Your Tech Story

Athulya

Being a cinephile with a love for all things outdoorsy, Athulya never misses a chance to chase inspiring stories or poke fun at things, even when the subject is herself. Currently pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, she is someone innately interested in technical and scientific research. Music reviews and op-eds define her as they allow her to explore different perspectives. Though sometimes she thinks she makes more sense playing the guitar than she does while writing.

SEMrush

SEMrush : Analysing, Optimizing and Managing Content

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With internet accessibility has grown exponentially in the last few years, most companies seem to be online, as most of their customers are online as well. Content marketing and digital marketing have never enjoyed a more profitable time than now, thanks to everyone being glued on the internet. But with so many different kinds of media, and different brands looking for customer attention, how can one stay on top? Having a strong online presence is paramount to success in today’s digital world, and any one or anything that helps with that automatically becomes invaluable. That is why, today we are going to take a look at the growth of SEMrush, a content marketing and SaaS platform that helps companies manage their online visibility.

SEMrush is a tool that helps marketers improve their online presence, and in the process boost their conversion rates and sales. While the company began as a supplementary SEO toolkit, it now utilizes many different tools, has expanded considerably since its early days. SEMrush helps brands and companies better their Social Media Marketing and improve their revenue generation. The field is so immensely powerful that the company now makes between $50 million and $100 million a year.

The Founder

Oleg Shchegolev, who is the CEO and co-founder of SEMrush, began working with SEO when he was a third-year college student pursuing a degree in Information Security. As the field hadn’t quite blown up at the time, SEO was relatively easy to master, and so Oleg ended up exploring multiple facets of SEO and quickly picked up information related to it. Oleg, and his friend Dmitriy Melnikov, who is the other half of SEMrush started experimenting with different SEO settings leading to the creation and release of SEOquake in 2006. SEOquake turned into one of the most sought-after SEO toolbars with over 4-5 million users, much to the surprise of the duo. This success inspired them to turn their passion for SEO into something larger, and that is how SEMrush was founded.

Founding SEMrush

Oleg Shchegolev founder SEMrush
Image Source: hackernoon.com

The duo started working on their platform during the financial crisis of 2008, leading to a rocky start filled with trials and tribulations. But what served as a saving grace for SEMrush was the fact that SEOquake was still generating revenue, and that, as a whole, IT start-ups don’t need a lot of capital upfront.

While beginning work on SEMrush, Oleg did not have much of a plan in mind and wasn’t sure how to build the right product or gain market share. The entire process was highly iterative, intuitive and experimental. Having no specific idea in mind, allowed Oleg to play around with different settings, modify and change his ideas and put together the perfect product. The only thing he was sure he wanted was to be satisfied with what the company created, and that was the main criteria based on which the team designed their initial products. Slowly, yet surely, the ideas started falling in place and Oleg gained an idea of what he wanted SEMrush to be, and how he wanted it to look.

After they had created their product, they needed to now, market it. The company started with no promotions, instead opting to distribute SEMrush among friends. Having worked in the IT field, the duo had a lot of contacts within the field, and that helped them get the software around. They stuck to a freemium model, distributed coupon codes, and gave users the chance to test their product out.

SEMrush : The Success

After being founded in 2008, the company expanded in 2015 adding keyword analysis tools to their arsenal and releasing over 100 updates. This way, the company turned from being just an SEO management tool to a content marketing tool that helped businesses stay relevant and visible. The company has also revolutionised the way brainstorming works in major companies by doing away with the concept of deadlines. Instead, they employ people who are enthusiastic and passionate about what they do and then give them the creative freedom to explore.

As a means of generating leads, the company has invested in educating the SEO community by hosting webinars, organizing chats on Twitter and nurturing blogging. SEMrush also makes use of agile marketing to create an incredibly self-sufficient and engaged marketing team. All these efforts have definitely paid off, because, in 2017, PCMagazine listed SEMrush as one of the best SEO tools of the year. Since then, the company has grown at a rate of 80% a year, and currently has several offices around the world, including Philadelphia, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Russia and has clients from over 100 countries.

