THE AFTERSELL Chronicles OUR STORY Dinner - Bahamas GKO 2025 Ghost Lake - Offsite 2025 2021-2026 Bahamas GKO Team photo
Landon and Varun cutting cake for 100 Upcart users! Fireman Derek’s bakeshop on a super fun Miami trip together HUMBLE BEGINNINGS Act HOW IT ALL STARTED 1 Founding Aftersell.
When we started Aftersell,we’d all live together in these Airbnbs and of all places we chose Edmonton, Alberta. The first time the 4 of us actually met in person and officially kicked off “Beam Commerce” was in our first summer Airbnb by the Commonwealth Stadium. Being the connector, I still remember - this was a fascinating personal moment for me - I still remember one of my favourite stories of the start of the business: Armon met Varun for the first time and they were sitting on the couch of this Airbnb familiarizing themselves with one another. Imagine witnessing a first date between two of your best friends - I’m not even sure how to describe it. And they ask a bunch of questions to each other - siblings? What do your parents do? And then at some point they’re on Google Maps street view and Varun is asking Armon for his address and they’re looking at each other’s houses! It’s still the funniest story ever and we meme VK for it to this day. But this story among many others ties into a very central theme that helped with the success of Aftersell - connection. I’ve found that one of the most important things in business is to wake up excited every morning about what you’re going to do, but most importantly who you’re going to do it with. I’m not sure if it’s the best business advice but it’s something I want to say anyway - be friends with the people you work with. You spend most of your life with them. It should feel good to come into work and be in the trenches shoulder to shoulder with the people around you. You can befriend your colleagues, managers, executives, etc. They’re all humans and have a lot to teach you but also a lot to learn from you.
Our first summer Airbnb @ Edmonton, near Commonwealth Stadium The beginning of the business was brutal. The 4 of us split everything from building new products, doing customer support live chat, owning sales calls, client success and management, and so on. Landon and Armon slept on air mattresses in this Airbnb while Varun and I slept peacefully in the other bedrooms with a promise to swap which didn’t happen. In the first summer we were growing Aftersell and launching Upcart. Towards the end of the summer, we started to add more apps and at our peak we had 8 apps: Aftersell - post purchase upsells Upcart - cart drawer Syncpal - PayPal purchase syncing Outsell - PDP popup upsells Checksell - checkout upsells Trackeroo - order tracking Volume discounts - PDP bundles & volume discounts Perfect product finder (PPF) - quizzes
Apps in 2022 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec The journey to building all of these apps was a fascinating one and there were a few hard earned lessons in doing so. But first, let me tell you the rationale behind why we did this. At this point, we had gotten Aftersell to $20k MRR and we had only one growth channel: Shopify App Store. No matter what we did, we couldn’t crack (and didn’t have the patience to crack) cold outbound, agency partnerships, influencer marketing, etc. So when we realized we had become masters of the Shopify App Store, we thought we could build a suite of $20k MRR apps by stacking reviews and driving product-led growth. There were 2 ways to $100k MRR for us: 1 1 app at $100k MRR or 5 apps at $20k MRR each. So we chose path 2 since it was the only one that supported our single growth channel. 2
Every app launch came with a ton of excitement and we would see very fast install growth because we had deep knowledge of the Shopify App Store’s ranking algorithm. Our method was simple: Build an app that has a high traffic keyword (e.g., upsell, quiz, bundles, cart, etc.) List the app as free initially to get a mass of installs coming through Use the installs to drive conversations to us via live chat through “free add-on services” (e.g., custom funnel design, free cart audit, etc.) Turn those into delightful customer experiences where we’d ask for a review Scale reviews as quickly as possible on every new app launch and reach the top of the ranking for a certain keyword Eventually take that ranking dominance and make the app paid 1 2 3 4 5 6 This worked all the way to step (5) every single time across every app and in some cases step (6) as well. The challenge was not that we couldn’t execute this process - it was actually something else entirely. And it seems so obvious now as I write it out but it wasn’t then. It really wasn’t.
You see, one of the biggest lessons most founders learn as they build a business, especially a fast growing business is the lesson of focus. Focus is a funny thing - everyone always thinks they’re doing it right but 99% of businesses are doing it wrong. And nobody realizes it until it’s painful. And once you learn it, you have to re-learn it. Over and over again.
