Why I started Shoprocket
This interview was originally published in 2016, three years after Shoprocket launched in 2013. Sharing it again because the questions still come up, and the answers, with more than a decade of hindsight, mostly still hold.
Why start Shoprocket in the first place?
Before Shoprocket, I ran a digital agency in London with two other founders, Anthony Gale and Chris McCreadie. About 90% of the websites we were building were ecommerce, and we kept hitting the same wall: no platform on the market was fast, easy to integrate into an existing site, and simple enough that non-technical store owners could actually use it.
Every project started with the same debate. Magento (heavy, slow, expensive). Shopify (good, but you had to move your whole site onto it). WooCommerce (fine for one client, pain at scale). None of them let us add commerce to a site that already existed without basically rebuilding the site.
So we built our own. Initially as an internal tool. Then clients started asking if they could use it directly. That was the moment Shoprocket stopped being an agency's tool and started being a product.
What was hard about the early years?
Every day was different, fun, and challenging. Most of the time we were juggling several crises at once: product decisions, hiring, funding conversations, client support, technical debt from rushing to ship. It was relentless.
The way through it was conviction about the vision. My co-founders and I knew what we wanted the product to be and who it was for. That clarity smooths over a surprising amount. When you're sure about the end goal, you can lose a day, a week, a funding round, and still get back up because you believe what you're building matters. Without that belief, any one of those setbacks is the end of the story.
How important is the team?
Essential. The team is the business. I learned the hard way that you can't do something like this alone, no matter how much you try. The skill is realising which roles you genuinely can't fill yourself and finding people better than you at those things.
The flip side: hiring badly is more expensive than hiring slowly. A small team of people who care, who own their work, who see the same vision, outperforms a larger team that's split across competing priorities. We've erred on the smaller-and-better side from the start.
How do you attract good people?
Honestly, we rarely have to advertise. Good businesses attract good people. We were part of the Seedcamp alumni early on, which helped; a lot of introductions come from that network. Past that, people we'd worked with recommend others they've worked with. It compounds.
What I look for: recognition of the opportunity, genuine ambition, and willingness to come along for what's going to be a long ride. Shoprocket isn't a get-rich-quick story. It's a patient compounding company in a hard space. The right hires understand that.
Advice for entrepreneurs thinking about starting a tech business?
Do it. I'd encourage anyone with a genuine idea to pursue it. Three things that helped us:
- Do the research. Know the industry, know the players, know what's been tried and failed. Having context means you can tell the difference between a bad idea and an unfashionable one
- Know what problem you're solving. Not in the vague "we're making ecommerce better" sense. Specifically: what goes wrong today, for which person, that your thing fixes?
- Stay dynamic. Running a business is not static. Things change, customer needs shift, market conditions move. Be willing to adjust while keeping the core conviction
Above all, do what makes you happy. If you can build something you genuinely love, you'll never really have to work again.
What's changed since this was recorded?
Quite a lot. Shoprocket is now in its third major version (v3), used by stores across 21 locales, handling everything from single-SKU launches to multi-store operations. The embed-anywhere thesis that started us is still the core of what we do. The team has grown, the product has matured, the problem has not gone away: most store owners still struggle to add commerce to the website they already have.
I'm still running the company. Anthony and Chris have both moved on to other things; we built the foundation together and I'm grateful for what they contributed. The mission is the same as it was in 2016, which I think is both rare and a good sign.
If you're a store owner reading this and wondering whether the tool your founder actually uses can work for you, start a free trial. 14 days, no card.
Building ecommerce tools for independent sellers since 2013.
