Julio Giannotti is the web manager for Interline’s three e-commerce channels, including Scandis.com. Although Interline is late to e-commerce, its online presence and traffic are well established. Consequently, Julio and his team needed solutions that could help them scale rapidly. They turned to the Shopify Flow platform and the new Shopify Plus e-commerce automation tools. By automating repetitive tasks, Julio and his team can focus on more important things like innovation.

With the introduction of Shopify Flow and the Wholesale Channel, Shopify Plus will help accelerate and transform business. By reducing the barriers to commercialization and learning faced by niche producers and specialty retailers, Shopify Plus will increase the incentive and opportunity for merchants to continue to sharpen their market focus.

The Association for Creative Industries (“AFCI”) is a non-profit trade group. It facilitates learning, discovery, and connections among a membership predominately comprised of niche producers, specialty retailers, and designers. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mark Hill, the president of AFCI, about the challenges and opportunities faced by his industry after successive waves of competitive disruption.

After interminable effort, your sales have finally taken off. In fact, you’re grappling with the “high-class problems” associated with growth. You’re so busy fulfilling orders, you have little time to spend on social media or content development. (Forget about new products! )You’re lucky to get a little time with your family in the evenings after reconciling daily reports from your credit card payment processor. All this success is killing you. It’s time to hire…right? Before you hire your first employee, ask yourself a few questions. Then dig deeper into the root causes of your pain.

With Bonjoro, you can easily create and send personalized videos to your prospects and customers. Matt Barnett and his team built Bonjoro to help businesses differentiate themselves by building customer relationships at scale.

A budget can be used as an instrument of control. It’s better to use a budget to learn faster and perform better.

“The Mom Test” by veteran entrepreneur Rob Fitzpatrick is one of our favorite business books. Concise, clear writing describes actionable concepts that will instantly help you have better, more productive conversations with prospective customers about your business idea. Listen to our podcast conversation about why we love the book, and download our selection of key excerpts along with our annotations.

Dave Bayless spoke with Mario Schulzke about “5 to 9” projects. Unlike side gigs such as driving an Uber car, a 5 to 9 project is typically born from intense personal interest rather than an immediate expectation of financial reward. Even so, a 5 to 9 project is something you can own and build, so it offers the prospect for accumulated value over time in addition to intrinsic rewards.

P2Binvestor (“P2Bi”) is an online marketplace lender that provides asset-based lines of credit of $1 million or more. Typically, its borrowers are rapidly growing consumer products and professional services companies that can’t yet access bank credit. Through the application of technology, P2Bi has democratized access to this kind of debt financing by making it available to companies having annual revenues as low as $1 million. I spoke with Krista Morgan, co-founder and CEO, about what makes P2Bi different.

Jordan Lacenski founded BrandBoss Creative. She also cofounded the SheWolf Collaborative (where she is an “alpha”). The collaborative is organized as a business “wolf pack” that consists of complementary providers of marketing services. Through its organization, SheWolf Collaborative benefits its clients, members, and the broader community of women entrepreneurs.