The time Oleg decided to launch SEMrush was probably one of the toughest periods to launch a start-up, and yet the IT professional kept battling against the tide, and now ten years later, the company employs over 500 people and boasts of more than 2 million users. With Oleg planning to add more features, enhance existing tools, better traffic analytics, expand to newer emerging markets and strengthen his brand, it goes without saying that 2020 will be a big year for one of the world’s leading digital marketing software.

Giphy : Giving Life to People’s Emotions in Gifs

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The internet has forever changed the way we communicate, shop, talk, interact and consume media. In short, it has had an impact on almost all spheres of our lives. But the one field that it has had maximum impact is the way we interact and communicate with people. Not only has the internet helped in making the world a smaller place, but it has also made edits on our language and speaking style. Long gone are the days when people would write paragraphs expressing their worry, concern or even love. Short forms, video clips, question tags and hashtags have proliferated into our vocabulary, making it easier than ever before to express how we are feeling.

But nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the usage of GIFS, which are short animated images that help people describe exactly how they feel. GIFs can capture all emotions, from our hatred for Mondays to our love for MS Dhoni. Seven years ago, Alex Chung and Adam Leibsohn utilized this need for expression to found Giphy, which now, boasts around 300 million active users. Here’s a look at their story.

The Founders

Alex Chung is a multi-talented individual holding degrees in philosophy, computer engineering, and graphic design. He started his career at Intel, beginning as a hardware engineer, and then worked his way up and led a team working on interactive television. He then helped found some service-based companies, worked with MTV, and then quit all his jobs, to take some time off for himself.

Giphy founder
Image Source: abcnews.go.com

That was when he met his long-time friend Jace Cooke for breakfast and talked about how much he loved GIFs. The duo was discussing how GIFs had the potential to become the new medium of communication in the future when they realised that there was potential in this idea. When they decided to search for GIFs, they realised that even Google couldn’t help them in finding the right one. Within a week, Chung came up with a basic algorithm that would help search for GIFs and soon after the page had over 30,000 views and the duo received a $1 million offer from Betaworks. And just like that, GIPHY was born.

Founding Giphy

Alex Chung and Jace Cooke founded GIPHY in February 2013. Initially, the software served as just a search engine for GIFS and attracted more than a million users within a week. This inspired the duo to set their targets higher and expanded into other ventures.

In August of the same year, the software gave users the permission to embed and share GIFs on Facebook, leading to a massive surge in users and visibility. This led them securing a spot in the Top 100 Websites of 2013 list published by PCMagazine annually. In November, the duo integrated GIPHY with Twitter and gave users the ability to share GIFs via URL. By May of the following year, GIPHY had started trying to gain investors and successfully raised $2.4 million through investors such as Quire, CAA Ventures and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. By the same time next year, they raised another $17 million, Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst being the major investors.

By March 2015, the company had acquired a GIF messenger known as Nutmeg, and this helped them make their way into the mobile market. The merger coincided with the Facebook Messenger‘s development plan, and soon, GIPHY was a part of the messenger leading to even more visibility and users. In August 2015, the duo launched their own app called GIPHY Cam, which enabled users to create, edit and share gifs on multiple platforms.

The Success

By 2016, GIPHY was worth over $300 million and was able to raise an additional $55 million as by then, it had hit the 100 million user mark. GIPHY was helping in the sharing of over 1 billion GIFs a day, and users were watching GIF content for up to 2 million hours every single day. A year later, their user base hit the 200 million mark, and when the API and website were taken together, user count went above 250 million. All in all, the company grew 100 times in 2013 when it started, 20 times the following year, and about five times in the next three years!

