⚡ How an Independent Snowboard Shop Became the Biggest e-Commerce Business on the Planet

Morning Innovators ⚡ This week (in less than 5 minutes!) we’ll explore…

🥳 The best funding opportunities, events and jobs in the start-up world
📰 The biggest news stories in the start-up world
💼 How an independent snowboard shop became the biggest e-Commerce business on the planet
🥇 How underutilised packaging space is the most genius marketing hack of 2024
👀 Our 3 favourite start-ups to keep an eye on this week
🎨 A tool that helps you easily create beautiful websites

✨ Last weeks most clicked link was this opportunity with the Stelios Foundation to win up to £150k to invest in your business.

Happy hustling,
Rich & Gary

First up, a quick reminder that our first start-up social event is coming round quickly. On March 21st in Cardiff, enjoy fun events, music, drinks, plus the founder of Ogi talking about all the hurdles they faced in their early days. Trust us when we say you don’t want to miss this!

There’s only a few tickets left so sign up now to guarantee a space before all the spaces are gone.

Can’t wait to see you there!

🎤 Events/Opportunities

🌳 Sequoia are currently accepting applications from pre-seed and seed stage companies for their Arc spring cohort. See what it takes to find product-market fit and build a company for the next decade.

🦅 Applications have just opened for Eagle Labs funding readiness programme. The programme is designed to help demystify funding and to provide founders with the skills and knowledge they need to fund their business growth.

🤑 Looking for investment? Angel investor Alex Macdonald is currently offering a $20k investment in one of the top 10 scoring start-ups on PitchLeague AI at the end of February.

💼 Job opportunities

🔒 Founder's Associate, Secfix
📝 Associate Product Manager, Goodnotes
😁 Client Growth Marketing Manager, Vivup

🪙 Fintech Wales have appointed their new CEO - former Founders Factory strategist Sarah Kocianski. UKTN

🧠 Despite interest soaring, overall investment into UK-based AI companies halved during 2023, compared to 2022. UKTN

🏦 Challenger bank Monzo is reportedly close to a new funding round that would value the FinTech at around £4bn. UKTN

✈️ The race is on as big companies and start-ups fight to create a stratospheric plane, that would soar 60-80k feet above Earth and could revolutionise wifi, as well as environmental and border monitoring. Sifted

Join the Fratelli Family: Where E-Commerce Growth Knows No Bounds!

Elevate your start-up with Fratelli, the digital growth powerhouse for e-commerce brands. Since 2013, we've been more than an ad agency; we're your family in the digital space. Our focus? Skyrocketing transactions with our expertise in Paid Ads, SEO, E-Com Management, and Web Design.

Say goodbye to high acquisition costs and hello to growth, as we make scaling effortless and enjoyable. With glowing testimonials from industry leaders, our proven track record assures you're in capable hands. Ready for tangible results? Join the pack at Fratelli and let’s achieve greatness together.

🏂 From Snowboards to Software: The Unlikely Journey of Shopify's Rise to E-commerce Dominance

In the early 2000s, the digital landscape was brimming with potential, yet for many aspiring entrepreneurs, the dream of launching an online business was often thwarted by the cumbersome and inadequate e-commerce solutions available at the time. This was the challenge faced by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake, three friends united by their passion for snowboarding and a shared ambition to carve out a niche in the online retail space. Their venture began in Ottawa, Canada, with the establishment of Snowdevil, an online store dedicated to snowboarding enthusiasts. However, the trio quickly encountered the limitations of existing e-commerce platforms, which were either too rudimentary or excessively complex for small to medium-sized businesses.

The turning point for these young entrepreneurs came when Lütke, leveraging his background in software engineering, decided to take matters into his own hands. Dissatisfied with platforms like Yahoo Stores, which catered to larger businesses with substantial budgets, Lütke sought a solution that was not just functional but also accessible to entrepreneurs like themselves. This quest led him to discover Ruby on Rails, a then-emerging open-source web application framework that promised a more streamlined approach to web development. The framework's philosophy of "Don't Repeat Yourself" resonated with Lütke, who saw it as the perfect foundation for building a more intuitive and user-friendly e-commerce platform.

