A weekly, recurring block (he says every Friday morning, for at least two years) spent searching new and old posts in large ecommerce Facebook/Slack communities and platform forums for questions about popups, email capture or list-growth tools, answering in detail as a genuine expert and pointing people to Privy's free plan, plus the same search-and-answer pattern on Quora.

“I'd block time each week to search new and old posts in the forum. Our wedge at the time was exit intent popups.”

Ben frames it as working because he was genuinely answering as a subject-matter expert rather than posting ads, which both helped individual askers and, over time, generated backlinks to privy.com.

“This was my area of expertise, and I could add value, genuinely. So I did.”

Existing email-platform partners featured Privy to their own user base.

“Thx to the folks at Mailchimp and Constant Contact for featuring us.”

For about two and a half years after the pivot, Ben personally handled all live customer chat himself, including for free users, until support volume reached roughly 40 tickets a day. Combined with the freemium model (easy to try, easy to upgrade, monthly rather than annual by default), he credits this hands-on support with generating organic word of mouth.

“I personally spent two years handling all live chats with our customers (until we reached about 40 tickets a day).”

He ties word-of-mouth growth directly to the combination of a generous free tier and high-quality support for free users, achieved without a sales or marketing team and without paid acquisition.

“because of the freemium model, and the great support we were offering free users, word of mouth spread like wildfire”

Privy launched into the Shopify App Store in 2015 as part of the pivot and stayed listed through the 2021 acquisition, plus equivalent listings in Squarespace, Weebly and BigCommerce's app ecosystems.

“From 2015, when we first launched Privy into the Shopify app store through 2021 when we were acquired, we saw almost 1M installs of our app.”

For each integration, Privy published a dedicated landing page and help doc on privy.com, and asked the integration partner to add a matching help doc, seeded with customer case studies sourced from the same online communities. This drove SEO plus webinars, guest blogs and backlinks with partners on a multi-year basis.

“This helped us absolutely dominate SEO around the key words that mattered most to us before Privy had real brand recognition.”

Ben's explanation is an incentive-alignment one: email service providers charge by contact-list size, so a tool that grew a merchant's list directly grew the ESP's own revenue, making ESPs willing partners for comarketing rather than competitors, at least until Privy later built its own email product.

“ESPs priced on how big a contact list is. The bigger the list, the more MRR the ESP made, and the happier the customer was. So it was a no brainer for ESPs to love Privy back then”

Landing pages, help docs and app-store listing copy written to target the search terms merchants used for each integration and competitor, executed for nearly all 50 integrations.

“we got really good at writing our app store listings to own those important search terms that had high search volumes”

Early on he pitched himself as a guest on other people's podcasts to build exposure and credibility; later he ran and hosted Privy's own ecommerce marketing podcast for three years.

“I ran and hosted a successful podcast for 3 years with over 800K downloads.”