This Simple Personal Branding System Built Shopify’s #1 Leader

Welcome aboard everybody. Harley and I did an interview a year or so ago. He's the president of Shopify in case you didn't know. And what I love about him is he's not just your typical president, CEO, boring corporate, uh, can't speak entrepreneurship.

Introduction.

Wow.

Uh, this guy's got entrepreneurship in his DNA and, uh, I thought, hey, let's have him back and share with you guys as well. And Harley, so, you know, this is my group. It's called Movement Makers. Everybody here is an entrepreneur. They're building their business. They are trying to use content to grow their company and obviously go out and change the world. And, uh, I think I'll ask you a couple questions to kick us off and then hop into some Q&A. How's that sound, Harley?

Sounds great to me. Love it. I am a card-carrying entrepreneur. I self-identify as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is everything to me right now. Uh, has been since I was 13 years old. The company that I built with Shopify is the entrepreneurship company. So you are my people. I'm really, really glad to be here.

So let's start with this. So start with the personal brand, cuz a lot of people in your position, they don't have a personal brand. They don't think it's important. Maybe they're just too afraid to get on shows and, and talk about things. Everything is super kind of PR bulletproof before you can get to, get to the president. Meanwhile, you're here making content, growing your brand, going on people's podcasts, reaching out, say, hey, I'd love to help support. What's, what was the reason behind building the Harley brand? And maybe what lessons have you learned along the way?

This amazing new board member on the Shopify board named Lulu, who I think is one of the greatest comms person on the planet. And, um, she talks about that nobody wants to follow a corporate brand anymore, that everything is now personal. I believe that. Um, so one is I think that any of you that are running a company, nobody wants to follow your brand account. They want to follow you. They want to follow the person behind the company, behind the product. I think that is, that is not necessarily some, you know, mind-blowing revelation, but I think it's, it's absolutely the case right now. That's the first thing. The second thing is, um, there's this great, do you guys know the company Carhartt? They make like work gear, work, like, person gear stuff. But Carhartt has this great tagline that everybody wants to wear Carhartt until it's time to wear— to do Carhartt, uh, basically. Like, everyone wants to wear, like, work, like, gear, but, like, nobody wants to do the work. Um, you know, Shopify is the entrepreneurship company, and you— it's nice to say you want to be the entrepreneurship company. It's nice to say that you are deeply steeped in the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurs, that you were deeply empathetic to what entrepreneurs require. but like you yourself need to actually also be an entrepreneur. Shopify is about 8,000 people right now that work at Shopify. And for the most part, the people that work at Shopify are also entrepreneurs. I lead Shopify. I also run a, a small Shopify store called Firebelly Tea. And so I think the second, so the second thing I would say is that, is that, you know, if your brand stands for something, you as the principal, you know, person behind the brand, you also need to stand for that exact same thing. This idea of having like this work-life separation I think is, is, is completely dated. There was like this version of business operations in the '50s and '60s and maybe even, you know, '70s and '80s that sort of changed in the last 20 years, which is that everything is now sort of combined, that we aren't— there's no separation between your work persona and your personal persona. And so I think that, um, you know, Bezos talks about work-life harmony from a time perspective. I think from a brand perspective, it's all kind of getting mixed as well. And when you think about the brands that you all love, that you wear, I'm wearing a James Purse t-shirt today. I know James Purse, the man, not just the brand. James deeply cares about making one of the best black t-shirts. What do you think about Kith, which are those sneakers right there? Ronnie Fieg, who created, you know, Kith, deeply believes in what he is building. And so I think that in 2025, you cannot build a great company when you yourself, as the principal of that company, are not steeped in that mission and that brand itself. The other thing that's really neat is that we all get to go direct now. We all— we don't need to wait to be on CNBC or some broadcast television, you know, show to talk about our business. We have cameras, we have microphones, we have social media, we have all these different venues of which to distribute any content we want. So like, you don't have to ask for permission anymore to put yourself out there. You have to do so. But I posted something on X. Yesterday that, um, this is like a couple hundred thousand views on it now. It was kind of a throwaway comment, but it seemed to resonate, which is that most people want to be quote unquote cool, but actually you have to kind of go through this cringe period to go from like, you know, vision to success. And I don't really love the term cringe. Uh, my, my, my 8-year-old daughter often refers to me as being cringy in some of the things that I do, but there is a little bit of like, you, you gotta kind of put yourself out there. There's a little bit of cringe that comes along with that. But the end result of it is that you get to build legendary generational products, businesses, and brands today that frankly, 20, 30 years ago, you know, the people with the most money were able to do so. And now anybody can do it. I love that.

How did you get over the cringe part of the early Harley brand, getting on podcasts and doing interviews?

Doing a lot of cringey things growing up, doing a lot of things that, you know, I was— I think Evan, you know this, but when I was 13, I wanted to be a DJ. Nobody would hire me, so I started my own DJ company and I DJ'd like 500 weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs and all types of corporate events. There was a cringeness involved in it. I was showing up to these weddings at 15 years old, DJing these weddings, and there was, you know, but my goal was I want to build, I want to be a DJ. I want to be, I want to, you know, I wanted to build a DJ company. When I was 17, I was at McGill University here in Montreal. I'd moved from South Florida to Canada to go to college. My parents didn't have any money, so McGill was very inexpensive here in Canada. So that's how I ended up in Canada. And I started selling t-shirts to universities, and I showed up and with my catalog and my, my samples of t-shirts and started selling t-shirts. There's a cringe and there's a cringiness involved in this stuff. I just, I don't care about this short-term being uncomfortable. I think, you know, getting really, really comfortable with being uncomfortable is this incredible unlock for entrepreneurship. And there are millions of stores on Shopify. Shopify is about 12% of US e-commerce. Uh, the only checkout larger than Shopify would be Amazon. So we see a lot of things. And if you look at the top merchants and brands on Shopify, you know, a lot of them, um, I've watched a lot, I've watched a lot of them build. Ben Francis from Gymshark, uh, you know, Trina from Figs. I've watched them have to go through some of the cringy stuff where they turn their camera on them and say, it's Ben, I'm building this, this t-shirt company called Gymshark. I think it's gonna be big one day. And, and then you get this ping, the signal back that it's working. And all of a sudden you don't really look at it like cringe anymore. You look at it like part of the process of building.

How are you thinking through building the Harley brand now? What, what are you working on? What's important?

