Shopify Started as a Snowboard Shop

In 2004, German programmer Tobias Lütke, who had moved to Ottawa, Canada, decided to sell snowboards online with his friends. He tried the e-commerce platforms of the time, but none of them met his needs: they were complicated, inconvenient, and limited.

Being a programmer, Lütke decided not to settle but to build his own platform using the Ruby on Rails framework, which had only recently appeared. His store was called Snowdevil.

Soon one important thing became clear: the most valuable asset was not the snowboards, but the tool used to sell them. If Lütke needed a convenient online store, thousands of other businesses needed one too. In 2006, the platform was launched as Shopify, and in 2015 the company went public on the stock exchange.

Today, millions of businesses run on Shopify in almost every country in the world, from small handmade-goods shops to global brands. And Shopify specialists, those who build and manage stores, are among the most in-demand professionals in the international freelance market.

The lesson from this story: sometimes, while solving your own problem, you create something far more valuable than your original idea.