Hirad Motamed

Even wonder what the top brand on Shopify is doing that you're not? Lululemon sells $736,297,000 annually. Thats close a billion dollars of person-shaped cloths. What's their secret? I spent several hours analyzing and collecting as much info as I can. I found their most recent Olympics based campaign to be brilliant. You can do the same, if you study from their success. In this DTC breakdown, I will be showing you 50+ resources including: - Creatives - Top of Funnel (ToF) Meta Ads - Home Page - Olympics Campaign - Email Flows - Reengagement Campaigns - Landing Pages - Collection Page - Product Page (PDP) - Pyschological Conversion Tactics - and more... I will be giving this breakdown away for FREE for the next 24 hours. All you need to do is like this post, and comment "Lemon" or the 🍋 emoji - if you repost in your feed you will get priority.  (make sure you are connected so I can send you a message)

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Canadian Founders Shouldn’t need to leave Canada. We need to fix our system. 🍁 Last week I was catching up with a founder from Canada. She had just returned from spending 3 months in SF. She said it was insane how the entire ecosystem there is built to incubate and launch startups but then also support them for the entire lifecycle through Series A and beyond.  In Canada we’re ok at getting companies started but then we have little support beyond that and we ultimately lose them to the valley. Her suggestion was to take all the money the Canadian government is throwing at our tech sector, and instead use it to send our Founders to SF for 3 months for a Founder crash course. As a Canadian, hearing that is super depressing but also accurate. My roadmap at Developer Capital is to find and fund great Canadian companies in the pre-seed and seed round, but then get them into the US for their Series A. Why? Valuations are better, risk appetites are sharper and it will help your sales when breaking into the US market. How can we as a country support them and encourage them to stay in Canada? The Challenge: Canada’s Startup Ecosystem is Broken 💔 If we don’t want to lose our brightest founders to the US, we need to re-evaluate our approach. We need to provide the SF experience right here at home. Here’s what we can do: ⚫ Access to capital. Yeah, im sure you’ve heard this before. Pre-seed doesn’t exist in Canada. Developer Capital is trying to change that but we’re only one firm. There needs to be more deal flow sharing amongst the pre-seed and seed stage funds. This one’s on us in the VC community. We can do better. We can share our deals. We can get out in the world more and meet Founders. Rather than waiting for others to validate our own opinions we can lead rounds and be first money in. ⚫ Ecosystem support. It’s pretty nuts the difference this one makes. When a company comes out of SF they instantly have access to a network of 1000’s of early adopter companies to go out and buy their product. And the VCs who invest ask all their Portcos to take a deep look at buying these great new products. Incestuous? Yes but it works, and gets these start ups to millions in ARR fairly quickly. ⚫ The right infrastructure: Accelerators and incubators sometimes get a bad rap, but the good ones do the job of acting like a bootcamp to get your company launched, understand how to get financed, and then how to iterate until you find product market fit. Canada needs to up its game and come out with a couple of AAA accelerators. If McGill is the “Harvard of the North” why can’t Canada have a “YC of the North”? I’m not pretending to have all the solutions. This is clearly a “hard problem to solve”. But as a proud Canadian I know we can do better and I want to be able for our best companies to stay here forever (whatup Shopify). We have the talent and the ideas; now we need the infrastructure and the networks to match. Let's make Canada a powerhouse! 🍁 🚀

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Every founder raising VC needs to read this 👇 Leadership advice / coaching from someone who has been round this track themselves can save you - as a first time founder - incalculable stress / time and money.

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We've seen this so many times. Your brand/customers/product is unique, but that doesn't mean you should reinvent the wheel with your commerce/marketing stack experience. When brands choose heavily-customized tech stacks, it usually leads to high implementation & maintenance costs. But more importantly, it makes it difficult to iterate down the line. You'll be stuck with your "custom" ecom site, loyalty program, unique UX for years - while your competitors will blow past you with "out of the box" tools.

