Episode #76: Meet the Startup Transforming Mobile Shopping with AI

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• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Samantha Herrick:
  Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. This is the Tech Optimist, a show brought to you by Alumni Ventures, a show where we discuss the people, technology, and innovations shaping tomorrow.

  Ross Correia:
  I truly believe mobile apps are going to be the future. And I know when I joined Shopify, it was the same thing. I said, “Everyone’s going to start shopping online.”

  Samantha Herrick:
  That is Ross Correia, co-founder and CEO at Reactiv.

  Ross Correia:
  I thought retail, and that has been the case to a certain degree. I think e-commerce has definitely spiked, but I think I see the same pattern with mobile apps.

  Meera Oak:
  With that type of saturation, understandably, we saw this surge in customer acquisition costs from the brand side, and—

  Samantha Herrick:
  And that is Meera Oak, partner at Alumni Ventures.

  Meera Oak:
  I think that was this constant complaint, this frustration that how are brands expected to compete when the costs are just so high? And that’s what I think was so exciting about the Reactiv opportunity to me.

  Samantha Herrick:
  So, if $1.1 trillion were in hundred-dollar bills, it would weigh—this is a real stat, everyone—it would weigh approximately 11,000 tons. And that’s me. My name is Samantha Herrick, the guide for this podcast.

  All right, you guys know what time it is. Welcome back to the show. Today I’m going to give you another snippet into Reactiv, the startup that is here today. Reactiv is a Toronto-based startup that has recently emerged from stealth mode with a focus on providing an AI-powered mobile commerce platform. Recently, Reactiv announced a $5 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, and it was founded in 2023 by Shopify alumni, Ross Correia and Zack Elias.

  As I said, it offers an AI-powered mobile commerce platform, but some key features I really want to bring up: there’s a no-code mobile app builder that allows e-commerce merchants to create mobile apps without coding skills; AI-powered customization that can generate a mobile app from an existing website; and Reactiv Clips—a standout feature that can create a functional section of a client’s app within an advertisement or social media post without requiring users to download anything. This could be huge for capturing customers while they’re scrolling through their feed.

  It also has customer engagement tools designed to improve sales conversion rates and integrates with Shopify, making it available in the Shopify app store.

  As far as traction goes, Reactiv claims its waitlist reflects $1 million in U.S. annual recurring revenue, and they’ve already generated $100,000 from that waitlist. Some current customers include Camp Moore, Missouri Star Quilt Company, Top of the Mornin Coffee, and Canadian online perfume retailer, Fragrance Buy. The team started as a bootstrap team of 10 people, and since August 2023, they’ve added 18 employees and plan to hire more in the future.

  Future plans: the seed funding will be used to further Reactiv’s engineering efforts, bring Reactiv Clips to market, and enhance the platform with more AI-powered features and developer tools. Reactiv aims to revolutionize mobile commerce by providing an easy-to-use, AI-powered platform for merchants to create and manage mobile apps, potentially disrupting the commerce space with its innovative approach to mobile shopping experiences.

  That’s all from me. We’re going to hop into an ad, and then right into the interview with Ross and Meera. So, hang tight.

  Speaker 4:
  Looking to invest in the next big thing? Alumni Ventures Seed Fund offers you access to dozens of high-potential startups at their earliest stages. These ventures are pioneering innovations across industries like biotech, AI, and energy. With strong lead investors and a focus on creating value, our seed fund gives you a front-row seat to the future of innovation. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to be part of the next wave of breakthrough startups. Visit av.vc/seed to learn more.

  Samantha Herrick:
  As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It’s not personalized advice and it’s not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

  Meera Oak:
  Hi everyone. Welcome to the Tech Optimist podcast. Today we are joined by Ross Correia, the CEO and co-founder of Reactiv, a promising early-stage company in the portfolio and one I’ve had the pleasure of working with for several months now. Welcome, Ross, to the podcast.

