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Eighteen months ago Portugal had about three Shopify Plus brands and no Shopify staff covering the country. One agency lobbied the platform to staff it, became the local Plus partner, and now runs 32+ Plus accounts as the market grew towards forty.
Shopify existed in Portugal but had nobody managing the country — and without a local Shopify team you cannot become a Plus partner there. So the agency pushed the platform to staff it, and then owned the market it had just created.
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Helder's agency in Porto turned ten years old this year, and for most of that decade it was not a Shopify shop at all. It started on Magento, then worked across Salesforce Commerce and VTEX, testing every platform the way agencies do, because they have to know what to recommend. Shopify was on the list early and kept getting rejected — not on the technology, but on perception. Merchants believed Shopify was for dropshippers and small brands and was not enterprise-grade. About eighteen months before this conversation, that changed and they moved. The obstacle was structural rather than commercial: Shopify existed in Portugal but had no team managing the country, and you cannot become a Plus partner in a market the platform does not staff. So they lobbied for it. Shopify put a team on Portugal, the agency became a Plus partner, and today about 90% of their installed base is Shopify, across 32-plus Plus accounts, with a team of 37 covering development, project management and design. The market number is the one that makes this a listing rather than an anecdote. By his count Portugal had roughly three Shopify Plus brands eighteen months ago. Today it is around thirty, and he thinks closer to forty. He also describes the migration direction now visible in bigger accounts: Salesforce Commerce to Shopify, and custom in-house platforms to Shopify. He discloses no revenue, and we are not going to estimate any. What is on the record is headcount, account count and market growth.
The Shopify practice did not begin from zero customers — it began from a ten-year book of them. Helder's agency opened on Magento, worked through Salesforce Commerce and VTEX, and moved to Shopify about eighteen months before this conversation.
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Data credibility: Founder-reported in a friendly in-person podcast recorded at the agency's own event. The traction figures — 32+ Shopify Plus accounts, a team of 37, roughly 90% of the installed base on Shopify after about 18 months, and the Portuguese market moving from about 3 Plus brands to nearly 40 — are all his own statements, given conversationally and with visible uncertainty on the market numbers (he says he does not know for sure, then estimates). No revenue, margins, contracts or client names were disclosed, and no documents were shown. The interviewer runs a Shopify developer channel and the founder is a guest at his own event, so this is an ecosystem conversation rather than an audit. The agency's name is rendered inconsistently by the automatic captions, so no spelling is asserted here. The Shopify guidance he cites on headless commerce (a rough €40-50M GMV threshold) is his recollection of Shopify's own academy material, not a quoted document.
No revenue figure is disclosed anywhere, so the useful question is what actually gets invoiced. It is project work — design, development and project management for merchants — with no marketing retainers and no software products, because he treats products and services as different mindsets and picked services.
Two wheels turn at once. The first is the partner tier.
The quiet years in this story are the ones where Shopify kept being the wrong answer.
A technical e-commerce agency, deliberately narrow. They do development, project management and design, and they do not touch performance marketing at all. His reasoning is a lesson in itself: performance marketing is a completely different discipline, and if you sell both to one client, a failure on either side can lose you both. They keep partners for the marketing work instead. The delivery model is three tiers, and knowing which tier a brand belongs in is most of the value they sell. Tier one, for a proof of concept or a first store, is a well-reviewed third-party theme, and he is explicit that there is nothing wrong with that. Tier two, for a brand that wants its own identity — he floats a rough threshold of four to five million in GMV while stressing it depends — is a custom design built on top of Shopify's own base theme, adding sections and blocks around it rather than replacing it, specifically so the store keeps inheriting new platform features and fixes as they land in the base theme first. Tier three is genuinely custom: headless with Hydrogen or another framework, external CMS, third-party search, even a custom checkout. On that top tier he is refreshingly conservative. He cites Shopify's own guidance that headless makes sense at roughly forty to fifty million euros in GMV because it is so developer-intensive, and he notes headless became fashionable largely because developers enjoy it — a developer-experience preference, not a merchant one. His rule: go headless for the right reasons, and remember you lose apps, tracking and analytics conveniences on the way.
Project fees and ongoing technical work for merchants, with no marketing retainers and no software products. He is clear that products and services are different mindsets, and they chose services. The interesting revenue mechanic is the partner tier itself. Being a Plus partner — and the higher tiers above it, which depend on how many merchants you manage and the revenue they produce — changes what you can sell. He describes getting enterprise sales support, solution engineers and a dedicated Shopify team alongside you, which is what lets a mid-sized agency in a small market credibly compete against Salesforce Commerce and other enterprise platforms for a large brand. In other words, the certification is not a badge, it is the sales team you could not otherwise afford. Custom app development sits inside the service line rather than being a business of its own: they build private apps to solve a specific client's edge case, because getting an app onto the public app store is hard and the app ecosystem grows very fast. They are explicitly not selling app products. One detail worth noting for anyone pricing platform work: he says merchants routinely misunderstand Shopify's cost, believing the monthly fee comes with a commission on sales. What they are actually looking at is card payment processing, which you pay on any platform through a payment provider — and on other platforms you additionally pay for hosting. Being able to explain that clearly is part of how the platform gets sold.
