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Episode 14: The Lifecycle AI Orchestration Layer — Zak Cassady-Dorion on ECD's Breakout Year
Zak Cassady-Dorion (ECD Digital Strategy), interviewed by Ben Walters (Postpilot)

00:06
Zak Cassady-Dorion
The agencies of the future are going to be between the brands and the software. Don't let that scare you — let it excite you. AI isn't taking over — well, it's taking over some things, but not all of it, at least not in the next few years. Ten years out, I have no idea what's going to happen. But you've got to lean in, because there's no fighting it.

00:38
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
But look, man, thank you for sitting down with me. It's been a wild year so far, and we're not done yet. I've been so impressed by the growth of ECD this year. I feel like a year ago you were the greatest agency that a lot of people had never heard of, and this year you've absolutely doubled, tripled, quadrupled down — you've been on a tear. Let's set the scene: we started the year together in Colombia, and it hasn't slowed down since. How would you describe our year to somebody who wasn't there for it?

01:11
Zak Cassady-Dorion
It's been an absolute rocket ship — rocket ship growth. You and I, and the ECD and Postpilot teams, have had a ton of fun. Being in Colombia together was awesome, having your team down there. Then we were in Colombia in January, and a couple of weeks later we were in Vegas throwing the wildest Beacher's Madhouse party. It's been an exciting year.

01:37
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Totally. Tell me more about your approach to the year, because I've seen so much activity — you're in the Klaviyo office right now, you just spoke to a room of 60-plus people, including their brand-new Chief Product Officer. What has that been like? How did you approach that relationship — you've absolutely nailed it this year as far as the Klaviyo relationship. You've been everywhere with Klaviyo. Tell me more about your approach to that and what it's been like.

02:01
Zak Cassady-Dorion
I approach it the same way we approach our customers. Our number one goal for our customers is to make our clients as much money as possible — that's our number one goal as an agency. So when I work with the Klaviyo team, and we work closely with all aspects of their team, whenever somebody from my team is interacting with someone from Klaviyo, our number one goal is to help them achieve what they're trying to do.
It sounds simple, but a lot of times people look at relationships and immediately think about what they can get from it. How I've been going at the relationship is not what can I get, but what can I give — how much can I give, understanding what different people want and how they benefit, and then giving them whatever they need. It's not a selfless thing — I'm not doing it just to be completely selfless. But I understand that if I help other people succeed, it'll come back around.

02:59
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
A hundred percent, man. And you give a lot — every time we're in a room together, your energy alone is infectious. It's been a ton of fun working with you, and I'm excited to keep building together. I want to take a step back — give me a quick intro on yourself. Who's Zak? What is ECD in one sentence? What does it mean to you? Share a little more.

03:20
Zak Cassady-Dorion
ECD — we're an e-commerce marketing agency. We do three main things: retention marketing, performance marketing, and Shopify design and development. Personally — the letters ECD come from my wife's initials, and they're also the first three initials of each of my kids' names. I'm a dad, I'm a business owner. Before being a dad, I was a traveler. In my twenties, I lived, traveled, and worked in something like forty different countries, doing wild stuff.

03:56
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
We'll save that for another day — I've had the pleasure of hearing the stories, and they're pretty fantastic. If anybody listening is curious, you should definitely ask Zak more about it. I'm curious — you spent your twenties traveling the world, and during that time you ran an import-export business out of Thailand and Nepal before e-commerce. How do you think that chapter still shines through in the way you operate your business today?

04:27
Zak Cassady-Dorion
I got really good with the unknown. My first business was right out of college — I moved down to the jungles of Costa Rica and started a mountain bike tour company. I had no idea how to start a business or how to build routes — I didn't know any of it. I was just okay with the unknown, knowing I didn't need to know what the whole roadmap looked like — I just needed to know where to put my next step, and then the next step. Same thing with the import-export business — I was importing textiles from Thailand and Nepal. First thing was finding the textiles, next was figuring out how I was going to sell them — it was really one step at a time.
That's helped me throughout the entire journey. I've been running ECD for ten years now, and that's helped me the whole way — but I think it's helping me even more now, because I've always said I love digital marketing because things change so fast, and every six months you have to keep learning. That's what I used to say. Now it's like every six seconds something is brand new. You have no idea what the next new thing is going to be — you just have to know the general roadmap and be okay with taking one step at a time.

