Ecom Growth Insider · Podcast episode

Shaan Arora: The Pop-Up Is the Growth Lever Nobody Tests

With Shaan Arora · Published 2026-06-05 · 40 minutes · Hosted by Andrej Tumachowitsch

Shaan Arora: The Pop-Up Is the Growth Lever Nobody Tests

Three years ago Shaan Arora was knocking on shop doors in New York asking strangers whether they were on Shopify, and walking farmers markets doing the same. Alia now serves more than a hundred million pop-up views a month, went from one million to eight million in revenue in a single year with no outside money, and has been acquired.

The number that got this episode booked: the brands he works with run ten to fifteen percent email opt-in rates on their pop-ups. Most operators are pleased with eight. His claim is that the gap is not the tool, it is that almost nobody tests the form, and that a pop-up is a growth lever sitting untouched while the team A/B tests everything downstream of it.

This is for operators paying for traffic that leaves without giving you anything. You get the tests that move opt-in rate most and in what order, when a mystery discount beats a stated one, why the returning visitor should see a different offer, and an honest account of what made a bootstrapped business attractive to a buyer.

What you will take away

• Five to fifteen percent, not one to five. He notes that Privy calls one to five percent healthy, while the brands Alia takes on typically land closer to ten to fifteen. His own framing is that it depends on the intent of the traffic arriving, and that the number is reached by iteration rather than by switching tools.
• Test in this order: copy, timing, image, the close button. That sequence comes out of the volume they see. Copy first because it moves most: 'you've earned ten percent off' against 'ten percent off' is a real difference. Then the delay before the pop-up appears, then the image, then where the X sits, which changes opt-in rate and has to be checked against on-site conversion rate before you keep it.
• A mystery discount wins when the real number is small. If you are giving twenty or twenty-five percent, saying so can beat a mystery, because the number itself is the incentive. At five or ten percent the number is not doing much work and curiosity does more. It is a test worth running rather than a rule.
• Watch the conversion rate, not just the opt-in rate. The metric he says almost nobody tracks is what each pop-up variant does to on-site conversion rate. His commercial reason is blunt: if Alia hurts conversion rate, brands leave. The second metric is welcome-flow revenue, because a pop-up that collects a better answer feeds a better flow.
• A quiz answer is worth having even without the email. Ask what they are shopping for before you ask for the address. If they answer and then leave, the answer is still stored and readable in aggregate. If they do give you the email later it attaches to that answer, and the welcome flow can be segmented on it.
• Show the returning visitor something else. If new visitors get twenty percent, the person who has already been to the site does not need twenty percent. Five or ten, or something with no margin cost at all. He says brands are consistently happy to test that, because it is the one change that gives nothing away.
• Some brands can offer nothing at all. Nike Strength and Skims run early access rather than a discount, and it works because people genuinely want to know when the next drop lands. Gamified pop-ups, spin to win, a Plinko board, a slot machine, work well where the brand can carry them and are wrong where it cannot. Brand ethos decides, not performance.
• What made a bootstrapped business worth buying. Fast growth, profitable from day one, no investors and no debt, and a founding team still doing the work. He calls it a clean business to acquire, and says the introduction came through a friend whose own company had been bought by the same acquirer. His own advice to founders is to take co-founders and to do sales yourself first.

Full transcript

Lightly edited from the episode captions for readability. The episode is the record - where they differ, the audio wins. The source is the published video's own automatic captions, which carry no speaker labels and no timings, so this runs as continuous prose rather than a speaker-by-speaker transcript.

Different brands have different opt-in rates based off kind of the intent of the customers that come on to the store. Privy defines healthy as somewhere between 1 to 5% whereas for us typically 10 to 15% tends to be tends to be pretty good for us. Three years ago Sean Aurora was knocking at shop doors in New York City asking strangers whether they were on Shopify. Today Aliya processes over 100 million pop-up views per month. Counts Nike, Milk Makeup, Peloton, Hot Ones among its clients and just got acquired.

Here's what caught my attention. The brands Sean works with are getting 10 to 15% email opt-in rates from their pop-ups. Most of the brands I talk to are happy if they're getting 8%. The difference is not the tool. It's how they're using it, what they're actually testing and what they understand about why someone would give them their email.