He says plainly that they do not generate leads. What they have instead is ten years in the market, and two mechanisms built on top of it. The first is the platform relationship. Shopify shares leads with them because they are deeply engaged with the platform and because they sell and launch — which is the quiet condition on partner lead flow everywhere. Partner managers route deals to agencies that close and ship, not to agencies that merely hold a certification. The second is events, and this is the copyable part. The conversation happens at one of their own: a private, invitation-only gathering of hand-picked Portuguese brands, about 160 people at roughly 30% partners and technology vendors and 70% merchants. Around twenty of their own clients attend. He is emphatic that it is not a sales event — no partner is there to pitch — because the value is merchants meeting merchants and hearing from their peers. His line: there is no better way to sell to other clients than having your own clients say good things about you, in a room, to their peers. They also invite competing agencies, including another Plus agency, and pass overflow work and leads to them, on the reasoning that competition is healthy and clients circulate anyway. And he found the podcast host through YouTube, having searched for good-quality Shopify content as an agency owner — a reminder that the buyers of technical services are watching technical content.
Their build stack is Shopify's own base theme, extended with custom sections and blocks and, at the top tier, headless front ends in Hydrogen or another JavaScript framework with an external CMS. The discipline they impose on themselves is to avoid breaking the base theme — build above, below and beside it, keep it as native as possible, and do everything by the book, so platform updates and fixes keep flowing in. On apps he names what they actually reach for: a combined loyalty, reviews and wishlist app with point-of-sale support and checkout extensibility; dedicated search providers rather than the platform's built-in search, which he considers limited; post-purchase order editing; returns and exchange tooling; and the usual email and support suspects. Plus a long tail of small utilities like pickup points and geolocation. His caveat is genuinely useful for anyone building in this ecosystem: the app set differs by country and region, so a stack that is standard in the US is not standard in Europe. No cost or margin figures are given. What can be inferred from the structure: this is a people business, and he says so — the only way to scale an agency is with people and projects — so margin is a function of utilisation and the mix across the three delivery tiers. They also spend real money on the community layer, hosting a 160-person private event, which functions as their marketing budget. One small culture detail with a marketing function: every client receives a physical Shopify order counter on launch day.
Copy the market-selection thesis, which is the whole entry. Find a country or region where a major commerce platform has real merchant demand and no local partner infrastructure, and get in before the platform staffs it. The leverage is not technical skill — it is being the credible local option when the platform starts looking for one, which turns partner lead flow into your acquisition channel. Portugal went from three Plus brands to nearly forty in eighteen months; whoever was the local partner during that period was carried by it. Copy the tier discipline. Knowing when a theme is enough, when a custom build on the base theme is right, and when headless is genuinely justified — he anchors it at roughly forty to fifty million euros in GMV — is what stops an agency from over-engineering itself out of profitability and a merchant from buying something they cannot maintain. Copy the event, scaled down. You do not need 160 people. The mechanism is merchants hearing from your existing clients in person, with no pitch in the room, and inviting your competitors so the room is genuinely useful. A dinner for eight does this. Change the scale expectation. This is a ten-year-old, 37-person services business with no disclosed revenue, so nobody should read it as a solo play. Our read on the small version: pick one under-served market, specialise in one delivery tier — the custom-design-on-base-theme tier is where most demand sits — and partner out everything else, exactly as he partners out performance marketing. Also note his own asymmetry: services and products are different mindsets, and building apps as products is a different business he deliberately declined.
First, platform dependency of an unusually deep kind. This business does not merely use Shopify, it is built on being certified by Shopify, fed leads by Shopify and supported by Shopify's sales engineers. Partner programmes get restructured, tier requirements change, and platforms have historically both created and destroyed agency businesses with a single programme revision. Second, the window closes by definition. The whole thesis is being early in an under-served market. Once the platform staffs the country and the market grows to forty brands, the next entrant is competing on price and credentials rather than on being the only option — and he notes competing Plus agencies already exist locally. Third, it is a people business with people-business economics. Thirty-seven staff means fixed cost against project revenue, and he says scaling requires hiring ahead of work. He also relays a rule of thumb he was given — that a commercial relationship averages a maximum of about three years — which frames churn as structural even though his own agency has ten-year clients. Fourth, platform features eating service work. Shopify keeps absorbing capabilities that used to be paid apps or custom builds, and the same movement reaches implementation work. An agency whose value is configuring things the platform will soon do natively has a shrinking scope. Fifth, evidence. Everything here is founder-reported in a friendly podcast recorded at his own event: no revenue, no margins, no client list, no contracts. The agency's name is rendered inconsistently in the auto-captions, so we have deliberately not asserted a spelling. The market figures — three Plus brands rising to nearly forty — are his own estimates, stated with visible uncertainty in the conversation.
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