Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Visit Shopify, originally added to eHub on Jun 05, 06.

eHub Interviews jaded Pixel

Thanks to Scott Lake and the team at jaded Pixel for this email interview posted April 24, 2006.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

jaded Pixel: Shopify is about removing the barriers that have kept the masses from setting up their own fully functional e-commerce sites. Essentially, we provide access to a simplified e-commerce system that has all of the features you need and none of the features you don’t.

Shopify is a hosted service so you don’t have to deal with finding a hosting company. We also have pre-integrated with many credit card processing gateways so you don’t have to figure out how to do that or pay some programmer to do it for you and if you don’t want a merchant account, we offer Paypal integration. Lastly we take care of all the hassles and worries about security so you can just concentrate on selling.

Our market is anyone who wants to sell online or who has had the misfortune of trying to set up an e-commerce system on their own and failed.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

jaded Pixel: We started Shopify because of our own experiences setting up an e-commerce site called Snowdevil. Snowdevil was an online snowboard store, however when we began the project we kept running into problems with different software packages. In the end, we developed our own application and in doing so we realized that there was more value in providing a simplified hosted ecommerce application than there was selling snowboards. Unfortunately Snowdevil is no longer online but that is where our roots are.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth? Do you have a day job?

jaded Pixel: Until about six months ago I had a day job and only worked part-time on Shopify. Tobi on the other hand has been working of this project for over a year. Right now, we are both living off of our savings however we have also raised a round of seed investment which should keep everything going for quite a while.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

jaded Pixel: Jaded Pixel has four core members.

Scott Lake
Role: Co-founder, CEO
Blog: http://tech.nologi.ca
Prior to founding jaded Pixel with Tobi, I was a Vice President of Technical Services with Tomoye Corporation, a world leader in Communities of Practice software. At Tomoye I worked closely to develop online communities with clients such as the US Army, Lockheed Martin, UNESCO, US AID, and John Deere. Other positions that I held at Tomoye were: Director of Canadian Sales and Director of Technical Services.

Before Tomoye I had a diverse background as an IT consultant working primarily for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade on some of the Canadian Government’s largest online projects.

Aside from that, I used to be a bike messenger, I’m and exhibited artist and I have PhD in Political Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Tobias Lüetke
Role: Co-founder, CTO
Blog: http://blog.leetsoft.com
Tobias Luetke is a programmer who made a name for himself in the open source community by releasing several popular open source applications over the last few years. Among them are:
Typo - The popular Ruby on Rails blog software
http://typo.leetsoft.com

Liquid - An application independent template engine
http://home.leetsott.com/liquid

Active Merchant - A library for integrations with credit card gateways
http://home.leetsoft.com/am

Money - Code that helps online stores deal with money and currencies
http://dist.leetsoft.com/api/money/

Paypal /Ruby - A library to integrate Paypal into Ruby on Rails applications
http://dist.leetsoft.com/api/paypal/

Before discovering ruby on rails and becoming a member of its core development team, Tobi worked on projects for many different companies such as Computec Media, Comtron and BOG Koblenz, an EDS subsidiary company.

Daniel Weinand
Role: Developer
Blog: http://troubleseeker.com

Daniel grew up in a medium sized town on the Rhine in central Germany. As an accomplished musician he considered studying composition at Berlin’s High school of Arts but eventually ended up studying computer science in the industrial town of Dortmund instead. After five years there and about three years of coding in java as a research assistant at Hagen University he finally discovered Ruby and is living happily ever after.

Justin Palmer
Role: Designer
Blog: http://encytemedia.com/blog

Justin Palmer is a 25 year old Interaction Designer and Software Developer located in Memphis, TN. He has been working in Web Development since 1998. He has a real passion for both design and development and love the challenges presented by both. He founded Encyte Media in late 2004 as a place share his thoughts and interact with the community and also to serve as the company in which to run his consultant business from. At jaded Pixel Justin does all our UI, branding and web design and loves the challenges

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

jaded Pixel: Justin is our lead designer so I will leave him to answer this question, here is his answer:

“Separate yourself from the code and the details of the application and just put yourself in the user’s mindset. When you see a screen for the first time, ask yourself “Would I know how to use this?” In short, do what feels right.”

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

jaded Pixel: As Tobi is a core developer with the Ruby on Rails project, Shopify is fully built using Ruby on Rails. We rely on JavaScript and AJAX to make the user interface responsive like a desktop app. Our Servers are running on Linux and we use the Postgres database. Every technology we use is open-source.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

jaded Pixel: Shopify is not live yet but we have had lots of people contribute feature requests. The most asked for thing is not a feature, instead it is just to make it simple.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

jaded Pixel: Although Shopify is being launched for an English speaking audience (Canada, the US England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand), we have had requests to use Shopify come from all over the world. We’ll concentrate on other audiences once we launch.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

jaded Pixel: In the next six months, Shopify will have launched and we will be well into developing the next features set. We really look forward to getting feedback from our users and making Shopify as good as it possibly can be. In two years, we will most likely have begun developing other applications that will follow in Shopify’s footsteps. More well thought out and very useful applications are going to be in the works.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

jaded Pixel: The greatest challenge to our success right now is the disparate location of our team. Justin is such a great designer that we accept the fact that he can’t be here in Ottawa. Justin is from Memphis however when we really need him, we fly him up for a couple of weeks of crunch programming. In all, it seems to work well.

Later this summer we will be having the same problem with Daniel as he will be going back to Germany for a few months. The good thing is that we have adapted and overall it seems to work. Our goal is to one day have everyone in Ottawa.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

jaded Pixel: As we are in the final stages of development for Shopify, the one thing that we need is to have the team together. As mentioned above, we are flying Justin in for the next 10 days to help with the one last push.

eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

jaded Pixel: Shopify’s business model is very simple. We do not charge any fees except for a small percentage of total sales. That means its free for anyone to set up a Shopify site and start selling. We thought about charging a monthly rate but we found it much more compelling to make using Shopify free and only taking money when our clients make money.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

jaded Pixel: Traffic on Shopify.com depends a lot on what we are posting in our blog. On days when we release screen shots or something like Vision (vision.shopify.com) we’ll get 1000 or more unique visits. On an average day we would get a few hundred unique visitors.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

jaded Pixel: I’m most proud of our decision to just go ahead and develop Shopify. Tobi had the vision so we went for it. One of the reasons, I wanted to do this company is because I knew Tobi would be as dedicated to this project as I was. That kind of confidence makes dedicating big chunks of your life to something risky a lot easier. Making something from nothing is a great feeling too.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

jaded Pixel: I think the wave of innovation that we are seeing with the web now is primarily being fuelled by coders and bloggers instead of Wall Street speculators. That being said, the result seems to be better developed applications that are actually useful and lots even have really good business models to boot. This is really a great time to be involved in the resurgence of the web since you can do way more with way less than ever before. Look out!!!

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

jaded Pixel: I usually keep up with websites via RSS, so here are the feeds I check everyday.

http://www.emilychang.com
http://www.techcrunch.com
http://www.crunchnotes.com
http://battellemedia.com
http://paul.kedrosky.com
http://evans.blogware.com/blog
http://daily.gigaom.com
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc
http://mathewingram.com/work
http://www.37signals.com/svn

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

jaded Pixel: I try to hit the sack at around 11 pm then I usually wake up at 4:30 am or so to worry about Shopify and Jaded Pixel for about a half an hour, then I sleep soundly until 8 am.

Thanks to Scott Lake and the team at jaded Pixel for this email interview posted April 24, 2006.

Visit Shopify
Originally added to eHub on Jun 05, 06

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan

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