Shopify

OpenStore: instant offers to buy your Shopify store, the Opendoor model for e-commerce

Shaan pitches OpenStore (Keith Rabois and Jack Abraham) as Opendoor for e-commerce: plug into a Shopify store's data and give the owner an instant buyout offer with no banker, deck, or process — rolling up Shopify stores the way Thrasio rolled up Amazon FBA businesses.

“OpenStore is the same thing for e-commerce. They're saying, you want to sell your e-commerce company? I'll buy your Shopify store right now. You don't have to go through the whole banker process, make a deck, do, do all this stuff. I'll just plug into your data and I'll just give you an offer right now. And so what they're trying to do is roll up Shopify stores.”

Steal thisApply the instant-liquidity model to any market of small sellers: plug into their data, skip the broker process, and make an instant cash offer to roll them up.

Modal: 'Shopify for car dealers' to sell cars online

Shaan describes Modal (modalup.com), a startup turning the in-store car-buying paperwork into software and giving dealers a digital checkout/buy button. He says they claim to boost sales ~30-35% and shorten purchase time, regretting that he passed on investing.

“it's like Shopify for car dealers in a way. So basically lets you sell cars digitally and online. So it creates like a website, a checkout button, a buy button that you can just send customers to that, that, that want to buy from you. It also just like automates all the workflow.”

Steal thisFind a brick-and-mortar industry stuck on manual paperwork and build the 'Shopify for X' checkout layer that digitizes the whole workflow.

The 'micro SPAC': crowdfund an operator to buy a business

Shaan describes the micro SPAC he and Andrew ran: raise ~$85-100K from random Twitter investors into a shell, then buy a profitable Shopify app on MicroAcquire for an entrepreneur (Daniel) to operate and grow. He frames it as 'just add hustle' to an already-running business.

“And I called it at the time. I said, This is like when you go to buy like cake mix and it's like just add water. This is a like just add hustle. Here's a business. It's here's the code's already written, the business is already running, the revenue is already there, and all you need to do is grow it and you just need to add that hustle into it to grow this thing.”

Steal thisPool small checks to buy a profitable indie business and hand an operator the keys to grow it.

Treet: embed a secondhand marketplace inside every Shopify store

Shaan describes Treet (treet.co), which adds a resale tab to a Shopify store so customers buy and sell used items in-brand with normal checkout, and the brand takes a cut. It decentralizes resale across brands instead of funneling to Poshmark/Mercari.

“they give your Shopify store a page or a tab that just creates the secondhand market right there in your store. So somebody who wants to buy a used item can just go buy it secondhand from within your store.”

Steal thisTurn resale into a brand-owned revenue line by embedding a trusted secondhand marketplace in your own store.

Testing a low-carb ghost kitchen: $3K in month one on an $8K bet

Sam's friend Andrew tested a low-carb bakery idea cheaply: he paid a chef a few hundred dollars to develop monk-fruit-sweetened recipes, built a Shopify site, listed it on DoorDash/Uber Eats with local delivery only, and did $3,000 in month-one sales against $8,000 invested. It lost money but proved the idea fast.

“Dude, he sold like $3,000 in month 1 worth of stuff and he's like invested $8,000 into it. So it didn't make a profit, but it kind of sick. He was able to test this idea very easily.”

Steal thisValidate a food brand for ~$8K: hire a chef for recipes, list on Shopify plus a delivery app, local-only.

Shopify for NFTs: pay the gas, two clicks to mint and sell

Furqan notes the dollar value at the top of NFTs is huge but only ~5,000 users actually mint because it's too hard. His NFT Labs project removes that friction: pay users' gas, deploy their contract for them, and give a landing page so minting is as easy as opening a Shopify store.

“And I believe that's one of the biggest opportunities in NFTs is just like, make it really easy for people to do it, almost as easy as creating a Shopify store. So that's like project idea one. We're going to basically pay for your gas. We're going to make it so you can deploy your own contract without ever thinking about it. You're going to just click a couple of buttons and get a landing page that you can send to people and they can buy stuff.”