As Lütke embarked on this ambitious project, he became an active contributor to the Ruby on Rails community. His involvement not only allowed him to refine his vision for a new e-commerce solution but also positioned Snowdevil as a real-life application of the framework, showcasing its potential for building complex web applications. This exposure was instrumental in attracting the attention of other online retailers within the community, who were intrigued by Snowdevil's functionality and expressed interest in adopting the platform for their own businesses.

Recognising the broader demand for a more adaptable and user-friendly e-commerce platform, Lütke, Weinand, and Lake made the pivotal decision to pivot from selling snowboards to providing a platform that would empower other entrepreneurs to launch and manage their online stores. This marked the birth of Shopify, a platform designed from the ground up to democratise e-commerce and make it accessible to a wider audience.

In the early days, Shopify's growth was largely organic, fuelled by word of mouth within the Ruby on Rails community and the burgeoning network of web designers and developers attracted to the platform's potential. The team's strategic decision to engage with the design community further accelerated this growth. By running monthly theme competitions and featuring winning designers on their platform, Shopify not only enriched its ecosystem with a diverse range of store templates but also cultivated a loyal base of advocates who were instrumental in spreading the word about Shopify's capabilities.

As Shopify's user base expanded, the team continued to iterate on the platform, incorporating feedback from early adopters to enhance its features and usability. This customer-centric approach was a key factor in Shopify's ability to attract a critical mass of users. However, the journey was not without its challenges. The initial freemium model, while effective in attracting users, was not sustainable in the long run. The decision to transition to a subscription-based model, with tiered pricing to accommodate businesses of different sizes, was a crucial step in ensuring Shopify's long-term viability. This shift not only provided the company with a more predictable revenue stream but also aligned Shopify's success with that of its users, as the platform became more invested in helping merchants grow their businesses.

Shopify's relentless focus on simplifying e-commerce, coupled with its grassroots marketing efforts and commitment to community engagement, laid the foundation for what would become one of the most successful e-commerce platforms in the world.

For aspiring entrepreneurs and start-up founders, Shopify's early journey offers invaluable lessons in the importance of agility, customer empathy, and the strategic use of community engagement to fuel organic growth. As we reflect on Shopify's path from a fledgling online snowboarding store to a global e-commerce powerhouse, the question for today's innovators remains: What unmet needs exist in your industry, and how can you leverage your unique insights and community to create a solution that resonates with users and stands the test of time?

We’ve shown you a lot of very cost effective ways to get your company or product in front of customers very creatively, but this is the first one we’ve shown that you can actually make money from. In Liquid Death’s case, a lot of money.

Liquid Death are absolute marketing legends, but they’re set to make $100,000s by selling their underutilised packaging space.

When looking at the audience of the Super Bowl, and the price of the Super Bowl ads, Liquid Death realised that their packages of canned water reach over 200,000,000 people with all of the stores they’re in - double the Super Bowl!

So, they’ve decided to head to eBay to auction off the bottom of their packaging, which is usually completely plain, with the promise that whoever wins can advertise their business on there.

This stunt has gone completely viral, with the most recent highest bid being around $100,000. This has given Liquid Death a ridiculous amount of exposure, and nice income on the side.

Could you sell any underutilised space on your packaging?

This week we’re trialling something different. Each week we’ll now be featuring one start-up we love. We’d love this to come from community recommendations, so if you know a start-up doing something awesome who deserves a shout-out, please reply to this email. 

 🏨 Rebookify is a service designed to save users money on hotel bookings. By forwarding their booking confirmation to Rebookify, the platform monitors for price drops and notifies the user when the same room is available at a lower price. This allows for easy rebooking at the reduced rate. Rebookify operates at no cost to the user, generating revenue through affiliate programs and advertisements, offering a hassle-free way to ensure the best deal on hotel stays.

Each week we’ll be highlighting our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our innovator community have recommended.

Kittl is a creative platform designed to empower users with AI-powered design tools for a wide range of projects like logos, posters, t-shirts, and more. It offers a vast library of templates, illustrations, fonts, and photos, making design accessible to both novices and professionals. With features like AI vector and image generators, text effects, and magic recolouring, Kittl streamlines the design process, allowing users to bring their ideas to life effortlessly, directly from their browser, without any downloads required.

Next week we’ll be looking at how a company that almost went bankrupt, ended up developing one of the most popular games of the last decade, becoming a household name globally, along with showing you more cool start-ups, funding opportunities, and plenty of awesome tips, tricks and tools.

P.S. Connect with us on LinkedIn…