Shopify not only helps its merchant partners sell products online but also encourages its employees to grow within and out of the organisation. Corey Holmes and Matteo Grassi, two former employees at Shopify, learned the essential trick during their job and capitalised on it with their own startup, which has now raised $3.5 million in a pre-seed round.
Holmes and Grassi know coding very well, though they know that online merchants don’t. While Shopify is quite an easy platform to build online store and sell products across the internet. However, merchants have to use additional tools to make the most of the e-commerce platform.
When you look at Popup, we allow you to build any type of online commerce experience that you need in a matter of seconds. It’s just a drag-and-drop to be able to connect everything based on your business.
Corey Holmes, Co-founder, Popup
Why Popup?
Holmes and Grassi’s startup — Popup — provides personalized experiences to its merchant partners. Founded in 2021, Popup makes it easy for merchants by offering a no code and drag and drop platform to personalize everything within few minutes.
Global E-commerce
E-commerce first rose exponentially when the world was locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, year 2021 saw a decline in online shopping and many consumers return to physical shopping options. But still, the retail e-commerce recorded sales of $5.2 trillion in 2021 worldwide. According to Tech Crunch, the global retail e-commerce is expected to grow by 56 percent to reach $8 trillion dollars by 2026.
What Merchants Need?
According to Holmes and Grassi, platforms like Shopify make online selling easy but don’t provide personalized experiences to their merchant partners. They claim that Popup provides no code solution for creation and management of online stores. It has a drag-and-drop visual editor that helps merchants customise homepage, landing pages, checkout page and ad campaigns.
“There’s a lot of merchants that we’ve been working with, and it opened their eyes to what we can do differently,” Holmes said as quoted by Tech Crunch.
“When you look at Popup, we allow you to build any type of online commerce experience that you need in a matter of seconds. It’s just a drag-and-drop to be able to connect everything based on your business,” he added.
Initial Phase of Popup
The beta version of Popup was launched in September 2021. It will be made public with all features in the first quarter of 2023. Currently, the company is earning by charging a monthly subscription and checkout processing fees from its merchant partners. The two founders didn’t reveal the traction Popup is getting in its initial phase, but the startup is able to afford a team of 40 employees.
On the top of that, Popup has managed a pre-seed round funding of $3.5 million. Dana Deeb, Project Manager at Popup, shared more information about the funding in a LinkedIn post.
“We are thrilled that Accel joined by Seedcamp, 20VC, Sam Parr. Kieran Flanagan (SVP of Marketing at Hubspot) Johnny Boufarhat (Founder & CEO of Hopin), Alex Zaccaria (Founder of Linktree), Jeff Weiser (Ex-CMO of Shopify), Blair Beckwith (Ex-Head of partnerships of Shopify) and many more are joining our journey to reinvent how merchants build online stores and pushing the boundaries of what has been considered the norm for 30 years,” Deeb posted on LinkedIn.
Popup’s Intent
Deeb added that Popup’s intent was not to be a copy of existing apps in the market. “In the last year, we built new commerce capabilities that enabled entrepreneurs, creators, and brands to build unique, personalized experiences while controlling the customer journey,” the project manager said.
“With Popup, they are not confined to a fixed blueprint that doesn’t go beyond the static homepage and product pages that simply show products, they are given the flexibility to ignite their imagination and redefine what is possible,” Deeb added.
Plan After Funding
Popup will use the investment money to grow its multinational team and expand its business operations. “This investment will be used to grow our multinational team, as well as to officially launch the product widely and build new partnerships with businesses worldwide,” Deeb said.
Holmes And Grassi’s Journy at Shopify
Holmes had joined Shopify in March 2017 as part of Large Accounts department in Vancouver, Canada. He was promoted to Strategic Team in September 2017. In April 2018, he was promoted to Regulated Industries, a department in which he worked until March 2019.
Grassi, on the other hand, had joined the Canadian e-commerce platform as EMEA Strategic MSM at Shopify Plus in July 2016. He was operating from Galway, Connacht, Ireland. As stated on his LinkedIn profile, Grassi was responsible for “MSM for the EMEA region managing a portfolio of the biggest eCommerce brands in Europe and the Middle East.”
In February 2022, Grassi co-founded Commerce4Good. Holmes also started his own ventures before coming into a partnership with Grassi. He founded Blockli.st in July 2019 and co-founded Nootrostax in December 2015. Together, Holmes and Grassi founded Viceroy Group, a drop shipping company based in the Netherlands.
“Originally starting with $1,000 and 1 online store, within one year we launched 7 brands from scratch and grew revenues to 8 figures. Today Viceroy Group is a fully remote e-commerce portfolio company focused on building D2C brands that build products to help people live better lives,” Holmes describes Viceroy Group on LinkedIn.
The two former Shopify employees took Viceroy Group to eight figures before starting Popup.
Who Funded Popup?
While Accel led the pro-seed round, Seedcamp and 20VC also contributed to the funding. Another former Shopify employee, CMO Jeff Weiser, also funded the startup with angel investor Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat.
“We saw a clear value proposition with merchants that are marketing savvy, are trying to grow and understand that stage of the journey,” Grassi was quoted as saying by Tech Crunch.
“As we develop, we will be able to move into other sectors where we can offer some features that are requested,” he added.
Other Success Stories
This is not the first time when former Shopify employees have founded their own startup. Stella Alexandrova, who was one of the 1000 employees laid off by Shopify in late July, had done something similar. Instead of being demotivated, she created an opportunity for herself out of this adverse situation.
“I was shocked. I was so confused because I could not have seen this coming,” said Alexandrova in an interview with businessinsider.in. She was growth lead at Shopify Canada for three years at the time of layoff.
An avid traveller herself, Alexandrova launched a travel app called Mave. The app aims to help people plan their trips without much scrolling. The idea was born when Alexandrova saw a sharp rise in Do It Yourself travel sites while planning a trip during early 2022. Rise in DIY travel websites simply means that people are now visiting multiple websites and spending hours to organise a single trip. As a result, she came up with Mave within a week after the layoff.
She was given five months of severance pay after being slashed from Shopify, effectively “paying for me to be able to start my own thing,” Alexandrova said. She used the severance as a runway.
“This is five months that I don’t have to worry about an income to pay for my rent. It gave me peace of mind that I don’t have to think about my bills and it’s a runway that most people wouldn’t get at the start of their business.”
Alexandrova has now 11 employees working for Mave. She says that the waitlist for her app has increased to 16,000 people. Alexandrova is also planning to fundraise for her startup.
