Mike Potter
Co-Founder & CEO
Mike Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind, which backs up and restores the data businesses run on Shopify, BigCommerce, Klaviyo, GitHub, Jira and QuickBooks Online. In 11 years, Rewind has covered over 200,000 stores, and it protects over 25,000 active stores today, including Canada Goose (a customer Mike says he never expected to land).
Mike studied Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University and started InTheHack.com while still in school (he calls it one of the most popular sporting websites in Canada). He later worked at Halogen Software and as a technical evangelist at Adobe. He launched Rewind in June 2015 with co-founder James Ciesielski, and they ran it on nights and weekends for about 18 months. The first real rescue came that December, when an inventory sync app with a bug deleted a UK baby shoe store's entire catalogue.
His message to merchants is blunt: an export is not a backup. Under the shared responsibility model, Shopify can restore its whole platform if a meteorite hits its servers, but not your one store after a bad CSV import or a buggy app. Delete a product and its images go with it, so your CSV ends up pointing at files that no longer exist. Rewind even has a saying for it: friends don't let friends use CSV files.
Mike is based in Ottawa and follows the 3-2-1 rule of backup at home, right down to a network drive in his basement copied to the cloud in case the house burns down. When he isn't running backups, he's usually building LEGO with his kids or walking his dogs.