For us, it took before we realized it the first time. Varun had done a call with the founder of FourSixty, a Shopify app that had been acquired. And this call was absolutely brutal - the FourSixty founder was telling Varun how it was really stupid for us to have a suite of apps and nobody values that more than a single app. Although brutal, Varun brought back the insight that having more apps doing the same revenue is generally valued worse than a single app doing the same revenue by potential acquirers and it potentially makes strategic acquisitions more difficult because a lot of the revenue in other categories isn’t useful to them. That set off a chain of thinking for the group around which apps we should make the tough decision to sunset. And it was emotionally charged for all of us because we had poured our blood, sweat, and tears into these apps. I specifically remember us sunsetting PPF and everyone had agreed to sunset their other apps but Greg and Armon could not bring themselves to sunsetting PPF - it was growing and some revenue but in the pursuit of focus, we made the tough call. 1.5 years
We kept Aftersell & Upcart because they were complementary apps in the same category - upsells. And then if you look at our growth trajectory after doing that, it was phenomenal. We put all of our energy into cracking additional growth channels and building the best upselling product. The growth trajectory became insane!
There’s 2 main lessons in this story: First and foremost, be relentlessly curious and seek the truth. Varun is one of the most curious people I’ve ever met. If you ask any of our group of friends, they’ll describe their first interactions with him in the same way: genuinely interested in my life, asks a lot of questions, and is really easy to talk to. I know it sounds so simple but it’s not. It’s so hard for people to actually care and think so deeply about others. And a lot of times you don’t realize but these questions and relentless curiosity yields incredible results - I can’t even tell you exactly how Varun connected with the FourSixty founder, got on a call, and got an insight that was instrumental in the success of Aftersell. But he did. And that’s the magic - that’s what happens when you’re relentlessly curious and seek the truth.
Varun & Armon egg toss @ Ghost Lake Competition winners got to throw eggs at our founders in business, it’s quite tempting to take the easy, unfocussed, shorter path that seems like you’re chasing “opportunities”. In reality, these are distractions disguised as opportunities. For us, it really did feel like a good idea: “we’re going to build the Adobe for Shopify Apps”. We didn’t realize how much that was going to distract us from our core business and opportunity set of Aftersell / Upcart which was making all of our revenue. When we refocussed and decided we wanted to solve the harder problems, it was tough at first. Growth didn’t happen immediately. However, all of the energy and hard work that we were putting into the other stuff also wasn’t yielding a step change. So at the end of the day - yes it’s important to focus. But the key lesson within that lesson is that most times you become unfocussed for the “easy thing”.
A fascinating story I still remember from the early days of Aftersell is the story of how we closed Dailysale - our first large client. At the time, they were doing well over 100k orders per month and their Storeleads rank was in the Top 1000. This was during a university term so I was visiting Armon at his apartment in London, Ontario - a few hours from Waterloo where Varun and I went to school. I had gotten an inbound sales call from Dailysale and I was super excited! Massive store, inbound, and it was a call with their founder, Jay Hofstatter! I got on the call and he was very direct (paraphrasing): “I’m speaking with a bunch of post-purchase upsell apps right now and I just need one feature, do you guys do AI recommendations?”. And unfortunately, we didn’t have AI recommendations as a feature in Aftersell at the time. So here’s what I said (paraphrasing): “Yes, we’re actively building this out. I can show you a beta of this tomorrow - are you free for a follow up call?” and we agreed to call the next morning.
As soon as I got off the demo call with Jay, I gave Landon a phone call. He was also on a school term at the University of Alberta at the time. I told him we needed to build a beta of AI recommendations by the next morning - I explained what happened and what’s at stake here. Instead of raging at me (which he probably should have done), he calmly just told me that he’ll figure it out. And I trusted him. I kept calling him a bunch throughout the day to check in on progress and he just kept telling me that he’s on it and it’s going well. Before going to sleep, Landon reassured me that the beta would be built and I’d have instructions by the time I woke up - which I did. Landon had spent all night building AI recommendations and had a fully functioning, production ready version of this feature ready to go. I called him when I woke up and told him to get some sleep while I go and close Dailysale. We closed them and activated them within that week and it was our first huge success.
