Thread by @jmwind

The best things in life are free...🧵

2/ If what you're looking for is inside information on $SHOP you just had to ask. Here's what I know that hasn't made the press or an analyst report yet.

3/ I'm an engineer, so will avoid any market crystal ball madness.

Call it Retail DTC or Run DMC... pick any buzzword you want but people have been buying stuff since before the silk road. That ain't stopping.

4/ Shopify sees a lot of different retailers and the tech platform's maturity reflects that. It's a compounding gift for engineers because we get to solve problems at scale before others do. Most don't appreciate how much of an edge this provides.

5/ Also, I was blown away by the number of medium to large retailers that missed the cloud and are hastily moving away from websphere/oracle/consultant built platforms. I had weekly calls with their CTOs in panic. Another $10b of revenue will come from those merchants.

6/ Shopify is now the app layer for cloud commerce and with the investment in more APIs and extensibility (eg, checkout, and even in Shop over time... see the gift app in the Shop app as a hint). These merchants are coming to Shopify before AWS or GCP.

7/ Shopify Flow hasn't gotten a lot of coverage, but this combined with metafields, scripts and Hydrogen will allow Shopify to be used by larger merchants and be more programmable. Think Visual Basic integrated in Excel... but for commerce. Analysts completely miss this...

8/ The analysts already model this in, but Shop, SFN, and Audience builder will overtime pay off as they provide both top of the funnel and back office full coverage for the platform. Complete vertically integrated platform with APIs. Another compounding long term investment.

9/ But Amazon is just so frigging ubiquitous. They own commerce search on the internet. You can't google + click and not end up on Amazon. I just checked my last 100 orders in the Shop app and 70% are from Amazon. If they can APIfy their platform and stop ripping off brands...

10/ ... so I've invested in Amazon too. There is opportunity in making commerce an integral part of the internet and there are a million ways to do that. There will be a lot of winners.

11/ Please read everything that @benedictevans and @benthompson have written as its pretty spot on.

stratechery.com/company/shopif…
ben-evans.com/benedictevans/…

12/ 83% of the world has a smartphone and being in the business of helping businesses with the digital silk road is a great business.

13/ I have no idea how the market will value $shop over the next 10 years or even tomorrow.

But what I know is that 10 years from now there will still be a lot of businesses using Shopify.

And the Shopify product you see today will be 10x better.

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