Sean bootstrapped Aliya from zero to 8 million in revenue in a single year. No investors, no debt, profitable from day one and then.digital came knocking. We talk about what a good pop-up program actually looks like, what the highest impact tests are, why mystery discounts keep outperforming standard offers and what Sean would do differently if he were starting again today. We also get into the acquisition side of things because there's a lot founders assume what makes a business actually attractive for buyers that is just flat out wrong. Let's get into it.

Sean, how are you doing? Hey, doing well. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, excited to to have you on. I mean you you bootstrapped Aliya, scaled it to to thousands of brands um and also just got acquired by.digital.

Congrats for that. And before we go into the before we go into the story, what do you believe most e-com founders fundamentally misunderstand about pop-ups? I think they don't see it as a growth lever. Um if you can get your pop-up correct and you can actually get your list size not only larger but more valuable and higher intent to massive revenue unlock. Most brands kind of use the Clavio pop-up, Postscript, attentive, whatever the ESP is, they use that pop-up.

Um but if you try to use a paid pop-up, specifically using OptiMonk, um you'll see a world of a difference. If a brand is I I mean I I I assume it's tough to say, but let's say a brand is spending 100k per month on ads. Like, what would you say what is the invisible cost of a bad pop-up strategy? Yeah, I mean, you know, it it could definitely It depends how large the brand is, but you know, if you were If your opt-in rate is something like 1 or 2% and you get something like 300,000 visitors per month on the site, and you can get that number from 2 to 4%, um you know, just by simply doubling the opt-in rate, you can you can generate thousands of uh extra dollars in revenue. Yeah.

I mean, especially long term. I mean, obviously on the one side, if you acquire the emails right away, you get like more purchases right away because a lot of those people, they see the email and they will buy quicker, and you'll get them to convert faster. But also, obviously, long term, like if you have a way bigger email list, the leverage of that is is way higher. And then like when next Black Friday comes up, when Q4 comes up, where you have like a lot of people that have a very high intent to buy something, having a big email list is just a huge future asset for the business. Yeah, 100% 100%.

In your In your experience, like what should a healthy email capture rate look like, depending on like the the traffic source? Yeah, exactly, right? Like I think I think um I think it's one of those things where if uh different brands can have different opt-in rates based off kind of the intent of the customers that come onto the store. Um Privy defines healthy as somewhere between 1 to 5% whereas for us we typically see closer to 10 to 15%. So I'd say somewhere between 5 to 15% tends to be a a a good number.

Of course there's just like kind of a good amount of stipulation that go into that. But um yeah, typically 10 to 15% tends to be tends to be pretty good for us. Well, 15 15% sounds like a lot. I mean most most brands that we work with they're like happy in their like 8% range, maybe sometimes going up to up to 10, but 15 is is a lot. Yeah, 100%.

And you know, it's it's not like you get there right away. Sometimes it takes a bit of iteration and testing, but um that tends to be a good a good number for our brands. Yeah. And how do how do you think brands can can get there? I mean obviously on the one side do it like using the the proper tool for the for the pop-up and then like just consistently testing or what do you see as the the the best tools to to increase it?

Yeah, I mean I think testing is important. I think a lot of brands don't test which is totally fine. So what we do is we we kind of do white glove onboarding where we can run the test for the brand um without the brand having to kind of guess what's what's going to be the most effective. I'm happy to share tips on what we see as the most effective strategies, you know, like so brands can try it out themselves, but um yeah, testing it and actually kind of like caring about testing it on a schedule tends to be quite important. Um uh we have this thing called smart testing where it runs tests by itself.

Um so that the brands don't need to think about hey, what what test should I be running and uh but doing consistently and testing the right things you can see significant significant uplift. Mhm. And how does the the smart testing figure out like what to what to test? Yeah, I know, it's a great question, right? So we have like we We we get close to over 100 million views of our pop-ups per month on our brands' websites.

So, we have a ton of data we use. Um so, you know, we have a schedule. It's like, "Hey, the first thing you should test is the copy. The second thing you should test is the time delay of when the pop-up comes up. The third thing is maybe an image.

The fourth thing is maybe removing the X button." Right? So, we kind of have a system just working with so many brands that hey, this is the this these these three or four tests are the highest impact tests. And if you can do those early on, you'll see the most alpha from those specific things. And then instead of the brand having to manually sit there and run every test, we actually just have the AI and it runs it runs the test for the brand. Mhm.

Okay. Okay. And what do do you usually see has the the biggest lift on the on the conversion rate? Yeah, no, to answer your question, I'd say copy, right? Like, hey, you know, simple thing, right?

