#118 with Harley Finkelstein (Shopify's President) - Why You Should Drop Out Of School and Start a Shopify Store
Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.
Oh yeah. Feeling like gold. All right, we are here. We're live. Harley, what's going on? Sean, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Hey, Sean. Hey, Sam. Good to be here.
We're gonna get to intros in a second. Apologies if my internet is gonna suck. I, um, I'm recruiting this guy who lives in Philly to be a writer at my company, and I'm currently living in New York, but like, he was like, "You know, I'm not sure," so I just got in a car and I went and rented a hotel for 2 days, and I just showed up at his house and I was like, to recruit him and convince him to join my company. And, uh, so that's kinda why I'm at this hotel.
I used to do fake trips, by the way, to Seattle. Like, just fate, like I had to be in Seattle.
Oh, I'll be in town, yeah.
So I'll just be in town. And actually, the person that runs Ecosystem is probably the greatest leader I've ever recruited, came from one of those meetings where every year for like 3 years, I would just happen to be in Seattle and we'd happen to have breakfast. And eventually he's like, "All right, I'm ready to jump ship." So I get it.
Yeah, so I did one of those trips and I booked the hotel for 2 nights because I was like, if he doesn't say yes the first day, I'm for sure here the second day. So I'm going to show up again. Totally. So we're here.
The trick is, is if you can get the, uh, the partner or significant other out with you to the dinner, it's, you know, it's a done deal. Because I used to talk—
we did, um, that's what we did.
You did that? Yeah. So I talked to Scott Harrison, who's the— he's a co-founder of Charity:water, and his big thing was he's like trying to recruit world-class talent to come work in a nonprofit. And he's like, how do you convince somebody to leave their, you know, million-dollar job at Google and like, you know, "Come work for 1/10 of that for me and like save the world." And so I used to, he'd always be in San Francisco, we'd catch up and I'd be like, "So what are you in town for?" And it's always that, he was like, "I'm taking, you know, the person I want and their husband or wife out to dinner and I'm gonna tell 'em, you know, the Steve Jobs line of like, you know, stop selling sugar water and let's, you know, come change the world." And it was pretty effective, I gotta say. He was closing a lot of good people.
It works. I mean, the key to this whole model is you have to be so long-term, right? If you're gonna be at a company or you're gonna be running your business for only a year or two, you can't plant those type of seeds proceeds. But when you sort of use a 10-year, or to be honest with you, I use a 100-year horizon on most stuff we do at Shopify and most stuff I do personally, which I know sounds extreme, but it's a good lens to use. You begin to say, it doesn't matter if I don't close this person or get this person for a year or 2 or 3. At some point, this may work itself out, and, and it, it always does.
And so we should explain, so Harley, you are, um, the big dog over at Shopify. I think that's the official job title. Some people call you the COO. Um, how long have you been there? So you said you're taking a long-term view. When did you join Shopify?
Yeah, so I joined Shopify 11 years ago. I was one of Shopify's first merchants. I was born in Montreal in Canada, grew up in South Florida, and moved to Montreal to go to McGill when I was 17. That was 2001. Frankly, the world, you know, went sideways in September 2001. Stock markets crashed and my parents lost everything. And I sort of became an accidental entrepreneur through that process. I wanted to support myself and wanted to help my parents and started a t-shirt business, started making t-shirts for universities. A mentor of mine convinced me to go to law school, um, not to become a lawyer, but to become a better entrepreneur. He, his hypothesis was that it would provide me, it'd be like finishing school for entrepreneurship, teach me how to write, how to think, how to be more articulate. And he happened to be teaching law at the University of Ottawa in 2005. And so I applied to one single law school. It was Ottawa and moved to the University of Ottawa and had no friends or family here in town. Started to look for where the entrepreneurs hung out. Met Tobi. He was transitioning from being a snowboard entrepreneur to being a software entrepreneur, and I ended up opening one of the first stores on Shopify in 2006.
And that was a t-shirt shop?
It was a t-shirt shop, yeah, a licensed t-shirt shop. And I finished law school, I made some money with the t-shirt shop, helped my mom and sisters and supported my family. And then in 2009, I was practicing law in Toronto for all of 10 months and hated it, thought it was the worst thing ever. And I called Tobi and I asked him if I can come join him and a couple others, mostly engineers, and sort of was the first non-engineer at the company. And I'm now actually the president of Shopify. And it's been an amazing ride.
That changed like 7 days ago.
Like a second ago, yeah. Just— Congratulations. Thank you. And it's been the ride of a lifetime. And frankly, it's what's needed. And I'm sure— I know you guys talk a lot about this, but my mission, my personal mission and my sort of professional mission are exactly the same. I think entrepreneurship is the greatest tool for freedom and for independence in the world, and it was out of touch for most people for a very, very long time. And Shopify tries to level the playing field so that anyone can do it. And on a personal level, my wife and I, who are both entrepreneurs, we also try to do that as well. So it is, it's truly my life's work.
What, how into the business, is it Tobi, right? That's the founder's name? Yeah, Tobi. How into, how far along was he into the business when you worked, when you started with him full-time?
About 3 or 4 years.
Do you know how, in terms of employees, any numbers you can give?
Probably sub-15 or certainly sub-20. The interesting story was, so Toby had moved to Canada because he met a girl. A good reason to move from Germany to Canada. When you move to Canada, I think it's the same in the US, as a new immigrant, you can't just get a job. You don't have any working papers. There's You're missing the documents to actually get a real job, get hired. But someone had told him that, okay, you can't get a job, but you can totally start your own business. And so being in Canada, he decided he would start a snowboard shop. And this is 2004. In 2004, there were two ways to sell something on the internet. The first way was you put it on a marketplace like an eBay or an Etsy or Amazon. I don't know if Amazon was doing third-party sellers at that point, but you can use another person's marketplace. And it was very inexpensive to do that. But you effectively rented customers from those marketplaces. So you didn't really build your own brand, your own business. The other way was you'd go to GSI Commerce, if you remember those companies, or Hybris, or a company like ATG, Magento. You go to these big enterprise companies and for like a million bucks, you'd build an online store. He didn't have that kind of money, but he was also one of the Ruby core members building Ruby on Rails with people like DHH and some others. He ended up falling in love with Ruby on Rails and deciding to build a piece of software to sell these snowboards. And that was 2004. And by 2006, it was clear as day that the snowboard business was a good idea, but the software business was a great idea. And that's around the time where I met him and he started enabling or allowing others to use the software to start their own businesses. And I joined a couple years after that.
And when you join an early company like that, oftentimes there's not a clearly defined role, especially if you're a non-engineer. It's like, hey, there's a bunch of shit that we need done, and then it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Is that how it was at that time?
