The inboxes of venture capitalists—and business journalists—are full of pitches from startups promising they’re the next billion-dollar bet. In the early days of the gig economy, many followed a particular formula: “Uber for” something other than ride-hailing.

In a telling sign of its recent success, Shopify now seems to be the startup world’s preferred marketing buzzword and business-model explainer.

At Y Combinator’s cohort-capping Demo Day in August 2020, Crunchbase counted seven startups using the shorthand, including Shopifys for exercise trainers, medical professionals and intracontinental air carriers. 

A search through two exhaustive chroniclers of savvy startups produces plenty of examples. The tech connoisseurs of ProductHunt have covered Shopifys for cohort-based courses, non-profits, online schools, SaaS, services, South America and tutoring. TechCrunch has featured Shopifys for cannabis dispensaries, coaching centres, live streamers, restaurants, self-storage and outer space.

Some Shopifys-for are competing against each other for the same market. There are at least three startups trying to build a Shopify for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), about which you’ve read so much recently, on different blockchains. NFTify has adopted the e-commerce original’s naming convention and, just in case you don’t get it, calls itself “The Shopify for NFT” in its Twitter profile.

Sometimes the startups are competing against the One True Shopify (which, you’ll be astonished to learn, did not respond to a request for comment on this trend). Mexico-founded Orchata says it’s the Shopify for online grocery, as does San Francisco-based Homesome. The Ottawa-headquartered original picked up a basketful of food and beverage retail clients during the pandemic, including local favourite Farm Boy and German low-price giant Aldi. Gurugram-based ANS Commerce and Hyderabad-headquartered Bikayi both claim the “Shopify for India” sobriquet; the actual Shopify has recently been refining its own offering on the subcontinent. Link-in-bio facilitator Beacons wants to grow up to be Shopify for creators, though Shopify is already many influencers’ preferred platform for merch stores.   

Startups using the shorthand with any kind of accuracy “will typically be B2B services, and it would mean essentially tools or services that help small businesses, creators or [what] have you essentially run their own business either on mobile or online,” said Andrei Hagiu, an associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business who studies platform companies. Many of the companies claiming the label are using it to advertise their product’s plug-and-play functionality, a simplified way for clients to set up a store or site selling whatever comes after the “for.”

Shopify prime’s success—it brought in US$2.9 billion in revenue in 2020, and continues to expand into adjacent fields like fulfillment and banking—makes it a good name to drop when you’re explaining what it is you do to investors and journalists, or to childhood friends at a class reunion. (Happy 11 years to the Hebron School Class of 2010!)

But startups using the shorthand carelessly may hurt their case rather than helping it, warns Hagiu, who is also an angel investor. “‘Shopify is successful, therefore this is [going to] be successful,’” he says. “That’s kind of silly.”