Now, there’s 2 lessons in here that are sort of intertwined: First - you have to believe. Believe in yourself, your team, your way of working. All of it. I often use the term “delusion” in a very positive light in business. A lot of people will tell you that something won’t work. They’ll tell you that the path you’re going down is “crazy”. But it’s simple, the craziest things are what drive the craziest outcomes. Of course, you have to be smart about it but there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you believe it deeply enough. Leaning on Landon
Mya, Landon, Dhruv, Greg and Varun run a marathon together! And the second lesson work hard and follow through Landon built an incredible feature in a day. Something that every engineer I would’ve talked to at the time would’ve given me a week long or month long scope for. He didn’t have AI then either and he didn’t need it to do what he did. Landon is one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever met and he studied physiology in school. He learned how to code on his own and has been able to lead alongside senior engineers at a billion dollar company. He scored a 526/528 on the MCAT (100th percentile in NA). His IQ is unbelievable for sure. But, he’s more than his IQ. To me, the most fascinating thing was that he was just calm throughout this entire Dailysale story. There was no frenzy when I told him that we needed to deliver in a day. There was just a relentless pursuit of winning. He did his part so that I could do mine and close the deal. Seeing how hard he worked motivated me to make sure that we didn’t lose this deal. It was of utmost importance to me. Concluding Act I - these were the humble beginnings of the Aftersell business. Connection, focus, belief, and hard work were just some of the themes that have still stuck with me to this day.
STAYING SCRAPPY AND FOCUSED 2 SCALING OUR TEAM Act Growing the business.
something that was getting quite difficult was keeping up with the quality of our products & service with just the 4 of us. We were a bootstrapped business built by university students and there were 2 things we didn’t want to do: 1) Raise money from investors and Hire people. The first is pretty obvious as to why - we didn’t want to dilute our equity for something we knew was working. And the second was just because as university students, it was a lot for us to have people’s entire livelihoods depend on us and our business performance. That was really scary. As the business grew, 1 2
At some point we just had to do it. We were working with contractors at the time - Greg and Evgeniya among others from DevIT. Anyone we worked with externally was an engineer. Until we hired Pierre for Customer Support in the summer of 2022. CS was our growth engine at the time - generate reviews, grow App Store ranking, and drive more installs. This was one of the reasons why it took us so long to hire for CS. In the beginning it was a capacity thing for us. As founders, we deeply believed that it would be really hard for someone to do the live chat job better than us. Not because we were so smart or capable or anything like that - just because we cared so deeply and we had the experience and hours to show it. However, when we hired Pierre, it was really important to us that we push to help train him up so he could be better than us. In his first week of onboarding, I remember sitting there for 8-10 hours every day doing live calls to train him. It was the most focussed onboarding we’ve ever done to this day. Explaining the market, product, business model, team, etc. in so much detail. We’d then do live chats where he was just observing how I’d do the chat. Then he started doing the chats and I was just watching and providing guidance. Until eventually one day, I gave him the challenge to do it on his own and get some reviews. Pierre crushed it that day! And over time, he kept proving that he was able to do live chat better than me. He was my first official full-time hire and thank god it was him because he proved that we could hire, train, and retain people to do great work.
Pierre, randon ., randon ., and Mark ahamas Now you may be thinking that this is a simple lesson - hire great talent. Yes that’s true - but there’s a lesson that’s a lot more important than that here. People are lifelong learners - when you can build a business that can be an institution for helping people grow and develop, you’ve truly done something special. Hiring is just the first step. Making people successful is much harder. And this is the role of leadership. In the story of Pierre, we hired someone with no experience in the ecosystem, the product, or anything like that. To do a job that we (the founders) deemed our primary growth channel. And the number one thing that we could have done at the time is set him up for success - training, feedback, and doing reps together. And in turn, he gave us incredible results and leverage to go and crack the next thing in the business. And most importantly, the conviction to believe that we can hire the next CS rep to continue to grow.
From there we got comfortable with hiring - not too long after we hired salespeople, brought engineering in-house, and even looked at other job functions to hire for like partnerships. Without knowing it, we were building a really good ground to train great talent. We prioritized values over experience on every hire, knowing that we can train people on technical skills. And we tried to make sure that one of the founders spent significant time training every new hire.