I think you have to be incredibly specific about what you care about, what your priorities are. My priorities are, other than my, my wife and my daughters, my priorities are Shopify first and foremost. I feel a deep responsibility to, you know, help lead this company. We are, other than the Royal Bank, we are the largest company in Canada, not largest tech company, other than the bank, we are the largest company in the country. There are millions of entrepreneurs that rely on us. There's, you know, 16,000 app developers that have built their businesses on us as well. That is a huge priority. And then the things that I deeply care about, my sort of icky guy, which, you know, is for me all about entrepreneurship. So on weekends, I don't watch sports on Sundays, A lot of people do. I have a podcast called Big Shot where I'm creating an archive of the greatest Jewish entrepreneurs of the last half century. People like Linda Resnick, who created Fiji Water, and people like Mike Milken or Izzy Sharp, who built the Four Seasons Hotel Company and brand. So, and then the rest of it I say no to because I don't have time for it as well. So if you look at, you know, what I'm posting on YouTube with Big Shot versus what I'm posting on Instagram with my daughters, The topics are, you know, the subjects are different, obviously, you know, on YouTube, it's these people that I'm interviewing for the podcast. On Instagram, it's me skiing with my daughters. But there is a certain similar— there's a string that ties it all together, which is like, these are things I care about. I care about being a really good dad. I care about entrepreneurs. I care about exploring, you know, the history of entrepreneurship and these legendary entrepreneurs. With Shopify, I want to make entrepreneurship way more accessible. So I choose to do things that I care about. You know, Evan, you and I were talking about me coming on, uh, me coming on here a couple weeks ago. I think we were communicating on Instagram DM and you told me a little bit what we're doing here with, with Movie Makers. And I was like, this seems like I should do this. Um, I— Rich Roll, uh, who's one of the biggest podcasts on the planet, had reached out to say he wants to have me on the Rich Roll Podcast. And I was like, I don't really know if that works out. It would've been amazing exposure for me, but what do I know about, you know, wellness and fitness and stuff? And he is like, actually, I wanna connect You know, how, uh, something that I did was 29/29, which is this Everest challenge. Um, he's like, I want to connect that to your entrepreneurial journey. And so he sort of convinced me that actually, no, it does make sense. But otherwise I wouldn't have done it. I would have said no to it because the opportunity cost me going on someone's show or podcast that doesn't make sense to me means I can't do this, which, you know, right now there's almost 100 people on here, 63 people on here who's You know, who, who are building businesses. Those are the people that I really care about.

I love it. And, and when you go to your Instagram bio, it says President of Shopify, but then also creator for your podcast, which is super weird and you're not gonna see for any other president of a, of a major corporation. Um, talk about—

that's me. That's, that's exactly what, like, I have a bunch of really good mentors and we can talk about mentorship, but one of the mentors that I've been incredibly fortunate to have in my life for almost a decade, is Seth Godin, one of the greatest marketers and branding experts on the planet, great visionary. Um, Seth always, you know, I, I went to Seth years ago to say, um, I, I want to, I want to create more content. I want to create, you know, I want to have more exposure for me, for Shopify. This is like pre-IPO. This is like 2013 when I first started talking to Seth. And I remember him talking about this idea of permission. He, he, he talks about permission-based marketing, but like permission in general, that historically you needed permission to do things, to start a company, to go on television, to put out a piece, a message or a piece of content to do anything was permission-based. And the easiest way to get permission was with capital, with money. So if you had money, you can actually do a lot of stuff. Capital was the main ingredient. The major shift that has happened in the last 10 years or so is that you don't need permission for anything anymore. And I think back to the earlier point about being okay with cringe is that if you look at our first episode of Big Shot, um, it was Charles Bronfman who built Birthright and, and brought Major League Baseball to Canada. His, his father was the founder of Seagram's, um, and, you know, an iconic entrepreneurial family. I think the first episode got like 400 views. It wasn't very good. Um, and the second one we did, it was Aldo Bensadoun, who created Aldo Shoes, multi-billion dollar companies, poor immigrant from Morocco, built this huge company. That got a little bit more. Your ability to, to go through that process where that first, you know, it's embarrassing, maybe, maybe it doesn't feel very good, maybe you feel it's a waste of time, but to go to the next one and the next one without any loss of ambition or passion or energy. When you, when you, when you combine that with being in this, like, without needing permission right now to do anything, to put out content, to build companies, you end up with what I believe is truly like this golden age of entrepreneurship. And I talk on earnings calls about the big stores on Shopify. You know, Hunter Douglas just came onto Shopify, Mattel, On Running, Staples, these very large companies. But actually, if you look at some of the largest merchants, if you look at the top 10 merchants on Shopify, I think about 6 or 7 of them were homegrown success stories. People that started on Shopify at their mom's kitchen table that, that are now Fashion Nova, Gymshark, FIGS, these huge companies now that, um, uh, Alo Yoga, Viore, these companies didn't exist 10 years ago. They're now the leading companies in their vertical without actually ever asking anyone if they could do something or they should do something. I think that's what I mean when I say this is the golden age of entrepreneurship. That's what I'm talking about.

How do you think about community and building a super loyal community? Because people love Shopify, are obsessed with Shopify. I look at you and you're, you're buying Shopify member products from your t-shirt to the sneakers to the coffee. Uh, you seem to remember, you know, the clients and not just the big names like Gymshark, but the people on the come up. How do you think through just building a loyal community for your business?

It goes back to the first question about like this, this, this authenticity that, you know, I think the days of, of what do you do? Oh, I sell something. What do you sell? I sell widgets. I sell whatever. Those days are over. That there is now, if you're sick, if you look at everyone that everyone on this call admires, there is a deep connection between the product that, that person that company is selling and the founder that started in the first place. We are not selling widgets. We are selling things that are deeply meaningful to us. And the same thing goes with Shopify. I mean, Shopify was the answer to the question, what would happen if everyone who wanted to or needed to start a business could do so? What if you simply brought the barrier to entry down to as low as possible, reduced the cost of failure to as low as possible in this idea of entrepreneurship? What would happen? And that's what Shopify has become. That's what Shopify is. And so I think it starts with like this, like obsession for what you're selling, this deep, like, it is not easy, it's not difficult to fall in love with the mission of Shopify. We wanna make commerce better for everyone. We wanna create more entrepreneurs. And I think while everyone is like chasing hype, the companies that I admire most, they're chasing outcomes. They are so obsessed with solving real problems that ultimately it builds real trust. And I think, you know, what matters here, a great example is I was criticized recently. Um, uh, we had our Q4 earnings call about 6 weeks ago and there was a bunch of articles that came out afterwards. It was a very good quarter. It was also, uh, the full 2024 year. So there was some articles that came out that talked about, um, the strength of the company and the business and the product and, and all the things that we're doing right. But a couple articles criticized Shopee actually criticized me directly for not talking more about AI on the call. That, you know, how, how could Harley, you know, uh, be on this call and not talk about AI in this massive AI movement? Everyone's talking about it. Every other earnings call in our space was talking about it. And I, I mean, I, I didn't respond to the article, but my— I'll respond to now. We're, we're not about this hand wavy, like, where we start— we, we talk about AI like we're trying to get as many, you know, as many AI terms into an earnings call so some analysts can check the box. So they talked about it 65 times, or they said the word, you know, like, you know, this, this term 85 times relative to what Nvidia said or what Amazon said. What matters to us, what matters to me is not about how many times we say AI. It's like, what does AI actually do? And so on the call, I talked about the fact that like now, you know, um, if you use Shopify, which, and Shopify Magic is, which is our AI tool, which is built in. You probably don't need to hire as many product photographers as you did a year ago, because now Shopify Magic can actually take, can actually, if you upload an image, we can create 5 different variations of it that we think are gonna be highly converting for you and your, your, your, your, for the consumer that's gonna buy from you. Or product descriptions. Years ago, you would pay someone or hire a team of people to write product descriptions, uh, for the particular SKU, or maybe you went on Fiverr or you outsourced it. Now Shopify Magic will do that for you for free. So I think part of it is like, you know, do you actually really care about the, like, solving the problem or do you care about sort of what people think? And, and, and, and, you know, AI at Shopify is not an exercise in hand waving. It's deeply rooted in how we innovate. I think the next part is like, I think the reason that millions of stores have put their trust in us is because I think they see that like we're just shipping more than, like, from a product perspective, more than anybody else. We've embedded this product innovation culture inside of Shopify. So, you know, —when there was a recent story that I just posted about Printemps, meaning spring, but the French term for spring, Printemps NYC. So Printemps is like the OG, the original gangster of luxury retail. They were started 150 years ago in Paris, in France. So they wanted to open up this like really innovative store. Like, again, France's oldest luxury department store wants to open up this new brand new store in New York City. And they come to Shopify because they know that we can actually like help drive their brand forward, whether it's online or it's in-store or it's integrating into things like Instagram or YouTube Commerce or live selling. I think the reason that these, these, these historic legacy retailers come to us is because all they see from Shopify, they follow along, is, you know, Shopify Editions, we're putting out all these new products. They can get a sense of the types of people that work at Shopify simply by our pace and our, our velocity of shipping products. And so when you're making a decision to use Shopify versus someone else, generally, if you, if you believe Shopify cares about entrepreneurship deeply and the people behind Shopify do, and you're also seeing that like, oh man, this product is getting better at a, at a, at a, at a rate that no one else is, is, is, can compete with. I think it puts their trust in you. And I think that's how you build real community. It's not by hand wavy, you know, like random terms you're throwing out, but rather by doing what you say you're going to do, creating a very high trust battery with the people that, that use your product and, and, and, and being authentic about that.

