I’m a co-founder of Diamond Candles, an e-commerce company that sells eco-friendly soy candles with a little twist – each has a ring inside worth at least $10 but up to $100, $1,000, or even $5,000.
My team and I turned it into a $12 million business in 12 months with a Shopify stock theme, a crowdsourced logo, a Paypal account, and a little social network called Facebook (our page has 1,047,120 fans as of this moment).
Our insane growth on Facebook started with the fact that… Continue Reading
Had a great time chatting with Laura Moreno at The Growth Hacking Podcast recently. You can listen via the embed here below or feel free to subscribe to Laura’s podcast on iTunes so you can catch other great interviews as they come out. Continue Reading
When I reflect back on the entrepreneurs I was inspired by they all had one unique quality about them, they were fundamentally the best people in the world to solve those problems and had a unique authenticity. – Tristan Walker
There has been a huge growth of all new ad networks based around content personalization and recommendation on publishers websites large and small like:
Several of the big winners powering these new native ad formats include companies like:
These ads are typified by a catchy visual thumbnail and a catchy title begging you to click on the piece of ‘recommended content’.
It is the ‘buzzfeed-ification’ of content and the advent of every copywriting headline technique known to man on every single blog post on the entire internet.
For better or for worse it is here. Why? Because I click the ads and you click the ads. We can’t help ourselves. Continue Reading
My answer to this question was originally posted in the Clarity.fm Q & A area. I shared my answer and wanted to repost here. Please excuse grammar or typos accordingly :-)
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Shopify is best use case for $0 to $1M ish, depending on product line, how many transactions that makes up, and if their are some custom things that are not possible on Shopify that realistically lead to huge gains that would cover more costs of a custom solution with something like Magento.
I recommend Shopify to everyone starting out.
That’s what we used at Diamond Candles up until about a $5M run rate. We were/are growing quickly so we hit a point where payoff of customizing checkout flow, add of social sign on, etc. that could not be done because of Shopify, would cover and surpass costs of a more custom option.
Best to think about this simplistic example.
Take a look at usage #’s for market share size from independent third party analytics tools from Builtwith:
http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Shopify/Market-Share
http://trends.builtwith.com/shop
http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/hosted-solution
Just because something is found on the web more isn’t the full picture.
Ex: I could make a blogging platform and have a bunch of scripts and bots install it on millions of domains and I would have majority of the market for blogging platforms (ya that would take a while and isn’t a realistic scenario but you can get the point). Continue Reading
