FOMO

Ryan Kulp didn't start FOMO from scratch. In 2016, he and co-founder Justin Mears acquired an existing Shopify app called "Notify" that already had a few hundred paying customers. Unlike a zero-to-one problem, Ryan faced a different challenge: how do I make this investment worthwhile? The math was simple—with only a few hundred customers, he'd never be able to quit his job or justify the venture. He needed to grow it to thousands of customers.

Ryan's initial strategy had two vectors: go "deep" into Shopify by capturing more of that market, and go "wide" by expanding to other e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and WooCommerce. Within the first few months of acquiring Notify, he expanded the product across these platforms. The rebranding from "Notify" to "FOMO" happened in summer 2016, signaling a fresh start.

During this period, Ryan wore multiple hats. He wasn't the CEO (he deliberately never claimed that title), but rather led product and marketing while a small engineering team handled code. The company culture was engineering-led—Ryan would identify customer needs and then build solutions, creating a feedback loop that motivated the entire team.

Ryan's first major breakthrough came through cold email. Working part-time with Justin (who was still employed elsewhere), they built lists of store owners using BuiltWith, a tool that identified merchants on each platform. They created cold email campaigns offering extended free trials (14-30 days instead of the standard offer), which generated meaningful results—from zero customers to 25 paying customers in a month.

However, Ryan acknowledges this tactic came with an ethical asterisk he's "not proud of": they created fake female personas (Betty, Wendy, Sally) to partition their campaigns by platform, hypothesizing that women might get better reply rates. While it worked, Ryan has never repeated this approach since.

When FOMO rebranded in summer 2016, they stopped cold email to protect their new domain reputation, pivoting to other channels.

With early revenue reinvested into the business, Ryan tested multiple growth channels with mixed results:

**Failed experiments:** Paid ads had a hard ceiling ($20/day maximum spend with poor ROI), content marketing didn't convert well (people searching for "power words" aren't looking for social proof tools), SEO was too indirect, and newsletter ads averaged $40-50 CPC with a couple hundred dollar CPA—unsustainable.

**The breakthrough—integrations:** What really worked was building native integrations with other platforms. Ryan realized that his core competency—having talented engineers—could be weaponized by shipping integrations at scale. After architect Clement refactored the codebase, integration build time dropped from ~3,000 lines of code to sometimes just 60 lines, with no changes to the end user experience.

Ryan used Google Analytics event tracking on FOMO's integration search page to identify what merchants were looking for. When searches returned zero results, he'd identify the demand signal and build that integration. For example, when people typed "WordPress," "WooCommerce," or platform names that didn't exist yet, Ryan would add them to the development roadmap.

The first major integration success came with WooCommerce. They built a WordPress plugin, negotiated a revenue share with the team, secured co-marketing support, and got featured in the WooCommerce marketplace. That playbook—cold outreach, negotiation, custom development, and co-marketing—became the template for over 100 subsequent integrations with platforms like MailChimp, Square, and Infusionsoft.

Critically, many of these integrations came with built-in distribution. Integration partners were often excited to feature FOMO in their monthly newsletters and marketplace pages, creating a "permissionless" growth loop. When FOMO shipped an integration the integration partner didn't ask for, the partner would enthusiastically promote it—essentially doing free marketing.

After six years of grinding, FOMO reached over $1M in annual revenue, served tens of thousands of active websites, and displayed billions of notifications monthly. The company shipped regular updates (tracked publicly via new.fomo.com's changelog) and maintained 165 full-length case studies and hundreds of customer reviews.

By the four-and-a-half to five-year mark, Ryan felt FOMO's core mission was mostly accomplished—they'd helped roughly 100 million consumers make better buying decisions online. Rather than trying to expand into adjacent products (which failed to gain traction), Ryan decided to find a better steward for the business. After a quiet search over a year with advisor help, Relay Commerce acquired FOMO. Relay's mid-to-late-stage experience and focus on rolling up e-commerce apps made it a natural fit. Ryan noted that watching the product evolve under new leadership—while not controlling every decision—was surprisingly gratifying. He's now living in Seoul, exploring broadcast media and entertainment, while his creation continues growing under new ownership.