10 ms·

Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X

360 points by ericthegoodking 3y ago

chupchap 3y ago
The only logical move would've been to setup a Shopify competitor and making a new platform
- injb 3y ago
  I'm not familiar with Shopify but this was my first thought on what he should have been doing with the money. Even if he didn't actually achieve it, if he had made substantial headway in that direction then Shopify would have been well advised to buy him out rather then kill him and risk a major new competitor. Still it sounds like a heroic tale and I this this guy is going to end up landing on his feet.
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justinclift 3y ago
Isn't this Shopify clearly engaging in theft? ... they locked us out of Upsell X and we couldn’t support it anymore. Even further - they kept charging merchants for Upsell X - but we never received those payouts.
- Michelangelo11 3y ago
  Yeah, they should have an open-and-shut case against Shopify here, no?
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Probably some manager in Shopify saw an opportunity to siphon off some funds, and figured they could hide behind lawyers. As a layman very much not-lawyer, the term "unjust enrichment" is springing to mind. Wonder if that's what this would be considered as?
tsunamifury 3y ago
"Crying to the regulator is a bitch move" I both understand the sentiment, but also how else are we going to stop 5 companies form running the world, and the rest of us eating grass?
- jc_811 3y ago
  I really enjoyed the article, but this one sentence also rubbed me the wrong way. Comes across as very immature & petulant IMHO
intrasight 3y ago
You made some bank. Be happy. Find the next opportunity to do the same.
awesomeMilou 3y ago
> However, Shopify killed it - just because merchants were choosing our solution over theirs. I don't see whats so suprising here.
spamizbad 3y ago
I'm not a business expert or an entrepreneur, but I've been around this industry long enough to know: Unless your intention is to flip your startup into an acquisition, I would recommend against plays like this. Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. I am saying this because I work for a large-ish company where someone did this to a section of our product that was also mediocre. One of our co-founders reached out to the company and actually offered to buy them for, what I felt, was an insanely high amount for what they were building. They rejected the offer so we threw some devs and an awesome designer at the problem, made something just as good, and then shut them out. They ultimately shut down.
- liquidise 3y ago
  I had the same thought. There is a a lot of value to be created with moves like this, but it is risky and does not have a long shelf life. Not necessarily a bad business play, but should be expected to be a short-lived one either way.
- sjducb 3y ago
  This guy clearly made several million euros. That’s a massive win. Sure founding a billion euro company is better, but if you don’t have a billion euro idea then starting a million euro company is worthwhile.
- nolok 3y ago
  > Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. Couldn't agree more. It goes something like this : "What do you offer ?" "Feature X on top of Y" "What stops Y from doing it themselves ?" Either A "Well it's not worth it" (then why do you do it), or B "Well, they haven't so far ..." in which case you have an end date already, you just don't know it yet and it's in the hands of Y. As you said, planning to be aquired is probably the best move, second one being to plan your independence (imgur to reddit like), because otherwise your company has no real future.
  - 3y ago
matrix_overload 3y ago
This is a very expected outcome if you are creating your business around improving a larger business' product. You are effectively doing the product/market fit for them, for free. Once they see that your solution works, they will just knock it off, or ban you altogether. It used to be seen by companies as bad PR/karma a couple of decades ago, but not anymore.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > You are effectively doing the product/market fit for them, for free. Once they see that your solution works, they will just knock it off, or ban you altogether. Or buy you. https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/01/apple-shortcuts-workflow-manager-departs-company/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/01/apple-shortcuts-workflow-mana... In this case, the TFA notes that Shopify offered the ISV a path forward and Mr. Leteyski chose "go to war" (Option B). He killed the business, not Shopify. He may chalk that up as a "win", but I'd bet his customers and employees don't.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > Shopify offered the ISV a path forward ... It sounded more like the "path forward" was to wait 2 years for the new Shopify APIs to come out. That's not even slightly a credible in-good-faith option. :(
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > It sounded more like the "path forward" was to wait 2 years for the new Shopify APIs to come out. So they waited two years and couldn't sign up any new customers during that time. How is that better?
      - justinclift 3y ago
        From the article, it sounds like if they didn't choose the option they did, then they would have had to either close their business or largely cease it: "He told me in plain words they don’t want us to continue operating and that they’re locking our API key for new installs as we speak." That's the "Option A" in the list: Option A - Stop what we’re doing, downscale the business and wait for the new APIs. "downscale" there is a bit confusing, as it's unclear if that really means to comply with the "don't continue operating" desire from the Shopify people. I'm guessing it does, and that they'd look for other business ventures instead, thus not a complete cessation of the business. So, it seems (to me) like they chose the right option. 2 further years of operating income and growth, though they didn't manage to figure out a working, alternative, income strategy before things went sideways at the end of the 2 years. :/
draw_down 3y ago
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nolok 3y ago
"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Absolutely this. If you’ve built something profitable on someone else’s land, get big and cash out as fast as you can. It’s unsustainable, you’re just doing an arbitrage play while it lasts. Do well fast so you optimize for more dice rolls in the future.
  - drited 3y ago
    The author seems well aware of that though.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Reinforcing the idea to help avoid future heartbreak and broken dreams for people here. If you’re equipped with the knowledge upfront, you won’t be as unhappy later. Expectations minus reality equals happiness.
- zengid 3y ago
  I feel like this applies to iOS apps too
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Building apps for other platforms, be they Shoppify or the App Store, always comes with the risk of getting booted off or Sherlocked. You can pray that the platform's customers will be upset if your product gets killed ("Shoppify broke our checkout screen" is not exactly bringing in new users) but in the end you need an exit strategy as a company. In this case, I do think legal action would've succeeded, but it would probably be a long, expensive, painful lawsuit, that's probably too much for this company to bear. You're also not guaranteed that the judge will make the losing party pay for your defence even if you do win, so it could easily be quite a Pyrrhic victory. With the new DMA coming into effect soon, I think businesses like these will stand a much better chance. The restrictions put onto gatekeepers by the EU can introduce significant risks to platforms being scummy to smaller developers.