Like, you've got 10% off or you've earned 10% off. Right? Like, simple simple things like that can actually make a pretty big difference and you know, you can even be like, "Hey, instead of try instead of saying you've got 10% off or you've got 5% off, try something like, "Hey, um here's a mystery discount." Or here's a here's a gift. Here's a mystery gift. Right?

So, like that that copy also works well where it's like, "Hey, you know, whether or not the offer is 10%, 20%, 5%", like the customer doesn't necessarily know, but because it's a mystery gift, they're pretty interested in in in in seeing what's what's behind the curtain. Um so, mystery gift is a good one for sure. Works for a lot of our brands. And if some brands are not really into mystery gifts, you can do other things like subscribe for special drops. Right?

And like, for us, we don't force any brands to do any kind of discounting. If they don't want to do discounts, we can find ways to get creative and still get high opt-in rates without needing to destroy your margins. Mhm. Max also talked like talked talked a lot about the the mystery discounts. Like he said that those are currently crushing it for for their clients and that they're doing them like in the in the pop-ups and also in the like cart abandoned flows and checkout abandoned flows that like mystery discounts are just way better than having like a normal like 20% off discount.

Exactly. Yeah, it's definitely a good to AB test, right? Cuz like if you're giving a 20 25% off, sometimes that can beat a mystery discount because like that number is quite large. However, if um if you you don't have something that's closer to 10 or 5% or 10% off, it's sometimes better to put the mystery discount because that's not as big of an incentive, right? So like it kind of depends on what you're comfortable doing, but it is something worthwhile to AB test and pretty much we test with a little bit with the majority of our brands that we work with.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I was curious I was surprised he also told me that they're even like doing the mystery discount all the way to the to the checkout. So usually how I knew that before is like you get the a mystery discount, you sign up to the email list, and then in the email it will say you get like 15% off, but they actually also like keep it a mystery discount until someone checks out. So they have to add the product to cart then enter the discount code, and only then they find out what the discount is, and then they're already like so far into the process that they just end up like purchasing.

So that was that was interesting. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I've I've I've I've seen that I've seen that before, yeah. Yeah. What what other offers do you do you see crushing it right now?

I mean there are like discounts, there's like the gift, there's also like a quiz or like a free um Have you ever seen like those free PDFs or lead magnets work? Because Max said he he he saw those work for e-commerce. Yeah, like it's it's not the best offer. I mean, you know, if you're going to be offering a PDF, it has to be at least relevant, right? And even then it's going to be hard to get people to want that, right?

Like for example, let's say you sell like collagen, right? And like you want to offer a PDF on like the best workouts, right? Like the best workouts to lose belly fat. Okay, that's irrelevant enough, right? If I'm If I'm looking for collagen, I probably looking to lose some belly fat, so like that makes sense.

Um Yeah, if it's if it's valuable, it could work. Also, it's a way to not have to give out discounts, and if you can find a valuable PDF that costs you nothing to serve, obviously it costs you nothing cuz it's a PDF, and you still get the email, like it's a win-win. You're knowing that, hey, if I were to offer 15% off, I would get more sign-ups than if I was offering a PDF, you also save 15% margin. Right? So, it's kind of a trade-off there.

So, yes, of course, it's not going to work as well as a 15% off discount, but, you know, it has it's had it has its place for different brands, too. We work with Nike strength. Um they use get early access. That works well. Like Skims also uses get early access, right?

So, brands that have like you know, if if you're if you're if you're shopping at Skims, you actually probably want to have early access to the next to the next drop, so that tends to work pretty well. So, it can be kind of brand dependent. Um you know, the idea of like having some autonomy, so you have one where you like choose which one you want to win. Um And uh you can either like I want to win this, and then you get that. So, the idea of like having some autonomy also tends to work pretty well.

Um a lot of it is like consumer psychology, which is interesting. So, it's like, hey, even if I don't It's like, you know, for us the balance is like, how do we make sure our brands are not giving out discounts more than they need to give out while still maintaining a really high opt-in rate. And finding that balance is something I think we've we've become really good at. Yeah. And with that, like what's your view on those like gamified pop-ups?

Like obviously the spin-to-win, but there are also a bunch of others where people have to do something first to to get it. Yeah, no. I honestly those work really well. Like our our spin-to-win crushes for our brands. We even call it Plinko.

It's like the ball drops and it kind of goes through everything into the bottom and hits. We actually we we we we we we have a slots pop-up we made, too. Like it's like you spin it and you get like three sevens and you get the discount. Those work really really well. I'll be like choose your character.

