About Chris

I am a builder. That’s where I started, and it’s the through-line for everything I’ve done since.

Before GemPages

I was born in Thai Nguyen, a small province in northern Vietnam, into a small family business. My parents sold groceries, then tofu, then sweet desserts.

From a young age I was already helping out at the counter. That was where I picked up my first lessons about customers and selling.

In grade 10, my grandfather opened a small photocopy shop with a “document drafting” service. That was the first time I touched a computer — the start of the path that would make me a developer.

My grandfather was also the person who shaped me most. He was a retired civil servant, but even in retirement he kept helping my grandmother deliver goods, and went back to school to earn an “office computing” certificate in his early 60s.

At 88 he was still driving himself to visit relatives. The last time I sat down to teach him about technology, he already knew how to use ChatGPT and order from Shopee.

That energy, that spirit of never-ending learning, is the greatest inheritance I received from him.

The story

I started writing code because nobody would build the tool I needed. In 2015, the Shopify ecosystem had storefront builders that were either too rigid for serious merchants or too complex for everyone else.

Unable to find one that fit, I built GemPages to solve my own problem first.

Ten years later, GemPages is the #1 page builder app on Shopify, used by 100,000+ merchants worldwide, with a 4.9★ rating and 95% five-star reviews.

We bootstrapped the entire way — no funding rounds, no exit pressure, no dilution. The product was built out, step by step, over a decade.

Communities I’m building

Outside of writing code and shipping product, I spend time building community for the Shopify ecosystem across Asia-Pacific. Two efforts run in parallel:

ShopX

The flagship annual event for the APAC Shopify ecosystem, organized by GemCommerce. Each edition pulls together merchants, agencies, app makers, and AI builders across the four cities of the 4S corridor — Shenzhen, Saigon, Singapore, Sydney. Conference format: stage, panels, networking, after-party.

4S Saigon Ecom Coffee Chat

The opposite shape of ShopX. Small rooms of 10–20 builders, three hours per session, no stage, no sponsors. Coffee chats along the 4S corridor — starting in Saigon, expanding to Shenzhen and Singapore over time.

See upcoming and past sessions →

Why this site exists

Most of what I’ve learned across these 10 years building GemCommerce has never been shared anywhere.

This site is where I write at length about that.

Here I share what I’ve learned about ecommerce, technology, and how to apply technology to sell better.

If you’re…

Running a DTC brand whose conversion rate just won’t budge.
Running an agency and looking for what actually moves the needle for your clients.
Founding a Vietnamese ecommerce brand and thinking about going global.
Building AI agents and wondering whether they actually make it into real operations.

…you’ll probably find something useful here.

The vision

I’m building toward two convergent products:

Self-Driving Storefront

An online store should be able to design itself, A/B test itself, optimize itself, and write its own copy. The merchant focuses on product and brand; the AI runs the operations.

AI Ecommerce Funnel

A conversion funnel run end-to-end by AI: from ads, advertorials, product pages, to post-purchase upsells. Each stage is informed by what worked at the previous one, and retrains itself on real merchant data.

My view: AI that writes generic content no longer works. The AI that can understand the entire sales funnel and is trained for specific verticals is the future.

The bigger picture

I believe Vietnam can be the Ecommerce Nation — the country that powers global ecommerce the way Taiwan powers semiconductors.

That’s why I push community events like ShopX and build the 4S Strategy (Shenzhen, Saigon, Singapore, Sydney), connecting the four hubs that matter for cross-border ecommerce.