ShowOff looks to US as ‘targeted ecommerce’ firm wins key contract

ShowOff, an Irish software company specialising in “targeted ecommerce”, expects to grow its workforce by 25 per cent in the next two years as it scales up its US operations.

The business, founded in 2012 by Wicklow school friends Shane Byrne and Philip Kirwan, uses its partnerships with Stripe, Salesforce and MuleSoft to help clients improve their digital operations.

Initially, Byrne and Kirwan set up ShowOff as a general app developer, but they have since added significantly to their product offering. “We started out as a mobile company, but we’ve moved now to the stage where we’re a full digital transformation agency,” Byrne said.

Today, the company develops new payments systems for its clients’ online sales platforms, as well as running data analysis and helping its larger customers develop subscription models.

“We’re experts in integrations around payments, around helping develop subscription models, and around data cleansing,” Byrne said. “We essentially put our heads and our hands where other people wouldn’t even put their hands.”

ShowOff, which is backed by Enterprise Ireland, counts Bentley Motors, Kwik Fit Tyres and National Express among its clients.

In 2021, working with Stripe, the business helped Kwik Fit to quickly develop and unveil a new mobile app as well as a new subscription system which won the product innovation of the year award from the British National Tyre Distributors Association. The product gave Kwik Fit first-mover advantage in the British market, and helped demonstrate ShowOff’s ability to deliver major projects.

For National Express, the biggest coach provider in Britain, ShowOff distilled the data of around 35 million customers and delivered “actionable records” on its passengers.

“Because they now had more accurate data, they were able to reduce their spend on marketing and make their operations more efficient,” Byrne said. “We worked with them throughout the pandemic, and kept their systems up and running.”

Now ShowOff has signed a multi-year, seven-figure contract with a major trade union in the US midwest, which forms a key part of its plans to expand in that region and will help it grow out its operations.

“One of our key areas of focus right now is our expansion into the US market,” Byrne said. “We want to nail that, especially around the products we can deliver on behalf of clients. That’s our foundational piece – we’ve had contracts in the US, but this new one is the biggest for us to date.

“We’ve grown into a team of 20 people now, and we’ve gone fully remote since the start of February. And we would envisage that over the next two years we’ll add another 25 per cent onto our workforce.”

In five years, ShowOff is aiming to have cultivated a well-established presence in the US, and to be viewed as the market leader in developing subscription models for enterprise-level businesses.

“Turnover is turnover. I could say we want to be turning over €10 million a year, but for us it’s all about the journey to getting there,” Byrne said. “We’d love to have a very established brand around the US market, and we want to continue attracting globally leading brands like we have done to date.”