  Ross Correia:
  Hello. Hello. Nice to be on the podcast. Thanks for having me here.

  Meera Oak:
  Awesome. All right, well let’s kick things off a little bit, and I could never do this justice, so I’m going to ask you to tell us a little bit about Reactiv.

  Ross Correia:
  Let’s do it. Reactiv is an e-commerce platform. We focus on mobile apps. We have a pretty big hunch that mobile apps are going to be the future. Whenever I talk to anyone these days, they tend to do most of their shopping on their mobile phone. It’s ironic because most of us at the company still do a lot of our shopping on the desktop—I kid you not. Mostly for airplane tickets or hotels, but some people, most people, do that on their phones.

  We see a very near future where all shopping is done on mobile phones. And rather than it being in the browser—which tends to have tons of pop-ups, is slow, clunky, sometimes doesn’t work, and then you have to go back to your computer—we’re building mobile apps.

  Ross Correia:
  And I know whenever people think of mobile shopping apps, our minds go back to 2010 when everybody launched a mobile shopping app and it was just a web version of their website. There was no true value. We’re completely changing that. We’re really focusing on providing as much value to the customer, the end user, and to the brand in terms of data and retention—getting that shopper to shop over and over again. So, that’s what we’re focused on. Of course, we’ve got AI powering the entire thing, solving a lot of the problems that previously we’d throw people at. We have some amazing tech, we’ve got almost 30 people on the team now, and it’s only been one year. It’s crazy.

  Meera Oak:
  That’s wild. And I have to call out that I’m one of those crazy people, Ross, that makes some of those big purchases on my phone now, just because of the ease with which companies have brought that to me as a consumer. So, I’m calling myself out here.

  Ross Correia:
  I love it. And that just means it’s getting better and better. Because I think five years ago, if you were to think, “Hey, I’m going to book this flight ticket on my phone,” people would be like, “You’re crazy. Don’t do that.” But now everyone’s doing it. It’s getting better and better and better.

  Meera Oak:
  That’s awesome.

  Samantha Herrick:
  All right, and we are going to take a few seconds and hop over to Reactiv’s fairly new YouTube channel. They’ve sat down with some of the companies and some of the e-commerce innovators they work with, and have just talked to them about their business and how Reactiv has helped them grow and innovate in this e-commerce space. So, I’m going to share a clip from Reactiv’s YouTube channel. This is with the CEO behind Med School Bro. Yep, you heard that right. The company’s name is Med School Bro. But they’re a really cool company.

  They help provide med students and people who are looking to get into med school with study supplies. Being in the social media space was huge for them because most of the time their customers are already using social media. Reactiv really helped them cultivate their system, their business, and their shopping sector within these spaces where their customers are very frequently. So, I’m going to turn my mic off and let Reactiv, their client, and Med School Bro take over from here. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy.

  Brandon Portnoff:
  My name is Brandon Portnoff and I am the co-founder of Med School Bro. Med School Bro is an influencer creator brand. We sell educational resources, study guides, flashcards, and PDFs to med students all over the world. There’s a lot of old and archaic textbooks in the current education system, and the industry has been ripe for innovation. One of the things that we bring to the educational space, specifically with medicine, is a fresh, fun new way to study for your exams. What we found is that it actually leads to better results than using the regular resources that have already been out there.

  Most of the people being introduced to us are on their phones, so naturally, when people are shopping on our website, they’re all browsing on their phones. One of the first things we thought about was if most of our shoppers are already using their phones, wouldn’t we want to give them a superior customer experience? Which is in the form of a mobile app—one of the reasons we wanted to build one.

  One thing I really love about the Reactiv team is it just feels like an extension of your team. Working with them is super responsive. Honestly, it’s been really easy, and there hasn’t really been any learning curve or onboarding process per se. It’s all been a super seamless transition.

