What I love about Dylan’s story and the Shopify customer development story is that Shopify doesn’t create anything (however elegant a solution it seems) without understanding how it’s going to help a person to run her business in the real world. If it isn’t going to benefit 80 percent of their customers 80 percent of the time, then it probably isn’t going to get built. That’s no mean feat when your customers are as big as Google and as tiny as a stay-at-home mum operating a kitchen-table business, but knowing where their customers started and where they hope to go makes all the difference.