Recently, Chung announced that the company was further expanding, now trying its hand at advertising. Giphy will soon be rolling out an advertising scheme that works differently from the one used by Google, which relies on search history to display relevant advertisements. GIPHY’s model plans to embed ads in private messages as their service is already a part of most messaging platforms.

With partnerships with over 200 companies, some of them as large as Disney, Tumblr, Pepsi and Universal Studios, it goes without saying that GIPHY has grown to become an industry giant. The company now employs over 80 people and is the front-runner in the race to controlling the GIF market.

Pitney Bowes

You’ve Got Mail: Success Story of Pitney Bowes

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Pitney Bowes is a company that sells mail machines, in a time when people rely more on email than on postal mail. Their business is supposed to, at least theoretically decline and hit an all-time low. Yet, their shares are rising and even hit the $26 mark per share, when ex-IBM employee Marc Lautenbach joined in 2012. So what helps a company that sells something the majority of the world sees as outdated, make revenue and keep afloat? Their shares have grown at a rate higher than that of Facebook‘s for the same time period. So what makes this possible, and how did Pitney Bowes get to the stage it is at now?

About the Founders

Arthur H. Pitney was born in 1871 and is an American inventor and entrepreneur who is known as the founding father of the modern postage meter. Pitney was responsible for filing a patent for the world’s first postage meter in Connecticut in 1901. He worked on the instrument for over twenty years, redesigning and perfecting the design along with his friend and partner Walter Bowes. As soon as the meter was given the green signal by the U.S. Postal Service, in 1920, the duo founded the Pitney-Bowes Postage Meter Company which is now worth over $6.1 billion.

Though Arthur Pitney was born in Illinois, he shifted to Chicago in 1890 and frequented the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. He worked as a clerk in a wallpaper store and his interest in mechanical engineering made him explore options to simplify the stamping process in his free time. By 1902, Arthur had gotten a patent for his gadget, even giving a free trial run in 1903. He first founded a company called the Pitney Postal Machine Company in 1902 and later renamed it to the American Postage Meter Company by 1912. The machine was not an instant success, and his financial crisis made him sell insurance as a side-business.

pitney bowes
Image Source: thehour.com

Meanwhile, Walter Bowes was a British industrialist born in Bradford in 1882. He moved to America and was working as a salesman for the Addressograph Company. In 1909 he bought the Universal Stamping Machine Company and initiated relations with the U.S. Postal Service to sell stamp-cancelling devices. It was around this time that he met Pitney, and decided to combine forces to form the Pitney-Bowes Postage Meter Company.

Founding Pitney Bowes

Pitney’s break came in 1919 when he was introduced to Walter Bowes, and by 1920, the duo formed the Pitney-Bowes Postage Meter Company. The first meter manufactured by the company became functional in November of 1920, thanks to legislation passed by the US Congress. By 1922, the meter was cleared for usage in Canada and England, and Arthur even won a Certificate of Merit from the Franklin Institute. After a dispute with Bowes, Pitney resigned in 1924.

Pitney served as the company’s inventor, and Bowes focused on lobbying to ensure the Congress would pass the required legislation. As soon as his labour bore fruit, the first meter was set up, and Bowes posted a letter to his wife, via the postage meter. In two years, the company grew, and over 400 such meters were issued for use, in the postage of mail over $4 million in value.

Soaring Success

After Arthur Pitney resigned in 1924, Walter Wheeler II became the general manager. Since then, the company has expanded exponentially, now providing services such as customer engagement and management, global e-commerce, shipping and location intelligence to over 1 million customers in more than 100 countries. The company now has more than 33 offices around the world, with operating centres in UK, Tokyo and Delhi, employing over 14,000 people from all over the world.

Pitney Bowes entered the postage-meter business in 1920, a time wherein sending a letter would set the sender back by only two cents. Today, the company has expanded and now has several divisions; a postal service for small and medium-sized businesses, and another that serves as a comprehensive shipping-management service. The latter brought in almost 57% of their total revenue, with Ebit earning standing at 35% of total income, at a time when Apple‘s Ebit margin stands at 30%. By 2003, the company was generating a profit of $498.1 million and by 2005, that earning grew by over 11%, hitting $5.7 billion in 2006.

