Ryan is the Co-Founder of Tru Earth

Purpose driven direct to  consumer brand builder.

Ryan has:

✅ Helped Grow Tru Earth to more than 160,000 active subscribing customers
✅ Together with Tru Earth's Changemakers, eliminated more than 165,000,000 plastic-containers from landfills..
✅ Donated more than 33,887,227 loads of laundry detergent to those in need.
✅ Grown multiple premium subscription boxes to multi-million dollar businesses.
✅ Written content has been read by more than 100,000,000 readers.

Connect: 
Facebook https://m.facebook.com/theryemckenzie/
Twitter: @RyeMcKenzie

About Tru Earth
Tru Earth® based in Vancouver, Canada is a leading eco-friendly household product company committed to eliminating plastic from landfills and oceans. At its core, you’ll discover that Tru Earth, is actually a movement (#TruEarthMovement™). The Tru Earth team joins more than a quarter million equally committed people in more than 50 countries to combat the 645 billion plastic household product containers dumped in landfills and oceans globally each year. 

Our customers are #TruChangeMakers™, disrupting the multi-billion-dollar household product industry, reducing carbon emissions by up to 94% and caring for the health of the planet and their families. 

Tru Earth’s suite of products and planned launches come with our pledge to provide #TruChangeMakers with laundry, bathroom and kitchen products they need to make a substantial impact on the health of our world. To do ourpart, we promise to match all first-time subscriptions by donating to families in need across the globe. Because at Tru Earth, we know many small hinges can swing very, very big doors.

Ryan Mckenzie

Every founder on this app is losing their minds over AI tools right now. ClaudeBot this. Moltbook that.

Half of it is slop. The other half you’ll never really use.

But every new drop makes you feel like you’re falling behind. The pace of AI right now is a shiny object machine. And it’s pulling operators away from the stuff that’s been working all along.

I run an eight-figure business. This is my entire AI stack: 

>Open ChatGPT in dictate mode
>Talk through 50 half-baked ideas
>Tell it to organize my brain
>Grab competitor copy, dump it in
>Ask what persona they’re targeting
>Hop on a call
>Let Granola take notes
>Pull action items 

That’s it. 

Free plan. No autonomous agents. No tools I don’t trust accessing all my stuff. 

Don’t let the timeline make you feel behind.

Everyone wants the sophisticated play. 

The sophisticated play is getting good at boring.

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Co-Founder Tru Earth | Saving the planet, one strip at a time.

Before Tru Earth I was running this outdoor adventure brand, and with it came a revenue glass ceiling I didn’t even realize was there.

I thought anything over a million dollars a year was incredible. Like, why would you need more than that?

Then I met Matthew Bertulli at a mastermind. Told him my goals. That it was gonna be a slide of the desk business. Just a nice little thing.

All he said: “Think bigger.”

Two words. And something clicked.

Most of what holds you back is your own self limiting beliefs about what’s reasonable. And you don’t even want to shed those beliefs sometimes.

Because your life is comfortable and you’re afraid that if you change those beliefs, something you really like about your life might change too.

Seven years later and I still think about that conversation.

CEO @ Lomi & Pela Case - Follow me as I talk about building my brands.

Everyone's calling Ads in Chat GPT the next Facebook Ads.

It's not.

The people using ChatGPT today are the same people who used to search on Google. Same audience. Different platform. 

The pie didn't get bigger. The searches migrated.

So if your Google Ads performance has been declining for 2 years and you can't figure out why: your audience is still out there, they just moved. And now there’s a way to follow them.

The data angle is real. Facebook had behavioral tracking. Google had intent. ChatGPT has both. 

People literally tell it their problems in plain English. Every conversation is a targeting signal.

If OpenAI builds their ad product even halfway well, the targeting should be strong. Early conversion data already looks solid.

Everyone is talking about this like a gold rush, but it’s a recovery play.