Was it kind of— I actually, um, the, the advice or the, the insight I give to folks who are thinking of starting early stage company who don't necessarily have, who are not an engineer or a designer or product manager or something like that, is just make yourself as valuable as possible. Forget everything you think you are, just find ways to add value. And, um, I was, I was technically a lawyer. I had built a number of, of businesses both online and offline. Um, and I— we didn't have a CFO then, we had no CMO then. I remember, uh, within a couple of months of joining, we raised our first Series A. It was from Bessemer. Bessemer led it. It was a $7 million round, and I think it was a $25 million pre or post, I can't remember. But I was like, look, I'm gonna figure out a way to like help raise this Series A. I'm gonna figure out what, what, what that means, how, what that takes. Um, I was, you know, furiously, you know, looking up what is a liquidation preference. Turns out it's a pretty important thing to know what it is. Um, But that was it. It was really, it was just add as much value as I possibly could. And it was only much later when we hired a CFO and a chief marketing officer that it became clear where I wanted to spend my time, which really was both on the storytelling side of Shopify, making sure the world knows that Shopify exists. So on the growth side, on the PR side of things, but also internally focus on commercialization, which is for me now, things like our growth team, our sales team, and got to build a Shopify platform, which is cool, and Shopify Plus, and I've just got to do do some really neat things.
So I, I, the other day I was reading because, um, Bessemer, who invested, they have this memo that they put out, uh, they put out a bunch of the historical memos of like what they said at the time they invested.
And these are, by the way, this is something that Sean's obsessed with. He'll go back and read like the, yeah, the founding letter of eBay or something.
Like he loves, or like, I'm like an archaeologist, but like instead of dinosaurs it's businesses.
It's a very good idea about this like marketplace. What do you think?
Right. So I dug up the fossils here. They put it out there, which is pretty easy. But there's a couple of really interesting things I wanted to ask your opinion on. Like you said, they invested the Series A, and they put this little chart on their memo. If you want to see it, just go to bvp.com/memos. They say, "What are the possible exit scenarios?" They'll say, "It could be a zero if they burn through cash and they mismanage it and they can't return the money." They give it a 12% chance of a zero outcome. And then they gave it, you know, a 28% chance of a $50 million outcome. And at the top of the range they had was a $400 million exit they thought would take 6 years. And they thought, oh, there's a 3% chance that they can, that they can reach this mark. And, you know, looking at it right now, Shopify market cap is $120— basically $130 billion. And so, um, exceeded, you know, even the Their grand scenario was $400 million. $130 billion is sort of like out of the, you know, it's out of this world compared to what they were expecting. Um, and I think this goes to show that even really smart, savvy investors who have seen many, many deals—
those are some of the best guys in the business, right?
Best—
the Bessemer team, those, like, that's a next level team.
Exactly. And so, you know, our ability to forecast and project these category leaders and growing markets is, is so, so poor. And in fact, in some ways, what you did, I think, was a much better way to guide your intuition, right? Just follow your intuition, which is like, hey, I've had this problem before. I used this thing. I think more people are going to have this problem. Let me jump right in and just see how much value we can create out of this.
And that was, for me, sort of my own sort of holy shit moment when I realized that Shopify was something much more than a software company was. When I moved from undergrad, when I moved from Montreal to Ottawa to go to law school, undergrad, as you all know, you don't have to show up for class. You can just show up for the exam, you pass, you're all good. And that worked great for me because I was, you know, I was running a t-shirt business and I spent all my waking hours running this little business. Law school uses this Socratic method and you're required to actually be there. So the t-shirt business, the wholesale business just didn't scale properly. And so I needed a way to make money concurrently while I was in class without having to leave class. And the moment where I had some relationships in the t-shirt industry because of the wholesale business and I set up this little online store, it's called Smoother, which was a nickname of of a law school buddy of mine. This was sort of in the Zappos days where we all sort of, people were creating business names and brands that were kind of random words that really meant nothing. So Smoover seemed fitting. And I remember sitting in tax law class and I wasn't an engineer. I had very little experience at that point in digital retail or retail in general. And I was able to build a store. And my biggest competitor after a couple of weeks was Walmart Canada. It was great. I made some money. I was able to pay tuition and help the family. But the fact that I, as a 21-year-old law student, was able to build a company sitting in class that competed against the largest or one of the largest retailers on the planet at that time, that felt incredibly different. That felt like giving people with ambition these incredible superpowers, these magical tools in which they can go and take their ambition and turn it into something really, really big. If I was able to do that and I was able to create independence, freedom, quote unquote success for myself, wouldn't it be great if we can do this at scale for, at that point, thinking of a million merchants, which we have now, we have more than a million merchants, that would've been crazy. But I thought, hey, if we give this to 10,000 people, this would be so unbelievable. And what would happen if anyone who had a product or an idea or a craft or a hobby was able to commercialize that thing and take it to a global audience? What would that look like? And I don't think the Bessemer letter memo was, was wrong by any means, but at that point, the total addressable market for people that needed an online store was very small. That's the first thing. Second of all, the Shopify product was fundamentally an online store builder. We were effectively CMS with a checkout. We had some bells and whistles, but it was mostly just, you know, an online store builder. And if you sort of fast forward till today, the relationship that Shopify has with the million or more brands on Shopify, some are, you know, a lot of small brands, but also some really big ones, the Jim Sharks and Allbirds and Bombas and Tommy John Underwear of the world and Schwinn bicycles and Nestlé and Procter Gamble, the relationship we have with them is that of we are their work. When someone says they're going to work in the morning and they're on Shopify, what they mean is they open up the Shopify dashboard. And the relationship we have with them today is we've given out over $1 billion of capital, so we're their banks in some cases. We help them with shipping and fulfillment. We help them with payments. We help them with physical commerce as well as online commerce. And so there was no way to predict where Shopify Shopify was going unless you were inside of Shopify where you were able to visualize or extrapolate, "Oh, wait a second, we can be more than just online commerce. We can be a retail operating system. We can also help with capital and shipping and fulfillment." Also, the addressable market is going to be more than just the people currently looking for online stores. It's anyone that has ambition or it's anyone that wants a piece of software that makes more money than it costs. I think for that reason, it'd be very difficult to predict something like Shopify 10 years ago.
Well, how big did you, like, let's say 5 years into your journey, you joined in 2009, you said?
2010.
Yeah, 2010, 2013. Do you remember your revenue? Let's say your third year and your fourth year in, do you remember your revenue?
I don't. Not offhand. I mean, it was, it was sub probably $100 million at that point, or maybe close to that.
Oh, well, that's great.
