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Episode 9

Jun 23, 2026

Zak Cassady-Dorion

Episode 9:

From the Gobi Desert to $100M+: How Matt Scanlan Built Naadam on Radical Fairness

Video Transcript

From the Gobi Desert to $100M+: How Matt Scanlan Built Naadam on Radical Fairness

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D2C Revenue Rocket Podcast — Episode 9

Zak (0:07)
Welcome to the D2C Revenue Rocket Podcast. Today we have Matt Scanlan, co-founder of Naadam. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Scanlan (0:16)
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Zak (0:18)
Yeah. So I have heard a lot of founder stories over the years and you definitely have one of the most wild and interesting ones. Before we jump into what you're doing now and where you're going, I'd love for you to share your story with everyone.

Matt Scanlan (0:36)
Yeah, well thank you for that. I forget sometimes — it honestly feels like a different lifetime. And there certainly was a period where our founding story was kind of all I had to offer, because we didn't know how to make product, we didn't know how we were going to distribute it, we didn't know how we were going to build the business — we hadn't done anything yet. So it's fun to go back to it.

It's a story of a kid who kind of didn't know what the hell he was doing — and I kind of still don't. But I'll give the shortened version because it's a long story. I'd spent a couple of years working in finance in New York, not really enjoying it, had no plan to do it long term, and knew I needed a break. I was about twenty-three, twenty-four at the time, and decided I was going to take a trip around Asia. I'd always wanted to see China, wanted to go to Southeast Asia. And I had a buddy who was studying abroad in Asia and he said he'd travel with me here or there, but that he really wanted to go to Mongolia. Mongolia was not on my list — I hadn't really known much about it. But he was interested, so I said okay, I'll meet you there first and then we'll hit the rest of the itinerary.

We went to Mongolia and I guess I never left. Very serendipitous. We didn't have a plan when we got there — we were just going to backpack around, stay in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. Looking back on it, knowing nothing about where we were going or what we were planning to do is, I think, why we're here today. I was super uncomfortable, by the way. I'd actually never really done this type of travel. I make myself sound a little cooler than I actually was. I need to remind people throughout this story that I was a very sheltered kid from Westport, Connecticut who'd never done anything like that before.

Matt Scanlan (2:59)
In any event, we were starving for comfort in a place that felt very uncomfortable. We were staying at a hostel behind the State Department store in Ulaanbaatar — this was over ten years ago, so the city was different in a lot of ways. We said, where can we find other Americans? So we asked where the expats were. We went to a place called Genghis Khan's Pub — I think it's still there. We get there and we realize there are no expats, it's just Mongolians, and everyone's looking at us strangely. We ended up meeting a couple of guys who offered to take us to the countryside. We spent all night talking to them and they said they were leaving the next morning if we wanted to come. So we agreed.

No questions were asked. We just said, yeah, sure, whatever. Long story short, we end up in the car for somewhere between twenty and twenty-two hours. We kind of thought we were doing a big circle and coming back to the city at the end of the day. Around midnight, we're not back in the city. We end up spending the night with a herder in a ger — a tent-like structure that nomadic herders use as their home throughout the Mongolian countryside.

We're thinking this is an awesome experience, but when are we going back? And what we find out over the course of a couple of conversations is that's not really what happened. We'd been taken to a relatively remote area of Mongolia called the Gobi Desert — the outer Gobi, past Khüngüü, in the southwest region. And we were basically left there. So we spent a month living with this family. They took us in, clothed us, fed us, and we had this remarkable, transformative experience where we came to one really important conclusion: they're just like us.

Matt Scanlan (5:21)
No matter where you go in the world, no matter how uncomfortable you feel because things don't feel familiar, people are people. When something's funny, everybody laughs. When someone gets angry, they yell at you. Those are universalities. It was this eye-opening, transformative experience that we came to really cherish, and we used it as the centerpiece of whatever we did next. Whatever we built going forward was going to be rooted in this understanding: you should treat everyone fairly because we're all equal. When you go into business together, everything you do should be to make it equal — you should win, I should win. That felt really simple.

Not having any experience or a real agenda led us to some really foundational conclusions that drove the rest of our careers — for better or for worse. That's not always what we've encountered along the way. There are plenty of people who want us to lose in a business deal. But our value system is our value system. It's what we learned to do. And so we eventually left Mongolia, but we came back with the idea of supporting the community through some nonprofit work. We understood that they subsisted off of herding animals — primarily goats. They combed the fur off those goats and sold it. They were the base of a big supply chain. That hair they comb is called cashmere. We didn't know any of this at the time, but we asked: what do you need? How can we help? And basically what they said was: veterinary care. They wanted the animals to be healthy, to have a more consistent livelihood. Simple.

