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Shopify’s Founder Tobias Lütke on Creativity and Constraints
I recently dug up an archive of Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke’s old blog, which linked to this interview with Signal v. Noise. Given Shopify’s impact, if you’re an entrepreneur, founder, or programmer, the whole thing is worth the read, particularly how well Shopify — at 28 people in Ottawa — adapted to constraints.
For example, Shopify was based in Ottawa, where there weren’t as many senior business development veterans on the job market. Instead, Shopify aligned its incentives with design companies for referrals and sales:
Our financial pressure and lack of experience in traditional BizDev also required us to come up with cheap and scalable ways to grow channels for our business. For example, the most successful initiative that we have done is create a partner system with design companies. If you are a design company you usually get a certain amount of money per design job and that’s it. Every design company on the planet wants to be more like the software guys and transition into monthly re-occurring revenue. So we created our Partner system in such a way that design companies (or anyone else) who bring us a customer will receive a 20% for-life profit share of that account.
There are now several design companies that get cheques from us, which in turn allows them to pay full time…
