The Orita Podcast

Aaron Schwartz
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Weekly

Each week, I'm sitting down with the most interesting people in eCommerce - founders, investors, marketers, and agency leaders who are actually doing the work. We're skipping past the highlight reels and getting into the real stories that shaped their success.

  1. 22h ago

    Retention by Design: Building Arcady Media and making AI useful for ecommerce

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Tarun Kamath, Founder and CEO at Arcady Media. Tarun sold paper airplanes in grade two, got banned from PayPal at 14, and founded Arcady Media at 18. Three years later he runs a 35-person agency that Shopify named one of its most recommended. • Why Arcady treats email and SMS as a lever for cash conversion and liquidity, not just another marketing channel • The bottleneck analysis framework: find the one variable that matters, whiteboard everything that affects it, test aggressively on that alone • Inside Arcadia Intelligence, the internal tool that stores every campaign hypothesis and checks whether it did what the team intended • How winning a Stripe, Lovable, and Klaviyo hackathon became the first agentic tool on Klaviyo's app platform • The $250 bouquet story: how one flower brand emailed its way out of a guaranteed Valentine's Day sale • Aaron on rescue revenue, the $40 million found in dead contacts, and why SMS proves itself in a month while email takes three 👥 Meet the guest Tarun Kamath, Founder and CEO at Arcady Media 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Tarun Kamath: Founder of Arcady on His Fourth Coffee [01:57] Email as a Business Lever, Not a Marketing Channel [02:08] The Ecommerce Growth Formula: Furniture vs CPG [10:00] Slowing Down to Speed Up: How Both Companies Learned to Sell [11:50] Who Uses Orita Best: Business Fundamentals Over Attribution Gold [13:19] Build vs Buy: Anticipating Shopify and Klaviyo's Next Moves [15:30] Inside Arcadia Intelligence: Every Campaign Gets a Hypothesis [18:57] The Bottleneck Analysis: Lazy Marketing Done Right [20:42] The When Company and the What Company [22:08] The $250 Bouquet That Got Away [23:17] SMS Proves It in a Month. Email Takes Three. [25:09] The Frequency Distribution Problem Every Big Brand Has [29:48] Paper Airplanes, Roblox Trading, and a Lifetime PayPal Ban [31:00] From Casino Job at 15 to Founding Arcady at 18 [33:39] What Consumers Expect Now: Personalization or Unsubscribe [35:00] Custom Emails From Shopify Session Data: The Hackathon Winner [37:00] Why Agility Beats Pattern Recognition Right Now 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

  2. 1d ago

    How Did You Hear About Us: Matt Bahr on Post-Purchase Insights and AI

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz and Daniel Brady sit down with Matt Bahr, Co-Founder and CEO at Fairing. Matt has spent seven years answering one question: what actually drove that purchase? The answer is rarely what your attribution model says. • How a customer's $40K influencer gifting problem became Fairing, built in two weeks as a side project that outgrew the main business • Why influencers are the most underutilized channel right now, including brands over $20M in GMV that spend nothing on Meta • The four questions every brand should ask post-purchase, and the CRO question that saved brands tens of millions • Why Fairing wants marketers to never touch their attribution survey again, and the methodology bias most brands introduce without knowing • What tens of millions of monthly responses reveal about AI-driven purchases, and why nobody is using Claude for product discovery • Aaron and DB on why sending more makes less, and the hardest question Aaron asks on every sales call 👥 Meet the guest Matt Bahr, Co-Founder and CEO at Fairing 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai Daniel Brady, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Matt Bahr: The Man Who Introduced Aaron and DB [01:57] Cold Calls at Yext to First Hire at Master & Dynamic [06:03] The $40K Gifting Problem That Became Fairing [07:50] Built in Two Weeks: The Side Project That Won [09:55] What Fairing Actually Solves: The Top of Funnel Problem [13:37] Building Where the Lampposts Are: DB's Measurement Theory [15:33] Influencers: The Most Underutilized Channel in Commerce [17:31] TV Is the Hardest Channel to Crack. Here's the Nuance. [19:18] New vs Returning: Splitting the Survey Questions [22:37] The 30% Response Rate Holy Grail and How to Hit It [25:07] The Four Questions Every Brand Should Be Asking [27:59] Why Marketers Should Never Touch Their Attribution Survey [31:30] What Tens of Millions of Responses Say About AI Shopping [33:23] Should Brands Sprint Toward AEO Right Now [35:06] MCP Servers and the Agentic Future of Commerce Data [44:18] Matt's Email Gripe: Sending More Makes More. Until It Doesn't. [49:42] The Hardest Question Aaron Asks on Every Sales Call 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

