Many thanks to Jack David, co-founder of ECW Press, for greenlighting this book. It was a homecoming for me because ECW Press, many, many years ago, published my first book, for which I have always been grateful. This time around, Lesley Erickson, Emily Ferko and Sammy Chin were a great help and a pleasure to work with. Also a thank you to Karen Milner of Milner & Associates for helping me reconnect with ECW.
I was fortunate to find an abundance of information on Shopify from a multitude of sources (those cited in the book can be seen in the Notes section). However, company executives declined to be interviewed. Nonetheless, they had given dozens of refreshingly candid interviews over the years, still online in various podcasts and other social media. Those interviews turned out to be an excellent source for answering the questions I had planned to ask the executives — and then some.
It was great having family keep me company while writing the manuscript. My wife, Ann, was working from home, as were my two sons, Lawrence and Shawn, taking a break from post-secondary studies to give entrepreneurship a try by operating an online store. An added bonus was watching the boys earn an income in the six figures from their store. Even if they had not made a profit, I am sure it still would have been a valuable experience for them.