Everything You Wanted to Know About the Shopify App Ecosystem with Blair Beckwith, head of Ecommerce at Tidio and Founder at Railspur

The Conversion Show

In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen interviews Blair Beckwith, head of E-commerce at Tidio and Founder at Railspur.

Erik and Blair, with their combined experience of 20 years in the Shopify ecosystem, discuss their experiences and reflect on the changes in the Shopify app store over the past 10 years and what's yet to come in the next few.

Erik and Blair discuss:

• The need for businesses to diversify platforms to truly thrive.
• Brands aren't doing product-led growth correctly.
• Anxiety and concern among app partners regarding competition from Shopify
• Experimentation and impeccable products are key in today's dynamic ecosystem.
• Is "freemium" still a sexy term?
• Product-led growth, pricing models, and the challenges faced by developers.

Host: Erik Christiansen

Guest: Blair Beckwith

Sponsored by: 38 Proven Email Pop Up designs by Justuno

Tidio

Railspur

Transcript:

Erik 00:51

All right, folks. Today is a special day for the conversion show because one of the top questions I get asked personally is having been in the shop ecosystem for ten plus years, one of the first questions I always get asked is, hey, what's what's the check? What's the deal with the Shopify App Store? And you know, anyone who's in this world today is the show for you because you have combined 20 years exactly of Shopify App Store experience between Blair and I. I just looked it up March 19, 2013, Blair and I first emailed each other. So today's show, you saw the title, you know who's on here, Blair Beckwith, welcome to the show.

Blair 01:44

Thanks for having me. Eric, I was looking today, too, and I was I mean, I was thinking back, I think that we met in person maybe that summer in San Francisco. It was one of my first trips as a Shopify employee. Shopify was so small back then, I barely had a budget for a hotel. I remember staying in the Tenderloin and meeting up with you for lunch. You had a little office, and I think I want to call like the financial district. Was that what that area was called?

Erik 02:15

Yeah, we moved offices every year for a while and, we were probably on 2nd and Mission.

Blair 02:26

It was a little bit more like a corporate building. It was a little bit more modern. It was on a nonground floor. I remember taking an elevator. I remember walking with you to go get sandwiches down by the water.

Erik 02:28

I was trying to impress you, huh?

Blair 02:39

Yeah. Yeah, it was, man, it was a long time ago.

Erik 02:43

I do have to correct you because you said you were. It was early days as an employee, but technically, weren't you an intern?

Blair 02:53

By that point, I had graduated to full-time employment status. No. Yeah, I started. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can get into all that we can get into. Well, for sure.

Erik 03:03

It's funny. Like, I'm trying to remember back the earliest memory, and in talking about budgets, you know, Shopify. I didn't have the budget for a hotel for you. We've always just seen as always been that way if I remember correctly, in Chicago Shopify didn't have a booth forever, and same with us. You know, people ask how did you grow Justuno early on? It's like, I would get an Expo Pass under Travis’s Ecomm store, Social Skateboarding for $70. And I would hit up every single technology partner’s booth.

Blair 03:44

Yup.

Erik 03:45

And meet with the, back then it was “biz-dev” people that was the title, to try to get into their app stores.

Blair 03:52

Yep.

Erik 03:53

That was the entire game.

Blair 03:55

That is such a that's still like the greatest hack that exists. If you've got friends or anybody who run a store that will let you buy a pass under their name for some of these events, it's like, Hey, do you want to spend 50 bucks to come as a brand or do you want to spend two grand to come as a vendor? It still works.

Erik 04:15

And then you invest. You invest in stickers and you put the sticker over the badge. So we're talking about growth hacking. Let's talk about the years of growth hacking in the Shopify App Store.

Blair 04:31

Things have changed. Yeah, for sure. You mean growth hacking for apps like just, you know. Yeah. In general. Yeah. I mean.

Erik 04:37

Well, it's obviously it's different now, but, you know, I felt so bad for you for long for so many years because I knew the politics you were dealing with. You know, it's like as soon as you start hitting a certain level, it's that there's this the politics are huge. So, yeah, go back to the days when everyone was hounding you for featured positioning, how did you deal with that?

Blair 05:10

I mean, there's probably like a lot to unpack there and I should probably talk to like my therapist instead of you. Right? It's it was finally it was there were parts of it that were fun. There were parts of it that weren't as you say, kind of eventually, as a company grows, you end up in more of a political realm naturally.

Blair 05:23

And I don't mean that in a bad way. I don't think politics are inherently bad. I think they're just part of part of work as a business grows. But pre-politics, it was a lot of just flying by the seat of your pants and making sort of gut instinctual decisions. And I think that has probably bled into who I am today even, I often laugh when I talk to people and say that I'm not the most data-driven person in the world.

Blair 06:02

I sort of came up in a world of limited data In the App Store, we didn't have a data analyst that was helping me make decisions. I had access to shared data analysts, and I was the bottom priority for any reports that needed to get made because the App Store didn't make any money. Right.

