Shopify’s start-up blog in 2005-2006
Some lessons for current and future start-ups? (Photo Credit: NYSE Group)
When the Shopify platform was under development in 2005 and 2006, Scott Lake and Tobi Lütke published a blog “to give people a chance to get to know us better.” It provides an interesting timeline on the path to the launch of the platform that was to capture the second largest share of the e-commerce market in North America by 2020.
Shopify was then called Jaded Pixel and the blog’s name was Pixelsoup. The majority of the posts are from Lake. This is not surprising as he was the co-founder responsible for business development. It was his job to generate “buzz” for the company.
Lake did a pretty good job. Jaded Pixel received a lot of coverage in the media, and the tech community in Ottawa became quite familiar with the start-up. The publicity also give them an audience on which they could do dry runs, contests and beta tests to get useful feedback on the design.
Lake had the cred: before Jaded Pixel, he had worked on developing online communities to create “buzz” for clients such as the US Army, Lockheed Martin, and John Deere. We shouldn’t underestimate his role in helping to get the company off the ground in its early days.
Lütke was the next most frequent poster, providing mainly updates on the coding. Next came Justin Palmer, who was working with Lütke to make sure the user interface (UI) was user friendly.
Daniel Weinand later took over for Palmer, and Lütke gives Weinand, his friend from Germany, a lot of credit for his contribution (even to the extent of making him a co-founder). But it appears we shouldn’t underestimate Palmer’s contribution either.
Even Fiona McKean made an entry, to announce the launch party, which was delayed by 42 days to give the team time to recover from their labours.
What follows are several of the posts (some edited to reduce length). Or you may want to visit the Pixelsoup blog itself. You’ll see interspersed with the task-related notes are some news items about recreational pursuits and social gatherings. It wasn’t all work, labouring away in isolation; there were breaks and fun to be had along the way too.
Posted by Scott Lake Sat, 27 Aug 2005 01:02:00 GMT
Hi all and welcome to the first posts of Pixelsoup, the Jaded Pixel company blog. Before we burst right into our views on everything, I think I should set a little context regarding what we’re trying to do with the blog. The essential purpose of this blog is to give people a chance to get to know us better as we prepare to release Shopify this coming fall.
As you can imagine, anytime you take a bunch of creative people, get them working on a large project together the result is an explosion of all sorts of ideas. The fact that the Jaded Pixel is so diverse makes it that much more interesting.
Posted by Tobias Lütke Sat, 27 Aug 2005 14:47:00 GMT
The Ruby on Rails official podcast recently conducted an interview with me. Most of the interview is spent talking about typo, my open source web-logging software which also powers blog.jadedpixel.com.
Nevertheless, there might be some interesting tidbits in there for the Shopify crowd. Listen in here
Posted by Scott Lake Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:31:00 GMT (edited)
I think everyone agrees that spam, pop-ups and banner ads are annoying as hell. What people fail to realize though is that web-marketing, if done right has the potential to be one of the most ethical types of marketing out there.
The cool thing about web-marketing is that you can actually be quite successful without having to use the shotgun effect and it can also be done in a way that people actually find valuable.
Luckily for us the internet provides a great way to share information. Therefore if you are willing to share information, people who want that information will generally be agreeable to be marketed to in order to get it. Great examples of this are blogs, online newsletters and industry whitepapers.
That being said, these are the types of marketing tools that we are integrating into Shopify.
You won't see this on "The Apprentice"
Posted by Scott Lake Fri, 23 Sep 2005 20:52:00 GMT
Recently, I gave up my day job to work on Jaded Pixel and Shopify full time. Tobi has been working on Jaded Pixel full time for almost a year now so I’m glad I get to start contributing at his level. JP is the third startup that I have been involved in.
If anyone out there is thinking about doing something like this, I only have one piece of advice: Make sure you start a company with someone that you’re friends with and that you both share the same overall goals and ideals. This is so important because when business gets tough, its friendship and shared ideals that will keep it all from unraveling.
The reason I’m thinking about this is now because Tobi and I are working together at Bridgehead today and we are in the “zone”. It feels great to have so many great ideas and energy coming together in one spot. No big message, just some good common sense. I’m amazed that Trump hasn’t pushed this point on the Apprentice yet.
Posted by Tobias Lütke Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:35:30 GMT
Some people voiced concerns about Shopify’s flexibility. It’s a hosted app so I can’t blame you. Most hosted apps on the net right now are very restrictive in the way you can customize them.
We know that’s not what our customers will want so this is how Liquid was born. Liquid is the template engine which allows you to customize the appearance of a shopify store in any way imaginable. The templates can be edited in the admin interface and are stored in the database.