So we'll have three characters. I'll be choose one then you get the discount. Um those work really well. Like all all the gamified pop-ups work well. Uh now of course like some brands, let's say a luxury brand, right?

Like let's say uh I don't know like a luxury lingerie brand, they probably don't want to use a spin-to-win. Fine. Totally fair. But like, you know, if you're shipping if you're a CPG product and your CPG product kind of has like it's kind of fun. You know, like Graza, for example, is one of our customers.

Like it's like a fun it's like a fun brand, like 100% go for it. Right? Because it not only it's on theme with the brand, but it actually does super super well. So something we often recommend to our brands to try out. Like Hold Another Goods, one of our other customers.

They've tried out a bunch of really fun stuff and it's all done super well. So my thoughts on it are like if it's okay with the brand ethos, 100% you got to try those things. And honestly, at the company at Alloy, yeah, we innovate on this a lot. Like we know the value of it, so we always think about, "Hey, what's the what's the new thing we could try out that hasn't been done before, but we think would have good impact?" We test it on some large brands and then we roll it out to all of our customers. Yeah.

Yeah, I think I think that's that's great. I mean, obviously like there are those really really like scammy spin-to-win pages. Like where you see like you go you go to the website, you're already not sure whether it's a legit website or whether you're getting scammed. And then there is like there's there's spin to win that appears and you're like really sketched out. Um but then I've seen some brands that also like crush it with like really engaging and fun pop-ups where you just even if you're not really interested in the discount, you just want to like test it out, like click on it.

Um because it's just fun and it fits fits the brand. Um so you you kind of have to find the right and yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a balance. It's a balance. And like yeah, it's it's really a balance and we have our recommendations and you know, if a brand is uncomfortable, totally okay.

But we have our recommendations for our brands. Yeah. And when it comes to like obviously improving improving the the pop-ups and also understanding how they play into the the customer acquisition as a as a whole and also how they support uh the the customer acquisition cost for scaling brands, in your opinion, like which which metrics should founders track and look at on a on a weekly basis? Yeah, it's specifically for the pop-ups, right? One is like how is this affecting your on-site CVR as well?

Right? Like and something that not many other I don't think any other pop-up tool does is besides us, but like you can see like how does your spin to win versus your mystery discount, for example, how do each of those affect your on-site CVR? Um it's an important it's very important for us to share about it because we know if we if we actually hurt on-site CVR, we're going to lose our own brands as customers. Mhm. So we're going to be tracking that especially if you're thinking about CAC, like hey, if you're spending more money on Facebook and um when they come to the site they're not converting, like what what was the point of you even really doing that?

And um you know, if they're coming to if they're coming from Facebook but they don't convert, but you have a good pop-up and they're inclined to use the pop-up, at least you get an email, right? So you at least you have something and can help with LTV, that can help inside of the the welcome flow revenue. I'd say like, you know, opt-in rate, of course, is important from pop-up standpoint, but like, I'd say, how does it affect CVR? Number one, and number two, how does it increase or decrease your welcome flow um revenue? Yeah.

What's a What's a realistic before and after for a brand that just like fixes their their pop-up? In terms of ideally in terms of like revenue impact, like what have you seen? Yeah, that's a good question. Like, we've seen from a from opt-in rate impact, we typically you can 2x their opt-in rate. So, if they're starting at 3%, they can come in and get 6%.

And there's a welcome flow revenue, we we we we we we got a lot of case studies on our website. There can be one with Aviator Nation where we increased revenue by 100% on the welcome flow. Um Again, it's not going to happen with every brand, but we've seen we've seen some pretty massive increases because not only are we getting more more customers in the list, but we're actually like getting higher quality customers because we we we use a we use quizzes in the beginning of the flows of the pop-up to get quiz answers, and then the quiz answers you can segment them inside of the welcome flow. So, it it it's cool cuz uh the pop-up information that you get from the customer can flow into your welcome flow, which makes more money for you. Yeah.

Yeah, that is awesome. Can you get the the the the quiz answers even if they don't submit the pop-up? Yeah, yeah, you can. Mhm. Okay.

like, let's say you go on the site, you you Yeah, you enter It's like, "Hey, what are you shopping for today? Like, t-shirts, leggings, jeans?" And you answer jeans, uh but you don't input your email, obviously we can't get your email, but that survey answer we have, we store it. So, you can use that to like see how are people responding at a high level, and then once you do put in your email, it'll be attached to that quick quiz answer. Mhm. Yeah, that is that is awesome.

