I'm Josh. When I first started, I offered to work for free for a month and still couldn’t close a single client. 8 years later, I run a 75-person retention agency behind $380M in attributed revenue. The beginning was quite a unique journey: • I spent every dollar I had on courses, books, and food. • Spent 4 months reaching out to brands who didn't care about email. • Couldn't even give my work away for free. I was in college and had no grand plan or startup vision. I just needed to make money so I could eat. I'd been flipping random stuff on eBay, dropshipping, making a little bit of cash on the side. But I saw an opportunity in email marketing and decided to pivot. But I had nothing: • No network. • No connections. • About $1,000 to my name. That was my entire operating budget. And the brands I was reaching out to didn't care about email at all… They were all-in on Facebook ads, doubling down on paid. Email was an afterthought to pretty much everyone. So I spent four months doing cold outreach every day. Reaching out to brands on social media trying to land a single client. And got zero results. Not a single client. So I had a new genius offer: "I'll do it for free. Four weeks, with no charge. We only talk about payment after I've driven results." It felt like the offer nobody could refuse. It turns out, free has a cost. If you're a successful business owner, the risk of handing your email system to a random kid off the internet is real. • What if he messes something up? • What if you lose customers? • What if skimping on a proper hire ends up costing more than paying for one? The opportunity cost of free was too high. And at the time I had no clue of it. I learned something that still shapes me today: For people who've already built something, money isn't the scarcest resource. Time and attention are. • Free doesn't solve for time. • Free doesn't solve for attention. • Free just means cheap. And cheap feels risky. Once I understood that, I stopped competing on price and I started solving for what was actually scarce. 8 years later… ~$380M in retention-attributed revenue. ~75 people on the team. ~60 active clients. It all started with $1,000 and four months of hearing no. The constraint you're solving for might be the wrong one.

This guy joined us from Mindvalley without much ecom experience, which made hiring him the biggest risk we took. Now he's taken on some of our biggest accounts. Meet Navid: He's based in Malaysia, so the time zone is great for us. But I was quite worried that his limited ecom, DTC, and retail experience was going to be a roadblock. He changed my mindset. I've come to realize that ecom and technical knowledge can be learned. Teaching it is much easier than coaching work ethic and intelligence into someone who has neither. So when you're hiring, find someone who's driven, smart, and willing. Look for a core understanding of marketing and client relationships. Then train them up on the ecom and technical side. Navid is proof of that.

This founder email template gets your customers to reply with what's bugging them.

A day in the life of a founder traveling for events. I start adjusting to the new time zone a few days before I fly. (Been using an app called Timeshifter for a long time, and it tends to work) Then I keep adjusting on the flight. I also use melatonin and caffeine. So when I arrive, I arrive fresh. Day 1: - Arrive during the day, so I'm forced to stay awake. - Hit up a local weightlifting or CrossFit gym and do something really hard. - Keep the day chill without many meetings. (That way, I can go to bed earlier in case I get groggy.) The rest of the week: - Wake up around 6 AM or earlier, same as at home. - Work out at the gyms I mapped out for the week. - Go to bed around the same time every night so I get enough sleep. (Sticking to that routine is why I adjust really quickly.) My setup: - A massive 25,000 mAh power bank that charges my laptop and my phone With it, I can get a full day of nonstop work on the road without needing a plug. I work from local cafes so I get to see the city too (I don't really enjoy sightseeing when I'm alone, I only do that when I'm traveling with my wife or in a group). Cafes are also a great way to meet locals and get to know them. If there's a local poker room, I'll hit it up. Poker is how I unwind, and it's almost meditative. When I play, I'm forced to be fully present. I don't use my phone or listen to music. I'm just fully engaged at the table. This sounds like a boring trip, but it's actually pretty fun. Next trip is Ecom North in Toronto on October 29-30. I’m already looking forward to it.

Exciting month at our agency - We closed a pretty massive deal with an estimated annual contract value of a $250,000+ (and we beat out two other really strong agencies to win it). - One of our clients does mid 8-figures a year. They hit higher highs in retention revenue for two quarters straight, while facing unprecedented competition in their space. - I just flew out to Boston as part of Klaviyo's partner advisory council and got to connect with the Klaviyo leadership team. Pretty awesome way to enter Q4

Quick tip to make more money this BFCM if you run an 8-figure subscription brand: Be mindful of the offer disparity between your first-time customers and your subscribers. Say your subscribers get 10-20% off every order on autoship. For BFCM, you might be offering first-time customers 30% off their first purchase. That disparity can cause a lot of churn without you knowing. There are four ways of dealing with it: Allow churn to happen and take it. Allow subscribers to stack their discounts just for the next order. Give subscribers a gift of the same value instead of the first-time customer offer. Allow subscribers to stock up at the discounted first-time customer rate. Allowing churn is a terrible idea, but it is a strategy. Stacking discounts is a terrible idea too. It just kills your margins at no incremental gain in value capture. And the gift has to be unique enough that subscribers see sufficient value in it to not churn and take up that first-time customer offer. So stocking up is the way to go. Your subscribers still get the same shipment, but they can also purchase an additional shipment at 30% off, or whatever your BFCM offer is. Pro tip: offer surprise store credits as an additional churn prevention but make them redeemable only in January when the Q1 cliff happens. Now go and reduce churn as much as you can.

