Latest / 1 to 100 / E41: How to build for Shopify in 2026 with Daniel Patricio

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E41: How to build for Shopify in 2026 with Daniel Patricio · 1 to 100

0:00
Did you guys know that Daniel is actually this good looking in
0:02
real life too? I met him in New York.
0:05
Yeah, at the Beanstalk event. You did know that?
0:08
I've met Daniel in New York also.
0:09
I think Daniel must just live in New York.
0:12
I only meet, I mean I can't say I only meet nice people in New
0:15
York because I met Zach and Trana, so that'd be rude.
0:18
But you meet a lot of lovely people in New York, which I've
0:22
gone to like twice in the last like 3 years and it's been with
0:27
you guys so. Yeah, we went to that coffee
0:29
shop. I forgot the name of it, but
0:31
yeah, I forget. There was somebody else there
0:33
too. Who was that?
0:34
Mike Raga, maybe? That's all right.
0:37
No, it was someone else. Part of my this last last
0:41
November, I actually paid to go to a conference there.
0:43
I was still skirting all the events around it, hanging out
0:47
with it. Wrong.
0:48
Yeah. Well, OK, I actually one thing I
0:51
want to dive in on, I have no idea where you're at in your
0:54
business right now, to be honest.
0:55
So I know like when you I know like the early beginnings, it'd
0:59
be cool to kind of just hear your story because you and I
1:03
haven't chatted in a year plus probably.
1:06
So anyway, I'd love to know like the backgrounds and also the pre
1:11
opera as well because I think that's interesting too.
1:13
And then basically like how you got to this point.
1:16
Cool, yeah. Or maybe keep because I I can
1:20
talk for an hour about myself if we, if we let it run, I don't
1:23
think that's the the goal. So I'll keep it snappy and we
1:26
can dig in wherever is interesting.
1:28
But yeah, so I guess my my story starts.
1:32
I was, I was in trouble. I became an entrepreneur in
1:35
university, had an agency, but my first software startup when
1:41
Facebook pages were a big thing. This is like just when Facebook
1:47
kind of started coming out with stuff.
1:49
Then I joined my friends design agency as like a product person
1:53
because I kind of learned how to build product.
1:55
I had a marketing background in school at that time.
1:59
I didn't like marketers. They were all like, I went to
2:02
school for marketing. They're like, you know, you
2:04
should buy a billboard. And I'm like, I don't know, man,
2:07
there's the Internet out there and that's really exciting.
2:10
We almost bought billboards the other day.
2:12
Billboards are having a revival and there's a cool way to buy
2:14
billboards, but you know, as the whole foundation, I think not
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super exciting. So join my friends design agency
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when like mobile was a thing. I feel like it's all ancient
2:26
history. We grew very quickly and then we
2:30
were acquired by this company called Shopify in 2013.
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So Shopify was pretty small at the time.
2:39
I think I'm technically was employee 300, but there was like
2:43
100 people or so at Shopify and R&D spent eight years there.
2:49
A lot of things happened, got bigger than 300 people, you
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know, went through the IPO two years later and kind of a bunch
2:58
of fun stuff. And then in 2021 I left shop
3:02
five once start my own thing, started running a store.
3:07
I mean, I've been running my store since 2015, but I went
3:10
into that full time and then I went shop of sorry, been Apple
3:17
kind of screwed with ads with was it iOS 14.
3:22
I started focusing a lot on conversion rates and on my store
3:29
and then I started getting carried away and kind of built
3:32
the first prototypes for Abra. So this was in 2022 and then I
3:40
started building Abra first year.
3:43
So basically the idea for Abra was we build an online store,
3:47
it's just like a bunch of pages and that has been got a little
3:52
bit better, but it's still a pain.
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I think it's a common pain point.
3:57
I've heard Rashad kind of mentioned certain things of
4:00
like, you know, your website, one static version of pages.
4:03
But in my business, I was focusing a lot on offers and
4:08
discounts and I had a pretty simple problem.
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If I couldn't make a discount work on the website, like, you
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know, if I was, I used to sell Bolt on just like South African
4:19
beef jerky. And if I was like running an
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offer on grass fed Bolt on, I send someone a link, nothing
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happens. They'd be confused or they
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wouldn't see it. So I'm like, wouldn't it be nice
4:30
if I was giving you a discount on Grosford Bolt on?
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You see it that you buy it. Amazing.
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So that's where we started and it was the first year was super
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frustrating. I didn't have a competitor that
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did this. I didn't know if anyone could do
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this. I messaged everyone on your
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shop. I'm like, hey, nobody does this,
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right? And there's no one that like
4:55
build this. And they said no, I'm like, oh,
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excellent. But then I learned the shitty
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part of that is that nobody understands you.
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And so I would like talk to merchants.
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I'm like, hey, you know, you have a discount and you can auto
5:09
apply it. And then I'll see it.
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And they're like, yeah, I can already do that.
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I'm like, can you, can you show me?
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And they're like, oh, no, oh, I just don't understand you or
5:19
like, oh, that's not possible. And I'm like, I know, that's why
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I built it. And so it was like the first
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year was like the hardest thing because like chose to build
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something almost like a took a angle of being APM at shop 5
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Like, oh, I'm going to build something you very unique that
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no one's done. It's like technically
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interesting. So the first year was like a
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long slog. Then the second year we started,
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we took this like little novelty we had around being able to
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change prices for people in the store.
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And we started building like Shop 5 was starting and push
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people away from Shop 5 scripts into this new thing, functions
5:56
where you could basically make very complicated discounts.
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And so it was kind of easy for us because we already had all
6:02
this way of mapping things, any price.
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And then we started doing complicated functions.
6:08
And then it like kind of blew people's minds in a way.
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We started getting much bigger merchants coming in.
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They're like, oh, wait, you know, I usually got to create
6:16
this whole elaborate price list whenever I'm launching a sale
6:20
and there's no way to do it to my e-mail list.
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And I'm like, OK, let me build it.
6:24
Like you can just pull over the function and then it works and
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that kind of just ripped the Band-Aid of just a totally
6:32
different merchant, everyone kind of seeing where we were
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kind of going there. And then we grew 14X in one
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year. So that was from a Nas small
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kind of starting to get some traction to like pretty crazy
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kind of growth working for very big merchants.