In other words you get a full blown, specialized and pleasant looking template engine to build your shop’s pages. If you are not the coder type you can just as well choose from several default templates and even easily customize them to your liking.
Posted by Scott Lake Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:00:00 GMT
I just wanted to let everyone know that Jaded Pixel is moving to new offices!!!
We will soon be strategically located in the space just above Bridgehead Coffee on Elgin Street in Ottawa. We didn’t want to stray too far from our primary caffeine source.
Branding Your Shop With Shopify
Posted by Justin Palmer Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:35:00 GMT
We’ve been hard at work on Shopify and recently gave shop owners complete control over the look and feel of their shop. Previously you were only allowed to modify a templates source code using Liquid, which is a really simple mixture of html and custom tags. Now you have the ability to upload your own custom graphic files opening the doors for what will soon be some interesting looking shops.
This has an added side effect–it creates job opportunities for designers. With shops like ebay, you’re confined to the look and feel of ebay and have almost no control over the design shell that encapsulates your page content. A designer could create a pretty lucrative business for himself by getting in the Shopify scene early on. He/She would one day have the ability to sell those themes using Shopify itself. It will be interesting to see what unique designs are produced for Shopify as a result of this.
Posted by Tobias Lütke Sun, 06 Nov 2005 17:47:00 GMT
I just released Liquid as open source.
This is the full template engine which will power shopify stores. You are welcome to use it in your own projects or just enhance it in any way you see fit. Chances are that i’ll merge enhancements back which will then become available in Shopify shortly after.
I even prepared a small video to show how to get up and running on liquid for the rails literate crowd.
Posted by Justin Palmer Thu, 17 Nov 2005 21:32:00 GMT
Google doesn’t seem to be slowing down releasing products so fast that their old products are still new. They recently released Google Analytics which is a product hashed from their acquisition of Urchin (now redirects to Analytics).
They took a product that was completely out of the price range for individuals and most small businesses and decided to give it away.
WebSideStory, arguably the leader in web statistics, stock price fell by 12% when they were blind-sided with Googles release of Analytics according to eWeek. The story that hits closest to home is how this move affects entrepreneur product sales.
Posted by Justin Palmer Fri, 18 Nov 2005 01:03:00 GMT
Almost forgot this one, Tobi recently uploaded some photos of the JadedPixel office. We have officially dubbed it The Pixelplex.
Posted by Scott Lake Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:04:00 GMT
Tobi and I are in the process of organizing our first round of investment and I have to say it’s quite an interesting process. Although I have been involved in start-ups before, I have never been in charge of raising investment money. So far, things have been going really well for us in that we are circulating a solid business plan and we are about to release our flagship product (Shopify).
The only thing that all potential investors seem to have in common is that they like the fact that Tobi and I have invested lots of our own energy, time, resources and money into Jaded Pixel.
Ruby and Rails Meeting in Ottawa...
Posted by Scott Lake Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:58:35 GMT
The first meeting of the Ottawa Group of Ruby Enthusiasts (OGRE) is set to happen Thursday December 15th at 7pm at Woody’s at 330 Elgin Street.
I think for the first meeting we should just get together and meet each other and Woody’s is good for that sort of thing.
If you’re interested in coming please drop me an email at: scott AT jadedpixel.com.
Posted by Scott Lake Tue, 03 Jan 2006 21:28:00 GMT
Hi all,
Tobi, Justin and I just wanted to take a second and wish everyone a happy new year.
Sorry we are a few days late but we have been working so hard on Shopify that we almost forgot about the holidays.
Stay tuned as good things are coming…
Posted by Tobias Lütke Sat, 07 Jan 2006 04:27:00 GMT
Coinciding with the big update of shopify.com and after long wait and many requests, here is the first public screenshot of Shopify.
This is the “Add a Product” page and it is where subscribers will input data regarding their products.
There are many interesting tidbits to be learned from this screenshot. For example if you look at the top of the screen, you’ll notice that Shopify’s store administration is made up of four main screens Orders, Products, Labels and Pages.
Take a Look at Shopify's Order Page
Posted by Scott Lake Mon, 16 Jan 2006 21:46:00 GMT
The central idea behind the Shopify Order Page was that we wanted users to have a place where they could easily track every aspect of any order in their shop. To do this we provided a clear layout that highlights all order information including cost breakdown and products ordered, as well as all shipping and billing information including billing address, shipping address and type of shipping.
In addition, the Jaded Pixel development team created a great order history section which tracks all important order events from the time the order is received to the time the order is shipped. This little feature is especially useful when clients enquire about the status of their order.
Lastly, should there be anything special that you may want to remember about this particular order, you can always make a note in the notes section
Posted by Justin Palmer Mon, 23 Jan 2006 16:50:00 GMT
Yesterday we all geared up and went snowboarding. It was my first time so I kissed the ice more than a few times, but I had a blast!
