Share on In 2012, Canada-based software company Shopify, was poised for the kind of 'hold-onto-your-seat' hypergrowth that most startups dream of. At the time, the company had been named as one of the ten most innovative retail companies by Fast Company, and was onboarding new merchants onto their cloud-based e-commerce platform at a rapid pace. Over the next four years, Shopify grew fast—from 20,000 merchants to more than 300,000. Shopify has remained at the industry’s forefront by offering timely integrations with payment providers like Apple Pay and emerging messaging platforms like FacebookMessenger, and by partnering with Amazon. Yet, during that first flood of new business, Shopify quickly realised its teams were struggling to onboard and support new merchants, mostly because the tools in place weren’t equipped for the deluge of new requests.