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And then last year we grew about 3X year over year on top of
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that. And yeah, so started kind of
7:01
with me, my Co founder. There was a design leader shop
7:04
fire and we worked at the agency before and now we're eight
7:08
people. And yeah, interesting parts are
7:13
on the way. They have like, you know, I
7:15
thought I was going to build a venture backed business when I
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start just because I've been an Angel investor for many years.
7:20
It's the worst possible time to do that.
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I'm glad we didn't raise money. We had the blessing of not
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raising money because we kind of built it on our own and now it's
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like got a lot of optionality and that kind of thing.
7:33
So yeah, in short, yeah, the last couple years have been kind
7:37
of bonkers, growing very kind of fast, solving like complex
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discount pricing, merchandising issues for very big merchants at
7:46
Shop 5, Yeah. And and playing the next level
7:51
to the sport, you know now. So yeah.
7:55
It's awesome. It's not SAS related at all, but
7:58
you're built on slabs are amazing.
8:01
Yeah, yeah, the slab the most true to South African experience
8:06
because the the problem is like the not FDA, USDA does the meat
8:15
inspection and like they are so picky about how dry it needs to
8:19
be like it turns to sawdust. If you listen to them presence
8:23
in Africa experiences you work into walk into a butcher shop,
8:26
they've got meat hanging from the ceilings.
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You can smell it. It's fresh like a steak.
8:30
They cut it to order neck. So a slab you get the you get
8:34
the full experience. Yeah.
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Yeah, it was great. That's amazing.
8:38
What made you decide to like continue to build on on Shopify?
8:46
I like building on Shopify. I think it's a bit of a romantic
8:52
thing for me of like and I even loved building on Shopify.
8:55
Even when I left Shopify, I wasn't like I didn't leave shop.
8:58
I'd be like, Oh my God, I'm so done with e-commerce and
9:00
whatever. Like I think for me, everyone in
9:05
my family is like a has worked in a grocery store.
9:09
Like my parents worked in a owned a grocery store.
9:12
I grew up in one. I was like almost the first
9:15
person in my family to actually have a job.
9:17
Like everyone else had been self-employed.
9:19
I was like the first person in my family not to have a job.
9:24
So I've always run around very like small businesses, people
9:28
kind of building things up from scratch.
9:29
And I think like the blessing and the curse of e-commerce in
9:35
this like Shopify era is like you can have like two or three
9:39
people running a business doing 102030 million a year and like
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you can just build software for them and it can do very powerful
9:47
things with them. And so I don't know, that's the
9:49
romantic part of it of like, I just like the upsize
9:53
opportunity. Like, I mean, the thing I love
9:56
building my career is I love making people people money.
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Like that's what I like. And I think there's just such a
10:01
tight feedback loop in e-commerce where if you do
10:04
something, it makes people more money.
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It's kind of obvious. Like cool, you know, we can kind
10:09
of go from there. So I think that's all the, the,
10:13
the, the emotional side to it. I think the, the negatives are
10:16
like people expect tier one software, you know what I mean?
10:20
They expect everything and they expect it to be damn cheap and
10:22
they want all the features. You know, it's not like
10:24
enterprise where you can go and you can sell a little widget
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into one part of the company. And they like slowly they're
10:30
like e-commerce merchants are everything done at the highest
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level. And yeah, $20.00 a month sounds
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good. And you're like my friend like
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so I think there's a bit of craziness there, but I I think,
10:41
you know, on the more practical side of wash off, I think it's
10:45
like the platform is reasonable. It's like reasonably well
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maintained, like, you know, you trusted they working on it.
10:52
There's someone there are next to choke where it's actually
10:56
built on top of. I think there's proof on the biz
10:58
model. I think you can kind of get
10:59
things up like, you know, I think the macro there's always
11:05
like, I think it was like the size of business.
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We wanted to build something very big.
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I think for me, the biggest reason, I mean, I built Abra the
11:12
way I built it is like, I think anyone that knows e-commerce
11:16
really well knows like shop has got a lot of work to do on like
11:20
real enterprise, you know, and so I think that's where shop has
11:24
put in their chips. I want to build software for
11:26
that. I think there'll be a very big
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market for it. Disagree.
11:30
Hard disagree. Disagree.
11:32
Hard disagree. I think over the last two
11:34
months, yeah. And this will be fun.
11:37
Like I'm I'm excited that we disagree about where Shopify is
11:40
headed. I don't think Shopify is trying
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to win enterprise. I really don't.
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I think that's why Toby fired his entire C-Suite effective at
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not I mean, like, I'm not trying to get clipped on that for the
11:54
editor. Don't clip that there has been a
11:58
changing of leadership at Shopify.
12:01
And I think what I don't know if you guys saw the layoffs from
12:05
yesterday or two days ago, Danielle, I don't know if you
12:07
have friends still there who got affected.
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But I think actually all signs point to extraordinary
12:14
conviction that agenda commerce is going to be create this next
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wave of companies and types of merchants that Shopify wants to
12:24
be able to support and grow on that wave.
12:27
And I don't think they're trying to win enterprise businesses.
12:30
I talk to enterprises every day, none of whom are considering
12:34
Shopify. In fact, I literally talk, I'm
12:38
not going to name the merchant, but I talked to a large merchant
12:42
who said, Oh yeah, we did an evaluation of like Shopify
12:45
commerce tools and Salesforce commerce and Shopify was the
12:49
easiest to say no to. And so I, I am not, don't get me
12:54
wrong, I'm not trying to say that Shopify is not great
12:56
software. I think it's great software.
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But I actually think that the strategy is not to win
13:02
enterprise. And I'm not I'm not convinced
13:05
that they will ever say that out loud, but their actions
13:08
certainly don't suggest that the strategy is to win enterprise.
13:11
Yeah. I mean, I think a cop out to to
13:16
avoid disagreeing is where do you draw the line in enterprise?
13:19
And I think and what does drawing the line in enterprise
13:22
mean? I think one thing is like.
13:26
Billion dollars of GMV. That is like nowhere near yeah,
13:30
yeah. And I don't, I think shop I
13:31
can't play there. Like, you know, I think when,
13:34
when like Shop 5 Plus came up, we're like starting to charge
13:38
people $2000 a month. I think people even internally
13:41
in Shop 5, that time in turning 13, whatever we're like, oh, if
13:45
you're doing more than $10 million, is that an enterprise?