That is a super valuable tool because we we always we look for ways to get more information from the from the audience and from the customers coming to site. Um so with all of our clients we're obviously using like a post purchase um survey and try to get like during the checkout process try to ask them some questions and send out email surveys to get more information. Um because especially nowadays like with the advertising and messaging you have to be sure that you speak the language of the customers and get like the messaging on point and also like show them the products that they're really interested in and everything is like custom tailored to your to your customers. Um so getting that data from the from the customers is also just just super super valuable. In terms of in terms of the the timing and the the rules like obviously there are a lot of different ways to to trigger the pop-up.

Um what's like your default starting setup that you that you test with with brands? Um in terms of like when the pop-up appears and everything. Oh yeah. So I mean typically the best time to show the pop-up for the first time is at 5 seconds. Um so just like on average again.

There's outliers but on average it's 5 seconds. Um what we always test and we know what works pretty well is thing called smart trigger. Right? So like hey you know let's say you're on a pop-up you it comes after 5 seconds and you click X cuz you don't want to fill it out right away. Um we actually have a way to trigger a pop-up for a second time in the same session.

So let's say like hey you click on X of the initial pop-up you then go browse the site we see you click on a collections page you click into a collection you scroll a bit we'll let you trigger the pop-up for a second time so that it's showing to the customers. Um maybe maybe when they're more ready to see it. Right? Maybe initially they were not ready but after you know some time they're they're now ready to see it and engage with it. So that's something we always do is like we'll we'll we'll kind of play around with the initial one the initial pop-up is shown and then we'll do a smart trigger for when it's shown for a second time.

Um. Now, and then we for copy we'll try as you mentioned like hey uh let's try mystery discount see how that works. And then you can there's also the X button, right? So, like by placing the X button on the left side or the right side or putting it directly on the X button you can actually see higher opt-in rates. Of course, how does that affect conversion rates?

We track that too to make sure like hey when you change the X button it's not affecting conversion rates but it isn't increasing opt-in rates. Great, that's a great trial for us to do. Um. Those I think those those three things, right? Like one is you know, the the timing, the copy, and then thinking about hey where do we put this button that they can escape.

If you can if you can put it in a more strategic place without affecting your on-site CVR it's it's it's a net positive. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean obviously you have to make sure that the the customers are not annoyed that they like can't can't can't like can't remove the pop-up and that they just leave the site again. Um and at the same time that they're not annoyed with seeing the the pop-up over and over again, but at the same time that you just maximize as many and get as many people on the list as as possible.

To you um what would you say like what what segmentation matters the most? I mean with the with the pop-ups there's also I know there's ways to segment between new and returning customers. Um is that something that you that you always like split or what is um what is the the strategy there? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so like yeah we have in in in our pop-ups you can show it to uh new site visitors and then returning site visitors, which is super nice.

Uh we like to actually show it to returning site visitors but show them something else, right? So, you probably don't need to give them a 20% discount if you give your if you give your initial customers 20% you probably don't have to give returning site visitors 20% you can probably give them more like 5% or 10% or maybe an ebook or something like that that's actually valuable for them since they've already shopped once or at least they've been to the site before. So yeah you can actually flex that up and down and it's something we've seen we've we've had a lot of success with and all these brands are totally like okay and willing to to try out something for the returning site visitors as long as it's not giving more of a discount than they need to be getting. Across the the top brands that that you have insights in and that you work with what do the best pop-up programs have have in common? Yeah I'd say the best pop-ups that we we have for some of our top brands like Nike Shox Ilia Beauty Milk Makeup Hexclad Breeze Solo Wave Hot Ones Toms Peloton would be a focus on testing right?

I think um the best pop-up programs per se are the ones where the content the copy the images the timing of the offers and the timing of the pop-up as well as the actual offers are being tested so if you go like hey what actually works well like what can we AB test to drive results. I mean I can get more into more details on what what test work best at a high level like generally testing. Um the ones who do that tend to see the best results. Yeah that makes sense and I mean we we see a similar pattern across like the paid ads like the brands that do the most testing that test the most creatives ads landing pages funnels they get best results. Um makes sense and yeah going a little little more into the specifics of the testing like what would like what kind of structure would you would you recommend there?

