23 Year Old Shopify App Founder \\ Sharing my Startup Journey with the World

Creating the best popups in eCom

(trusted by Nike Strength, Comfrt, Aviator Nation, TOMs, Hostage Tape, and 2K+ others)

We scaled to $6.5M through word of mouth. We're now hiring a Head of Marketing👇🏽

Hot Ones, Graza, Hostage Tape, Nike Strength, and Comfrt are a few of the 2500+ brands working with us.

In the past 14 months, we went from less than $100K ARR to $6.5M ARR without raising a single dollar.

I think we're at a point in the company where our product is a lot better than our marketing of the product. 

It feels like people are surprised about how good our product is because our marketing isn't on par yet. 

Which I think is a really cool opportunity for a cracked marketer. 

We're looking for someone who's been in eCom or in SaaS before. And is ready to own both strategy and execution. 

If this sounds like you, please shoot me a dm. 

And if you're a friend reading this, maybe comment for visibility! :)

Shaan Arora

Bootstrapped to $6.5M ARR // Building The Next Generation of Popups

We’re hiring for a top 1% ML engineer. So far, we’ve bootstrapped to $6.5M ARR👇🏽

Hot Ones, Graza, Hostage Tape, Nike Strength, and Comfrt are a few of the 2500+ brands working with us.

In the past 14 months, we went from less than $100K ARR to $6.5M ARR without raising a single dollar.

We’re a young team and we love what we do.

We want to work with other folks who are hungry and who want to be impactful at an early stage startup.

Our popups get 100M views per month.

We’re looking for someone to make sense / use all of this data that we get.

If you have demonstrated experience solving challenging, real-world problems with large-scale data using machine learning - we want to meet you.

If you’re interested and fit the above qualificiations, pls shoot me a dm.

Or if you know anyone that could be a great fit, pls shoot me a dm as well.

I easily have the lowest IQ on my founding team 👇🏽


And I absolutely love it.

These three guys know a lot about a lot.

Tech, politics, history, literature, or literally anything at all.

They're often debating these topics, and I just listen in and try to learn.

My main contribution is usually asking, “Wait, can you explain that again?”

The smartest thing I ever did was find people way smarter than me and convince them to join.

Everyone says "build an advisory board."

I say find one advisor you can actually call a friend.

Here's the difference:

Most founders collect advisors like Pokémon cards. 

Huge names. Impressive titles. Zero real value.

Instead, find ONE person who's 1-2 years ahead of where you want to be.

- They need to be in the same industry
- Not a competitor
- And someone who's scaled the way you want to scale.

For us, it was Noah Tucker ☃️.

When we met him, we were at $200K ARR. And he was a year ahead of where we wanted to be. 

Bootstrapped. Same model. Same challenges we were about to face.

Now? He's someone I can text at 2 a.m. with questions.

Find one person who gets it.

Someone who's close enough to remember what your stage feels like, but far enough ahead to guide you through what's next.

I chose to do my startup full-time out of college. [most ppl shouldn’t]

Should you?

Answer these questions for yourself:

- Would it be fine if you were to make no (or very little) money for 6 months?

- Are you okay without having the typical benefits you’d get from a job? (401K, health insurance, etc.)

- Does the idea of working for someone else for any amount of time make you feel like throwing up?

- Are you ready to put this startup above anything else in your life for 6 months?

If the answers to the above are all a (resounding) yes, then you should think about giving yourself 6 months after college to work on your startup.

And if you’re making good progress after that time and can be fine financially, then you can think about continuing to build.

My path after college was living w/ my parents for 6 months and giving myself that time to try and build the company to a point where there was real progress.

After it, I felt that I was happy with the progress and traction and decided I would keep taking the gamble. And I’m glad I did.

Think about these questions above and sit with them.

Bootstrapped to $7M ARR // Building The Next Generation of Popups

We’re throwing a Christmas party in NYC for our eCom friends ❤️

(45 spots total!) 

If you’re in the eCom world and want to hang out, eat great food, and enjoy great drinks, you should come join us.

Agency partners, brand owners, and tech partners are all welcome.

Sign up link is in the comments!