The YouTube commerce integration was amazing. And for people who don't know, there's a, there's a shelf on YouTube. So under every video, there's a shelf where you can sell your products. And as long as you have a Shopify account, you can link it to your YouTube channel. And then under every single video on your channel, whatever you're selling in Shopify can then be featured there, which is crazy. You don't need to do it video by video. It just automatically goes across all your videos on your channel. Have you seen wins, success stories, case studies, anything you wanna share about the YouTube shelf?

Oh, for sure. Like YouTube Commerce for some merchants, some of the time works incredibly well. Let me, let me give it a different perspective that I think will be even more helpful for, for the group of people that are watching this. I believe that the future of retail is retail everywhere, but not necessarily that means you have to sell across every channel possible. We have an integration to YouTube. We also have an integration integration to Roblox, where you can sell right in your Roblox game or universe. Um, we also have integration to Spotify. So if you are an artist, you make music, and you have a, uh, a solid, strong, loyal following of, of viewers or listeners on Spotify, and you also happen to have a clothing brand, if you're Drake and you have OVO, or you're, um, Beyoncé and you have Sacred, uh, which is her, her cosmetics company on Shopify, now you can sell your products directly in your artist profile. I think the way that anyone who's selling that's in sort of commerce or retail or, or, or selling a product to direct to consumer that's watching, I don't think you need to be everywhere. I think you need to be the right places. And the example that I always give is, um, actually I'll give you two examples. Um, Athletic Greens does $600 million, uh, or AG1 does $600 million selling one single SKU. But they're not everywhere. They're on particular podcasts and particular advertising and particular, like, satellite radio stations. And they obviously sell online. They don't really have physical stores, although they do have something with Starbucks that they're experimenting with. So the reason I think AG1 has done so well is because they, they look at every surface area that exists as a potential place to transact, and then they overlay where are the most likely next consumers of AG1 spending their time. That's where we need to actually— so they figure it out and Pat Cole is their CEO, is an amazing CEO. Figured out that actually a lot of AG1 users also go to Starbucks. Sometimes they forget their AG1 at home, they don't bring their pack with them, or let's just actually make it easier for them to buy there. I'll give you another example. Sarah Foster and Aaron Foster, they have a great company called Favorite Daughter. Amazing Shopify store. They also have physical locations too. They, their marketing channels are twofold. One, they have this incredible podcast called World's First Podcast. And two, they created a hit show on Netflix called Nobody Wants This. And when you look at these sort of things, you're like, what does a Netflix show have to do with Favorite Daughter clothing brand? Well, they realize that the people that are likely to buy Favorite Daughter are also people that really like this type of comedy. And what if we actually created a show that would help drive more business to Favorite Daughter? The crazy part of this Sarah Foster, Erin Foster story is you don't actually know where the clothing brand starts and the podcast ends and the Netflix show, you know, like It's all kind of combined. Kristen Bell, who's the star of the show on Netflix, all she wears is Favorite Daughter. But on the podcast, they talk about building Favorite Daughter. And when you go into the store, the Favorite Daughter store, they're also promoting their, their show. And so this idea of looking at all these surface areas, not as I have to be everywhere, but rather all these surface areas, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, a pop-up that you do at a farmer's market. All these places are opportunities. The way to win at these opportunities is to be like, if my clientele, my demographic is not gonna be at a farmer's market, even though it's available to me, I'm going to say no. Same thing like me saying no to podcast requests to go on, even though I know it's, it's a huge podcast and it's gonna get me a ton of attention. It's the wrong type of people. It's the wrong type of attention. It's, it's not the entrepreneur crowd. It's the, I don't know, the, the fitness crowd. That's not my crowd. So that's how I think about it. But for some merchants, some of the time, like MrBeast selling Feastables, who has the largest YouTube channel on the planet, yeah, it works really, really well.

Uh, just in terms of starting an audience from scratch, if somebody is already a successful entrepreneur, they built their business, uh, they're used to having levels of success, and then they're starting, and it can be hard to not see a ton of views on a video, what advice do you have for somebody starting their channel from scratch?

Go read Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans. It's a very simple blog post. Just look it up. 1,000 True Fans, Kevin Kelly, great writer. That is the, that's the, that's the blog post. That's the piece of content that I read whenever I'm feeling like I'm not enough. I'm not doing enough. I don't have enough views. Um, and we all feel that way. I feel that way all the time. I, you know, I put an episode of Big Shot or something, or I put a piece of content, no one No one seems to care about it. I just go back to that, that blog post and read it again. It does not matter if 10,000 people care. It matters that you have a group and maybe it's not 1,000 or maybe it's 100 people for you. Maybe it's, it's 10 people for you, but as long as some people really care about it, that it really resonates, it's all that matters. And then eventually just like, you know, keep going and do not lose enthusiasm as you, as you go in, in many ways, like, you know, Shopify is a $100 billion, uh, company by market cap today. Part of, you know, our success has been we simply just have more enthusiasm and more care about the product and the business than others do. When others, you know, we, we, we had a logistics company for a while, we ended up selling. It didn't work for us. We didn't view that as a massive failure. We viewed that as the successful discovery of something that did not work. The payments business worked great. The capital business works great. The shipping business did not work. We didn't lament it. We didn't, we didn't sit around licking our wounds. We just moved on. We sold the company to a company called Flexport for less than we paid for it, and we just moved on. That, I think, is the key.

Just a quick follow-up on Kevin Kelly's book. Are there any other podcasts or channels or books, or what are you consuming right now?