So we raised some money for a nonprofit. It didn't go the way we thought — we just weren't understanding something. We realized there was a big problem in the supply chain. The herders were at the bottom of a supply chain that, for literally centuries, had benefited by fixing cost structures based on remoteness. People would arrive through remote areas, collectively fix lower prices, and then resell the material in a commoditized supply chain. We started asking questions: What does it sell for? Who do you sell it to? What's the end price? And we came to the conclusion that the people getting screwed the most were the people we cared about most — the herders.

Matt Scanlan (7:48)
They did not benefit from their hard work. They didn't see the end product, they didn't see the markup along the way, and they were just trying to sell what they could to make money off the hard work they did all year long. To put this in perspective — they subsist through negative forty degree temperatures on average in the wintertime. They live in the steppe region of Mongolia, which is frigid and grueling most of the year because they're nomadic. They live in gers and move them anywhere between two and eleven times a year to follow the herd. And they simply comb the animals in the springtime and sell the material. That's it.

So we came to one really weird conclusion: why don't we just buy the material directly from them? Cut out all the middlemen who are screwing them. We came up with the idea that we would get our hands on about two and a half million dollars of cash and buy everything from them. And we did. I found someone to lend us two and a half million dollars. I wired it to a bank account in Mongolia, took it all out in cash, and we drove that twenty-two hours off-road into the Gobi Desert, where we bought about sixty tons of cashmere from the entire community — about sixteen tractor trailers' worth. Then we trucked it back. It took thirty-two hours to get it back to Ulaanbaatar. We had no idea how to process it, no idea how to spin it, no idea how to make a sweater, no idea how to sell it. It was a crazy, crazy experience.

Matt Scanlan (10:13)
Looking back on it, knowing what I know now, there's no way I would have been able to take the same risks. But it was this relentless need to solve the problem in front of us for the people we cared about. And that same mentality, that same value system — we've tried really hard to maintain it in everything we've done. I'd be lying if I said we've done it perfectly. We haven't. Business is tough. But I've said to investors and lenders over time when they ask: why can't someone just buy this business and remove the whole thing? Why can't they gut the value system if it's not advantageous financially? Two reasons. One, you don't end up with the same product or value proposition for the customer if you change that. Two, as long as I'm here, these are our values. These are my values. This is the only thing the brand stands on. We make sweaters and we do it with an equitable lens — toward a value proposition for the customer and for the people we source the material from. We wouldn't do it any other way.

Zak (11:40)
That story is so awesome. And I'm sure you could tell the full version for hours and still not get to the whole thing. My twenties had a lot of similar experiences — nothing that led to building a hundred-million-dollar-plus business, but I did a lot of similar things where I would travel to places and people would say, hey, do you want to come to my village, and I'd just go. Usually for twenty-four hours or twelve hours. But when you guys realized you weren't going anywhere and you were staying there — you're twenty-three years old, first time really outside the country somewhere unfamiliar — what were you feeling?

Matt Scanlan (12:28)
Overwhelmed. Initially I was really scared. There was just so much ambiguity. No one spoke English, so it was really challenging to root ourselves in anything. There would be days where we didn't talk to anybody but each other. We felt out of place, uncomfortable — none of the things that make us feel comfortable were there. No electricity, no running water, no food, we hadn't brought any clothing with us. We were not prepared for this.

It was only one experience that turned everything around. I was really busy making myself miserable early on. I was overwhelmed and scared and constantly thinking: I'm different. I'm not the same as them. And that was making it harder — I was distancing myself from reality, which I'm sure is a normal defense mechanism. But then Dick and I were asked to herd the goats one day. You kind of just open the gate, let them out, and follow them wherever they go. But another herder's goats ended up mixing with ours, which is apparently a nightmare to sort out. One of the herders we were staying with came out and was really angry, yelling at us in Mongolian.

Matt Scanlan (14:27)
We didn't know why we were in trouble. We hadn't thought we'd done anything wrong. But it was the first time I felt comfortable — because I understood what was happening. I didn't know what he was saying, but I knew I was in trouble. I've been yelled at before. I understood the situation, and it clicked for me really quickly: you are just like anyone else I've ever met. All of a sudden everything started to rewire. I spent the rest of my time there finding the similarities between us rather than the differences. And that transformed my whole life. Honestly, it's just practical advice for anyone. If you walk into a room, go to a party where you don't know anyone, and you spend your time thinking, these guys are not like me — you're going to make yourself uncomfortable. If you're focused on differences, you're going to have a hard time relating. From that point forward it really was like a light bulb. We flipped the switch and started to really settle in and enjoy the experience.