05:39
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Love that. I think a lot of operators have a challenging time with that — that's probably why we see stats like the business failure rate. If you're not comfortable with the unknown, being out of your element, that's a very important skill to have — it helps you run a more successful business and a more successful team. Business and humans are unpredictable, so being comfortable with that lets you persevere and succeed, which is awesome — and clearly that applies to you.
You touched on something there — you said nowadays things are changing every six seconds. You're alluding to the AI revolution, which has already occurred, it's already upon us. I want to dig into that a little. You've said the future of the agency is AI orchestration — being that layer between brands and their software stack, not just a shop that sells hours and basic services. Unpack that for me — what does that actually look like day to day, especially at ECD?

06:44
Zak Cassady-Dorion
There are two ways to look at the changes happening in any space — but especially the e-commerce agency space. One, you can look at it and be scared out of your mind. The other is to look at it and get really excited, and I'm super excited about it. Up until now, eighty percent or so of what brands pay agencies for has been execution — and that's going away. Six months, a year from now, it's going to be completely gone.
With all the AI software out there — the cloud tools, the GPTs, the other tools — and all the AI products these softwares are building inside their own tools, like Composer and Customer AI inside Klaviyo, Sidekick and the AI toolkit inside Shopify — they're automating a lot of the tasks e-commerce agencies and operators spend their time on now. I think that's awesome, because it's going to free up a lot of our time to do higher-level strategy. And no matter how great the AI is inside Klaviyo or Shopify, all of that context is still going to be at least somewhat siloed inside their own software. So I think the place for the agency of the future is going to be between the brands and the softwares they use — that lifecycle AI orchestration layer is where I think the agency of the future is going to build and thrive.

08:19
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Yeah, I love that, and it's true. You're at the Klaviyo office again, making reference to Composer and all these tools. I was out in Edinburgh two weeks ago for Rachel Jacobs' e-commerce agency summit — I know we went to Austin together too. I led a roundtable and posed this question to agencies: do you see this as an opportunity or a threat to your business? It was curious to hear everyone's perspective — obviously differing takes, but I think generally everybody felt like now is the time to get your hands on it, understand it, learn these tools, and be the shining light, be the guide.
Brands have always looked to agencies for a level of expertise and strategy they might not have in-house. So I agree with you — removing the layer of execution isn't a bad thing, it's a huge opportunity to free up more time for strategic thinking. You are the experts — you talk to a lot of people who aren't familiar or comfortable with what AI is capable of today, so why not look to an amazing agency like ECD to execute on that for you, because you know how to do it. You're training teams of 60-plus, 100-plus people at Klaviyo on how to do it. And then you have that added element of — hey, we've run strategy for hundreds, thousands of brands, we know what works, so let us do that for you too. I love your take on that.
Talking about the variety of tools — when you're bringing a new tool or channel to a client, adoption is a place where some agencies fumble the bag. What's your general framework for getting a brand to actually adopt something new, instead of just saying 'thanks for the recommendation' and never using it?

10:09
Zak Cassady-Dorion
I think the biggest thing is finding a product that you really like — a new lever you could pull for a brand that's going to drive revenue — and then becoming an expert at that product yourself. What really helps with that is having a really good partner team, really good partner enablement, partner managers who don't just care about their metrics but genuinely care about helping and educating agencies.
Ben, you guys are freaking awesome at that — Postpilot is one of our favorite softwares out there. I've referred to Postpilot as the secret weapon in e-commerce, because not nearly enough brands are using it, and one hundred percent of the time it drives awesome revenue profitably for our clients. It depends on the scale a brand is at — we work a lot in the commercial, mid-enterprise, and enterprise level, and regardless of how big or small the brand is, the people there can only do so much, and they're hiring agencies to drive revenue for them. So it's our job as agencies — one, learn the different softwares; two, teach it to the brands so they understand it; and then be able to execute on that software on a recurring basis.

11:41
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Yeah, that's amazing, and I appreciate the shoutout in the middle of that answer. I'll give a shoutout to Tyler as well at Klaviyo, because I know he's been a big supporter this year.

11:49
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Tyler is amazing. We've been Klaviyo partners for nine years, and Tyler Solstrom and I started working together directly about eighteen months ago. When we started working together, things just took off like a rocket ship, because he embodies focusing on what benefits the agencies and really educating them on what they need to do to be successful. If you have a great partner manager, listen to them and execute.

12:17
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
I love that you mentioned Postpilot as the secret weapon in every founder's tech stack, and in your playbook for your clients. Could you dig a little more into what clicked with direct mail — what makes it click for a retention-first, Klaviyo-native shop? What set in for you that this is a channel worth testing, and then worth doubling down on?

