The Retention Edge podcast is back!

After a short hiatus, we’re back with a great interview. For this episode, I got the chance to sit down with Shaan Arora, co-founder and CEO of Alia, to talk about how their company grew from a dorm-room startup into an AI-powered pop-up platform used by 4,500 brands - and how eventually they were acquired for $60 million.

We covered list growth, the offers that move opt-in rates the most, and what he learned bootstrapping a Shopify app all the way to an acquisition.

I had a great time with this one. Give it a watch or listen below, or keep scrolling for the best insights I took away from it.

Now let’s run through some of the top takeaways from the episode.

Here's the pattern Shaan saw on hundreds of demo calls.

A brand is on Klaviyo. They love Klaviyo for email and SMS. Then he asks about the pop-up, and the answer is always some version of "it's fine."

That "fine" is the problem.

His point: the big ESPs (Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript) are excellent at what they prioritize, and pop-ups aren't it. They put their R&D dollars elsewhere, which is a perfectly rational call for them. So the pop-up that comes bundled in is mediocre by design, and most brands accept it because it technically works.

Meanwhile the gap is enormous. Shaan talks about moving brands from 2% opt-in to 5%, 6%, even 10% of the people who see the pop-up.

Think about what that does downstream. Every subscriber you don't capture is an email you never send, a flow that never fires, a first purchase that never happens.

The default costs you nothing to run and a fortune to keep.

If you’re trying to get more email signups, the answer probably isn’t a prettier pop-up. It’s what you put in it.

Shaan's team leans on the mystery discount: instead of "get 10% off," the pop-up says "enter your email for a mystery offer," and the reveal is the same 10% they'd have shown anyway.

Same margin, higher conversions, because customers are trained to expect a discount and curiosity beats a number they've seen a thousand times.

And often you don't even need a discount at all. Some of his brands offer early access, VIP status, a guide, or "cut the line" on the next drop, giving up no margins at all, and it still fills the list, because people want to feel like insiders.

A visitor who clicked a specific TikTok ad and a visitor who typed in your URL should not see the same pop-up.

Shaan's brands tailor the pop-up to the landing page and the ad that drove the click. If the Facebook creative promised a specific offer or led with a specific angle, the pop-up echoes it. The experience feels one-to-one, and the opt-in reflects it.

The other move here is offer testing to protect margin. Everyone assumes you have to give 20% off. So test it.

Give 15% to half your traffic and 20% to the other half. If conversions hold, you just found free margin. Most brands never run that test and end up overpaying on every subscriber they acquire.

When I asked Shaan what drives the 2 to 3x lifts, he didn't say design or copy. He said serving the right pop-up to the right person at the right time.

Alia does this with AI: products they call Smart Offers and Prism that show dynamic, per-customer pop-ups and run tests continuously instead of a human setting up a handful of A/B tests by hand.

The system tries "get 10%" against "get a mystery discount," learns which wins, and rolls the winner out to more of your traffic.

The scale behind that is what makes it work. Alia renders roughly half a billion pop-up views a month. That's an enormous amount of signal about what converts.

It doesn’t just deliver a higher volume of signups either, this system also delivers higher quality signups. When someone opts in for an offer that actually fits them, they're a better subscriber than someone who dismissed the same generic banner and typed their email to make it disappear.

This is the takeaway I'd underline for anyone whose instinct is "more subscribers, always."

Shaan was direct about the flip side: list health. If you're pulling in subscribers fast and never cleaning the ones who soft-bounce, hard-bounce, or haven't opened in months, you're dragging down your domain reputation and your deliverability. Growth and hygiene are the same job.

On channels, his read: email and SMS aren't going anywhere, SMS is still climbing among larger US brands, and WhatsApp is the one to watch outside the US. Alia already supports it, and he pointed to Tom's in the UK as a brand leaning into it.

If you sell internationally, WhatsApp belongs on your 2026 roadmap.

If you want to take one thing away from his story, it’s focus.

Shaan bootstrapped Alia to a $60 million acquisition by doing one thing (pop-ups) better than companies with a hundred times the resources, precisely because they were spread across a hundred other things.

Then he almost raised a friends-and-family round in 2023 and walked away from it, because he realized capital wasn't his constraint. Positioning and product-market fit were.

The lesson for operators? The boring, bundled part of your stack you've labeled "good enough" is often where the easiest wins are hiding.

Catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify now.

I’ll back soon with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.