The growth channel we cracked after the Shopify App Store actually wasn’t cold outbound or agency partnerships. It was social - taking over the zeitgeist. One of the best people I’ve ever met at this skillset is Armon. I don’t think people understand just how good he is at this. His ability to cut through and understand what people want / need is next to none. Earlier on, Armon started to post on TikTok to see if he could drive installs from it. In the beginning it didn’t work - but he kept going. And we started to notice that every time he’d post on TikTok we’d end up in the “Trending” section on the Shopify App Store’s home page. So he doubled down - multiple TikToks per day, creative ideas, etc. It was a full motion for him. And it drove so many installs on Upcart.
I still remember that this was when we all had realized we hit the install volume to take Upcart paid - we priced it at $14.99/mo and went paid. We thought for sure that the TikTok installs would drop. Although there was a small drop, our paid users just kept growing. He was somehow driving so much interest via TikTok at a point where nobody would’ve thought that B2B SaaS could be sold through it. I’ve seen Armon pull this kind of “magic” off in a lot of these social scenarios and have always wondered how he’s able to do it. And it’s not just because he’s got this innate ability when it comes to social media - that’s true for sure. But, if you dig a little deeper and think about how he’s even developed this skill - there’s a really important lesson: Have the courage to be Armon’s got an addictive personality - when he latches onto something I’ve never seen him fail at it. I think about the YouTube channel he scaled to 100M views just because he wanted the award plaque from YouTube. I think about his dropshipping store he built. I think about how he started Aftersell because he thought he could beat the incumbents. SUCCESSFUL
None of these were insanely unique ideas - he just knows he can out-execute them all. In business, everyone’s always focussed on the ideas & strategy which is quite important. But, the thing that’s often forgotten is being able to actually execute on these ideas. When we’d set out to build Aftersell, I would never have thought it’d be the behemoth that it is today. This hasn’t happened because our ideation and business strategy were great - although that was a component of it. We spent 10% of our time on it though. And it was a really important 10%. However, we spent the other 90% of the time deep in the weeds executing and building the business - bit by bit, deal by deal. This isn’t an argument to be made about what’s more important between strategy and execution - I think it’s pretty obvious that both are. But, remember that you’ll be spending most of your time on execution. Therefore, by only being good at ideation and strategy would be doing yourself a disservice on time. So get in the weeds, understand what makes the machine tick. Get to know the first principles of the business you’re working on. Own things end to end. Be resourceful. And keep trying when things get hard, especially when things get hard.
Something that people get surprised by is when I tell them that we bootstrapped Aftersell. We didn’t raise any money from investors. And no, we didn’t then go and raise money from our friends or family either. It’s really funny looking at this whole story now - we were up against a competitor who had raised $20M when we started. Another competitor had been at the top of the upsell keyword on the Shopify App Store for years and had thousands of reviews. And another 2 competitors had early access to Shopify’s post-purchase API to build out the 1-click upsell feature. Fast forward to today and we’re larger than all of these businesses combined and many have tried to sell their business to us. Anyone you would’ve asked at the time we were starting would’ve told you that we would’ve needed to raise money to even think about building this business. But we didn’t. Let me tell you why:
We had this conversation over and over again and we realized that we didn’t have “money” problems. We didn’t have a 2nd growth channel. Should we have hired a Head of Sales to help crack cold outbound? What would they have done that we weren’t doing? Would they have cared more than us? Probably not. Would they have written better outbound email copy than us? We could get advice on that. We just never thought that was a money problem. A lot of businesses will hire to solve a problem like this. But, we thought it was important to figure it out ourselves so that in the long term we could hire, train, and retain people to do it with us. We thought about every problem in the business like this - product, engineering, design, sales, marketing, customer support, etc. We were literally doing everything ourselves.