eYrKEC2 3y ago
When you expand on something core to another company's platform, that is sometimes referred to as "picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer."
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  Yes, but some times you have time to pick up enough pennies to buy the huge mansion that you see on their photos.
  - eYrKEC2 3y ago
    Sure. $600k/month sounds like some fantastic pennies.
    - spaceman_2020 3y ago
      Yeah, OP probably made $5-10M. I know founders with $100M exits that made less than that thanks to equity dilution.
      - sdfghswe 3y ago
        [flagged]
        jcollins1991 3y ago
        Good afternoon - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        sdfghswe 3y ago
        > Good afternoon - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Yes, good afternoon. Have you actually read what you're linking? > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
thinkingkong 3y ago
Theyre lucky they let this last as long as they did. Lots of other teams and products built on top of someone elses ecosystem havent been as lucky. I think the term we use for this is being “Sherlocked” back from when Apple copied Sherlock and turned it into spotlight. Anyway theyre joining the ranks of famously successful short lived products. Glad they made bank in the meantime.
- darkarmani 3y ago
  And the quicksilver app (command+spacebar).
sharps_xp 3y ago
I'm impressed a single individual got to 600K MRR by himself. Only a few people can say that they've done that. Who knows when shopify would've taken their checkout experience seriously were it not for this guy. you can have interesting experience, build temporary things, be proud of it, and move on to the next thing.
- alexfoo 3y ago
  He didn't get to 600K MRR by himself: " The highest headcount we had a at a particular time was 16 people - all remote " First hire came at "around 100 customers". So that was probably EUR10k/MRR given the average monthly revenue per store. Still very impressive!
invalidname 3y ago
I was contacted by a non-technical team with a concept about a new shopify based startup. I thought I can just build it in a couple of months then let them operate it. I spent a month on it just researching through the mess that is the Shopify API. It was a pain. I got the mockup working but it looked like this is risky. Tried all channels and got nothing. Eventually someone answered and it seems that everything I built won't work. We would need to jump through hoops to be Shopify compatible and I decided it would strip the startup of its value. Decided to declare the month of work I did as a loss and bail. Still traumatized from the whole mobile development pain of Apple and Google...
mwn 3y ago
You had a great run, but I think it is unfair to say that Shopify “saw what you were doing” and “hijacked” your business. Obviously a small team can move faster and Shopify could easily have internal development plans for the same solution for a long time. Kudos for the €600k MRR and your execution.
- matsemann 3y ago
  If Shopify "hijacked" it by making a better product it would be more okay. When they however outright just ban competition, that's anti-consumer behavior and should be stopped.
  - mwn 3y ago
    No, in the part "April 2020 - Shopify hijacks Upsell X" they are requesting him to "not distribute mass solutions via private apps to Shopify merchants in order to bypass checkout". Shopify had their own checkout from the beginning and the whole purpose of his application was to bypass the existing solution. I assume there were Bulgarian payment providers connected to Shopify in 2017, but according to himself these payment providers wouldn't accept their business idea to run a pharmacy as an e-commerce. Therefore, he made a workaround.
brianwawok 3y ago
Well, I can relate as I just got an email that Shopify changed their partner TOS today because of me. They had demanded that I add a negative keyword "Shopify" to all of my Google ads. I declined, because - it wasn't in our partnership agreement and I in fact DID want clients who used Shopify to find my business. (I am in the e-commerce space selling a product that works for many marketplaces including Shopify). Just got an email today about a partnership TOS change. Now I need to put a negative keyword in any Google ad campaign they deem it necessary, despite like I said, Shopify users being great product fits for me. I am just a little dude. What power do I have? Not really anything, the biggies get to tell me what to do. I either follow the rules of the game or get banned from the platform. Rather frustrating to say the least.
- shopify_throw 3y ago
  This has been the case for years. You weren’t allowed to bid on any search terms related to Shopify on Google Ads. Lots of Partners did though.
  - appplication 3y ago
    Pretty scummy practice. Not only does it drive out competition/innovation, it effectively reduces the cost of Shopify’s ad buy.
    - brianwawok 3y ago
      Yah it increases my ad cost and decreases their ad cost. Partners eh?
  - brianwawok 3y ago
    You did not read my post. I did not bid on Shopify. I bid on "e-commerce sales" Shopify is insisting, and in the new terms mandating, I add a "Negative search term" of Shopify to my bid for "e-commerce sales" Go look up negative search terms if you aren't familiar.
    - 3y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
A lot of bootstrappers start of this way. Hell even I started out this way. But the golden rule is, you need to move away while the sun is shining. Reinvest profits elsewhere and start a business which doesn't depend on anybody else. The current crop of people building on Open AI should also pay heed.
rootsudo 3y ago
Hey, better be killed by Shopify then murdered by Meta/Microsoft/X with "Checkout X" But yeah, should've gotten the MRR high and then shop it around and take a nice buyout. Some PM noticed, shopify noticed the MRR and decided they can implement it and take it for a ride.
satvikpendem 3y ago
How many times are we going to hear the same old story warning of platform risk? It happened with Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Stripe, and so many others. If you want to control your company, don't build off someone else's infrastructure, make your own, even if it's harder to do so.
- monsieurbanana 3y ago
  This reads like a success story, I'm not sure your advice hits the target.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    How does it read like a success story? The bottom half of the article is all about how Shopify pulled the rug out from under them by giving them 3 days to tell their users about "breaking ToS", locking them out of their app, and ultimately seizing their account.
    - monsieurbanana 3y ago
      The 600k monthly recurrent revenue makes it look like a very successful story Launching a product in a walled garden, getting around 10 million recurrent revenue with a small team and almost no other fees, then stopping after a few years looks to me like a dream come true. Almost better than not having the pull rugged. Once you have that much money it's time and a stress-free life that I would seek. The article reads a bit weird to me because there's a lot of complaining about Shopify including in the title, yet they also mention that they knew this would be the outcome from the beginning.
Michelangelo11 3y ago
> Shopify also dedicated some of their employees to pretend to be desperate Checkout X customers and beg our support to let them in. Not sure if I should be proud or annoyed by such pitiful actions. Man that's something. Kinda flattering that they're so desperate for reasons to cut you off, they start to try to fabricate them.