13:48
And it's like it's laughable if you've like seen real
13:52
enterprises and like again in the 1 billion plus strategy.
13:55
So I think there's always been like Shabbat sensor scale is
13:59
always kind of leaned, I think smaller.
14:02
I think the line that will never be crossed is, but I don't think
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Shafa will ever build anything for Enterprise at the expense of
14:11
everyone else. I don't think it'll ever happen.
14:13
And maybe that's what you need to do to build for Enterprise
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like you know, for so much of the time shop.
14:18
But they're like, we don't give a shit about an RFP.
14:20
If you have an RFP, we don't want to talk to you like we will
14:23
not. You won't do that.
14:24
We won't go to those conferences.
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We don't know those things. Yeah.
14:27
And just to be clear, I think that there is obviously wisdom
14:32
and extraordinary strategic foresight and having that view,
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this is like a $200 billion market cap company.
14:40
Like I'm, I'm, I'm not saying it to be negative on this.
14:44
I'm actually admiring the strategic clarity that says,
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hey, we have high conviction that a jet like let me say it,
14:55
let me say it slightly differently.
14:57
Everything with Agenda Commerce that has been released in the
14:59
last three months, Shopify's name is all over it, all over.
15:03
Like I cannot think of a single press release that Shopify's
15:06
name is all over in the agentic commerce world.
15:12
But I don't think I could say the same thing about enterprise
15:16
sales. And I think that that is a very
15:18
good demonstration. And, and if they end up being
15:21
right, guess what? They're going to win the bigger
15:23
prize. And so I, I admire it.
15:26
I'm not, I'm not trying to be negative, but I just don't think
15:28
they're going after Enterprise. That's that's all I'm trying to
15:30
say, yeah. I don't think it's the number
15:32
one thing for sure. I'll agree with you there.
15:35
It's I think it's hard to argue it's the number one thing they
15:39
are doing right now. I would say again, my bias for
15:44
only living in my little Shopfire bubble for so long as
15:47
like, you know, I think of the business doing 200, three, $100
15:50
million earning like, oh, these are bigger than usual, bigger
15:54
than we've we've seen in the Shopfire world.
15:57
I would say like on the Abra side, again, I spent many years
16:02
building software for, you know, the zero to 1,000,000 merchant
16:06
because that was the types of things we built at Shopfire
16:08
because we had to build for 100% of people.
16:11
So for me looking at a merchant doing 2 or 300 million is even
16:15
stretching the box on the context we have.
16:17
And I think I don't know if that's called mid markets.
16:20
I don't know where that's called.
16:21
I think there's, if you're in the SAS side, I think there's a
16:25
lot of technical gaps in that area.
16:29
I mean, I like again, this is my playing to my naivety, but like
16:34
I think enterprise, it's maybe less technical.
16:36
It's more the way you work in my opinion.
16:40
Tell me the knock Mears of enterprise.
16:42
I, I, I I don't want to. I don't want to usurp the convo.
16:45
We should like, I want the other guys to chime in here.
16:49
Yeah. Jeremiah, I'm.
16:49
I'm. Curious what you think.
16:50
I can tell you how I think about it because I actually agree,
16:53
Daniel, with what you're saying. It's, it's a mindset.
16:55
We literally have a optional enterprise plan at no, which is
17:01
for people who think of them as enterprise themselves, as
17:04
enterprise businesses. That's for the people that want
17:07
RFPs, that want all these crazy forms filled out, that want
17:10
annual contracts, that want all these things.
17:12
We say you are enterprise and so that is custom pricing and we
17:17
will come to an agreement on what that pricing has and
17:19
everybody else goes into the self-serve.
17:22
Here's the the the three plans you can pick from.
17:26
So for us, we actually, we really do look at it as a
17:28
mindset because I have brands that are doing 50 million a year
17:31
that are in that enterprise mindset and brands that do 500
17:36
million a year that are not. And so I, I actually, I
17:40
definitely think of it in terms of a mindset.
17:43
Those ones that like, think of themselves as enterprise are so
17:47
challenging too. Like we have one that signed up
17:49
for us at Stamps. They installed our app in
17:54
September. We haven't even had a
17:55
conversation with them. They switched to Shopify in
17:58
sometime in 2025. They haven't even added like
18:02
it's not that they didn't work with us.
18:04
They don't have reviews on their site at all.
18:05
Six months later, like it's just like a, like things move so
18:11
slowly. This is a company that does
18:12
billions a year in revenue. They're one of the top 300
18:15
stores on, on the Internet. And it's just like, it's just a
18:19
like that is so hard to work with.
18:21
Like there's a question of like, do we even want to work with
18:24
them? So I'm not going to name who
18:27
that is, but but it's just, it's challenging in that context.
18:31
So I I very much agree with the mindset idea behind Enterprise.
18:36
I mean, I think it, we don't have to go on the whole rent
18:39
enterprise rabbit hole, but like I think and maybe a cynical way
18:43
of doing it is like that, you know, the fast growing merchant,
18:47
I think the most fun merchants to work with in shop are like
18:50
people that are growing fast, that know their stuff.
18:53
They're like, hey, dude, if you can do science, make new money
18:55
tomorrow, install it tomorrow, we'll get it going.
18:57
Let's see how it works. We have the AB test by anything
18:59
that's chef's kiss. Lovely Pot.
19:03
I think if you were to think of a spectrum and the worst kind of
19:06
view of an enterprise customer, it's like it's somebody that's
19:08
just trying to not get fired, right?
19:11
That's maybe a little cynical. It's people that are making a
19:14
decision to buy something. And let's say on the feature
19:18
side, every feature you have checks every box, but your price
19:21
is $25 and their budget is $2000 a month.
19:25
The delta between $25,000 and the 2000 is the risk they have
19:29
of getting fired. It's like, oh, there's like a
19:32
big app from this enterprise that checks all the they do all
19:36
the bullshit that we say we need and there's $25 app.
19:40
It looks like they do the same thing, but I must be doing
19:43
something wrong. And if that $25 app screws us,
19:46
we've got again billions of dollars of upside that at risk
19:51
here. It wasn't worth saving that
19:53
money. So I don't know.
19:54
That's how I've seen it. It's a very cynical I'm SMB guy
19:58
at heart. I look at it but and not to dumb
20:01
it down, but that's how I see it putting it.
