# How Shopify Turned a Snowboard Shop Into a $90B Platform by Treating Tooling as Strategy

By: Justin Abrams
Published: 2026-01-02

Shopify started because Tobi Lutke wanted to sell snowboards and the existing tools were terrible. Founders who scratch their own itch build the best products. Here is how Cause of a Kind turns a founder's itch into a stack.

In 2004, [Tobi Lutke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke) wanted to sell snowboards online. He found a snowboard he liked, partnered with a friend, and opened a small ecommerce shop called Snowdevil. There was just one problem. Every ecommerce platform he tried was terrible. The user experience was clunky, the customization was limited, and the developer experience was a nightmare.

So Lutke, who happened to be a [Rails](https://rubyonrails.org) developer in the early Rails community, did what good engineers do. He built the tooling he wished existed. He wrote the platform that would power his snowboard shop. The snowboard shop did fine. The platform changed the internet.

[Shopify](https://www.shopify.com) is now worth tens of billions of dollars at current market cap. It powers millions of businesses. It generates billions in annual revenue. And it started because [a guy wanted to sell snowboards and the existing tools were not good enough](https://www.shopify.com/blog/shopify-history).

The case study lesson is that founders who build the tool they themselves need almost always end up with the best products. The market knows immediately whether something was built by someone who has lived the problem, or by someone who has only read about it.

### Why Founders Who Itch the Itch Build Better Products

Most products fail because the founder is solving a problem they have only observed, not lived. They have done market research. They have run customer interviews. They have read the trend reports. But they have never personally felt the pain that their product is supposed to solve. So they ship a product that is technically correct but emotionally wrong. It addresses the surface symptoms instead of the underlying need.

Founders who have lived the problem build different products. They know which features actually matter because they have personally cursed at the existing tools at one in the morning while trying to make something work. They know which edge cases are common because they have hit those edge cases themselves. They know which workflows feel broken because they have suffered through the broken ones.

Lutke knew Shopify needed to be developer friendly because he was a developer. He knew it needed to be customizable because he wanted to customize his own store. He knew it needed to be fast because he had been frustrated by slow platforms himself. The product fits the market because it first fit him.

### My Own Itch Built My Career

I am a [Long Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island) kid who has spent my life outside. Mountaineering, snowboarding, surfing, scuba, cycling, rock climbing, golf. I have built my professional life around the same instinct that has driven every adventure I have ever taken. If the path does not exist, you make one. If the tool does not work, you build one. If the gear is wrong, you fix it before you start.

[Mike Rispoli](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikerispoli/) and I met at fifteen on a rock climbing wall. Twenty years later, we are still partners. The studio we built together, [Cause of a Kind](https://causeofakind.com), came from the same instinct. We were two creative technologists who wanted to work with cool people on great products, and the agency world we encountered did not work the way we wanted to work. So we built our own.

Then we kept doing it. [FIN Forecasting](https://finforecasting.com) came out of running an agency. We needed financial forecasting that actually understood agency economics. Nothing on the market did. So we built it. Now it serves other agencies. Long Island Technologists came from wanting a community of builders in our home region. There was no such community. So we built one. Forward Fest, which is coming in 2027 at [Northwell at Jones Beach Theater](https://www.jonesbeach.com), is coming together because Long Island deserves a tech festival and nobody else was making one. So we are.

This is the only way I know how to work. Build the tool you wish existed. Make the community you wish you had. Throw the festival you would actually want to attend. The product follows the founder's life.

### Why This Is the COAK Edge

When founders come to [Cause of a Kind](https://causeofakind.com), they often come with an itch. They have lived something. A problem they keep encountering, a workflow they keep fixing, a tool they keep wishing existed. Most agencies treat that itch as a specification. They take the description, scope the build, deliver the deliverable, and collect the invoice.

We treat the itch as the entire product. The specification is not the point. The lived experience behind the specification is the point. We sit with founders long enough to understand why they need the thing, not just what they need. We ask the questions that make founders sharper. We pull out the assumptions that need testing. We build the product that fits the founder, because we know from our own work that products that fit founders also fit markets.

This is not a methodology I learned in a consulting engagement. This is how I have built every project I have ever cared about. From the early enterprise consulting work for [Marriott](https://www.marriott.com), [Disney](https://www.disney.com), and [Salesforce](https://www.salesforce.com), to the bootstrapped studio with Mike, to the [podcast](https://strictlyfromnowhere.com) we host together, to the festival we are about to throw. Every project starts from a real itch and gets built by a team that respects where the itch came from.

### What to Do With Your Itch

If you have an itch, do not bury it. Do not assume someone else will build it. Do not wait for the market research to confirm what you already feel. The market research will always lag your instinct. The instinct is the asset.

The best products in software history started as side projects scratched by founders who could not stand the existing options. [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com) was a snowboard shop. [Slack](https://slack.com) was a game studio's internal tool. [Basecamp](https://basecamp.com) was a project management hack inside an agency. [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com) was a photo feature inside a check in app called Burbn. Every single one of these companies began as a tool built by a founder who refused to keep suffering with what existed.

Your itch is the asset. The studio you hire should know what to do with it.

[Cause of a Kind](https://causeofakind.com) is the studio that knows how to turn an itch into a stack.

Forward to Extraordinary. [Connect with me on LinkedIn.](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cuzzinjustin/)

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