Month: October 2011

(That’s me having the “Grilled Cheeseburger” – a big burger patty stuffed between two grilled cheese sandwiches – at the Thomson Diner on Friday with my friends Natalie and Eldon. I thought it would make a good opener for this article.)

If I had a million dollars, I’d skip past the Barenaked Ladies’ to-do list and jump straight to the suggestion made by “Lawrence” in the movie Office Space:

Alas, I do not have a million dollars, but thanks to Shopify’s recent second round of funding, I’m now in charge of a million dollars. Since I can’t use it to make Lawrence’s idea my personal reality, I’m doing the next best thing: helping fund Shopify apps with the Shopify Fund. You can find out more in my tech blog, Global Nerdy, or in the Shopify Technology Blog.

And here’s the whole “What would you do with a million dollars?” scene from Office Space:

And in the same spirit and theme, here’s the Geto Boys’ Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta, also featured in Office Space, as performed by Kermit the Frog (warning – swearing galore):

Normally, I’d simply put an article like this in my tech blog, Global Nerdy, but hey: this is big news, and I work at this place!

Here’s the first paragraph of the press release that Shopify put out this morning:

OTTAWA, Ontario, Oct. 17, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Shopify, a leading ecommerce platform used to create and power online stores, today announced that it closed a $15 million Series B growth investment from Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Georgian Partners. This new investment adds to the $7 million of Series A funding received last year, providing a sizable balance to fund continued growth.

Here’s a quick run-down of Shopify for those of you who aren’t familiar with what we do:

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform that makes it easy to create an online store and sell products online. It was created out of necessity — when Shopify CEO and co-founder Tobi Lutke and friends wanted to start an online store for snowboarding equipment, they couldn’t find any ecommerce platform they liked. Being software developers, they did what came naturally: they wrote their own. It then occurred to them that it wasn’t snowboards they should be selling, but shops. And thus Shopify was born.

Shopify by the Numbers

Creative Commons photo by NeilsPhotography. Click the photo to see the original.

When we say “15,000+ shops run on Shopify”, we mean 15,000+ active shops. These shops aren’t free trials, but active paid accounts actually selling stuff. Among our customers are: Angry Birds, Beastie Boys, CrossFit, DODOcase, Evernote, Evisu, Foo Fighters, GitHub, LMFAO, Penny Arcade and Tesla Motors.

In 2010, 2.7 million customers shopped at Shopify shops. To give you an idea of how many people that is, that’s the same number of people that lived within the city of Chicago that year (according to Wikipedia).

Creative Commons photo by Jay Reed. Click the photo to see the original.

Those 2.7 million customers placed a total of 1.6 million orders that year. That’s a lot of shopping carts.

Creative Commons photo by Mr. Spielbrick. Click the photo to see the original.

Those 1.6 million orders, put together, combine to form a sum of $124 million in sales for 2010. That’s about the budget of each one of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows films.

Ecommerce by the Numbers

Let’s talk about Shopify’s field, ecommerce.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, ecommerce represents less than 5% of all retail sales in America, but growing at twice the rate.

In the second quarter of this year – that’s just the months of April, May and June 2011 – the total retail sales in the U.S. was just over $1 trillion ($1.04 trillion, if you want to be a little more exact).

(If you need an idea of how much $1 trillion is, PageTutor has a great graphic explanation.)

Ecommerce was just a tiny slice of that $1 trillion in three months, but still respectable. In the second quarter of 2011, ecommerce sales in the U.S. were $48 billion.

And wilder still: sales through ecommerce are growing at twice the rate of all retail. In the second quarter of 2011, total retail sales grew by 8.1%; ecommerce sales in the same period grew by 17.6%.

For more about ecommerce, check out the U.S. Census Bureau’s report on retail ecommerce for 2Q 2011 [PDF].

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Readers of this blog will know that I spent the summer doing my “immersion” at my new job as Shopify’s Platform Evangelist at the Shopify offices in Ottawa. When summer ended, so did the immersion, and I returned back home to Accordion City, where I’m doing a fair bit of work from my home office. To get a look at my home setup, go read my blog post titled Old Office, New Office.

What you might not know is that Shopify recently picked up another employee based in the Greater Toronto Area: Craig Miller (pictured on the right), who used to be the head of product of the Canadian wing of Kijiji, whose parent company is none other than eBay. He’s now Shopify’s VP Marketing.

While my role allows me to be very flexible with where I work, Craig’s requires a more permanent space. After doing a little searching for some suitable digs for Shopify’s Toronto office, he picked a great spot run by some friends of mine: Camaraderie, located on the east side of downtown, a stone’s throw from the financial district.

Camaraderie – from the French and meaning “a spirit of friendly good-fellowship – is a coworking space founded by Rachel Young and Wayne “Bunnyhero” Lee, two names that people who follow the Toronto tech and startup scene will recognize.

Camaraderie occupies the second and third floors of the building at 102 Adelaide Street East. Like many coworking spaces, it offers a common working area with desks as well as a couple of private offices. There’s also a boardroom, a kitchen on each floor, a small lounge and tech amenities like wifi, printing and scanning. In addition to functioning as an office during business hours, Camaraderie has also opened its doors for events from parties and art shows to Crisis Camp workshops. Camaraderie is a vital part of Toronto’s tech and startup community, and I’m incredibly pleased that I’m adding it to my regular stomping grounds“

Shopify takes possession of its private office within Camaraderie on Tuesday, November 1st. Craig will be doing his VP Marketing thing at Camaraderie full time. I’m planning on starting the day at the home office and then coming into the office for the afternoon, commuting there by bike as often as possible (the commute on bike takes only slightly longer than the commute by transit). I’m looking forward being a Camaraderie regular!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Whether you’re one of the 1% or the 99%, the 100 Percent shop (powered by Shopify) has a T-shirt for you!

(Photo taken last weekend at Eldon’s stag party, held in Pete Sutton’s cottage in Picton. More details later.)

Self-Defense with Jo is an odd but entertaining series of instructional videos created by Jo Bonten. He’s got a YouTube channel chock-full of short episodes featuring quickie self-defense tips. The newest series of videos in his channel is called Out in Nature…

…and the first installment is titled Fast Movement Through Nature:

Feel free to click on any of the pictures in this article; they’ll take you to the video, which must be seen to be believed.

In this video, Jo demonstrates a couple of techniques for evading “prosecutors” (perhaps he means “pursuers”) who are after you. He starts out on his bike…

…which he dismounts, and then portages across a field that he could’ve easily biked across.

“It is smart to take the bicycle with you,” he says, explaining why he carried the bike across the field, “since it can be useful again.”

With the “prosecutors” still on his tail, Jo ditches the bike (as well as the bright orange reflective vest, the exact opposite of what you should wear when being chased) and opts for a water route. “When you don’t have another choice, you must leave the bicycle behind and continue with swimming!”

The swimming’s the slowest-paced part of the video, but it’s a short segment, and the background music helps liven things up.

Having reached the other side, he crawls through reeds, presumably so that his pursuers won’t see him. However, as he crawls, he’s carving a very obvious trail:

After a little more crawling and wanton wetland destruction, he stands up.

“I think I have lost my prosecutors!” he declares at the end. Nicely done, Jo.