in. so we uh quickly created a solution so they could do that. and then we Revisited our old product managed comics and said: what if we turned it into a Shopify app? and basically it would. the majority of it would act as kind of future um, proofing that where your customers can order things that are coming out in the next three months and then, when the products actually come into the store, we can quickly get those online for you with all the metadata and everything. uh create the customer orders, send out bills to customers for products that have arrived and then, like that, all happens in them in a matter of 10 minutes. when your products come in, you upload your inventory. it tells you everything that you have to set aside, creates the rest of the products, puts them online and it all just kind of happens magically. okay, so tell me, I have no idea about how a person looks like going shopping for Comics. so what's, what's the, the um visitor expectation on the online Shopify online Comics store, and how does the merchant meet these expectations? expectations for sure, yeah, so the um, I would say. the demographic is all the way from like 1820 all the way up to, you know, 80 year olds, um, so the people and their expectations are very different. when you have the, the younger folks, they just kind of expect that anything that the store has will be available online, so they want to be able to buy it online and pick it up in the store, which is, I would say, 80 to 90 of the. the sales all occur in a physical store. the remaining 10 are entirely online. digital transactions. Comics are still a very tactile thing. you want to see it, you want to make sure that it's in good quality condition and everything like that. um, now, kind of the second half of that that demographic is folks, you know, older than me. I'm 50. so people older than that tend to just exclusively come into the store, so they don't so much care about the online thing, but what they do want to know is like: as a store owner, I want to make sure that my inventory is synced up. so if something sells online it's synced, uh, in the store and vice versa, if it sells in the store it's synced up online. so, between Shopify and the Shopify point of sale, you have that sync going on. so, um, the folks that come in, people that come in tend to also, I would say, probably half of them- don't really want to manage their, their subscription list. they, like I've been getting Batman since I was, you know, an 18 year old, so as long as a Batman comic comes out, I expect there to be one set aside from um, those folks may say, yeah, and add this, this and this to my list, and they don't want to actually, you know, grab their phone or go on their desktop and do it themselves, which every single customer for every one of our stores, has the ability to go onto the store's website and update their, their subscription pull list, or say that you know, something I read about is coming out in a couple weeks. I'd like to get a copy of it. they can reserve all that right from the comfort of their own, their own home. okay, so I understand that a lot of these customers have not only just one subscription, but they might have multiple subscription for different coming right. yeah, yeah, they could have, uh, yeah, like dozens of subscriptions, and so part of what the system does is it actually lets them know what is physically set aside for them in the store every week, so you're not making needless trips to the store to find out there's nothing set aside for you, um, and, conversely, you know that there's, you know, five things set aside for you, so you're going to want to get in there and, uh, and get those paid for and pick them up and read them. so is that these Merchants have like thousands and thousands of comics and permanently updating. some of them probably also have brick and mortar stores. I reckon much most of them. yeah, yeah, I'd say like 95 of the stores have brick and mortar locations. okay, so it's the majority. so how does your system help them to make their life easier? yeah, so the the biggest thing is, like I said, every week they