Um, right now, I mean, I'm finding that some of the, like, new media that's coming out, uh, like on some of these shows that are happening direct on X are really interesting right now because of— so Big Shot's like this really cool passion project of mine. I don't actually care if anyone ever listens, ever watches it, although I think it's pretty neat, but I'm, I'm there's something— I'm the child of immigrants. My father came here in the '50s from Hungary, Holocaust survivor. After the Hungarian Revolution, or during the Hungarian Revolution, Canada let in 40,000 immigrants from Hungary. He came here to escape persecution. My grandfather built an egg stand at a farmer's market not too far from where I'm standing right now. I am deeply interested in, like, these immigrant communities, including my own, the Jewish community, who came to places like Canada and with nothing and built these, like, empires. How the hell did that happen? These are not like blue bloods. These are not like fancy last name people. These are like immigrants who had no choice, but they were forced entrepreneurs, not passion-based, but forced into entrepreneurship. And yet somehow they've become disproportionately successful. Um, that, right? I'm, so I'm reading a lot of those like books right now, like these autobiographies around, um, you know, people like the Bronfman family or, um, one of the people that I'm, I'm, I think is super fascinating is a guy named Larry Silverstein. Who, um, poor kid from New York City, uh, who now owns the World Trade Center. Um, and ended up buying, you know, he heard a story of, of a man who bought the Empire State Building by convincing 5,000 people to give him $1,000 each. And together they bought the Empire State Building. Harry Helmsley, I think was his name. Um, so I think these stories of like entrepreneurs like that is really neat. Super cool.

All right. Let's, uh, do some Q&A. Alex, what's your one question for Harley?

So my school's mission is to solve the world's greatest problem, which is loneliness through belonging. And I run Canada's largest salsa dance school, but I lose too many students after level 1 where they just start to believe that they belong. And so my goal is 70% retention going from level 1 to level 2. What's, what's a powerful retention insight you've gained from Shopify being like a community-based business model that I should steal from you? And a second part to it is like crazy moonshot idea. What's one thing no one's trying that definitely everyone should be trying for retention?

I actually think it's, uh, this isn't gonna be any type of, you know, massive insight other than what's worked for us. Gamification for retention really, really works. You know, we have these, um, Shopify miles and awards here. This is actually a demo. Um, but we, um, we realized that, you know, if you're an artist, a musician, and you're at the top of your game, eventually you, you know, you win a Grammy, uh, Oscars for art, for, you know, for actors, Tonys if you're on Broadway, so on and so forth. There was, there was nothing like that for entrepreneurship. Um, and so we created the Shopify Milestone Awards and actually get to hand deliver them. We created them initially for anyone that has a million orders. And so I went and gave a million, the million order milestone to a couple merchants. And then I got, you know what, like $100,000 is a lot too. And so we created the $100,000 award and they gave those away as well. We actually now have the $10,000 order award that we're giving out. And I don't know if we'll go to $1,000, but it is remarkable how many people send me notes. I mean, like literally thousands of people send me notes each year telling me that like when they were at $8,000 orders and they had $10,000 in sight that they just didn't stop because they found it. Um, so find a way to gamify it, I think could be really amazing. Now, Alex, for you, that may mean that someone who comes into your, you know, program, into your, into your school, you know, is like, you know, I don't know, like member of the month, or maybe it's like, you know, some sort of like, you know, performance that they're able to do in front of the rest of the school. But I think gamification of whatever you're doing is, is incredibly underrated. In terms of like one, one, one thing that people are not doing that I, I think they, they absolutely should be doing. Um, I think like the value of, um, something deeply personal, handwritten notes, a 30-second video that you film on your iPhone that you send to someone after, you know, someone you, you, you think is doing a really good job at Maybe you're also concerned that they're dropping off. It's a customer of yours or someone that is in your community. You're like, this person really kind of needs to be here. Um, I think a handwritten note or a quick video. Hey, it's Harley. Um, Alex, I think you're doing an amazing job. Just want to say like, you know, I'm in the car right now on the way to the airport, but I just want to say like, you're killing it. And maybe this video means nothing to you. Maybe it means something to you, but like, we see you, we see what you're doing. It's, it's, it's awesome. That works so well. I mean, that works disproportionately well relative to the, the, the input of work that it takes. Um, I totally think that, that you should do more of that. Yeah, those would be the things off the top of my head.

All right, Sebastian, what's your, what's your one question for Harley?

Yes, thanks so much. Uh, Evan and Harley, thank you for your time. Really, really inspired by your story. Really resonates as well. I'm in Montreal too, an immigrant as well that arrived here from, from Colombia. So I actually joined an early stage startup in Montreal. So again, similar story while I was in college, like you kind of joined Shopify back then. So I'm at a point now where 6 years in after having been with this startup, learned a ton, grown a ton, I have to kind of make a decision, right? Do I stay with this company and try to do what you did 10 years later, becoming president and whatnot? I think this is a company that's going places. Or do I start my own thing and essentially become independent? So I'm curious to know if you went through points in your career at Shopify where you had a similar dilemma of whether to continue at Shopify or start your own thing. And in theory, there could be a hybrid, but company policy is no side hustle. So it's a little bit tough.

I mean, look, I started Firebelly Tea like 2 years ago once, uh, and then as soon as it had any type of scale, I hired a CEO because I think side hustles can be very, very dangerous. I mean, it's okay to have a couple side hustles while you're getting started to figure out which one you want to invest further in. But I think once you're like, once you're operating at scale, I think side quests are a bad idea. Main quest only. Don't fuck around. Um, in terms of the decision of like start my own or continue, If you believe that ultimately you can achieve more of your own goals by, uh, being on, like, on the rocket ship of some, like, you know, on this larger rocket ship, go for it. Um, my goal was always to— because I, you know, money was always quite emotional. I didn't grow up with a lot of money, um, in my home growing up. It was a little bit like, you know, my parents always worried about money. They That anxiety trickled down to me. I always felt that growing up, do we have enough money? Am I going to be able to do the things my friends want to do? It actually was very motivating for me to become an entrepreneur because I didn't want to have that scarcity mindset. I wanted to feel abundance. I'm not sure even today, you know, I don't have to worry about money, but I still feel a little bit of scarcity sometimes, which I think that's part of growing up in a household of immigrants that don't have a lot. So I knew that one, I wanted to be like, I wanted to have financial security, but I also knew that entrepreneurship was going to be my life's work. There was no doubt about that. And, um, I have yet to find something that allowed me to create more entrepreneurship in the world than Shopify. So therefore, like, you know, I talk a lot about this idea of life's work, ikigai, life's work, whatever you wanna call it. But ultimately what I think it comes down to is, does your personal your personal mission and your professional mission, do they overlap? Does the Venn diagram overlap? And Harley's personal mission and Shopify's, like, company mission overlaps. Therefore, I stay there. Um, you know, I, I was, I'm a lawyer by trade. I went to law school. I practiced law for all of 10 months. It was obvious to me that that was never going to be what I did. In fact, like, there was aspects of law that I was appealing. I mean, I like the consistent salary. I like the idea that, like, If you work for a big law firm in Canada or the US or any, you know, major Western world law firm, if you work for a big law firm and you work there for 20 or 30 years, you will be a millionaire unequivocally, 100%. Like that's, uh, you know, uh, a 10th year partner at any major law firm in North America makes $1 million or more every single year. I was like, wow. I was like, that checks the box of financial security for me. So that, like, it was appealing to me. But it didn't check the box of life's, life's work. I wasn't deeply passionate. I got a chance to work with entrepreneurs, but not in the way that I wanted. Um, so I think that's really the question you have to ask yourself, uh, Sebastian, is whether or not like your mission and the company's mission are the same. I don't think I could do, I don't think that, um, you know, I can go run a company that makes, I mean, I love James Perse. I love the t-shirts. I love the story, but I'm not the right guy to run James Perse because James, Um, the entrepreneur behind James Purse, he thinks about like GSM, the rib, and like when you talk to him and you meet with him, all he wants to talk about is fabric.