  3. Aug 5

    Chief of Stack: Shopify, Smarter Operations, and What Comes After the Search Box

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Matt Cohn, Technical Chief of Staff at Shopify. Matt started on the brand side figuring out how to get Paw Patrol toys into kids hands digitally. Now he sits in the Office of the President at Shopify reporting to Harley Finkelstein and watching three million merchants navigate the fastest-moving period in commerce history. The merchant empathy he built at Spin Master is still the thing he relies on most. • Why the CSM role has fundamentally changed and what it means that the Venn diagrams between AE, SE, and CSM are converging • The great data cleanup: what every brand needs to get right in the next 12 months so they show up correctly in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode • How Shopify thinks about Universal Commerce Protocol and why structured product data is now a competitive moat not a back-office chore • What Mattel and Barnes & Noble got right about modernizing without losing what made their brands matter in the first place • Why coding agents are a bigger leap forward from LLM chat than LLM chat was from traditional search • The tension both Aaron and Matt see in the ecosystem right now: everyone says they do what the best tools do, almost nobody does it as well 👥 Meet the guest Matt Cohn, Technical Chief of Staff at Shopify 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Paw Patrol to Shopifys Office of the President [01:46] What Spin Master Taught Matt About Merchant Empathy [03:35] The Toy Verticals Dirty Secret: Child Consumes Parent Purchases [05:17] Omnichannel Before It Had a Name: Spin Master in 2017 [07:38] Why Matt Left Brands for Merchant Success at Shopify [09:44] How the MSM Role Has Fundamentally Changed [12:25] AI Lowered the Bar for Information Now What Is a CSM Worth [14:18] Working in Harleys Office: What the Job Actually Looks Like [16:29] 150 Product Updates: How Matt Actually Keeps Up [17:46] Rewriting the AI Guide for 2026: What Moved to the Top [21:04] Sidekick and the Internal Operations Opportunity [23:08] Iterate First: The Habit That Separates Fast Builders [27:40] Personalization Is Everywhere Now and Mostly the Same [29:16] AI Shopping Discovery: How to Show Up in ChatGPT and Perplexity [34:38] Mattel Adults and Barnes & Noble: What Legacy Brands Got Right [40:28] Why Aaron Screwed Up His Brand and What He Would Do Differently 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

  4. Jul 24

    Behind the Metric: How Hark Turns Customer Stories Into Growth Signals

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Fran Brzyski, Co-Founder & CEO at Hark and Lisa Eng, Head of Marketing at Hark. Fran and Lisa went to college together. Fran ended up on Lisa's couch a lot. Now she runs marketing at the company he founded. That context actually matters for how they talk about Hark. The argument they make together is a simple one: retention marketers are drowning in metrics and barely talk to their customers. Hark is trying to fix that, not by aggregating your existing reviews and support tickets, but by going out and getting net new zero-party data at specific moments in the customer journey. Fran has a line that stuck with me. An insight is not an observation. An insight is when you thought a cohort would behave one way and they behaved another. Most feedback tools give you observations. Hark is trying to give you the other thing. Lisa spent 13 years on the brand side at Spanx, TAR Cosmetics, and Shutterfly before joining. She calls it the dark side. She means it affectionately. Mostly. 👥 Meet the guests Fran Brzyski, CEO at Hark Lisa Eng, Head of Marketing at Hark 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Two Guests One Podcast: Fran and Lisa From Hark [00:36] Lisa Eng: 13 Years on the Brand Side Then the Dark Side [01:34] Fran Brzyski: JP Morgan Six Months Then Never Again [03:35] What Hark Actually Does and Why Surveys Are Broken [04:46] Walk Me Through It: What Happens When a Brand Signs On [07:28] Feedback Is Still Batch and Blast: Lisas Lifecycle Framing [09:27] The Aha Moment: When Clients See the First Responses Roll In [11:04] Is There Still a Place for Surveys [13:37] How Gen AI Changed Harks Product Vision [15:46] Who Actually Buys Hark and Who Feels the Pain First [18:35] Why DTC and Not Every Industry at Once [20:25] From Brand Side to Vendor Side: What Lisa Had to Unlearn [22:43] Where to Drop Hark First in the Customer Journey [25:18] When Feedback Cuts Out the AB Test Entirely [28:36] What Brands Should Not Be Actioning on Feedback [33:19] The One Unique Asset Every Brand Is Sitting On and Ignoring 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