thedangler 3y ago
Can you still get around not using Shopify for their checkout with your own payment provider?
- thedangler 3y ago
  Never mind, read further and seems you can't.
dgb23 3y ago
Aside: Why isn't there a payment protocol standard that's implemented in browsers?
- sneak 3y ago
  Because the browser manufacturers have their own centralized payment protocols (Google Pay, Apple Pay) that they would prefer you use so that they can surveil your habits and get a cut of the fees. Apple Pay is definitely integrated into Safari.
- hadrien01 3y ago
  There's the Payment Request API[1] which in theory allows you to use a single JS interface to declare a payment intent and your providers (so far only Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay are compatible). Though it is a single way of declaring your payment for multiple providers, you still need to subscribe to each provider individually and implement each specific post-authorization logic. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_API https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_A...
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lolinder 3y ago
The author set up a business in what they knew was a gray area. 6 months later the ToS were updated to explicitly ban what they were doing, and they got an email that pretty clearly implied that they would need to make major changes but wouldn't be shut down right away, but the author chose to interpret silence as authorization to keep scaling. About 8 months later Shopify's COO told them explicitly that Shopify didn't want them to keep operating, and the author used a technical detail of the way they phrased the ToS to justify continuing to scale. At that point I lost all sympathy for the author. The COO of the company you've built your product on told you that they don't want you to keep running your business. At that point they shouldn't have to keep playing whack-a-mole with loopholes in the ToS, and the fact that they did does not speak well of the author or their company.
- ketzo 3y ago
  The author very clearly doesn't want your sympathy: > I was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it. They made their money while they could. They are disappointed they couldn't keep going, but it doesn't seem like they feel "entitled" to continue.
- deely3 3y ago
  I'm not sure why did you lost all the sympathy. If company decided to kill your business, thats ok, because company in its rights to do so. But why thats mean that you should not feel sympathy to killed business? Google is in its rights to kill Google Reader or ad-blockers, Mozilla in its rights to kill complex 3rd party extensions, Nintendo in its rights to kill any emulation but does it mean that we should be happy to oblige?
- darkarmani 3y ago
  > The COO of the company you've built your product on told you that they don't want you to keep running your business. That doesn't sound like a reasonable request. It's not like the COO is paying them anything to stop running their business. Can you imagine if Microsoft shutdown, because IBM asked them nicely to stop their business back in the 80s?
rahimnathwani 3y ago
I’m surprised at all the comments focusing on the negative here. I found the story inspiring: they bootstrapped a business, grew revenue, hired some people, and grew revenue further. The founder created value and captured some of that value. The fact that the business can no longer acquire new customers is sad, but it’s only a small part of the story. The founder’s 6 year journey is probably more interesting than what most people did at work over the past 6 years.
- Magi604 3y ago
  Same here, it was a great story.
- davidw 3y ago
  Yeah, the story isn't one of those "THIS IS SO UNFAAAAAAIR" things. It's just a description of what happened. Depending on the costs, 600,000 euros a month is pretty good even if it doesn't last forever. > If I sound bitter - I’m not. I like Shopify. I own Shopify stock. I believe they’re completely dominating the e-commerce platform space and none of their current competitors stand a chance of catching up. I know they did what’s best for their business and this is the end I expected.
  - J_Shelby_J 3y ago
    I don’t understand how Shopify can maintain market dominance as just a middleman value extractor. Probably why they’re forcing their app. I deleted my account and haven’t used Shopify since they wouldn’t let me get my order tracking any way besides the app. As someone who worked adjacent to logistics it was just the hardest hard “no” of all time for me. Money moves to easily now days to build a monopoly on e-commerce.
    - hintymad 3y ago
      Similar to how Alibaba did with Taobao and TMall in China and Southeast Asia? Aggregators do offer values.
    - lockhouse 3y ago
locallost 3y ago
But still: congrats! Seems like a fun ride, a lot accomplished, money earned, and if I understood correctly they still have their current customers, just no new customers. So they are still getting that MRR. Maybe raise prices since the customers have no other options :-).
asdev 3y ago
people giving their advice but never even made $1 MRR from their own products. this is an amazing write up, lots of lessons to learn from this.
oellegaard 3y ago
What is the value of using something like Shopify if you don’t even use the checkout and gateway included? You also need to code your own theme AFAIK
atourgates 3y ago
An interesting take. The only bit I strongly disagree with is this: > One advice we got was to file an antitrust case against Shopify in a European Court. > Theoretically, we could’ve argued that Shopify uses anti-competitive practices to get rid of their checkout competition. Similar to what Spotify & Epic Games did against Apple. > While that might’ve been a viable option, honestly, I don’t have the balls to pick a legal fight with a multi-billion corporation. > On top of that, I believe that crying to the regulator is a bitch move. After everything, I still believe that Shopify built their platform and they should be able to do whatever they want with it. I have no insight into how the EU's competition laws would or would not apply here, but that's literally the regulator's job, and it's certainly not a "bitch move" to hold companies accountable for anticompetitive behavior (if that's what's happening).
- wackget 3y ago
  Yeah seriously. Sounds like he drank the capitalism kool-aid.
lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
It's remarkable when stories like this reach the top of Hacker News, but then people still do not understand why one might want to build an application on a "Can't Be Evil" platform like a crypto network. Scalability/costs/complexity aside — this is why Ethereum and similar decentralized computers are attractive.
- kwar13 3y ago
  Can't upvote this high enough.
- imafish 3y ago
  How would a crypto network help here?
  - ergocoder 3y ago
    Crypto almost always could have solved anything.
    - Dah00n 3y ago
      I hope this is sarcasm? Pretend Shell or Ford switched to crypto only. How much do you think they would sell?
      - ergocoder 3y ago
        The fact that we aren't sure it is a sarcasm is hilarious.
- projektfu 3y ago
  They should build a hypothetical business with unproven revenue instead of the one with $600k MRR and growing?
- jc_811 3y ago
  How exactly would using a crypto network help with this story of the author creating a Shopify app?
ivanmontillam 3y ago
