E44: 3,500 Customers and Zero Outbound with Shaan Arora

In this episode we talked to Shaan Arora, the co-founder of Alia, about bootstrapping Alia Popups from $1M to $9M ARR in a year, bootstrapped, with zero outbound, and no venture capital. He started building Alia when he was 20, because he interned at Credit Suisse and decided he would do whatever it took to work for himself.

Two customers, $20 a month, getting Etsy accounts blocked from cold outreach that most people would be embarrassed to do. Now he's got 3,500 customers, up from 1,100 last year, a 30 person team, and the freedom to design whatever he wants next.

60% of their revenue comes from agency partners. The rest is word of mouth and referrals. People literally right click to inspect element on sites they like, see Alia in the code, and sign up.

Their ACV 3x'd in the same period because bigger brands started showing up. Rishabh shared a stat that three enterprise customers at their company represent the same GMV as thousands of Shopify brands combined, making the case that depth of scale teaches you more than breadth of scale.

We talked about whether Alia should expand outside Shopify or go deeper. Rishabh's take is the business is already telling you what to do, just follow the line. Jeremiah talked about expectations being lower outside Shopify and how that might actually be a good thing.

We got into the agents conversation. What happens when someone spins up an LLM, connects it to Shopify and Twilio, and just does the thing your software does for pennies.

Rishabh's counter is that the real job of a software vendor was always economies of scale and knowledge across customers, and that doesn't go away. Jack talked about wanting software that just does everything for him, the supremely lazy version of agentic commerce. We also talked about why taking capital might be the move right now, why the window to use it as a weapon doesn't stay open forever, and why Shaan can basically design whatever deal he wants at this stage.