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A former Woolworths head of price strategy scrapes the retail market, benchmarks a chain's own prices, promotions and range against it, and sells the answer as $20K–$50K annual contracts to a handful of large retailers.
profitable and unfunded six years in · Super Retail Group tender won on an initial three-year deal paid annually up front · no ARR disclosed
He did not quit into the idea he had. He quit with twelve months of runway from a second mortgage, took consulting gigs to pay for it, built one client a price-tracking tool on the side, and found out the side thing was the company. "I sort of did the old pivot until you find something that works for a customer, and then just double down on that."
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Aaron Cowper spent about 15 years in corporate roles — pricing consulting at McKinsey out of Singapore, then head of price strategy at Woolworths in Australia — and had wanted out since finishing an MBA in Spain around 2012. He is also, by his own description, risk averse: a mortgage, a second child on the way. So he engineered the jump instead of taking it. He waited until bonuses were paid, took a second mortgage nominally for a renovation, and gave himself roughly twelve months of cash. If it made money it made money. The original idea was to attack Nielsen Homescan, the panel data Woolworths bought — 10,000 Australian households with scanning guns, expensive, skewed by demographic and, in his experience, not very accurate. He started building a consumer shopping-companion app that would be free to use and monetised by selling aggregated purchase data back to retailers. Then the arithmetic of a consumer panel became obvious: that needs funding. What he did instead paid the bills and became the company. He took consulting work with retailers, and during a pricing project at Myer — brought in by a friend who ran the Myer One loyalty programme — he built them a tool that tracked their prices against the market. Amazon was about to launch in Australia, retailers were panicking about price, and the side tool was what people kept asking for. He dropped the app. The first real contract came from a tender he was invited into by his network: Super Retail Group, owner of Supercheap Auto, BCF and Rebel Sport, replacing an incumbent they were unhappy with. ShopGrok had no website at the time and would not have shown up in any vendor search. They won, took the year up front against roughly a 10% discount, and the cash paid for the hire who is now COO. Two weeks later a car hit Cowper's scooter and broke around fifteen bones. He delivered the contract anyway, standing, with his arm in a sling. Six years on the business is profitable with no outside money.
Every early ShopGrok customer came out of the fifteen years that preceded it. Cowper had run price strategy at Woolworths and done pricing consulting before that, so the people who buy competitive pricing insight in Australian retail either knew him or knew someone who did.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on the Unfunded podcast (Day One network). Everything is self-reported by Aaron Cowper and unaudited: ShopGrok is private, and no revenue, ARR, customer count or growth rate was disclosed anywhere in the episode. The concrete figures that do exist are the $20K–$50K annual contract value range, the roughly 10% discount taken in exchange for annual prepayment, the initial three-year Super Retail Group deal, the $3,000 grant from the Incubate programme at the University of Sydney, and about twelve months of self-funded runway; the interview never states a currency, and the customer base is Australian and New Zealand. The $5M revenue and 30–50% growth numbers are what M&A advisers told him a premium valuation requires — they are not ShopGrok's figures, and he says the business is not at that point. Customer names (Myer, Super Retail Group and its Supercheap Auto, BCF and Rebel Sport brands) and the competitor Revionics pulling back in Australia are as he states them. The auto-caption garbles the name of the analytics hire who became COO, so she is left unnamed here.
The first dollars were consulting fees, not software revenue, and Cowper treats that as the design rather than a compromise.
Retention did most of the work. The product sits inside how a merchandising team sets prices each week, so customers stayed, and because Australian retail is a small labour market the people using it carried it to their next employer and recommended it unprompted.
The quiet stretch here was financial rather than emotional and it lasted years. Cowper paid himself nothing while paying a junior developer, and the milestone that told him he was through was reaching roughly the salary he had walked away from in the corporate world — which took a few years.
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