Ben Fisher✨

Founder @ Rodeo and Fractional CTO to 8-figure DTC brands, sharing learnings as a Full-stack Coder, Designer and Shopify Expert

My friend Paul says I'm a "Human Zapier." That checks out. 

I'm a solid programmer and a decent designer, but they're really a means to an end: I love to build things and solve business problems. 

I'm a product person, a technologist, and an entrepreneur at heart. 

My superpower is at the intersection of tech + design + automation/optimization. And I love dtc ecomm.

I get a DISGUSTING amount of satisfaction by eliminating inefficiency. And I do it through building software tools.

I am obsessed with Systems Thinking and love to experiment with new ways to connect disparate systems.

I won't stop until we've got a deceptively simple solution that's damn fun to use.

**

For the past 10 years, I've built "commerce enablement" tools in the Shopify ecosystem that help DTC brands make more $$$.

With CartHook, we brought post-purchase upsells to the Shopify ecosystem and worked directly w/ Shopify to add it natively. 

CartHook processed > $1B GMV and added $250MM/year in revenue through its post-purchase upsell tech. It was acquired by Pantastic in 2022.

At Rodeo, we released one of the first native Shopify subscription apps (acquired by Recharge) and pivoted to a LTV Growth platform that originated as a small feature. Ultimately, wound it down as Shopify actively started building a solution themselves.

I'm on a mission to build damn good tools that help you make more money and have fun doing it.

Co-founder, Technical CEO

Ben Fisher 🏴‍☠️

Playing w/ AI + Automation | Prev @Rodeo, @CartHook (trusted by AG1, Four Sigmatic)

Deeply researched product, growth, and career advice

My biggest takeaways from Stewart Butterfield:

1. Product design is about creating understanding, not removing friction. Teams obsess over reducing friction and removing steps, but 70% to 80% of product design challenges are actually about helping people *understand* what your product does and what to do next. Users arrive barely interested and confused about what you offer. If they can’t quickly grasp what they’re looking at, they’ll leave. Making it easier to do confusing things just gets users to the exit quicker. The mantra should be “Don’t make me think,” not “reduce friction.”

2. You’re not selling features—you’re selling outcomes. Nobody wants a saddle; they want to go horseback riding. Nobody wants a hammer; they want something built. People understand cars and beer without explanation, but new software needs an explanation of both what it is and why they should want it. Slack wasn’t selling messaging features—it was selling better team coordination and reduced email chaos. If you can’t articulate the transformation your product creates in people’s lives, you’re just listing features.

3. Organizations naturally fill with fake work that looks exactly like real work, what Stewart calls “hyper-realistic work-like activities.” Meetings to preview deck slides, analysis of tiny feature differences, elaborate processes around insignificant decisions. People aren’t lazy; they’re responding to having more time than valuable work to do. Leaders must continuously ensure there’s enough valuable work and explicitly say no to projects that can’t possibly generate meaningful impact.

4. Small conveniences create emotional connections that drive word-of-mouth growth. No one switches products because of a good time-zone picker or smooth password recovery, but these details make users love or hate your product. Slack grew largely because people who used it at one company would join a new company and advocate strongly for adopting it. That advocacy came from accumulated small delights, not major features.

5. The “owner’s delusion” explains why bad experiences persist everywhere. Restaurant owners create terrible websites even though they’ve experienced the frustration of visiting other terrible restaurant websites. Business owners assume visitors care deeply about their product, when in reality people arrive distracted, in a hurry, just above the threshold of caring at all. The solution is to regularly step back, be a normal person with limited time and patience, and honestly evaluate if your product makes sense.

6. Only pivot after exhausting all reasonable ideas. The right time to pivot isn’t when things get hard—it’s when you’ve genuinely tried every non-ridiculous approach and can coldly, rationally assess that the expected value has dropped below alternatives. Pivoting is humiliating because you’ve convinced investors, employees, and users of a vision you’re now abandoning. That emotional cost means most people pivot too quickly or too late.

Venture Athlete & International Expansion Expert | Thriving as Generalist in a Specialized Economy

I’m Dominik, founder, athlete, & creator. A proud generalist. This is my story: 

For the last 7 years, I helped bootstrap one startup from 0 to 1M in revenue and built the international business from scratch for one of Europe’s fastest growing EdTech companies (50 -> 240 employees in my three years there).