Blair 06:21

But it was when I was making decisions about who was getting featured and who wasn't and who should be in the App Store and who wasn't. It was a lot of like more instinctual. Okay, Do I think that this is going to be good for brands? Is this going to be better than the solutions that already exist?

Blair 06:41

Is this like attacking the problem in a new and novel way? Right. I think that's so much a part of working at a startup and Shopify was a startup at the time, right? Is just like, how do you operate in a world with limited data? Because the data is so rarely there.

Erik 06:58

You know, let's go back to 2013 and you know, for for listeners that aren't aware, pull up LinkedIn, Blair, back with you. You'll see that you know, Shopify wasn't always what Shopify is today and what was the environment, you know, what was the team structure, how big do you recall how big Shopify was back in 2013.

Blair 07:46

And 2013? I would guess it was probably about like 150 to 200. I joined in early. I joined in early 2012. So when I joined, they had just closed on the acquisition of an agency that was like 20 people and that got us up to 100 people. So when I joined we were between 80 and 100. And at that point, we were at least doubling headcount every year.

Blair 07:54

So jumping from 2012 to 2013 to hundreds, probably reasonable. I don't know if you can hear my cat in the background. I'm sorry about that. If that's a thing, maybe we can cut that in post.

Erik 08:13

I literally just hit mute on my because I've got two dogs here and our dog walker just showed up.

Blair 08:23

And it was I mean, it was a massively different environment, You know, I think even like even like how I got started at Shopify, it was just like a thing that wouldn't be possible in later years. Right. Like, you made a comment about me being an intern but yeah, I, I became an intern before there was like a formal intern program. I became an intern because I emailed Toby and said, Hey, I hate I hate school. I want a job. Can you give me a job? I'll work for free, you know? And that was like that worked in 2012. I don't know if that would work. And like any year after that.

Erik 08:56

That's something I always respected about you when I first met you because you were still an intern status, I believe. Yeah, I could be wrong, but I myself, learned more in college through my internships than I did in college. And in 1998, I interned at Left Field, one of the first online interactive agencies. We’re taking Hotmail banners …. But everyone around me was one was a history major. Dylan, you know, the Eric like not no one studied what they were doing knowledge. And when I asked what should I do? the advice was do web design, it’s the future.

Blair 09:44

Yeah yeah.

Erik 09:54

It changes your perspective and gives you access to people. A company like Toby Jeremiah, they want to help you grow.

Blair 09:53

Yep.

Erik 09:54

Big learning lesson I think there.

Blair 09:57

Yeah. No, for sure. I'm like, you know I've got a I've got a two and a half-year-old now. I've got a I mean, I shouldn't say this because like, half my family doesn't know. A lot of my friends don't know, but I got another one on the way.

Erik 10:09

Oh, is this big announcement.

Blair 10:11

Big announcement. Please hold off. Please hold off releasing this until like at least a week after we record. So the chance to tell people in case I was listening.

Erik 10:19

You heard it here first.

Blair 10:24

I mean I can tell you right now it's going to be a boy.

Erik 10:29

As my friends call it. It's like the lottery.

Blair 10:32

Yeah. One and one. You know, it's it is nice to get the full spectrum there, but no, anyways, like we're talking about like, you know, saving up for school, like, that's a thing that you do as a young parent. You put aside some money for your kids so that they can go to school. And I mean, we're putting aside money for but I don't know what that money is going to be spent on.

Blair 10:53

Right. Whether that's university or like a coding boot camp or by then who even knows, maybe there's gonna be like prompt engineering boot camp so that she can, like, wrangle A.I. to do her bidding. Right? Like, who knows? We don't know how that money's going to be spent, but I think it's almost like it's almost a certainty that it's not going to be spent on something like a traditional college or university degree.

Blair 11:14

You know, it's cause I do think, yeah, just the spectrum of experiences now that you can gain outside of that environment is just like so incredibly wide compared to even really just like, yeah, like ten years ago when I went through.

Erik 11:27

Yeah. Experiential education is invaluable. You know, we're starting to see that, that shift here too, in terms of like vocational like, yeah, skill set. Just as Shopify announced I saw Good Morning America, They really kind of did the first interview I’ve watched about that, you know more than two people in a meeting. he was speaking about look it's all about building a company and to build it you have to be building, you know, building a house.

Erik 11:50

You need to be putting up walls, putting in wiring. You can't be meeting half the day about doing this work. And that's where meetings kind of have gotten in the way. It's an interesting time we're in right now today, and you know, what is it, August 2nd, 2023, is that we're just in ourselves as we look at the Shopify App Store and generating leads and, you know, we ourselves are have really pared down and gone back to the basics.

Erik 12:05

And it's been really interesting looking at our own business and top of the funnel and product-led growth. And for Travis and I to still be in the driver's seat. Yeah and actually kind of a fun six months getting back to the basics of what got us here and so yeah I mean talking about and you know even you know our goal today is talk you know old school Shopify App store.

