Shopify and the Hard Thing About Easy Things

However, there’s another side to this. The pickup and delivery apps (Instacart and the like) are likely to outperform as they capture the high-margin consumer brand marketing dollars, but without the physical retail infrastructure. Building your own distribution via DTC marketing and relationships also gets more important, with Facebook and Shopify... See more

And then eBay started pitting sellers against each other, as you're trying to please buyers more. And as they went down this path of optimizing for getting rid of friction, they killed what made the place so uniquely magical. And eBay's still around, obviously, but it is not on the pulse of commerce like it used to be. So that was a model of sellin... See more

Warby Parker might have started the DTC trend, but the true awakening came with Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s interrupting the somewhat ridiculous Gillette domination of razor blades at mass/retail. Would-be entrepreneurs and VC investors mistook this unique category situation (single dominant incumbent player, ridiculously high margins, small/ligh... See more