Global Nerdy

Dan Martell has serious startup cred. He founded two companies that got acquired (Spheric in 2008, Flowtown last year), is working on Clarity.fm, mentors at 500Startups and GrowLab, is an angel investor and answers questions of the startup helper organization Sprouter and blogs at Maple Butter. If you’re in a startup or thinking about starting or joining one, you’d do well to follow him on Twitter and check in on his writings from time to time.

If you’ve got questions about startups, you’re in luck: Dan has posted 189 answers to the most popular questions from Sprouter on Maple Butter. He answers such questions as:

• I’ve heard that people need to move to a ‘Valley’ to succeed. Is that true?
• What % of available time should I put into these: 1. Building Product, 2. Building Metrics/Usage Reports/KPI and 3. Raising Angel Investment?
• What’s the best way to find a co-founder for your startup?
• What are 3 things that make a startup team successful?
• How should I approach an angel investor?
• What is the best way to approach another startup for a potential partnership?
• What is your advice for dealing with criticism when starting/launching a new business or coming up with an idea? Should the idea or business be kept secret?
• How can we reward our top users without money and without appearing too big brotherish?
• What advice can you give us to avoid the fear of start our own company and not stay working for someone else?
• What’s the best startup advice you’ve ever received?

Important questions; interesting answers. Dan’s article is worth checking out.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

In Shopify shops, a product can have multiple photos and multiple variants (variants are slightly different versions of a product, such as different sizes and colors). Tetsuro Takara, one of the guys on Shopify’s Guru team, has written an article showing how you can rig up your shop’s template to show a matching photo for the currently-selected variant (for example, showing a picture of the orange version of the t-shirt when the customer has selected “orange”). It’s a clever, subtle trick, but I think it’s one that your customers will like.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

The most recent report released by Pew Internet Research, The Rise of In-Store Mobile Commerce, revealed that 50 percent of shoppers used their smartphones to research purchase decisions over the holidays. Of note were the following statistics:

• 38% of those surveyed used their smartphones to make a voice call while shopping in a store to ask about a product.
• 25% used their smartphones to do price comparisons; they were comparing the price of an item in stores to prices for the same item in online shops.
• 24% used their smartphones to research the products they were shopping for online. I do this all the time at shops. It’s how I picked out my current camera, the Canon ELPH 300HS.

“You can’t win the web without winning mobile,” I told my manager’s manager back when I was at Microsoft (and that’s how I became the Windows Phone Guy on Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team). Now that I’m at Shopify, I’m still waving the mobile flag: you can’t win at ecommerce without winning at mobile. And as of today, we’re a good deal closer to winning.

Shopify has just announced that it has acquired Select Start Studios, an award-winning mobile development company based in Ottawa with over 35 apps in Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. This acquisition brings over 20 new people and a helluva lot of mobile app skills and brainpower into the Shopifold.

[Update: Here’s TechCrunch’s coverage, and here’s Mashable’s.]

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has this to say: “The S3 acquisition brings in top talent that will rapidly deliver on our mobile strategy, and produce several new mobile product offerings this year.”

Tariq Zaid, Select Start’s cofounder and CEO, says “We’re thrilled to be joining Shopify to execute on the company’s mobile initiative. Their focus on mobile, deep understanding of technology, and overall culture make this a natural fit. We’re already cooking up some really exciting innovations that show just how game changing mcommerce will be.”

Welcome aboard, Select Start! I’m looking forward to working with you guys.

Select Start were in the process of building a mobile app for our friends at Toronto-based startup FreshBooks, so technically, they’re now clients of ours. In response they sent us this lovely “horse head in the bed cake” inspired by that classic scene from The Godfather. The message that came with the cake reads: “Nice selection for the start of 2012…you bastard!”

Here’s an interesting observation made by Adam McNamara: Shopify was once based at 185 Rideau Street in Ottawa, and that’s where Select Start were based until they joined us. That’s an office with killer startup karma. The question Adam asks is: “Who’s next"?”

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

If you watched the WAT video that I pointed to in this earlier post, you saw some really counterintuitive behaviour from JavaScript and probably laughed and facepalmed at the same time.

A Stack Overflow user going by the handle of Ventero has taken it upon himself/herself to explain each of those JavaScript oddities, by way of pointing to the ECMA-262 standard. If you were scratching your head trying to figure out why those JavaScript statements were full of WAT, your answers are there!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.