Yeah, I'd say start with um a test for timing. That's going to be like, "Hey, what time should the pop-up show? Should it be 2 seconds, 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 7 seconds? Should you show it at exit intent as well as on entrance, right?" Um now, another test you can do is trying out mystery copy. So, you know, you've got a mystery discount.

Um that can work well, too. So, I think those two tests off the bat are good. Um now, like knowing what are the optimal times to test, what is the optimal copy to use for that AB mystery discount copy test, like those are kind of more nuanced questions, and really it can be both brand dependent and depend on what works in the industry. So, for us, how we do this testing is we actually have um this thing called smart testing, which runs through all of our recommended tests automatically for the brands. Um and um it kind of will test the copy, the images, the delay time, um and we'll do it in automated fashion.

So, we're using AI to make sure that it's testing the right things, ending the test, and starting the new test. Um so, that's been super cool, and that's kind of what we use for our testing internally, and our customers can use it as well on their brands. Um and that's kind of been a big big needle mover for us, so no. Being in con- being in a state of constant testing is probably the best state to be in for most brands because, you know, if A is performing better than B by 2%, even 1%, like and you have enough of a you have enough site traffic, like that 1% can be thousands of thousands of dollars free. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And all of that all of that compa- compounds over over time. And with the I mean, with the AI testing, it's everything becomes way, way easier and faster. So, is it now that that you can do things completely on autopilot, or is there still some some involvement from the from the founder or the team? Yeah, so what with the with the brands, so typically we'll like see what they're comfortable with. Like, "Hey, are you comfortable with us testing this delay time?

Are you comfortable with us testing these images and this copy?" So, essentially they just need to click on like approve for what they're comfortable with testing. And once they have approved the things comfortable testing, then it runs autonomously after that. Um let's stick with it those bounds that that that the brand has approved, and it runs through all those options. Like, it iterates and runs through all those options. Mhm, interesting.

That's that's awesome. And I mean, testing is obviously the the most important thing. Um if founders if a founder could only test one thing, what would it be? Would it be the the timing? I'd say uh timing would be a good thing to test.

Yeah, that that'd be important to figure out what time should it show. Um and then inside Ollie as well, we have this thing called smart triggering, where uh based on essentially a model that we have, we figure out when we should show the pop-up for a second time. So, of course, it gets shown for the first time to all the site visitors, but if you show it for a second time, you actually see a pretty high opt-in rate of people that yeah, enter their email when they see it for a second time. So, that that is something that we do as well. But yeah, I'd say testing timing is is is is great.

And if you would have to say like one timing that works best across like most brands, like what would that be? Maybe 5 seconds. Okay. And if you look at a brand that is like doing 1 million a month and a brand that is doing 10 million a month and a brand like does that is doing even more, um when it comes to like capture and retention, like what would you say what are the biggest differences? Yeah, between 1, 10, and a month.

Yeah, we definitely work with brands of all those sizes, so I've kind of seen I've seen that play out. I'd say the biggest difference is that they honestly have more team members on their attention team at at different sizes, right? So, there's like they're kind of more involved, they're a bit more thoughtful. Um I think which is nice and um in terms of like what I've seen in their attention setup, I think um the focus on pop-ups actually scale with the size of the brand pretty well. Right?

So, like if a brand does say 1,000 a month, sorry, maybe 100,000 a month, like they're going to be a bit less focused on a brand that does a million. Then the brand that does 10 million is a lot is really focused on a brand that does 100 million extremely focused on it. I think it's because as you grow like an extra 1% on your pop-up opt-in rate is actually like very, very meaningful. Um so, brands at those sizes tend to just care more, right? And they're they want to be more involved, which is completely fine with us.

They want to test more, they're um they understand the impact of even a 0.5% difference on an AB split test. Um so, I think that's that's a big difference. And then a second one might be like the focus on aesthetics. I think um brands that are not as large like are less focused on the aesthetics of the pop-up and they kind of just want pure results focus, which is totally fine with us, too, but brands that are a bit larger, you know, but the ones between the 10 to 100 million monthly range, like they want to make sure it's very true to their brand book and and and and the message that they want across everything um is very important to those brands. So, that's that's something else interesting that I've been seeing.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean that makes sense. I mean I like I'm not sure whether you you have seen that, but on the on the ads what we what we see quite often is if the brand is a really small, they care a lot about branding and how the image looks and they think everything has to be perfect. Then at a certain size, they realize that like at for example 10 million, they realize that it doesn't matter that much and as long as they get results, as long as they get sales, they're way more like willing to test different things and be more aggressive.