Yeah. I mean, we, I mean, I certainly knew we were on to something. I sort of always had the you know, the twinkle in my eye that, hey, this is something really, really special.
Wait, so you guys were doing $100 million in revenue in year 4?
It's probably, it's probably less than—
I don't know the exact numbers, but so one cool thing with this memo is it has it for those earlier years, so '09, uh, '08, '09, uh, basically. And it looks like '08 was like $1 million in sales revenue, um, '09 $2.5 million, and then 2010 predicted was $5 million at that time.
So it's definitely sub-$100 million, so I'm not even close to that point, um, but But you guys weren't struggling, right? We, um, struggling. I mean, I did not know— I mean, I thought there was huge potential to this thing, but like any early-stage startup, there is a sense of, is this thing gonna completely—
Did you sell shares along the way?
Um, not much, no. Uh, I, I mean, I may have done a very small secondary just to be able to afford a house when I got married. Uh, but beyond that, no. Um, amazing. And, and I think that is a great question to ask because it does show sort of the confidence you have in the business. So yes, there was some traction and yes, we began to see that people were being successful, but it was actually watching stores that started on Shopify around their mom's kitchen table that grew to be— I remember there's a company out of San Francisco called Dotocase. Do you guys ever remember Dotocase? It was like this beautiful leather-bound iPad case. And they started with us early, you know, at some point in 2010. And then Obama took a photo of him holding his iPad with the DODOCase. And I remember thinking, like, this is a company, they make a great product, but what we have done is we've enabled them to distribute it at scale, and including to the president of the United States. And I remember thinking that this is real now. It is real that it's not just a place to sell a product for a limited period of time or some sort of promotional product, but this actually enables more people to try their hand at entrepreneurship.
And again, it wasn't like you couldn't do it.
You could sell on eBay, or you can sell a product, you know, you can build a store on Magento, but it was just out of reach for so many people. So the amount of people back in 2013 who self-identified as entrepreneurs was so damn low, and it wasn't because they weren't ambitious, it was because they're just— the tools just did not exist.
Sam, there's this, uh, dope quote that I think Toby said that I think is like one of the, you know, like, does it involve rebels? Yes, you've heard this one.
So I was gonna say the exact same thing. I'm not gonna steal your thunder, but let me preface by saying Harley's got this like beautiful, PC, inspirational way of describing like, we're gonna empower these people. The best description of Shopify was described exactly how Sean's about to explain it, which I thought you guys wouldn't want like to militarize it, but it is the best way.
I thought it was amazing. Uh, basically he's— there's a quote that he said where he was like You know, Amazon wants to build a giant empire, and at Shopify, we want to arm the rebels, which is basically like, you know, give, give each of the individual merchants the tools and abilities to sell and have great shops on their own rather than become the one big mega shop of the world.
And I thought, by the way, would be really boring, right? I think as consumers, you know, one of the major things that I'm seeing now in retail, sort of in kind of a, a pandemic, is one the obvious, the obvious thing, which is that we've had like 8 or 10 years worth of acceleration in digital commerce as a percentage of total commerce, um, in the last like 6 months. So we've gone from like 15% of, of e-commerce to total retail to like 25%. Okay, that's cool, that's neat. But the bigger thing that I'm watching is consumers globally have unequivocally began to vote with their wallets to buy from independent businesses whenever possible. And that's— those are the rebels. And it's not that those rebels didn't exist. It's that now if you are a business, you know, let's say you make beautiful jewelry for your family and you decide this morning in the shower, I'm going to start a business today and sell this jewelry. The fact that you can give consumers the same one-click checkout experience that Amazon does, you can offer really affordable shipping for 2-day shipping, you can get pricing on payments and late shipping labels that is similar to what the big guys are getting. That is only happening because of this arming the rebels thing. And what really has happened is that Shopify, if you pretend for a second that we are a retailer, we're not, but pretend for a second we are, we are the second largest retailer, online retailer in America after Amazon. The difference is that number 3, number 4, number 5, that's like Walmart.com, Target, all these other retailers. They take those economies of scale and keep them for themselves. Whereas because we're a platform and because we're trying to arm the rebels, we actually can distribute all those economies of scale to entrepreneurs so that today, starting on Shopify, you effectively get the same rates on all these things you need to run your business that the big companies were able to afford, and you get it day one. And that is the idea of arming the rebels. That is how you level the playing field ultimately.
Were you guys just sitting around hanging out brainstorming and you came up with that shtick, or did someone bring it to you, or did you read it?
That's a beautiful Is that like an ad agency, you know, earn their million-dollar retainer by coming out with that product?
No, no, no, we are so not that company. We don't believe in ad agencies. I don't know where it came from, but it certainly is resonating and sticking. And the truth is, the rebels are winning. Like, I think the greatest, you know, workout gear right now is Gymshark. I think the most comfortable pair of shoes I have is Allbirds. I think, maybe too much information, the best underwear is Tommy John. Like, the stuff that I love, not because they're on Shopify, but because I think as a consumer, I like high-quality products. Products, they're all independent businesses, AKA rebels. So it isn't like I'm supporting them from this philanthropic charitable angle. I'm supporting them and I'm buying from them because they have the best stuff. And I think that is, that is really great.
So let's, let's actually go down that path. And you mentioned something earlier about Schwinn bikes. I like Schwinn bikes because it's like a classic American brand. One of my favorite entrepreneurs, Sam Zell, bought And I don't actually know if he still owns it, but he's a real estate guy. And it's super interesting. If you had $50 million to buy a brand right now and, and, and put them on Shopify, what would you do?
Who would you buy or invest in if you can't buy? Right. So I'm speaking personally now, right? Yeah.
So this is you, Harley.
I'm trying to think of some of the worst experiences I've ever had online shopping. So here's the cool part of the Schwinn story, to your point about Sam or whoever owns it. To now, Sam, I think the reason I love the Schwinn story is because Schwinn Bicycles is a great brand. It's iconic. People that have Schwinn Bicycles love Schwinn Bicycles, but it took, you know, decades to convince them to go direct to consumer. It took them, it took a pandemic to convince them to finally decide to create a beautiful direct-to-consumer online store on Shopify. In the first week of COVID hitting, I remember Heinz Ketchup set up a store on Shopify to do, uh, direct-to-consumer in-home condiments. I think it's called Heinz at Home. Lindt Chocolate did the same thing. Snickers did the same thing as well.
Yeah, I mean, we've had PepsiCo, PepsiCo brands on Shopify for a while. Lay's potato chips.
I think you guys did like, uh, snacks.com or something.
