Sell Around the Curve: Catch Merchants Before They Shop Your Category

By the time a merchant lands on a G2 grid or fires off an RFP, you've already lost most of the deal. They've picked a favorite, anchored on a price, and lined up two or three names to make it look like a process. You're the 9th demo, competing on features and discount. The only way to win that account is to never let it become a competitive deal in the first place.

That's the whole idea behind what Justin Michael calls selling around the curve — reaching the buyer before they're actively shopping your category. Future visioning. You get in during the window where they know they have a problem coming but haven't named a solution yet. In that window, you're not a vendor on a list. You're the person who framed the problem for them.

The curve, applied to Shopify

Every merchant purchase has a curve. It starts with a triggering event — a hire, a raise, a growth spurt, a store launch — and ends weeks or months later with a signed contract. Most app sellers show up at the end, when the merchant is heads-down comparing Klaviyo vs. Omnisend or Recharge vs. Loop.

The leading edge of that curve is where the money is. A retention lead who started three weeks ago hasn't picked an SMS tool yet — but they will. A brand that just crossed into Shopify Plus is about to re-platform half its stack. A DTC company that just closed a Series A has budget it didn't have last quarter and a board pushing for growth. None of those merchants are "in-market" by the definitions a static lead list uses. All of them are about to be.

Hiring is the earliest signal you get

The single best predictor of what a merchant is about to buy is who they just started paying. A job posting is a merchant spending real money to solve a problem — which means it's a preview of the tooling that role will demand within its first 90 days.

A new retention or lifecycle marketing hire means email/SMS and loyalty budget is coming. A head of CX means they're about to shop helpdesk and returns. A senior developer or Shopify engineer means a build or migration is on the table. Hire first, tool second — always in that order.

This is exactly what hiring-signal alerts are built for. You get the posting the week it goes live, not the quarter after the tool got bought. Some plays worth wiring up:

• Retention/lifecycle hire → SMS, loyalty, and reviews sellers reach out before the new hire has picked a vendor.
• CX/support hire → Gorgias, returns, and post-purchase tools get in before the helpdesk RFP.
• Growth/performance marketer → attribution, CRO, and personalization tools land while the budget is still forming.
• Ops or fulfillment hire → OMS, 3PL, and inventory tools reach a merchant who's clearly scaling operations.

You're not pitching a product to that new hire. You're arriving in week one as the person who already understands the mandate they were hired to deliver.

Stack the signals to nail the timing

One leading signal tells you a merchant might move. Justin Michael's triangulation principle says the overlap is where the gold is — stack signals until you've pinpointed both the account and the moment.

A retention hire alone is a maybe. A retention hire plus a recent Plus upgrade plus a Klaviyo install six months ago that's now underused? That's a merchant with the budget, the mandate, and the timing all lining up at once. Layer in what tools they already run — visible on every brand profile through tech-stack detection — and their decision-maker contacts, and you've gone from "someone in my TAM" to "this person, this week, for this reason."

That stacking is the difference between spraying a list and running targeting on steroids. You're not guessing who's ready. The data told you.

Get in before the frame is set

The reason early beats late isn't just less competition — it's control of the frame. The first credible person to define the problem sets the criteria everyone after them gets measured against. If you reach a merchant while they're still forming their view of "what good looks like" in retention or CX, you write the scorecard. The vendors who show up later are grading themselves against your rubric.

This is where permissionless value earns its keep. Don't lead with a demo ask. Lead with something useful for the world that new hire just walked into — a teardown of their current flows, a benchmark for their category, a specific gap you spotted in their stack. You're not selling around the curve to pitch faster. You're doing it to be useful before anyone else is even paying attention.

Wire it into your actual workflow

Selling around the curve only works if the signal reaches you fast enough to act. A hiring event you find a month late is just a normal cold email. The whole edge is speed.

Point your leading signals at the channel you live in. Pipe every alert into Slack so a new retention hire or Plus upgrade hits your team the day it happens, and use the AI assistant to ask, in plain language, for the exact overlaps that matter — "beauty brands that hired a lifecycle marketer in the last 14 days and aren't running loyalty yet." That's a shortlist of merchants about to enter your category, handed to you before they know they're shopping.

The app sellers winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest lists. They're the ones showing up first. Start with the earliest signal you can get — the hire — and build outward from there. Be the frame-setter, not the ninth demo.