Both Hamish and his co-founder Carol decided before they started the business that they were going to grow what could only be described as a medium sized company — there was no ambition to build a massive organization. A lot of how they think about scaling is driven by speed and medium-term ambitions rather than longer-term ones.
More from this episode
This is why Order Editing currently exists as an add-on via Shopify only and has decided not to expand to other e-commerce platforms. Hamish admits you could sell to a brand like Nike for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and that building for the long term would require diversifying onto other platforms. But that would take two or three years to build, get to market and grow awareness — whereas spending those two to three years investing in Shopify could get them to 10 or 12 million ARR. It's nonsensical, he says, when you're not looking to be the operator of your business in five years time.