Something like that. Yeah, I don't remember exactly what, what the domain was, but the idea that these brands are, are now going direct-to-consumer is great and also kind of weird. Why have they not been direct to consumer? Go back 250 years. Think about the way that consumers purchased. First of all, as a consumer, the way— the place you went to buy was the place where people congregated. So the town square in a small town. If you bought bread, you bought bread from the baker. And if you bought shoes, you bought from the cobbler. There was no intermediary there. And then in 1876 in Philadelphia, a guy named John Wanamaker created this concept called a department store. It's called Wanamaker's Department Store. And it was the first time that a bunch of different brands and a bunch of different products were all sold under the same roof. And it was a big store in Philadelphia, which is I think where you are right now, right, Sam? Yeah. And I'm sure there's some Wanamaker Street there as well.
There's the Wanamaker Mile. You know the Wanamaker Mile? Exactly.
That's probably where Wanamaker's store was. And after that happened, after Wanamaker's Department Store launched, you effectively had this period of something in the neighborhood of 130 years of incredible intermediation where you had resellers of other people's products. And I think the reason you had that was because distribution was difficult. So if you were— do you guys know Boosted Board, skateboard company? I own one. So if you were Boosted Board and you wanted to get your hands into your products into the hands of consumers, you had to put that into a store like a Best Buy because Best Buy had stores all over the country, all over the world, and that's how you did distribution. But then, as the late '90s and early 2000s came around, the internet completely democratized and commoditized distribution. Everyone had distribution. And so you would've expected very quickly everyone that was being sold through an intermediary would've very quickly moved towards direct-to-consumer. And for the most part, a lot of them did, but, but there were so many laggards. And some of our favorite brands, the brands that frankly are iconic, um, just did not take that route quick enough. So the fact that Schwinn did that now, and the fact that others have followed suit. That, to me, is amazing. I just— I wish that happened more— a lot more quickly. And now what happens when I see brands that are still not going direct to consumer, but I know that I want to purchase, particularly a $1,400 or $1,500 bicycle, let me buy the thing. How could it be so difficult to buy for me to spend $1,500 on a new bike? So what are the brands? Let me think. The brands that I think are— OK, my favorite t-shirt in the world, and he's a friend, so he's probably going to hear this, but my favorite t-shirt in brand in the world is James Perse. I think James makes the greatest t-shirts ever. Um, and you can buy it off jamesperse.com, and it's an okay experience. I think it could be 10 times better if they were on Shopify. They don't have accelerated checkout. They don't allow me to use Shop Pay, which, if you've ever used Shop Pay, it's like the greatest way to purchase something online, or Apple Pay. They don't allow me to do 3D or AR, uh, fittings. Um, that is a brand personally that I would, I would put money into. And if James needed my money, I would put money into there. That would be one. A second One would be, I think there's incredible direct— I think there's incredible amount of demand right now, especially for high-end wine online. And it is almost impossible, some because of regulation, but some just because of, frankly, laziness, for these great wine brands to go direct to consumer. I don't know why that's taking so damn long. Probably the next one I would say would be, I think buying Apple is one thing, but buying electronics online, I don't know where to buy it from. I don't know exactly where I'm going to get the best price or value. I don't know who's going to send to me fastest. That to me creates confusion amongst consumers. Confusion is bad.
Which, which category of electronics?
Well, I mean, we talked earlier about my, my setup. Uh, if I want to buy a new DSLR Sony camera right now, um, I would love to just go to Sony and buy it, but I can't. I, I can't go to Sony. I have to go to all these different stores, and all of them are different pricing, and all of them are going to ship at different rates. But as a consumer, it creates a lot of creates a lot of confusion. Frankly, I may just end up not buying it at all. That to me is quite ridiculous.
Yeah, I like that. There's this theory of business that's like business goes through two trends. It's bundling and unbundling. What you described about shopping is basically that, where it was initially unbundled, got bundled into a department store, has begun to become unbundled on the internet again as the retailers basically have direct relationships with their customers. But then there's also, still at the same time, there's Amazon, right? I think that one of— one of the key trends here was being able to reach your customers through essentially Facebook ads and draw them to your website. Otherwise, you know, how the hell will they know that you exist?
Right.
And so I think that was kind of the key.
Think of your favorite retail experience, right? Physical, online, physical retail experience. My favorite physical retail experience is when I walk into a store and walking in, they know my size, they know that I'm walking in, they have things ready for me. It doesn't have to be high-end even. It can be even a low-end store that just has, you know, cool socks and knows that these are the socks I always love. One of the reasons that I'm not surprised to see massive closures from big physical retailers, especially those that did not have their own brands, is because they stopped adding value. Why do I have to walk into Barney's to buy a James Perse shirt when I can buy directly from James Perse? Well, I would do it, and I would allow Barney's to share in the profit margin if they're adding some additional value to me. So maybe it's education, maybe they've curated something that I wouldn't have seen before, maybe they help me, you know, find products and brands that I wouldn't otherwise see. But if they're just going to sell the thing I can get directly from the brand itself, they don't deserve the profit margin. And I think consumers have voted against that, which is why we see so many iconic department stores close down.
The company Gymshark is fascinating to me and everything that we're going to say. The cool thing about British companies is even if they're private, they have to reveal their revenue if they do above $20 million, I think, in revenue. Like you can go to companieshouse.com or something like that and look at it.
Australia.
Yeah. And it's great. And Gymshark was like crazy profitable given how fast they were growing and that they were like selling hard goods, which is rare. Besides Gymshark, which companies have you seen where you're like, oh my gosh, if I wasn't doing this or if I had like a young friend and I wanted to tell them to go and start this business where you've just seen the margins and you're like, wow, this is, this is shocking how good this is.