Early days Aftersell dashboard design When we decided we wanted some money to grow faster - instead of defaulting to raising money from VCs, we went down a different path. We started doing university pitch competitions and seeking government grants - we had a lot of access to non-dilutive funding as students. I can’t tell you how many competitions we did and how many we won - we travelled everywhere from Windsor to Arkansas to New York for these pitch competitions and won more than $200k in non-dilutive funding. At a point, we got so confident we’d keep winning these competitions that we asked Armon’s brother to give us a $200k loan since he could get that money for lower interest from being in medical school. We used that money to acquire an app and then paid off the debt through pitch competition winnings. This should tell you something really important about how we operate and what I want to pass on as lessons:
First - business is a game of optimizing around constraints. Oftentimes, people look for a lot of comfort - the perfect hire, the best clients, exact org structure, etc. But, you’ll never be comfortable in business. At the end of the day, you operate with the ultimate constraints of the market. There’s real physics there and your entire job is to do one of two things: 1) change the paradigm (i.e., change the constraints) or 2) operate in the best possible way within the constraints. You won’t always find the “unicorn” person. You won’t always be best positioned to win. Funding may not always be the right answer. Force the right constraints on yourself to be successful. It takes a lot of discipline - when we were starting Aftersell, capital was really cheap - we could’ve raised a lot of money. But, even though it wouldn’t have diluted a lot, it wouldn’t have solved our problems either. We would likely have gotten complacent around the capital and not executed at the same level that we did. We were obsessed with the business in every way possible. We weren’t arrogant but we genuinely thought the 4 of us could cover every possible skill needed in the business to get it to success before we needed to hire. For every person we added, we were hyper-aware of why we needed them, what their role would be, how we would train them, etc. That discipline is something that a lot of businesses lose as they scale. But I think it was perhaps one of the most important ingredients to our success.
Greg’s Aftertank team @ Ghost Lake Varun and Dhruv @ Princeton after winning the Tigerlaunch pitch competition Second - build up delusional conviction so you can take risks. Imagine being in university, having no money, and taking out a $200k loan just because you think you’ll be able to pay it off from winning a bunch of competitions. It sounds a bit insane… because it is! I talked about this earlier when I had promised Dailysale that we already had AI recommendations. It was a risk that was rooted in delusion. The competitions were the same - I genuinely didn’t see a world where we didn’t win the roster of competitions we had lined up. It’s what I thrived off of - a stage to tell our story and the pressure to perform. I wasn’t afraid of it. I was excited about it. And most importantly, there was no other outcome possible for me. Some people call it manifestation. Others call it belief. I call it delusional conviction.
I’ve never talked about the acquisition process for “Beam Commerce” (the holding company of Aftersell and Upcart). I think it’s important that people understand how this process went - it tells you a lot about what a founder is triangulating when getting acquired. When we first started having talks about the acquisition, we had recognized Rokt as a really promising acquirer for the business - we thought the business case was quite strong and we’d be a great culture fit. Our broker got us in touch with Rokt via Stuart Fitzroy. We had a chat with him and some folks from the FP&A team at the start of 2023 and we showed our projections. And our projections were unbelievable - we had 5x growth baked in for the year. We were at $150k MRR and we were projecting over $500k MRR for the end of the year. The Rokt team looked at it and understandably said - this isn’t going to happen and it’s not a good business to buy if it’s that small and therefore passed on us. We then continued to move forward with the process - talked to a few other strategic acquirers but the most traction came from a private equity backed rollup. They were buying a bunch of eCommerce software businesses to make a suite of apps they could get economies of scale from with operating expenses. We went deep with them - presented our full business, growth strategy, etc. As we negotiated the price with them, we were “lowballed” quite a bit. We negotiated and pushed for a better multiple. However, it was tough for them since they were backed by debt financing and their economics always had to factor in risk, with every little strategic synergy. We weren’t excited about selling to this business either, but we thought it would probably have a good financial outcome. Looking back, this would’ve been a huge mistake.
You see, an acquisition is about balancing 3 things: Strategic synergy: this is what excites builders - it’s a lot more fun to work on something that you believe can be really great. Winning is fun so it’s important to optimize for the highest odds of winning. And winning big! Team outcomes: when you build a business, you start to develop a massive amount of affinity to the people that pour every day of their lives into the business so it’s important to optimize their growth and learning trajectory. Financial outcomes: and of course, it’s still important to look to maximize the financial piece of the puzzle. 1 2 3
As we went deeper into the process with the PE-backed company, we realized that none of these 3 angles were being met - 1) there was no strategic synergy other than cost optimizations, 2) they weren’t looking to develop the team, in fact it would likely have ended up with a bunch of layoffs due to PE cost cutting, and 3) the financial outcome didn’t feel like it valued us properly. However, there was a saying that our broker kept telling us - “a bird in the hand is better than 2 in the bush”. Landon and I wanted to take the deal because of it. And Armon and Varun kept pushing to not. So as they pushed, we ended up asking our broker to reach back out to Rokt - our results were looking really strong. It was August and we had already crossed 5x growth - just between February when the first meeting was and August. That growth rate became really impressive to Rokt and we got another meeting. This time, there was a lot more interest and we got an intro to Bruce Buchanan.