My 2 cents here: It's not always too bad or weak to assume some platform risk to make some business. Just always keep in mind that, it's not forever and that you should preserve some of that piggybacked money for less risky endeavors. I think business that are mounted over a giant, whilst prone to be killed anytime, can be used for a quick buck[0] as part of a larger plan. In this case, the author was aware of that, but more fore-thinking would have helped. For instance, I leverage Telegram bots to make some business, but I'm ready for such an scenario where Telegram, decides: - To make its API paid. - To copy the features of my bots into product features. See what happened with Reddit's API. WordPress purchased WooCommerce and it became a happy story, but it could have gone wrong and become a horror story where the purchase could have not happened, and WordPress gone into destroy mode. I tread lightly. -- [0]: Do not conflate "quick" with "easy" in this context. The faster, the harder it is.
asdfasdfkjl 3y ago
> While that might’ve been a viable option, honestly, I don’t have the balls to pick a legal fight with a multi-billion corporation. On top of that, I believe that crying to the regulator is a bitch move. Everything was so composed and professional until they got to that part. Whattttttttt?
rglover 3y ago
Best business lesson I've ever learned: never build your business on top of someone else's business.
szundi 3y ago
Takes years until he loses 80% of clients, people are so lazy switchig even if it saves money
- imafish 3y ago
  Correct, although eventually most stores using the product will die out. This is actually one of the biggest reasons for app churn on Shopify - stores going out of business :-)
smsm42 3y ago
Maybe sell it to Musk? Rumor is loves everything with X in it.
kunalgupta 3y ago
ah the old private app switcheroo
kunalgupta 3y ago
Their mistake was that they built something hard that was literally a clone of Shopify. It made it hard for anyone else to want to compete with, but it was exceedingly easy for Shopify to compete with. Most Shopify apps build features that Shopify doesn’t have, and therefore the App Store revenue share model makes more sense for Shopify.
shopi-throw 3y ago
I work at Shopify. This was inevitable. Shopify is Checkout. Checkout hijacks like this are taken extremely seriously because it diverts GMV and provides an inconsistent buyer experience that Shopify doesn't control. I'm honestly surprised the company didn't take stronger action here.
- altairprime 3y ago
  Taking stronger action would alienate the affected Shopify customers and create bad press for them. Their selected level of action is just sufficient to keep everyone happy except the one person that is their competitor. Presumably, then, they deemed it “insufficiently profitable” to shut the existing customers down.
- Sepia0378 3y ago
  hey, i just made an account to reply to you here. i think you hit the nail on the head. which leads to an extremely frustrating experience for our company, because shopify for some reason decided to block access to markets if you are not using shopify payments. i live in a place where it is basically a necessity to offer a multi currency shopping experience, and our locally preferred payment methods are not supported by shopify payments. i have asked so many people at shopify over the years, but no one can tell me what to do. i don't mind paying my 2% to shopify, but i do mind if something so simple "just does not work". can you tell me why i cannot use markets, multi-currency with a third party payment processor in the native check out? i get that shopify wants to funnel people over to their psp, but in our edge case it just does not provide what we need. sorry for the rant, i am really frustrated because no one has been able to give me answers to my questions, not even a "we want to make sure we get our share and in your case that leads to a bad experience, sorry"
mcemilg 3y ago
> Our affiliate program was simple. You bring a customer and we pay you 15-25% of the revenue we make from that customer. Forever. there is a very thin line between a pyramid/ponzi scheme and a generous affiliate program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  The most important factor is how much it costs to join. For checkout x it's a negligible amount and there's a free trial. It's just a generous affiliate program.
rhuru 3y ago
Kudos for the author to write this article. Really learned so much from it.
cycomanic 3y ago
>... locked us out of Upsell X and we couldn’t support it anymore. Even further - they kept charging merchants for Upsell X - but we never received those payouts. Putting all the other things aside, but this struck me. How is that legal? That sounds like outright theft to me.
cryptica 3y ago
Wow that is a crazy next level user acquisition story. Acquisition using source code as marketing, never heard that before. Great to read from a true self-made entrepreneur. I can relate to the feeling of everything working against you and having to do some insanely contrived stuff to get around all the hurdles though I never faced such constraints as the author. Entrepreneurship in the tech sector these days feels like a full circus show; you need to clown around a bit in front of investors to raise funding, when that fails, you need to ride a unicycle over crocodile infested waters, then jump through some flaming hoops, then tame a few hungry lions... Then after all this, one of the lions goes nuts and you get devoured anyway.
totallywrong 3y ago
Don't build your house in another man's land.
- the_sleaze9 3y ago
  It's been said elsewhere, but they were scrappy, nimble and never lost sight of their position. I'd say it's a _huge win.
pirsquare 3y ago
The key to long term success in Shopify ecosystem is to focus on a niche market. For example, a scheduling tool for merchants. If you build something that almost every merchant will use, it will be eventually added to Shopify's core offerings.
slim 3y ago
I own Shopify stock aha! that explains the tone
shove 3y ago
The comments are generally impressed at the “600k monthly revenue” and while I am too, is that “our business was grossing 600k/month” or “the sites we supported were grossing 600k/month through our checkout”? These are … very different.
leteyski 3y ago
Hello everyone, I'm the founder of Checkout X and the original post creator - so flattered to see all the engagement here. Thanks for the kind words and the criticism, I totally respect everyone's opinion on the topic. I intentionally waited a couple of years before I wrote the post as I just wanted to share the story of Checkout X for people to see it - without any agenda. Checkout X is a closed page for me and I'm looking forward towards the future. Some updates from me: - I built another Shopify app ( Vanga AI ) that got acquired this year - I've summarised my thoughts on the current Shopify ecosystem in another blog post: Why I'm leaving the Shopify apps business ( https://www.leteyski.com/why-i-m-leaving-the-shopify-apps-business https://www.leteyski.com/why-i-m-leaving-the-shopify-apps-bu... ) - I've summarised some of the business lessons I've accumulated into a Startup assessment framework called: The Dead Horse Framework ( https://www.leteyski.com/the-dead-horse-framework https://www.leteyski.com/the-dead-horse-framework )
- rexreed 3y ago
  I'm curious about your use of affiliates and how they worked out - definitely would like to get some guidance there. But it's not for a SaaS app, so not sure how much guidance you can provide.
- rexreed 3y ago
  Also - I really like your graphics in your blog post. How do you go about generating them?
3m 3y ago
In this thread: lots of people who have never started a business giving advice to a guy who was making 600k/mo about why his business was dumb. Hacker News at its best.
bluishgreen 3y ago
"honestly, I don’t have the balls to pick a legal fight with a multi-billion corporation. On top of that, I believe that crying to the regulator is a bitch move." So somewhere between balls-less and a bitch. Mmkay.