Yeah. So first of all, I think I think, so Ben Francis is the founder of Gymshark, is a friend, and I know that story well because like I remember when Ben started that business and I've watched it grow. I've had a very close view to that business. And the truth is, the reason that business is so great is because one, they have high-quality products, and two, they have a deep understanding of who their customer base is. They're not, if you look at Gymshark's influencer program and you look at, another company's, you know, bigger company that's more established influencer program, it's totally different. One feels transactional and one feels like a real relationship. And you can see that. I mean, even inside of Gymshark, the ratio from influencer reps to the influencer is very, very small because there's an intimate relationship. And so anyone that is promoting Gymshark on social media has a deep connection to Gymshark. They know Ben, they've spoken to Ben, they've talked about products that are coming out. And I think I think they've done it in a much better way. One company that doesn't get enough attention but is an amazing business is Fashion Nova. I don't know if you know that business. Yep. So Richard started Fashion Nova out of Los Angeles. Fashion Nova has done such a great job to the extent that if you look at Fashion Nova right now and you go there tomorrow, the inventory turnover is massive. It's mostly made in Los Angeles, and the way that they've created this sort of hyper hyperfast fashion is remarkable. Fashion Nova is a company that frankly is as prominent as any of the major fashion houses, and Richard just started it in a very different, compelling way. I think a lot of the influencers that end up starting businesses, whether it's Kylie Cosmetics or it's Jeffree Star, who both started— had lives before their Shopify stores, What people don't understand is actually how great of a business those folks have. They are not selling promotional products. Drake's OVO store, it's not a promotional product. The Yeezy store is not a promotional product. And I think the public in general views a lot of these Kylie Cosmetics things as, oh, it's just a brand extension. No, it's not. It's someone who deeply understands, who deeply understands that space. In her case, it's cosmetics. Or Jeffree Star, he was doing makeup tutorials for, you know, for years on YouTube and decided, I can make a better product than I'm currently using from Sephora. Then they go ahead and they produce it, they manufacture it, they design it, they sell it themselves. I find a lot of those types of businesses, they get some attention, they're on the front page of Fortune, people really think it's cool. But I think once you actually go a level deeper, it's incredibly impressive what they've done. Then you can keep going. You can look at what Tom has done with Tommy John Underwear or the Allbirds store, what Joey has done at Allbirds. These are companies that if If— let's actually— this is a good place to pause on this. If Michael Jordan started the Jordan brand today, he would own 100% of it, just like Yeezy does, just like Drake owns OVO, just like Kylie owns Kylie Cosmetics. But because the Jordan brand started in the mid-'80s, he was a licensor of his brand to Nike. He received a royalty. The royalty was substantial, but he had no choice but to work with Nike on this deal because fundamentally Nike had add the means of manufacturing and the means of distribution.
That would be my answer to your question, Sam, of where would I put the $50 billion, is I would go to Zion Williamson or Luka Dončić or something, the next NBA star, and I would say, "Hey, don't just sign with Nike. Own your business. Own your brand. I will put up the money and let's go direct to consumer. Let's own the relationship with your customers," rather than just licensing your face and your name and someone else, right, who then controls it indefinitely. And then they can cut you when you hurt your knee, you know.
And but that's not like new. That's not like new. Like, isn't that what O Media— Oprah, uh, what, you know, what's her thing called? Oh, something, uh, I mean, that's not, that's not crazy.
That isn't new except for the fact that this— the scale that they're at right now is new, right? The amount— I mean, that we've never seen a scale before, right? So I had, uh, I, I, this is cool and I'm not trying to name drop, but it's, it's a really neat story. I've been I have a relationship with this guy, Marshawn Lynch, Beast Mode. Yeah. And so I get to spend some time with him. He's a really cool dude and he's done amazing things for his community in Oakland, but he's also a great entrepreneur. When we talk, we do not talk about the NFL contract, which I think was $90 million or something. We talk about Beast Mode Apparel, which is a Shopify store. And he is as excited, I mean, especially now that he's not playing football anymore, with Beast Mode as he was with his other life. And the reason was Beast Mode, one, he owned 100% of it. Of. He was not at the beck and call or at the helm of the NFL or of the team. He was able to employ a ton of people in his community and his family. What I think is unique about these businesses and having this idea of 100% ownership is that it moves the power imbalance from the big company to the actual person behind it, to the brand behind it. And you're right, Sam, that this is not necessarily new as a concept. Oprah has been doing it, others have been doing it for a while, but no one has done it at this scale so that Drake, for example, may have a bunch of hits coming up or he may not have way more hits. But OVO Apparel is its own thing now that it is tied indirectly to him having hits and him being a great brand. But, you know, the collaboration with Canada Goose— I mean, it's one of the most well, you know, one of those popular winter jackets is the OVO jacket. Who would have thought that Drake, a kid from Toronto, would be making one of the most popular winter jackets? And that that brand is not a one-time thing but has incredible longevity. And when you contrast that with like going to a concert when you were 13 years old and you went to whatever concert you went to and you bought, you know, a t-shirt at the stand, it was like a gilden kind of crappy t-shirt with the tour dates on the back. We have gone so far from that. And that means, I think, that all that to be said, actually, that I think what we're seeing is everyone is now turning into an entrepreneur. And that, I think, is really cool.
Sean, do you know anything about— so our audience, Harley, it's like, I actually think it's 85% male. It's probably all dorks like me and Sean, um, so they probably don't know too much about Fashion Nova. Sean, do you know anything about Fashion Nova?
Uh, I, I've studied it a little bit, but go ahead. You sounds like you have something good.
So for the guys out there listening, Fashion Nova, if you're a fool and live underneath a rock, it's basically— I don't know how to describe it. It's like fast fashion. It's almost like H&M or something like that, or, uh, Forever 21 online.
Born on Instagram. But the guy I'm here. The guy who started it, I think he's an Iranian immigrant, or I forget where he's from, somewhere in the Middle East. His parents started—
Persian.
His parents started like a, one of those like just kind of boring shops on the corner, nothing special, that sold clothing. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, we can make this a little bit better. So he started doing— and he sponsors basically Cardi B was like his big sponsors, and he sponsors tons of people just like Cardi B. And it's It's like, it's like the World Hip Hop. What's it called? What's it? Hip Hop?
What's it called? World Star Hip Hop.
World Star Hip Hop crowd, which I love and I follow. And it's like that same crowd. And here's how I knew he was crushing it. He owns 100% of the business. And about 3 years ago, when they still were small, I read in TMZ that he bought a $20 million mansion in LA. Avicii.
He bought Avicii's house.
Yes. And the best way to find out, or the easiest way to find out if a private company is crazy profitable is by looking at the real estate holdings of the owner. It's hands down the best. Like, like, it's the best way.
If you don't know anything. Maybe. You don't know how big the mortgage is. You don't know the economics. But actually, one of the things you said is super interesting. So let's take Cardi B. So Cardi B now is like, you know, it's huge and everyone would wish that they had a partnership or a brand affiliation with Cardi B. But Richard, the genius of Richard is that he discovered Cardi B before anyone even talked about it. And he planted these seeds, these small investments with people that he thought had the potential to be the next biggest pop star in the world. And because of that, what you end up with is a relationship between Fashion Nova and Cardi B that is unlike any other relationship from any other brand because Richard was part of Cardi's story. He was there when— and gave her money and he gave her assistance and support when no one else would. And I think that's— that to me is one of the traits of an amazing entrepreneur. They see something that no one else did. Now Pepsi can come in today and just overpay, but Cardi is never going to give the same type type of attention, care, love, and promotion to Pepsi as she's going to give to Fashion Nova, to Richard. And I love that. I think that is— that's really— that's the heart.