Erik 12:51

But you know, can you just share real quickly where you are today? Because I was checking out your site and I do at some point want to talk product-led growth and freemium and pricing because that is critical to the Shopify App Store.

Blair 13:03

For sure. I think we can I think we can talk a lot about history. I think we can talk a lot about a lot about growth in the ecosystem today. And that's sort of the lens that I have today is sort of growth in the ecosystem. I mean, really short version of what I did post Shopify was like consulting and startups, right?

Blair 13:33

I did like a lot of consulting with SaaS vendors in the space, investors in the space, and then did a couple sort of tours of duty full-time at startups. Today I am head of eCommerce at a company called Tidio, we are a customer experience platform for SNBs. I would guess that we actually have a very similar story to Justuno, we launched in Shopify around the same time maybe a year later or so, I think it was like 2014.

Blair 13:57

We are cross-platform. We've got an absolute monster of a user base, but we are a little bit below the radar, like we're not necessarily focused on the sexiest direct consumer brands out there. Our core is just like real, meaningful businesses no matter where they are, whether that's Shopify or elsewhere. I mean, e-commerce is really big for us, but we do more than e-commerce.

Blair 14:28

We do like real estate agents, we do like regional telcos through Europe. We have a huge range of customers, but sort of as head of e-commerce, I focus largely on Shopify and I work across our marketing team, our product team, our support team as like, I mean, I'm driving some initiatives forward, but I'm also just like the voice Shopify sort of actually in a lot of these conversations and helping the product kind of on.

Erik 14:59

The Voice of Shopify.

Blair 15:00

The Voice of Shopify.

Erik 15:02

That will be the title.

Blair 14:22

Oh, no, don't do that to me. Don't do that to me. So yeah.

Erik 14:31

You know, it's crazy. Being in this ecosystem for so long. When we started, how many, how many, what? 100? 200, 300, How many were in the App Store in 2013?

Blair 14:44

But in 2012 it was like 60. So it was like 60. It was a it was a very different time.

Erik 14:52

What is the number now? Do we even know?

Blair 14:54

I think we're up nearing 10,000. If not over 10,000. And that's after a lot of pruning, right, Like Shopify has been fairly aggressive in and getting rid of apps over the years.

Erik 15:05

Let's dig into that because it's…

Blair 15:08

A spicy topic to start.

Erik 15:10

Out of respect for Blair, I held back a lot and in reaching out and anyone who runs any app store, I feel for you. But you know, us being Justuno the first on the market and watching companies just straight rip off our product. which is more of the Magento world yet a lot of overseas brands and you know I respect that we invested in a Shopify because there was that care of Blair in there to curate and make sure.

Blair 15:46

As well as I could.

Erik 15:49:17

As well as you could, you can’t do it perfectly. So in my time, I think maybe two brands I've seen publicly kicked out of the App Store. We've got reviews just like Amazon critical to how you get displayed.

Blair 16:11

Yep yep based.

Erik 16:14

How you see, what were you aware of at the time and what did you struggle with?

Blair 16:23

When it comes to sort of the curation angle specifically.

Erik 16:26

And will people.

Blair 16:27

Yeah. Cheating and people.

Erik 16:30

You know people do you tell me privy has that many reviews.

Blair 16:34

Well, it's funny, right? There's like and I will say I'm, you know, very good friends with some of the privacy folks. I do look at Ben's awesome. Ben's awesome. There's like a whole spectrum, right, when it comes to cheating versus not right. And you mentioned privilege. There's no way they got all those reviews. Standards have changed. What is cheating and what isn't cheating is sort of increasingly less black and white, if I recall correctly.

Blair 17:04

Pervy was one who collected a lot of reviews through their onboarding process. Right? This is a very common thing to do at one point when a merchant installs app, helped them get set up, ask them for a review, sometimes even word it in such a way that it was implied that leaving a review was part of the onboarding process and they could not proceed with leaving a review.

Blair 17:31

Right. This was a thing that happened for a long time. It's obviously not the best user experience. I think we struggled for a long time to figure out how to make rules that were understandable or like make rules that covered cases like that, right? It's very easy to make a rule that says you cannot buy reviews.

Blair 17:55

It gets murkier when people say, What does that mean? What does it mean? I can't buy reviews. That's like not as simple a question as it seems at first glance, right? There are situations that everybody would agree with. Like if I go on Fiverr and there's a listing that says 100 reviews for $300, that is, I think everybody agrees buying reviews.

Blair 18:20

If I offer an example. Yeah, yeah. Like if I offer a $20 Starbucks gift card to every customer that leaves a review, is that buying a review? I think like most people would agree that that is buying a review. If I, if I say leave a review in the app Store will have a link back to your store which will give you SEO benefits.

Blair 18:49

Is that buying a review? You're sort of like you're not even offering something, you're just telling them that there's a benefit to them leaving a review. I think that's the type of situation where you get like incredibly murky and it is like very hard to come up with rules that have very clear lines. You know.

Erik 19:08

One, as we fast forward to the present day when there's a sea