Three years ago Farhan, David and I started Helpful to build the next generation of enterprise mobile products using AI. We focused on hard problems in fast growing companies for which there was a big market and no existing solution. Our small and awesome team built and launched three amazing products:

AI-Powered Employee Directory: A beautiful, mobile employee directory and org chart that helped you find not only people, but also an answer to any question.

Asynchronous Video Messages at Work: a communication tool for distributed teams that uses short, emotion-packed videos and images in addition to text.

Live Interactive Audio: Dialog is a live interactive audio experience. Just last month Ben Stiller, Jake Tapper and Golden Globe winner Patricia Arquette used Dialog to reach their audiences.

We’re proud of everything we accomplished here at Helpful, and we wanted to say thank you to all of our customers. We learned so much working with you and we are indebted to you for your support and partnership. But all good things must end, and over the next two weeks we’ll be shutting down Helpful Video and we’ll reach out to help you transition to new software. Stay tuned for more updates on the future of Dialog.

Every ending is also a new beginning. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we will now be joining the amazing team at Shopify to help them make commerce better for everyone. Shopify has had an amazing journey so far, but in many ways it’s also just getting started. With 600,000 merchants, 1 million active users, and over $82 billion sold through the platform, the opportunity ahead of Shopify is massive. I’m delighted to be joining as VP of Corporate Development (working along with David). Farhan is joining as a VP of Engineering. The rest of the Helpful team and we will be a part of the fast-growing Shopify presence in Toronto.

A special thank you to our investors who believed in us from the very beginning. It was humbling to be working with so many sharp folks from before we had a team or a product.

And thank you most of all to the Helpers — all of those who made Helpful what it is! It was a privilege to work with such smart and impactful people.

Daniel