Hey Cowboys,

Happy Monday! We're in San Diego this week for the Commerce Roundtable, and we've set up to record Ecomm Cowboy live on-site.

LIVE NOW — come hang out on X or YouTube.

Live from San Diego: Who we're talking to today

Over two days, we're sitting down with some of the sharpest operators in DTC, and our Day 1 guests all keep coming back to the same question: if paid media alone doesn't carry a brand anymore, what does?

Max Sturtevant, Founder of Well Copy, treats email and SMS as a profit channel, not a content calendar. He argues that welcome flows should send every day, that a two-day gap between emails is money lost, and that BFCM customers are often the worst cohort a brand pays the most to acquire. With Q4 around the corner, the timing is right.

Tyler Brechbiel, Co-Founder of TBAR Partners, says brands judge TikTok Shop by the wrong scorecard. Look past the channel's own P&L to what it does for the whole business: spillover sales on Amazon, a lift at retail, and a steady supply of cheap creative for Meta.

Chase Dimond, Co-Founder of Structured, thinks the classic five-person retention team is turning into one operator running an AI stack. He's also blunt about discounts training customers to wait for the next sale.

Jamil Bhuya, Co-Founder of Otherhalf Studio, says most brands overspend on traffic and underspend on the site that traffic lands on. His team argues for native Shopify builds over headless setups and bloated app stacks.

Kyle Hency, Co-Founder of Chubbies and now CEO of GoodDay Software, is going after legacy ERP. His view is that brands now fund growth from profit, not venture money, so inventory planning is where margin is won or lost.

Bryan Starck, Founder of Customer Conversations, thinks most brands are guessing about why customers buy, stay or cancel. His company runs AI voice interviews with a brand's own customers, so the answers come from the people paying the bills instead of a dashboard or a cancel reason dropdown.

Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective, closes out our day on the future of the agency. He's said "the future is one person with a machine," and that operating costs need to fall to 10% of revenue. We'll ask him how that works inside a services business.

What ties our Day 1 guests together: revenue is easy to buy, and profit is hard to keep. Whether it's email, TikTok Shop, your website, your inventory, your customer insight or your org chart, each of them is betting the margin is in how you run the machine, not how much you feed it.

Tomorrow we sit down with Ezra Firestone, Yasmin Mahe, Kyle Yeoman and more. Catch every conversation on the Ecomm Cowboy channel.

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Ecomm Cowboy is the go-to live show for ecommerce operators, breaking down the latest DTC, retail, and AI news while interviewing the founders and executives building today's fastest-growing brands.

We’re live Monday to Friday at 12 PM CT.

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See you on the stream,
Ecomm Cowboy Team