All while competing at the highest level of the beautiful sport of Lacrosse, including an appearance for the German National Team at the 2022 World Games (the Olympics’ little brother).

While my professional achievements may seem more impressive on paper, representing Germany on an international stage is the feat that I’m most proud of.

I wasn’t very athletic up until my mid-twenties. Very little talent, but a lot of injuries to make up for it.

Until one day, I started working with a personal trainer. He helped me break down the fundamentals I needed to fix.

I worked hard, and I worked consistently. Showed up to every practice, every gym session. Did my recovery & mobility work daily.

4 years later, I made the national team roster.

The potential was in me. But it needed help unlocking.

Throughout my entire career, I’ve also helped humans unlock their potential, just in different ways:

- By teaching people in rural Rwanda and Brazilian homeless shelter how to make glasses for less than $1, and how to build a business around it
- By bringing unemployed nurses from Italy to Germany and teaching them German, opening a completely different career path for them
- By expanding the leading operating system for schools throughout Europe, so that education becomes more digital and thus accessible
- By writing about my experiences online and sharing them with the world

In late 2023, I made the decision to quit my cozy, well-paid, full-time job that fit my profile perfectly.

I'm on a mission to build my own portfolio career - and help others to unlock theirs. Join me on my journey towards building a portfolio of cashflow-positive, impact-driven businesses.

These businesses have one goal: help others unlock their potential. Just like my personal trainer did for me.

I wish that some of the best portfolio company owners turned creators had documented their journey from day 1, and not retrospectively.

So that’s what I’m doing.

I write for generalists like myself, who want to make a living in a specialized economy without specializing themselves. 

You can do more than one thing in your life. 
Let’s design that life together. 

Sign up for my newsletter here: www.dominiknitsch.com/newsletter

Dominik Nitsch

Over the past four weeks, I’ve received 93 applications to Generalyst. Here’s what to avoid if you’re currently applying to jobs: 

(1) Using ChatGPT-generated answers to free-text questions. 

We smell this from a mile away. It sounds good and professional, but tells me absolutely nothing about YOU. I want to see how you, not your AI, think and write. If you’re going to use AI, get so good at prompting that it doesn’t read like generic fluff. Don’t be a politician; be someone with edges. This ain't corporate. 

(2) Say: "I'm a results-driven professional with cross-functional expertise that spearheaded expansion". 

My brother in Christ, I have no idea what you're trying to tell me (besides that you're good at bullshit bingo). What's a "results-driven professional"? Like, would anyone ever describe themselves as an "activity-driven professional"? Why say "spearheading" when you could use a word that one actually uses in their day-to-day life? 

(3) Say: “I’m looking to do strategic work.” 

Instant no. In a startup, even the founder does like 97% operational work. Building a company is about, well, building. Not planning. In order to produce prime strategic work, you have to get your hands dirty first. (If you want to do strategic work, maybe strategy consultancies are your jam.) 

(4) Straight up lie in an interview. 

I never would’ve thought I’d have to say this, but this happened twice now: candidates claimed to have done something that was very easy to invalidate with a few Google searches. 

What else grinds your gears as hiring manager/recruiter?

Founder @ Generalyst | building talent infrastructure for early-stage startups | 1,022 generalists read my newsletter to future-proof their career

Our educational system is (still) broken. Because it conveys THIS as the perfect career: 

- pick a degree that you wanna specialize in
- get a master's that drives you further down specialization 
- start your first job 
- specialize further in one thing 
- do that thing for the next 40 years 

I have two problems with this. 

One, it's incredibly f**king boring. 
Two, it's a terrible way to prepare for the future. 

We don't know what the future holds. Had you told me six years ago that today that in 2025, I'd be able to run any research using a chat interface and get better results than most interns would produce within ten minutes at the price of $20/month, I'd have told you you're insane ... yet here we are. 

However, there's one skill I know is gonna be important: 

Adaptability. 

New technologies emerge daily. You can either fight them, or adapt to their existence, learn how to use them, and move forward. 

The best way to build out this skill: becoming a generalist. 

→ build out your set of meta skills
→ then, build a broad foundation in your field.
→ once you have this, go deeper on a few topics

I believe the future belongs to generalist. 
To the ones that adapt, learn new things, see intersections between different technologies. 

The days where being a "jack-of-all-trades" was a disadvantage are over.