chupchap 3y ago

The only logical move would've been to setup a Shopify competitor and making a new platform

injb 3y ago
I'm not familiar with Shopify but this was my first thought on what he should have been doing with the money. Even if he didn't actually achieve it, if he had made substantial headway in that direction then Shopify would have been well advised to buy him out rather then kill him and risk a major new competitor. Still it sounds like a heroic tale and I this this guy is going to end up landing on his feet.

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justinclift 3y ago

Isn't this Shopify clearly engaging in theft? ... they locked us out of Upsell X and we couldn’t support it anymore. Even further - they kept charging merchants for Upsell X - but we never received those payouts.

Michelangelo11 3y ago
Yeah, they should have an open-and-shut case against Shopify here, no?
- justinclift 3y ago
  Probably some manager in Shopify saw an opportunity to siphon off some funds, and figured they could hide behind lawyers. As a layman very much not-lawyer, the term "unjust enrichment" is springing to mind. Wonder if that's what this would be considered as?

tsunamifury 3y ago

"Crying to the regulator is a bitch move" I both understand the sentiment, but also how else are we going to stop 5 companies form running the world, and the rest of us eating grass?

jc_811 3y ago
I really enjoyed the article, but this one sentence also rubbed me the wrong way. Comes across as very immature & petulant IMHO

intrasight 3y ago

You made some bank. Be happy. Find the next opportunity to do the same.

awesomeMilou 3y ago

> However, Shopify killed it - just because merchants were choosing our solution over theirs. I don't see whats so suprising here.

spamizbad 3y ago

I'm not a business expert or an entrepreneur, but I've been around this industry long enough to know: Unless your intention is to flip your startup into an acquisition, I would recommend against plays like this. Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. I am saying this because I work for a large-ish company where someone did this to a section of our product that was also mediocre. One of our co-founders reached out to the company and actually offered to buy them for, what I felt, was an insanely high amount for what they were building. They rejected the offer so we threw some devs and an awesome designer at the problem, made something just as good, and then shut them out. They ultimately shut down.

liquidise 3y ago
I had the same thought. There is a a lot of value to be created with moves like this, but it is risky and does not have a long shelf life. Not necessarily a bad business play, but should be expected to be a short-lived one either way.
sjducb 3y ago
This guy clearly made several million euros. That’s a massive win. Sure founding a billion euro company is better, but if you don’t have a billion euro idea then starting a million euro company is worthwhile.
nolok 3y ago
> Specifically, tying yourself up to a closed ecosystem by building what amounts to a (albeit very nice and powerful) super-feature. Couldn't agree more. It goes something like this : "What do you offer ?" "Feature X on top of Y" "What stops Y from doing it themselves ?" Either A "Well it's not worth it" (then why do you do it), or B "Well, they haven't so far ..." in which case you have an end date already, you just don't know it yet and it's in the hands of Y. As you said, planning to be aquired is probably the best move, second one being to plan your independence (imgur to reddit like), because otherwise your company has no real future.
- 3y ago

matrix_overload 3y ago

This is a very expected outcome if you are creating your business around improving a larger business' product. You are effectively doing the product/market fit for them, for free. Once they see that your solution works, they will just knock it off, or ban you altogether. It used to be seen by companies as bad PR/karma a couple of decades ago, but not anymore.

CharlesW 3y ago
> You are effectively doing the product/market fit for them, for free. Once they see that your solution works, they will just knock it off, or ban you altogether. Or buy you. https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/01/apple-shortcuts-workflow-manager-departs-company/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/01/apple-shortcuts-workflow-mana... In this case, the TFA notes that Shopify offered the ISV a path forward and Mr. Leteyski chose "go to war" (Option B). He killed the business, not Shopify. He may chalk that up as a "win", but I'd bet his customers and employees don't.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > Shopify offered the ISV a path forward ... It sounded more like the "path forward" was to wait 2 years for the new Shopify APIs to come out. That's not even slightly a credible in-good-faith option. :(
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > It sounded more like the "path forward" was to wait 2 years for the new Shopify APIs to come out. So they waited two years and couldn't sign up any new customers during that time. How is that better?
    - justinclift 3y ago
      From the article, it sounds like if they didn't choose the option they did, then they would have had to either close their business or largely cease it: "He told me in plain words they don’t want us to continue operating and that they’re locking our API key for new installs as we speak." That's the "Option A" in the list: Option A - Stop what we’re doing, downscale the business and wait for the new APIs. "downscale" there is a bit confusing, as it's unclear if that really means to comply with the "don't continue operating" desire from the Shopify people. I'm guessing it does, and that they'd look for other business ventures instead, thus not a complete cessation of the business. So, it seems (to me) like they chose the right option. 2 further years of operating income and growth, though they didn't manage to figure out a working, alternative, income strategy before things went sideways at the end of the 2 years. :/

draw_down 3y ago

[dead]

nolok 3y ago

"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Absolutely this. If you’ve built something profitable on someone else’s land, get big and cash out as fast as you can. It’s unsustainable, you’re just doing an arbitrage play while it lasts. Do well fast so you optimize for more dice rolls in the future.
- drited 3y ago
  The author seems well aware of that though.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Reinforcing the idea to help avoid future heartbreak and broken dreams for people here. If you’re equipped with the knowledge upfront, you won’t be as unhappy later. Expectations minus reality equals happiness.
zengid 3y ago
I feel like this applies to iOS apps too
jeroenhd 3y ago
Building apps for other platforms, be they Shoppify or the App Store, always comes with the risk of getting booted off or Sherlocked. You can pray that the platform's customers will be upset if your product gets killed ("Shoppify broke our checkout screen" is not exactly bringing in new users) but in the end you need an exit strategy as a company. In this case, I do think legal action would've succeeded, but it would probably be a long, expensive, painful lawsuit, that's probably too much for this company to bear. You're also not guaranteed that the judge will make the losing party pay for your defence even if you do win, so it could easily be quite a Pyrrhic victory. With the new DMA coming into effect soon, I think businesses like these will stand a much better chance. The restrictions put onto gatekeepers by the EU can introduce significant risks to platforms being scummy to smaller developers.

eYrKEC2 3y ago

When you expand on something core to another company's platform, that is sometimes referred to as "picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer."