20:04
Putting aside the definition of enterprise, I clearly don't know
20:06
what enterprise is. I'm more confused than when we
20:09
came into the conversation. But you don't have enterprise
20:13
pricing, right? So what matters to you is.
20:16
The amount of customers who can afford your highest plan and
20:19
ideally the that Tam increasing, right.
20:22
So Shopify plus store growth is probably a lot more relevant to
20:26
you than enterprise stores on Shopify.
20:28
Yeah, yeah, for sure. The.
20:30
Do you think that's happening? Is Shopify plus store growth in
20:34
the US? Like what is the store growth of
20:36
Shopify in the? US, you know, I asked Gemini.
20:40
I got a really in specific answer.
20:42
It's at 126%, but that doesn't seem realistic.
20:45
I don't know that like last quarter, but I know over the
20:47
last couple years they were reporting that plus growth at
20:51
being above average, above the total market.
20:54
So I don't know if it's changed from the last quarters, but
20:57
that's what I've couldn't see. The flip side of this whole
21:01
enterprise thing, because Rashad, I think your business
21:03
operates more this way. I actually would love to be able
21:06
to service those people because once I get them signed up, the
21:09
odds of them leaving are very low.
21:10
That like Daniel, the one you just described where they're
21:12
like, yeah, I'll install it tomorrow.
21:14
They're also the first ones to leave when something else comes
21:16
along that's more interesting. So the enterprise ones are
21:18
great. The problem that I have is not
21:21
that I don't want to service them, it's that my business is
21:23
not structured to be able to service them.
21:25
I don't have the people like essentially you need, you need
21:29
the right people in place to be able to actually service those
21:31
businesses and it becomes far more expensive to service the
21:35
business that's asking for all those enterprising things.
21:39
And yeah, we like, we get a few of those coming in every quarter
21:43
probably is what I would say that doesn't, they may be large
21:47
contracts, but I just don't, we just say no because it's like
21:51
it's not worth the the cost of the like the headspace of trying
21:56
to deal with these things so. Yeah.
21:59
Is there a world where you guys sell to Shopify or Shopify
22:04
builds you and just goes completely around you?
22:07
For Abra. Builds around us like like
22:11
steals are, steals are like they just build a way better discount
22:15
product in Shopify. Do you think that's a potential
22:18
future? Not it won't happen fast.
22:22
Maybe it happens over five years and they'll mean multiple steps.
22:25
But I think, you know, the, the thing we always used to say was
22:30
like, you know, Shopify builds for the 80% of the use cases and
22:36
then the last 20% we need then shop I needs the ecosystem on.
22:43
It's a, it's a, you know, create a rule rather than like a thing.
22:46
But I think the biggest thing that I've probably seen a shift
22:51
from when I was at Shafa is like the discounts team, who I know
22:56
quite well at Shafa now, they spend almost all their time on
23:00
AP is, you know what I mean? I don't know if it's like 8020
23:02
or that kind of thing. Because for them, like in this
23:05
area of discounts, Shafa will never build enough stuff for all
23:12
the weird things merchants want to ask.
23:14
And if anything, even within the, the context of Abra.
23:18
So if you decide to build a competitor to me tomorrow and
23:21
you're like, OK, we're going to take one discount, we're going
23:22
to go and do it. Like, listen, man, I've got like
23:25
30 customers that have these weird check boxes that need to
23:30
be slotted in here. Because when they are doing
23:32
this, they need margin control here and the SKUs need to be
23:35
there. There will always be someone
23:37
that needs some kind of weird specific thing there because
23:42
like, because it makes them more money, right?
23:45
Like, you know, you can go to a small merchant and be like,
23:47
listen, shut up, just do 20% off and everything.
23:49
You don't want to pay me more money, so let's deal with it.
23:52
But when you got a merchant that's doing hundreds of
23:54
millions of dollars and if something is going to tell you
23:56
save them 5% or it's going to increase the conversion rate by
24:00
8%, those are such big numbers that it is worth them kind of
24:05
investing in it. So I think actually, I think
24:08
there will always be some weird stuff that Shopify won't be able
24:12
to completely build with build. So I think there'll be some part
24:16
of the puzzle. Can Shopify make it easy on the
24:18
storefront to do what we do? Sure.
24:20
Should they? I hope so.
24:22
It'll make my life easier too. Like will they offer all the
24:26
functions we have in Shopify? I don't think they'll ever do
24:29
that. But I think if anything, I think
24:32
probably the biggest thing I've learned in running this business
24:35
is, again, I told you about that first year I had in the business
24:38
where I think we was trying to sell our app for 50 dollars,
24:41
$100 a month, which was, you know, not the cheapest thing in
24:45
the shop fight ecosystem, but you know, very cheap compared to
24:48
our pricing. Now our top plan starts at $1000
24:51
a month. When I was going around telling
24:54
everyone, oh, we got this thing, Abra can do this, promise you
24:56
it's going to make you more money.
24:57
And people were bulking at $50.00 or $25 and they actually
25:02
didn't have a problem with the pricing.
25:04
I thought it was a pricing thing.
25:06
I thought it was a, a marketing thing, but the problem was
25:09
actually that discounts are so damn complicated that you need
25:14
someone to help you figure it out.
25:16
Like by that I mean like if you're trying to figure out how
25:20
to combine 2 discounts and Shopify, I can give you 10
25:24
different ways you can do it. And the short answer is it
25:27
depends. So you know the thing, a thing I
25:31
we quickly learned was that merchants actually needed help
25:35
with that, especially larger merchants because they had
25:37
weirded needs and that kind of thing.
25:38
So we almost reached a weird tipping point in our business
25:41
that was quite scary. We were having these massive
25:43
merchants. We weren't charging them a lot
25:46
and we were spending a lot of time with them.
25:48
And like me and my Co founder kind of looked at each other and
25:50
like, do we like doing this? And we like yes it's fun doing
25:56
this for this merchant, but can we do it for 1000 people?
25:59
No way in hell. So me and my Co founder kind of
26:02
looked at each other and be like hey, this is fun.
26:03
Like I like when a big merchant has a crazy idea of what they
26:07
want to do. We can come in, we do a thing
26:09
for them, we help them figure it out and they make a shit ton of
26:12
money. Big fan of that.