Co-Founder of Alia - Alternative to Popups | BostInno 25 Under 25

If you're doing founder led sales, I hate to say it, but you have to smile A LOT on every sales call.

When I used to take a ton of calls, I would literally look at the clock at the start of each call and force myself to smile for the first three minutes of the call.

And I get it.

Some days the calls stack up.

I’ve had days with ten back to back calls.

Then the eleventh call hits at 8:00 p.m. and I still had to smile through it.

The only way to justify it to yourself is this: at the end of the day, you get to lie down, close your eyes, and know you genuinely tried on every call.

When you smile, the prospect can see it. It tells them you care about what you're selling and that it actually matters to you.

And if you can make them believe it matters to you and that you're excited about it, it becomes exciting to them.

So smile. Whatever you have to do, force a smile every single time.

Why I'm fine if my content gets called cringe

Over the weekend, brands collected over 6 million emails using Alia 🫡


Along with that, we had over 100 million visitors for Alia brands

And we saw zero downtime during a time where our traffic was the highest we've seen it 😁

Another cool stat: between 11am-12pm ET on Black Friday, we collected 95,000 emails - that's about 26 per second

Well done, Alia eng squad ❤️ Bill Wohlers Jake Sutter Dhananjai Senthilkumar

Crazy stats for a brand of ours that was referred by the goat Matthew Fier

PLEASE keep your popups on during Black Friday. Here's why👇🏽


Your traffic will never be higher than it is in that week.

Every visitor who lands on your site is someone who showed intent, they clicked an ad, an email, or a social post to get there.

Turning off your popups means you’re losing the easiest chance to capture them.

--

And here's quick advice on what offer to put on the actual popup:

- it should match the sitewide offer that you're already giving

--- 

Attached is a super cool popup we made for a brand of ours as we approach bfcm.

We're here for you and your popups this BFCM 🫶🏽

We grew Alia to $7M ARR with no outside funding and hit 3 major mistakes that we had to push through.

In the past 20 days, over 500 unique BFCM popups have been created in Alia🫡

Last call for our Christmas Party - only a few spots left! If you're in NYC and in the eCom space, we'd love to have you 🥳

As a list growth nerd, this is literally the best message I could receive

Super super excited to announce that Elaine has joined our team! ❤️

Strategic Alliances & Partnerships in Ecom

I am GUSHING to share this news... and beyond honoured to announce I am joining the amazing team at Alia!! Within the last year alone, Alia has grown from $1M to $7M 🤩 WOW!
An incredible startup redefining how Shopify brands grow through high-performing pop-ups ✨
Even more inspiring is the momentum behind the team: co-founders Shaan Arora, Cory Gill and Bill Wohlers bootstrapped Alia out of college and growing the team tremendously over the last year. This unbelievable growth couldn't have been done without talent, trust, and an incredible team  💪
Stepping in to lead Agency Partnerships, I couldn’t be more energized by the foundation already built — hundreds of partners, strong relationships, and so much potential ahead. I cannot WAIT to get started 🎉🎉
📍 ALSO - I will be in New York next week visiting our office and would LOVE to chat if you're in town and interested! DM me — let’s connect! 
See y'all soooooon 👋

Senior AE @ Alia | Making Popups Better

🚀 The Alia team is hiring our first SDR.

Alia has been growing fast this year, helping Shopify brands lift opt-in rates and improve their popup experience. With momentum picking up, we’re bringing on our first SDR to join us in NYC (hybrid).

All levels of experience are welcome to reach out. Experience in ecommerce is a major plus.

This is a true outbound SDR position: prospecting, experimenting, learning patterns, and building pipeline from scratch. You should be someone who genuinely loves the hustle.

We’re a lean team, and this first SDR seat comes with huge growth potential. Compensation is competitive.

If you want to stand out, don’t just send a resume. Show Shaan Arora and I what you’ve got. DM, email, call me at 516-304-9384, or send something creative.

Let's go!!

Growth @CLNF | AI Developer🧑🏾‍💻 | Cat Dad | #144k

Alia performed like a champ during this BFCM. We had issue after issue building up to the event. Cory Gill, noon on Thanksgiving Day, was there to help us alter the discount code delivery in the pop-up after we caught yet another software fumble…

Great software, great team 💪🏾

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