gavinballard

Recurring order functionality is typically delegated to a third party app in Shopify land; the two biggest incumbents in this space have pretty ordinary UX so it’s likely you were looking at one of those.

More recent entrants in the market do a much better job on this front.

There is a great company here in Australia (https://greatwrap.com.au) already doing this at decent scale with potato waste. Their manufacturing costs are on par with traditional plastic wrap.

Disco Labs | Senior Backend Engineer | Melbourne, Australia or Remote within Australia | https://www.discolabs.com

We write software that powers commerce for hundreds of merchants across the world, including some of the biggest brands on the Shopify platform. Our core product is Submarine, a platform for building bespoke customer experiences around subscriptions, memberships, pre-sales, crowdfunding and more.

Our vision is to build Submarine into a core piece of the world’s global ecommerce infrastructure while helping thousands of businesses flourish along the way – and do it all as part of people-first company built on trust, innovation and excellence.

Engineers joining us at this early stage will have the opportunity to shape and build out our product from its early stages in collaboration with our engineering, product, delivery and customer support teams. We’re still a small company, so it’s a great opportunity to have an outsized impact while still knowing everyone’s name (and their pet’s name, too).

We primarily use Ruby in our stack, but language isn't the most important factor to us in finding the right candidate.

Compensation: Between AUD$152,565 to AUD$171,615 (ex super), alongside a meaningful equity stake in the business taking the total annual package to between AUD$191,821 and AUD$212,776. Lots of other benefits too such as every third Wednesday off, fully flexible working to fit work around life instead of the other way around, mentor- and mentee-ship opportunities, professional development, and more!

Apply: gavin@discolabs.com

Yes! I don’t really get the jump from using the GraphQL API to “this can only be used by small players” when it’s empirically not.

That article is absolutely bang on, We Make Websites is one of the best in the business when it comes to Shopify.

Disclaimer: my company has worked with WMW on a number of projects, including Hasbro (which last time I checked weren’t particularly “mom and pop”).

I strongly disagree that Shopify is only good for "companies with few SKUs or mom-pop kind of stores". Perhaps that's where they started out, but their Plus offering is very solid these days and provides a good platform for retailers of all sizes.

I run an agency that's highly specialised in Shopify, so obviously I have a dog in the fight, but as someone who's recently helped migrate a business with ~$6b/year in revenue to Shopify I think it's time to retire that particular misconception.

I don't think this is true - I believe it's only their merchandise store that's on Shopify. Car purchases are done through their own, custom platform.

That said, there are definitely plenty of huge merchants running on Shopify turning over hundreds of millions of dollars through the platform - we work with quite a few of them.

This is awesome, thanks for sharing!

I'll dive into the implementation a little more shortly, but just wondering how easy it is to add additional constraints (for example, that pieces need particular orientations)?

Edit: Oh, I see there's a "Part Rotations" parameter. Excellent!

Australia does this through the use of "franking credits" attached to dividends.

As someone who has built a comfortably profitable business focused purely on Shopify-related products and services, I agree that it's a great market to be in.

I understand and can relate to some of the hardships the sibling throwaway comment is referring to, but I feel you're going to face challenges whatever you do when building a business, and this is simply one that I'm comfortable with choosing.

RailsLTS (https://railslts.com/) is probably the product you're referring to in (2).

> Thanks for the excellent resources, I'll look that up.

You're welcome!

> Well, I haven't even created the paid product at this point, it's still early in the game. Just trying to get a feel for the potentials.

Sure, but you're at the top of Hacker News right now and there's zero downside (and lots of upside) in getting your project in front of a bunch of developers. Even if they don't start using it right away, maybe it will stick in their minds and then six months down the track (when you do have a paid version) they'll Google it.

Mike Perham has done a great job of turning two successful open source projects (Sidekiq and Inspeqtor) into successful businesses.

If you're interested, I recommend listening to his interviews on the ChangeLog Podcast (https://changelog.com/159/, https://changelog.com/130/, https://changelog.com/92/) where he talks about how he monetised those products.

I'm pretty sure that succeeding in this is not going to be a matter of how many "stars" your project has, but rather a function of the dollar value of the problem your software solves and how well you market the paid product. You should start that marketing now by providing a link to your project :).

Agree. The LTS releases are great, but for anything you expect to be working with on an ongoing basis I think it's worth the yearly pain of upgrading rather than a huge headache every three years.

Buffer is quite well known for this, you can view the salary of everyone in the company here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE8....

~$500/m from sales of my Bootstrap framework for Shopify themes (http://www.bootstrapforshopify.com).

Trademarks are a form of intellectual property.

It's quite real, but there are some marks which are so well-known (like Coca Cola) that they can argue that the use of the mark in any context is likely to cause consumer confusion.

If you did launch an OS called CocaCola, they would argue that there would be some confusion in the mind of the reasonable consumer as to whether there was some association with the soft drink manufacturer.

What do your clients do with the things you maintain and deploy? Does it help them make money? If so, then you're helping your clients make money.

I'm in the same position as you (running a small development/consulting shop) and it made a world of difference when we started changing the perspective of our pitch to clients from "yes, we can build a website, it will cost $X" to "yes, we can solve that problem for you, which will save/make you $Y".

I used to use Skyscanner only for intra-Europe flights, but it's quickly becoming my first and last stop when looking for cheap deals. Really fantastic service.

Absolutely.

At the risk of sounding like an acolyte, I've been reading Nathan's stuff for a while and once I decided I had something valuable to teach, I happily shelled out for Authority to get some guidance and focus on how to go about packaging and launching a course book.

I'm mid-way through the writing process and I don't regret the purchase at all.

Not sure if "largely unused" is right. I use them all the time, and have seen them in pretty common use around the place.

I sell a framework for Shopify theme development (http://bootstrapforshopify.com). It's free to use on sites that have been set up with my affiliate link.

I make about $200/m in affiliate revenue from Shopify (http://www.shopify.com/?ref=disco) <= Yes, that's an affiliate link.

It's there (the Unity / Rhythm / Balance... example)!

Great write up, really enjoyed it.

One thing that I feel I've noticed is that AirBnB doesn't actively inform you when you have or earn referral credit. I had a nice surprise the other day when I booked a place and got it (nearly) for free.

Is that a conscious decision on AirBnB's part?

Looks great, Ben! I agree with thebiglebrewski that a link to a demo site would be super helpful.

FYI, I built a similar (paid) product for Shopify Themes (http://bootstrapforshopify.com) and I have gotten quite a few queries from folks asking about a similar thing for Wordpress - there are people willing to pay for something like this, for sure, if you're interested in offering a supported version or something of that ilk.

In any case, now I have somewhere to direct folks that ask about a WP Bootstrap framework :).

Ooh, I hadn't seen Typeplate. Thanks for the tip :).

I'm not aware of any LESS equivalents (but then again, I do very little LESS work).

It may be heresy, but I haven't had any issues using both preprocessors in a single project, so I'll often just use LESS for Bootstrap-related stuff and SCSS for everything else.

To provide a counter-point to jwcooper, I've used both the original LESS and the SCSS version, and I have run into a couple of minor quirks (things like elements inside input groups not lining up correctly) with the latter.

While I've always personally preferred SCSS over LESS, when I'm starting new projects these days I tend to just use the LESS version of Bootstrap, as it makes it much easier to update, it's tested much more widely, and fixes for any issues that do crop up are available faster.

Perhaps an extra degree of verification for pledges beyond a certain value?

Author here. This is a side project I've been working on for a little while. Would really appreciate any feedback / suggestions, whether on the landing page or the product itself!