26:14
And they'll pay us 2000 dollars, $3000 a month for that.
26:19
That works. So I think like the biggest
26:22
thing that's everyone needs is a little if you go down the thing
26:27
of like is Shafa going to build our exact tech?
26:29
Are they going to build our exact features or are they going
26:32
to offer our service? I don't think they'll offer all
26:35
three of those things and I don't think they'll offer that
26:37
there. So I think we'll always have
26:39
somewhere there. I think in terms of an
26:41
acquisition, I mean, I think, you know, we aren't venture
26:46
backed, so we have a lot of options and what we we could do
26:49
in terms of exits. I think like my Co founder Ellie
26:52
and I've been working together for 13 years.
26:54
We like working together. We're really good at what we do.
26:58
So you know, we do this for another two or three years.
27:02
I'll be open to an exit. Sure, maybe.
27:04
And I think like the types of things any acquirer would build
27:07
is like we know this domain inside and out.
27:10
So if there's like, you know, anyone in the marketing stack
27:14
that doesn't have a lot of leverage around discounts and
27:16
merchants, we have tech expertise and like the service
27:20
to Taculate. If that's shot like really
27:24
pulled on all the APIs, maybe that could happen.
27:27
If that's another marketing platform, you know, all things
27:33
on the table for the right price, You know, I wonder if
27:36
that's the path that Shopify would take, the building into
27:39
the core product. Exactly what you do, just
27:41
acquiring someone in the space who's doing it really well.
27:46
Yeah. You know, the, the hard part,
27:48
the hardest part of like building anything at Shopify was
27:51
that, you know, you need Shopfire.
27:54
Shopfire doesn't cut corners, you know, from an engineering
27:58
point of view, which can be, it sounds like just a positive
28:01
thing, but it can have some downsides, you know what I mean?
28:04
Like if Shopfire is trying to get something done, they've got
28:07
to build it the right way, you know what I mean?
28:08
They've got to build all the primitives, have the primitives
28:11
built well, then you glue it together.
28:13
Then you kind of launch it for the platform and for for
28:15
customers and everything. That's the the way it works is
28:19
so that's sounds awesome, but it can be frustrating if you're
28:23
like, hey, our customers have no way to send a, a good welcome
28:28
e-mail. And then we're like, I could
28:30
bang this out in a weekend, you know what I mean?
28:33
But we're like, well, is it the right way?
28:35
Because if you do it this way, then that's going to affect
28:38
this. And then we don't have this
28:39
infrastructure and you got to do it.
28:41
So that can be the, the good and the bad side of building
28:43
something in, in any big company.
28:45
But I think especially in Shopfire, I think the thing I
28:48
loved at Shopfire and that I was really quite good at is like
28:52
when you have all the relationships of all the people
28:54
internally and you're like, you know, hey, I'm trying to build
28:57
this analytics thing. So I know I've got to go speak
28:59
to this guy in Ottawa that is doing this data modelling
29:02
project. And this person that's working
29:04
on a preprocessor and this person that's working on like
29:06
the visualization and like, here's the merchant story,
29:09
here's the things to get very excited about.
29:11
And that's what you need to do. And so I love doing that kind of
29:15
stuff. And I think even just when I
29:16
joined Shopify, our product team of like 10/10/10 of us like kind
29:22
of in their first year, I think like 80% were founders.
29:27
Like nobody had ever been a product manager at a tech
29:31
company. They were either engineers,
29:33
designers or literal founders. And so they expected people to
29:38
have that accountability. And I think there's some problem
29:41
domains. If it's important to get done,
29:44
you really need someone that gives a shit and like isn't it
29:48
is OK with like breaking some eggs to like along the way to
29:51
get it done. So I think that could be a
29:54
reason we, we end up there. Like if, if, if discounts and
29:58
like the storefront stuff kind of overlaps.
30:01
I, I kind of joke a little bit. Like before I left shop, I
30:05
worked on marketing tech Shopify.
30:07
I bought the marketing section Shopify.
30:09
And like I always had this dream of having like a single way to
30:14
like automate, like if you're doing a product launch and you
30:18
could pull together website changes, pricing changes, all
30:22
the stuff. That was my dream of what I
30:23
wanted to kind of build. And I feel like I almost wrote a
30:26
brief about it, but we're like, Oh no, well, you know, the
30:29
themes have to like be upgraded to themes 2 point O and then
30:33
we're going to need to do this and we need to do this.
30:35
That's been like 4 years now, you know, since then.
30:38
But like, you know, you see like the new rollout stuff that Shafa
30:42
is building tied into the SIM Gym stuff.
30:45
The SIM Gym thing's a better headline, but I, I get super
30:48
excited about it. Oh, sick.
30:50
There's a few primitive that they're using to power the SIM
30:53
Gym thing that's going to be very powerful because you can
30:56
use it as a primitive for reporting and reps our rods and
30:59
that kind of stuff. So I think it would be cool to
31:01
work on that again from the inside now that I've Fast
31:04
forward through time, got a bunch of the infrastructure
31:06
always wanted and that kind of thing.
31:08
But yeah, we'll see. Yeah.
31:10
Like how has your go to market changed like over like the last
31:12
three years of running the company?
31:16
I mean, we have a very weird go to market.
31:18
I mean, I don't know if it's that weird, but it's almost like
31:20
exclusively I would say kind of partnerships driven and I would
31:25
say it's not. It has to be technical for me.
31:32
So like I would describe, I mean, everyone does partnerships
31:35
and I think a lot of people do a partner strategy for for me, I
31:38
always look at like for our merchants that use us, what is
31:42
the software they they use and what are the problems within it.
31:46
So, you know, if we look at even just Shopify as a partnership,
31:49
because we had a, quite a few recommendations from Shopify's
31:52
MSM team, like with Shopify, we actually kind of plant the seed
31:57
of like basically you want to find a crack with each partner.
32:00
And for Shop, I was like a lot of the Launchpad.
32:03
So if anyone was using Launchpad and having UX issues or panes,
32:08
we could help if they wanted to do what Launchpad could do, but
32:12
only to people they send an e-mail list to, that's us.
32:15
So like over time, I like found this little crack with say with
32:19
Shop I and like we do so much work with Shopify around that.
32:26
And another partnership has been huge for us is like tap cart.