  The one thing about Reactiv Clips that piqued our interest was the fact that it actually reduced the friction for shoppers to even have to download our app. With the Reactiv Clips, we’re able to give our shoppers that mobile experience without them having to download the app. They, of course, can after if they want, but it removes that friction. Another great thing is that we’re able to send push notifications to people who use the App Clip. It works really well for things like abandoned carts and abandoned browse push notifications.

  A lot of the time when someone goes to our website, we don’t have their email, so we can’t send an abandoned cart or an abandoned browse email—we lose them forever. But with Reactiv App Clips, we can actually capture that potentially lost business.

  Meera Oak:
  Very cool. I think one of the first things that really struck me when we first met was your founding story. I’d love to hear a little bit about you and your background, and share that with our listeners. I also wanted to call out the dynamic you have with your co-founder, Zack. I’d love for folks to hear how Reactiv came to be, and a little bit about how you and Zack got to know one another.

  Ross Correia:
  I would love to. I’ve been in the e-commerce space for over 10 years now—it’s all I know, for better or for worse. I used to be a merchant when I first started; I was in the food space. I do not recommend that to anyone. If you’re in that space, I sympathize with you—it is so tough. We were making a beef jerky product with no preservatives, no sulfates, no nitrates, which means it just goes bad really quickly. We tried to sell that on grocery store shelves.

  You can imagine where this story ends. At grocery stores, it costs so much money to get your product there, so we pivoted and started selling online. I found Shopify and thought, “This is the greatest tool ever.” I fell in love with Shopify rather than the product we had. A couple of months later, I found myself with a job at Shopify—I don’t know how that happened.

  This was before people really knew what Shopify was. I remember people saying, “What is this company you’re joining? Who are they? Why are you working from home? Is it a pyramid scheme?” Nobody believed anything. But I joined Shopify really early on, starting in support, just wanting to get my foot in the door.

  That’s where I met Zack. I’ve known Zack for almost 10 years now. We both met in the trenches at Shopify. I remember we met at an offsite, and a mutual friend connected us—that was it. We’ve been best friends ever since.

  And so, I was at Shopify. I was in support for a little while. I was on a marketing team that got to travel all over Canada and the US. Everyone thinks that’s so glorious, but after you do that for a month or two or three months, it gets quite tedious. And then I joined the sales team. I always said I never wanted to do sales because, in university, I had a sales job for one of our carriers called Rogers, and it was the worst job on the planet. I said, “I’m never getting into sales ever again.”

  Of course, my guru at Shopify, his name is Jamie, was like, “No, you should try this, you should do this.” So, I did. I fell in love with sales, closed some of Shopify’s biggest deals on the retail side back in the day, and spent about three years there.

  I met my partner there—she’s been at Shopify for nine years. So, all we talk about in our house is Shopify and e-commerce. Then I was a director for a public company in the payment space after that for a year and a half. Zach and I found ourselves together at another company building mobile apps. In the Shopify ecosystem, we learned things to do and things not to do.

  Then, one year ago, in September 2023, we decided to found Reactiv. Our goal was to take all the problems and everything we learned in 10 years, distill it down, think about where the market is going, and put everything into it. We’ve risked everything for it. People call this crazy, but here we are.

  Meera Oak:
  Oh my gosh. I love—well, just a few callouts. I think it’s so interesting how people expressed concern when you were initially thinking about joining Shopify, and now think about where it is today. I also love the fact that you were hesitant—or maybe not hesitant, but uncertain—whether sales would be your path. Now, knowing you as you are, it feels so natural to you. You’re such a natural storyteller. I think it’s awesome that you were able to find your way there.

  Ross Correia:
  Thank you. It doesn’t even feel real some days. It all culminated in Reactiv.

  Meera Oak:
  That’s amazing. I think you actually teed me up perfectly because where I wanted to shift a little bit more was towards the product and the market. You mentioned the 2010 era in your introduction. When I think about e-commerce booms, I think of the COVID era more recently and this incredible shift that brands made to embrace e-com, mostly because that’s where their consumers really wanted to find them—like myself.

