Ten years. One focus.
Hextom started in 2015, when traditional retailers were moving their stores online faster than the tools could keep up. The bet was simple: build small, sharp apps that solve one merchant problem at a time — and listen hard to the merchants using them.
In the first six months, seven apps shipped and 15,000 merchants installed them. Sixty-eight feature requests landed in the roadmap in that same window — every one of them driven by a merchant email. The first customer-service hire came before the team had a real office. That rhythm — ship, listen, ship again — is still how the roadmap gets written today.
The operating principle has never really changed: "We build apps to help shop owners solve problems. If the app is too complicated to use, that's just solving one problem by creating another one." A decade later, "easy to use" is still one of the most-repeated phrases in our 11,000+ App Store reviews. That isn't a coincidence — it's a constraint we hold every release to before it ships.
The roadmap is written by merchants.
Active merchants form a standing group — internally we call it the Force of Innovation — that we ping for feature priorities, pre-release feedback, and blunt critique. They shape the next version before it ships, not after. When a request keeps coming up across that group and across support tickets, it gets prioritized. Most of what's in the suite today started as a request from a single merchant who took the time to write us an email.
We try to make that easy. Every install triggers an automatic welcome email — not a marketing drip, just a question: what's working, and what isn't? Replies come straight to engineering. Customer service has always sat next to the people writing the code, and it always answers in a few hours. Most of the time, the person who responds is the same person who can fix it.
De-engineering the interface.
Engineers building tools for engineers is easy. Engineers building tools for store owners — bakers, jewellers, apparel founders, dropshippers, multi-million-dollar brands — is harder. Sometimes we have to de-engineer ourselves and write in the language our users are comfortable reading. Plain-English settings. Jargon-free copy. Defaults that already make sense before anyone touches them. Interfaces that don't need a manual.
That discipline is why most Hextom apps are running productively within a few minutes of installing. It's also why a single team of engineers can support a suite this large: less customization surface area to misconfigure, fewer support tickets that need a debugger to resolve, more time spent shipping the next thing.
Where we are now.
Ten years in, the suite has grown to thirteen apps spanning marketing and customer engagement, sales and conversion, catalog and bulk operations, global selling, and store automation. More than 270,000 merchants are running at least one of them. The 4.8★ average across 11,000+ reviews comes from the same loop that produced the first version of Free Shipping Bar in a Toronto coffee shop: ship something small, listen to who installs it, fix what isn't working, ship again.
We're still engineer-led. Still based in Toronto. Still answering our own support email. The plan is to keep doing that.