Most of what you’re seeing is demand that already left Google. Now there’s a channel to go get it back. 

If you're spending on paid search and watching returns erode, pay attention. This doesn’t “change everything.” But it does explain what already changed.

6 behaviors I see in founders who stay healthy while scaling:

1. They focus on fewer things 
Running 30 initiatives = zero progress 
Focus is doing less, better

2. They chase asymmetric opportunities 
One big swing beats 20 small tweaks
Incremental wins rarely change a business

3. They optimize for signal, not activity 
Busy feels productive 
Outcomes are what matter

4. They update their thinking at each stage 
What works at $1M breaks at $10M 
Every revenue stage needs new mental models

5. They hold contradictory ideas at once 
Scaling is complex 
Black-and-white thinking doesn’t survive it

6. They build teams that make decisions 
Approval loops kill momentum 
Great teams have agency

The pattern: healthy founders remove complexity

My ADHD brain has 40 tabs open at all times.

Here’s what I do to manage:

- One task at a time. Not “mostly one.” Literally one.
- Physical Pomodoro timer on the desk. Something I can see counting down.
- Dedicated workspace. If you work where you relax, your brain fights you all day.
- Clear the desk every morning. A cluttered desk is a chaotic brain.
- Every notification off. Shopify, Stripe, email, Slack. All of it.
- Phone on permanent sleep mode. Five people can reach me. Everyone else goes to voicemail.
- No email or Slack during a focused block. They can wait.
- No open tabs. I used to have dozens running at all times. MinBrowser fixed that.
- Facebook ads? Go straight to Ads Manager URL. Never through the feed. I've lost hundreds of hours to that scroll.
- Freedom app to block sites during Pomodoro sessions. Even when you get tempted, you can't access them.
- Physical notebook for random ideas. Write them down, close the loop, come back later. Otherwise your brain opens a hundred tabs internally and none of them close.
- Take breaks. Parkinson’s Law is real: work fills the time you give it. If you sit at your desk for 8 hours straight, the last 4 are garbage.

Your brain isn’t broken. 

It just needs a system that works with it instead of against it.

This is first world advice.

If you can’t pay your bills, “build a machine that produces value” won’t help you eat.

You need revenue. Fast.

Maslow’s hierarchy applies to business too.

At the bottom: survive. Solve a problem someone will pay for right now.

Once you’re stable: yes. Build the machine. Think in systems.

Applying $10M thinking to a $10K problem gets you neither.

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Building a durable company means stacking real pillars underneath it: DTC, third-party marketplaces, retail, international. 

Four years is enough time to get somewhere. Rarely enough time to build something.

When you’re growing that fast, you’re holding on by the skin of your teeth. The train goes wherever it wants. You’re just hoping not to fly off the caboose.

Every region needs localized packaging, localized payment gateways, localized language.

You can build fast. Just know the difference between building something fast and building something that lasts.

Two things changed the trajectory of my career.

1. Hitting rock bottom.

- Built a ringtone subscription business. It collapsed.
- Had just bought a house, a condo, and signed an expensive lease.
- Owed the government a pile in taxes.
- Put the tax money into a “regulated” forex opportunity.
- Forex collapsed too.
- Bailiff showed up to seize my SUV.
- I was driving around screaming from stress.

2. Choosing commitment.

- Standing in the shower one morning. Full messaging framework for Tru Earth just clicked.
- The product seemed too cheap to scale. But at that moment, the entire positioning downloaded.
- Voice-noted the whole thing before I dried off.
- That messaging carried Tru Earth for years.

If you can, choose #2.

But if you’ve already hit #1, the clarity that comes from survival mode is real.

The bottleneck isn’t taste, intelligence or creative systems.

Most people online are so vanilla. They don’t expose their interests or say anything controversial. 

They just share business stuff.

Look at Hormozi. Grows his hair, grows his beard, always wears a tank top, works out like a motherf*cker. Says a lot of controversial stuff. I bet you half of it he doesn’t even mean. But people align with it.

