YouTube.
Shopify.
Groupon.
Before tech giants like these became household names.
They were just a spark of an idea
championed by entrepreneurs willing to risk it all.
But fame and success didn't come overnight.
Many had to revamp their business models
and pivot their plans time and time again
before discovering a strategy that clicked for customers.
Get inside the minds of founders and CEOs
who stopped at nothing to bring their vision to life.
This is Make It Work.
Tech Giants
It wasn't the plan of the founders for Shopify
to become a $10 billion commerce ecosystem.
It started with an idea that only scratched the surface of what was to come.
So how did the founders turn Shopify
into one of the most profitable e-commerce platforms in the world?
It all began with three friends and a passion for snowboarding.
In 2004 founders
Tobias Lutke
Scott Lake
and Daniel Wiegand
came together after Lutke,
who was burnout from his programing job,
was looking for something different.
At the beginning, there was no grand plan, says Lake.
We just said, Let's do e-commerce, but sell some snowboards.
And eventually it became Snow Devil.
It was supposed to be simple
just an online store to sell some highend
snowboards from small snowboard companies
Right away.
They ran into a huge problem.
Every tool that Lutke tried to use
to build Snow Devil wasn't working.
What he really wanted was a simple user-friendly tool,
one that didn't exist yet.
In an especially frustrated moment.
Lutke took on the challenge and worked day and night,
creating the software himself.
And after two months of development,
they launched their company, Snow Devil,
even as they packaged up snowboards and sent them off to customers.
The founders began to realize that their e-commerce software
might be an even better product to sell.
They saw an opportunity to help other people sell online.
So they shelved Snow Devil and refocused
on creating a product that would help people build their own stores.
They asked a group of
friends and family members to invest in their idea
and built a $200,000 nest egg to fund it.
The entire family fortune
was hinging on their success.
In 2006
Lutke, Lake and Wiegand, and officially launched Shopify
as a set of tools merchants could use to build their own sites.
For the first time with Shopify,
individuals who had never sold anything online before had the fundamental tools
they needed to set up a successful e-commerce shop.
Their first office was in a coffee shop,
and in 2006 they were making
$8,000 per month.
But Lutke decided to switch Shopify
this entire business model overnight.
Shopify went from charging its merchants a percentage of sales
to selling monthly subscriptions,
which was a more reliable revenue stream.
Lutke was taking calls from customers into the night.
But the most important thing was that they had paying customers
That same year,
A Toronto based Angel investor wrote Shopify,
a $250,000 check and valued them at $3 million.
In 2008, Lake left to pursue other business ventures
and Lutke being a programmer,
had virtually no business background.
So when he took over as CEO, he had to essentially get an MBA in a couple of weeks.
Lutke needed capital to grow.
He rode his used bike to VC pitch meetings
and lived in a spare room in his in-laws house to save money.
Lutke was sitting in meetings talking
about building things that would take a year
when he knew they didn't have four weeks of money left
and he couldn't tell anyone.
It was a stressful time.
Then the recession hit in 2008.
And while it seemed to be hurting everyone,
Shopify did really well.
Thousands of people who'd lost their jobs
were opening online stores to survive.
In 2010, Shopify was finally able
to secure a VC investment of $7 million,
and the business was able to grow from there.
In 2019
Lutke posted on Twitter,
"Amazon is trying to build an empire
and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels."
Today, Shopify has over $5.1 billion in sales and services
In 2020 Shopify
surpassed 1 million merchants worldwide on the platform.
Their ability to adapt quickly, anticipate the market
and react with products in demand
is one of the main reasons they've accomplished a lot
in a relatively short amount of time.
Like many startups,
Shopify started as a solution to a problem the founders had personally experienced,