The Verb Problem

What Shopify Teaches Every Founder About Positioning

I spent several weeks studying Shopify. Not the product. Not the stock price. The language.

How the company describes itself. How customers describe it. And the distance between those two descriptions.

That distance turns out to be the most useful thing I found.

The pattern on the company side

Tobias Lütke explains Shopify through software. A frustrated snowboarder who couldn’t find decent e-commerce tools, so he built his own. The platform worked better than the snowboard business. They pivoted. Simple origin. Accidental empire.

Harley Finkelstein frames it as a war: “Amazon is trying to build an empire, and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels.”

Ask either of them what Shopify sells, and you’ll hear verbs.

We enable merchants.
We democratize commerce.
We simplify selling.
We arm rebels.
We make commerce better for everyone.

Every statement is an action. A benefit delivered. An outcome promised.

Not one of them is a noun.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. Verbs describe what you do. Nouns describe what you mean. These are not the same thing, and confusing them is the single most common positioning error in business.

Volvo doesn’t say “we make safe cars.” Volvo means safety. The noun lives in your head without the company saying a word. Tesla doesn’t say “we build electric vehicles.” Tesla means future. The noun precedes the verb. The concept precedes the execution.