Because when everything starts looking the same, nobody’s attracted to you because they don’t feel like they have anything in common with you outside of “I'm this hard working, grinding” guy.

My kids already say everything’s AI this, AI that.

We're heading back to a place where people follow and listen to people who are clearly real. You’ll get verified by being authentic.

Founders sand off every edge that would make someone actually give a sh*t about them.

You've got maybe 1000 days before AI levels this whole playing field.

A friend of mine runs a supplement brand doing solid numbers in the US.

About six months ago he started noticing something unusual in his analytics. Consistent traffic from Canada. Not paid. Organic. People were finding him through social media and word of mouth across the border.

He was excited for about ten minutes.

Then reality set in. His US-based 3PL wouldn't ship north without brutal surcharges. The few orders he managed to fulfill took two to three weeks and arrived with surprise customs fees that destroyed the customer experience on delivery.

So he watched the traffic. Every week. Canadian visitors showing up, bouncing at checkout, leaving.

He described it as watching revenue walk out the door through a window he couldn't open.
We connected him with Breakthrough Fulfillment. 

They had him fully operational in Canada within two weeks. Freight forwarding to local warehouses, next-day delivery to Toronto, Vancouver, and other major cities. No surprise duty at the customer's door.

Within 90 days he had added a revenue stream he had been accidentally ignoring for over a year.

The part that stands out is how common this pattern is. Brands generating organic Canadian demand without realizing it, then losing those customers to a logistics problem they assume is too complicated to solve.

If you are doing real volume in the US, check your geographic analytics. If Canadian traffic is showing up and not converting, the demand already exists. The infrastructure is the only thing missing.

https://lnkd.in/eGUqzqCe+M+LinkedIn&utm_campaign=3pl+feb+wk2

If this sounds familiar, comment below or send me a DM. I will connect you with the team.

www.breakthrough.studio

Breakthrough Studio - Premier 3PL Services | Streamlined Logistics Solutions

Every upgrade feels like a flex for about two weeks.

The office, the car, the lease on a bigger warehouse.

Then it just becomes another bill. Another thing you have to feed every month whether the business is up or down.

The best thing I ever did was start asking "does this make my life easier or does this just make me look like I'm winning?"

Most of the time it was the second one.

Social proof is NOT dead. Stop listening to your timeline.

That’s just bad advice from brands who don’t understand the difference between a 1.5 and a 4x ROAS.

I spend $50K+/month on static ads. And it comes down to one thing: 

Matching the right trust signal to the right stage of awareness.

This changes everything about how you allocate ad spend. 

The same testimonial converts at 4x in one ad and barely breaks even in another. Because nobody asked: does this buyer even need convincing yet?

I broke down exactly which signals belong where here:

Social Proof Isnt Dead Youre Just Using It Wrong 

Landing pages are basically first dates.

You can say all the right things, look great, check every box.

Then you make one claim that's slightly too big and the whole thing falls apart.

Believability is more important than impressiveness. Always has been.

Entrepreneurs don’t like to admit this:

The janitor probably has a better life than you do.

For a few months after I stepped away from the day to day at Tru Earth, I'd be at the gym in the morning and my brain would start screaming at me:

You gotta get to your desk. You gotta get to your desk. You gotta get to your desk.

And I'd be standing there mid-set going... What desk? I don't have a desk to get to anymore.

That voice wasn't rational. 
It was just years of training. 
Years of being always on. 
Years of every morning being about the next fire, the next hire problem, the next thing that needed me specifically to figure it out.

You don't realize how much that costs you psychologically until you stop paying it.

When you're in the middle of it, you think everybody operates like this. You think this is just what it takes. 

- Managing people who won't be in the same room anymore because they don't like each other.
- Solving problems with no clean answer.
- Carrying decisions home every single night and pretending you're present with your family when your head is still at the office.

