Ask most software CEOs who they build for and you get a market-sizing slide. Ask Alex Persson and you get a person: a founder shipping orders out of a garage. That is the customer Privy chases, and Persson talks about them the way other executives talk about whales and logos.
Today he is the Chief Executive Officer of Privy, the Boston-headquartered email and SMS marketing platform for ecommerce merchants. He took the job in 2024, inheriting a company that founding CEO Ben Jabbawy had spent years pointing at one stubborn problem: how do small online stores keep customers coming back without the budget, the team, or the dedicated specialist that big brands take for granted.
Persson's answer is not a longer feature list. "We are really obsessive about keeping things simple," he says. "If a merchant can set something up in minutes and immediately see results, then we know we are doing a good job supporting them." It is a deceptively boring mission statement, and that is the point. Simplicity, for the merchant doing everything alone, is the feature.
Privy describes its own buyer plainly: founder-led, scrappy, growing. Persson leans into it. "Privy is built for the growing merchant," he says. "We work with founders who are shipping orders from their garage, the small team doing everything for themselves, the brands that have momentum but need leverage." Most marketing software drifts upmarket toward bigger contracts. Persson keeps pulling the other way.
That instinct comes partly from where he started, which was nowhere near marketing.