  With that type of saturation, understandably, we saw this surge in customer acquisition costs from the brand side. I think there was this constant complaint and frustration: how are brands expected to compete when the costs are just so high? That’s what I think was so exciting about the Reactiv opportunity to me. So, I think it’d be great to unpack a little bit more about how you thought about Reactiv meeting this moment and why you chose to build within the mobile app platform space.

  Ross Correia:
  I hope—fingers crossed and knock on wood—we’ve done a lot of research, but I truly believe mobile apps are going to be the future. When I joined Shopify, it was the same thing. I said, “Everyone’s going to start shopping online.” I thought about retail. That has been the case to a certain degree. E-commerce has definitely spiked, but I think I see the same pattern with mobile apps.

  Here’s a crazy fact that a lot of people don’t know. In 2022, Apple released a state of affairs for the App Store. They broke down all of the sales from all of the apps inside the App Store—this is just for Apple. In 2022… I don’t know, take a guess, Meera. How many millions, billions, or trillions do you think Apple’s apps will be processed in 2022?

  Meera Oak:
  Oh my gosh. I don’t even know. Percentage-wise, I don’t know.

  Ross Correia:
  You’re like, “This is being saved in history.”

  Meera Oak:
  I know. I’m like, “This is going to be cemented.” No… probably from a percentage perspective… oh gosh, at least 60… I don’t know, high 60s or 70s.

  Ross Correia:
  Okay, so it’s crazy. No one knows this, but it’s on the web—you can go and find it. In 2022, apps processed over $1.1 trillion—

  Meera Oak:
  Oh my God.

  Ross Correia:
  —in GMP. It’s a lot of money.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Ross is right. That is a massive amount of money. Now, I want to help you all visualize and contextualize how much money that is in terms of the federal government. The US government borrowed $1.1 trillion in just the first six months of fiscal year 2024. Interest payments on the US national debt crossed the $1 trillion mark in 2023. NVIDIA, one of the world’s most valuable companies, has a market capitalization of about $1.1 trillion.

  If you were to spend $1 million every day, it would take you about 3,014 years to spend $1.1 trillion. If $1.1 trillion were in hundred-dollar bills, it would weigh—this is a real stat, everyone—approximately 11,000 tons.

  This one’s even crazier and easier to conceptualize: stacked, those bills would reach about 689 miles high. To put that in perspective:

  • Boston to Washington DC is approximately 440 miles, so 689 miles is about one and a half times that distance.

  • Boston to Miami is roughly 1,250 miles, meaning 689 miles is about halfway to Miami from Boston.

  • A marathon is 26.2 miles long, so 689 miles is equivalent to running approximately 26 marathons back-to-back.

  • If you walked at a pace of 3 miles per hour for 8 hours a day, it would take you about 29 days to walk 689 miles without any rest days.

  Hope you enjoyed that little detour. We’re going to do an ad and then we’ll be right back.

  Speaker 4:
  Do you have a venture capital portfolio of cutting-edge startups? Without one, you could be missing out on enormous value creation and a more diversified personal portfolio. Alumni Ventures, ranked a top 20 VC firm by CB Insights, is the leading VC firm for individual investors. Believe in investing in innovation? Visit av.vc/foundation to get started.

  Ross Correia:
  If you look at that number, it actually goes up 30% year over year. And no one really talks about it. People are mostly focused on the web. Then, if you break that down further and you remove things like flight tickets—because of the crazy people—and you remove things like games, and you remove all sorts of other stuff, and you just focus on commerce, meaning people buying things like CPG products or things they want for their home, it’s the lion’s share. It’s over $600 billion in revenue. And again, it keeps growing 30% year over year.