Steal thisFind a category with huge dollars at the top but tiny user counts because of friction, then build the Shopify-easy on-ramp that abstracts away the hard parts.

Sold Shopify themes business in 2013, bought it back at 5-6x in 2019

Andrew Wilkinson's agency started selling $150-250 Shopify themes when Shopify was a small Canadian startup, rode it to a big business, then sold in 2013 before realizing how huge Shopify would get. He bought the business back in 2019 for roughly 5-6x what he sold it for, betting Shopify would keep growing.

“And so we were kind of thinking like, "Hey, it's a small little Canadian company. These guys seem nice. Let's do it." And we started doing it, and Shopify just grew into a behemoth. And we rode the whale and did really well. And we actually sold the business in 2013. We didn't realize how big Shopify would get. And then we bought the business back in 2019.”

MFM raises a $100K micro-SPAC off a single tweet

After Andrew DM'd offering to give away a $5K micro-SaaS, Shaan tweeted it without even replying; strangers chimed in offering $5K each, so they raised $100K into a blank-check entity and closed on a Shopify app.

“And so we ended up raising $100,000 as a micro SPAC, meaning a blank check company. So we raised $100,000 into an entity to go and use that entity to go buy a business off of MicroAcquire. And then as of last week, it closed. So we found an entrepreneur, found a business, and we closed that deal to buy a Shopify app.”

The mini-SPAC that gifted a college kid a $100K Shopify business

Shaan describes running a 'mini SPAC' on Twitter: instead of business school, he crowdfunds the purchase of small profitable SaaS apps and gives them to operators to run. He bought a senior a profitable $100K Shopify app, with the backers getting a kickback if the kid grows it.

“And now we basically gifted this kid— he's a college senior— we gifted him a $100,000 business. It was a Shopify app and it's a Shopify app that it's already profitable and the person behind it hadn't run it. And so this is like a new education model, right? Like this guy is not, you know, instead of going to business school, he's going to get to run a business And for us, we get a kickback if this guy's able to grow it.”

Build 'Stripe for Vice' to process sex, cannabis and porn payments

Stripe bans sexual products, cannabis, and porn, which blocks Shopify checkout for whole categories. Shaan pitches a payments processor purpose-built for vice industries, noting the three verticals alone move hundreds of billions of dollars.

“And so there's an opportunity, I think, for, you know, building Stripe for vice products, because cannabis can't use Stripe, and neither can any sex products. Porn can't use Stripe. And so if, you know, just those three industries alone, That's like multiple hundreds of billions of dollars of turnover. And so who's building Stripe for Vice?”

Steal thisBuild a payments processor for industries Stripe bans: sex, cannabis, porn.

ShopSalesData: estimate competitors' Shopify revenue and sell it as a monthly report

Shaan helped a mastermind member pivot into shopsalesdata.com, which estimates a Shopify store's sales (partly via order-number tracking) and emails a monthly competitor report — sales, social following, Facebook ad count, month-over-month changes — for ~$100/month.

“So the website is shopsalesdata.com, and, uh, I hope he gets a bunch more customers from this. I hope he's still doing it. Um, he still emails me my report. I hope he's taking more customers right now. But it's monthly report of Shopify competitor data in your inbox every month for $100 or something like that a month.”

Steal thisScrape public signals to estimate competitors' metrics, then package the cleaned data as a recurring monthly subscription report.

Andrew turned $10M into $220M buying back a company he sold

Andrew sold his Shopify-ecosystem software company for $7M in 2013, regretted it, bought it back for ~$26M in 2019, then took it public — turning ~$10M of cash into $220M.

“So in 2019, we ended up buying it back for $26 million or so, and then about 2 years later, just a couple of weeks ago, we took it public, and at one point it hit over a billion-dollar valuation. Right now it's at like $600-something million market cap, and so I had about $10 million into that business in cash,, and it turned into $220 million.”

