He Built a Shopify App for MrBeast, Now It's Doing $2M ARR

How Hamish McKay did it: He Built a Shopify App for MrBeast, Now It's Doing $2M ARR

Order Editing is a software company that online shoppers use to make changes to their order after they buy something online, while online retailers pay a monthly subscription to use it. Hamish McKay describes it as giving customers a "Grace period" where they can make changes — just like you can do on Amazon — but brought to Shopify specifically, which is where the company operates. The mechanism is their own IP that guarantees the retailer's system doesn't get the order until Order Editing says so: "very simple but very effective."

The value proposition wasn't obvious at the start. Hamish started the business thinking the most valuable part was saving brands time and money on customer service — cutting the emails from customers asking to change an address or cancel an order. He did that for about six months and hadn't made a single dollar. Then he did a post on LinkedIn showing how a brand could email a customer after they buy and say "hey Thea there's space in your package for another item, get 20% off for the next half hour." They posted it, signed their first two clients off the back of it — a nine figure brand as the first client, then Nike directly after, who are now investors in the business — and the veil was lifted: the marketing they'd been positioned around was wrong. The real story was monetizing the post-purchase moment, with brands making $500,000 or $1 million a year by getting customers to add items after they've made the initial commitment.

In the first year Hamish bet everything on three things: building in public, with him as the face of the brand doing organic social; making sure the first customers were massive brands (the first UK client is Opoli, a 100 million pound brand) so people would ask "how did you get that client so early"; and raising small checks from three influential angels in the industry, losing maybe 3% of equity but bringing in three or four hundred thousand dollars of annual recurring revenue. He spent like 30 grand touring around the US for three months and went overseas for 120 days filming, seeing clients and recording the journey — very much a marketing decision to blow out their LinkedIn influence. They hit a million in AR right at the finish line of the first year.

Now Order Editing is going through what Hamish calls a period of anxiety and then clarity. The company will finish the year doing about two and a half in ARR — roughly 3x on last year — and his vocal goal is 5 mil AR. He's deliberately decided to double down on Shopify rather than expand to other e-commerce platforms, because he and co-founder Carol decided before they started that they were building what could only be described as a medium sized company, with no ambition to build a massive organization. The deeper take comes out in the rapid-fire close: "fuck growing to be as big as possible" — for certain people. Different types of people want different types of businesses, and Hamish thinks people should build businesses they actually want to operate.

What you'll hear

• The Grace period mechanism — how Order Editing's own IP holds a Shopify order until they say so, so shoppers can change it after checkout
• The positioning mistake — why six months of marketing around saving customer-service time made zero dollars, until one LinkedIn post flipped it
• Monetizing post-purchase — how a 20% offer in the package gets customers from two to three items and makes brands $500K–$1M a year
• The three levers to a million in AR — building in public, landing massive first clients like Opoli, and raising small angel checks
• VC-backed growth without the VC — why Hamish traded venture capital pressure for general public pressure by building in public
• The scale math problem — going from 2.5 to 7.5 in 12 months could mean 3,000 deals at a 50% close rate, so the answer is product and account-management teams
• Building a medium sized company on purpose — why he won't expand off Shopify and doesn't want to be the operator in five years

Key claims from this episode

Chapters

Quotes from this episode

Themes Hamish returns to

• Positioning is hard to know upfront — what positioning and value proposition will land is a really hard thing to know before you start your business and start pitching
• No expectations is leverage — when no one knows who you are, you can change messaging, pricing and your business model freely; "no one knows who the hell you are, you've got no expectations"
• Building in public as a growth engine — being candid about revenue maximizes FOMO, inspiration and affinity, and was their most viral way to grow in the first year
• Public pressure replaces VC pressure — they didn't raise venture capital because they didn't want the pressure, and traded it for general public pressure by building in public
• Medium by design — Hamish and Carol chose to build a medium sized company driven by speed and medium-term ambitions, not a massive organization
• Verbs not nouns — Hamish quotes Oscar Wilde to frame himself as "doing the founder thing at the moment," not permanently a founder