Some of the most recognizable companies in tech exist because a founder’s original business idea simply didn’t work — and Shopify is one of the clearer examples of a pivot that turned a frustration into a much bigger company than the one it replaced.

In 2004, Tobias Lütke set out to open an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil. At the time, the e-commerce platforms available for small merchants were clunky, limited, and poorly suited to what he wanted to build, so he did what a lot of frustrated developers do: he built his own software to run the store instead of using what was on the market. The snowboard shop itself did modest, unremarkable business.

The software, on the other hand, kept catching the attention of other people. Merchant friends who saw what Lütke had built for his own store started asking whether they could use something similar for theirs. Rather than continuing to treat the software as an internal tool supporting a mediocre snowboard business, the team made the call to rebuild it as a product other merchants could use directly — and Shopify, the e-commerce platform, was born from what had originally been considered a side project to the “real” business.

The snowboard store was eventually shut down entirely. Shopify now powers millions of online stores worldwide and is one of the largest e-commerce platforms in existence — a business built almost entirely from what had originally been considered infrastructure, not the product.

The pattern is a familiar one in hindsight: the actual opportunity was hiding inside the tool built to solve the founder’s own problem, not in the original business idea that tool was built to support. Paying attention to which part of a struggling business other people seem unusually interested in is sometimes the clearest signal available about where the real opportunity actually is.