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Deep Pockets Over Party Rounds It's YC demo day in 2 weeks and fundraising around the Summer 24 batch is already at fever pitch. Many founders are experiencing a lot of demand and it's tempting to raise a bunch of money from lots of small checks. I'm biased but if you are lucky enough to have plenty of interest, I suggest you engage those with deep pockets. 1. Most Companies Need More Money. Regardless of your momentum now, most companies end up needing a little more capital to reach the next round. If you've only raised from angel investors, they most likely won't be able to add much more to their position. 2. Term Sheet Minimums. Plenty of lead investors will ask for a minimum amount to be raised for the next round to close and for them to wire the funds. If your cap table has funds who can participate at the later stages, this relieves a lot of the pressure to fundraise beyond securing the term sheet. 3. Investor Network. Most funds are measured by who invests in their companies after they do and at what price. So your fund investors are heavily incentivized to help you fundraise your next round, if they've invested a large enough check. #startups #fundraising

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"Raising VC money doesn't feel good." At the dog park a while ago, I ran into a founder that I'd coached through Techstars Toronto Accelerator. I asked him how his company was doing. He told me, and it was exactly like founders dream it up: - found PMF - raised millions - scaled the company - and no longer CEO, he sits on the board "Now, I can just walk my dog whenever I want!" "But," he said: "It was not fun." He told me that he'd been asked to speak to a group of early-stage founders and the first thing he said to them was: "Raising money doesn't feel good." (They were all shocked, he said). He talked about all the pressure, conflict and stress of being a VC-backed founder. Since then, I've heard so many similar stories, so I made a decision a few months back: Even though my niche was "tech founders raising money" for 7 years, I was no longer gonna make that my thing. I don't feel right encouraging entrepreneurs to try and create a scalable company anymore, cause I think for 99% of founders it's not even what they want. They've just been sold a dream. And the people who DO want it probably don't need my help anyway. These days, I'm focusing on: - solo business owners - mainly service providers - building a bootstrapped company - focused on sales, marketing, and profitability vs. 'venture scale' I'm continuing to support Ontario accelerators because I love helping entrepreneurs, but in my: - content - speaking - coaching - & community I'm advocating for solopreneurship, bootstrapping, and building an honest personal brand. Thanks to Prateek Sanjay, Toby Egbuna, Melissa Kwan, and others for inspiring me to do this, directly or indirectly. P.S. Yes I did use an unrelated picture of my corgi Mathilda for this. No regrets.

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A few months ago, we received a gig that took us by surprise. A request to build an online store using Shopify. We were initially puzzled. "who still uses Shopify extensively?" Lol As it turns out, many businesses do. And for good reason. Our client was seeking a robust, user-friendly e-commerce solution that could handle their growing customer base and inventory seamlessly. #shopify was the perfect fit. Its benefits were clear:   #shopify is: ✅ Ease of Use: Shopify's intuitive interface made it simple for our client to manage products and track sales without needing extensive technical knowledge. ✅ Scalability: The platform's ability to scale effortlessly meant it could grow alongside our client’s business. ✅ Customizability: With a plethora of themes and plugins, we tailored the store to perfectly match the brand's identity. ✅ Integrated Payments: Secure and varied payment options ensured a smooth checkout process for customers. With our talented experts Afribreath, we built a sleek, high-performing online store that not only met but exceeded our clients’ expectations, boosting their sales by 50%. At Afribreath, we pride ourselves on having a pool of highly skilled tech professionals ready to deliver innovative solutions tailored to your business needs. Whether it’s Shopify or another platform, our expert talent is here to elevate your online presence. Ready to transform your ideas? Let’s connect!