My first chat with Bruce was fascinating - it really just felt like there was such cultural alignment that I hadn’t felt at all with the PE-backed company. The strategic synergy was also clearly there - we had a lot of real-estate and an entirely new segment we wanted to penetrate with Rokt’s products. Therefore, with (1) and (2) being high-signal, we were hoping that (3) could work out. Alongside the invite for a call, we had an invite to the Rokt NY office to meet with the Executive team. From there, things moved very quickly - everyone felt good about the strategy, the team, and the financial outcome. A month after the NY office visit, we presented the business to the board and this was the most insane board meeting I’ve been in to date. It was the 4 of us at one end of the table and I did a quick overview of the business before jumping into Q&A. It felt like a very high stakes board meeting - the deal structure had been agreed upon and everyone wanted to do it. The Q&A felt like a flash - I got question after question and I was just trying to keep up!
I still remember Karen Katz asking me “If your business is doing so well - why do you want Bruce as a boss?”. This question threw me off for a second but then I made a joke and said “I’m hoping he’s a good boss” and then jumped into my response and this response is the lesson here: Personally, I wanted Bruce as a boss because I saw an immense opportunity to learn from one of the smartest operators I’ve ever met. And from a business standpoint, I’m addicted to winning. I wanted to win this ecosystem and market so badly and the business case here just made so much sense. My advice is to optimize these 2 vectors at all times - think about the long game and if the learning opportunity that you have in front of you is meaningful. And think about why you build in the first place and for me the answer to that is very simple just “to win”.
As the details of the deal were being sorted - we (the founders) shifted our focus to how we would win. It was great in theory but there was a lot of work to do. The goal of the acquisition was to build a $100M revenue business in 3 years. We wanted to do it in the first year. The first step to doing this was to build the integration of Rokt Thanks into the Aftersell app and we actually wanted to do it prior to the board meeting so we could show the board a demo. Landon told Greg that we were doing a partnership with Rokt and were going to implement it via their APIs. Within a week, they had the Rokt Thanks product fully functional via Aftersell and I was able to demo it to the board! After that board meeting, there was a unanimous decision to move forward with the acquisition. So the lawyers, accountants, and teams started to push forward to get the deal done so the team could attend GKO in Sydney.
ROKT SYDNEY GKO The Aftersell team @ Sydney Popping Champagne with Bruce @ Sydney GKO Popping Champagne with Bruce @ Sydney GKO So that’s Act II - remember, this business was built from training great talent (not just hiring), incredible courage and execution, pushing through the constraints and getting your hands dirty, delusional conviction and a deep desire to learn and win.
Act POST ACQUISITION 3 DRIVING ALIGNMENT Setting us up for success. A toast @ our first GKO in Sydney
Since we were being acquired, we wanted to host an offsite to actually announce it to the team. This was really important to us because it was a huge change in people’s lives but also one of the coolest opportunities ever for everyone. So, we put together our first offsite in Banff and got the team together at the Rimrock Hotel. Bruce flew in to attend too. One of the things we ended up doing then was buy a bunch of boxes with locks and keys and then we taped the keys to the bottom of people’s chairs and the boxes were on the table for everyone. The boxes had a Rokt hoodie, a Fitbit, a fake boarding pass to Sydney, and a personal handwritten note from the founders. We spent every minute planning the announcement moment. The slide deck was perfect - we worked on it for weeks leading up to it and rehearsed the announcement to make sure it landed. We spent a lot of energy on this because it was really important to maintain the culture of trust and transparency.
