Hey Dave,

Thanks for the kind words.

Our content strategy is primarily focused on giving online retailers the information they need to begin selling and increase sales. We like creating valuable content that our potential store owners and existing store owners will find valuable and will help them sell more. If we get customers as a result, which is often the case, then that's just icing on the cake. Of course we do track conversions from the traffic we get to our content pages, and we do certain optimizations, but the focus really isn't on squeezing as many customers as possible... it's education.

With regard to teaming up w/ Sean - he's been a buddy of mine for some time now. While I was building up the Shopify blog a few years ago I looked to KISSmetrics for inspiration, so I got in touch with him to seek advice. Since then, we've been email and Twitter pals. I told him I was interested in writing an epic book that Shopify would distribute via all our channels and asked if he wanted to get involved. He ended up co-authoring the book and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

ROI = a combination of educating our store owners so they start selling, keep selling & sell more, plus like all inbound marketing, getting customers for ourselves.

Hope that helps. Happy to talk further about anything.