One of our clients did over $4.9M in retention revenue YTD. And that's on a 1-day click (literally one of the tightest forms of attribution).

My parents' dream was stability and security. Mine is a little different. Growing up, we didn't have much of an opportunity to live life beyond our basic needs. At one point, my parents were homeowners, and then they weren't. So their dream was for their kids to go to university, get a good job, and get a stable paycheck. That was it. But I don't want my family to be confined by the limitations of our resources. I want all of us (including my parents and my extended family) to experience life to its greatest extent. I got to see some of that with my mom. She had never been abroad until I brought her to Taiwan for my engagement trip and to New Zealand for my sister's graduation. For the first time, she got to experience travel and some luxury. - My parents' dream: stability and security. - My dream: experiencing life as it happens. The security of tomorrow still matters to me, but so do the joys of life. That's my dream. You choose yours.

Rest-of-year email vs. BFCM email What changes: - Rest of year: You're segmenting heavily and trying to run efficient sends. - BFCM: You're going broad and hitting the whole list multiple times, so you have a higher tolerance for negative engagement. - Rest of year: You're putting value first, because people aren't expecting or wanting to hear about discounts all the time. - BFCM: You can get really aggressive with your sales copy, because discounts are expected. - Rest of year: You're optimizing around AOV and LTV, and you're mindful of acquiring customers whose first purchase only breaks even or makes a marginal profit. - BFCM: Customers you acquire generally have a lower LTV than at any other time of the year, so you're making a volume play and retention's job is to bridge them into long-term loyal customers. - Rest of year: Your bundles have to be a little tighter on AOV. - BFCM: The tolerance for higher AOVs in your bundles tends to go up, because people who feel they're getting a great deal are willing to spend more.

A single Klaviyo number will not tell you how your retention is doing. Here is the stack we actually read on an account: - Klaviyo revenue as a percentage, next to Northbeam revenue as a percentage - The Northbeam to Klaviyo revenue ratio, week over week and year over year - Email revenue against SMS revenue - Opens, clicks, unique opens, unique clicks, unsubs, spam and bounces, as percentages - Emails sent against web sessions - Click and revenue per recipient - Percentage of checkout orders that include a subscription - How many subscribers we touched with email and SMS in a 24 hour window, against baseline We do not read all of this to report a number. We read it to know what to change next.

We have a beauty brand doing under $1,000,000 a month. In one month, email went from under 10% of revenue to 20%. The change was one thing. The welcome pop-up. We rebuilt it into a full-page takeover with two choices. Free shipping or a free gift. We never said what the gift was. You found out in the email. That built the anticipation. And the jump was measured on a one-day open and a one-day click. Not the five-day window that makes every dashboard look bigger than it is.

We're accepting a new group of DTC brands into our done-for-you retention program. This is for you if you're a 7-8 figure DTC brand owner who's hungry to scale, but you're struggling with things like: - Paying to acquire customers who never come back after their first order - Riding a revenue rollercoaster from one promo to the next - Watching customers stop opening your emails and tapping through your SMS If any of that sounds familiar, keep reading. We've helped 500+ brands turn one-time buyers into customers who keep coming back, and we've generated $380M+ in attributed revenue. Inside the program, we give you: - Email, SMS, push, WhatsApp, RCS, and direct mail (where applicable), all done for you - A dedicated Klaviyo Master Elite Partner team that works across 11 platforms, including Attentive, Braze, Postscript, Omnisend, and HubSpot - Strategy, copy, design, segmentation, and deliverability handled in-house - A campaign calendar built around your goals and planned a month ahead - Weekly written progress updates, so you don't have to ask what's going on - Monthly or biweekly strategy calls where we go through your results And before we touch a single email, you get a full audit that looks at: - How your email campaigns score against industry benchmarks - Your flows, from opt-in to checkout and from upsells to winbacks - Your send times, segments, and split tests - How much traffic your email and SMS send to your site - How much of your list hasn't received an email in the last 30 days If you want to see if you're a fit, book a call below. chronos.agency/appointment/