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Hamish McKay has run an absolute masterclass of building in public. Building in public can be controversial, especially if you’re in a market with a low barrier to entry (the Shopify App Store) and you’re fully aware that a few ankle biters are incentivized to grab some of your nascent market. However, in a platform-based ecosystem, it’s understandable and even necessary. If your whole company depends on a third-party platform to be a viable business, you have to be really careful of your primary vendor becoming your primary competitor. My hypothesis? To be taken seriously by enterprise customers, Shopify is continuing to clean up the App Store and quietly removing unmaintained or low-quality apps. I’d also bet that there are going to be a new tier of apps along the lines of, “Shopify Basics," so that new enterprise merchants don't feel like the only way to take advantage of Shopify is layering on a pile of apps. Everyone knows Amazon Basics, right? Amazon uses their treasure trove of consumer data to identify popular products and create a generic line of equal or better quality offerings. Batteries, binders, and bookshelves are all sourced, manufactured, and sold by Amazon directly. Amazon chooses the products to source and sell themselves based on data from the vendors who took the risk of selling on Amazon. We’ve all heard of the handful of large brands who refuse to sell on Amazon - or if you’re Walmart, go so far as to refuse to consider vendors who use AWS for their infrastructure. (Spoiler alert... Amazon never needed you to sell on their platform to identify market trends, they just learned about your margins.) I imagine Shopify has a few highly-paid MBAs in their strategy department combing through app store data, segmenting the data by merchant size, billing volume, or even API usage to determine which apps gain the most traction among merchants. Then, they make the decision whether to build, buy, or ignore. Hamish has set himself up to be bought by Shopify, and I bet it happens sooner rather than later. If Shopify simply rips him off, they send a very public message to the app development ecosystem that will stifle ongoing innovation. If they buy him, similar to their other acquisitions, they remind the ecosystem that you too can get rich by taking on the risk to build in this ecosystem. For us, our primary risk is the Shopify Search & Discovery app. It’s a phenomenal app and eliminating the need for apps like Boost Commerce, Fast Simon, and SearchSpring. Why pay a third-party app for functionality that Shopify offers for free? Our business risk is further amplified by sitting between not just one, but two platforms: Shopify and Google - who are actually partners! We get to watch the innovation (aka competition) happen in real time, and our success will depend upon who can build and maintain better AI-powered search algorithms for large merchants. Based on the AB tests we’ve run, our bet is on Google.

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The AI chatbot on Shopify's help site shows why the company is #1 at what they do. What I like about it: 1. The first message it sends tells you that it can connect you to the support team. Which is huge, seeing that other platforms make it feel like it's impossible to talk to a human. After some back and forth, it even shows a small button for a direct connection. 2. It saves you a lot of time browsing the endless pages around a topic. Shopify's docs have expanded a lot, and you may now have multiple pages about the same feature. (By the way, where did the scrollbar go?) 3. One of my clients thought he was talking to a human. 4. It connected me to a person quickly when I asked, and gave me the average waiting time. What I don't like about it: 1. The results may not always be accurate. However, this is usually solved with a bit of prompt engineering, or even pushing for an accurate answer. 2. There are people and businesses that get replaced. You now don't need to ask an expert. You can ask the bot and get an answer from the source. (This might be actually good if you're an expert and have a lot of clients that ask very basic questions all the time.) I also know a few groups on social media that help Shopify newbies (while selling them something), where 99% of the questions have no point of being asked there, anymore. Have you ever used the chatbot? What was your experience? #shopify #shopifyplus #ecommerce

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Would you move your startup for $10+ million benefit + 50% ish cap gains tax to the 🇺🇲? I did it before, why not again? #SiliconValley "Budget capital gains changes are a tipping point for Canadian #startups: survey." MaRS Discovery District, Communitech, Invest Ottawa survey of #Entrepreneurs and Founders. Canada is a great place to incubate companies with a huge quantity of early stage private and public capital and terrific policy support. So why go anywhere else as a founder once you have incubated in such a great place for entrepreneurs? #capitalgains, capital gains, capital gains. That's what this video is about. Thank you to Krista Jones and Christine Bomé and all my friends at MaRS DD for leading from the front. This survey gave me hope that Canada will once more be able to be an innovation champion. Please read the survey! https://lnkd.in/gqMm6yu7