That's not me. Nikolai, what do you got? What's your one question for Harley?

Evan, Harley, thank you guys so, so much for this information. It's been amazing. I took so many notes here. Um, I'm also a, a Jewish immigrant from Uzbekistan. So Harley, thanks so much for everything that you're doing. Um, my question is I'm building a professional services technology company. And I think as many businesses in the beginning, we struggle to figure out where to get customers and how to take them through our pipeline. What are your recommendations for us getting customers early on and, um, continuing to get customers?

So right now there's about, I don't know, 40,000 agencies and freelancers that are Shopify partners, quote unquote, that refer business to us that, you know, that work on work on Shopify stores for, for, for merchants and brands. One of the first things I did when I came to Shopify was build that program, was build the partner program in like 2010 or so. And I remember meeting these really ambitious entrepreneurs that were like, we're gonna, we wanna be, you know, we wanna be a Shopify agency. Like, and again, Shopify wasn't very big then, so it was cool to hear. They're like, we wanna be e-commerce, uh, an e-commerce agency. We wanna help tons of great brands build beautiful online stores. When I look back now, 15 or 16 years later, the ones that have been the most successful at building professional technology agencies that did professional services, they were very, very important to a very specific type of merchant. They really verticalized so much so that like, I think some of them went overboard, some like, so now when we get a phone call from a merchant, our sales team gets a phone call from a merchant and the merchant is, you know, in— they want to create a sneaker store in Vancouver. They— we kind of know who to send it to because like, you know, we— like, there are— there's a group of, of agencies, some of them are not even based in Vancouver, but that are really good at working with that type of product in that type of geography. They understand duties and taxes, or I guess tariffs now. They understand like sneakers and design of that. They understand the look and feel of it. My advice to you is not to go too broad, is actually be very, very specific to really specialize initially. So, you know, if, if like be the go-to for this particular type of customer, now your total addressable market is gonna be very, very small, but 100% or 20% of a small market is much better than no, like going way too broad and you're just, you're competing with everybody. Make, make yourself, and I mean, I, I mentioned my t-shirt business, um, that I had when I was in McGill. This is 2001. I built this really great t-shirt business making t-shirts for universities across Canada. I've had a bunch of companies around the same time that did not go well. The reason that one went well was I was very, very specifically targeting Canadian universities that needed a particular type of t-shirt. It was like frosh and orientation apparel. So the stuff you get your first week of school, that was what I did, and I did it better than everybody. When they would ask me to produce stuff for the bookstore, I would always, of course, bid because I, I'm ambitious. I never won any of those deals. Why? Because you, I was competing with like the biggest promotional products companies in the US. So when I focused on, I'm a student, I make teachers for other students, I focus on Canadian schools only. I, I know what Canadian students want and it's only orientation week stuff. I killed it. And the second I tried to go broader than that, I always lost. I think you should go very specific. And then also the cool part of going specific is you can create content and marketing around that niche. And you can— and so if you are selling e-commerce, buying the AdWords or buying ads on Instagram for e-commerce is gonna be expensive. But if you buy it for like, it's— I only do Canadian legacy retailers in the clothing space. All of a sudden, as you begin to limit your addressable market, you begin to like— it becomes less and less expensive for you to target them. And your content can always be very like— it's always going to be on point for that, that type of customer.

One of the things I love about Harley is you can talk about almost anything. Shaq, what is your question for Harley?

I've heard you speak about authenticity, and I totally agree with you in how you do one thing is how you do everything. And also about, you know, sticking to your main quest. I've been avoiding mine for years, right? And I'm finally— I feel like I'm on the path. And as I'm doing this and, you know, going through the cringe, I can feel myself, like, taking it super seriously to the point where, like, I'm blocking myself, you know what I mean? So, like, if there's any sorts of insights that you can give towards like just, you know, like being true to your core and your purpose and doing it, man. Like, what could you tell me, dude? I don't know if that's like a really vague question, but—

No, I think, I mean, I think I get what you're saying, so I'll repeat it back. But effectively, like, I think that you mentioned the word serious, like, You know, you wanna be serious about your work. You don't wanna, you don't, you don't wanna be serious about yourself. You don't wanna take yourself too seriously. Um, I am absolutely okay to be cringey or embarrassing or whatever the term is. Um, I take my work seriously. I don't take myself seriously. I think one of the best, okay, let me tell you, let me tell you the worst part of entrepreneurship because we talked about all the great parts of entrepreneurship. Like the great part of entrepreneurship, you get to, you get to build whatever you want. You get to build companies. You get to like a, a poor kid from nowhere like me gets to I get to, you know, build this crazy life that I have right now that is— I get to run this big publicly traded company that I built from scratch, and I get to have all these amazing opportunities. Entrepreneurship is the great equalizer. It's completely— it's not a perfect meritocracy, but it's about as close as you can get to a meritocracy. Okay, that's the great part. What sucks about entrepreneurship? It's super lonely. It's like there's no, it's not a team sport. One of the things that has been very valuable, and actually a story that most people don't know, is I actually met Toby before I became one of the first merchants on Shopify. I used to go to these entrepreneurship meetups all the time. I really loved it. Why wasn't that I needed friends? I had, you know, I've always had a good group, small group, but a small group of really close friends. My, my best friends are people that are like, like family to me. But I love the fact that I was able to go to these like meetups. It was used to be, we called ourselves the Young Entrepreneurship, the Young Entrepreneurs Club, YEC. They ended up rebranding to Fresh Founders, which is now, there's, there's, there's some, there's now Fresh Founders in different cities, but that's where Toby and I met. We met at this like Fresh Founders meetup. The reason I loved having these meetups with other entrepreneurs is I would go there and I would say like, ah, like I'm thinking I'm putting out this video, a little bit embarrassed. Like it feels a little bit cringey, or I'm thinking about doing this thing and reaching out to this person, but I love the idea that I had a bunch of people to call me out, to call me out on my own, like, stuff, my own, my own blockers. And I think you don't actually get that for free with entrepreneurship. You actually have to go and you have to purchase that, not with money, but with your time. And so one of the things that I would do, Shaq, is I would actually go and find a bunch of people that are at a— they don't have to be in the same business as you or same industry, but a bunch of people that are at the same stage of journey as you're at. And like, like, and there's, I don't know where you live, but every city has a bunch of entrepreneurs and meetups somewhere on some timing. It could be a hackathon, it could be a coffee shop, it might be in someone's basement. It doesn't matter. But having a group of people that remind you, like, you know, Tom, I don't know if you heard this, but Tom Brady walks around with, um, with something in his wallet. It's a true story that says, don't forget you're Tom Brady. Um, you need someone that's gonna remind you that like, like this is who you are. Like, do this dude. Like, keep going. Uh, don't, don't worry about the cringe or what other people think. Just get it done. If Tom Brady sometimes forgets that he's Tom Brady, you're going to forget that you are who you are. You're going to forget what you care about because the greatest, you know, one of the wealthiest athletes in the history of the world forgets it sometimes. He has to create reminders for himself. Everyone on this call, we have to remind ourselves of that. I think the best way for us to remind ourselves of that is by having people around us that remind us to say, but last week, Harley, you said you're going to do this video and you didn't do it. Why not? And then you sort of, you create these like accountability, not coaches, but accountability community people. And I think that actually for me has been one of the greatest things. Also, I do that now. Now I have a cohort of people that I'm in a WhatsApp group with other people that run large publicly traded companies. And every now and then I begin to actually ask them questions. I say, I'm thinking about doing this. Like, hey, I'm, I'm not gonna go on Bloomberg after earnings. I'm thinking about going out on like, you know, just posting a video on X about our earnings results. What do you think? Like, I'm, they're like, actually Harley, you already said you were gonna do that last quarter. You didn't do it. Why not? I think that stuff matters.

