How Rohan McCloskey Built GoGenerosity
Rohan McCloskey ran three restaurants in Mount Maunganui through COVID, came out the other side without losing a single venue, and then walked away from hospitality to build a tech company. GoGenerosity is now live in New Zealand, Australia, the US, the UK and Canada, with more than five-star average reviews on the Shopify App Store and a churn rate from its ideal customer profile that Rohan describes as basically zero.
The number that keeps coming back in this conversation is one in six. That is the donation rate at Rohan’s best-performing merchant, a period wear brand called AWA whose customers donate $5 at checkout on average six times out of six, consistently, for two years. The platform average is one in fifteen. Even that number should make most retention marketers do a double take, because these customers are choosing to give money on top of the price they already agreed to pay, every single visit.
“It doesn’t actually cost you anything to do good.”
What Is a Pay-It-Forward Donation at Checkout?
A pay-it-forward donation at checkout is a voluntary micro-contribution a customer adds to their order, typically $2 to $5, which gets pooled with every other donation from that store and converted into a gift card delivered to a charity partner at full retail value. One hundred percent of what the customer gives reaches the charity. The platform charges the merchant a separate SaaS subscription fee. Unlike a rounding-up model or a traditional cash donation, the charity receives actual goods, not currency, which closes the loop on where the
The Data Actually Backs It Up
Rohan commissioned mystery shopping through Hume to stress-test the most common objection he hears from prospects: will a donation prompt at checkout hurt conversion? Every mystery shopper said no friction was added to the experience. Ninety-eight percent said they were more likely to return to a brand running GoGenerosity than a direct competitor selling the same product at the same price. Finding a retention lever that moves repeat purchase intent by that margin without touching price or product is genuinely rare, and Rohan will tell you the data surprised even him.
The merchant side is just as striking. Only one customer in Rohan’s ideal customer profile has ever churned, and that was a merchant who ran into financial difficulty of their own. In two and a half years, one business left for a reason that had nothing to do with the product.
If 98% of customers say they’re more likely to come back, the conversation has moved on from whether this works to whether you’re running it yet.
No One Gives a Shit About Your Dashboards
GoGenerosity has no merchant login and no portal. When a store joins, the team sends a monthly report by email. That’s the entire reporting experience. Rohan’s reasoning is straightforward: merchants are already juggling twenty tools. A dashboard nobody visits adds weight without adding value. The product runs in the background and stays out of the way.
Most SaaS products are built around the opposite instinct: make the client feel value every time they log in, give them charts to look at, show them the product doing things. Rohan decided the value should show up in Shopify metrics and customer retention numbers, not in a home screen that needs tending. Two and a half years in, one churned merchant suggests the call was right.
“No one gives a shit about your dashboards. Just do the product well. Just do it and make sure it does what it says it can do.”
Raise When the Fire Is Already Burning
The harder part of this conversation is the section most founder content avoids. Rohan raised capital before he had found product-market fit in ecommerce. The original version of GoGenerosity was built for physical in-store experiences, and when the raise happened, the team chased enterprise clients. Enterprise sales cycles run two to three years. The runway ran out before the deals closed.
When Rohan finally found traction in Shopify ecommerce, there was almost nothing left to fund the growth. He gave up his salary. He restructured everything. By Christmas Day 2023, he couldn’t get out of bed.
His psychologist advised against stepping away completely. The guidance was to reduce the load, stay in it, and keep the mind moving. Rohan watched other founders go dark during recovery and sometimes not come back. He stayed because he genuinely believed the product worked, and the data kept backing him up every time he looked.
Raise when the fire is already burning. Raising to light it is how good businesses run out of road.
The Takeaway
The model is genuinely simple: a customer gives two dollars at checkout, it becomes something real for someone who needs it, the merchant pays a monthly subscription, and nobody’s margin takes a hit. The data says customers who give come back more often than those who don’t.
The unglamorous part of this story is that it took Rohan nearly losing everything to find the version of the product that worked. The version that’s working now has a five-star rating, a near-zero churn rate, and one merchant who donates one in six times across every single order.
So if you’re a brand that sells physical goods through Shopify and you haven’t looked at what purpose-driven checkout giving does to your repeat purchase rate, that’s probably the most interesting experiment you’re not running.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does GoGenerosity work at checkout? A customer sees an optional donation prompt at checkout, typically $2 to $5. Their contribution is pooled with every other donation from that store and converted into a gift card at full retail value, which the charity partner redeems in-store to obtain goods for people in need. One hundred percent of the customer’s donation reaches the charity. GoGenerosity charges the merchant a separate monthly SaaS fee, so there is no deduction from the customer’s contribution.
Does a checkout donation hurt conversion rates? Based on mystery shopping data commissioned by GoGenerosity through Hume, one hundred percent of mystery shoppers reported no added friction at the checkout. The feature is opt-in for the customer and does not block or complicate the standard purchase flow. The data also showed 98% of mystery shoppers were more likely to return to a brand running GoGenerosity than a direct competitor.
What is the typical donation rate on GoGenerosity? The platform average is approximately one in fifteen customers donating on a given order. Rohan’s best-performing merchant, a period wear brand, sees one in six customers donate $5 per order, consistently over more than two years. The donation rate tends to be higher on brands with a strong community connection or values-aligned customer base.
How do you know when to raise capital as a startup? Rohan’s experience is that raising before product-market fit creates more problems than it solves. With capital in hand, the pressure to deploy it pushes teams toward large enterprise clients with long sales cycles, burning runway before the product has found its real customer. His view: raise when the fire is already burning, not to light it.
Based on Episode #641 of the Add To Cart podcast with Rohan McCloskey, Founder and CEO of GoGenerosity. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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