We did a State of the Union first to ensure everyone knew what we built was incredible and this wasn’t a “fire sale”. We went through the history of the business - precisely some of the stories I’ve written about here. We then did the announcement and told everyone we were being acquired by Rokt. There were 3 commitments we made to the team: Everyone is staying and accelerating their career None of the founding team is leaving Massive leap towards our mission 1 2 3
We then went into explaining: What is Rokt? Why is Rokt acquiring Aftersell and what does it mean for us collectively? What does this mean for each of us individually? It was a presentation that landed really well with the team and I’m still so proud of the team for being so engaged and open- minded as we had the conversation. We went into Q&A after and got a couple of hard-hitting questions from folks - shoutout Ryan for always asking the challenging questions. It really meant a lot that people felt safe enough to ask some of the questions that they did. 1 2 3
We then did some functional breakouts and I did a 1:1 with every individual on the team to get their thoughts and any concerns they wanted to share with me. I kept note of it all to ensure that I could lead in a way that addressed their largest fears around getting acquired. The thought and care we needed to put into the announcement shows you perhaps one of the biggest leadership lessons and that is the culture of trust & transparency. Instead of writing a separate lesson on this one, I think it’s better for you to see this excerpt from Dianna’s visit to the Aftersell offsite last year: “Aftersell’s team culture is truly phenomenal ... and is unique and special in ways that stand out immediately. The team is highly engaged and energized, with a clear sense of connection and collaboration that fuels both happiness and high performance. There is a contagious energy across the group, reflecting not only enthusiasm for the work, but also deep confidence in one another, in leadership, and in the path ahead. The culture feels intentionally set up for success, combining strong alignment with rapid growth to create an environment where people are thriving and the business is well-positioned to scale and succeed.” The lesson is to design for trust & transparency - set people up for success by enabling them to challenge you.
One of the hardest things from the acquisition was what followed a few months after it. We had our first few sales onto Rokt Thanks in the first few days but they were all our friends. We then got into the actual growth challenge. Rokt Thanks in the Shopify ecosystem was so new that nobody understood it. Within the first half of the year, we were tracking to finish the year at 40% to plan. Everyone on the team would read the CEO report, see SMB at 40% to plan and feel quite disheartened. The founders had a tough time with this as well but we didn’t give up. If I jump ahead, we ended the year at 99% to the plan. So what happened between 40% and 99% within 6 months? Teamwork. The team rallied together and we re-learned the lesson of focus. We reorganized our BD team to ensure we could successfully sell our network products. We had an offsite in Victoria where the entire team got immense clarity on what the primary focus of the business should be for the rest of the year.
Ultimately, when we got very aligned as a full team - the results really shifted. We delivered above and beyond what anyone thought was imaginable. I was immensely proud of the team at the end of this offsite because it was so abundantly clear that everyone knew exactly what we needed to get done and more importantly to my point on execution earlier - we got it done. And what was even more impressive is that the business was set up so well for the following year (and all the way until now). We really worked out how to operate and there was a lot of learning before we started winning. So here are the lessons from this phase and they’re not that obvious from the story:
First - focus is a lesson you’ll keep having to re-learn. Bruce talked about this at the GKO this year - as a business scales, you start to face “entropy”. And it’s really hard to see when you’re just pushing every day on the specific work you’re doing. But, it becomes abundantly clear when you zoom out and look at how much energy you’re spending your time on things that don’t matter. Ultimately, we know that of the 10 things you’ll do in a year, only 2 of them will be valuable. The rest is a distraction. Yet, we all keep doing it - it requires so much discipline for us to continue to weed out and re- prioritize but it’s immensely important to do so. - is the lesson of rallying. I love building because I get to rally with people and go shoulder to shoulder and crack tough problems together. As I mentioned at the beginning, connection is the basis of this but you don’t realize how powerful it is until you witness it and the impacts firsthand. A group of people all pointed in the same direction, pushing at pace toward the same goal are unstoppable. So when you’re faced with a tough challenge, just pause, look around, rally the troops and push hard - you’ll surprise yourself with what you can achieve. Second
This next story is another story about people - and it’s about a lot of the people in the business today that everyone knows and respects and their key characteristics. When we were first acquired, we made the decision to go out and look for a Head of Sales - little did we know that we’d end up hiring Nate Vanschaik, one of the best sales leaders we could have asked for. Nate applied to our job posting inbound and he was the top salesperson at our largest competitor so we had to take the call. We responded to him, invited him to an interview, and did the first call. At the time, I could have sworn he was literally just calling with us because he was a “spy” from the competitor. But, he interviewed really well so we talked to him again. And this time, he had prepared a full slide deck with notes on what he would have done and it was so well thought out that we were so impressed. However, Nate didn’t bring any leadership experience - and that’s what we were looking for, someone who could come and build a sales team and formal sales motion. A lot of people would’ve chosen not to hire him. But, we decided it was worth betting on him - after all, he was one of the best sellers in the ecosystem and could probably work out how to lead - that’s what we did. And we’re so glad we made that call. He came in and has since just been on an incredible run - great hires, incredible training and development, and new business has been growing incredibly well.
