About A Better Lemonade Stand

A business is nothing other than the sum of thousands of tiny decisions, and each one of those decisions is critical to the success of your online business. A Better Lemonade Stand is an online ecommerce incubator that helps make each of those thousand decisions easier. A resource and community, A Better Lemonade Stand exists to inspire, educate, and support entrepreneurs like you, in the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey. By providing comprehensive and reliable advice, resources, and tools, along with a supportive community, we’ll help you build, launch, and grow your ecommerce business.

So welcome to A Better Lemonade Stand, we’re excited to be part of your journey. To begin, subscribe to our emails, dive into the blog and resources, get engaged within the community and most importantly: start something.

About The Founder

Starting his career with a background in marketing and later learning the process of starting an ecommerce business the hard way, Richard began A Better Lemonade Stand to serve as a journal to share the information he was learning as he was building his businesses.

Shortly after, he joined Shopify’s Growth Team – helping grow the world’s most innovative ecommerce platform from 60,000 to over 200,000 merchants during his tenure. He did this primarily through the process of reverse engineering and writing about the complicated aspects of building, launching, and growing an ecommerce business – inspiring, educating, and guiding hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world.

Shortly after Shopify’s IPO on the NYSE and TSX in early 2015, Richard left the company to focus on A Better Lemonade Stand full time.

Now serving 250,000+ entrepreneurs monthly, A Better Lemonade Stand has grown to one of the most comprehensive online resources and most active communities of ecommerce entrepreneurs in the world.

Follow Richard on Twitter, or connect with him through the contact form.

Giving Back

In 2015, researchers at the University of California published a study which found that 72% of entrepreneurs self-reported mental health concerns. That figure was described as being “significantly higher” than non-entrepreneurs.

According to this study, approximately one half (49%) of entrepreneurs suffer from at least one form of mental health condition during their lifetimes. These conditions include depression, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and a host of addictive disorders.

The research has shown that entrepreneurs are:

• Twice as likely to suffer from depression
• Six times more likely to suffer from ADHD
• Ten times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder
• Three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse

It’s acknowledged in this study that the many reasons which make entrepreneurs so good at what they do — such as creativity and innovativeness, goal attainment and achievement motivation, as well as the likelihood to assume risk — may also contribute to the mental health conditions that they experience. These traits, combined with the long hours that entrepreneurs typically work, the high standard they hold themselves to, lack of sleep, exercise, and proper nutrition plus the stress and anxiety that can manifest from owning and operating a business can create a difficult and all-consuming environment within which some entrepreneurs live.

We recognize that being an entrepreneur is not easy, so in our effort to help entrepreneurs, we’ve decided that it’s important to support as much of an entrepreneur’s journey as we can and that means not only supporting the good times but also the bad times as well. That’s why we’ve decided to donate a portion of our profits each year into CAMH.

As Canada’s largest mental health teaching hospital, CAMH sets the standards for care, research, education, and leading social change. They’re a Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (WHO/PAHO) Collaborating Centre with a dedicated staff of more than 3,000 physicians, clinicians, researchers, educators, and support staff and they offer outstanding clinical care to more than 34,000 patients each year. CAMH also conducts groundbreaking research, provides expert training to health care professionals and scientists, develops innovative health promotion and prevention strategies, and advocates on public policy issues at all levels of government.

We’re proud to support CAMH and everything they do for individuals experiencing mental health conditions, including business founders within the entrepreneurial community.