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.

Sidekick AI

Imagine if ChatGPT and Canva had a baby and it grew up to be an Email Marketer.

Sidekick AI is that baby. 

Create emails in 2 minutes and have them setup in your ESP, ready-to-go.

Co-Founder

Preflect

Advisor

Hush Blankets

Making Canadians fall in love with sleep again.

Director, Marketing

Domio Sports

Increased some optimizable metric by some unverifiable % that may or may not impress you.

Director, Growth Marketing

Digital Marketing Manager

Zensurance

Digital Marketing Specialist

University of Toronto

As a professional manchild, I performed my duties to the best of my capabilities:
- Constantly pull all-nighters to extend my procrastination
- Skip classes to play Hearthstone and FIFA
- Eat food no human should at times no human should
- Drink everything but water
- Somehow pass my courses with lowest possible GPA required (a lesson in efficiency)

Professional Manchild

My Parents' Home

As a professional child, my duties were to:
- Throw tantrums when I didn't get my way
- Stay up way past bedtime, regularly
- Somehow pass school and high school

Professional Child

Helping You Create Better Email Content 🍩

I break down newsworthy (and snoozeworthy) email marketing campaigns to help you level up your email marketing game.

Khaled B.

This one delusional mistake is causing $10m+ clothing and apparel brands to leak 100s of thousands of dollars every quarter.

"We send 3-4 emails a week to make sure subscribers are not annoyed."

Unfortunately, how 'annoyed' subscribers are is measured by how many emails it takes to annoy the CEO / CMO / Head of Retention dislikes.

This year we've been fortunate enough to work with data-driven brands willing to buck the trend (special shoutout to True Classic and Viasox).

We've scaled up email send frequency to insane levels (check out milled.com for both brands to a sliver of the campaigns we send out every month).

Core segments are getting MORE than an email a day.

And by running controlled send frequency tests, we know exactly how much higher revenue we're driving by increasing send frequency.

Here's what happened when we increased frequency. 

The negatives:
- marginal increase in unsubscribes and spam complaints
- marginal drop in open rates and click rates

The positives:
- zero impact on deliverability (verified with glockapps, mailsoar)
- significant increase in # of clicks
- significant increase in revenue

I'm convinced the whole '3-4' emails a week is a sad hoax propagated by the same data-hating people who also claim image-only emails will hurt deliverability without having done a head-to-head test in years 🤷‍♂️

Khaled Bashir

AI Agents in email marketing for brands like True Classic, Viasox, Nulastin and more

Love this True Classic social proof campaign my team created for this season's BFCM 🔥 

 If you've noticed open rates declining leading up to this week, you're not alone. This happens EVERY BFCM week. 

Brands send way more emails than usual.

Inboxes have NEVER been this cluttered.

If you want to be noticed, you have to cut through the clutter with pattern interrupt.

But here's one important thing you need to keep in mind...

Don't stray away from the fundamentals!

Social proof is a fundamental principle of conversion. This email is all about social proof, but we added a culturally relevant theme to it which also enabled us to highlight the product's benefits and features.

Let me know if ideas like these are valuable, happy to share more examples we're trying for clients!

My favorite email of the day.

I've shortened to as little as 1 line, but this is the first time I've seen as short as 3 words.

Definitely testing this out.

Story of this BFCM: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Could not have survived this one without my incredible team. 

Took almost a year to build this team, and super grateful for every single one of them!

Some unfiltered thoughts about BFCM:

- It's basically a cult religious event in our industry

- Every BFCM I go through shrinks my lifespan by a year

- Leading cause of internal/external teams turning on each other

- The amount of effort/stress expended between friday-saturday is disproportionately higher than the revenue share it brings in

- I never get to shop on BFCM because I'm too busy selling, or rather knee-jerking responses to sales

I think this is a little embarrassing for Email Marketers:

Email content analysis is lagging far behind Ad content analysis and CRO. 

a) The tools are lagging -> we need more apps like Motion (Creative Analytics)

b) The education is lagging

c) The AWARENESS is lagging (why don't enough people talk about this?!?!?!)

There's a disproportionate amount of talk about deliverability 

...and image emails vs plain text emails

...and open rates and iOS15 (guys it's been like 2 years now? or 3 years?)

Can we just gather the smartest minds in the industry on a zoom call and ask them how they structure creative tests? How do they extract patterns from results and actually use them to guide email content creation in the future?

We need to put more thought into email creative beyond 'flowchart' emails because 'cool brand we admire' is doing it (I'll save you the trouble, the flowchart email always converts less, and nobody can read it on their phone).

Rant over (for now).

Black Friday Email Hack: This is another pattern interrupt for Black Friday emails.

Inboxes are more crowded than ever. 

If you want to get noticed, you have spin your message in an uncommon way!

This one's FOMO + Social Proof wrapped into one.

taplio

The Battle

Ben Fisher✨

Khaled B.

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taplio

The Battle

Ben Fisher✨

Khaled B.

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ben Fisher✨'s LinkedIn Performance

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