And then there's the janitor.

The janitor:
- Shows up
- Checks every box on the list
- Walks out at 5 o'clock
- Doesn't think about it again until tomorrow

No mental load. 
No 2am problem solving. 
No Slack notifications at dinner.

A lot of entrepreneurs look down on that. 

I think that's wrong.

Not everybody should be an entrepreneur. Not everybody values the same things. And the person who doesn't take work home with them? They're arguably wealthier in the one thing every founder eventually realizes matters most...

Time. 

And the ability to actually be present inside of it.

If you’re building something right now and you feel this weight every single day, I’m not telling you to quit. I’m telling you to notice this.

Because the cost is real.

My kids are only young once. It's been really nice to just be there. Not thinking about tomorrow's fire. Just hanging out with them and soaking it in.

This is what life is all about.

Nobody tells you the weird part about stepping back from the business you built.

You go from "I'm the CMO of [brand]" to "I'm... working on some stuff."

Your identity was the company. Now you have to figure out who you are without it.

It's a better problem to have than most. But it's still a problem.

I’ve built businesses that did $100K months and ones that did $0 months.

The operator who walks out of the $0 month is someone you couldn’t have built on purpose. 

That only comes from surviving it.

Most operators are optimizing against themselves.

Your open rate went from 18% to 23%. You called it a win.

But 23% against brands your size, in your category, on your platform could be bottom quartile.

You don’t know. And that’s the real problem.

Omnisend’s Benchmark Calculator pulls real data from 150,000+ ecommerce brands and shows you where your email and SMS actually stands, not just whether the numbers are trending in the right direction.

Open rates. Click rates. Revenue per email. Benchmarked against brands running similar send volume and similar categories.

This is the difference between “our emails are improving” and “our emails are beating the top 20% of brands in our space.”

Q1 just ended. Before you commit to a Q2 plan, you should know where you actually stand.

If your benchmarks are coming up short, sending more isn’t usually the fix. Getting on a platform with the flows, segmentation, and automation infrastructure to actually convert is.

Omnisend’s US merchants average $79 in revenue for every $1 spent. The Benchmark Calculator is free.

If your current ESP can’t even show you how you stack up, that’s already your answer.

Run your numbers here: https://lnkd.in/dddMBgx8

Use code RYAN30 for 30% off your first 3 months.

Already on a paid plan elsewhere? Omnisend handles the migration for free. Automations, templates and flows. All done in 5 days.

And yes, I’m a proud Omnisend partner.

Open article: Recommended by Ryan McKenzie by omnisend.com

A friend of mine owns this little café I like to visit from time to time. 

And man, this guy’s got it figured out...

A couple real estate investments. His future is set. He runs the café because he wants to, not because he needs it to work perfectly.

And something clicked for me sitting there.

That’s the actual goal.

Not the flashy milestones. Not scaling to 9 figures for the sake of saying it. Not even the massive paydays.

The goal is having enough resources working for you that you can take risks and fail without everything coming apart.

I think most founders get into this game thinking about success. But they forget that things change.

Products lose steam. Business models stop working. Algorithms evolve.

It’s easy to feel untouchable when things are good. But what happens when it all stops?

That’s when you need to be okay starting over.

The café owner had it right. He built enough outside the business that he could operate without any desperation. No panic. No survival mode.

And it made me realize: I need enough resources outside of my main thing to keep going on my terms. Because everything ends eventually.

But if you’re prepared for that?

That’s freedom.

Kyle Bigley

Co-Founder @ TxtCart | Helping Brands Scale Conversational SMS powered by AI | Not a Forbes 30 Under 30

Built TxtCart from zero to $4.8M ARR (and growing) helping 3,500+ Shopify brands generate over $100M+ in SMS revenue. I'm the Founder and CEO of TxtCart, a leading conversational SMS platform that helps eCommerce brands scale through AI-powered text marketing. We’ve worked with brands like Joyride, MetalPlex, Haute Home LA, CROSSNET, and Pupsocks to turn text into one of their highest-converting channels.