  So, our focus with Reactiv is really to be where customers want to be in the future. When we look at new customers too—the new shoppers—we look at Gen Z. They want to shop on their phone. They do everything on their phone. It’s crazy: when I tell people the story about Reactiv and what we’re building, and I talk to people our age at a bar or a party, they’re like, “What do you do?” I explain it with Amazon in mind. When I talk to my nephews who are 10 and 12 years old, they’re like, “Oh yeah, shopping apps. Coolest thing ever. Which apps can I shop with?” That’s the future we’re heading toward, and we want Reactiv to be the company powering it.

  Whether you’re a small SMB who’s just getting started and wants to focus on getting a customer and having them shop over and over again, or you’re a massive brand like Nike, Lululemon, or Zara one day—instead of spending millions of dollars to manage your own team to build and manage an app, you can use a platform like Reactiv. You get 90% of what you want, and then you use our SDK to build the final 10% on top. It’s pretty cool.

  We’re breaking all the rules. We’re boiling the ocean. We’re going after small, mid, and large businesses, but for some reason, it’s working. We’re pretty excited about that.

  Meera Oak:
  No, I love it. I think that’s actually part of the magic here—it has such broad appeal across different size brands and customers. So, it’s no surprise to me that it’s catching fire. Speaking of catching fire, I know that you’re coming off of a very big announcement with the company’s seed fundraise and product launch. I’m not even going to let myself speak to this, so I would love to hear—and I’m sure listeners would love to hear—the specifics and what you’re hoping to accomplish with this funding.

  Ross Correia:
  We’re super excited. We’re going on one year now, and we’ve managed to close a pre-seed and a seed as well in this awful market somehow. We’ve been pretty lucky. Again, we broke all the rules. I would not recommend our playbook to anyone. But we’re coming off of a big seed round that we just closed in July. I think I’m allowed to say: Bonfire Ventures led the round. We got Foxe Capital, Daher Capital. We’ve got the lovely folks at Alumni as well, part of our biggest seed round.

  Our focus here—we think of Reactiv and our future in horizons. The first horizon for the company was really the first year: building an amazing team and an incredible product.

  And I know when we talk about Reactiv, people are like, “What is it? It’s just mobile apps?” But it’s actually a dashboard where a merchant, a business owner, can go in and customize their app to look and feel however they’d like. Something we learned about being in the app ecosystem for a long time is people actually hate doing that. They hate managing multiple CMS solutions. You’re managing how your website looks, you’re managing how your app looks, you’re managing social media. You’ve got all these channels, and you want them to look and feel the same so that customers get the best possible experience no matter where they interact.

  So, we built an AI tool that will actually build the app for you and update your app based on your website—and that was a lot of work. We also built incredible, super-performant mobile apps that people love to use, and they’re fully accessible. If you have a customer using an extra-large font or someone who can’t actually see their screen, we support a reader and other accessibility tools that will read to you. We’re actually the only company in the market doing that with mobile apps, and we think that’s super important.

  So, you’ve got your app, your dashboard, your data, reporting, push notifications—you have AI that powers your push notifications. Our first horizon was about building that product and finding 10–15 customers who wanted to use it from the start. We launched earlier this year with about 15 customers in private beta and went from zero to over $100,000 in ARR—almost overnight. Everyone said, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

  What was really cool was when we looked at the data, all our hypotheses were true. AOV was up about 30%. Conversion was up. If a customer purchased in the app for the first time, they were twice as likely to repurchase than if they purchased on the web for the first time. We saw strong metrics as a business, and our merchants were also seeing these metrics, which is just as important.

  We had a lot of assumptions, got feedback from our first customers, and iterated based on that feedback. One of the biggest challenges in this ecosystem is that if you’re thinking about building an app today, you either use a cookie-cutter platform—which confines you to what that platform allows—or you go with an agency, spend millions of dollars, and then the world is your oyster.