In fact, when we were looking to hire Omar Abboud, I remember Nate pushing so hard - he put his word on the line and told me that Omar is one of the best salespeople he’ll ever be able to hire. He said he knew who he wanted on his team and it was him. We all obviously know now that we’re very lucky to have him in the business but Nate’s push for Omar was a key driver for why we hired him. I had very little to go off of but Nate’s conviction made me really want to hire him. Nate’s done that a few times with commercial contracts, recruiting, etc and it’s one of my favourite things about him. Omar A., Omar E., and Dumebi @ GKO Nate giving Sayaad a hug and congrats for Aftersell awards.
The lesson here is really about conviction. Guang, Nate, Julia, Sharon, Samar, Greg, Opey, Keaton, and our senior leaders all have this amazing ability to push for what they believe in. I’ve had times where it’s been tiring - I know that Greg and I have had rigorous debate over many topics, and Sharon has always had an insightful thing to say in senior leadership meetings. But to me, their ability to have conviction in what they believe in has been the most impressive. They’re decisive and know what they want. They ask for it. And they deliver off the back of it. That’s what I want to see in our leaders - and that’s the type of leadership that we should all want. Decisive. Willing to put everything on the line to win. Guang @ Ghost Lake 2025 Sharon hosting our first ever live customer interview @ Ghost Lake
Greg & Opey segment @ GKO Bahamas Samar & Val @ Ghost Lake 2025 This next story ties into conviction as well and is maybe one of the other underrated parts of Aftersell’s success. At the beginning of this year, I talked to the senior leadership team about this concept of “owning the zeitgeist”. And when I said this for the first time in the room, everyone looked at me like I was a crazy person - what does that word mean? Owning the zeitgeist really means taking over mindshare. It’s the thing that makes all of our other activities much easier - selling a client becomes easier, recruiting better talent is easier, and growing the business is easier. We’ve since set out on a journey this year to do this and we’re seeing so much success - the influx of inbound leads driven purely from marketing activity has been amazing, every event we do is a hit, and everyone in the ecosystem has just one app on the tip of their tongue: Aftersell.
I don’t think businesses typically would sit down and put “owning the zeitgeist” as one of their top priorities. But we did. And we’ve done that in other things as well - early on, we made app store review generation our #1 priority while everyone told us we should be focussed on sales or partnerships. We’ve constantly tried to build a product-led business in an ecosystem that heavily skews to sales-led organizations. It’s not that we aspire purely to be contrarian. It’s that somehow, we always find ourselves at the forefront. There’s a really important lesson that I’ve only learned recently on this which is: Pierre asking a question @ Ghost Lake Offsite 2025 Look for the non-obvious answers - they usually carry a lot of value in them. If you do a first principles analysis and there’s something glaring at you but you can’t understand why only you’re seeing it - pull that thread further. It’ll typically contain a lot more information for you. It’s going to be a bit odd and you’ll feel like you’re pushing against something but trust me, it’ll make sense at some point. And when it does make sense - you’ll have unlocked a transformative nugget of insight.
So that’s Act III - after the acquisition, we’ve spent a lot of time and energy setting Aftersell up for success with a great culture, getting focussed and rallying together, having leaders that carry conviction, and always always always seeking the non-obvious answers. As we transition out of the Aftersell business, I want you all to remember that we’re about to begin Act IV and I want you all to carry the lessons and emotions that I’ve written in these chronicles with you all (I haven’t used AI to write a single word). I’m sure you will all do an amazing job at continuing to live the values of this business and keep winning. - Dhruv The team having lunch @ Ghost Lake offsite 2025 Winning Aftertank team throws ice water on Dhruv @ Victoria offsite 2024
ActThe next chapter...4 WHAT’S NEXT?
The next act is to write...yours
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