[lolinder]

The author set up a business in what they knew was a gray area. 6 months later the ToS were updated to explicitly ban what they were doing, and they got an email that pretty clearly implied that they would need to make major changes but wouldn't be shut down right away, but the author chose to interpret silence as authorization to keep scaling. About 8 months later Shopify's COO told them explicitly that Shopify didn't want them to keep operating, and the author used a technical detail of the way they phrased the ToS to justify continuing to scale.

At that point I lost all sympathy for the author. The COO of the company you've built your product on told you that they don't want you to keep running your business. At that point they shouldn't have to keep playing whack-a-mole with loopholes in the ToS, and the fact that they did does not speak well of the author or their company.

[ketzo]

The author very clearly doesn't want your sympathy:

> I was never so naive to believe that they’ll just let me go around forever, piggyback on their platform and reap most of the benefits. Even though what we were doing was not forbidden - it was clear that Shopify would disapprove of it.

They made their money while they could. They are disappointed they couldn't keep going, but it doesn't seem like they feel "entitled" to continue.

[deely3]

I'm not sure why did you lost all the sympathy. If company decided to kill your business, thats ok, because company in its rights to do so. But why thats mean that you should not feel sympathy to killed business?

Google is in its rights to kill Google Reader or ad-blockers, Mozilla in its rights to kill complex 3rd party extensions, Nintendo in its rights to kill any emulation but does it mean that we should be happy to oblige?

[darkarmani]

> The COO of the company you've built your product on told you that they don't want you to keep running your business.

That doesn't sound like a reasonable request. It's not like the COO is paying them anything to stop running their business. Can you imagine if Microsoft shutdown, because IBM asked them nicely to stop their business back in the 80s?

[lolinder]

When you've built your business on helping your customers use Shopify's product without your customer having to pay Shopify for it... it's a pretty reasonable request to knock it off.

[wes_walke]

Is the author looking for sympathy? I didn't get that from the article, just a post mortem of the company and what happened.