32:30
So like on the mobile app side. And you know, if I was starting
32:34
this company, I don't think I'd be like, oh, and you know, we
32:36
have to go into like mobile apps.
32:38
It's the number one thing we got to do.
32:40
But we basically found in it with tap cart like they have
32:44
like such a sticky relationship with like very sophisticated
32:49
brands, like discounts and promotions were just not a
32:54
thing. They'd had a lot of time to
32:58
build. And they have some great like
32:59
out-of-the-box ones. But just like shop by itself,
33:01
there were always these edge cases.
33:03
So if it was like tiered gift with purchase in there, that was
33:08
like a weird little like crevice where we would help people a
33:12
lot. Like when Scripps got migrated,
33:16
deprecated, they had no way to do an app exclusive.
33:18
Our team built something in 24 hours, said, hey, here, here you
33:21
go. Take it.
33:22
So you know, that's an example of tap guide.
33:24
And so we have like a bunch, we probably have like 4 or five
33:28
partners that bring all of our leads.
33:30
And I think the weirdest thing back to your question of like
33:32
what is different now than it was then is like we, we are very
33:37
bad at explaining what Abra as a whole is.
33:41
You know what I mean? There's no like billboard plug.
33:44
Abra is perfect at doing this, you know what I mean?
33:47
But it's almost all these weird little crevices per partner that
33:52
have really clicked. And so like Abra is something
33:55
very different to all the different ways we get customers
33:59
is almost the the thing that I think like, you know, people
34:03
have this tendency of like you're doing like textbook
34:07
marketing here of like, oh, we need to have a perfect brand
34:09
positioning and we need one message that's absolutely clear.
34:13
I'm like, fuck that. It's not that at all.
34:16
You need something not well ran. You need something shop that
34:19
like the account manager at this partner really gives a shit
34:23
about because like where all the magic happens when an account
34:26
manager has a problem and you're the only person that can solve
34:30
that problem. They don't give a shit about
34:32
your brand. They don't care about your three
34:34
values or whatever the hell it is.
34:36
You know what I mean? Like they want those crevices.
34:39
So I think like again, I'm not a marketing guy.
34:42
I'm a product person at heart. So for me to give a shit about a
34:45
partner, we have to do something interesting together.
34:48
It has to be creating something that we can't do with someone
34:50
else. That's what gets me excited.
34:53
And then I think that thing is it's not macro hand WAVY big
34:58
thing. It's like very specific and
34:59
small little edge. Maybe we'll have to get better
35:02
at other things. But like that's been the
35:05
playbook that's kind of helped us for the last two years.
35:07
And like, I think even going into this year, we kind of
35:11
aiming to do more the same of like, you know, what are the
35:14
more complicated things that like our priority partners kind
35:18
of need, you know, and that kind of thing.
35:20
I just, I think that's such a good way to think about
35:22
partnerships. That's effectively, it's a
35:24
better way of framing the way that I think about it as well,
35:26
which is like, if, if you can solve a problem for a partner,
35:30
that's better than like I, I'm really not into the Rep share
35:33
thing. I there's a.
35:35
Never. Works pieces for that sometimes,
35:37
but the best scenario is I actually am solving a problem
35:39
for a partner that makes them not care about any financial
35:43
component at all because we're making their business more
35:45
successful and it's I think that type of partnerships is
35:48
stickier. Yeah, I mean, this might seem
35:52
like a bit of a tangent, but like, you know, Rashad was
35:55
bragging about Shafa and doing all this agentic stuff.
35:58
Like that's Shafa's product strategy, you know what I mean?
36:01
They're not trying to build their own LLM.
36:04
They're going to every partner that's making news about the AI
36:08
strategy and saying let's build some shit together, right?
36:11
And like then they are the platform to do that.
36:14
Like my kind of run at Shafa was all about the social commerce
36:18
stuff. We can argue whether that went
36:20
anywhere, but we were building integrations with Facebook,
36:24
Google, Pinterest, TikTok, Snap, you name it.
36:27
Whoever was excited about commerce, we weren't trying to
36:32
build our own social network at Drop By.
36:34
We were building like I used to work with, say, the guys at
36:37
TikTok and you're like, hey, what are you trying to do?
36:39
What kind of new ad parts can we build?
36:41
We built a new integration. The press release went up, not
36:45
only supposed to talk about the stock price, but I don't work
36:47
there anymore, but you see the stock price going crazy plus the
36:50
plus sales people would say, oh shit, you guys launched A TikTok
36:53
integration like nobody asked what it did.
36:56
There's like shopfire has the exclusive TikTok integration
36:58
that would get more customers. So I think like that's my
37:01
playbook when I was coming to Abra of like, it's very hard to
37:04
market yourself. Like Abra is the greatest way of
37:07
doing discounts and things like that.
37:09
Nobody gives a shit. But like if I'm on tap cart and
37:12
there's this thing that's new on tap cart, it's the only way to
37:15
do it in any mobile app and you have to use this thing called
37:17
Abra. Do it.
37:18
Sure, whatever, give me that, you know, and it's how you can
37:22
kind of, you know, build a bigger narrative than yourself.
37:26
So I don't know that's the playbook.
37:27
I'm going to keep playing when we yeah, you guys, you guys
37:34
sound super agile. What's the process of building
37:36
Abra look like? We have stand ups on Mondays and
37:41
Wednesdays and me and my Co founder that speak to all the
37:43
merchants and kind of manage all the sales and stuff.
37:49
We determine the road map and we build it and we design shit at
37:53
night and we get it rolling. So it's like Abra's like 5
37:56
engineers and myself who's a product person slash CEO slash
38:04
salesperson. And my Co founder is a he's kind
38:08
of manages all our OPS and accounts and he also happens to
38:12
be a very, very good product designer.
38:14
So we do every, we, we try to really avoid specialization in
38:20
all parts of the company. Maybe we can get away with it
38:22
when we're eight people, we got one marketer that does lots of
38:27
marketing things. So that's even they can't be
38:30
kind of specialized. But I think, I think something I
38:35
always learned as APM at Shopify was like, engineers need to give
38:41
a shit about design. They need to give a shit about
38:44
the merchant problem, they need to give a shit about QA, Right?
38:48
Like so many companies, you can slice the way you build your
38:52
product into a million things. They're like developers that
38:55
want requirements given to them and they want to just build
38:59
their software and then they want someone else to QA that.
