Shopify and When the SaaSpocalypse Goes Too Far | Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

I appreciate Matan for being a sacrificial lamb here and echoing all these analysts on the South by earnings call.

It was like, okay, this whole AI is destroying all software has gone too far. This call was the ultimate example. These analysts were asking the same question again and again. I'm like, I thought you analyze this company for a living. How do you not understand these things? I whipped out that article in an hour and I'm like, wait, let me explain these very basic things. And then I got an email from somebody. He's like, that's the best article you've ever written. I'm like, what are you talking about? I feel this is so... I guess it wasn't because Matan read the article and is still asking the same dumb question. Sorry, Matan. Okay. Number one, credit to James on the Peak Google thing. I don't talk about people because I was so astronomically wrong. No, actually, I've talked about it a lot. I threw myself on the sword saying I screwed this one up like five times and every... the fifth one, I've done it enough now. I've sort of hopefully atoned for my sins here. The broader point that we've talked about, about brand advertising relative to say a Facebook, and why is Facebook anti-fragile? Because if the brand advertisers, you go back to the summer of 2020, they boycott Facebook, all that does is give lower ad prices to all these individualized companies who are fighting for the same thing with the Harry's Razors of the world, which eats into the big branded advertisers' market and makes them stronger. So they're actually weakening themselves by boycotting Facebook and Facebook's just getting stronger, right? And so yes, the nature has changed in part because of all this individualization and things that have happened.

Shopify is obviously a huge enabler and driver of this because anyone can set up a merchant site in Shopify and you're basically getting the same tools and experience that everyone on Shopify is getting. And Shopify has gone increasingly into the enterprise space, like very large brands, and all the investment that goes into building out the capabilities to be able to do that is available to the smallest merchant for a relatively low subscription.

Well, so Shopify is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this world of Facebook advertising in particular. So you have this like, and I've talked about like why do I like Facebook ads? I actually bought some because I wear glasses all the time for various reasons. We don't need to get into a discussion. Yes, I'm aware of the surgical alternatives. There's reasons why I can't get them, etc. etc. But I wear glasses in the winter in Wisconsin, snow on the ground, glare, you need to wear sunglasses, right? So I had these cheapy, you know, like from Amazon, from China, like $15 sunglasses over your glasses. Looked absolutely ridiculous. So I get an Instagram ad for fashionable sunglasses over glasses. So of course I buy it because it's Instagram. I pay like 80 bucks for them, which is much more than my $15 Amazon ones. Pretty solid. I mean, it's a pretty tough space. How do you make glasses that go over glasses look good? They kind of look like the Meta Ray-Bans. Like, they have very thick side things or whatever. So I'm really primed for the Ray-Ban world. The problem with Ray-Bans is my prescription is so bad that I can't actually get them. They only go to like minus 7 or something like that. I'm worse than that.

To say the least. Yeah. I'm happy that Instagram is helping out. But they actually included a little note in there that said, "Oh, we're based in Middleton." And because they saw my address was Madison. I don't think they knew who I was or anything like that, but you know, I appreciated it.