  5. Jul 21

    Scalero and the Art of Saying No: Focus, Email, and AI

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Will Pearson, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Scalero. Will has been building Scalero for six years by doing one thing nobody else in lifecycle marketing does: saying no. • Why Will and his co-founder met at Vivino, watched email drive the majority of revenue, and decided to build a company around the part everyone underestimates • How Scalero thinks about email as a reminder channel rather than a revenue channel, and why that reframe changes everything about how you execute • The workflow obsession: why Will inspects how an email gets out the door before he ever looks at open rates or revenue metrics • Why the data engineering team exists and what it unlocks for brands that have hit a ceiling on what their lifecycle program can do • How AI is making Scalero faster but also creating more work, and what that means for agencies trying to keep up with platform velocity • Why the brands that survive inbox summarization will be the ones with a story worth a headline, not just a discount 👥 Meet the guest Will Pearson, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Scalero 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai" 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Two Founders Who Almost Did a Deal a Decade Ago [00:32] What Scalero Actually Is: Studio Not Agency [01:18] Why the Software Is Named After Italian Desserts [02:21] From Target to Vivino: How Will Fell Into Lifecycle Marketing [04:41] The Original Vision vs What Scalero Became [06:10] Cannoli, Autoslice, and Building Tools That Save 15 Minutes [09:14] Email as a Reminder Not a Revenue Channel [12:47] Why Scalero Has Data Engineers and What They Unlock [14:21] The Temptation to Go Full Service and Why They Keep Saying No [17:29] Platform Agnostic: How Will Chooses the Right Stack for a Brand [18:49] The First 30 Minutes With a New Brand: What Will Actually Looks At [22:18] How Lifecycle Marketing Has Changed Since 2019 [24:57] AI Makes You More Productive But Gives You More To Do [27:49] Inbox Summarization and the Death of the Generic Email [30:39] Where Personalization Goes Wrong and Why Surprise Still Wins" 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

  6. Jul 16

    From Dashboards to Decisions: Analytics, Attribution, and AI Inside Klaviyo

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Kelsey Capps, MarTech Product Leader at Klaviyo. Kelsey has been working on consumer data and analytics since 2010, across AdTech, MarTech, CDPs, Square, and now Klaviyo, where she leads product for analytics, personalization, and AI. She also has a story about building a feature that every customer asked for, everyone loved for three days, and then nobody knew what to do with. That story alone is worth the watch. This episode goes deep on what it actually takes to turn data into decisions, why dashboards are not going away no matter how good AI gets, and what the best brands on Klaviyo are doing differently before they ever touch the advanced analytics suite. • Why the most valuable thing you can do for your analytics is close the last mile from insight to action, and why most tools still skip it • How Kelsey thinks about getting engineers close to customers and why not every engineer wants to be and that is fine • What Klaviyo Composer is actually building toward and why every team at Klaviyo is now working on tools and sub-agents to support it • The cohort analysis lesson: building what customers ask for versus building what they can actually use • Why customers want to be understood and not just targeted, and what that means for how you collect data in the first place • How one cosmetics brand used Klaviyo funnel analysis to find and retarget shoppers who came in through ChatGPT and never checked out 👥 Meet the guest Kelsey Capps, MarTech Product Leader at Klaviyo 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai Daniel Brady, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Kelsey Capps: Fifteen Years in Consumer Data Now Building Analytics at Klaviyo [02:15] How Do You Actually Get Customer Feedback at Scale [05:17] Using Glean and AI to Turn Support Tickets Into Feature Requests [08:01] Should You Train Your CSMs to Do Discovery [11:04] How to Bring Engineers Closer to the Customer Without Forcing It [14:00] What Kelsey Expected Walking Into Klaviyo and What Surprised Her [16:09] Why Klaviyo Was Sitting on Data It Was Only Tapping the Surface Of [18:00] From Dashboards to Action: How Klaviyo Thinks About Actionability [21:00] What Klaviyo Composer Actually Is and Why Every Team Is Building Toward It [22:00] Dashboards Are Not Dead: Why Push and Pull Both Still Matter [27:07] Where to Start in Klaviyo Analytics If You Have Never Gone Deep [34:00] Live Demo: RFM Customer Insights Funnels and Audience Performance [44:00] The Most Obsessed-Over Page in Klaviyo Analytics Is Not What You Think [45:00] Finding Agentic Commerce Traffic From ChatGPT and Perplexity [51:33] The Feature Everyone Asked For That Nobody Knew How to Use 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