Scott pulled off some really good camera trickery to make some of the photos look like I was burning up the slopes, but in reality I spent most of the trip ass to ice. heh.
It was great to relax for a while and escape the mass geekery we have going on.
Posted by Tobias Lütke Tue, 24 Jan 2006 22:49:07 GMT
We get a lot of questions about the ”bring your own domain” feature of Shopify. Somewhat surprisingly there doesn’t seem to be many web applications which offer this feature (are there any?).
Here is how it will work in Shopify
You tell your provider to point your domain record’s name server to ns1/ns2.shopify.com and it becomes available for configuration right in your Shopify admin. For each of your domains you can create email aliases which are forwarded to email addresses of your choice.
If you don’t want to point your entire DNS record to our name servers you can alternatively just point a CNAME to the shop, thats for the more technical people because it requires a deeper knowledge of the inner workings of DNS.
Posted by Scott Lake Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:20:35 GMT
The Ottawa Group of Ruby Enthusiasts (OGRE) met last night for its second meeting and a great time was had by all.
In total, we had 16 people attend the meeting and they were treated to the first public disclosures about Shopify and the direction that Jaded Pixel is going.
The jP team gave a well received presentation about several of the open source applications that Jaded Pixel is releasing in support of Shopify. Among them are “Vision” (to make life easy for designers), “Liquid” (a templating engine for ruby), “Opinion” (our community and discussion tool) and lastly “Guidance” (our help system).
Thanks to everyone who came. If you’d like another take on the meeting you check out Derek Featherstone’s blog boxofchocolates.ca
Posted by Scott Lake Thu, 16 Feb 2006 17:42:00 GMT
Jaded Pixel got some serious ink in the Ottawa Citizen’s Tech Weekly section today. In total, its a three page story detailing Tobi’s success with Typo and other open source projects, as well as the work we are doing with Jaded Pixel. If you’d like to read the whole story you can check it out here.
Shopify Theme Challenge and Vision...
Posted by Scott Lake Tue, 21 Feb 2006 04:09:00 GMT
Win an iPod Nano and get your name up in lights!
jP is looking for some great themes to include with Shopify and we’d like your help. In fact, we want you to help us so much that we’ll give a 1 Gig iPod Nano to any anyone who contributes a theme that we choose to use.
If you’re a winner, not only will we splash your name all over our site, but you’ll be among an elite group of designers that people will run to when they want to pay to get templates designed.
In total, we’re looking for about ten themes and if you give us something extra-special we may even throw in a Technine Snowboard as a extra-thank you.
To get started just download Vision here
Vision is a downloadable tool which runs a virtual instance of Shopify right on your computer. Its strength is that it lets you create themes without all the hassles of having to install web and database servers just to see what your theme looks like.
The only requirement for participation is that you allow us to legally use your template in our product.
You can send your completed themes to: themes(at)shopify.com
Posted by Scott Lake Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:29:55 GMT
Amy Hoy, of Slash7 fame, recently posted a great interview with our very own Tobi Lütke. In all they covered a variety of topics including, Vision and why it was created, some tidbits about Shopify and of course a bit on Web 2.0 and Ruby on Rails.
If you don’t know Amy you should check her out, she is a great blogger and her site has lots of little goodies for the designer in us all.
Read the full interview Here.
Screencap: Manage Your Product Page
Posted by Scott Lake Tue, 04 Apr 2006 23:09:00 GMT
Well, we have been a little quiet on the blog lately about our progress. That has mostly been because we are working so hard on finishing Shopify. In any case, here is another screencap to take a look at. This is the “Manage Your Product” page and you should notice a few interesting things like our use of “Collections” and the new administration menu item entitled “Blogs and Pages”. More on that very soon.
Posted by Scott Lake Fri, 14 Apr 2006 18:27:00 GMT
Shopify went beta yesterday. You could feel the excitement around the office as everyone was finishing up just before Justin posted the beta badge on the Shopify site. This is a closed beta and there are probably about fifty or so stores up and running with many more to come. So far we have had great feedback and tracked down some elusive bugs. From my point of view Shopify looks fantastic and Tobi and the other pixels should be really proud of what they built.
The first 20 comments to this post get invitation keys to take a look at Shopify.
Posted by Scott Lake Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:17:00 GMT
Since launching our closed beta on Friday, we have had so many useful comments on this blog, as well as on Techcrunch which posted a review of Shopify yesterday.
One of the most interesting parts of all of this has been the attention we’ve received regarding our pricing model. On the Shopify site we make mention of earning a 3.75% commission of total sales. Since not many of our competitors are entirely commission based, we have used the 3.75% number for the past few weeks as a data point with which to consult our community regarding pricing.