sdfghswe 3y ago
Yes, but some times you have time to pick up enough pennies to buy the huge mansion that you see on their photos.
- eYrKEC2 3y ago
  Sure. $600k/month sounds like some fantastic pennies.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Yeah, OP probably made $5-10M. I know founders with $100M exits that made less than that thanks to equity dilution.
    - sdfghswe 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - jcollins1991 3y ago
        Good afternoon - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        sdfghswe 3y ago
        > Good afternoon - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Yes, good afternoon. Have you actually read what you're linking? > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

thinkingkong 3y ago

Theyre lucky they let this last as long as they did. Lots of other teams and products built on top of someone elses ecosystem havent been as lucky. I think the term we use for this is being “Sherlocked” back from when Apple copied Sherlock and turned it into spotlight. Anyway theyre joining the ranks of famously successful short lived products. Glad they made bank in the meantime.

darkarmani 3y ago
And the quicksilver app (command+spacebar).

sharps_xp 3y ago

I'm impressed a single individual got to 600K MRR by himself. Only a few people can say that they've done that. Who knows when shopify would've taken their checkout experience seriously were it not for this guy. you can have interesting experience, build temporary things, be proud of it, and move on to the next thing.

alexfoo 3y ago
He didn't get to 600K MRR by himself: " The highest headcount we had a at a particular time was 16 people - all remote " First hire came at "around 100 customers". So that was probably EUR10k/MRR given the average monthly revenue per store. Still very impressive!

invalidname 3y ago

I was contacted by a non-technical team with a concept about a new shopify based startup. I thought I can just build it in a couple of months then let them operate it. I spent a month on it just researching through the mess that is the Shopify API. It was a pain. I got the mockup working but it looked like this is risky. Tried all channels and got nothing. Eventually someone answered and it seems that everything I built won't work. We would need to jump through hoops to be Shopify compatible and I decided it would strip the startup of its value. Decided to declare the month of work I did as a loss and bail. Still traumatized from the whole mobile development pain of Apple and Google...

mwn 3y ago

You had a great run, but I think it is unfair to say that Shopify “saw what you were doing” and “hijacked” your business. Obviously a small team can move faster and Shopify could easily have internal development plans for the same solution for a long time. Kudos for the €600k MRR and your execution.

matsemann 3y ago
If Shopify "hijacked" it by making a better product it would be more okay. When they however outright just ban competition, that's anti-consumer behavior and should be stopped.
- mwn 3y ago
  No, in the part "April 2020 - Shopify hijacks Upsell X" they are requesting him to "not distribute mass solutions via private apps to Shopify merchants in order to bypass checkout". Shopify had their own checkout from the beginning and the whole purpose of his application was to bypass the existing solution. I assume there were Bulgarian payment providers connected to Shopify in 2017, but according to himself these payment providers wouldn't accept their business idea to run a pharmacy as an e-commerce. Therefore, he made a workaround.

brianwawok 3y ago

Well, I can relate as I just got an email that Shopify changed their partner TOS today because of me. They had demanded that I add a negative keyword "Shopify" to all of my Google ads. I declined, because - it wasn't in our partnership agreement and I in fact DID want clients who used Shopify to find my business. (I am in the e-commerce space selling a product that works for many marketplaces including Shopify). Just got an email today about a partnership TOS change. Now I need to put a negative keyword in any Google ad campaign they deem it necessary, despite like I said, Shopify users being great product fits for me. I am just a little dude. What power do I have? Not really anything, the biggies get to tell me what to do. I either follow the rules of the game or get banned from the platform. Rather frustrating to say the least.

shopify_throw 3y ago
This has been the case for years. You weren’t allowed to bid on any search terms related to Shopify on Google Ads. Lots of Partners did though.
- appplication 3y ago
  Pretty scummy practice. Not only does it drive out competition/innovation, it effectively reduces the cost of Shopify’s ad buy.
  - brianwawok 3y ago
    Yah it increases my ad cost and decreases their ad cost. Partners eh?
- brianwawok 3y ago
  You did not read my post. I did not bid on Shopify. I bid on "e-commerce sales" Shopify is insisting, and in the new terms mandating, I add a "Negative search term" of Shopify to my bid for "e-commerce sales" Go look up negative search terms if you aren't familiar.
  - 3y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

A lot of bootstrappers start of this way. Hell even I started out this way. But the golden rule is, you need to move away while the sun is shining. Reinvest profits elsewhere and start a business which doesn't depend on anybody else. The current crop of people building on Open AI should also pay heed.

rootsudo 3y ago

Hey, better be killed by Shopify then murdered by Meta/Microsoft/X with "Checkout X" But yeah, should've gotten the MRR high and then shop it around and take a nice buyout. Some PM noticed, shopify noticed the MRR and decided they can implement it and take it for a ride.

satvikpendem 3y ago

How many times are we going to hear the same old story warning of platform risk? It happened with Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Stripe, and so many others. If you want to control your company, don't build off someone else's infrastructure, make your own, even if it's harder to do so.

monsieurbanana 3y ago
This reads like a success story, I'm not sure your advice hits the target.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  How does it read like a success story? The bottom half of the article is all about how Shopify pulled the rug out from under them by giving them 3 days to tell their users about "breaking ToS", locking them out of their app, and ultimately seizing their account.
  - monsieurbanana 3y ago
    The 600k monthly recurrent revenue makes it look like a very successful story Launching a product in a walled garden, getting around 10 million recurrent revenue with a small team and almost no other fees, then stopping after a few years looks to me like a dream come true. Almost better than not having the pull rugged. Once you have that much money it's time and a stress-free life that I would seek. The article reads a bit weird to me because there's a lot of complaining about Shopify including in the title, yet they also mention that they knew this would be the outcome from the beginning.