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Are you ready to unlock the full potential of Product Operations? 🔍 Only 2 weeks left until Product Ops: 101 - Getting Started with Product Operations on October 30, 2024, led by Denise Tilles! With only 2 spots left, this hands-on workshop will give you practical tools to implement and scale Product Ops strategies. By the end, you'll have a clear roadmap to drive better outcomes within your organization. Secure your spot now: https://lnkd.in/exBcs2V5 🎟️ #productops101 #productoperations #productmanagement #workshop

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The 2024 Future of Work list highlights the next generation of startup companies that are revolutionizing the way we work. 3.4 billion workers show up for a job every single day. Most of those workers are unhappy, underpaid, and underappreciated. The Future of Work has now become an existential topic for companies around the world. Over the last decade, public Work Tech companies such as Workday, Atlassian, and monday.com have enabled companies to do more with less, automated repetitive tasks, and collaborated seamlessly across geographies and time zones. The companies recognized on the 2024 Future of Work 100 have raised a cumulative $30 billion in venture capital financing, with a total valuation over $140 billion. The ranking is represented by companies across 17 countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the USA. Airtable, a low-code platform for building collaborative apps, tops the 2024 list. The 2024 Future of Work 100 honorees showcase the diversity of WorkTech companies and highlight strong market capitalization, increased efficient growth, and a newfound focus on profitability. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as an important theme with 93% of the recognized companies have implemented AI capabilities across their product lines. Business Wire #futureofwork #worktech #collaboration #startups #venturecapital Acadian Ventures

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3. Sidekick We all already know and use AI like Chatgpt, but Shopify's Sidekick is like a Chatgpt trained on your own data. That's like the difference between a CEO and a (very smart) janitor. Also, Sidekick has access to your store, so it can make changes to it (like creating a customer segment or discount).

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Convoy v24.4.1 is out 🎉 Lots of features I'm excited about - You can now stream, transform, and send webhooks directly from our Message Broker sources (Kafka, etc.). Previously, you needed to transform the event first before publishing it on the topic Convoy reads from. Now, you can plug Convoy directly into your CDC pipeline! h/t to Matt Ober for being beta testers! - A community member ( Nitzan Goldfeder) contributed a RabbitMQ source! This is exactly why we like open-source! - We re-implemented our rate limiter to work on PostgreSQL (this is part of our continuous effort to phase out Redis, Long-Live PostgreSQL) And a lot more bug fixes. :) Link to the full post in the comments!

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Try more things. Fail more often. Learn faster. Burn brighter. Plant more gardens. Launch more startups. Make more babies. Build more community. Help others do the same. This is effective opportunism. Pronoia & Purpose. E/opp is a better meme than Hiis. Just as inspiring, but more secular. Gender neutral vs. male-coded. More conjectural, less prophetic. E/opp is building & growing your mind & body. Building & growing startups. Building & growing families & communities. Effective Opportunism.

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Canada's Brain Drain is undeniable! 🌍 Why are ambitious Canadian startup founders flocking to the US? 𝗟𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 The US economy is 12.5x larger but its VC industry is 30x larger. In 2023, US VC deals were $150-200 billion while Canada was ~$6 billion. 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗹𝘆 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 In the US, speed and risk-taking reign supreme. It's a dynamic environment where ideas rapidly transform into reality, unlike the more cautious pace in Canada. 𝗕𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 With an economy 12.5x the size of Canada’s, the US offers unprecedented reach and potential for growth. 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗮𝘅𝗲𝘀 Although not the main factor, higher taxes in Canada add to the challenges. Recent hikes in capital gains taxes have not helped. For Canada to thrive in the innovation economy, it's time to tackle these hurdles head-on. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  Excerpt from a discussion I had with Mark Nashman. Link to the full video in the comments. #startups #venturecapital #investing #Canada #culture

