PopShops.com is a privately held US corporation headquartered in the Pike Place Market business district in Seattle, Washington.
Our ongoing mission is to create a useful and user-friendly set of affiliate power tools, and to have fun doing it.
Jessie is the founder and CEO of PopShops.com. Having spent over 18 years in the technology industry specializing in design, usability, and UI architecture at Microsoft and its whirlwind spin-off, Expedia.com, she is a firm believer in maintaining a nimble development environment and a creative, user-focused team. Originally from Austin, and a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she now lives in Seattle with her husband, son, and two dogs (none of which can be trusted with food on the counter). Jessie has spoken at numerous affiliate events including Commission Junction University, Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Convention, EcomXpo and more.
Dan is the CTO at PopShops.com. With a combined total of about five hours of sleep since the founding of PopShops, he has taken PopShops from a simple idea to a robust set of Web-based tools. Before he arrived to save the day at Popshops, Dan's activities are shrouded in mystery. Suffice it to say that Dan has a borderline unhealthy fascination with Bollywood yet lives a productive life with his wife and two children in Washington DC.
Ashish is a veteran internet pioneer and an entrepreneur. Prior to joining PopShops, Ashish held various leadership positions in product, marketing, and business development at Amazon.com, Expedia.com and a number of Seattle start-up ventures. Ashish holds an MBA from Rochester Institute in NY and received his Electrical Engineering degree in India. Ashish and his wife Leslie live in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle and enjoy hiking and pampering their two dogs, and he completely understands Dan's obscure Bollywood references.
Brock's journey from Wisconsin to Seattle included a pit-stop in Redmond, after Microsoft acquired the successful start-up Jellyfish where Brock was Chief Scientist and the principal architect of the platform that is now Microsoft's Bing Shopping. Brock brings to PopShops a rich, wonderfully geeky melange of experience in the areas of search, artificial intelligence, context, machine learning, and data integration and fusion. He's also funny and his dad worked at NASA - how cool is that?!?
Michelle is Director of Merchant Development. She brings to PopShops her experience in the airline and hotel industries, as well as years of parenting. She has several years experience working with a variety of web-based marketing companies. At PopShops she is lead for all things merchant-related, including integrating new merchants, updating feeds and resolving customer queries among others. Michelle and her son Jaxon live in Seattle. She enjoys photography, exploring new places, and connecting with friends.
Seen here pictured with Senior Corporate Nutritionist for PopShops, Lucas Johnson, Matt is the user education lead, merchant liaison, and the "other" outgoing person at PopShops. When not wrestling his son for the last drop of milkshake, he combs through the PopShops merchant database, keeping a weather eye out for feeds gone wild (or just plain gone). Formerly an editor at Expedia and Zillow, Matt has resolved to rid the PopShops website of all typos.
PopShops evolved--and continues to evolve--organically to make life easier for anyone who participates in the affiliate industry. Here's how it all started...
With over 14 years of product design and usability experience at Northwest technology companies like Microsoft, Expedia, and Zillow, Jessie Jones was ready for a change. Interested in working from home to spend more time with her baby and curious about affiliate marketing, she began setting up niche, online shops in an attempt to earn affiliate commissions as a revenue source. Easier said than done, it turned out.
She was stunned to learn how difficult it was to grab products across networks, how quickly the information became stale, how many typos ruined the tracking, and how confusing it was to navigate all of the different affiliate networks. It became evident that she was going to be spending much more time dealing with technical problems than promoting her niche sites.
What was missing, she realized, was a set of easy-to-use tools that anyone--regardless of technical ability--could use to add relevant products to their website or blog. Jessie's background in product design gave her the inspiration to create the tool set that would become PopShops, but she knew she'd need help turning her concept into reality.
A sequence of lucky events followed: Jessie was introduced to Dan Harms, a talented, UI-focused Ruby on Rails/AJAX developer with an entrepreneurial bent who had just finished taking some time off to raise his children. Then, from the heavens (via craigslist), came Angel Djambazov: experienced affiliate manager from Onlineshoes.com, recipient of the highly coveted 2006 Affiliate Manager of the Year Award, and, as one blogger called him, "an Affiliate Legend." The final stroke of luck came when Eric Artzt, a long-time friend and program manager extraordinaire from Microsoft, reconnected with Jones and jumped on board. Together, in true agile development style with many site iterations, they refined the concepts behind PopShops along with much valuable input from early beta users, newbies and power affiliates alike.
The team formally launched PopShops to the world in July 2007. A few months later, Jessie's husband Matt stepped in to help with all things merchant-related, including adding new product feeds, removing defunct ones, and keeping affiliates apprised of both.
PopShops.com is a proud part of the creative, exciting Seattle technology startup movement. PopShops's ongoing mission is to create a useful and user-friendly set of affiliate power tools, and to have fun doing it. PopShops is headquartered in the Pike Place Market business district of Seattle, Washington.
Please find more information below about PopShops. If you have any questions, or would like to schedule an interview with the PopShops management team, please don't hesitate to have your people contact our people. Want to see PopShops in action? E-mail to request a live demo.
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Please contact: PopShops Corporate team
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