I will say that one option which we are considering is the idea of a sliding commission scale in which the percentage lowers as sales increase. As always, we’d love to hear any ideas and suggestions you may have.
Posted by Scott Lake Thu, 11 May 2006 21:10:03 GMT
I just wanted to give a quick update on the Beta. In the past month or so we have had over 400 beta testers take Shopify for a spin and I’m pleased to say that it has been a huge success. Not only have we received great feedback on all aspects of Shopify, we have also been able to correct lots of bugs and display issues. Special thanks goes out to Kenzie Campbell, John Tajima and Amy Hoy for some especially useful feedback.
Posted by Scott Lake Thu, 11 May 2006 21:48:00 GMT
Reorganize.ca specializes in high quality products that help get customers organized. Kenzie Campbell was responsible for the Reorganize design and he has created something which is simply beautiful.
Aside from the fact that this store is terrific there are a couple of other reasons why I am bringing this to your attention. . . .The second is to mention that this past Saturday, Reorganize.ca made its first sale. This is important news for us because it was the first sale that any Shopify store has ever made. Thanks to the whole Reorganize team for helping us reach this milestone.
Jaded Pixel Makes the Globe and Mail
Posted by Scott Lake Thu, 18 May 2006 21:41:00 GMT
jaded Pixel was featured in an article in the Report on Business Section of the Globe and Mail today. For those of you who don’t know, the Globe and Mail is one of Canada’s national newspapers. Shane Schick writes a weekly small-business column and this week he focused on e-commerce solutions for small businesses and gave us a lot of ink. You can read it here.
Posted by Tobias Lütke Sat, 27 May 2006 15:53:00 GMT
Rafe Needleman of CNet took Shopify for a spin. Quote:
“... It’s a hosted commerce site—not a unique concept. But it’s got a super-clean design that makes setting up a store incredibly easy. If you have a small business that sells goods, this site is definitely worth checking out.”
Shopify makes quick work of setting up shop
Posted by Scott Lake Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:51:00 GMT
Its no longer just a blog, its no longer just a beta, Shopify is now a living breathing LIVE application.
A couple of hours ago, Tobi, Daniel and Justin put the final touches on Shopify and launched it to the world. It’s a great feeling. We have all worked really hard to get the product launched and now that it is, all we want to do is start on new features to make it better. Now that’s passion!
I do want to thank everyone who helped us during the beta. The feedback we received was invaluable. As well, Paul Ouderkirk and Cody Fauser both helped us tremendously in getting Shopify finished and so they also deserve a big thanks
Adding Comments to Your Shopify Blog...
Posted by Scott Lake Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:52:48 GMT
Special thanks goes out to Jeevan at Haloscan for providing Shopify users a simple way to add comments and trackbacks on their Shopify blog pages. For those of you that don’t know, Haloscan is a free commenting and trackback service for blogs. If your interested in adding comments to your Shopify blog pages you can find the necessary code here.
Posted by Scott Lake Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:16:59 GMT
In the last few weeks we have done a couple more podcasts. The first was with Reid Levy, a young entrepreneur from Colorado. Reid is interviewing lots of very interesting entrepreneurs on his podcast and our interview can be found here.
Next came an interview with Daily Pixel boss James Cogan, who along with David Peralty of Digital Life News and phoenixrealm, do the TechCanuck Podcast. You can listen to that interview here.
Shopify Launch Party - July 14th
Posted by Fiona Mon, 26 Jun 2006 22:01:00 GMT
The release of a new product is almost always greeted with a launch party to celebrate the finalization of the code. When Shopify was released on June 2, 2006, the development team didn’t have the energy to lift another cup of coffee to their lips let alone stay up all night partying. Instead, after a month of recuperation, jadedPixel will instead be throwing a party to celebrate the first 42 days of release (totally random number picked to coincide with a Friday)!
We’d like to invite all of our customers, Shopify readers, fans of our blogs, Ruby enthusiasts, and technocrats to join us. If you happen to be in the Ottawa area on Friday July 14th, we’d love to have you join us as we raise a pint or three to the hard work and long nights that culminated in the release of Shopify.
For more information and to sign-up for updates please visit shopify.com/party.
WorkHappy's Shopify Interview...
Posted by Scott Lake Wed, 05 Jul 2006 21:08:00 GMT
Carson McComas runs a great site called WorkHappy.net which lists and reviews lots of terrific resources for entrepreneurs. Earlier today Carson was kind enough to post an interview we did together that talks mostly about Shopify and how it came to be. If you’re interested in reading it, you can access it here. Lastly, you should also check out Carson’s blog entitled Frogbody.com. END.