How Shopify Turned a Snowboard Store into a Global Commerce Platform

Back in 2004, three friends decided to sell snowboards online. That’s it. That was the whole idea. No master plan. No VC pitch decks. Just Snowdevil, an online store run by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake.

But there was a problem. The e-commerce tools available at the time were, in Tobi's words, awful. Clunky, overpriced, and clearly not built by people who had ever actually tried to run a store. Instead of settling for what existed, Tobi, a developer by trade, did what good developers do: he built his own solution. Something leaner, more elegant, and tailored to how real people wanted to sell online.

Now here's where most stories would stop. Snowdevil could have been a modest success. They could have made a comfortable living selling snowboards. But they saw something most people miss.

They realized that the software they built to sell snowboards might actually be more valuable than the snowboards themselves. That insight; simple, almost obvious in hindsight became the seed of Shopify. In 2006, they officially pivoted. From product to platform. From snowboards to software.

This wasn't a pivot out of desperation. It was a pivot from relative success to chase an exponentially bigger idea. And that’s rare. Most pivots I’ve seen in my career come from a place of pain. Sales aren’t happening. Customers aren’t biting. The team is tired. Shopify’s story was different. They were doing alright. But Tobi saw what could be much better.

In my experience, the best pivots often start from the founder’s own frustration. Not from surveys or analyst reports, but from living the pain yourself. That’s what makes the problem real enough to care about. Tobi didn’t just see a market opportunity. He felt the constraints, built a tool to solve them, and then realized others might want the same thing.

I went through something similar when we built a tool to help founders and investors generate investment memos. We thought that if we could help people write clean, structured, and compelling memos, it would streamline the decision-making process. Inside that product, we had built a valuation system, a way to model early-stage company valuations with more clarity and rigor. To our surprise, no one really cared about the memo builder. But the valuation system? That got attention. People wanted that. So we leaned into it. We carved out the valuation piece, commercialized it, and built around that instead. That pivot taught me a lot about listening not just to what users say, but what they actually use.

What makes Shopify’s journey even more impressive is how they stuck to their principles. Tobi famously rejected short-term hacks. He focused on infrastructure, on building tooling for developers, and on keeping the platform open. That kind of long-term thinking is rare. Especially when you're growing fast and everyone around you is telling you to juice numbers, optimize funnels, and "go enterprise."

And it worked. Shopify today is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the internet. Not just an e-commerce company, but a platform that empowers millions of entrepreneurs.

What I take from this story is simple but powerful: sometimes the biggest opportunities come when you build something for yourself. When you solve your own problem well enough that it becomes everyone else’s solution too. That requires not just skill, but clarity of thought, and the courage to zoom out when things are going "fine."

Shopify didn’t wait for permission. They didn't need market validation to pivot. They trusted their experience, bet on their own tooling, and leaned into what they were uniquely good at.

And in doing so, they built something much, much bigger than a snowboard shop.