Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. When I have a hundred million dollars in sales, I'm not going to want to pay Shopify $10 million a year or whatever they’re charging. The business model was really holding them back here. But they figure that out and they decide, “Okay, we gotta switch things up. How are we going to do this instead?” SaaS is like barely becoming a thing at this point, Salesforce, of course, exists, “What if we look at this SaaS idea and instead of charging on the usage basis, what if we just make it really, really simple? We'll charge $29 a month and you get a full-featured commerce packaged in a box from us.” It turns out that was pretty magical. Obviously, the reason that this worked well is because there are things that you can charge more for as people develop bigger and bigger businesses. It's not every single, I don't know the biggest business on Shopify, but there are enormous businesses on Shopify, they're not just paying $29 a month. At this point, Unilever’s on Shopify. Google is on Shopify, enormous, enormous companies are on Shopify. But if Shopify were taking 10% of their revenue, of course, that wouldn't be possible. This is a funny side to it. It also speaks to what the company was like in these early days and they're like how Tobi and Scott were thinking about things. They knew they needed to make this change, so they're just like, “Okay, yeah. Let's change it. Let's ship it and flip the switch.” When they did that, they didn't really talk to any of their customers before they did that. They did it the day before Tobi and Fiona got married. That was probably not a good idea. Tobi talks about how he spent the whole night, the night before their wedding just taking calls from super angry customers who did not understand what was happening to their business.…

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