But then at a certain point, once they're even bigger than that, branding becomes more and more important and then they start focusing on it more again. Yeah. So that that's actually interesting. I I think it's a really interesting curve. I've seen the same thing where it's like yeah, at the beginning you're like you actually care a lot and then you realize like, hey, I actually care more about revenue.

And once you have the revenue, you're like, okay, let me go back to brand. It's a it's it's it is definitely interesting, but you know, luxury brands, fashion brands, apparel, I think they care about brand the whole way through, whereas like supplement brands, uh yeah, like health brands, they tend to kind of care in and out. Um but apparel like cares a lot throughout the entire journey. Yeah. And with those brands that like want to to stay premium and have like super polished branding, like what was how do you build pop-ups that that don't feel spammy, but still get good good results?

100% yeah. I mean, you can look at all the top brands as well like um the brands that do the most revenue in the world like Nike, Adidas, Puma, Walmart, Top They actually all have pop-ups on their site too. And and those aren't all high luxury brands, but like uh the idea of hey, if a brand that large that's done a lot of research is using a pop-up, you should probably you your brand should probably use one too, right? Um now how do you stay on theme? Like, you know, we can we our our our editor and is quite rich in the sense where like we can get very granular in design, which is nice.

So those brands care a lot about making sure it fits their aesthetic and a pop-up can do that. So, color, font, imagery, all that stuff, right? Uh that's a piece of it. Now, when it comes to the offer, like those brands typically don't want, let's say, you know, we have spin to win, we have this game called like Plinko. We have pick the character, we have a gambling thing.

So, we have some fun more gamified things. Um those brands don't want to do that. Totally fine. They want to have on brand not like super spammy or into your point like looking like cheap. But they want it to just maybe be like, "Hey, join our mailing list." And there's actually not an incentive to join the mailing list, but because they're a high lux because they're a luxury premium brand, actually people do want to learn about the next drop and then do want to join the mailing list.

Um so, they actually sometimes can offer nothing. Like, for example, we just we actually don't know this influencer, she's pretty huge. Her name is Alex Earl. She lost a She launched a brand on Shopify called Real Actives, sold out in the first 24 hours, went absolutely crazy. We we we launched with them with our pop-ups, which is cool.

And now we're collecting emails to know when the next launch is, next drop is. Um Nice. And uh yeah, that's been That's been super cool. I saw you brands like that that kind of have strong base or they're focused on luxury like they can sometimes get away with not giving out discounts on the pop-ups. Yeah.

Yeah, people just want to be part of the of the list and know like what is going on, be be up to date. Yeah, exactly. Now, I want to to quickly touch a little bit on the um the journey of um of the the the business getting a getting acquired and like some of the the lessons that you that you learned from that. Um and what is what I'm interested in is like what first of all, like what led you to the decision um to to going to to to go to the acquisition from a from a bootstrapped position. Yeah, that's a good question, right?

So, um if you don't know him Social Snowball, he's one of my good friends. He's an advisor of ours. He got acquired by Duda Digital, which is the same business that acquired us. Um you know, during his due diligence process with the business, he actually kind of kept bringing us up and uh eventually made the introduction to me, their CEO of the business of Duda Digital. Um you know, they do over $100 million a year in revenue.

We do um close to a 10th around a 10th of that. Um and he made the introduction. So, I spoke with their CEO. We had We had you know, a number of conversations and they were quite interested. We were quite interested and it kind of felt right because they're an ESP and we're a pop up provider.

So, it's kind of natural It's a natural home for us, I think. Um you know, we weren't actually looking to sell the business right away, but it they wanted to do a full exit and the numbers made sense to us, the acquirers made sense, the timing made sense to us, so we we decided to do it. Um I'm I'm very happy we did it. I I I still think it's a great deal and I think that we now have leverage to work with an ESP, which is cool. And like kind of see what comes out of that.

I think we'll stay a pop up tool for a while. It It's our bread and butter. We know there's a ton of more revenue we can make from it and there's still more innovation space and honestly, I think we are the best provider in the space and a lot of people know that. So, uh having that leverage like we do some cool things. Um Yeah.

Happy to answer more questions specifically with the acquisition, but those are like my my my general thoughts, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of a lot of SaaS founders they dream of of getting acquired one day. Like what do you think?

What did did you guys do differently um that that helped you with with achieving that? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, you know, we So, we really quickly, right? So, last year we went from 1 million to 8 million in revenue. Um completely bootstrapped, so we didn't raise a single dollar.

