Scott Lake: Small Business Blog Interview

Scott Lake of Jaded Pixel says, "The biggest suprise is how quickly people respond to important posts." Jaded Pixel launched the shopping program/website Shopify recently, and we featured their blog last week. Scott was kind enough to tell us a little more about the blog...

Pajama Market: How has the blog impacted your company?

Scott Lake: The blog has had a huge impact on our company mostly because it is our primary way to communicate with our community. We read every comment and often post follow-up comments to clarify or answer questions. Its a way that we can use to express ourselves on more than just the business.

PJ: What has the response been from your customers/clients?

SL: The response has been really good and has certainly grown over time. Now that our product has launched we get a a lot more people reading the blog as well as a lot more subscribers. The funny thing is that we don't really pay much attention to how many people are reading our blog. We post to it because the people who are reading it are interested in what we're doing so if it was 10 people or 10,000 we would write it the exact same way.

PJ: What types of things about your work day inspire you to write a post on your blog?

SL: These days since we have been reaching so many milestones, the post mostly focus on the release of Shopify. Once things settle down you should start to see the blog start to deal with a wider array of topics than just Shopify news. The things that inspires us to blog are usually things that are either really important or really interesting. If all work stops and we all get into a conversation about something, there is a good chance that we will blog about it. That being said everyone at Jaded Pixel runs a personal blog and a lot of stuff shows up on those blogs as well.

PJ: What have been the biggest surprises with your blog so far?

SL: The biggest surprise is how quickly people respond to important posts. When we announced that Shopify was in Beta, I went back about five minutes later to fix a typo and five comments were already posted. That surprised me. Other than that the level of passion that people show for Shopify is also surprising sometimes. It is actually a great feeling to have people be passionate enough about your product that they go out of their way to tell you on your blog.

PJ: What blogging program do you use for the blog? Did you create this blog yourself? How do you like the program?

SL: The jaded Pixel blog is running on Typo which is the Ruby on Rails blogging engine that my partner Tobi created. Typo has served us really well and we are really happy with it. Since Tobi wrote Typo, it wasn't like we had much choice.

PJ: Is there anything else you would like to share about your blogging experience?

SL: Blogging is a great way to get the message out about what you are doing. It also keeps you connected with your community.  I would recommend it to anyone who has a company.

Tags: shopify, shopify.com, jaded pixel, tobias lutke, scott lake, ecommerce, estore, bridgehead coffee

Comments

[Steve]

Shopify has a great site. But does anybody know about www.fivestores.com ? They seems to be working on similar product like Shopify.