  Reactiv bridges those two. We give you a platform to do about 90% of what you want, and then you can partner with an agency that uses our SDK to build on top of the app. We actually have three massive agencies in the Shopify ecosystem building mobile apps for customers for the first time ever. We’re doing this on both the merchant and partner sides—we’re trying it all, and everything seems to be working.

  With this funding, our next focus is to continue growing the team. We’ve got about 30 people on the team now—which is probably insane—but we’ll likely grow that. We’re adding more engineers so we can build faster, integrate quicker, and push new features customers need very quickly. We’re also building out a sales team to go after the market and spread the word about Reactiv. We’re building a marketing team as well.

  Our focus is doubling down on product-market fit and proving we can scale this. We plan to do it in record-breaking time—about a year—and we plan to raise a Series A a year from now. It’s been crazy.

  Meera Oak:
  That’s crazy. I know. And I think something that really struck me was just the price point required to even secure an agency—it already excludes so much of the market. It’s so cost-prohibitive that many brands just can’t access it. I think Reactiv is really offering not only a better solution, but also serving a segment of the population that was just underserved and had no other way of building these capabilities or reaching their target market. That’s so exciting, Ross. We’re thrilled to be a part of the journey.

  I think something I wanted to close out with was the best way for our audience to engage with you and the Reactiv team. Who are you hoping to connect with as you add fuel to the fire with this round?

  Ross Correia:
  I think the biggest thing for this round is getting in front of more merchants and businesses to show them what we can do. When people think about a mobile app, if we ask most business owners, “Hey, would you like a mobile app?” they always say yes—but there’s a “but.” That “but” is: what percentage gain can I expect? What’s the strategy I need? How much time will this cost me?

  For a lot of businesses that do decide to build a mobile app, they don’t have an app strategy in mind when they start. An example is we’ll work with a large business that launches a mobile app but never had a strategy behind it, so they don’t have a budget. No one’s creating content or sending notifications, and the app remains stagnant.

  But in the best possible cases, we see merchants absolutely crushing it with numbers you wouldn’t believe. So, our big focus now is to get in front of as many merchants as possible and help them with app strategy. That’s Reactiv’s job too. We provide the software, but we also help with strategy behind the scenes.

  We’ve worked with apps for a long time. We know what works and what doesn’t. We’re actually taking all the data from our apps and using AI to figure out what’s working with customers and what’s not. We’re hyper-segmenting down to the individual user. If we notice your profile, Meera, is similar to someone else’s, we’ll try running the same campaign for you automatically, removing the need for someone to manually do it.

  Our big focus is getting those merchants, talking through app strategy, getting them bought in from the beginning, and then showing them the value just one month in with their app. It’s cool. It’s really fun to change people’s opinions.

  Meera Oak:
  Also, one month in—just knowing across the enterprise spectrum and how feedback loops usually work—seeing that ROI in just 30 days is so powerful for a brand. To your point, keeping a relatively lean budget and ensuring that every incremental dollar is spent the right way is incredibly powerful.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. This is the Tech Optimist, a show brought to you by Alumni Ventures, where we discuss the people, technology, and innovations shaping tomorrow.

  Ross Correia:
  I truly believe mobile apps are going to be the future. When I joined Shopify, I said, “Everyone’s going to start shopping online.” I thought retail—and that has been true to a degree. E-commerce has spiked, but I see the same pattern happening with mobile apps.

  Samantha Herrick:
  That is Ross Correia, co-founder and CEO at Reactiv.

  Meera Oak:
  With that type of saturation, understandably, we saw this surge in customer acquisition costs from the brand side.

  Samantha Herrick:
  And that is Meera Oak, partner at Alumni Ventures.

  Meera Oak:
  There was this constant complaint and frustration: how are brands expected to compete when costs are so high? That’s what excited me about the Reactiv opportunity.

  Samantha Herrick:
  To visualize $1.1 trillion: if it were in hundred-dollar bills, it would weigh approximately 11,000 tons. My name is Samantha Herrick, your guide for this podcast.

