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You had a great run, but I think it is unfair to say that Shopify “saw what you were doing” and “hijacked” your business. Obviously a small team can move faster and Shopify could easily have internal development plans for the same solution for a long time. Kudos for the €600k MRR and your execution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worse than that—within 6 months of them starting to operate Shopify updated the ToS to make it clear that the app they already knew was a grey area was actually formally banned. They received an email that said they wouldn't be shut down right away, which the author took to mean "carry on!" Then Shopify's COO called them personally to tell them to knock it off, and they used a technicality in the phrasing of the…
Why should Shopify be allowed to decide what two other businesses (merchant and OP) willingly do just because they own the platform? No, they shouldn't have to play whack-a-mole, I'd argue they shouldn't be allowed to.
Any two businesses are welcome to transact with each other, as long as they're not using resources that belong to a third party who doesn't want to be involved in the transaction.
"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
It's remarkable when stories like this reach the top of Hacker News, but then people still do not understand why one might want to build an application on a "Can't Be Evil" platform like a crypto network. Scalability/costs/complexity aside — this is why Ethereum and similar decentralized computers are attractive.
"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
It's not even like they were making some cool thing that just happened to only run on AWS or something. It's more like: "We improved an important but comparatively small core feature of a huge, complex service built, owned, run, maintained, and constantly improved by one company. They probably had our whole business on a Trello card in their long-term project board from the moment we started. Then, out of nowhere, th…
This guy made literally (tens of?) millions of dollars in revenue from his software. Sure the gravy train stopped, but man I hope to be shortsighted like that someday.
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[flagged]
Good afternoon - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, good afternoon. Have you actually read what you're linking?
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even like they were making some cool thing that just happened to only run on AWS or something. It's more like: "We improved an important but comparatively small core feature of a huge, complex service built, owned, run, maintained, and constantly improved by one company. They probably had our whole business on a Trello card in their long-term project board from the moment we started. Then, out of nowhere, th…
>> "...but this just seems really shortsighted." This guy made literally (tens of?) millions of dollars in revenue from his software. Sure the gravy train stopped, but man I hope to be shortsighted like that someday.
While living in Bulgaria
"I built my business on top of someone else's product without any gurantee whatsoever of being able to continue in the future, and when it became valuable for them to stop me they did". Doesn't matter if you're a twitter client, a facebook app, a shopify app, a reddit client or whatever, either what you offer is negligible, or you did their research for them and now they can take over.
"I always saw Checkout X as a limited-time-window opportunity and honestly I couldn’t see a future different to what happened to us."