39:01
Like screw that. Like that's absolute bullshit.
39:05
Because the minute you have people doing that, people get
39:08
lazy, right? If somebody is just building
39:12
what someone else told them to do, they're not going to care
39:15
about why it gets built and they're not going to.
39:17
And if they have to write the code but not QA it, they're not
39:20
going to care how good it is. They're not going to care what
39:22
sport thing. So like, this is something I
39:25
kind of learned to chop out. Like how do you make every
39:27
person, your team kind of care? So I give my aunts, like I make
39:33
my engineers write product briefs.
39:34
Like I obviously help them, but like they need to scope the
39:38
feature. They need to like define it.
39:40
They need to figure out why it happens.
39:41
I'll bring them the why, I'll bring them the merchant, I'll
39:44
give them the use case and that kind of thing.
39:47
But they got a scope of that kind of debt.
39:48
And then I think from a business perspective, like I don't get to
39:51
just be a salesperson. I mean, I wouldn't be a good
39:54
salesperson, but like you need to do unscalable things because
40:00
like the most powerful thing I can do for a customer is like if
40:05
they sign up for a demo, they get me, which is nice.
40:09
I got a good energy, good vibes, lovely, cool, cool, cool.
40:14
But like if they have a feature that we don't have.
40:17
You know what I mean? Like some, that's where I'm most
40:19
interested in because I'm like, oh shit, that's actually really
40:22
cool. Why do you do that?
40:23
You know, why do you need that? Why is that important to you?
40:27
And I? It might be something really
40:28
cool. We're like, oh, actually we've
40:30
got that feature coming out next week.
40:31
Just hold on, let me get see if I can get access to it for you.
40:34
Or like, oh, actually I was in the road map.
40:36
We can change it around. Or maybe I'll say, you know
40:39
what, that's a brilliant idea. I've never thought of that.
40:41
Let's go ahead and build that. And I mean, that sounds almost
40:44
like, you know, some bullshit thing someone would say about,
40:49
oh, it's so good to have a founder.
40:51
Can you imagine if I have a salesperson that did that?
40:53
Can you imagine? You hire a salesperson tomorrow,
40:56
they start going to calls with merchants and they're like,
40:58
yeah, you want that feature? Don't you worry, we're going to
41:00
build it next week. I'd fucking fire the guy on the
41:03
spot. And I'm like, you fucking
41:04
lunatic, get out of here. I don't know how much fuck the
41:06
guy's adding to things, but like if you had a sales guy coming
41:11
out of nowhere telling your engineering team what to do,
41:13
you'd freaking execute the guy on the spot.
41:15
Like it's insane, right? But like when you have the
41:18
founders kind of when you have the person accountable for
41:21
products and kind of involved in that, it's a great loop.
41:26
It's an awesome part of the business because you know, I
41:28
come to my founder and I don't go like, hey, I'm the CEO of
41:31
bitch, you're building this feature.
41:33
You know, that's not a good reason to do it ever.
41:35
But I'm like, I just got off the call with this really
41:38
fascinating merchant. I know we built this Bogos
41:41
feature. We never thought of this use
41:43
case, but it's actually a very good reason why he did it this
41:46
way. Do you think?
41:47
And, and I know our platform inside and out.
41:49
I know I could, I know I've been bought it, know why we built it
41:52
that way. And I'm like, hey, can we just
41:53
change this line here? And then we can do this And then
41:56
we say, Oh yeah, hands down. Then it happens in two hours.
41:58
So I think I mean, again, this all comes back to like business
42:02
model is so important, right? Because like, it would be insane
42:06
for me to do that stuff if we were a company that had
42:09
thousands of customers, right? Our business doesn't need
42:12
thousands of customers because of how we charge, because our
42:14
business more because of the shit I want to do.
42:16
Like I love doing that shit. I love doing that stuff.
42:19
I want to try and do so as long as possible because I just want
42:22
to build things for people and that kind of thing.
42:24
So I think that's how we build things.
42:25
That's how we ship things. This might be in the, the nuance
42:29
of different businesses, but I kind of love when our sales guy,
42:33
he asks questions and he and he cares.
42:35
I, I, I think I heard this on the operators podcast.
42:38
It might be Matt. I'm talking about how caring is
42:41
a superpower because it's sort of like persistent direction.
42:46
It's not just direction to like get the job done to like check
42:50
the box, but it's like direction to achieve the thing for for the
42:55
business and for the end consumer, right, to solve the
42:57
problem, right? Yeah.
42:59
You mean you can't build anything good?
43:01
You can't build anything good, but people don't care.
43:04
Like it's just not going to happen.
43:05
You know what I mean? Hey, Daniel, what's a, what's a
43:09
good outcome for you? Like let's just Fast forward
43:11
three years. Like what does a good outcome
43:14
look like? Is it, is it getting acquired by
43:17
Shopify? Like like why did you, why did
43:20
you build this company in the 1st place?
43:22
Like, what's the? What does a good outcome look
43:24
like? I just want to.
43:26
I just want to keep doing this. Like I like this.
43:31
And this to me is like, I have a really good team.
43:34
I'm building really good software.
43:36
It's working very well. Like that was the thing I love
43:40
to Shopify. Like in those early days, I had
43:42
like awesome people that we knew.
43:46
We were building cool shit and we kind of got to do it.
43:49
And I think when I left Shopify, it was just becoming too
43:53
professional for me, right? Like I am not a professional
43:56
manager. I would not be a great VP of
44:00
product in a 10,000 person company.
44:05
That's not who I am. So I kind of left.
44:09
I wanted to build that from scratch here.
44:10
I love what I'm doing now. I would do that again.
44:14
I mean, it's it's, I don't think it's like a financial thing.
44:18
I don't think it's a like we need to run this forever.
44:23
In this instance, I'd be open to joining a company for two or
44:26
three years, five years, like go on another run kind of exploring
44:30
or building something if especially if it's very high
44:33
leverage online to where we are with Abra.
44:35
Yeah, I think I want to have maximum control over things.
44:40
I think like we could just like bootstrap to Infinity and beyond
44:47
and just kind of grow that and keep building an awesome
44:49
company. Or like, you know, the fun part
44:52
of not raising is like if there's an awesome company
44:57
that's very aligned strategically and we want to
45:00
sell for 50 mile, like we can do that and we can decide to do
45:04
that and we can kind of tackle that.
