From Hospital Bed To Micro-Multinational: The Birth of Shopify Ninjas

I’ve never shared how Shopify Ninjas was started until now, but there is a backstory. This post describes it.

Rewind to March of 2011.

I was lying in a hospital bed, in a semi-darkened room. It was 3 am, and my temporary roommates were all asleep. I was dialed up on painkillers after a minor shoulder surgery and felt a rush of ideas coming into my head. Sleeping was impossible, so I found a piece of paper and a pen, and started furiously writing ideas down. I even sent some emails from my phone (don’t tell the nurses!) asking my friends for suggestions on business names.

I’d been working with Shopify for quite a while already, and started to develop some good skills using it to build solid, good-looking, functional stores pretty quickly. My initial thought was: what if I built an online video course to show people how to build a store quickly and easily, taking the pain out of the learning process?

Within an hour, I’d noted down all of the course contents, steps, and modules. After some further thinking, I managed to drift off to sleep.

That hospital-bed-written list eventually became an online course (Shopify Course), which has since been retired in favor of other projects — but the course itself was absolutely the spearhead for what has now become a full-time business with several team members working across 3 continents, and serving customers in over 20 countries.

I look back on this as a somewhat bizarre moment — why didn’t I start earlier? — but I’m also glad I had the time, and the prompt, to start on a new journey.

This was a nice reflection at the end of 2014 on how far we’ve come since then, becoming a micro-multinational, helping businesses 10x their revenue, working on really fun projects and building unique tools for Shopify Store owners. Looking forward to 2015 and more big things to come!

Thank you for keeping up to date with our Shopify Insider Blog @ Blackbelt Commerce,  we have many other valuable and informative posts that will help you to continue to optimize your website:  here are our top recommendations; You Can Now Add Your Logo and Color Scheme, selling and social media: the facts, all you need to know to start an e-commerce store, and What We Learned From Our Rebrand. We can also help you with many other services. You can learn all about who are the Shopify Experts at Blackbelt Commerce.

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Image credit: g Tarded