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Applicants, I hate to break it to you, but: 

Nobody reads your CV in full. 

If you take a look at the number of applications for any given job here on LinkedIn, you get a feeling for how many CVs hiring managers sift through on a daily basis. 

Given that they also have other things to do, you can't assume they'll spend >5min reading your CV. So while it may be tempting to put EVERYTHING on there ... please don't. 

When I screen CVs for Generalyst, I look at it for 20-30 secs before forming a snap judgment. Pretty sure others operate similarly. 

Use this to your advantage: 
→ make your CV as short and concise as possible, less is more
→ outline the most important factors that make you stand out
→ write a brief 2-3 sentence summary (and for the love of God, DON'T let AI write it)

The job of a CV isn't to get you a job, it's to get you a first interview.

I'm currently building my second service business. Success comes down to 3 things (imo): 

Strong branding, relentless execution, and aligned incentives. 

A brand only becomes strong when external perception matches internal intention. If at Generalyst, we say we have top candidates for early-stage startups, but founders disagree, the brand breaks. When founders consistently confirm that our candidates are exceptional, the brand compounds.

That external pressure forces us to deliver every time.

I learned this during my first startup, Linguedo. We taught Italian nurses German in-house and put in far more effort than was strictly necessary. The course was so intense it would've become prohibitively expensive for most people. 

Once they passed their German exam, we placed them in local hospitals. 

The result: every single hospital was a (or at least, wanted to) become a repeat customers. Turns out, we did a much better job teaching German than any other language school. 

Underneath it all is one principle: value creation and value capture must live in the same place.

- We only earn money when a candidate signs.
- Candidates never pay.
- Companies pay for a successful hire.

Everyone wins when the match is right.

Building a great service business isn’t art. It’s just a craft. 

Do the basics better than most, do them longer than most, and let people talk about it.
That's it.

One hour from now, my 100th newsletter is gonna go out to 1,031 subscribers. Inside: 

→ how a single email I sent out on Dec 31st, 2022 lead to a fledgling portfolio career
→ how I'm currently designing said portfolio career
→ what the plan for the future is 

You can still subscribe to get those insights delivered into your inbox. Click the link below my name and it's gonna take you there. :)

(and to everyone reading all these newsletters – thank you!)

No one: 

People on LinkedIn: "after raising 120M, finally got that corner office" 

(just kidding, this is a WeWork - views are nice though)

A misconception that drives me nuts: young employees work harder than old employees. 

Dude yeah, of course a 20-year old needs to work harder than a 40-year old:
- they haven't figured out yet how to be ridiculously productive
- they lack the experience to understand what's important 
- they don't have the tools yet to get stuff done quickly 

I'm 100% convinced that: the candidate with ten years of experience will generate more output in six hours than the recent graduate will in twelve. 

Case in point: the most productive people I've ever seen are parents with several children. 

If they gotta go pick up the kids at 15:00, you can rest assured that whatever they needed to get done WILL be done by 15:00. They might say no to useless meetings, maybe skip lunch break, not respond to low-priority emails. 

But they will get it done. 

And isn't that what you want in an employee? 

We don't need more "productivity porn" where people simply sit at their desk all day. 

Output is what matters.

“The difference between greatness and mediocrity isn’t in the spectacular moments but rather in avoiding critical errors.” — Shane Parrish

Warren Buffett's first rule of investing? Never lose money. His second rule? Never forget rule one. 

This isn't clever wordplay - it's the mathematics of success. A 50% loss demands a 100% gain to break even. Or look at elite athletes: while average quarterbacks mix brilliant throws with costly interceptions, Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes protect the ball first.

For Lacrosse defenders, fans look for the hard hits, fancy takeaway checks, and high-risk double teams. 

Coaches look for: 
→ accurate positioning
→ loud, constant communication
→ rock-solid footwork 
→ proper passing & groundball technique 

The best defense is the one that makes no critical mistakes, not the one that makes fancy plays. 

In business, most people look for high funding rounds, quick hacks, and eccentric founders.

Whereas most successful businesses have: 
→ solid profit margins
→ a legitimate problem that they solve well 
→ people who genuinely enjoy going to work 
→ a hiring process that avoids mis-hires 

Let’s wrap it up with another quote from Shane: 

“Excellence isn’t about occasional brilliance – it’s about consistent execution.”

Photo cred: Rebecca Fällenbacher

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