A small idea that a clerk in an ordinary store in 1920, led to the formation of a company which became the world’s largest manufacturer of mailing equipment. With Pitney-Bowes controlling over 85 % of the American and 60% of the world’s postage meter market, it is safe to say that it has left behind a strong legacy. If anything, this success story is a testament to the fact that genius ignites in small details, and that it can be found in the strangest of places, in the strangest of times.

ahrefs

Bring in the Traffic : Success Story of Ahrefs

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Today, the internet has become more accessible than ever. This has led to the formation of a whole new kind of marketing, i.e. digital marketing. Digital marketing has become an essential part of every business’s strategy and accounts for the highest conversion rates among the different types of marketing. Whether it be in the form of long blogs, short posts, drip email marketing or Social Media Marketing, having the right online presence makes a whole lot of difference in today’s world.

With so much content available for consumption online, businesses are finding it challenging to stay relevant. That is where SEO, the Search Engine Optimisation, plays an essential role, as it helps in raising your website’s visibility. Tools like Ahrefs allows you to leave your SEO woes behind, and in turn, raise your website’s visibility. Having grown their ARR by over 65% within just two years, it goes without saying that Ahrefs is one of the most preferred SEO tools in the industry.

About the Founders

Dmitry Gerasimenko is a Ukrainian by birth, having been born in Nizhyn, but now lives in Singapore to manage Ahrefs. Dmitry’s father handed him a computer when he was six, and ever since, he has been fascinated by computing ad programming. After school, he went on to pursue a degree in computing from the Kyiv Polytechnic University. He relocated to Singapore in 2012 to grow and expand Ahrefs, after having fallen in love with the place when he visited Singapore during one of his visits to Asia.

Ahrefs founder
Image Source: ain.ua

He began his career as a C# and PHP developer for a website design studio in Kyiv. Following this, he freelanced for an American company before turning entrepreneur. Dmitry’s love for the search engine’s started in school wherein he built a documentation search engine and even started making money selling books until he lost the project due to server issues. This love led to launch a web crawler almost ten years after graduating from University.

Founding Ahrefs

When starting Ahrefs, Dmitry had no partners, and hence bore all the risks alone. He invested his savings in the company and hired freelancers when he could afford to do so. The first $400,000 went into product development and was the amount he had saved while working as a freelancer. As the company grew, he went from handling simple projects to more advanced ones and built a team along the way.

In 2010, he recruited Igor Pikovets, who was a friend from university. A year later, the duo launched a link-index paid service. The tool started as a small fish in an ocean of other such tools, and slowly built their way up to becoming one of the most used SEO building tools available on the market now. That company grew into Ahrefs, which now has over 300 billion pages in the index, and updates over 8 billion every day, averaging at 100,000 every second.

Ahrefs acquired its first customers via ads on SEO forums and focused on building a quality product. One of the primary reasons that led to this exponential growth is that they provide a product that triumphs all comparison tests. The SEO growth market is one that is overcrowded with a lot of players; hence, standing out isn’t always an easy task. This is precisely where the company has been able to do so well because they provide a superior offering that consumers find to be the best in the market.

The company markets its product as its most important marketing tool and uses its existing customers as their company’s vocal advocates. When Ahrefs was just developing, Dmitry spent all his time, improving the quality of the application and accumulating data. That was what he focused on because he felt he could do that better than anyone else and that later became the company’s backbone. All that data which was built up, grew as the company grew, and soon, Ahrefs started gaining a reputation for having the best SEO related data.

The downside of this concentrated effort was that the tool’s design and usability weren’t that great because they weren’t areas Dmitry focused on. With the customers they had gained because of their extensive data, Dmitry built a team of web developers who over the years bettered the UI of the engine, and fixed user issues, making Ahrefs an all-in-one package.

