Ecom Growth Insider

The best ad Freddy Rode has ever seen, for performance and for scale, was a 360p Facebook livestream recording. Three or four minutes, subtitles added, and he'd never have expected it to win. When he opens a new ad account, he doesn't start with CPA. He starts with where Meta is putting the spend. If an ad in a CBO doesn't get spent, he says, there's probably a reason why. Freddy is a creative str...

Most founders worry about the wrong person finding their sales tax problem. A tax office rarely comes looking for a foreign ecommerce brand. A buyer checks every time, because it's a standard due diligence item. Gareth Kobrin is the CEO and co-founder of Yonda, based in London. Yonda handles the compliance side of indirect tax for ecommerce brands, so sales tax in the US and VAT and GST everywhere...

Most ecommerce brands compete for attention on the same two platforms, against the same competitors, at the same rising cost. Brand licensing is the other way in: you borrow a fanbase somebody else spent decades building, put it on the product, and pay for it out of sales. David Born has worked in licensing for about twenty years. He was inside Warner Bros. Consumer Products and at Cartoon Network...

Her store locator tells you to go buy from a shop she does not own. If that shop is out of stock, you email her the store's name and she sends you a free shipping code as a thank you for trying. She built a seven-figure haircare brand on that instinct and never bought an ad to do it. Kate Assaraf founded Dip in 2021 — plastic-free shampoo and conditioner bars, now in a little more than 500 indepen...

The same product does not behave the same way in two places. Langer's blood orange sparkling water is the number one seller on a supermarket shelf; on Amazon it is ginger. Their zero-sugar cola outsells the regular roughly ten to one on Amazon, and closer to 60/40 in grocery. Same brand, different winner — because browsing a fixed shelf and searching a marketplace are not the same behavior. Bruce...

A buyer is not trying to work out what a brand is worth. He is trying to find a reason to pay less for it. That is the half of due diligence nobody explains, and it is where most founders lose money they had already earned. Dave Guttman has bought, run and sold companies for most of his career. He was President of First Stop Health, a telemedicine company that made the Inc. 500 in back-to-back yea...

Adam Hotchkiss runs a bootstrapped telehealth brand doing over $1.7 million a month with a team of four. Net margins above 30%, no outside investment, and he threw out the entire brand six months in to get there. Six months of purchase data told him who was actually buying: young athletic men. So he killed the clinical, stock-photo look and rebuilt AlgoRX around the people already paying. Revenue...

Most brands say creative is the biggest lever they have, then spend almost nothing on it. Matthew Gattozzi's answer is that the P&L already tells you the truth. Matthew spent over a decade in ballet and danced professionally with Ballet Austin. A back injury ended it at 21. He took the standard that came with it and built Goodo Studios, a creative studio producing ads for e-commerce brands. Sp...

Most brands using AI for ads start with the prompt. Will Sartorius says that's the last thing you should touch. Will runs SelfMade, a New York agency that raised around $19 million as an Instagram posting app, nearly went under after a bad acquisition, and got rebuilt into an AI creative engine when Will took it over at 28. His clients don't get creative brainstorms. They get three analyses that d...

When did you last actually change your price? Not the ad creative, not the landing page. The price itself. If you are like most founders, you set it once on a spreadsheet and never touched it again. Drew Marconi is the co-founder and CEO of Intelligems, the profit optimization platform behind a thousand-plus A/B tests and more than $600M in DTC transactions. Before this he was chief of staff to Mc...

Right now, while you read this, an AI agent could be on your store, reading your product pages and deciding whether to recommend you to a real customer. You will not see it in Google Analytics, and everything you built to convert a human is invisible to it. Raphael Cohen ran product for 150 million people at Waze and has had two companies acquired. Now he is building Haggle (haggl.ai), the infrast...

Your popup probably converts at 8%. The best Shopify brands are pulling 15 to 20% with the same traffic, and this episode is the playbook. In this episode of Ecom Growth Insider, Shaan Arora, co-founder and CEO of Alia, breaks down the popup playbook he built into Shopify's fastest-growing popup app. Alia now powers Nike Strength, Peloton, Hot Ones, HexClad, ILIA Beauty, Milk Makeup, Skims, Toms,...

