Tech Story Pack — From a small idea to a big platform

Canva, Airbnb, Shopify, Spotify and Mollie: five tech companies that started small and grew into platforms, and the decisions about customers, business model and capital that came with it.

Canva started with school yearbooks, Airbnb with three air mattresses and Shopify as an online snowboard shop. This pack shows how those first versions became platforms, including the rejections, the crises and the criticism. It starts with the first customers and the business model and ends with two very different routes to growth: Spotify with licences and a stock market listing without new money, Mollie with fifteen years of growth without outside investors.

How the pack is built up

• Story 1 · Melanie Perkins, The decisions behind Canva: from an online design tool for school yearbooks to a global design platform, with the rejections, convincing investors, agreements between co-founders and a freemium business model.

• Story 2 · Brian Chesky, The decisions behind Airbnb: from three air mattresses in a San Francisco flat to a global marketplace, with credit card debt, trust between strangers and the coronavirus crisis.

• Story 3 · Tobias Lütke, The decisions behind Shopify: from an online snowboard shop for which he built the software himself to a global platform for entrepreneurs, with choices about investors and shares and the costly expansion into logistics.

• Story 4 · Daniel Ek, The decisions behind Spotify: a legal music service in a market full of piracy, with licences as the real start-up capital, the freemium model, the stock market listing without new money and the rounds of layoffs before the first profitable year.

• Story 5 · Adriaan Mol, The decisions behind Mollie: from SMS services to a European payments platform, fifteen years without outside investors, followed by large funding rounds, a reorganisation and the acquisition of GoCardless.

Pack saving

Bought separately, these five stories cost €60 together (5 × €12). As a pack you pay €48: you get one story free.

Who is this pack for?

For (aspiring) entrepreneurs building software, an app or a platform, and for anyone who wants to understand how tech companies make choices about customers, prices and investors.

Digital pack · 5 PDFs · 212 pages · Available immediately after purchase

The founder stories were written independently by FOREFACT; Canva, Airbnb, Shopify, Spotify, Mollie and the people named are not involved in them.