12:45
Zak Cassady-Dorion
The first thing that clicked, years ago when we first started using Postpilot, was — historically we wouldn't do any direct mail. Not because it didn't work, but because we couldn't track it. If we can't track it, I can't show a client 'you spent this much money and it drove this much in revenue' — that number either works or it doesn't, but it's crystal clear. That's clarity. When I found Postpilot, and you guys showed me how the attribution actually works, that's when the first light bulb went off.
The next thing that really clicked was — we spend a lot of time inside Klaviyo, email and SMS marketing. You go into the audience section, look at your profiles, and see all the profiles you can target — and then all the past profiles that are suppressed, that you can't target. If you look at how many of those suppressed profiles are customers, it's a huge number. You can't email them, you can't text them — maybe they unsubscribed because you sent one too many emails, or they were having a bad day. But when you connect Klaviyo to Postpilot, you can create segments and target all those people, because they still like your brand, they still buy from it — they just need to know about you. That was the first big unlock.
And then working Postpilot into flows has been a really big one — we build our Postpilot strategy right into our Klaviyo strategy. Say we run an abandoned-cart email and SMS flow that lasts seven days — you'll get a lot of people who purchase, but there are still stragglers who don't. So we trigger our Postpilot abandoned-cart flow to start at ten days, and it sends a postcard, which captures a big chunk of those people too. We build it into all of our flows and use it for campaigns. For any brand that's not using it — test it out for a month or two and just watch it. It will work for you.

14:56
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
So good — you guys are definitely the pros, you know what works and what doesn't. I love watching the architecture of the accounts you run, the back end — it's just so clean. As you pointed out, there are so many reasons to leverage direct mail through Postpilot. The suppressed-buyer list is a massive one, especially heading into peak Black Friday holiday season.
Check your suppressed list — how many people are you not able to reach who are buying from your brand or have recently bought from it? How are you getting in touch with them? Why not send a postcard — a surprise-and-delight experience that breaks through the noise? They're going to receive so much digital noise over the next five months — the peak season ahead of us.

15:43
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Yeah — I've got to touch on that too. We love Postpilot all year, but during Black Friday we like it even more, because during that week — or the two weeks around Black Friday — every brand and their sister, brother, and cousin comes out of the woodwork sending emails and SMS messages. You'll get an email from a brand you purchased from three years ago and think, these guys must be emailing their entire list — I thought I unsubscribed from that. It makes it a lot harder to stand out.
But not nearly as many brands send postcards. Emails and SMS messages are instant — you get so many in a day. But postcards, you touch them, you feel them, and they end up on your kitchen counter, your fridge, or your bedside table — you're looking at them over and over again. And your spouse is looking at it too, thinking, that's right, my husband — my wife — loves this brand, maybe they're leaving this out as a signal for me to buy them a gift from this brand for the holidays.

16:50
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Totally — I always leave my mail on my desk too long. I think, this is a good offer, this is a brand I like, I'll use this at some point — and it sits there, and sits there, and eventually maybe I'll make a purchase, whether online or in retail if they have it. I love that — the longevity and quality of the channel is so much more than email, SMS, and paid ads. Of course this operates differently, alongside those channels, and there are a lot of benefits to that — for an agency owner watching this.
How do you pick your best partners — the ones you want to go deep with, versus the ones you keep at arm's length? What's the tell for you that a partnership is worth the real investment? You talked about the team a little — maybe it's that, and maybe there's something more.

17:34
Zak Cassady-Dorion
I think the first and most important thing is that you learn the product and really believe in it. If you don't believe in the product, don't latch onto it, no matter how great the rev share is. You have to really believe in it — find a product you really, really love. Next, the partner team is a big part of it — how available the partner team is to you, how much they help you with enablement. That might not factor directly into the decision of which ones to work with, but what happens is — the partners from the softwares that are the most responsive to us are the ones my team remembers. And when they're creating a promo calendar or a new strategy for a client, that's what they're thinking of.

18:26
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Totally, that makes a ton of sense — being available is always important, no matter what line of business you're in, especially in B2B partnerships and software sales.

19:14
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
If you were advising an agency founder just getting started today — in this age of AI, age of automation — what would they build that you didn't, that you had to figure out five years later?

19:30
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Look at where the product roadmap is going. Whatever your e-commerce agency is building, don't look at what the softwares can do today — look at where that roadmap is heading, and build the agency services that will be able to leverage those products in the future to drive revenue for your clients.

19:59
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Amazing — so have a proper roadmap, and look ahead as much as you can at your partners' roadmaps, and everybody in the ecosystem.