I currently lead a team of 20+ operators (just 7 FTE), across product, growth, and success focused on making SMS both automated and deeply personal at scale.

Beyond TxtCart, I’m a founding member and investor in a few small companies. I’m passionate about SaaS, DTC, and the future of AI-enabled / conversational commerce. Always open to sharing ideas, collaborating, and building with other ambitious operators.

Tweet me: @kylebigley

Co-Founder & CEO

TxtCart is the leading Conversational SMS Marketing platform for eCommerce brands. Our modern ai-powered texts (paired with real humans) drives over $35 million in revenue for over 3,000 Shopify brands such as Joyride, Crossnet, Obvi, Pupsocks & more.

Worst ways to build wealth in your 20s:

- Financing a BMW on $10K/month Prioritizing gym over income when you're dead broke 
- Spending every weekend at bars burning cash and hours 
- Chasing the highest-paying salary right out of college 
- Buying crypto, you can't explain to your mom 
- Leasing a lifestyle you can't actually afford

Best ways to build wealth in your 20s:

- Bootstrap a business you OWN 
- Put the $3K car payment into investment accounts instead 
- Live below your means even when your salary says you don't have to 
- Build skills that compound, not a resume that impresses strangers 
- Sacrifice comfort now so your 30s aren't a scramble 
- Start something on the side while your job funds it

Study the bank accounts of people who sacrificed their 20s.

Not the ones who looked rich during them.

TxtCart is the leading Conversational SMS Marketing platform for eCommerce brands. Our modern ai-powered texts (paired with real humans) drives over $100 million in revenue for over 3,000 Shopify brands such as Joyride, Crossnet, Tracie Martyn, Pupsocks & more.

Founding Member

Limited Partner

Advisor & Investor

Project Manager

Assistant Project Manager

Private Equity Analyst

Co-Founder & CEO @ TxtCart // First AI-Native SMS Platform for Shopify brands looking to scale // Bootstrapping to $30M ARR

New York Building Industry Scholarship

Co-Founder & CEO @ TxtCart // First AI-Native SMS Platform for Shopify brands looking to scale // Bootstrapped

5 Do's and Don'ts that took me from an employee making $125K/yr to $4.8M founder:

❌ Answer to bosses who have immense power over your life 
✅ Control your own destiny and make your own calls 

❌ Navigate corporate politics just to get sh*t done 
✅ Build a company where the best idea wins, not office politics 

❌ Watch one bad review or layoff destroy your security 
✅ Bet on yourself instead of hoping your job stays safe 

❌ Accept that someone else decides your ceiling 
✅ Create unlimited upside by building equity, not earning a salary 

❌ Let "what if I fail" stop you from even trying 
✅ Ask "what if I succeed" and build toward that instead

How to build a SaaS you’ll regret:

☐ Build it because “founder” sounds cool
☐ Ship based on what you think people want
☐ Hire the cheapest dev you can find and wonder why it breaks
☐ Take VC money before you understand your own product
☐ Quit during the slow part

The SaaS isn’t broken. You just stopped too early.

If you're starting 2026 feeling behind, read this.

I failed my first brand and lost f*ck tons of money on it.

TxtCart flatlined for 2 years before anything clicked.

I worked construction 7 am - 7 pm and built my SaaS on 4 hours of sleep for years.

I almost walked away more than once.

Now I'm at $4.8M ARR and 100% owner of everything I've built.

The gap between "nothing is working" and "everything is clicking" is smaller than you think.

Don't stop in the middle of your own story.

365 days from today can look completely different if you just stay in the game.

