Doesn't Cost You Anything to Do Good: Rohan McCloskey on Building GoGenerosity | #641

Rohan McCloskey refunded $350,000 in donations, gave up his salary for a year, and nearly lost everything. He's still building GoGenerosity. And he'd do it again.

That kind of conviction usually comes from one of two places: delusion or proof. In Rohan's case it's the latter. One in six customers at his best-performing store donate every single time they shop. Ninety-eight percent of mystery shoppers said they were more likely to return to a brand running GoGenerosity than a competitor selling the same product. Only one merchant in his ideal customer profile has ever churned, and that was because the merchant's business hit financial difficulty, not because the product failed.

Rohan is Founder and CEO of GoGenerosity, a Shopify app that turns small customer contributions at checkout into real goods delivered to charity partners. The model is cleaner than it sounds: a customer adds a $2 or $3 donation at checkout, those donations pool, and the charity receives a gift card at full retail value redeemed in-store. One hundred percent goes through. GoGenerosity charges merchants a monthly SaaS fee on top. Before all of this, Rohan ran three restaurants in Mount Maunganui through COVID, survived, and then decided to start a tech company instead.

Today, we're discussing:

• How the GoGenerosity checkout model works in practice and why 100% of customer donations reach charity partners [05:03]
• The Hume mystery shopping data: 98% of shoppers were more likely to return to a brand running GoGenerosity than a direct competitor [15:26]
• Why one in six customers at Rohan's best-performing store donates $5 every single visit, and what two years of that data actually proves [18:07]
• The no-login product philosophy: why GoGenerosity deliberately has no merchant portal and sends monthly reports by email instead [28:38]
• Why raising capital too early nearly killed the business and what a two-year enterprise sales cycle actually costs a startup [47:35]
• What Rohan's psychologist told him on Christmas Day 2023 and how he kept building through a serious burnout [44:16]

Connect with Rohan McCloskey | Explore GoGenerosity | Connect with Rosa Willis | Connect with Nathan Bush

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