6 months into your launch, the data shows you're targeting the wrong customer. Do you pivot the entire brand, or push through with what you've got? In this episode of Ecom Growth Insider, Gene Oh, co-founder of day-guard, walks through how he and his best friend Felix Lee brought Korea's jelly-stick alcohol-aid category to the United States. Day Guard was featured in Forbes in February (the articl...

If your ROAS or MER tanks the moment you push more spend through, this episode is for you. Carl Weische is the founder of Accelerated Agency and runs CRO for brands like AG1, Huel, Vessi, The Oodie, and 200+ more 8, 9, and 10 figure DTC companies. He joins Andrej on Ecom Growth Insider to break down the exact system he uses to turn CRO into a profit lever from the ad click all the way to the thank...

Most brands doing $1M/month are pulling $2K from their post-purchase funnel. Nizar Abdul-Halim comes in and turns that into $100K to $200K. Same brand. Same traffic. Same products. That's not a tweak. That's a profit center that was sitting there the entire time, completely ignored. Nizar has been in ecommerce for almost a decade. He's run his own stores, built and sold an ad agency, and deployed...

Email is still the highest-ROI growth channel in ecommerce. But most brands overcomplicate it and leave serious money on the table. In this episode of Ecom Growth Insider, I sit down with Max Sturtevant , founder of Wellcopy , one of the biggest email & SMS agencies in the DTC space. Max’s team supports around 130 brands with a team of roughly 80 people , and he shares the exact retention leve...

Meta Ads in 2026 isn’t about campaign hacks or complicated funnel structures. The brands winning today are running a creative-led system: new messaging, new angles, and net-new concepts shipped consistently. In this episode of Ecom Growth Insider, I’m joined by Andrew Foxwell (Foxwell Digital, Foxwell Founders) to break down what’s actually working right now across the Meta ecosystem. Andrew has a...

Most ecommerce brands don’t scale past $500K/month because of bad messaging — not bad media buying. In this episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I sit down with Sebastian Valiente , creative strategist behind $30M+ in DTC revenue, to break down how he helps brands unlock scale through performance creative, deep persona research, and net-new messaging angles. We dive into: Why brands plateau at $200K,...

Everyone wants the success. But few want the responsibility that comes with it. In this raw solo episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I share a story that shook me — and a mindset shift that every entrepreneur needs to hear. It’s about why responsibility is the price of success , and how avoiding it is silently killing your growth. Inside, I cover: Why responsibility scales with your business — and ho...

Most DTC brands think scaling is about spending more. But more ad spend without the right creative, offer, or financial clarity? That’s a recipe for wasted budget and stalled growth. In this episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I’m joined by Sebastian Williams — one of the top Meta Ads media buyers and ecom growth operators in the space. After managing 7-figure budgets for brands like Dr. Squatch, Thr...

Your Meta ad account isn’t underperforming because of your product. It’s because your content sucks — and your ad account is starving for better creatives. In this solo episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I break down a real client case study where one single UGC ad outperformed over 100 branded videos , slashing CAC by 20% and saving a losing ad account. Inside, I cover: Why your ad fatigue isn’t a...

If you’re an ecommerce founder heading into 2026… You don’t need 50 things on your to-do list. You need two. In this short solo episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I break down the only two tasks you should obsess over to drive serious revenue this year: Creative output and diversity Irresistible offers that actually convert Here’s what you’ll learn: Why most ad accounts fail before Black Friday even...

Most ecom brands don’t fail because of bad products or weak ads — They fail because they’re too slow. In this solo episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I break down why speed is one of the most underrated advantages in business — and how moving faster can unlock better ads, stronger positioning, and category dominance. Inside, I share 3 real-world stories: Why brands regret not scaling when their ads...

In this solo episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I break down a simple but powerful truth: 💥 Most brands don’t need more strategies — they need more focus. Everyone wants to try the next big thing: TikTok, SEO, influencers, livestreams… but the fastest path to growth? Just double down on what’s already working. Inside this short episode, I cover: The question I ask every brand owner before anything...

AI isn’t just changing how people write — it’s transforming how they search, discover, and buy products online. In this episode of Ecom Growth Insider , I sit down with Jon Mest , expert in digital discovery and founder of ChatRank, to unpack how ecommerce brands can show up in AI-driven search results — and what happens to those that don’t. We cover: Why your organic traffic is declining (and wha...