Michelangelo11 3y ago

> Shopify also dedicated some of their employees to pretend to be desperate Checkout X customers and beg our support to let them in. Not sure if I should be proud or annoyed by such pitiful actions. Man that's something. Kinda flattering that they're so desperate for reasons to cut you off, they start to try to fabricate them.

thedangler 3y ago

Can you still get around not using Shopify for their checkout with your own payment provider?

thedangler 3y ago
Never mind, read further and seems you can't.

dgb23 3y ago

Aside: Why isn't there a payment protocol standard that's implemented in browsers?

sneak 3y ago
Because the browser manufacturers have their own centralized payment protocols (Google Pay, Apple Pay) that they would prefer you use so that they can surveil your habits and get a cut of the fees. Apple Pay is definitely integrated into Safari.
hadrien01 3y ago
There's the Payment Request API[1] which in theory allows you to use a single JS interface to declare a payment intent and your providers (so far only Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay are compatible). Though it is a single way of declaring your payment for multiple providers, you still need to subscribe to each provider individually and implement each specific post-authorization logic. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_API https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_A...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lolinder 3y ago

The author set up a business in what they knew was a gray area. 6 months later the ToS were updated to explicitly ban what they were doing, and they got an email that pretty clearly implied that they would need to make major changes but wouldn't be shut down right away, but the author chose to interpret silence as authorization to keep scaling. About 8 months later Shopify's COO told them explicitly that Shopify didn't want them to keep operating, and the author used a technical detail of the way they phrased the ToS to justify continuing to scale. At that point I lost all sympathy for the author. The COO of the company you've built your product on told you that they don't want you to keep running your business. At that point they shouldn't have to keep playing whack-a-mole with loopholes in the ToS, and the fact that they did does not speak well of the author or their company.

ketzo 3y ago
The author very clearly doesn't want your sympathy: > I was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it. They made their money while they could. They are disappointed they couldn't keep going, but it doesn't seem like they feel "entitled" to continue.
deely3 3y ago
I'm not sure why did you lost all the sympathy. If company decided to kill your business, thats ok, because company in its rights to do so. But why thats mean that you should not feel sympathy to killed business? Google is in its rights to kill Google Reader or ad-blockers, Mozilla in its rights to kill complex 3rd party extensions, Nintendo in its rights to kill any emulation but does it mean that we should be happy to oblige?
darkarmani 3y ago
> The COO of the company you've built your product on told you that they don't want you to keep running your business. That doesn't sound like a reasonable request. It's not like the COO is paying them anything to stop running their business. Can you imagine if Microsoft shutdown, because IBM asked them nicely to stop their business back in the 80s?

rahimnathwani 3y ago

I’m surprised at all the comments focusing on the negative here. I found the story inspiring: they bootstrapped a business, grew revenue, hired some people, and grew revenue further. The founder created value and captured some of that value. The fact that the business can no longer acquire new customers is sad, but it’s only a small part of the story. The founder’s 6 year journey is probably more interesting than what most people did at work over the past 6 years.

Magi604 3y ago
Same here, it was a great story.
davidw 3y ago
Yeah, the story isn't one of those "THIS IS SO UNFAAAAAAIR" things. It's just a description of what happened. Depending on the costs, 600,000 euros a month is pretty good even if it doesn't last forever. > If I sound bitter - I’m not. I like Shopify. I own Shopify stock. I believe they’re completely dominating the e-commerce platform space and none of their current competitors stand a chance of catching up. I know they did what’s best for their business and this is the end I expected.
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  I don’t understand how Shopify can maintain market dominance as just a middleman value extractor. Probably why they’re forcing their app. I deleted my account and haven’t used Shopify since they wouldn’t let me get my order tracking any way besides the app. As someone who worked adjacent to logistics it was just the hardest hard “no” of all time for me. Money moves to easily now days to build a monopoly on e-commerce.
  - hintymad 3y ago
    Similar to how Alibaba did with Taobao and TMall in China and Southeast Asia? Aggregators do offer values.
  - lockhouse 3y ago

locallost 3y ago

But still: congrats! Seems like a fun ride, a lot accomplished, money earned, and if I understood correctly they still have their current customers, just no new customers. So they are still getting that MRR. Maybe raise prices since the customers have no other options :-).

asdev 3y ago

people giving their advice but never even made $1 MRR from their own products. this is an amazing write up, lots of lessons to learn from this.

oellegaard 3y ago

What is the value of using something like Shopify if you don’t even use the checkout and gateway included? You also need to code your own theme AFAIK

atourgates 3y ago

An interesting take. The only bit I strongly disagree with is this: > One advice we got was to file an antitrust case against Shopify in a European Court. > Theoretically, we could’ve argued that Shopify uses anti-competitive practices to get rid of their checkout competition. Similar to what Spotify & Epic Games did against Apple. > While that might’ve been a viable option, honestly, I don’t have the balls to pick a legal fight with a multi-billion corporation. > On top of that, I believe that crying to the regulator is a bitch move. After everything, I still believe that Shopify built their platform and they should be able to do whatever they want with it. I have no insight into how the EU's competition laws would or would not apply here, but that's literally the regulator's job, and it's certainly not a "bitch move" to hold companies accountable for anticompetitive behavior (if that's what's happening).

wackget 3y ago
Yeah seriously. Sounds like he drank the capitalism kool-aid.

lazzlazzlazz 3y ago

It's remarkable when stories like this reach the top of Hacker News, but then people still do not understand why one might want to build an application on a "Can't Be Evil" platform like a crypto network. Scalability/costs/complexity aside — this is why Ethereum and similar decentralized computers are attractive.

kwar13 3y ago
Can't upvote this high enough.
imafish 3y ago
How would a crypto network help here?
- ergocoder 3y ago
  Crypto almost always could have solved anything.
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    I hope this is sarcasm? Pretend Shell or Ford switched to crypto only. How much do you think they would sell?
    - ergocoder 3y ago
      The fact that we aren't sure it is a sarcasm is hilarious.
projektfu 3y ago
They should build a hypothetical business with unproven revenue instead of the one with $600k MRR and growing?
jc_811 3y ago
How exactly would using a crypto network help with this story of the author creating a Shopify app?

ivanmontillam 3y ago

My 2 cents here: It's not always too bad or weak to assume some platform risk to make some business. Just always keep in mind that, it's not forever and that you should preserve some of that piggybacked money for less risky endeavors. I think business that are mounted over a giant, whilst prone to be killed anytime, can be used for a quick buck[0] as part of a larger plan. In this case, the author was aware of that, but more fore-thinking would have helped. For instance, I leverage Telegram bots to make some business, but I'm ready for such an scenario where Telegram, decides: - To make its API paid. - To copy the features of my bots into product features. See what happened with Reddit's API. WordPress purchased WooCommerce and it became a happy story, but it could have gone wrong and become a horror story where the purchase could have not happened, and WordPress gone into destroy mode. I tread lightly. -- [0]: Do not conflate "quick" with "easy" in this context. The faster, the harder it is.

