ShopGrok

01The full story

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.