I love it. Harley's other side hustle is motivational speaker. So this is great.

Yeah, definitely not.

But thank you for saying that. Dude, that Tom Brady, uh, little clip needs— definitely needs to be clipped. Yeah. Uh, who do we got? Harry. Harry from AFG Studios. What do you got, man? What's your question for Harry?

Thanks, Harley, for being here. Appreciate your time. Um, so I have a question. I wanted to get like maybe your opinion or thought about something. Um, I basically speak to people that are older and they have money, so I basically help them in retirement and we educate people on how to actually do it. So they come to me with their pile of money and they're like, hey, how does this really work? So currently we work and use in terms of a platform, and I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about older people on where they're— where they live. Like, my avatar lives currently at the moment on Facebook, which is a very oversaturated, uh, place for me. Um, also, uh, direct mail, that's a, a big thing, which is kind of like, you know, old, but it works. And also now YouTube is a brand new, uh, you know, venue for us. So I'm just wanting to get your opinion, being, you know, a younger person and obviously extremely successful, to try to capitalize on what I do with my avatar, which is like an older person, and they don't really go on Instagram, they don't really go on all the new technologies. What's out there right now in terms of a platform or a space that maybe we can kind of take advantage of currently in today's day and age?

I think you're doing the right things. I think you're not getting distracted by all the new shiny toys. If your demographic is not going on TikTok, you should not be creating anything on TikTok. If your demographic is going on, on Facebook, that's where you should be as well. Direct mail. I'm not surprised it's working because actually there's like very few people use direct mail, but actually everyone still gets direct mail. So it sounds like you're actually doing all the right things in terms of finding like alpha in places that people have overlooked. One thing though that I think is, is also interesting is that, you know, there you can actually take tactics from new media and apply it, or new sort of like more modern business tactics, and apply it to a more traditional type of demographic. So for example, one of the things that you see a lot of in like my world is collaboration. So you see like, you know, some Skims, which is shapewear from Kim Kardashian, doing a collaboration with Fendi, like the luxury brand from Italy. Why does that make sense? Well, because Fendi wants to reach into the Skims demographic, which is young and Kim Kardashian, very social media, and they want to bring some of their people on like they want to insert their message into the brains of the Kardashian fans. And why does Kim want to do that with Skims? Because she wants to actually go after the more luxury demographic and bring them into the world, the Fendi customers, into the world of Skims. That is a very, very valuable and effective tactic. So one of the questions you may wanna do is like, you probably make a lot of content, uh, talking about, you know, retirement and, and savings and all that type stuff. I don't know your business well, but there's probably a bunch of like, you can create your own content and your own show, or you can go on other people's shows with really interesting ideas and actually incept your message into their brains. So, that stuff, like those type of tactics, I think are, are not really like a lot of people are using it in sort of these modern, you know, Gen Z businesses, these collaborations, this idea of inception, incepting your story into, you know, taking effectively hijacking someone else's audience. But how do you do that in terms of, in terms of your business? So, you know, you talk about YouTube, you can put out a lot of content on YouTube, but I suspect there's This is a random, random idea, may not even work, but like there's probably a bunch of cooking shows, for example, where people like literally cooking shows where YouTube channels are doing that, where maybe instead of like doing some sort of ad roll advertising in the middle of the show, you go on and say, hey, Harley here. And some of you watching maybe think about retirement soon, uh, what you're going to do, how you think about money, you know, uh, how you think about, do you have enough? How do you think about savings? Um, well, this is who I am. Um, I also love to cook. So like, you know, this is why I'm here, but if I can be helpful to you, let me know. Now, rather than you trying to encourage people to watch your videos, you're actually incepting your message to someone else's videos. That is a tactic that is very modern, but you can apply that in your demo. Most people are not doing that. So you can actually not say like, you're not reinventing the wheel. Those things, the collab market exists. I mean, you know, this is what Nike figured out decades ago with working with, with professional athletes, that if you like Michael Jordan, you should also be wearing Nike. Um, I think you can probably use a very similar tactic. The only other thing I, I would say is just a warning to, uh, to everyone watching is that don't get sidetracked by like, by shiny things. I think that there is every, you know, every couple years there's sort of a new trend, a new platform, a new medium for us to jump on. It's, it's important to experiment on those mediums. I'm not sure you should have like a YouTube playlist or— sorry, a Spotify playlist. That may work really— I don't think you should be in Roblox. That may not make any sense. You can experiment with it, you can try it because you may find some sort of gem of an insight there. But I would, I would try not to focus on things that are shiny objects. I think that would be, um, that would be dangerous. I think a lot of people get caught in this where they're a little bit schizophrenic based on shiny toy syndrome.

Okay, John, what's your one question for Harley? What do you got for us?

So yeah, my name is John Leroy and we just launched our Shopify app on your marketplace. So thank you. We help, we help Shopify brands by providing premium quality print-on-demand services. Nice. Quick question. When do you think it's smart for a founder to seek a strategic partner or investor, not just for the money, but to actually level up the business? And when is it just a distraction in disguise?

