The first Shopify order was mine.
Order #1001 sounds more impressive than it was. At 5:55 in the afternoon, I bought three stickers from Apply: two copies of a design called Blossoming and one called Dairy. I paid with PayPal and picked standard delivery.
This was not a customer sale. It was me checking the plumbing.
One email went to the company side. I forwarded it with a very technical explanation: “This is the email to tell us someone bought a sticker.”
The other went to the customer side.
“Sticker customer gets.”
That was the whole note.
Five months earlier I was finishing interviews and learning stickers. By May I was working on Apply full time. Now we had a Shopify store that could take an order, accept payment, and send both sides of the transaction an email.
There was plenty around it that was not finished. We were still building the storefront, working through product requirements, organizing the catalog, and deciding what the company was supposed to look and sound like. A new “How to Apply” banner landed in Drive that morning. The store was beginning to resemble a real place instead of a collection of documents and conversations.
The company itself was still early too. Two days later I told a former Aaptiv colleague that things were good, we were closing an angel round, and we planned to launch in a few weeks.
Planned was the important word. The test order proved that one path through the store worked. It did not prove that the launch was done, that customers were waiting, or that the business worked.
For the moment, there were three stickers headed back to the person who already owned them.
The store worked. Now we needed someone else to use it.