A Resounding Success

As the business grew, Dmitry took in more employees. Hence, a team that had less than six members grew to become a close-knit family of over 30 employees. Ahrefs has always had stringent hiring policies, and they hired only when it was absolutely necessary. This is one of the main reasons why Ahrefs does with 30, what most companies do with over a hundred employees!

For instance, most employees at Ahrefs wear more hat than one, with the CMO also being in charge of the blog. Having let go of the freelance bloggers who handled the Ahrefs blog, Tim Soulo took over the blog and in doing so gained more control over the marketing strategy of the company.

Another interesting point is that Ahrefs does not have a dedicated HR team for hiring new recruits. Everything from looking for new employees to finalising the paperwork is done by the core team itself, with the person in the driver’s seat change according to the position being filled. As Dmitry has a background in programming, handles the technical hiring side and was the one who recruited Ahrefs’ present CTO, Igor.

Such a dedicated team of employees who are well-versed in their respective fields has helped the company achieve a YoY growth rate of over 65% and an 8-figure revenue. Ahrefs current has over $50M ARR and employs more than 45 people, with the team having kept 50 people limit for the company. They are still growing over 60% a year with predictions putting them at $64 million by November 2019 and $102 million by September 2020.

When Soulo joined Ahrefs, their blog attracted 15,000 visitors a month, and now over 250,000 go through their website every month. They have 8 to 10 employees handling marketing, and market-related research, around 7 taking care of customer support and the rest of the employees working on web development.

Ahrefs now has plans to create a search engine of its own. Dmitry has announced that the engine will work on principles similar to that used by DuckDuckGo. This means that it will not engage in the collection and sharing of personal user data. The fact that DuckDuckGo recently hit over 1 billion monthly searches goes to show that there is potential in this market, and Ahrefs is trying to be one of the first few to harness that potential. Ahrefs search engine strategy will also enable it to share profits with publishers, helping to foster more innovation.

wix

Wix : Web Development Like Never Before

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Wix.com Ltd, developed by the company Wix, which is based in Israel, is essentially a cloud-based network advancement and improvement platform. The platform enables customers to create their own mobile or HTML5 websites using just drag and drop tools. Users can use the platform to add plug-ins, facilitate e-commerce, perform online marketing, create contact forms, engage in email marketing and even create forums for their websites. The company has functioned on a freemium model, with significant revenue coming from premium subscriptions taken by people.

The company grew tremendously since its inception and now has offices around the world, including ones in Canada, Germany, India, Lithuania, the US, and even Ukraine.

About the Founders

Avishai Abrahami served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the computer intelligence unit from 1990 up to 1992. After his stint with the military, in 1993, Abrahami co-founded a software company called ALT Ltd and worked as its Chief Technology Officer until they sold it in1997. Later in 1998, he co-founded a company that dealt with data centre management software development, called Sphera Corporation, and served as the Chief Technology Officer for two years. He then shifted to the position of Vice President of Marketing for the next three years. He then left the company to work as the Vice President of Strategic Alliances between 2004 to 2006. Abrahami served as the CEO of Wix.com and since 2006 was a Board Chairman from 2013 to 2016. Following his break, he was designated the Honorary Chairman and currently serving as a Board Member of SodaStream International Ltd.

wix founders
Image Source: haaretz.com

Nadav Abrahami, who is Avishai’s brother, is the Vice President of R&D and is a programmer who had earlier worked at Oberon media.

Founding Wix

Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan founded Wix in 2006. Being Israelis themselves, they opened their first office in Tel Aviv with backing by venture capitalist investing firms such as Insight Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Benchmark Capital. Their first product was launched in 2007, via an open beta mode on Adobe Flash.