20:09
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Yeah — make assumptions and educate yourself, learn as much as you can. You're only going to get so much information from your partner's roadmap — one, because they'll only share so much, and two, sometimes they don't even know what the roadmap is yet. But learn as much as you can, make your own assumptions about where things are going, and build a product to service that.

20:25
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Nice, I love that. Where does the ECD model go next? What are you building toward that maybe doesn't exist yet — your own roadmap? Give me as much or as little as you want.

20:34
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Well, kind of like I mentioned at the beginning — we're building for the agency of the future, building the software that's going to enable brands to leverage the softwares they use to drive more revenue. The lifecycle AI orchestration layer.

20:50
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Awesome. If we could pull in one brand right now onto this call that you could pitch, that you haven't had a chance to yet — who is that brand? What's the brand you want to work with badly?

21:02
Zak Cassady-Dorion
I love that question. Historically, the brands we've worked with have been in the two-to-twenty-million-dollar range — good brands, but not necessarily household names. This year we've started working with a lot of really well-known brands that everybody knows, and that's been exciting — being out with your family and seeing, 'yeah, that's my brand,' or 'yeah, I market that brand.' That's been fun.
One brand I'd love to work with is Comfort. I love the brand — I like the product, but also the founders' mentality and how fast they grow. They can see what's happening in the future and build toward it. That would be a fun brand to pitch.

21:55
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
A hundred percent — shout out to Hudson and his team at Comfort. I was actually just out in the Hamptons on Friday, and Hudson was speaking on a panel at Northbeam — it was cool to get an inside peek at how he thinks about operating a brand. He talked a lot about branding, and the feel of a brand versus what the product simply delivers, and I think that's key. When you think about a company like Comfort — it's not the first sweatshirt, sweatpants, home-lifestyle brand — but there's definitely a feeling to it, and everyone wants to be part of that feeling. That's why they've had such wild success in such a short time. We work with the Comfort team, so you never know what'll come of something like this if they're taking a look.
Let's go back — quick fun question: Colombia, Miami, Vegas — obviously we've had a couple other trips this year. What's your ranking, what's number one?

23:04
Zak Cassady-Dorion
The Colombia trip. It was amazing. Our team is growing — two years ago I started bringing the whole team together yearly for offsites. Two years ago we did Argentina, it was awesome, about fifteen of us. Last year we did Colombia, and Ben, Drew, and Mermy joined us from the Postpilot team, and it was awesome.
But what was really cool about it was just having the whole team together. When you're a remote company, you spend your whole time on emails, Slack, and Google Meets, and you don't get that time where you're just walking down the hallway, or going out to eat and having conversations about life, about family. It was a really special time — I think that was the highlight of the year.
I've been on a ton of good trips — I've traveled more this year than ever before. It's been like every other week I'm traveling — I was at the Klaviyo offices all week last week, had a suite at Fenway for an event, and I'm back here again this week. But it's been a good year, lots of good events.

24:42
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Unreal — you've been having a ton of fun, and that's a big claim coming from a world traveler who lived abroad all over the place in his twenties. This has been the most travel ever. Colombia was a blast — I'll double down on that. Myself, Drew, and Mermie were so impressed when we walked into that room and saw the team in full. I knew you guys were crushers, but I didn't realize the size of the team, or the quality of every individual — there was so much energy and life, and it was clear everyone cared so deeply about the ECD mindset and approach. We had a ton of fun, and I thank you again for including us in that.
I'm excited to see what January 2027 looks like — we'll have a blast, I can't wait. Alright — one more question, and then let me know if there's anything else you want to cover.

25:26
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Some more fun together.

25:35
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Finish the sentence: the agencies that win the next five years are the ones that —

25:41
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Lean heavily into AI now.

25:43
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
Nice, awesome — yeah, I agree. If you don't learn it now, you probably won't have a business in the next twelve months.

25:50
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Yeah — but don't let that scare you, let it excite you. AI's not taking over — well, it's taking over some things, but not all of it, at least not in the next few years. Ten years out, I have no idea what's going to happen. But you've got to lean in, because there's no fighting it.

26:05
Ben Walters (Postpilot)
No, that's a good call-out. When language like that gets used, some people take it the wrong way — like, 'well, why do I even build at all, I'm done for.' No — you should see it as an opportunity. Where there are treacherous waters, there's always the opportunity to push past and move beyond, and there's land on the other side. There's a lot of money to be made, and a lot of potential. I appreciate you saying that for founders and operators out there thinking about building — don't be scared, take it head on. Brother, this was great.

26:54
Zak Cassady-Dorion
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