You might not know his name, but if you have ever been interested in selling products online as a business, you might have heard of his company, Shopify. Tobias Lütke, listed at #90 on the list of Canada’s wealthiest people, is one of the three founders of Shopify and has risen as a giant in the world of eCommerce product selling.
Tobias Lütke was born at the very beginning of what is considered the Millenial, or Gen Y, generation (1980). In 2004, prior to Shopify, Lütke and two other founders wanted to start their own online snowboarding equipment business and found themselves unsatisfied with other eCommerce products that were available at that time. In 2009, they launched Shopify where other businesses could coders and developers could create their own applications and sell them on the Shopify store. Since its inception, Shopify has become a massive platform where small businesses can create online shops for their products and sell products directly to customers. There are currently 800,000 stores that are powered by Spotify, as had a 1100% stock increase since the company went 2015, where it started at $28, and is currently residing at $314 a stock.
As someone who is currently using Shopify in my eCommerce class, I can see why it is so popular. Starting a business has never been easier than before. If someone has a fully developed product and a domain, for only $30 a month, Shopify provides an outlet for individuals to create a website, list their products, and ship them to their customers. Lütke and the other founders saw a problem and capitalized on it at the perfect time, and it has made them a significant amount of money from it. In fact, according to statistics, Shopify’s total revenue, which comes from their various payment plans and percentages of sales, from 2018 was slightly more than $1 billion. As one of the “oldest” Millennial Entrepreneurs, Lütke has made quite a bit of money by creating a place where small businesses can achieve their dreams of crafting their own website and selling their products, which can’t be found on competing websites, such as Amazon and eBay.
Shopify is such an amazing tool for new businesses to sell their products. Although it isn’t the first online outlet for such businesses to do so, they were among the first to make the store individualized to each business. As with almost every single successful entrepreneur, they found a problem, and created a solution to it. I’ve noticed that even if they weren’t the ones that actually created the solution, they were the integral part to see what might work, if people would actually want it, and how to manage the business once the product was created. Since Lütke noticed the problem while trying to create an online store, he probably didn’t go to school as a programmer. He found a need and pulled the people and resources together to fill that need.
This was such an interesting story! I have heard of Shopify and people using it to launch their website and sell products, but did not know how it was started. He found a problem and created a solution to it, which seems to be the formula for successful entrepreneurs. Especially in the past couple years, Shopify has become huge part of e-commerce and that is seen through the 800,000 stores.