Zak (16:01)
I traveled in a similar way for about eight years in my twenties. And I will tell you — every single time I was in a position like that, I was scared out of my mind. So I don't know if you're ever really prepared.

Matt Scanlan (16:16)
No, but it's a mindset. You can evolve. Some people are prewired to be more accepting and open, and that openness is critical to how we built this business. There's no secret formula for how we built Naadam. Nothing spectacular other than that we focused on relationships with people and finding similarities. It's all rooted in people.

Zak (16:59)
You know, I think that does position you well for whatever comes next. And something I want to note: you have to be okay with the unknown to do what you did. That's a really important quality for any successful entrepreneur. We have no idea what's going to happen next, and you've got to be okay with that.

Matt Scanlan (17:34)
Today I still operate Naadam, but I've also invested in a lot of consumer businesses and worked with a lot of other founders. And the common characteristic of people who stick it out is comfort with ambiguity — understanding that you can't control everything and some of it you're going to have to figure out as you go. If you don't like ambiguity, being a founder is extremely painful. You'll never find comfort. Tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to prioritize in the absence of structure and pick what your structure needs to be — that's what allows a founder to navigate over a long period of time. Consumer is, for whatever reason, at the higher end of complexity in the startup world. I wish I'd known that originally. It requires stamina.

Zak (19:00)
Something else you mentioned — being really good with people and understanding people has been one of your strengths. And all anyone's talking about right now is AI. It's just wild, the changes from one month to the next. But one thing that is not going to change no matter how good the technology gets is that personal relationships and understanding people will still be a key component to running a business.

Matt Scanlan (19:45)
I should hope so, because I'm not building AI models. I'm a people person. My job is rooted in the relationships we've built — whether it's with our suppliers overseas, the herders we built the business around, our customers, our vendors, or our employees. I'll tell you — I struggle with the AI conversation. I've certainly experienced it as a consumer. I use it to write emails, polish up proposals, analyze legal documents. But it's not transforming my business today. It's come a long way in the four years that I've been paying attention to it. But I haven't seen a major inflection point get triggered by mass adoption of these tools yet. I think it will happen. I think it will have a major efficiency impact on the business. But I don't know if it's going to have the offsetting people impact that people think it will. I don't see a world where you completely deleverage from your reliance on people to operate this business. I think it'll make large groups of people more efficient, which will make businesses better. But I'm not preparing for mass layoffs and transitions to AI agents. I'm not seeing it. And so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Matt Scanlan (22:03)
I've looked at dozens of tools — customer service, creative, whatever — and it makes sense to me. I just haven't seen it transform things yet. And I'm not an AI naysayer. I'm just saying personally, I haven't seen it yet. I don't know if that's what you're hearing from other founders, or if I'm the odd man out.

Zak (22:29)
Well, I think the way I'm taking it is that it's pushback on the line of thinking that AI is going to take over everything. Sam Altman says all jobs will be replaced within three years. And what you're saying is: no, that's not going to happen. I agree with that too — at least I hope so. What I am seeing is that a lot of the execution-level work is being done a lot quicker, a lot more efficiently — which is freeing up more time for high-level strategy thinking.

Matt Scanlan (23:16)
I certainly think so. The tools are improving, but the rate of improvement is also the rate at which people get comfortable adopting them. There's a buffer there. If a performance marketer has spent ten or fifteen years operating within a certain structure, they're not going to automatically adopt new tools overnight in the way it sounds like they should. And I'm acutely aware of the rhetoric coming out of AI founders — it's a great way to prop up an IPO price if you're telling everyone it's going to change the whole world forever.

I'm not the smartest person in most rooms I walk into, so let me preface this: I'm just an average person looking at it through a particular lens. I'm not a super technical person. I'm not going to build agents to automate my whole life. And I'm not seeing the tools automate big parts of my business yet. When I hear founders and operators talk about how they've transformed everything using AI, I'm very skeptical. And when it comes to how it will affect people mentally — that's hard to predict.