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Contrary to what you might expect, the more software you buy for your business, the more gaps you'll have. Putting Shopify at the core of your tech stack is a good start. I'm seeing software vendors get more serious about integrations and delivering working solutions Versus just providing 'their bit'. Salespeople who can solve the tech stack problem rather than sell someone the specialist tool have the upper hand if the default starting position is that we already have too much disconnected tech. Centralising and integrating your master data is the key. Start with your product data: Products / Variants/SKUs Barcodes Product Names Fabric / Material Composition Colours HS Codes Suppliers Country of Origin Build out from there. Your supplier database and onboarding flow are good to get after next 👀 #techstacks #ecommerce #paradoxofchoice

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Shopify showed the world that simplifying something complex can generate $8B in annual revenue. Here’s how I’m bringing that lesson to the company I co-founded: When Shopify started, they were turned down by almost all VCs - The market was deemed way too small.    What those VCs missed - Shopify was creating its own market. The VCs didn’t see this because they were only looking at existing markets. Now, Shopify is closing in on $8B annual revenue. “Market sizing gets much larger as friction is removed.” Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify. Because taking something complex, making it simple, and inviting new players into the e-commerce space. Expanding the market size… This is essentially what we’re trying to do with private market investing at Stableton. Private companies that have reached the growth equity or pre-IPO phase are typically fast-growing, well-funded, often profitable and can provide strong returns to investors. The problem: It is out of reach for most investors, including banks and wealth managers. And even here, most of them typically only participate in primary funding rounds. The only way to invest is by participating in secondary transactions, which are complex deals many investors are unaware of. We’re taking this complex problem and making it simple. We’ve built a portfolio of the Top 20 pre-IPO tech companies by making 50-100 secondary transactions per year. As the go-to partner for pre-IPO investing, we can enable financial firms and their end clients to participate and subscribe to this portfolio, much like an ETF. This way, they get exposure to some of the most attractive private assets without ever engaging in a single secondary trade. From complex to simple. Want to learn more? Check out Stableton’s Navigator newsletter for the latest investing trends and insights: https://lnkd.in/eBE5GxAK #secondaries #innovation #growthequity

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I was listening to this episode of Lenny Rachitsky's Podcast (https://apple.co/3YIIyDI) when the guest, Archie Abrams, referenced Shopify's 100-year perspective. I love this, which is a large part of why Shopify has succeeded. Shopify's 100-year perspective got me thinking about what if more of us had a 100-year perspective? How might we live our lives and conduct our businesses differently if we played a longer game? Would we take more risks, invest in longer-term value, be less stressed about next week, and more? The pushback would be that most people don't live to be 100 (the life expectancy worldwide in 2022 was 72 years), and most organizations don't make it a few years, let alone a century. But even if it is unlikely that you or an organization you lead will be around for 100 years, what's the harm in conducting yourself like you and it will be? The answer, I believe, is there isn't any. Having a long-term perspective, longer than what most people or organizations would think of as long-term, only has upside. It gets us out of reactionary, impulsive thinking and action. FOMO becomes irrelevant. Fads and trends fade into the background and get chased by others as you stay focused on building something long-lasting. A 100-year perspective would change a lot of our societal, political, and economic planning, policy, and discord, too. We're all driven by KPIs, OKRs, and other metrics that define our short-term success or failure. Make no mistake: You have to succeed in the short term to have a chance at a 100-year run, but there is probably a lot of opportunity for most of us to reverse our perspective from being short-term driven to long-term, which would benefit us and our organizations. Since they are outliers, we marvel at centurions' longevity and secrets to living a long life. Organizations celebrate anniversaries and longevity with parties, commemorative items, and honorary logos. We're turning 30 in 2025 at Transform Labs and will indeed celebrate the milestone. Still, we're still far from a finish line when you think about it compared to 100 or another 100. In many respects, we're just getting started and building on a legacy that will continue for another 70+ years. We all have an opportunity to live and lead with a 100-year perspective. If we or our organizations don't make it that long, so be it, but what if we do or can facilitate it?

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