  Today, we’re diving into Reactiv, a Toronto-based startup that recently emerged from stealth mode with an AI-powered mobile commerce platform. Reactiv raised a $5 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures and was founded in 2023 by Shopify alumni Ross Correia and Zack Elias.

  Key features include:

  • No-code app builder: E-commerce merchants can create mobile apps without coding skills.

  • AI-powered customization: Can generate a mobile app directly from an existing website.

  • Reactiv Clips: Creates a functional section of a client’s app inside an ad or social post without requiring a download, improving conversion.

  • Engagement tools: Designed to boost sales and integrate directly with Shopify.

  Reactiv’s waitlist represents $1 million in annual recurring revenue, with $100,000 already generated. Customers include Camp Moore, Missouri Star Quilt Company, Top of the Mornin Coffee, and Fragrance Buy. The team grew from 10 to 28 employees in August 2023, with plans to hire more. The seed funding will enhance engineering efforts, bring Reactiv Clips to market, and add more AI-powered features and developer tools—revolutionizing mobile commerce.

  That’s all from me—we’ll hop into an ad and then the interview with Ross and Meera.

  Speaker 4:
  Looking to invest in the next big thing? Alumni Ventures Seed Fund offers access to dozens of high-potential startups across biotech, AI, energy, and more. With strong lead investors and a focus on value creation, our seed fund gives you a front-row seat to the future of innovation. Visit av.vc/seed to learn more.

  Samantha Herrick:
  The Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only, not personalized advice or an offer to buy or sell securities. See the text description for additional details.

  Meera Oak:
  Welcome, everyone. Today we’re joined by Ross Correia, CEO and co-founder of Reactiv, a promising early-stage company I’ve worked with for several months now. Welcome, Ross.

  Ross Correia:
  Hello. Nice to be here—thanks for having me.

  Meera Oak:
  Let’s start with a little about Reactiv.

  Ross Correia:
  We’re an e-commerce platform focused on mobile apps. We believe shopping is shifting to phones—not browsers, which are slow and cluttered. We’re building smooth, functional mobile apps for that future.

  Ross Correia:
  When people think of mobile shopping apps, they remember 2010, when apps were just websites wrapped in code. We’re changing that—delivering real value to customers and brands, with AI powering the entire experience. We’ve grown to nearly 30 people in a year—it’s been wild.

  Meera Oak:
  That’s wild. I’m one of those people who makes big purchases on my phone now.

  Ross Correia:
  Exactly. Five years ago, booking flights on a phone seemed crazy. Now, everyone does it—it’s only getting better.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Let’s hop over to Reactiv’s new YouTube channel. They’ve talked with customers like Med School Bro—a company providing med students with study supplies. Social media is huge for them, and Reactiv helped them build their business right within those platforms. Let’s listen.

  Brandon Portnoff:
  I’m Brandon Portnoff, co-founder of Med School Bro. We sell study guides, flashcards, and PDFs worldwide. Traditional textbooks are outdated—we offer a fresh, fun way to learn that improves results.

  Most visitors shop from their phones, so we wanted a superior experience via a mobile app. Reactiv made that seamless. With Reactiv Clips, shoppers can access our app without downloading it, reducing friction. We can also send push notifications for things like abandoned carts—even if we never had the customer’s email—recapturing lost sales.

  Meera Oak:
  Very cool. One of the first things that struck me was your founding story. Tell us about your background and your co-founder Zack.

  Ross Correia:
  I’ve been in e-commerce for over 10 years. I started as a food merchant selling preservative-free beef jerky, which spoiled quickly and was too costly for grocery shelves. We pivoted to online sales, where I discovered Shopify and thought, “This tool is incredible.”

  I joined Shopify early, working support, then marketing, then sales—despite swearing off sales after a bad university job. A mentor convinced me to try, and I loved it—closing major retail deals.