45:06
Yeah, maybe it's a bit folksy and kind of lame.
45:09
But you know, I think again, I got very lucky in the shop fire
45:15
situation, right? We're there two years pre IPO.
45:20
Shop 5 was worth less than a billion dollars when I joined,
45:23
right? Like amazing run.
45:26
And like, I think I kind of had like a very simplistic view when
45:30
I joined shop 5. Like, hey, if I can afford to
45:32
buy a home in the greater Toronto area, which seemed hard
45:36
back then, is even more hard now.
45:37
I'm like, I'll be blessed. And then I want to use the other
45:41
half of the money to start another company afterwards.
45:45
And so checkbox, checkbox for achieving that and some more.
45:51
But yeah, I think in terms of like next, the next stuff, it's
45:56
like, I like doing this. I love like running software
45:59
teams. I love building stuff.
46:01
I love soft. I think keeps getting more and
46:03
more exciting. So yeah, I like like doing this
46:07
that blocks my but. Yeah, it seems like at some
46:11
point if you, I don't know if you yeah, if you follow Zach,
46:15
but at some point you may want to move to Miami.
46:17
Then you got to do, you know, you got to you got to exit this
46:20
thing and then be able to afford to install a rack in your place.
46:25
So that way you couldn't work out in between podcast.
46:28
Recordings. It's not even a crazy.
46:30
Expense that's like it's not. I know that is like a.
46:35
The real question I have is how many 45 plates do you have?
46:38
4 But then I have like 30 fives. 50 fives I got, yeah, I think I
46:43
have like a total of like 500 lbs.
46:45
Really. OK, not that I ever touched.
46:47
£500 but. Yeah, I was going to say that
46:49
sounds risky, dude. I don't.
46:50
Yeah, if you're working out a lot, I mean, not that I'm not,
46:53
I'm not saying that you you can't hit that weight on on the
46:56
left, but it just seems like you don't want to take that risk if
46:59
you're working out alone. No, but I, I, I invite friends
47:02
over for, for sessions and so we always have different weights.
47:05
And it's actually been one of like the biggest like social
47:09
upgrades of my entire life is to have a gym in my backyard now.
47:13
Like I'm probably doing like 3 sort of like hangout meetings a
47:17
week and like, they're great. And then, yeah, it's actually
47:21
been like one of the best sort of like things I've ever bought.
47:25
You know what, I just thought for a second, most people would
47:27
do this, like with a beer in their hand, but they're
47:30
deadlifting Zach and his friends.
47:34
I was going to ask. I have to ask Dan, when we had
47:38
PJ on from judge me and thinking about maybe it's because the
47:42
entirely different businesses you have to explain your product
47:46
and your customer has to have that felt pain.
47:48
Whereas people going to judge on me they they just want to get
47:53
reviews up on their website. But one of the things that he
47:56
said was that Shopify is prioritizing low cost apps on
48:01
the App Store. What are your thoughts around
48:04
that? I mean, you're definitely not a
48:05
low cost app. I think there's a barbell there,
48:09
right? It's like a barbell.
48:11
Well, Zach's got us thinking about spot racks and everything.
48:15
So there's a barbell where there are millions and millions of
48:19
merchants on Shop 5 that go to the App Store, right?
48:25
That is true. There are millions of merchants
48:27
that go to the App Store. They want stuff as cheap as
48:31
possible near 0, right? Free installation and think
48:35
that's what they want. And then there are plus
48:39
merchants that Shopify does not have the features they need.
48:45
Shopify does not have the service they need.
48:48
Shopify is not a service provider.
48:51
You know what I mean? Like say like some of the MO
48:55
enterprise platforms where they'll do stuff custom.
48:58
So that's the other ball bell, right?
48:59
So it's two barbells, millions of merchants that want something
49:03
free as possible near 0 cost and then there's other barbell of
49:07
people with very complex needs and doing and doing that.
49:10
So I think those are the 2 barbells in shop fire.
49:12
I don't think very big merchants coming to in very big run
49:17
against the enterprise argument. Very big merchants coming to
49:20
shop fire. I'm not looking for yes, but you
49:23
better have the cheapest reviews Apple.
49:25
I'm not coming to shop Fire. I think it's a different
49:28
conversation, right? So they really have to be
49:29
conversation. I think the thing to be careful
49:31
and the reason I say it's a barbell is it's very dangerous
49:34
to be in the middle there because if you are selling
49:38
something too expensive to the small merchants, they do not
49:41
care about you. Shopify does not care about you.
49:43
And by Shopify doesn't care about you, I mean they're not
49:45
going to send traffic from the App Store to you.
49:48
And or if you're like, yeah, if you're too expensive or if
49:53
you're too high touch and you can't charge enough, you're
49:56
gonna have a big problem. And I think this is where the
49:58
issues I was having in our first year of the businesses, I tried
50:01
to make it cheaper, but it needed touch.
50:04
And so again, reviews doesn't need any touch.
50:07
Can have automated support, can have IAI doing everything just
50:12
in good docs and tackle it. Whereas like I've written, you
50:16
know, 30 different docs for all our merchants.
50:18
But The thing is, they'll read them and be like, but help,
50:23
help. I have this spreadsheet.
50:25
Can you look at my spreadsheet and tell me how to do this?
50:28
You know what I mean? And that's where you kind of
50:30
need it, right? Like an MSM at Shafa can't go to
50:34
a massive global fashion brand and say, Oh yeah, just go
50:38
install, let's go look at these docs.
50:39
You know what I mean? That kind of thing.
50:41
All right, we lost two people very suddenly.
50:44
But dude, this was so much fun. I, I didn't know most of your
50:48
back story. So it was, it was great to to
50:50
learn more about it And, and and yeah, it was great to chat.
50:54
You are fun. This was a fun conversation.
50:56
You made me want to buy some Bolt On.
50:58
I was looking at your Bolt On brand while we were in this cool
51:02
one. I sold it.
51:04
I sold it. There's no, there's no
51:05
obligation to buy my bolt on anymore.
51:07
It's not an obligation. It was just, it was making me
51:09
hungry. Yeah.
51:10
Bolt On. Lovely.
51:11
Yeah, Daniel, good to see you, man.
51:13
Yeah, Good to see you, man. All right, catch you guys.
51:16
Great guys.