I took a new role recently that looks strange on paper for an agency founder: Investor and CTO at The Cabin Luggage Company, an ecommerce brand of my own. After more than twenty years building and scaling stores for other people, I put my own money, and my own nights and weekends, into one I have to answer for.
Why do this to myself
Because it is the most honest way to stay sharp. For two decades I have advised ecommerce owners from the outside, where a bad week is a difficult client call. As the merchant, a bad week is my own cash gone. Every decision lands differently when there is no client to absorb the risk: which feature to build now versus later, how much to spend on ads before I trust the numbers, whether a slow week is a problem or just noise.
My career started at the other end of that spectrum. In 2003 I was a web developer earning 60 dollars a month. Over the next decade I helped grow that company from 16 to 120 employees, and in 2014 I founded MageCloud. I have built for founders the entire time. Sitting in the founder’s chair myself is the one experience all that work never gave me.
What it has already taught me
The lessons came fast and humbling. A weekend where we followed every best practice and still made zero sales. A conversion rate that started at 0.25 percent because we were a brand-new site with everything still to prove. Analytics polluted by automated traffic that made the numbers lie. And a running list of decisions, video versus features, reviews versus ads, that all feel heavier when the money is yours.
This role is the live experiment behind almost everything I share now, and it keeps my advice anchored in a real profit-and-loss rather than theory. It is why I can say plainly that ecommerce is not for everyone, and I am living it, and why thinking like a merchant changes every decision you make. The weekend we did everything right and got zero sales taught me more than a hundred client projects, and the turnaround came from ten changes made one at a time, the same lessons I now bring back to every client.
If you want an advisor who is also standing in the arena with real skin in the game, not just holding a slide deck, book a call.