Yeah. I think if you can actually do the math that an extra dollar of investment on the left side gets way more than a dollar on the right side, you should consider taking investments. Like, when people raise money, you're basically signing a contract with that investor that one of three things is going to happen. One, you're going to go public, IPO. Second, you're going to acquire. Third, you're going to go out of business. So hopefully the third thing doesn't happen. So you're left with IPO or acquisition. If you have no intention to get acquired or to IPO, I don't really like, I, the, the only, there's no reason to raise money. I mean, other than paying out a bunch of dividends, which, you know, if you're profitable, you don't really need to raise money. I think this obsession with fundraising is insane. I, I, I think that the, the, the reason and the timing to raise money is when it's like jet fuel, that like you have something that is so valuable that if you just had an extra million bucks or $100,000 or $10,000, you can easily turn that $10,000 into way more than the $10,000 than you raise. Anything that is not that, own your company, like finance it, finance your business based on your own sales and your profitability. I think there was an era of time where like, and this is sort of what they call like the ZIRP phenomenon, zero interest rate phenomenon, whereby interest rates were zero, money was free. And so like everyone kind of went out to raise money because someone else was going to buy your company eventually. But if you actually like your business, you want to run it. I, I just don't think that that's that important. Um, we have, I mentioned I have a little tea company called Firebelly Tea on, on Shopify that I, I, um, I launched with my best buddy and we get these random offers to take money. I never understand it. Like why, like if, if, if I could, if, if I raised money, if I take your money, I'm basically now committing that I'm going to sell in 3 years because you need a return on your investment. Like I don't want to commit to that. I may want to decide to run this for the rest of my life. I may decide I wanna take dividends. I may decide I wanna shut down cuz I'm, I don't wanna do it anymore. I, I, I, I think the only time to raise money is when it literally can like completely change the trajectory of your business. And if it doesn't do that, don't do it. Now there is, there is an exception to this, which is strategics. Strategic investments is a whole different thing, which is that, you know, if you have an app on Shopify, for example, and Shopify says, actually, like we're gonna build this product But instead of us building it, like we actually want to acquire you. We want to invest in you. A good example is we have a product on Shopify called Shop Pay Installments, SPI. Shop Pay Installments is, is our buy now, pay later product. We were going to build it ourselves, but before we built something ourselves, we look at the market to see who's doing this really well. It turned out that Max Levchin, who's the co-founder of PayPal with, with Elon and Peter Thiel, he had a company called Affirm and it was a private company. We said, well, we want to, we're going to white label a firm, effectively make it Shopify installments, and we're going to invest in the company. We're going to make an equity investment into a firm. Um, and the reason that Max doesn't need my money, he doesn't need Shopify's money. Max is a very— Max is a billionaire, I believe. But because Shopify invested and we were also white labeling it, it meant the trajectory of Affirm completely changed. Affirm is now publicly traded. They've done better. We've done better because of it. There are some times where a strategic investment completely changes the trajectory of the company. That's when you consider it. Other than that, and other than the exceptional circumstance where it becomes jet fuel, I don't see the reason to do it.

Okay, Haas, what's your one question for Harley? All right.

Hey, Harley, thanks for the knowledge. So as a communications coach and a speech coach, I host a podcast and I host entrepreneurs and I host professionals, employees, and people from corporate world. And I'm noticing something, and entrepreneurs, they say whatever they're thinking, they are, they don't self-censor, communication is very open. And with employees, there's a lot of self-censoring and more reservation, being reserved. So, being the president of Shopify, how do you maintain a healthy culture, a healthy communication style, or what are your thoughts on that? Is that true? Is my perspective true? How do you see it?

I think we have 8,000 people, and I think if all 8,000 people went out and started talking about giving a different message about Shopify, who we are, what we care about, what our mission is, that would be very bad. The flip side is that if everyone goes out and talks about Shopify and goes to conferences and, and is on social media and we're all kind of speaking from the same songbook, that is very, very good. So, you know, I, I, my sort of informal role at Shopify is chief storyteller. I love telling stories internally and externally. Part of why I spend so much time telling stories internally, I have an internal podcast called Context where we share context about different decisions we've made, is I want to effectively give everyone that works at Shopify the songbook. They don't have to use it, but if they want to have their own brand, they will all, they want to talk about all the great stuff they're proud of at Shopify. Here it is. Here's exactly what you should, here's, you don't have to do anything with it, but if you are going to do it, we should all be speaking, speaking from the same songbook. And we don't limit them. We want people to. To, you know, um, one of the things I love is where I randomly, like I'm on YouTube and I see some, some keynote at some random conference in Vegas or something. And it's like, I don't know, it's a, it's an engineering conference or it's a performance marketing conference or it's a graph. It's a, it's a UI, you know, UX design conference. And I click on it and I see someone that works at Shopify on stage talking about how they do their job in an incredibly unique way at Shopify. I think it's great for Shopify. It's great for recruiting. It's great for merchants to see it, partners to see it. I love that stuff. So we are, we, we want people to do that. It just, they have to, you know, it has to be authentic. It has to be honest and it has to be based in some reality what the company is. If they start going around saying Shopify is going to become, you know, a services company, or we're gonna be focusing now on restaurants or grocery, which we're not, that doesn't work. But I think, you know, we, like, I'm in the Montreal office here now. We have beer fridges. We don't lock up the beer fridges. Why do we not lock up beer fridges? Because like the people that work at Shopify, they're adults. I like, every time I walk into an office of some company and like there's a beer fridge and like there's a lock on it, I'm like, what are you guys doing? Like, are you hiring people that, and you're worried they're gonna get like totally drunk at lunch on a Monday? Like you're hiring the wrong people if that's the case. So. We don't lock up our drink fridges or our beer fridge here at Shopify. We certainly are not gonna lock up people's own personal social media accounts. We want them to go out there. I just think the leaders of the company have a responsibility to arm their people with the right tools to be successful. Now, if they want to go out and talk about family or fitness or anything unrelated to Shopify, they should go do that. I am also not, I, I don't wanna lock up that beer fridge either, but if they're, they wanna talk about Shopify, which I want to encourage, I wanna make that very easy for them to do.

Let's go, Bo. What do you got for us?

My core business is helping people find and fund their ideal business. And, um, I'm extremely passionate about it. When I first, I got clear, I created a mission statement and that really helped me drive my business. At first it was, you know, to help 10,000 aspiring entrepreneurs become successful business owners over the next 10 years. Then it was 100,000. Wow. It was a million with the power of, you know, YouTube and social media. It's very doable. Not, I might not be, be working one-on-one with them. But of course, they're going to hear me on somebody's podcast. I'm extremely consistent. You know, I put out 2,000 videos on YouTube. I don't get a ton of views, but people have search intent and they find me and it works very well. I have constraints where, you know, it's just me and I have a team of 5. But, you know, I'm the person that has to figure out the problem, right? And really, I'm looking for I want to do bigger things, obviously, like most of us. And you get kind of— you're looking at a lot of different ways to grow. And I'm just trying to think, ultimately, I don't want to be into the day-to-day transactions of arranging the SBA financing for them to acquire the business. Like, I like to be on bigger platforms. And I'm thinking, do I want to create like a marketplace for entrepreneurs, like a learning platform? Evan Carmichael, how do you, what's your idea? Like when you got into Shopify, obviously it isn't what it is today. And some of it was probably timing and the right product at the time, right? A little bit of being in the right place at the right time, right? With the right product. But I'm trying to figure that out because I'm extremely driven in it. And it's like, I always am trying to improve and I'm trying to figure out a weird pivot to like really have mass impact in the world. It's not a financial thing for me. It's just like I have a lot of— I can take somebody and they're like, figure out a game plan because I have the same conversations over and over again. A lot of people don't want to work for, you know, the man anymore. They want their own business. And I love helping people get into business. I'm trying to figure out how I can have more impact in the world and maybe like digitize it or some other kind of platform I'm getting on other people's podcasts. I'm doing the work here with Evan. I just wrote a book thanks to Evan. He connected me to Tom Wheelwright. So thank you, Evan. So that's coming out. So I'm doing the things to build self-awareness to the marketplace, but I'm thinking like, where can I have the most impact? How do you go about thinking about strategically growing?