  7. Jul 14

    Partnerships Unlocked: Building Scalable Alliances at Klaviyo and Beyond

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Dan Caldwell, Technology Partnerships at Klaviyo and Chris Lavoie, Founder & CEO at Partnership Mastermind. Most partnership programs have too many partners, too little focus, and one overworked manager trying to make all of it move at once. Dan and Chris have both been on every side of that problem. • Why leading with customer value before the sale is the only partnership motion that actually scales • How to find the right person inside a massive platform when your main contact has a hundred other priorities • What Chris learned from asking Klaviyo's senior team about their three biggest rocks for the year and building every partnership activity around those • Why only 28% of partners in a typical book of business are actively producing anything in the last 180 days and what to do about it • How AI is changing the partner manager role from reactive relationship maintenance to proactive signal detection • The super IC model emerging inside partnership orgs and why the flat partner manager structure is going away 👥 Meet the guests Dan Caldwell, Team Lead of Technology Partnerships at Klaviyo Chris Lavoie, Founder and CEO at Partnership Mastermind 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Two Partnership Experts Walk Into a Phone Booth [00:57] Chris Lavoie: From Organic Chemistry PhD to Partnership Mastermind [02:05] Who Partnership Mastermind Is Actually Built For [04:02] Dan Caldwell: Ten Years in Tech Partnerships at Klaviyo [05:43] How Dan Became the Gatekeeper Nobody Could Crack [07:07] What Actually Gets a Partner Taken Seriously at Klaviyo [10:29] The Gorgeous and Klaviyo Story: Why Nothing Happened at First [15:39] How to Find the Team That Actually Cares Inside a Big Platform [19:28] What Still Works in the Old Partnership Playbook [21:58] When to Go Wide and When to Go Deep on Partner Types [28:17] Brands as the Forcing Factor: Getting Integrations Done in Two Months [32:08] Are You a Doer or a Puppet Master as a Partner Manager [42:30] How AI Is Changing the Partnership Role Right Now [45:30] The Super IC Model: What Partnership Teams Look Like Next 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

  8. Jul 13

    Pore Over the Data: Running Ecommerce at Dermalogica in the AI Era

    In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Courtney Wallace, Head of Ecommerce at Dermalogica. Courtney has held almost every marketing title that exists across brands as different as Hot Topic, Unique Vintage, Too Faced, Pink Lily, and now Dermalogica. She has thoughts on what that actually teaches you. • Why being a generalist is a leadership strategy, not a liability, and how knowing every job on your team changes the way you lead it • The Harry Potter scavenger hunt that tanked conversion rate and what it taught her about channel alignment and shared goals • How Dermalogica runs hundreds of experiments across six global sites and how they decide which friction points are worth testing first • Why incrementality is non-negotiable at Dermalogica and how their CEO runs cohort analysis for fun • The build versus buy calculus at a brand with its own digital disruption department, and the bar a vendor now has to clear to earn a yes • How Dermalogica is trying to bring the personalization of the treatment room to the website, and where they are still figuring it out 👥 Meet the guest Courtney Wallace, Head of Ecommerce at Dermalogica 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Friends Who Keep Running Into Each Other at Ecommerce Events [00:32] From Hot Topic to Dermalogica: The Career No One Plans [01:28] Did You Meet Tom From MySpace? Paramore, Bruno Mars, and Social Before Social [03:45] How a Facebook Message to a Brand CEO Became a Career Defining Role [05:25] Being a Generalist Is a Leadership Strategy Not a Fallback [07:06] Data Are the Tea Leaves: How Courtney Actually Reads the Numbers [09:10] Making Any Spreadsheet Dance and Why That Is the Problem [13:24] The Harry Potter Scavenger Hunt That Tanked Conversion Rate [15:00] How Do You Fund a Bet That Has No Proof Yet [18:37] Flexibility Has Always Been Needed. AI Just Made It Urgent. [21:34] Testing Budgets, Experimental Buckets, and Breaking Things on Purpose [25:35] Head of Marketing and Head of Ecom Should Be Best Friends [29:58] Build Versus Buy: The Bar a Vendor Has to Clear at Dermalogica [42:26] Customer Expectations Keep Going Up and the Treatment Room Has to Come Online [47:20] The Marketing Engineer Role and Why Pure Analysts Are at Risk 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Each week, I'm sitting down with the most interesting people in eCommerce - founders, investors, marketers, and agency leaders who are actually doing the work. We're skipping past the highlight reels and getting into the real stories that shaped their success.

Information

  • Creator
    Aaron Schwartz
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    97
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Aaron Schwartz
  • Show Website
    The Orita Podcast