I found the story inspiring: they bootstrapped a business, grew revenue, hired some people, and grew revenue further.
The founder created value and captured some of that value. The fact that the business can no longer acquire new customers is sad, but it’s only a small part of the story.
The founder’s 6 year journey is probably more interesting than what most people did at work over the past 6 years.
Depending on the costs, 600,000 euros a month is pretty good even if it doesn't last forever.
> If I sound bitter - I’m not. I like Shopify. I own Shopify stock. I believe they’re completely dominating the e-commerce platform space and none of their current competitors stand a chance of catching up. I know they did what’s best for their business and this is the end I expected.
I use to run our businesses webshop with my own code but having less time to keep up on it I gave up and switched to OSS CMS instead. Not Shopify though as they take (at least back when I checked) a huge chunk of money for the service. I can't remember the amount but it was something like 3%? For a medium business that's enough to hire developers to create your own! Now I use a payment provider (bank) instead and it costs nothing except the payment processor fee I already had to pay.
What? 600k euro per MONTH is like you can retire forever in one year. That would be 7mm euro. More than like what most people make during their entire life.
But of course they probably made that in revenue, not profit. Still, I bet they are in a pretty good spot to create a new product, company, etc and with a nice cash reserve if they want to retire.
Btw, according to the article they still keep their old customers, so not like the service has being completely shut down. It's just that they can't take new customers, so at some point they should have pretty low revenue, but maybe they still have a fair amount per month like 100~200k with a super reduced team.