  My partner has been at Shopify for nine years, so our home is full of e-commerce talk. After a stint as a payments director and working with Zack at another mobile app company, we founded Reactiv in September 2023. We distilled a decade of lessons into this company, risking everything for it.

  Meera Oak:
  I love that. It’s amazing how natural sales became for you.

  Ross Correia:
  It doesn’t even feel real some days—it all led to Reactiv.

  Meera Oak:
  Let’s shift to the market. E-commerce boomed during COVID, pushing customer acquisition costs sky-high. That’s what excited me about Reactiv—how you’re addressing that.

  Ross Correia:
  Mobile apps are the future. In 2022, Apple apps processed $1.1 trillion in sales.

  Meera Oak:
  Wow.

  Samantha Herrick:
  To put $1.1 trillion into perspective:

  • The U.S. government borrowed that much in just six months of 2024.

  • Interest on U.S. national debt crossed $1 trillion in 2023.

  • NVIDIA’s market cap is $1.1 trillion.

  • Spending $1M daily would take 3,014 years to spend that much.

  • Stacked $100 bills would weigh 11,000 tons and reach 689 miles high—about 26 marathons or a 29-day walk.

  Speaker 4:
  Alumni Ventures, a top 20 VC firm, offers individual investors access to innovation. Visit av.vc/foundation.

  Ross Correia:
  App sales grow 30% annually. Commerce alone is over $600 billion. Gen Z shops entirely on phones. When I tell adults, they think Amazon; my nephews think shopping apps are the coolest. Reactiv wants to power that future—for SMBs to global brands like Nike or Zara.

  Reactiv provides 90% of what you need out-of-the-box, with an SDK for the final 10%. We’re breaking rules but it’s working.

  Meera Oak:
  That’s part of the magic. You recently announced a seed round—tell us about it.

  Ross Correia:
  We closed a pre-seed and seed despite the tough market. Bonfire Ventures led, with Foxe Capital, Daher Capital, and Alumni Ventures participating.

  Year one was about building an incredible team and product:

  • A dashboard for merchants to customize apps easily.

  • AI tools that build and update apps automatically.

  • High-performance, fully accessible apps—the only ones like this on the market.

  With 15 beta customers, we hit $100K ARR quickly. Metrics showed:

  • AOV up 30%.

  • App shoppers are twice as likely to repurchase.

  Reactiv bridges cookie-cutter platforms and costly agencies. Merchants get a robust base app and can work with agencies using our SDK for custom features. Three top Shopify agencies are already building apps this way.

  With new funding, we’ll grow our 30-person team, add engineers, and build sales and marketing to prove scalable product-market fit. A Series A is planned in a year.

  Meera Oak:
  Agencies are too costly for many brands—Reactiv opens the market to them.

  Ross Correia:
  Exactly. Our goal now is meeting more merchants and helping them strategize. Many build apps without a plan, so they stagnate. We use AI to analyze user data, segment customers, and automate campaigns—showing ROI within a month.

  Meera Oak:
  Seeing ROI in 30 days is incredibly powerful for lean-budget brands.

  Ross Correia:
  Our App Clips are a superpower. Most people don’t know about them, but they let users open and run a mobile app without installing it.

  For example, clicking an Instagram ad usually leads to a web landing page. With Reactiv, it opens the app instantly—smooth, ad-free, and high quality. Businesses get full data and can send notifications. App Clips let us compare true web vs. app performance, showing incredible results.

  This holiday season, we’re launching with many merchants, capturing data, and pushing updates in the new year.

  Meera Oak:
  Amazing. Ross, thank you so much for joining us—it’s been a treat for me and our audience.

  Ross Correia:
  Thanks for having us, Meera.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Thanks for tuning into the Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate us and subscribe to keep up with future episodes. Email us at [email protected] with questions or suggestions, and visit av.vc. As always, keep building.