Mitchell Harper and the business of starting again

Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani met in a PHP chat room. Before there was a shared company, there was a shared programming language and the discovery that both were in Sydney. The internet had performed its familiar trick of connecting strangers; in this case, the strangers could actually meet. Their collaboration eventually produced BigCommerce, software designed to let other people get on with running a business. A surprising amount of Harper’s career would turn on that last idea: work out what is getting in someone’s way, then build something that removes it.

The beginning has none of the furniture usually arranged around a corporate origin story. No grand campus. No ceremonial napkin. Two developers were already making things, comparing problems and finding customers. The relationship mattered before the brand did. Years later, the company would operate across Sydney and Austin, attract institutional investors and employ hundreds of people. Its first useful connection required considerably less administration.

Two programmers, one city

Harper had run DevArticles, a programming website he later sold to Developer Shed. He also worked on the web presence of a computer hardware company. These were connected activities: learn how software works, explain it to other developers, then learn how people find and buy it. Writing was already part of his commercial education. A useful article could introduce its author to someone who might eventually become a customer.

With Machaalani, he built Interspire, selling software that customers installed themselves. Content management, email marketing and shopping carts belonged to the same practical world. Businesses wanted to do things online without commissioning every component from scratch. For the founders, paid software licenses supplied revenue they could use to keep building. Customers financed the next stage by buying something they could already use.

That detail gives the early story its particular texture. Before a presentation about future scale came the less glamorous obligation to make a product worth purchasing. The founders were developers, but they had to think about distribution too. Teaching people on the websites developers read made commercial sense. The marketing could travel in the same package as the instruction, with a short introduction to the company at the end.

The chore customers wanted to lose

Interspire’s shopping cart found buyers. Those buyers also explained what they would rather stop doing. Installing software meant finding somewhere to host it, keeping it updated and looking after the machinery behind the storefront. Merchants wanted the founders to take care of that work. Their request contained a business proposition: keep the capability, move the maintenance to the people who understand it.

BigCommerce launched in 2009 as the hosted version of Interspire Shopping Cart. Customers could manage their stores through the web while the company handled the service behind them. The change sounds tidy in retrospect. For a merchant, it meant fewer technical responsibilities competing with stock, orders and customers. For Harper and his colleagues, it meant accepting those responsibilities on the merchant’s behalf.

By March 2010, Harper said the service had attracted nearly 3,000 clients. He described a product shaped through direct conversations with its users. The team posted design wireframes on its blog and invited responses. Customers could object while a feature was still a drawing, which is generally a cheaper time to discover that somebody dislikes the plan.

That willingness to show unfinished thinking is revealing. A software interface is a collection of decisions about what people will understand, notice and do. Getting those decisions wrong creates work for the user. Harper wanted the experience to be approachable while leaving room for merchants to grow. Listening was part of engineering the product, with consequences for everything from the interface to the business model.

A camera, then a capital round

Harper also took the teacher’s role literally. Early BigCommerce videos covered business, marketing and social media. Someone learning to sell online might need an explanation before needing another feature. A founder on camera could make the company useful before a prospective customer had opened an account. The audience could take away an idea even if it never bought the software.

His early product advice had the impatience of a developer who wanted something in people’s hands. “Just get something out there.” He recalled a launch with a hastily assembled website, an unsatisfactory billing setup and no proper logo. These are useful imperfections to remember. A polished origin story can accidentally suggest that a polished launch was a prerequisite.

Money presented a different calculation. Early in 2011, Harper publicly expressed reservations about venture capital and the pressure to grow faster than the company could serve customers. Later that year, BigCommerce completed a $15 million Series A. The company had reached a point where extra investment could fund product development, recruiting and marketing. A position that suited one stage did not have to govern every stage afterward.

In 2013, Revolution Growth invested and Steve Case joined the board. By April 2014, reported funding totaled $75 million and the company employed 320 people. Those figures belong to that moment, rather than to Harper’s personal balance sheet. They mark a change in the scale of his working life: a business once supported by software purchases was now building an organization with institutional capital behind it.

When the organization becomes the product

Recruiting acquired its own creative department. In 2014, BigCommerce approached engineers at San Francisco’s technology shuttle stops, handing out invitations to a happy hour. The plan put the company where the people it wanted to hire already stood. A growing software business needed attention in the employment market as well as the customer market. Apparently, even a bus queue could become a distribution channel.

The more intimate adjustment happened inside meetings. At 23, Harper had been managing people twice his age. He later wrote about feeling nervous during interviews and conversations with his team. The authority on an organizational chart did not immediately produce the confidence to use it. He learned that younger managers could earn respect through their work and their willingness to keep learning.

His advice from that experience was unceremonious. Be yourself. Admit a decision was wrong. Explain a change of course. He acknowledged having defended bad decisions because he did not want to appear mistaken. There is an expensive little trap in that instinct: the effort to protect a manager’s reputation can leave everyone else carrying the consequences.

He also urged managers to ask about people’s lives, spend time together outside ordinary work routines and find out what was slowing a team down. These are modest instructions for someone associated with a venture-funded software company. They suggest how much of the job happens between formal processes. A person waiting for a decision still needs someone to make it; a neglected problem does not become smaller because a meeting has ended.

A different kind of feedback loop

In 2015, Harper launched PeopleSpark, addressing communication between managers and employees. The origin was familiar. He had encountered a problem while operating a company and wanted a better tool for dealing with it. Receiving regular feedback from a growing team was difficult. The distance between a manager’s impression and an employee’s experience could widen long before an annual review arrived to discuss it.

There is a clear connection between the merchant-facing software and this later venture. Both concern information that has to reach someone who can act on it. A store owner needs a manageable view of orders and products. A manager needs to understand what colleagues are encountering. The situations differ, but both become harder when important information is buried beneath the effort required to obtain it.

Harper had also stepped away from BigCommerce’s daily operating leadership. In 2016, he explained that he preferred starting and scaling businesses to the routines of running an established organization. The distinction is personal and consequential. Founding a company can qualify someone to understand its beginnings without creating a permanent obligation to enjoy every job that follows.

“Yeah. I like starting from scratch.”

Mitchell Harper, 2016

The classroom after the company

Education gave that preference another outlet. Harper promoted Startup Growth Blueprint, a course covering the stages of building a company. He spoke about helping inexperienced founders avoid mistakes he had already made. The subject had changed from using software to building a business, but he was still packaging practical knowledge so another person could put it to work.

Some of that influence can be seen in Nathan Chan’s work at Foundr. Chan has credited Harper as a mentor who taught him hiring strategies. That is a quieter connection than an investment announcement. Advice becomes another founder’s interview process, hiring decision or management habit. The mentor’s name may disappear from the daily activity while the lesson continues to do its job.

The public record of that teaching extends through the Insane Growth podcast and later circulation of his interviews. In January 2025, Foundr republished an archive conversation with Harper about building BigCommerce. The release was a return to an earlier discussion. Its subjects remained recognizable: customer feedback, recruiting, capital and the decisions required when a small software business becomes a larger one.

Harper’s story makes the founding role look less like a fixed identity and more like a succession of practical assignments. Write the code. Explain the product. Hear the complaint. Hire the person. Hand over a responsibility. Each assignment changes what the next one requires. For a programmer whose consequential partnership began in a chat room, the ability to learn from a conversation has proved rather useful.