It seems like when a business gets big what sells most is narrative.
Shopify touts itself as a company that is arming the rebels as against Amazon that is building an empire. And boy, they are doing well at that.
The recent Amazon Prime Day showed me that the anti-amazon church is increasing. The members sure don't all share a singular reason, but at this early stage, they don't care.
It's beautiful to see how Shopify is implementing its narrative of "arming the rebels". They give merchants more power, they support them with loans through Shopify capital, they have various subscription tiers just to ensure merchants can do whatever they want with their store and etc
Shopify isn't winning because Amazon treats its workers bad, they are focused on the fact that Amazon is building an empire and they on the contrary wants to give small businesses the tools to build their own empires. Something like - instead of making Jeff Bezos rich, come make yourself rich using us.
I'd wager that's not how Shopify started, but that's what sells now đ
Shopify touts itself as a company that is arming the rebels as against Amazon that is building an empire. And boy, they are doing well at that.
The recent Amazon Prime Day showed me that the anti-amazon church is increasing. The members sure don't all share a singular reason, but at this early stage, they don't care.
It's beautiful to see how Shopify is implementing its narrative of "arming the rebels". They give merchants more power, they support them with loans through Shopify capital, they have various subscription tiers just to ensure merchants can do whatever they want with their store and etc
Shopify isn't winning because Amazon treats its workers bad, they are focused on the fact that Amazon is building an empire and they on the contrary wants to give small businesses the tools to build their own empires. Something like - instead of making Jeff Bezos rich, come make yourself rich using us.
I'd wager that's not how Shopify started, but that's what sells now đ
In the beginning you can acquire customers by just telling them what problems you are solving for them.
But to get to levels of scale you can't do that just by communicating problems you are solving. Rather you need to communicate realities that you are making possible.Â
As in the old days could get by positioning Shopify as a way to circumvent the need to code your own website. However after years of successful growth you eventually need a more life-changing narrative to sell to broader markets.Â
In Shopify's case there's the story of arming the rebels... I think this is more a narrative to sell to the press. But the big narrative they sell to customers is become a boss, quit your job, stuff like that.
There's a large portion of Amazon that you link into unknowingly.  being one of them since Amazon Web Services powers a large majority of modern internet applications.