The P.S. that changed my life

In 2011 a recruiter named Doug reached out to me over LinkedIn. He had seen how successful Kijiji had become and was curious to know if I would be the right person to lead Shopify’s marketing team. He was persistent so I met with him, and eventually the Shopify team. Everything about the job was perfect, save one thing: the location. I had just bought my first house in Toronto. The job was in Ottawa. On this point they wouldn’t budge.

After much deliberation, I sent this email to the Shopify team:

Hi Harley/Tobias/Russ,

I wanted to thank you all for meeting with me last Thursday at your offices. I was really excited by the team, what you’ve accomplished in the past five years, and what the future holds for Shopify. That said, over the long weekend it really did sink in to me: Toronto is my home, it’s where most of my family and friends are, and where I’d like to settle down and hopefully raise a family of my own. It’s pretty clear to me that the role is a long term one, and that it just couldn’t work out without relocating for at least 3 years, if not longer. Russ, you mentioned over lunch that I have to go with my gut on a choice like this, which is what I’ll be doing. So I’m sorry to have to drop out of the running for this role.

Again I wanted to thank each of you for spending time with me last week and wish you all the success in filling the role. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on Shopify and watch it grow from afar.

All the best,

Craig

PS: I notice you are now bidding on competitor brand names. Awesome to see. Here are some other ideas to keep you going until you find a VP of Marketing:

- Call up competitors and ask them to stop bidding on your keywords. If they don’t keep bidding on theirs.

- Advertise on the Google content network. CPCs will be lower, though conversation rate will be lower too.

- At first glance your keyword list seems incredibly small. I would expand it to well over 10,000 to reduce CPCs. Google can do it for you for free. Call them up.

- Advertise using paid search on Bing/Yahoo too. You can copy your keyword list over from Google. CPCs will be lower, though conversation rate will be lower too.

- Look into http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html Your competitors are doing it well already

- Offer a flat affiliate payment option as well. Sure 20% is probably more lucrative, but most affiliates would probably want guaranteed cash.

- Multivariant test your homepage and the sign up flow. This is super easy to do and will result in great returns

A week later they called me up and asked how we could make me living in Toronto work. The rest was history..

Always be good to people. Always. Even if there’s nothing in it for you.