Newsletter #37: Shopify news, Biaheza, and Kylian Mbappé

Hi there,

I hope you're feeling good.

It’s already my 3rd week working at Shopify. Time flies!

I’ll be moving to London in a couple of days. It feels strange to leave Paris, my family, and my friends. Moving all around the globe for remote work, or holidays, is something. But packing all my belongings in one suitcase and leaving on a one-way ticket is a different feeling.

I’m ready for this new adventure. Bring it on!

In today’s edition, we’re discussing Shopify news, Biaheza, and Kylian Mbappé.

Let's dive in.

Work

Lots of cool things happened in the Shopify ecosystem this week. I’d like to highlight 3 of them.

• Front Vibe released a Hydrogen theme called Fluid

You read that right. A Hydrogen theme!

Thomas from Front Vibe shared a demo on Twitter and I thought it was quite impressive.

Fluid is built using Hydrogen, Remix, Tailwind CSS, Radix, shadcn/ui, and Sanity for the content management part.

It beautifully mixes Hydrogen with Sanity’s Presentation feature, which allows you to update your content in real-time through a live preview.

If you’re curious about how it works, you’ll be happy: it’s open source.

Discover more about Fluid on its website, its GitHub repository, or in the tweet announcing its launch.

• Shopify built a live preview of a Blender scene with the Apple Vision Pro

Daniel Beauchamp, who has been working at Shopify for 13 years and is now Principal AR / VR Engineer, managed to build a live preview of a Blender scene with the Apple Vision Pro.

He shared it on Twitter, and the result is absolutely mind-blowing!

I wasn’t the only one fascinated: the video has more than 2 million views.

Bonus: Shopify will be open-sourcing it in the next couple weeks.

• Shopify completely revamped the app submission experience

The submission interface is now much simpler. It includes a checklist, and automated checks. Shopify also introduced action-oriented statuses to let app developers know exactly where their app is in the process.

In practice, when submitting an app to the app store, we all had our own checklist made on the side to not forget anything. This new app submission page is a step towards merging Shopify’s checklist with our checklist, all in favor of creating a clearer and smoother experience.

It almost makes me want to build a new app to test this out!

Inspire

One of my favorite YouTubers is Biaheza.

Biaheza is a young American guy who started making money online when he was around 17 years old. This was back in 2018.

He started his online journey with Instagram theme pages, which he later turned into great audience magnets to fuel his dropshipping stores.

Dropshipping? I know what you’re thinking. But bear with me.

Biaheza is not the typical dropshipper. He is not flexing in Bali with his golden watch and his paid course on how to make 1 million dollars per day with zero effort.

He is in the no bullshit team, which is why I like him. He is super transparent about both his successes and failures.

Most importantly, he has a true hustler mentality. Dropshipping happens to be the activity that brought him the biggest amount of money, but he also tried dozens of other side hustles.

In a series of videos, provocatively titled “Millionaire starts from scratch”, he starts over and tries to see how far he can go. He starts with flipping items, cleaning gutters, moving furniture, etc.

He is hardworking and has a way of motivating us to work just as hard.

He is also super positive, and loves to insert memes in his videos, making them even more entertaining to watch.

In the past few years, Biaheza shifted his YouTube channel towards his new interests, including crypto and trading. He also tried the podcast format, interviewing other young entrepreneurs who made millions online.

I find these topics less interesting, so I have stopped watching his videos regularly.

However, I still smile when I see his thumbnails and I’m grateful for the inspiration he gave me years ago to pursue all kinds of side projects.

Discover more in the 20min video about his whole journey, or in the first episode of his “Millionaire starts from scratch” series:

Explore

In edition 14, I was writing about Mouloud Achour, and why I think his interviews are simply the best ever made.

Mouloud has all the qualities that so many interviewers lack: preparation, patience and genuine curiosity. He manages to create a casual and cosy atmosphere where the interviewee feels comfortable and listened to.

This week, I watched an interview that was not conducted by Mouloud Achour but had the same great effect on me.

It’s an interview of Kylian Mbappé, by Amazon Prime Video Sport France.

Very simply, what a marvel.

It’s so rare to see a journalist ask Kylian Mbappé questions about… football. No sarcasms, no questions about potential future transfers, just football.

And, when giving this incredibly talented player a chance to express himself, what we get is a marvelous result.

We see his eyes light up and his eyebrows furrow as he explains how and why he made every one of these moves years ago against those specific teams.

For anyone who likes football, or anyone who enjoys seeing people speak passionately, this 17min interview is a must-watch.

Enjoy.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading this edition until the end.

I'll talk to you soon.

Take good care of yourself.

Coralie