Ah. We have a pretty involved founding team and we have a great product. Um so, I think really it was like hey, the growth is phenomenal. We've been profitable since day one. We've took on no money, so we have uh no investors.

We also have no debt. And uh it's a clean business to acquire, right? Like fast growth, young founders who are smart and involved and are motivated to keep growing the business, but then the acquirer has the upside of having a big uh chunk in the growth that we're going to have. Um so, I'd say like hey, you know, like if you grow quickly, people are interested. If you can do it If you can do it profitably, they're even more interested.

And if you can do it bootstrapped, they're even more interested, right? So, we kind of have all three of those things and it it it works in our favor. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And if you look back at the journey from like just starting out to to where you're at now, like what's what's one thing that you would do again and what's one thing you would never do again?

Yeah, that's a good question and I I love talking about this part of of the business. Like I think uh building a business is just such a phenomenal way to learn about the world. But, I think I just matured and you know, I I I I don't even know I I got several It feels like I got several PhDs in in all different fields in the past 3 years starting a business because you just do everything. Yeah. And one thing I would 100% do again is work with my co-founders.

So, I have two co-founders, Bill and Corey. Actually, we Me and Corey were best friends in college. We met Bill in college, too, and I I'm very thankful I had I I had and still have them and will have them as co-founders, I think, for the rest of my life um because shared sorrow is is is half the sadness, but yeah, shared joy is double the joy, right? So, being able to share in the success and and and and work through problems together makes this whole this whole thing much more fun and the hard times easier to bear. So, I would definitely work with my co-founding team again and I recommend any founders to get co-founders because um you know, I know you give up equity, but to me, I'd much rather have, you know, 30% of 60 million than 100% of of 1 million, right?

Like, it's just it's just better. Um So, that's one something I'd do again. Something I would not do again Man, I don't know. I feel like I feel like I enjoyed the hard parts. I got I I struggled through the hard parts and I mean, stuff that I shouldn't have done, I still did because I learned from it.

Um let me think I should look like I don't know, honestly, like I made mistakes 100% in my journey, but I would I I would make those mistakes again because it it allowed me to learn. Like, so I'm glad I'm I'm glad I made a lot of mistakes. If I didn't, then I wouldn't mature and I wouldn't grow. So, I kind of had to make those things, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. And that's awesome. I also think that's like building a business is one of the best things that you can do for your personal development and for for growing because it just challenges the the hell out of you. And it's very very tough to do and you get a lot of like feedback from like the market, from from everyone. Um but it helps you grow super fast.

Yeah, and one other thing I would do as well is I would I would I started a business. I was doing sales. I would do sales again because you know, there's no better in my opinion there's no better life lesson than doing sales, especially doing sales when no one wants to talk to you. Right now sales is easier because we know we're well-known in the space. We have brands.

We have data to back it up. We got acquired so people are like, okay, this is a real business but when you have no customers, no funding, you don't know a single person in the industry, that sales call is very different from our sales calls today. Uh but uh I would I would I would I would recommend doing sales as a young founder because like dude, there's no better rejection therapy than getting getting said no to a million times a day. There's nothing better than that, man. Yeah.

Yeah. I I can relate to that. Did you do cold calling or what was the Yeah, did cold calling, did cold emails. I actually also I live in New York City. I went door-to-door in New York City.

I went to different people's Oh, wow. shops here and knocked on the door and said like, hey, you interested? Some people didn't take it too well. I I I would go to farmers markets. I I used to do this.

I I still do it sometimes actually. I go to farmers farmers markets cuz a lot of those are like smaller businesses. And I'll be like, hey, like, do you guys have do you guys have Shopify? Can I can I chat to you about your business? And so like stuff like that was fun and then I would get on all the sales calls.

So when we started getting more traction, I would have like 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. back-to-back calls for 12 hours. And that was a whole different beast, right? It's a good problem to have.

Now we have sale now we have sellers and closers that that take the calls. Um but that's also kind of part of the the journey. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Awesome.

Where can can people follow you, learn more about about you and the the business? Yeah, for sure. So, our business URL for, you know, to for getting a demo of our pop-ups and learning more about it is alliapopups.com. Um a l i a popups.com. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter the most.

So, LinkedIn is just my my first and last name and then um my Twitter is I am Shauna Dora, so I am and then my first and last name. Perfect. Appreciate you hopping on. Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.