It's a really good question. There is this fine balance between throwing throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks and being distracted. I've always found that advice to be kind of bad advice because people are like, well, just try a bunch of stuff and see what works and double down on the thing that works. I mean, your biggest commodity is your time. So if you're, if you're spending all your time throwing shit at the wall and only like, you know, 10 things are hitting the wall and only think one thing sticks, the opportunity cost is very, very high of those things as well. What I found to be far more effective is that in your business, in your day-to-day, Beau, there's probably one thing. That resonates most with people that like it may be, you know, for some reason dentists really like hearing your stuff because dentists are, you know, they're dentists by trade, but they're actually running a business. I've noticed this actually a lot with a lot of, um, uh, with like a lot of entrepreneurial podcasts that it ends up being a lot of like medical professionals that end up listening because like they went to medical school or law school or, or dentistry school, but no one ever taught them about profit and loss statements. Or how to do marketing or how to actually do proper accounting. There's probably one thing right now that you're already doing without having to throw more shit at the wall that simply just, you are like, huh, there's like, that feels, that feels different than the other stuff. I don't know why people like this thing so much, but I mean, this is, you know, Evan has obviously found this as well with these type of sessions where this isn't like hand wavy, let's like raw, raw stuff. We're talking about like the last hour we've spent together has been incredibly tactical questions. So clearly Evan knows that like his community is tactical. It isn't like, with all due respect, it's not the Gary Vee rah rah, like let's all bounce off, off walls and, and, and high five each other for no reason. It's like, I have a specific problem. My dance studio retention is down. What do I actually do? There's probably something like that, Beau, that you have, that you are, have overlooked because maybe it's just not, not that interesting to you. I, I would encourage you to explore that a little bit more. And you, one of the best ways to do that is like, even if you don't have a lot of views on YouTube, Look at the YouTube comments. Who are the people that are most engaged? If you actually take your, your, your most viewed YouTube videos and look at the comments that are most up, you know, thumbed up, um, relative to the others, and you simply sent out messages or replied and said, curious, you know, what industry are you in? You may actually figure it out that actually you're like the— sounds so stupid, but I'll say it anyway— you're like the dentist whisperer. Like the dentist actually need help building their businesses because ultimately they think they're dentists, but in actuality they're entrepreneurs. They're just kind of bad at entrepreneurship because no one told them that they're gonna be, have to be entrepreneurs and run their own businesses. So, um, that actually may be the thing. That's what I think you should do. That's also what Shopify has done. We basically had figured out that even though it's, we can go into restaurants, we can go into grocery, we can go into servicing. Like service businesses, like, you know, uh, architects and dentists and doctors and all these types of— and lawyers where we sell units of time rather than physical products, it's not for us. There's this great story that, um, uh, back to Seth Godin. Seth Godin told me this amazing story that when the original Momofuku opened in New York City, David Chang's restaurant is a famous chef. Um, Seth was sort of mentoring David Chang and David said, hey Seth, I'd like you to come into my restaurant opening a Momofuku. So he goes in with his wife Helene, and they sit down, and the waiter comes over, and they order all this stuff. And Seth says, by the way, I was told to order the Brussels sprouts, but I don't eat bacon, so please take out the bacon and just give me the Brussels with no bacon. Waiter says, sorry, we can't do that. Seth goes back and forth, says, please, I really want to try them. Waiter says, sorry, we don't do it that way. Eventually, David Chang comes out of the kitchen and says, Seth, what's the problem? And Seth says, David, do you want me to try the Brussels sprouts? I don't eat bacon, so just remove them. And Seth says, unfortunately, the Brussels sprouts are made with bacon. And so if you don't eat bacon, this dish is not for you. And that is the moment that Seth knew that David Chang would be a huge success because he understood who he was selling to and what he was selling. And he wasn't willing to like make these accommodations just because it kind of felt good. And he was like, you know, again, throwing shit at the wall. He made a particular dish that he believed was perfect for a particular type of person. And if they, if that was, wasn't how the dish was served, that's okay too. I think you gotta figure out what your Brussels sprouts are.

Harley, any final words for the group? And then is there anything that we can do to support you, whether this group or the people who are watching on YouTube? Can we support you in anything you're up to?

So I, I, I love this hour. Um, unfortunately I have to go in a few minutes, but I, I, I mean, I love talking about the tactical side of entrepreneurship. I think that there is this glamorization of entrepreneurship that exists that I, I, I don't actually love, even though I care so much about entrepreneurship, even though I think it's human's greatest way to self-actualize, it's not actually a glamorous thing. It actually kind of sucks most of the time. And then eventually you get out of the suck period and it gets really, really good. And yes, it could change your life and all that. The reason I like these conversations in this type of format, uh, Evan, and I'm grateful for you and your community for, for allowing me to spend some time together, is we all kind of know that like it isn't glamorous. We're choosing it because we still think despite it not being glamorous, It's the best way for us to spend our time. It's the closest thing. This group of 62 people that's on here right now, it's the best way for all of us to find our life's work. I have found mine through Shopify. Beau has found his through the content he's creating and the businesses he's coaching. And, and, you know, and, and, and, and Shaq is trying to figure out exactly how, you know, how to put this all together in terms of, you know, pushing himself into this area of being uncomfortable because that's where the magic all happens. What I would ask all of you is, um, as you begin to find things that work, share those things. We are not living in a zero-sum world anymore. There's like this idea of, of business being finite and being zero-sum is bull— it is not true. I remember when Allbirds was created, it was the same week that Noble was created. Noble has now taken over like, uh, basically all the CrossFit Gymshark all run Noble Shoes and Allbirds, notwithstanding the fact that the market has kind of been weird to them, has built this billion-dollar company as well. Those two founders have shared information, have shared like best practices for a decade now, and it's made both of them bigger and better. My ask of you is that knowing that entrepreneurship is not glamorous, that there are days that kind of suck, that we still choose despite all that stuff, and you're trying all these different things, my ask of you is that to share the things that are working, you're not gonna give your competitor some sort of trade secrets. That's not how business is done. Business is now a positive sum. And the more people that we can help, the more like it, like, you know, high tides lift all boats. If we create a larger pie, invite more people into entrepreneurship, it'll encourage more entrepreneurship. It'll encourage more people to share. It helps all of us. So my ask of you all is to think about sort of this idea that don't just grow your piece of the pie around entrepreneurship, grow the pie itself, share more of what is working. There is nothing that I've done that I'm not willing to share with the whole world. If someone wants to build their own version of Shopify, please go ahead. It's gonna make me work harder. I think competition actually is a wonderful catalyst for, for creativity and hustle and passion and ambition. Um, that'd be my ask. I think that the celebration of entrepreneurship is incredible. It should not be glamorized cuz it's hard, but when you find stuff, pay it forward like I, like I'm trying to do here.

I love it, man. Well, you're getting love in the chat. Love your energy, Harley. Thanks for the insights. Thank you so much, Harley. That was magical. Thank you so much, Harley. Incredible. Inspiring and genuine. Appreciate you spending the time with us today and looking forward to connecting soon, man. Thank you for everything you do for entrepreneurs. See you guys. Thank you so much. To watch former Kajabi president Jonathan Cronson talk to my mastermind group and fix your pricing, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. Are you charging too little because you're scared to believe in what you offer? You might think low prices help more people, but they actually make people doubt your product.