Ecommerce 3.0 is livestream selling that makes Shopify a dinosaur

Shaan predicts the future of e-commerce is TikTok-style livestream selling (as already happening in Asia) — sellers running stores from an iPhone, holding products up live and answering questions — which he says will make Shopify's grid-of-images stores look like a dinosaur.

“That's what I think e-commerce is going to look like. And I think it's going to make Shopify look like a dinosaur in the past.”

Steal thisBuild livestream-native commerce tooling for solo sellers running a store from a phone.

Build the 'ClickFunnels for e-commerce' on top of Shopify

Shaan's free idea: a dead-simple landing-page builder (think Carrd) that uses Shopify as the backend but lets merchants instantly spin up one-page, mobile-optimized offer, deal, and product-launch pages that convert, without touching Shopify themes. Existing headless tools like Shogun all suck, so whoever does it well will print money.

“E-commerce, I think, needs— somebody needs to build the ClickFunnels for e-commerce. That is basically, it just connects with your Shopify, so it uses Shopify as the backend. But on the frontend, it lets you really, really easily spin up these one-page, mobile-optimized, basically card for e-commerce. And everyone's gonna be like, oh, that already exists. No, trust me, I tried all of them. They all suck.”

Steal thisBuild a Carrd-simple landing-page builder that plugs into Shopify as the backend for fast, converting offer pages.

Shopify was born because Tobi couldn't get a job in Canada

Harley explains Shopify's origin: German immigrant Tobi Lutke couldn't get hired without working papers, so he started a snowboard shop in 2004. He built the store software in Ruby on Rails, and by 2006 it was clear the software was a far better business than the snowboards.

“But someone had told him that, okay, you can't get a job, but you can totally start your own business. And so being in Canada, he decided he would start a snowboard shop. And this is 2004.”

Bessemer's top Shopify scenario was a $400M exit; it's now $130B

Shaan dug up Bessemer's original Series A memo on Shopify. The best-case scenario they modeled was a $400M exit at 3% probability; Shopify's market cap at recording was about $130 billion, showing how badly even elite investors underestimate category leaders.

“And at the top of the range they had was a $400 million exit they thought would take 6 years. And they thought, oh, there's a 3% chance that they can, that they can reach this mark. And, you know, looking at it right now, Shopify market cap is $120— basically $130 billion.”

Competing with Walmart from tax law class

Harley's 'holy shit' moment: as a 21-year-old law student he built a Shopify t-shirt store ('Smoover') during tax law class, and within weeks his biggest competitor was Walmart Canada. That a kid in class could out-compete a giant retailer revealed Shopify was far more than a software company.

“And my biggest competitor after a couple of weeks was Walmart Canada. It was great. I made some money. I was able to pay tuition and help the family. But the fact that I, as a 21-year-old law student, was able to build a company sitting in class that competed against the largest or one of the largest retailers on the planet at that time, that felt incredibly different.”

Amazon builds an empire; Shopify arms the rebels

Shaan relays Tobi Lutke's framing of Shopify's strategy versus Amazon: rather than become the one mega-shop, Shopify gives individual merchants the tools to run great independent stores. 'Amazon wants to build an empire; we want to arm the rebels.'

“You know, Amazon wants to build a giant empire, and at Shopify, we want to arm the rebels, which is basically like, you know, give, give each of the individual merchants the tools and abilities to sell and have great shops on their own rather than become the one big mega shop of the world.”

Sell a course on the skill you already have

Harley's pick for an underrated business: take a skill you're already good at and sell a course around it. His example is an Italian grandmother who taught tourists to make pasta, then pivoted during COVID to selling pasta-making lessons online via Shopify.

“I think something that's underrated is people taking a skill set they currently have and that they're really good at, something that's unique to them, and actually selling a course around that skill set or selling something that helps people acquire that skill set.”

Steal thisPackage the skill you already have into a course instead of chasing a new product to sell.

Scrappy competitor research: count cars, read receipt order numbers

Shaan's tactics for estimating a private competitor's revenue without inside access: sit in the parking lot counting customers, then buy the cheapest item morning and night and compare the sequential order numbers on the receipts to count daily orders. He notes the same receipt-number trick works on Shopify e-commerce stores.

