People ask about our name more than almost anything else. It isn't an acronym or a made-up word. Pasilobus is a real genus of orb-weaver spiders, described by the French arachnologist Eugène Simon in 1895, and found across Africa, Asia and the Pacific. What it does with its web is the reason we chose it.
A spider that spins less
Most orb-weavers build the web you picture: a full wheel of spokes and a long sticky spiral, rebuilt often and big enough to catch whatever flies into it. Pasilobus doesn't. It builds a small triangular web with only two sectors, and in place of the spiral it hangs a few widely spaced sticky threads across it.
It looks like an unfinished web. It's the opposite. Pasilobus catches almost nothing but moths, which is exactly the prey a normal orb web is bad at holding: a moth's loose scales come away on the sticky spiral and the moth flies off. Pasilobus's threads are built for the job instead. Each one is fixed so that one end breaks free when something hits it. The line swings loose with the moth hanging from it, and the spider hauls it in.
Less web, placed exactly where it counts, and it catches what a full orb would miss.
Pasilobus belongs to a group of orb-weavers, the Cyrtarachninae, whose webs have been pared down over time. Some relatives, the bolas spiders, go further and hunt with what looks like a single thread tipped with a sticky ball. The direction is the same across the group: fewer threads, each doing more.
Why we named a company after it
The idea behind the name first came from Richard Dawkins's Climbing Mount Improbable, a book about how intricate designs in nature come from long runs of small, patient improvements rather than grand leaps. The Pasilobus web is a good example: a structure refined over a very long time until nothing unnecessary is left.
That's the way we want to build for Shopify stores:
- A few threads, placed where sales happen. Each of our apps does one job: wishlists, order limits, short links, store locators and so on. No sprawling suites where you pay for twenty features to use two.
- Built for the actual problem. The spider's threads exist because moths behave in a particular way. We start from how merchants and their customers actually behave, and build to that, not to a feature checklist.
- Small improvements, kept up. A web that works is maintained, not admired. Most of our work is patient iteration on things that already exist: faster load times, clearer settings, fewer support tickets.
It shapes how we look after stores, too. In our monthly care plans, and when we audit a store, the most useful change is often taking things away: an app nobody uses, a script that slows every page, three overlapping popups. We wrote about the patterns we see most in what we see wrong in most Shopify stores we audit.
How to say it
PAH-see-LOH-bus. You'll hear it several ways, including from us, and all of them are fine.
The short version
Pasilobus is a small spider that gets more done with less web. We're a small company, based in Seattle, that tries to do the same for Shopify stores: a few well-placed tools, looked after properly. If that sounds like what your store needs, come and say hello.