Is it crazy to say that Fashion— would I be— I don't know how to ask this because I know you're not able to say, but I imagine Fashion Nova is in the $500— is between $500 million and $1 billion in revenue.
I can't give out individual merchants' revenue because it's not my revenue, it's their revenue. But they've done incredibly well. And more importantly, though, it's— they have longevity. There's staying power to this thing. This isn't a one-and-done type of thing. That's the reason why I love talking about the Allbirds story so much, because frankly, they only have 3 or 4 SKUs, but there is the staying power of it. But what is the, what is the common denominator across all of these great DTC brands that I think are, are, are leading in their categories, in some cases have become the incumbents, is that they're using modern retail techniques. Um, if you ask Joey from Allbirds whether or not they're online or offline, he's like, who cares? If you go to my store and you try on a pair of shoes and you complete the purchase in store or online, it doesn't matter to me. It's all just retail. The future of retail is about consumer choice. So however a consumer wants to buy is okay for them. If you talk to the Best Buy CEO and you ask them about their channel conflicts, which is a real thing inside of Best Buy, they will talk about the fact that online commerce hurts offline commerce. Excuse me? What? Offline commerce— it's all just commerce. If I decide to go into— if I was the CEO of Best Buy, I would shrink all my stores down and make them almost like FAO Schwarz playgrounds. I'd play with the stuff, I'd try the cameras out, I'd use the products, and then I'd go home and buy the products on my iPad. That's the way I would want to purchase. But Best Buy, because they use a more traditional view of retail, which is there's online, there's offline, unfortunately, it doesn't lend itself well to consumer preference in 2020.
Let's play a little game called overrated/underrated. I can tell from what you talked about a second ago, I would say that maybe underrated is a trend where, um, influential people owning their own brands and going direct to consumer, right? Beast Mode, uh, you know, George Clooney with his album.
Underrated is because I think a lot of people think it's just a marketing ploy or some sort of like promotional product.
I would say it's equally rated. It's, it's perfectly rated properly now.
Uh, in our crowd, it's rated properly now, but I would say, and, and mainstream, it's still not the mainstream behavior, let's put it that way, right?
You don't see them raising money. You see very few IPOs, and they're like, they're like, they're is a— it is a tough time if they actually do want to access the public markets unless they SPAC.
Um, so, so, so there's— and there's different categories, right? So like, it's happening— it happened in alcohol, right? Conor McGregor with his whiskey, George Clooney with his whatever. And then there's beauty where Rihanna is doing it, Kylie is doing it, etc. There's shoes, uh, that we're talking about where, you know, whether it's Yeezy or what I was saying, which is like kind of like athletes not, not going with the behemoths and maybe doing their own thing, kind of like what LaVar Ball tried to do but like if that actually worked. And so there's more categories. So let's say that's underrated, where that trend's gonna continue and it's gonna grow and it's gonna go into more categories, right? Like maybe Richard Branson should have his own wine and he should create his own direct-to-consumer wine brand and that should be a great thing, you know, Billionaire Wines. And what's overrated? So maybe, I don't know, like what's your take on dropshipping or like some of the other trends you're seeing in online retail? Online where you think maybe the hype has exceeded what you think is the true value or longevity of it.
Of it? I actually think it's gonna be controversial maybe for you and for your listeners, but I think dropshipping is being completely misunderstood. Completely misunderstood. Dropshipping is a process improvement for retail. That is all it is. And I think the fact that there's so many videos about dropshipping courses and we're all inundated with advertising to think about dropshipping and the courses thing is, you know, you see it everywhere. But dropshipping, do you guys know that the,, the, the brand Movement Watches, MVMT.
Oh, you know Jake? Okay, so I know Jake really well too, and Kramer, and they're amazing guys. I've known them since almost, almost day one. They actually won one of our Build a Business competitions years ago.
Probably your first big hit, your first big success, right?
Uh, I wouldn't say first big, certainly ones that got a lot of attention because they got bought by Movado, and there was sort of a whole story to it. Um, they started with a dropshipping business originally. Originally. And it was only once they figured out, wait a second, there's a market for this thing, that they then began to design, manufacture, and vertically integrate. Would they be here today had the concept of dropshipping not existed? No, because they'd never— they were, as you know, Sam, they were in their dorm room. There was no way for them to actually produce these products without a dropshipping model. Dropshipping allowed them to access entrepreneurship in a capital-light way, and then they were able to expand into it. There's a soccer store that I forget the name of right now, but the guy started— it was a soccer blog and he had a really good following. He was talking about basically Champions League soccer and he ended up just as an experiment going on Oberlo, which is a dropshipping app that we purchased a couple of years ago. And he found a bunch of soccer balls on Oberlo and he just started posting them. And within like 3 weeks, he realized, wait a second, these people that are reading my blog also want to purchase products. And so he changed his business model just away from blog. Blog became secondary thing. The retail thing became the main business, and he started manufacturing his own soccer balls, and it's a huge success now. So I actually think dropshipping is probably— is on the other side of the category, which it's just misunderstood. Is there too many dropshipping courses? Probably. I don't know. I have no data on that. I don't know objectively speaking. It feels like there's a lot of dropshipping courses, but as a business model, it's very, very effective. And I think that— so I think that's one. I actually— one that is overrated is making masks. I think that there's enough masks out there. If you're making a new unique mask or you're making making great, you know, unique hand sanitizer that's probably, that has its own positioning and is different. I can see it, you know, doing well, but I think there's a lot of masks out there right now. I think something that's underrated is people taking a skill set they currently have and that they're really good at, something that's unique to them, and actually selling a course around that skill set or selling something that helps people acquire that skill set. I remember looking at, like, you guys know Justin Guitar from YouTube, like amazing way to learn guitar. There is a grandmother in in Italy who has a Shopify store, um, and we can put this in the show notes, uh, if you guys do that, I can send you the link, that she was doing, um, courses when tourists came to her little village in Italy. She would teach them how to make homemade delicious pasta. That was really cool and worked really well, but COVID hit, Italy got hit first, she had to pivot, and she ended up starting a Shopify store where she sells, um, lessons on how to make pasta. I think that so many people are sitting around trying to figure out ways to commercialize their hobby or try to make some money, supplement their income, and they actually don't realize that the thing that they could make money with is the skill set they already have. I think that's completely underrated right now.
You mentioned buying an app. I meant— did you mean— what you were implying was like a Shopify plugin? Yeah. Is that what you guys call them? You call them apps? Yeah. You know, our good friend Andrew, who is on the show all the time, I think he started this thing called WeCommerce, and it's all about buying those businesses. I know of another guy named Syed that does that as well. He owns, he does it for WordPress and Shopify. What apps don't exist that should exist for the Shopify ecosystem?
