The long version

I started in ecommerce around 2008, back in the MySpace era, and ran my own stores from 2009 to 2017. That's where I learned the actual craft: funnels, creative, ad platforms, conversion. Not from a course — from running the stores.

I'm not a developer. I took the classes and worked through the tutorials anyway, mostly so I could tell whether the engineers I was hiring were doing good work.

In 2013 I started Exposely out of Los Angeles — a self-serve marketplace where brands bought distribution directly from people with real audiences, no agency in the middle. This was influencer marketing before anyone called it that. I'd come up through MySpace, so I was essentially selling the thing I'd already been. We never raised outside money.

In 2017 I was consulting for Fashion Nova as their senior media buyer, managing $1M a month in ad spend, and doing media buying at an agency called Agency Y.

In 2018 I co-founded LiveRecover, an SMS cart recovery app for Shopify. Real people texting real customers about abandoned carts. We were one of the few SMS apps operating at that scale without outside investment. We sold to private equity in 2021.

After that I took the summer off to run cross-country. Then I got bored. So I bought OrderBump, a checkout upsell app, in October 2021 and sold it by February 2022, then spent the next few months helping transition it into AppHub's ownership. I want to be honest that a lot of that outcome was timing and luck, not genius.

Then came Vigilance, which blocked browser extensions like Honey from injecting discount codes at checkout. It was the first company I raised outside money for — around $250K from operators inside the Shopify and DTC ecosystem, because I wanted their names on the cap table as much as their capital. We had Shopify Plus merchants signing up fast. Then Shopify announced it was deprecating checkout.liquid, which was the entire mechanism our product ran on. We shut it down and offered to return the money.

That's the one worth studying. Everything I built sat on top of someone else's platform, and the platform is allowed to change its mind.

Now I'm building Internet Research Unit — alternative data for the ecommerce industry. Revenue, SKUs, tech stacks, and consumer trends across millions of DTC brands, for brand owners, agencies, app developers, and the people financing them. It's the first thing I've built that isn't a tenant of one platform.

Alongside it I ship three small Shopify apps: sonarID spots the VIPs buying from your store, OrderEdit lets customers fix their own orders before they ship, and OrderSurvey asks them why they bought.

From September 2025 to May 2026 I was a product manager at Shopify — the platform most of this page is built on.

I also believe software should feel exciting to use, not boring and outdated. My co-founder and I do our own design. That's probably visible here too.