I head up customer experience at Re:amaze and we work with merchants on Shopify, Bigcommerce, and WooCommerce. These alternatives all have something to offer that is unique to a particular merchant's business preference. Shopify is much easier to set up and offers more direct access to marketplaces. Bigcommerce is a bit more powerful for high volume, high GMV businesses looking for headless commerce. WooCommerce is, of course, low cost and works with WordPress and that's a huge plus for many merchants. These are very basic differences but merchants should look at every platform to see which one suits them best.
My brother in law bought one the moment he saw one. Returned it for a different color. Now he has 9. It's been 4 days. These things are definitely a phenomenon and the eCommerce world is going crazy.
There needs to be a right balance between bot and human. Personally, I think bots are a replacement for UI, not a replacement for real conversations. I want to use a bot when I activate a credit card for example. It's a glorified "activate" button in lieu of actual UI, but if I have fraud on my card, I want to talk to a human, because I want a conversation, not a substitute for a series of UI decisions. We're on track for developing an "assistant" bot of our own here at Reamaze. Our starting point for AI at Reamaze is a bot for assisting agents with responses, not customers.
A tech lead is not supposed to be a mediator. He/she is supposed to lead and that means understanding the business, the product, and the priorities enough to communicate as simply and as directly as possible. It's not about whether or not you need a "tech lead", it's about whether or not you have anybody, and I mean anybody, that can fulfill those tasks. It might very well be two people, or a team that can drive specific targets, doesn't matter. A "tech lead" is just a title that further complicates matters.
There's a disconnect between founders who want to build a startup and founders who want to build a business. They think the two are the same but they're really not and this study clearly shows that. There are situations where startups turn into businesses but I'd rather build a profitable business for myself from the start and our team than to build a startup purely focused on "growth".
I am very disconnected from the "startup" world, and something in your comment has me asking: What is the difference between a startup and a business? To me, they ought to be one in the same...
a startup is a company designed to scale very quickly
Steve Blank believes a startup is determined by the search of a business model. If you have a business model, then you have a small or new company, not a startup.
Another distinction worth making, almost its own axis really, is the difference between "a tech business" and "a business that uses tech".
Companies like Cisco, Facebook, Apple, Google, Canonical, and so forth are companies that are tech companies--without their technology, they wouldn't be in business at all. They provide a service or product that is IP in its own right.
Companies like Chipotle, Subway, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and so forth are companies that use tech to achieve economies of scale and growth that wouldn't be as easy otherwise but could still be done. You can imagine a way of making something that to the user is substantially like the Uber today without a complicated backend, even just using call centers and massive dispatch. The key part of their business is part-time contractor drivers, which is a business and not tech innovation.
It's easy to assume that all startups are tech startups, but that's not quite true and it also can limit and slow developing a good business model.
But then, can't you make the same analogy for early stage Google--basically, a big marketing firm that manually places ads in the yellow pages? Similarly, Facebook can also be executed over a phone system ("Press 1 to hear your friends' updates, press 2 to post an update...")
I'm not sure there's such a strong distinction between a tech business and a business that uses tech nowadays.
Google's core beginning was PageRank (under license from Stanford), without which it would've been no better than similar offerings at the time. Additionally, their approach to setting up their equipment and making use of cheap gear and managing said cheap gear probably gave them a leg up...something they still do today at scale. So, no, you can't really make that analogy.
Facebook was a tech company specifically, and not a company using tech, because the entire product was devoted to rapidly filling social profiles and spinning up the microsites that were user accounts, mining those accounts for information, and then integrating as a platform for advertisers and game developers. None of that tech is really stuff they could've outsourced and still had a business--they couldn't have just white-labeled MySpace for example and gotten away with it.
It's the difference in preference between e.g. $500k nearly sure profit versus a tiny chance of $100M profit but a most likely result of losing it all. For a "normal" business, the first one is preferable; a startup is the condition where the first result is considered unacceptable and the investors are there for the second possibility only - go big or go home.
It means quite different cultures, quite different "correct answers" to similar situations, and has mostly opposite requirements for many business factors and people involved.
The second job of a startup CEO is actually everything outside of building a product. Everything from hiring the right team, to making sure people are happy, to finding sales/distribution channels, marketing channels. It's not a question of what else the CEO should be doing but a question more of how long he/she should be doing those things.
A lot of this has to do with experience and whether or not you're trying to fulfill expectations (VCs, etc). You really don't know when a product will become loved no matter how much you iterate and it's also impossible to know for sure how long you need to "slog" it out. Some products become loved far earlier than others. The best thing to do as a founder is to drive at your vision hard as quickly as possible, acquire users to test multiple theories and gather feedback, and iterate when there are signs. Even then, not all iterations or pivots are created equal. There are many different ways to grow a business (many of which veer from traditional silicon valley values) and it's up to the founder to stick to his/her own values and to what makes sense at the time. I don't think there's a single founder out there who wants to build just a mediocre product. This is why product-market fit should be the primary focus for any growing business.