Ah, the neat part about the ecosystem is that because we have so many, we have more than a million stores, we have so many different verticals, there isn't one, you know, like there isn't one particular thing that everyone needs. So the way we view, we view the app ecosystem is as follows. Shopify's core offering, what we give to everybody everybody is what most people need most of the time. It satisfies the majority of people's product market requirements. But every single business has particular needs that are not like anyone else's. So you may have a sneaker store, it's a US-based sneaker store, but your primary market is Europe. And so what you may require is some sort of application that does a very quick conversion from US shoe sizes to Italian or European shoe sizes. We probably would not build that into Shopify because it's a niche market. But that is where the opportunity exists for someone to come in and build that for that particular vertical. Sometimes when— and that's a dynamic definition of most things most of the time. For a long time, email marketing was something that we left to the apps. So we had almost every email marketing app in the ecosystem, and a lot of them did really, really well. At a particular point, we realized that email marketing is so important that it now qualifies, it's crossed the threshold for most people most of the time, and now Shopify has email marketing built built in. Now, what we do in those cases, we go to the app developers and we're very clear that, hey, we're going to be building this thing because it now fits our definition of what should be in the Shopify core offering, but here's the room that you have to continue to build on top of. And I think because of that, because we have that type of relationship with our ecosystem, it means there's always room for more people to make money. But there isn't one thing that you can go to. You can say, well, right now there is meal kits or groceries becoming a real niche for us. Well, grocery was never a vertical for Shopify. It is There's probably 10 things that grocery stores need to run a really successful Shopify store that Shopify is not providing. And that's where, that's what you should build on. And actually that's one of the reasons why looking at the Shopify user communities, our forums, being on social media and asking Shopify merchants what they need to make their business better is a really great way to figure out what you should build next for Shopify. And we don't often buy those apps because we believe in an independent app ecosystem. But every now and then with something like Oberlo or Kit, um, there's a couple others as well, or Handshake. It feels like bringing them into the fold is the right thing for us to do.
I have a very selfish question. So the, at The Hustle, we've got close to 2 million subscribers and it's amazing. It's so cool. It's cool. And people have asked us to sell stuff. I always, I'm like, uh, it's a, it's so, it's such a big pain in the ass. I don't wanna do this. Um, because it's not our business. Our business is content. But earlier you said something where you're like, yeah, this, these people switched from content to commerce and it worked out quite well. What should The Hustle sell?
It's a great idea. It's a great question. Um, I don't— I, I know you, you know, I know your audience is not only incredibly, um, engaged, but, uh, they also like to talk about The Hustle. I mean, that's how I found out about it and what you guys are doing with the podcast. I would actually ask your audience what is the thing that, that they need the most and then work from there. So at the beginning, before we started rolling, we talked about video and audio. You and I are both using the SMB7 mics, these Shure mics. They are clearly the best microphones to use for interviews like this or anything, anything that requires digital voice. Maybe you put together a package because a lot of your people that watch The Hustle are probably running their own businesses. They're probably startup entrepreneurs and they probably are on video Hangouts all day long. And if there is a way for you to put together a package for $250 that comes with a better camera, a better microphone, and a better setup, that may be something that works really, really well. Alternatively, you may actually decide that you want a physical book, like actual trees, actual paper book with 1 thing or 10 things that everyone said on the podcast that you think could be very compelling. One of the things we talked about is, you know, Sean, we talked about overrated, underrated. Maybe there's something that you have that, you know, it's a beautiful notebook that has ideas that are overrated and underrated. And so as an entrepreneur thinking of starting a new business, you start to write down all your ideas and diary commoditize them. That's the cool part of what— I think what you should not do is take a shitty t-shirt and write The Hustle on it, because that to me is commoditized. I think what you should do is think about, wait a second, who are the people that are using— that are listening to us that love The Hustle? Okay, great. They're all sitting in front of the computer all day long. Maybe the AV kit is what we should be doing. But I think that is how more folks should be thinking about how they take a content brand and commercialize it into more physical product. And I don't necessarily think there's something that— I don't think you can do that in the wrong way. I've been loving my Ember mug. I never thought I'd like an Ember mug, but actually sitting in front of a computer like that, the Ember mug is amazing. My coffee is always warm. Maybe it's a collaboration between The Hustle and Ember, and actually maybe this particular Ember mug, you convince them to have a double battery because people that listen to this podcast are just, you know, they go hard and they're always in front of their computer and they don't want that battery to die. That's the type of stuff I would think about.
Well, goddamn, maybe you just made me some money.
I hope so. That's why I came, I came on to, to, to, to try to convince The Hustle to become a retailer and a merchant. And, um, and that's actually the cool part about what we're seeing around COVID, that grandmother I talked about in Italy, she became a merchant. These restaurants in New York City, uh, you know, you probably see tons of them, Sam, that have become become, um, merchants. They weren't merchants, they were restaurants.
We had a guy advertise with us. It was, uh, oh, uh, uh, Mr. Holmes Bakery or something, or Mr. Holmes Bakery in San Francisco. I don't know if you saw, but they made bakery stuff. And then like they were the first ones like, we're gonna sell banana bread mix. And they jumped on that right away and they created a Shopify store and they advertised with us. And we told— we sold a shit ton of that for like, like maybe thousands kits, and they were the first people to hop on that banana bread train.
And that is because they knew who their audience was. They had a deep understanding of the people that like their bakery also are the types of people that would like to make their own products, bake their own bread. That is, you know, if you just put out something and said, hey, like, here are 3 ideas of things we're thinking of making, tell me what you want, um, I, I will help you build a Shopify store, uh, myself if you'd like, because I just think this stuff is so damn cool. Uh, but that's this episode. That's the stuff that I think works. I think where people get it wrong is they just create promotional product, and that is trash for the most part.
So let me ask you a question. 5 years from now, 7 years, 10 years, something like that, will we still be shopping like the way we do today where we, you know, we see some ads on social media or we get an email about a product, we go click, there's a website with a bunch of pictures as a grid, and you scroll, scroll, scroll, you click to checkout, and then you, you know, you either one-click checkout or you type in your shit. Is that what shopping looks like 7 years from now, 10 years from now?
