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.

23 Year Old Shopify App Founder \\ Sharing my Startup Journey with the World

Creating the best popups in eCom

Trusted by Nike Strength, Hexclad, Comfrt, Milk Makeup, Hot Ones, and 3K+ others

Shaan Arora

This feels surreal to say. Alia has officially been acquired by Dotdigital.

There were a lot of nights I pictured writing this post.

[more emotional parts below, but I need to first talk to our customers and partners before anything else]

NOTHING will change for our partners and customers.

We're not asking anyone to move their ESPs to keep working with Alia.

If you have Slack channels with us, those channels will remain and you'll still keep your current CSMs with us.

Our same commitment to customer support and customer success for our customers and partners will still be there in full force.

We're not done building Alia by any means. Our team and product are staying intact.

And we're excited to build and move quickly as we've always done, but now with the resources of a much larger company.

-

I want to first express gratitude to my co-founding team.

Cory, Bill, and Jake have challenged me every single second of this journey and I appreciate it more than they'll ever know.

I try to read more and listen to more podcasts so that I can understand what they're saying when they're chatting to eachother at work.

I'm forever indebted to them, and I'm excited to keep building with them for a very long time.

I'm extremely grateful for the broader Alia team as well. I know that we ask a lot and that we're not the most typical company in many respects, but I'm damn 
proud of you all and your commitment to the company.

I'm very grateful to my family for the unwavering support and all the thoughts and prayers they've been sending since we started this whole thing four years ago.

When I asked my parents if I could live with them after college and work full-time on my crazy idea that had no funding or revenue, they didn't hesitate for a second.

Living at home with them when our company had no money gave me the chance to ground myself and work as hard as humanly possible.

My parents have supported me and given me space when I needed it, and I appreciate them dealing with me when my mood swings based on the revenue growth of the company on a week-to-week basis.

I also want to thank my friends for supporting us and caring. I know we can act crazy sometimes about this company and I appreciate you bearing with us.

Thank you to Dotdigital for trusting us and our mission. We’re just getting started, and we’re thrilled to build the future side by side.

Cory and I first started building Alia four years ago when we were 20 years old, 
both interns at a bank.

Being able to celebrate this with the same person who I've been with since the start is a feeling I can't put into words.

Oh, and by the way, we didn't take a dollar of outside funding to build Alia. 

As I'm holding back tears, I'll conclude with this:

I've been posting almost every weekday since January 2024 on LinkedIn and Twitter. And, at least once a week since then, I've dreamt of writing this post and how it'd feel to write it.

It feels better than I could've ever imagined.

Bootstrapped to $60M Exit // Building The Next Generation of Popups

I've always thought it'd be cool to have a proper sales team in person. And here they are 👇🏽

Like having people in the office just ripping the phones. 

And having other people taking back to back to back demos and closing deals. 

And having the sales team learn from eachother and exchange tips. 

And ringing a bell when a big deal closes. 

Like all of that I thought would be so cool to do. 

And now we're actually doing it and they're all here in the office and I get to just watch all of this unfold. 

I used to do every cold call, knock on every retail store in NYC to get demos, take every sales call, and send all the follow up emails (and I liked to follow up A LOT) to get closes. 

And now I get to watch people who are better than me at these things just go out there and CRUSH IT. 

Let's get after it Sameer Soomro, Raihan H., Rohan Duvvuru, and Abdul Anwar

Bootstrapped to $9M ARR // Building The Next Generation of Popups

We just shipped one of the most requested analytics features from our brands

LTV and repurchase rate analytics👇🏽 

Specifically, we now track the following, amongst others:
- Cohort data showing the number of shoppers at each order milestone (1st, 2nd, 3rd order, etc.)
- LTV
- Repurchase rate
- Median time to purchase

And A LOT of filtering capabilities as you can see attached. 

Bill Wohlers builds and ships at the speed of lightning ⚡️

“Wtf, how did a Shopify app sell for that much?”


I’ve been hearing this a lot in the week since we closed.

People hear “Shopify app” and they think something like a Wordpress plugin.
It’s understandable, but it underestimates 1) how big Shopify is and 2) what you can accomplish if you stay focused and execute ruthlessly.

1 - Shopify is not just some cute build-your-own-shop company. It powers many of the brands everyone knows and loves, including Alia customers like Comfrt, Hexclad, and DRMTLGY, as well as future Alia customers like Red Bull, Kylie Cosmetics, Gymshark, and literally millions of other brands.

2 - Our company is at the cutting edge of popups, which almost all Shopify brands depend on. They might seem simple, but anything that drives this much revenue can unlock millions of $$ in lift when you go as deep and remain as focused as we have.

Despite this, there’s one question I get asked constantly - “How much left is there to build in this space?”

The honest answer is - I don’t know, but I know we’re not anywhere close to the limit.

How do I know that?

Because in a few weeks, we’re dropping a feature that no competitor has released yet. Something that will up the standard for personalization in e-commerce, and add yet another bullet to the long list of reasons that Alia should be THE go-to for every single Shopify brand.

Stay tuned, more coming soon.

Enjoy this photo of us on a Times Square billboard with a George Washington actor at Mt Vernon:

Founder @ The SaaS Hub | Helping Shopify Apps Get Seen, Trusted, and Installed

View Yuvraj Kewate - building TheSaasHub’s profile

🚀 From $1M to $8M ARR. Bootstrapped. 
That’s the journey of Shaan Arora, Founder of Alia the Email & SMS Popups app on Shopify.

We recently recorded an in-depth conversation for The SaaS Hub Podcast | Shopify App Founders Edition, and it’s one of the most honest founder discussions we’ve had so far.

Starting today, I’m dropping a few short clips from our conversation on YouTube.

The full episode goes live tomorrow.

In this episode, we talk about:
• Scaling from $1M to $8M ARR
• Building in a highly competitive pop-up category
• Bootstrapping vs raising capital
• The discipline behind sustainable SaaS growth
• What most founders get wrong about scaling

What stood out to me the most was not just the growth numbers but the clarity and conviction behind the decisions.

If you’re building on Shopify or running a SaaS company, you’ll want to watch this one.

Short clips dropping today.
Full episode tomorrow.

Subscribe & watch here: https://lnkd.in/dBMZSbf7

#ShopifyApps #SaaS #Bootstrapped #Ecommerce #FounderJourney #TheSaaSHub

Founder & CEO of Contara: The Retention-Driven Conversion Agency

Most Shopify pop-ups convert at 3-5%. Here's how we increased that to 15%+ for our clients.

1. We use Alia to power our pop-ups (highly recommend)

2. We lead with a fun question

Here's your game plan:

When someone lands on your site, prompt them with something interactive. Something that makes them WANT to engage.

Examples for CPG brands:

- "What's your biggest wellness goal right now?" (for a health brand)
- "What's your go-to morning routine?" (for a supplement brand)
- "Pick your flavor personality" (for a beverage brand)

It should be just one click, something fun, make it feel like a quiz.

THEN after they answer, hit them with:

"Nice choice. Here's 15% off your first order, just drop your email."

Why this works:

1. Micro-commitment
They already engaged. Psychologically they're more invested in finishing the interaction. Giving you an email feels like the natural next step.

2. It feels personalized
A question says "we want to know YOU." 

3. You collect zero-party data
Now you know what they care about. Their first email from you can be tailored to exactly what they told you. Open rates go through the roof.

4. It breaks the pattern
A question stops the scroll because it's unexpected.

Check out this example on our client's site.

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