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I think they're simply ploughing all their revenue back into growth through sales/marketing. If they wanted to they could turn down the customer acquisition spend and ride their recurring revenue to a tidy profit.

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That depends. In the case of shopify probably yes, but you'd have to look very closely at the life-time value of those customers. There is a small possibility that if they turned down the rate of acquisition that the retention would be just poor enough that they would not make it to profitability, or alternatively that they would be profitable only for a short while.

This can be quite hard to establish, especially for companies that have raised significant capital (Shopify raised $120M+), they can keep that from happening for a long long time.

For companies that have not raised significant capital, if they're able to finance their growth out of their income stream then yes, they can convert to profitable overnight.

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