“Then we found you could order on receipts and we could go in and in the morning we would buy the cheapest thing and in the evening we'd buy the cheapest thing and we would compare the numbers of the order numbers and we would know how many orders they did that day. By the way, you can still do this with e-commerce stores. Yes, you can go and when you get a Shopify receipt at the beginning of the month and the end of the month, you'll know how many orders a Shopify store has done.”

Steal thisBuy the cheapest item from a competitor at the start and end of a period, then subtract the sequential order numbers to estimate their order volume.

Start a social media / e-com agency: 4-5 clients at $1k-$10k/mo = six figures

Asked what he'd do as a 22-year-old, Tai recommends a service business, specifically an e-commerce agency helping mom-and-pop shops and restaurants move to Shopify. Charge $1,000 to $10,000 a month, land four or five clients, and clear six figures.

“you can pivot into, for example, e-com agency where you manage people, get help all these restaurants, help all these brands, mom and pop transition to a Shopify store and so on. And you can charge them $1,000 to $10,000 a month based on what you do for them. And You have 4 or 5 clients and you're in 6 figures. That's a no-brainer for most people.”

Steal thisHelp local shops move to Shopify, charge $1k-$10k/month, and land 4-5 clients to hit six figures.

Shopify for V-commerce: storefronts for services delivered over video

Shaan's biggest current idea: as COVID pushes services online, build a Shopify-style platform for 'video commerce' so trainers, tutors, therapists, doctors and lawyers can spin up a storefront that takes payment and auto-delivers the Zoom session, replacing the stitched-together Stripe + Calendar + Zoom + email workflow.

“So I think that there's an opportunity to build Shopify for video commerce. So Shopify for anybody who's delivering a service through video. It's not an e-commerce product where they're selling a physical item or even a digital item. It is a video conversation between either one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many.”

Steal thisBuild a one-click storefront that takes payment and auto-schedules/delivers a Zoom session, targeting service providers (tutors, trainers, therapists) selling over video.

Light and Airy for e-commerce: bulk photo touch-ups for Shopify stores

Shaan pitches a bulk photo-enhancement app for e-commerce: store owners obsess over product photos, so let them upload a batch and auto-apply a 'light and airy' preset before pushing to Shopify. He claims a developer could build a $2-5M business from it.

“Anyway, so I was telling him, I was like, somebody should do this for e-commerce where I just bulk upload a bunch of photos and it just light and airy touches all of them up. And then I just like, you know, add those to my Shopify or whatever. And he's like, oh sweet, I could build that like easy.”

Steal thisBuild a one-click bulk photo-enhancer for Shopify store owners and charge ~$20/month.

Build a ClearBank for creators (and one already did it for e-commerce)

Shaan explains how ClearBank underwrites e-commerce loans by reading Shopify/Facebook sales data that traditional banks can't assess, then proposes the same model for the 50 million creators: a lender that understands creator income and offers debt instead of equity.

“And so ClearBank came in and was a bank for e-commerce. And so similarly, I think you could have sort of a ClearBank for creators.”

Steal thisUnderwrite loans for an underserved segment using their platform data (Shopify, YouTube) that legacy banks can't read.

Pinduoduo for Shopify: a 'buy together, save together' button

Shaan pitches a Shopify checkout button that turns customers into an acquisition channel: instead of paying ~$15 per customer on Facebook ads, offer a group discount where buyers recruit friends, mirroring how Afterpay's button lifted checkout rates.

“I think if you added a buy together, save together button, you would increase sales. So works is you're about to check out and it says, great, you can either have this item for $80, but if you get 5 friends to buy, you all get it for $60, um, you all get it for $50 or whatever it is, some discount there. And you basically are saying, rather than paying $15 per customer in Facebook ads, I will pay, you know, $15— I'll pay $10 right now to discount this item for you, um, because you're going to go acquire 5 customers for me, right?”

