How Shift Grew

“I did that in community chats, forums, Twitter, and Reddit. I'm old school. Given my developer audience, I still mostly do Twitter.”

Indie Hackers high

“Congratulations on building something that's been valuable to the Laravel community for a decade. Reaching that level of longevity is probably harder than building the product itself.”

Indie Hackers medium

“Expanding the catalog has been an obvious driver of revenue growth. Every new Laravel release creates a new Shift. But I also built adjacent products: a test generator, code modernizer, and one-off refactors. These help normalize seasonal revenue.”

Indie Hackers high

“The biggest growth lever has always been community. From day one, Taylor Otwell backed Shift with a tweet. That one retweet reached exactly the right audience. That definitely gave Shift the initial boost most projects never get.”

Indie Hackers high

“SKIMS is shifting toward a predominantly physical retail business model ... toward physical retail expansion, international expansion, product innovation, and category expansion.”

Sacra medium

“SKIMS has also established a Nordic and Baltic wholesale channel through Stockmann—Finland's leading department store—available both in-store and on stockmann.com across Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, signaling continued partner-retail expansion across new European markets.”

Sacra medium

“I also send a weekly newsletter to Shift users and try to livestream every Wednesday.”

Indie Hackers high

“SKIMS' international expansion is anchored by dedicated infrastructure and leadership. ... Its permanent Middle East presence launched through a partnership with Al Tayer Insignia at Mall of the Emirates in Dubai (December 2025)...”

Sacra medium

“With collaborative products like Canva, your free user base tends to continue to give you more and more users over time as they invite more people, as long as there is engagement.”

Sacra medium

“Most of Canva's user base is on free. They're engaged on free, because free is a very powerful product in itself. Most of your work, you can get away with having a free plan, and that's by design. Canva wants as many people as possible to use the product.”

Sacra medium

“I got involved. Spoke at Laracon. Got on community podcasts. Wrote blog posts. Built courses where I saw knowledge gaps. None of it explicitly marketed Shift. I'm not salesy. But I was never afraid to mention Shift when it added value to the conversation.”

Indie Hackers high

“the feedback was those early email follow-ups. From day one, I sent an email follow-up every single user 48 hours after they ran a Shift. Two simple questions: What manual changes did you still have to make? How did you find out about Shift? The answers weren't always what I wanted to hear. But I...”

Indie Hackers high

“This allows the company to reach millions of potential customers with minimal traditional advertising spend, significantly reducing customer acquisition costs compared to traditional apparel brands.”

Sacra medium

“A key element of SKIMS' business model is its ability to create buzz and drive demand through limited-edition drops and collaborations.”

Sacra medium

“I started building Shift that night at the conference hackathon. When I had a working prototype, Taylor mentioned it on Twitter to help me find testers. I continued working on it when I got home. A few weeks later, I launched laravelshift.com on December 23, 2015. Over the Christmas holiday, I ma...”

Indie Hackers medium

“With collaborative products like Canva, your free user base tends to continue to give you more and more users over time as they invite more people, as long as there is engagement.”

Sacra medium

“SKIMS has also expanded its reach through strategic partnerships with retailers like Nordstrom and Selfridges—including a European pop-up shop with Selfridges—providing additional revenue streams and exposure to new customer segments.”

Sacra medium

“By network effect, I mean the more people are on Canva, the more designers are encouraged to create designs for Canva, which makes the template library richer and fresher, and people keep returning.”

Sacra medium

“I run a monthly ad on Laravel News, too. I don't think it moves the needle. But it's a good deal and keeps Shift in front of eyeballs.”

Indie Hackers high

“Those initial tweets from Taylor likely convinced the first few customers. I also think the ridiculously low pricing 'derisked' the service. After trying it, the value was obvious - as measured by Shift's crazy high retention rate.”

Indie Hackers medium

“SKIMS has expanded into activewear through NikeSKIMS, a joint venture with Nike that has grown into a full head-to-toe offering ... the NikeSKIMS Spring '26 collection further extends SKIMS' reach through Nike's existing distribution infrastructure across Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and K...”

Sacra medium