Every Sunday, Shopify opens its offices to builders, developers, and teams working on their next idea. That's Builder Sundays: a free community event where hundreds of people show up to do focused deep work, share what they're creating, and build alongside others in a creative space.
It's not a networking event. It's not a pitch night. It's a room full of people actually building things, with demos at the end to share what they've built. The energy and accountability that comes from doing it together is what keeps people coming back.
Since switching to Easy Appointment Booking in September 2025:
- 15,000+ bookings taken across 3 Canadian cities
- 6,000+ community members booked in through the platform
- 275 tickets released per Toronto session, one of the highest-capacity configurations on our platform
- 1 program lead running weekly sessions across all 3 cities
Before: a cart flow running weekly sellouts
Builder Sundays was already popular before Easy Appointment Booking. Sessions in Toronto and Montreal were selling out every week. But the team was managing all of it through a standard Shopify cart flow, using inventory counts as capacity limits.
That setup wasn't built for what a high-demand weekly event actually needs. The team had no way to release future dates on a schedule, no way to reschedule a booking or add and reduce capacity, no check-in system to track who actually showed up, and no visibility into how full each location was.
When demand is low, a cart flow works fine. When you're releasing hundreds of tickets a week and selling out every time, the cracks show quickly.
A cold email that found the right person
A few months before launch, we reached out to the Builder Sundays team to see if we could help take bookings each Sunday. That cold email found the right person.
We had a conversation about where a booking app could help them: the week to week management of the event, and turning administrative time into time spent making the program better.
It was a full-circle moment for us. We'd spent plenty of our own Sundays building Easy Appointment Booking at Shopify. Now we had the chance to power the event itself.
By September 2025, Builder Sundays went live on Easy Appointment Booking in Toronto and Montreal simultaneously - same week, no phased rollout.
Laura Dykstra, Senior Program Manager of Events at Shopify, put it best after launch:
"It went SO smoothly, efficiently, and quickly. I'm so grateful! What a huge improvement from our old setup!"
What dedicated booking infrastructure unlocked
Replacing the add to cart flow with a booking calendar gave the team capabilities that Shopify inventory management was not designed to provide.
Weekly date drops
Builder Sundays releases tickets every Wednesday at noon for the following Sunday. Think of it like a product drop, but for event access. Instead of having every future Sunday open at once, the team controls exactly when new dates go live. This creates a weekly rhythm, builds anticipation in the community, and prevents overbooking weeks in advance.
Getting the timing precise was one of the earliest requests from the team. The booking window needed to open at exactly the right moment, down to the hour, so the team wouldn't have to manually update availability twice a week.
Check-ins and no-show tracking
Every attendee gets checked in at the door each Sunday. That gives the team accurate attendance data, surfaces no-show patterns, and shows the real gap between tickets booked and people in the room.
That gap is exactly why the ticket counts are set where they are. Toronto releases 275 tickets per session; Montreal and Ottawa each release 180. Knowing it precisely, week over week, is what lets the team size each release with confidence instead of guessing.
Capacity analytics and custom reporting
The team can see fill rates across all three cities, export attendee lists with intake question responses and check-in status, and track demand trends over time. That visibility informed the decision to expand from two cities to three.
From 2 cities to 3, with the infrastructure to back it
In the first full month on Easy Appointment Booking, Builder Sundays handled 1,600+ bookings across Toronto and Montreal. Volume held steady, carrying them through a December slowdown, a January rebound of nearly 2,000 bookings, and into consistent four-figure months. By March 2026 they hit 2,100+ bookings in a single month.
Weekly sellouts and per-city fill rates made the case for a third location. On February 24, 2026, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein announced Ottawa on X:
"Builder Sundays is growing. Toronto. Montreal. Now Ottawa starting March 1.
Ottawa builders have been asking for this for a while... we heard you.
We're also moving to weekly ticket releases so more builders can join."
Ottawa opened on March 1 and has handled nearly 1,400 bookings in its first three months, with just one more event added to their setup. Behind the scenes, every booking flows through Shopify, with confirmations going out automatically.
The team running all of it is smaller than the numbers suggest. Laura Dykstra oversees program operations across all three cities and partners with Oscar Rodriguez, Operations Senior Lead, to drive program strategy. The on-site security team handles check-ins at the door, and other employee volunteers lend their time to keep each Sunday session moving.
Easy Appointment Booking carries most of the operational load. Scoped portal access lets each location manage its own sessions without anyone needing admin access to the store. Customers reschedule and cancel themselves instead of emailing the team. Check-ins run from a computer at the security desk. That's how 15,000+ bookings across three cities stay manageable with very little overhead.
Still building together
Builder Sundays keeps growing, and the booking infrastructure grows with it. The team's feedback has directly shaped features on our platform - from more precise booking windows to custom attendance reports and export filtering. We just shipped a more accurate rolling window feature based on their operational needs.
The cart flow got Builder Sundays started. The booking infrastructure is what let them scale to 15,000+ bookings, 6,000+ community members, and 3 cities in under a year - and keep the focus on what matters: giving builders a place to show up and create.
Builder Sundays runs every Sunday in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. Book your spot at buildersundays.ca.