Due to the high functionality, ease of use and a large number of options made available, the product grew and gained momentum, and by 2010, the company had amassed 3.5 million users. Following this, Benchmark Capital and Bessemer Venture along with Mangrove Capital pushed for a Series C funding which brought in an extra $10 million. The money led to further developments in the software and by 2011, Wix had almost doubled in volume, with over 8.5 million active users. This, in turn, led to another round of funding, which was able to raise $40 million, making the total funds raised $61 million.

Wix: A Win-Win

By June of 2011, Wix had launched a Facebook module and hence entered the social media world. They followed suit in 2012 with a new HTML5 site builder and did away with their old Adobe Flash platform. Wix also launched an app market to sell applications in 2012 and introduced a software development kit that enables people to create web pages with ease. All these new developments helped push the company’s growth, and by 2013, they had over 34 million active and registered users. Once they hit this mark, they opened their IPO on NASDAQ and raised over $127 million. In 2014, Wix acquired an Israeli start-up which was focusing on mobile commerce applications called Appixia. They followed up this with the acquisition of an online restaurant delivery system OpenRest.

This merger paved the way for Wix Hotels, which was launched in August 2014, which was a booking system for hotels and rooms. This hotel booking software also became a part of the Wix Restaurants service which was launched later in 2016. To further their reach in the social media marketing sector, Wix acquired Moment.me in 2015, which was a website builder that doubled as a social media lead generator. The company further expanded its horizons by releasing Wix Music in 2015 to help independent musicians sell their work. By the time, Wix had acquired DeviantArt in 2017, for over $36 million, the company had multiple investments in multiple fields.

Wix is also renowned for its marketing strategies, having created several well-known SuperBowl advertisements, by teaming up with DreamWorks Animation several times. The advertisements were so popular that they attracted over 300 million viewers both through online platforms and social media.

Wix was valued at over $4.5 billion and was the first Israeli company to be valued above $4 billion. The company’s share value closed at a record of $95.8 in 2018, with an ROI of 480% having opened at $16.5 in 2013. Considered to be one of the largest cloud-based platforms in the world with millions of users across the world, Wix is a success story that highlights passion and determination. Abrahami is a true soldier who has weathered multiple storms to get to the position he is in now, and it is his skill, experience, and dedication that got Wix to where it is now. With 42 million users in over 190 countries in the world, it is safe to say that Wix is at a great place right now.

shopify

Shopify : The Ecommerce App Marketplace to Sell Online

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There might be only a few people who haven’t yet heard of Shopify, but if you are one of them, then you might have missed out on a gem. A venture-capitalist backed company that grew exponentially to become a multi-million-dollar enterprise, Shopify is the success story that we all dream of.

Shopify brings together stores and includes everything from large MNCs to small hobby stores that belong to local retailers. It even counts little businesses that didn’t get the funding they required through Kickstarter and includes people left out by department stores and malls. With monthly subscription fees ranging between $14 to $179, Shopify provides all of them a chance to sell their goods and reach out to a maximum number of people. The tool grants them access to everything from design templates to analytic tools to monitor sales. The platform has become such a huge revolution that it recently crossed the $7 billion mark in total sales.

Shopify has over 120,000 customers across the world, and they all pay a monthly fee to use the e-commerce giant who has tie-ups with bigshots like eBay, General Electric, Gatorade, Wikipedia, CrossFit and Amazon. Read on to understand how Shopify grew from being another run-of-the-mill idea to an e-commerce stalwart which does sales worth more than $7 billion!

About the Founders

Shopify founders
Image Source: inc.com

Tobias Lütke exhibited an aversion to authority at an early age, and even while at school in Koblenz, Germany, he asked more questions back than answer the teachers. He always looked for shortcuts, putting in the least effort possible to pass, and spent most of his time on his computer. By the time he was 12, he was writing programs, fixing the machine itself and creating games for himself. It got to a stage where his parents were worried and took him in for psychoanalysis.