No. I mean, you're going to have elements of that. But that's the neat part about modern retail or modern commerce right now is that— so right now, from Shopify, you set up a Shopify store. You can build your beautiful online store. You can take our point-of-sale product and sell in a physical store. But you can also push products to Amazon through Shopify. You can push to Walmart through Shopify. You can push it to eBay, to Pinterest, to Houzz. More and more, people are using augmented reality on Shopify, which we have— which we have built into the product. But if this was 5 years ago or 10 years ago, we'd probably have a MySpace integration too, to enable you to push to MySpace as well. Obviously, having a MySpace integration now would be completely useless. That, I think, is the way to think about modern retail is that wherever consumers are, that's where you need to sell. Right now, consumers are on social media, and consumers, when it's not a pandemic, are in physical stores, and they're certainly perusing online, and that's where you should sell. But if you are, um, we have an integration with a company called Reverb, which is out of Chicago, I believe. It's a used musical instrument marketplace. If you're selling musical instruments on Shopify, you should activate the Reverb channel because that's where your consumers are purchasing. And if you are Chip and Joanna Gaines, who have Magnolia Shop on Shopify, they got that big TV show, um, uh, Fixer Upper, they sell a lot of their products using Shopify's augmented reality because people don't want to go to Waco, Texas, but they want to know whether or not the couch is going to fit in their house. Very simply, from their Shopify store on your mobile device, you can easily natively— from the native browser, you can see how that stuff fits. That is the neat part. Now there are probably 8 or 10 channels that are primary channels, online being the biggest, physical retail being the second, and then all the other channels. There's probably, I don't know, 5 to 10 primary channels. My hypothesis, my belief is that in 10 years from now, there's going to be a bunch of whole other channels that we have not even thought about right now. Is the retailers and the brands that are going to be relevant then as they are now will be agnostic to those channels. They don't— they won't care that this channel is better than the other channel because they're going to sell wherever the consumers are, whereas the old-school retailers and certainly the department stores, they cannot get over the fact that no one wants to come into their physical location. And so they lament it. They're mad about that. And that's just not the way to run retail in the future. It isn't. Think about how you all used to buy video games when you were a kid. You'd walk into a store at a particular time, you'd line up at the cash, you'd get the video and you go home. And that's because the retailer was dictating to you, Sean, and you, Sam, how to buy the, the product. But now you're like, I'm not buying that way, I'm going to buy however I want. I'm going to buy on my couch, on my iPad, or I'm going to buy at a pop-up store. I'm going to buy on Instagram or Facebook. That is the future retail. It isn't one channel over the other channel. Websites are going to be less— it's none of that stuff. It's just about where consumer choice is. And if we want to be the most relevant company in retail in the future, as I think we are now Now, we have to enable merchants to sell anywhere that they have customers.
Last question from me. I know we got to go. Do you— I think that running a public company and going public sounds like the worst thing on earth. Like it's just hell to me. You got to report to people, you're— everything's out in the open.
Blink twice if Sam's correct. We know you can't say.
I actually, I mean, I can say I've— it's been, it's actually been a really interesting experience. I think it's been, for me on a personal level, I've actually really enjoyed it. The roadshow was one of the most interesting 2 weeks of my entire life. We met 100 different investors around the world and I got to tell my favorite story, which is out of Shopify. I find the investors we currently have understand, for the most part, the long-term vision of Shopify. I think the fact that we can easily raise money to do do all types of cool things. That's gotten easier as well. I know that there is, particularly as I talk to private company entrepreneurs and founders, that there's this hesitation to go public. I'd love to spend more time talking about being a public company because I actually think that there's a lot of advantages to it. If you have the ambition that certainly I have, and I know Toby definitely has it, that we want to build a 100-year independent business, being a public company is a much easier way to do that. And it's a much more effective way to do that.
Oh, you made $1,000 today.
Yeah. My wife Shopify store, you made her $1,000 today. Thank you very much for making this possible. I didn't do anything.
She made $1,000. We just made it accessible. What does she sell?
She sells— I can't talk about it on the podcast, but I'll DM you about it.
Cool.
That'd be awesome.
Now I'm really curious what she sells, but I mean, so the type of degenerates who listen to this show are badass, and they're gonna— if they heard what Sean was making, they would go and spin up something exactly like it on Shopify and probably make more money than he's making.
Exactly. That's why I, I have this rule, which is before something's working, when it's just an idea phase, oh, I tell the whole world about everything, all my ideas. We have a podcast where we give away ideas for free. Uh, but once something starts to work, you know, I zip it. And so, uh, that, that's my rule.
Well, thank you, uh, Harley. By the way, I would have normally said this from the beginning, but your name is awesome. Oh, thank you. You've got like one of the cooler names. Uh, when I first heard about it, you, like years ago, whenever you guys were going public, I was like, let's see what this guy looks like. And you do not look at all like I thought you were gonna—
What were you picturing? Finkelstein is sort of an old Jewish kind of name.
Uh, yeah, like an old guy with like a beard, definitely like Jewish beard, like, but like kind of fat. Like, I think of like a, like a, like a hairy— I don't know, Harvey Weinstein. That's not good.
This is— so I mean, I think this is a compliment. It doesn't feel like one right now, but I know what you're saying. But yeah, yeah. Oh, thank you.
I'll take that.
I'll take that.
You're good looking and like hip. You got like what looks like a fancy cashmere hoodie on. You look badass.
This is, um, this is called blue salt, uh, and it's like comfortable hoodies ever. It's out of California, it's a Shopify store, and these are the most comfortable shirts ever.
So shout out to Blue Salt. He just experienced a Sam compliment where he starts off being like, you're awesome, and then he's like, I thought you were going to totally suck and be fat and hairy.
No, I know what it is. I know what it is.
It's the guy from Community. He's the guy who has the, the, the perfume business. His name's similar to yours. You know what I'm talking about? No, we're not Community. Sorry, Parks and Rec.
Parks and Okay, no, I don't know, but I'm gonna go look that up right now. Um, but thank you for, for liking my name. And honestly, uh, I think anything that encourages, inspires more people to think about entrepreneurship and starting businesses and, and hustling is a really, really good thing. And so I'm grateful that you help, um, people think about this stuff. The fact you give away business ideas, and frankly, most ideas you give away are probably million-dollar companies, that is really cool. So thanks for doing that. That's, that's, that's, that's That's awesome.
Thanks for coming. Harley, on one of our podcasts, we talked about how popular the genre of erotic fiction is and how women love to read Fifty Shades of Grey and a little bit worse. A listener took that idea, built an erotic newsletter for Black lesbians, and just sold it for, I think, I don't know, $100,000, 3 months later. That's amazing. That's my favorite success story. There's much bigger success stories from the group, but that's my favorite for all the reasons you can probably think of. Probably, yes.
Well, that's cool. Look, I'd love all your listeners to start their hustles and businesses on Shopify, but frankly, more entrepreneurs in the world is a really good thing. I think entrepreneurship is the greatest form of self-expression.
Well, thank you again. This is awesome, and we appreciate it. You're going to have to come back again.
Yeah, right on.
This is great.
It's been a great honor. Thank you. Thanks, Holly.