Zak (25:49)
Yeah, it is hard to predict. I think we're going to see a change in the type of work people are doing. There's always going to be a need for the human layer in all of this. What I'm seeing is that historically, eighty percent of the work that brands paid us for at my agency was execution. In two years from now, brands are not going to be paying us to do eighty percent execution — the AI tools being built natively are going to make that a lot easier. But there's still going to be a place for agencies. It's just going to look different. Someone needs to hold all the context about the business. I don't care how great the AI tools inside of Shopify or Klaviyo are — if you come to me and say your signup rate on forms is way down, the AI may not have the context that it's down because you just launched a new sweater, ran a new Meta campaign, and the traffic quality dropped. We need people in between to apply context and make decisions with all the data we have.

Matt Scanlan (27:31)
I agree completely. I think they'll be adopted the same way any SaaS solution you use to operate a business today was adopted — things that ten years ago seemed transformative. The people who operate businesses will adopt different AI tooling. But human judgment is never going to go out the window. Not in our category. In marketing, there are aspects of human psychology and selling that are crucial. I tell the team here all the time when we get caught up in the details: we should not forget that we are selling things to people. This is not that complicated. I have something and I need to get you to buy it from me. AI will certainly present shortcuts to populating and presenting that information based on available data. But human judgment will be required regardless.

Zak (29:02)
I don't buy the argument that we're going to be selling to agents instead of humans either. The reason is that people like to consume. People like to purchase. They like the gratification of pushing that buy-now button.

Matt Scanlan (29:26)
In my experience of doing this for over a decade — nothing is ever as bad as it seems, and the monster in the closet is never as scary as you thought. The things I think will happen are always worse than the actual outcome. If I just sit with the worst case scenario for anything in my business, I will come up with something worse than what could actually happen. I apply that same logic to all of this. And I don't want to make this whole conversation about AI because I honestly don't know anything other than what I see every single day. We sell sweaters. I'm in the schmata business. That's it. Whenever I get too heady about things or overcomplicate them — which I do frequently — I remind myself that I'm a simple sweater salesman. If I forget that, then I'm overlooking the foundational premise behind why we run this company.

Zak (31:00)
I like it. You sell sweaters to people. People purchase your sweater.

Matt Scanlan (31:06)
That's it. We're always searching for ways to be more profitable and make the process more efficient, but I don't think the fundamental pieces of that transaction are going to change too dramatically in my lifetime of operating this business. But listen — if you're seeing something I'm not, I love being proven wrong.

Zak (31:41)
I don't think I disagree with the premise of what you're saying. Ultimately, we're going to find efficiencies with AI, different people are going to adopt it at different rates, and ultimately there is going to need to be a people layer in everything we do.

Matt Scanlan (32:21)
Yeah. We are building things for people. I've lived by a premise for the life of building Naadam, and really anything I've endeavored along the way: keep it simple, stupid. Bring things down to their foundational level and make decisions from that perspective rather than trying to account for all possible variables. In the short time I've been doing this — ten years or so, which is relatively short in the lifetime of a brand — I've seen so many mutations of direct-to-consumer. I remember raising money to launch Naadam in 2015 and it was all: retail is dead, no one's going to go into a store again, e-commerce is changing everything, spend ten million on performance marketing and make twenty or thirty and just keep going until infinity. That was the premise behind launching DTC businesses back then. And none of that is true today.

Zak (33:55)
And how many times over those ten years has email been dead? Email's dead, email's dead, no one's using email.

Matt Scanlan (34:03)
A hundred percent. Every six months something changes and there's a prognostication about what's dead and what's going to change everything. I've just become desensitized to the noise. The thing I always come back to is: what are the foundational elements of this problem? Remove all the other noise. Make this one plus one equals two. I'm sure there are businesses way more sophisticated than what I do, and people way smarter than me executing them. I am not those things. So one plus one always needs to equal two for me. If I can't get to that place, it's not a decision for me in that moment. That's the only way I've been able to manage the ambiguity we talked about earlier — which, by the way, never goes away. The longer you do this, the bigger the problems become. I wish someone had told me that years ago.

Zak (35:17)
Alright. I've got some other questions about the DTC side and launching the business. But I have to ask — you're twenty-three, twenty-four years old and you're holding two and a half million dollars in cash. How did that feel?

Matt Scanlan (35:41)
Scary? No, honestly it didn't. Looking back at that time, there was just so much I didn't know. It wasn't real, if that makes sense. Those decisions today, I would understand the consequences of the mistakes. But at twenty-four, I didn't know there were consequences. It just felt like what it took to get from A to B to C.