Me at 21: 

- Wall Street dream dead 
- Working in NYC construction from 7 am to 7 pm 
- Working late nights and weekends to build TxtCart 
- Two failed ecom brands already under my belt
- No investors, no roadmap, no idea if it would work

Me at 29: 

- $4.8M ARR, 100% bootstrapped 
- Left a $125K salary when TxtCart hit $50K MRR 
- 1,000+ ecom brands running SMS through my platform 
- Building toward $10M ARR 
- Planning the house, the family, the life I actually designed

The only difference between 21 and 29 is that I didn't quit when it made sense to.

When I first started TxtCart, I almost killed it three times.

The first time was 2019.

The product was bad... embarrassingly bad. 

I look at those dashboards now and cringe. 

I had no real proof it would work, and nothing I was shipping made a strong case for it.

The second time was when people started saying SMS was dead.

That Klaviyo would kill it. 
That Attentive had already won.
That I was too small and too late to compete with enterprise players that had armies of salespeople, and a decade of runway behind them.

The third time was when a VC check came in.

I seriously thought about taking it.

What all three moments had in common... everyone around me saw the ceiling. 

None of them saw what was actually happening underneath.

Klaviyo kept hiking prices. 
Attentive locked brands into contracts. 
When SMSBump got absorbed by Yotpo, 25,000 merchants suddenly had nowhere to go that felt built for them.

The gap was real... and it kept getting wider.

If I'd listened, TxtCart wouldn't have reached $4.8M ARR.

The opportunity was there the whole time. I just had to stop letting other people's doubts become my operating reality.

Those are exactly the moments worth leaning into.

Worst ways to scale a SaaS:

- raise before product-market fit
- hire 20 people to look like a real company
- run paid ads on a leaky product
- copy what Klaviyo did in 2019
- optimize for MRR screenshots, not retention

Best ways to scale a SaaS:

- let customers fund it from day one
- fix churn before touching acquisition
- keep the team small until revenue forces your hand
- build in public so distribution compounds with the product
- own 100% until someone writes a number you can’t ignore
- study the ones that hit $10M without a VC check.

If you're not using TxtCart 💬 to power sms for Shopify, why not?

TxtCart 💬

We automate literally everything at this point.

It’s how 7 people run a $4.8M ARR business. 

But banking ops has always been the one area we couldn’t touch. MCP access to real cards and real accounts is next level. 

The stuff you can build with this is insane. Excited to poke around more soon!

Today we're launching something we've been building toward for a long time.

The Slash MCP gives AI agents full access to the Slash API. Your agents can connect directly to your Slash account and operate autonomously. One access point for the way modern teams are actually starting to work.

It has never been more clear that agents will start doing everything on our behalf and the one thing that's been consistently missing is financial infrastructure. Agents can research, write, code, and analyze. But the second they need to actually spend money, a human has to step in.

Now, that's no longer the case.

Connect any agent framework and give it full programmatic access to your Slash account. Create purpose-built virtual cards with custom spend limits for specific tasks. Send payments and issue invoices to customers. Set up authorization webhooks so your agent can approve or deny transactions in real time based on whatever logic you define.

We're insanely excited to see what our users are able to build with this new level of banking access. Available to all of them today.

*Slash Financial, Inc. is a fintech company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Column N.A., Member FDIC. The Slash Platinum Card is a Visa® charge card issued by Column N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa. More info in bio.

Huge event tomorrow, stoked to see everyone!

Proud to announce that TxtCart is the exclusive SMS partner of The Founders Club and a sponsor of tomorrow's Founders Forum at Cosm Los Angeles.

600+ founders, operators, and brand builders under one roof. This is the kind of community we were built for. Ecommerce founders scaling 7-9 figure brands who care about real results, transparent pricing, and tools that actually move the needle.

Fun full circle moment for us: Chris Meade and CrossNet were one of TxtCart's very first customers back in 2020. Now we're partnering with the community he and Aaron Spivak have built into one of the best founder networks in the world.

If you're at the Cosm tomorrow, come find the TxtCart team. 

We'd love to connect.

See you in LA.

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The Battle

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