Steal thisBuild a Shopify checkout plugin that swaps ad spend for a group-buy discount so each customer recruits the next.

The designer cat furniture flop that taught Andrew to hate e-commerce margins

One of Wilkinson's dumbest ideas: a Shopify dropshipping store selling designer cat furniture, born from his own ugly-cat-furniture problem. He learned how brutal e-commerce and dropshipping margins are, found it impossible to profit without $1M in inventory, and contrasted it with his asset-light 50%-margin digital businesses.

“And so I started an e-commerce store on Shopify that was selling designer cat furniture. And I just, to be honest, I didn't understand how bad e-commerce margins were, and especially dropshipping. And so I spent a ton of money on fulfillment and shipping and all that stuff. And I basically realized it was impossible to make money unless I went out and spent $1 million on inventory.”

Corporate universities: company-run talent pipelines (Google U)

Shaan argues companies should build their own universities to fix broken talent pipelines, citing McDonald's Hamburger U, Shopify's Dev Degree, and his old Google U pitch. He predicts companies will increasingly create or rebrand failing universities to grow talent from the grassroots up.

“which is companies either creating their own or partnering with failing universities, rebranding it as their own and, uh, attracting talent there and having sort of a talent pipeline from the grassroots up because it's so hard for them to recruit talent, recruit top talent.”

Steal thisBuild a branded company university to own your talent pipeline instead of fighting to recruit trained workers.

Fashion Nova: immigrant turned a meme into a $600M Shopify brand

Sam celebrates Fashion Nova's founder, a Middle Eastern immigrant whose parents ran a knockoff-clothing mall store. He took it to Instagram, flooded models with funny clothes until 'Fashion Nova on everything' became a joke, and built a roughly $600M-a-year brand selling cheap clothes, now with Cardi B as spokesperson.

“And so Fashion Nova is, I think it's one of the largest Shopify stores out there. And it's like a $600 million a year fashion brand and they sell really cheap, low quality clothes, but they're kind of like funny and cool. Right. It's like Cardi B is now their spokesperson.”

Reverse-Shopify with an IP-lookup tool to find winning stores

Sam describes finding business ideas by looking up Shopify's IP address in a site-ranking tool, which surfaces the top stores hosted on Shopify ranked by traffic. It's a way to discover proven, high-traffic e-commerce businesses you've never heard of.

“What he did was he went to the site and he found websites that all use the same IP address. Shopify has the same IP address. And this website coincidentally has a way to rank websites on an IP address. So basically what I'm saying is we entered in Shopify's IP address and we found all of the other sites Shopify is doing, and it ranks them.”

Steal thisLook up a platform's IP in a site-ranking tool to reverse-engineer its biggest, highest-traffic customers.

WordPress is 35% of the internet; Shopify only ~2% of e-com stores

Sam relays listener-cited stats: WordPress powers about 35% of the internet, while Shopify makes up only roughly 2% of the e-commerce store market, with WooCommerce actually far bigger.

“they go, Shopify only makes up 2% of the e-com like store market. Yeah. And WooCommerce is actually significant, way bigger, which is crazy to me, which is crazy to me.”

Envato: $300M lifetime sales, $94M revenue, $33M profit in 2017

Sam cites Envato, a marketplace for WordPress themes and plugins, as having grossed $300M in sales since 2008 and doing $94M revenue with ~$33M profit in 2017.

“And Envato, all they are, they probably wouldn't like my oversimplification, but it's basically a marketplace for WordPress themes and plugins. And since 2008, this thing has grossed $300 million in sales. And in 2017, they did $94 million in revenue with something like $33 million in profit.”

Sell picks and axes, not gold

Discussing the Shopify roll-up, Sam and Shaan note the smart play is buying the plugins (the picks and axes) rather than the shops themselves (the gold) — the tooling around a gold rush is the durable business.

“No, these guys would never do that. No, it's picks and axes, not gold.”

Steal thisIn any gold rush, sell the picks and axes — build the tools merchants need, not the merchant business itself.