I've been asked a million times whether I had security with me, whether someone was around. It didn't even cross my mind. The only way to transact at that time with the people we were working with was to show up with cash. They wouldn't trust us to wire money. Show it to me. Put it in my hand and I'll give you what I have. Really, really fundamental.

So we went to the bank and started withdrawing the two and a half million dollars. To give you some perspective — we had to go to several different banks throughout the day because no individual bank held that much cash. Each one would put it in a shopping bag. So I'd walk out with two Stop & Shop bags, throw them in the backseat, go to the next bank, same thing. The entire backseat and trunk of the Land Cruiser was floor-to-ceiling cash. All you could see was money pressed up against the glass. It was sixty-five pounds of money — two million tögrög in the Mongolian currency.

Matt Scanlan (37:38)
We arrived in the area the next day and just kept all the cash locked in the trunk. Then I would spend all day buying from the herders. I'd meet with one, bring his cashmere, we'd weigh it, inspect it, pay him cash, he'd walk away, we'd throw it in the warehouse, and we'd just keep doing it for three weeks straight, every day. It was insane. Looking back it feels like a movie. At the time I was just too naive to know what was really happening. It was just how we had to do it.

Zak (38:42)
I totally get it. I spent my mid-twenties living in Hawaii, importing textiles from Thailand and Nepal — nothing near the scale of what you were doing. But I told a friend I was leaving Hawaii to travel Southeast Asia and he called me out on it. Said his dad was leaving on a sailboat to sail around the world and needed one more person. It was a three-week sail from Hawaii to California. Gnarly trip — fifty-foot waves, sixty-mile-an-hour winds.

Matt Scanlan (43:38)
I love those experiences. I grew up sailing and used to spend summers sailing schooners around Martha's Vineyard. And I know the crossing between Hawaii and California is treacherous if you're not an experienced sailor. Doing that is like a death sentence. That's insane that you just signed up for it.

Zak (44:15)
Insane. But it's the same thing — I was twenty-six, twenty-seven, just looking for adventure, thinking I was indestructible, wanting to blow my mind and try something new. Now I have three kids and I couldn't imagine if one of them wanted to do something like that. My poor mother.

Matt Scanlan (44:43)
I look back at those experiences building Naadam and I think — if I knew everything I know today, if I wrote out every experience I've had that nearly killed me, there's no amount of money you could pay me to do this again. I never feel secure. I always feel like we are just a few steps away from failing. That never goes away. But being naive — you have to have that. I've always had the feeling that I just had to figure it out, that I had to keep going. That survival mentality is the only thing that's really driven me through all of it. That, mixed with a heavy dose of not knowing what I don't know. It's just solving problems. Whatever it takes.

Zak (45:58)
Yeah. You either do whatever you have to do, or you don't — and then you don't make it.

Matt Scanlan (46:02)
Right. I talk to people all the time who are starting companies and they say, well, I want to keep my day job and start this on the side. My advice is always: if you don't do it a hundred percent, you're not doing it. If you're keeping a safety net, you're never going to give it what it takes to make it work. I certainly have felt that if I didn't feel like I would die if I failed, I would not have kept going. There's no logical reason to keep going otherwise.

And that's driven me through every major inflection point building this business. We've gone through several mutations — the early days of scaling DTC with a lot of venture backing, then a private equity-backed holdco roll-up strategy, and then we came back to a single standalone brand diversified across different distribution channels. It looks a lot more like the business that existed before 2015 in this category. It's been a wild experience. But it's always been: I have to figure out how to get from A to B, and if I don't, I fail. Being in that process a hundred and fifty percent is the only reason we're here today.

Zak (47:42)
Yeah, I agree with all of that. Not knowing what's going to happen, realizing you've got two choices — you do this and you succeed, or you don't and you fail. It's simple. You're going to do what you have to do to live.

Matt Scanlan (48:06)
I was listening to a podcast with Jensen Huang from Nvidia, and he was talking about how even today he's scared to death to fail. I've heard a lot of founder podcasts where these guys seem untouchable and formulaic. But that resonated with me more than basically anything I've heard from another founder. I'm not afraid to admit it — I am scared to death to fail. I will do anything possible to avoid that, because I view it as survival at all costs, all the time. Building a business in this category, I think, takes a bit more of that. It's extremely volatile. It certainly has been over the past ten years. And that founding experience — being dropped in the middle of nowhere and having to figure it out — has guided our values, but it's also been the playbook. The founding story never adapted away. It's been how we've done things.

