Shopify Expert Insights

Dedicating 20% of our time to personal projects and research is the secret sauce that makes our client work successful.

We call it Ethercycle Labs. Its shaped our culture in to one of open exploration, let us take risks that clients couldnt, and given us insight on everything from the landslide shift toward mobile to the dynamics of crowd-funding.

To explore projects outside of clients demands, we began a Labs initiative in March 2012. The Labs program allows us to catalyze new thinking while getting into the consumer mindset. This research has provided us guidance on what to support for our clients, helped us reach new customers, and just generally been a great learning experience for the whole team.

Sharing everything we do publicly for free has been our best advertising. Our labs projects are almost universally things we built for ourselves that we shared. Collectively, those releases generate up to 1 million page views monthly, resulting in a lot of referrals to Ethercycle, and subsequently new leads or newsletter subscribers.

Explore what you can do with no restrictions, share it, and see what it can do for your business. At worst, you'll have learned something. At best, you'll have made something wonderful.

In 2009, I quit my job to launch Ethercycle. Back then being a consultancy hadn't crossed my mind.

Quite the opposite, I wanted to build an ecommerce SaaS app for bike shops. A little over a year after we started, we realized that our business model was flawed. We had made ourselves too dependent on other people. At the same time, we had met a lot of people who misunderstood what we were trying to do. These new friends did, however, understand that we knew the Web, and they would often ask: "Could you maybe help with our website?" Looking at the problem rationally, it became obvious that we needed to pivot.

Startups typically need to pivot and evolve their business model over time, especially as customers start to use the product or service. In order to pivot and keep your business moving forward, set limits. If a business model isnt working, you have to set a limit on saving it.

Decide in advance, before your emotions get the best of you, how much time, money, and effort youre willing to put in to iterating a business model before accepting that it isnt working. Failure doesnt have to be scary if you embrace it early, learn from it, and move on to the next thing. The last thing you want to do is rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic.

During the month of March 2013, Calming Manatee received 613,792 total page views. Of them, 26.87% were from mobile devices.

Unique Visitors by Mobile Device

1. iPhone - 59.45%
2. iPad - 14.06%
3. iPod - 3.03%
4. Galaxy S III - 2.10%
5. Other - 21.36%

Unique Visitors by Mobile Operating System

1. iOS - 75.74%
2. Android - 22.60%
3. Windows Phone - 0.93%
4. BlackBerry - 0.62%
5. SymbianOS - 0.05%
6. Other - 0.06%

Unique Visitors by Viewport

1. 320x480 - 45.06%
2. 320x568 - 16.15%
3. 768x1024 - 13.77%
4. 720x1280 - 5.61%
5. 480x800 - 3.01%
6. Other - 16.40%

Audience Demographics
Compared with internet averages, the site appeals more to users who are under the age of 35; its visitors also tend to consist of childless women browsing from school and work who have incomes between $30,000 and $60,000. Roughly 90% of visits to the site are referred from social media.

Insights

1. The Galaxy S3 is clearly the dominant Android device. Consider adding one to your testing suite. Don't spend too much though as it only accounts for 1 in 50 mobile visits. Consider a Bad ESN unit from eBay.
2. These stats are largely unchanged compared to January. There was no market upheaval this quarter.
3. New BlackBerry devices became available worldwide, yet their market share has not yet changed. We'll keep an eye on it.