After Grade 10, Lütke chose to ignore studying at a university, and instead, joined an apprenticeship for computer programmers. He worked with Siemens during this period but found his work with Java to be repetitive and restrictive. He was also a passionate snowboarder, and on one of his trips, fell in love with a girl from Ottawa, prompting him to move to the city from where he would launch his company.

Meanwhile, Scott Lake was the polar opposite, being someone who looked like he would become a CEO. He had been a jock while at school and was an extrovert who was at ease around people. Lake was friends with Lutke’s girlfriend’s parents, and it was at their house that the two of them started talking. Being 12 years older than Lütke, was never a barrier, and soon enough the duo agreed to start a business. There were no large discussions, as the pair decided they would trade in snowboards and named their company Snowdevil.

Founding Shopify

Lütke enjoyed the idea, as, by 24, he was done with coding after having done it for the past 10 years. But looking at templates for their e-commerce website made him realise, they weren’t good enough, and he built their business website on his own. He wanted to use a Japanese programming language, called Ruby to build the framework and made use of Ruby on Rails, which was created by David Heinemeier Hansson.

Lütke used this framework to create Snowdevil’s software, and as Ruby on Rails was new, the website gained notice. As they were selling snowboards, Lütke and Lake both realised that their biggest product was the software itself! Hence, they coaxed 10 friends into investing in their company, named Jaded Pixel, and managed to raise about $200,000. Lake then named the software Lütke was building Shopify in 2006, setting the wheels in motion for an e-commerce revolution.

Soon they launched Shopify, added people, first of which was Daniel Weinand, who was a German programmer who was friends with Lütke. Shopify’s first office was a group of chairs around a table in a Bridgehead coffee shop, and in October, the same year, they made $8,000. In 2008, when Lake left the enterprise, the company had over 10 employees and was making over $60,000 a month.

Shopify: A Success

Soon angel investor John Phillips, who had founded Klister Credit Corp was interested in the company, valued it at $3 million and gave them $250,000. Until Lake left, Lütke had been in charge of product design and development and had never been involved with the finance side of things. When he became the CEO, he had to learn and learn quickly.

He flew to Silicon Valley, met with venture capitalists and read up on everything they told him, from conversion rates to marketing funnels. Slowly, yet surely, he picked on the finance, yet cash was hard to come by, and on several occasions, Shopify relied on Lutke’s girlfriend’s family to make ends meet.

Finally, in 2010, one of Silicon Valley’s most notable investment firms, Bessemer Venture Partners, found Shopify. Bessemer went on to purchase 20% stake in Shopify for $7 million, and in the next year, they raised $15 million. In 2013, OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners invested $100 million in the company, and Shopify acquired Select Start Studios and Jet Cooper, hitting a valuation of $1 billion.

The Success

Shopify then grew exponentially, and now employs more than 500 people, with 400 of them being based in Ottawa, while the rest work from Toronto and Montreal. Most of the non-Ottawa based employees help with Research and Development and Customer support. The company is now regarded as Canada’s leading playing in the e-commerce and high-tech sector.

Since then, the company has grossed over $7 billion in sales and now has tie-ups with over 150,000 store owners. Shopify grew from a two-person storefront to a six-storey office building with clients from all over the world. During that process, Lutke grew from being an introverted coder to a remarkable leader, who led by example.

The New Office

Shopify’s new office in Ottawa is a huge structure, which took over 180,000 pounds of concrete to finish. Each of its floors has large staircases to connect each other, and every floor has its own theme, ranging from Urban Street to 1920’s Chicago! Intermixed with such a creative space that comes with a large slide, are traditional professional spaces comprises of meeting rooms and offices, with high-tech equipment, soundproofing and large-screen monitors. Much like Lutke itself, the building is some parts childish, and other parts professional, but all of it, much like the man himself, is genius!

The company is growing so fast that plans are already on for an expansion of its office. With market experts predicting Shopify to surpass $2 trillion in international sales, it goes without saying, that the company is gearing up for a bright and busy future!