Zak (49:31)
Figure it out. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've sold a new service to a client and then gone back to the team and said, we just sold this. And they're like, how on earth are we going to do this thing?

Matt Scanlan (49:48)
Yeah, all the time. I totally get that. Sell it and then figure out how to do it. We've hired people from large organizations and you explain that and they say, what are you talking about? That's an insane operating model. But I think it's foundational for a lot of startups. I guarantee you our team here just knows it at this point. They're like, what now? What did you just sell us into?

Zak (50:29)
What did you commit us to do? Yeah. Zak, how are we going to do this?

Matt Scanlan (50:32)
I've done a lot of that. And you just figure it out. You just figure it out.

Zak (50:40)
And it gives them so much self-confidence. When you go to your employees and say, guys, you can do this — you can figure this out — and then they do it, and they're like, wow, I can do this.

Matt Scanlan (51:01)
Right. It's a confidence-building process. The more times you just have to figure it out and you're successful, the more comfortable you become living in an environment where that is how you operate. I'm confident other businesses don't work this way — I've seen it work differently. But at least in my experience, and it sounds like in yours as well, that's the operating model. And I'm comfortable in that world.

Zak (51:37)
Yeah. And I think some people need to know exactly how everything plays out — and that's wonderful, there's probably a lot more security in that. But I think with AI, we need to be okay with not knowing exactly what the picture looks like. I guarantee you digital agencies two years from now are going to look drastically different. The ones that are still around, anyway.

Matt Scanlan (52:09)
I think so. The services that are going to be offered will be transformed. But the agencies that know how to implement, train, and utilize these tools are the ones that are going to be leveraged the most. We already get a lot of outreach from individuals and corporations who come in to train teams on how to use certain things, or map out how to adopt different agent systems. I think that will be a big part of how agencies service customers going forward — because a lot of businesses are not going to do this on their own. I look at my father-in-law's business, a chemical manufacturer in the Midwest. I'm pretty confident they're not mapping out SOPs to overlay agent usage across internal systems. So I think the agency world will adapt to the variation in who's adopting what and when.

Zak (53:23)
Yeah, that makes sense. Agencies selling to landscape companies are not going to adapt nearly as quickly as others.

Matt Scanlan (53:39)
There'll be variation across the board. I'll just remain a little cautious.

Zak (53:50)
Alright Matt, we're about at time and I had three pages of questions — I've got two and three-quarters left. Let's do some rapid fire. One consumer brand you admire right now.

Matt Scanlan (54:14)
Malbon Golf, I think, is doing really, really cool stuff.

Zak (54:18)
Most underrated skill for founders.

Matt Scanlan (54:20)
Endurance.

Zak (54:25)
Best advice you ever received.

Matt Scanlan (54:25)
Shut up and listen.

Zak (54:26)
Three tools in your tech stack you couldn't live without.

Matt Scanlan (54:30)
Company-wise — Klaviyo is becoming a larger part of our business model. We've also adopted a tool called Homegrown, which is an AI tool for creative. And the third... I don't know off the top of my head. Those are two solid ones. And Shopify, of course.

Zak (55:10)
Awesome. Matt, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for coming on.

Matt Scanlan (55:16)
Thanks for having me, man. This was fun. Loved hearing your stories too. It's nice to know I'm not the only crazy one.

Zak (55:24)
There's others out there. Before we wrap up — if you're serious about growing your e-commerce brand, go grab a free revenue audit. We find the revenue you're leaving on the table. We'll analyze your store, marketing, and retention channels to show you exactly where the biggest revenue opportunities are. It's completely free and you'll walk away with a clear growth plan. Just go to klaviyo.com/ECD and book your audit today.

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Meet the Host

For over two decades, Zak Cassady-Dorion has worked across entrepreneurship, marketing, and digital commerce, helping businesses grow in fast-moving markets. Today he is the Founder and CEO of ECD Digital Strategy, a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency and Klaviyo Platinum Partner working closely with platforms like Shopify, Meta, and Google.

Throughout that time, Zak has seen the same pattern repeat itself across the DTC world. Some brands plateau while others break through. The difference is rarely a secret tactic or a lucky ad. More often, it comes down to disciplined strategy, clear data, and marketing systems designed to prioritize revenue over vanity metrics.

On the D2C Revenue Rocket Podcast, Zak sits down with founders, operators, and growth leaders to unpack the playbooks behind real DTC success. The goal is simple: help brands break through revenue ceilings and build the systems that power their own revenue rocket.

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