asdfasdfkjl 3y ago

> While that might’ve been a viable option, honestly, I don’t have the balls to pick a legal fight with a multi-billion corporation. On top of that, I believe that crying to the regulator is a bitch move. Everything was so composed and professional until they got to that part. Whattttttttt?

rglover 3y ago

Best business lesson I've ever learned: never build your business on top of someone else's business.

szundi 3y ago

Takes years until he loses 80% of clients, people are so lazy switchig even if it saves money

imafish 3y ago
Correct, although eventually most stores using the product will die out. This is actually one of the biggest reasons for app churn on Shopify - stores going out of business :-)

smsm42 3y ago

Maybe sell it to Musk? Rumor is loves everything with X in it.

kunalgupta 3y ago

ah the old private app switcheroo

kunalgupta 3y ago

Their mistake was that they built something hard that was literally a clone of Shopify. It made it hard for anyone else to want to compete with, but it was exceedingly easy for Shopify to compete with. Most Shopify apps build features that Shopify doesn’t have, and therefore the App Store revenue share model makes more sense for Shopify.

shopi-throw 3y ago

I work at Shopify. This was inevitable. Shopify is Checkout. Checkout hijacks like this are taken extremely seriously because it diverts GMV and provides an inconsistent buyer experience that Shopify doesn't control. I'm honestly surprised the company didn't take stronger action here.

altairprime 3y ago
Taking stronger action would alienate the affected Shopify customers and create bad press for them. Their selected level of action is just sufficient to keep everyone happy except the one person that is their competitor. Presumably, then, they deemed it “insufficiently profitable” to shut the existing customers down.
Sepia0378 3y ago
hey, i just made an account to reply to you here. i think you hit the nail on the head. which leads to an extremely frustrating experience for our company, because shopify for some reason decided to block access to markets if you are not using shopify payments. i live in a place where it is basically a necessity to offer a multi currency shopping experience, and our locally preferred payment methods are not supported by shopify payments. i have asked so many people at shopify over the years, but no one can tell me what to do. i don't mind paying my 2% to shopify, but i do mind if something so simple "just does not work". can you tell me why i cannot use markets, multi-currency with a third party payment processor in the native check out? i get that shopify wants to funnel people over to their psp, but in our edge case it just does not provide what we need. sorry for the rant, i am really frustrated because no one has been able to give me answers to my questions, not even a "we want to make sure we get our share and in your case that leads to a bad experience, sorry"

mcemilg 3y ago

> Our affiliate program was simple. You bring a customer and we pay you 15-25% of the revenue we make from that customer. Forever. there is a very thin line between a pyramid/ponzi scheme and a generous affiliate program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

Dylan16807 3y ago
The most important factor is how much it costs to join. For checkout x it's a negligible amount and there's a free trial. It's just a generous affiliate program.

rhuru 3y ago

Kudos for the author to write this article. Really learned so much from it.

cycomanic 3y ago

>... locked us out of Upsell X and we couldn’t support it anymore. Even further - they kept charging merchants for Upsell X - but we never received those payouts. Putting all the other things aside, but this struck me. How is that legal? That sounds like outright theft to me.

cryptica 3y ago

Wow that is a crazy next level user acquisition story. Acquisition using source code as marketing, never heard that before. Great to read from a true self-made entrepreneur. I can relate to the feeling of everything working against you and having to do some insanely contrived stuff to get around all the hurdles though I never faced such constraints as the author. Entrepreneurship in the tech sector these days feels like a full circus show; you need to clown around a bit in front of investors to raise funding, when that fails, you need to ride a unicycle over crocodile infested waters, then jump through some flaming hoops, then tame a few hungry lions... Then after all this, one of the lions goes nuts and you get devoured anyway.

totallywrong 3y ago

Don't build your house in another man's land.

the_sleaze9 3y ago
It's been said elsewhere, but they were scrappy, nimble and never lost sight of their position. I'd say it's a _huge win.

pirsquare 3y ago

The key to long term success in Shopify ecosystem is to focus on a niche market. For example, a scheduling tool for merchants. If you build something that almost every merchant will use, it will be eventually added to Shopify's core offerings.

slim 3y ago

I own Shopify stock aha! that explains the tone

shove 3y ago

The comments are generally impressed at the “600k monthly revenue” and while I am too, is that “our business was grossing 600k/month” or “the sites we supported were grossing 600k/month through our checkout”? These are … very different.

leteyski 3y ago

Hello everyone, I'm the founder of Checkout X and the original post creator - so flattered to see all the engagement here. Thanks for the kind words and the criticism, I totally respect everyone's opinion on the topic. I intentionally waited a couple of years before I wrote the post as I just wanted to share the story of Checkout X for people to see it - without any agenda. Checkout X is a closed page for me and I'm looking forward towards the future. Some updates from me: - I built another Shopify app ( Vanga AI ) that got acquired this year - I've summarised my thoughts on the current Shopify ecosystem in another blog post: Why I'm leaving the Shopify apps business ( https://www.leteyski.com/why-i-m-leaving-the-shopify-apps-business https://www.leteyski.com/why-i-m-leaving-the-shopify-apps-bu... ) - I've summarised some of the business lessons I've accumulated into a Startup assessment framework called: The Dead Horse Framework ( https://www.leteyski.com/the-dead-horse-framework https://www.leteyski.com/the-dead-horse-framework )

rexreed 3y ago
I'm curious about your use of affiliates and how they worked out - definitely would like to get some guidance there. But it's not for a SaaS app, so not sure how much guidance you can provide.
rexreed 3y ago
Also - I really like your graphics in your blog post. How do you go about generating them?

3m 3y ago

In this thread: lots of people who have never started a business giving advice to a guy who was making 600k/mo about why his business was dumb. Hacker News at its best.

bluishgreen 3y ago

"honestly, I don’t have the balls to pick a legal fight with a multi-billion corporation. On top of that, I believe that crying to the regulator is a bitch move." So somewhere between balls-less and a bitch. Mmkay.