Hey Cowboys,

Happy Tuesday! 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.

We're back at Commerce Roundtable in San Diego for our second day of recording Ecomm Cowboy live on-site. Day 1 was about keeping more of what you earn.

Our Day 2 guests take the next step: if you're going to spend, how do you know which dollars are actually working?

Yasmin Mahe, VP of Growth & Customer Lifecycle at AG1, came to growth from finance. She joined AG1 to build its growth finance function just as the company went from bootstrapped to having real capital to invest. Her view: chasing the lowest possible CAC can mean you're underspending and letting competitors harvest the demand you built. She's taking those lessons to Lola Blankets next.

Jordan West, President of Social Commerce Club, treats TikTok Shop as a demand engine for the whole business, not a separate channel. His creator "blitz" playbook took Portland Leather Goods from about $1,200 a day to $1M in sales in 20 days.

Kyle Yeoman, President of Groove Life, brings the anti-promo case with receipts. Groove cut its average discount rate from 33.7% to 2.9% year over year, pulled nearly all of its Amazon ad spend, and watched Amazon revenue grow more than 20% anyway.

Jordan Menard, Gravity AI, has scaled a CPG brand from both the operator and the media-buyer side. He says advertising inside AI chatbots may be the biggest ad opportunity since Facebook ads, and he's hinted he'll break news about his next venture with us.

Eric Rausch, Co-Founder of New Standard Co., says retention is the most understaffed part of the P&L. His team runs it for brands like AG1, True Classic and David Protein, and once collapsed 26 rebill flows into three.

Jacob Posel, Co-Founder of HQ, was the AI lead at Common Thread Collective before starting his own company. His argument: most brands' AI problem isn't the models; it's getting their team to actually use them.

Luke Austin, President of Common Thread Collective, is the numbers guy. He brings the forecasting and measurement benchmarks behind CTC's work, including the finding that 3% of ads drive more than 80% of spend.

Ezra Firestone, Founder of Smart Marketer, closes out our two days. He still runs his own brands, including oVertone and Safe Sleeve, and was early and loud on AppLovin as a paid channel. He's also bought and turned around a struggling brand with private equity partners, so he can talk about building brands and about buying them.

What ties our Day 2 guests together: the brands that win next year won't be the ones that spend the most. They'll be the ones that know exactly which dollars work, whether that's paying more for the right customer, cutting the discount, measuring the halo or forecasting before they spend.

That's a wrap on two days live from San Diego. 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.

You can find our work on YouTube, X, and LinkedIn.

Have questions or want to come on the show? Simply reply to this email, we’re happy to chat.

See you on the stream,
Ecomm Cowboy Team