S3E07: Justin Aronstein - Embracing Failure & Nonconformity

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the tastemakers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce famous. Welcome to Commerce Famous episode seven season three.

Joining me today is Justin Ehrenstein, a new face to the ecosystem. He is a chief product officer for Mobile First, longtime ecommerce veteran, and we're gonna walk through a little bit of his journey today. Justin, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for having me. Really happy to be here and and excited to explore.

Yes. So, one of the reasons we really wanted to have you on the pod is because, you know, there is no hall of fame for ecommerce, but so we have to make our own, which we call the Commerce Famous Podcast. And so we like to talk to people who really focus in on a problem and go all in on it. And so I particularly love your background. I particularly love some of the stops that you had.

So why don't you introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners, who you are, where you come from, that kind of thing, and we'll bust into some of those experiences. Awesome. My name is Justin Arenstein, and I I really got started ecommerce as a sophomore in college. I got an email from a from a business student that went out to all the computer science students, and he was looking to start an ecommerce venture. And I said, hey.

I I can do this as much as anyone else. Granted, I didn't really know what I was doing, but I always bet on myself in figuring it out. And, within three months, we launched an ecommerce custom platform. I brought on a friend to do the front end development, and I did the back end. And and we built it from scratch in a dot net environment.

Hindsight being twenty twenty, I probably should've opened Google and see if there were some off the shelf ecommerce platforms, but I didn't. I said, I'm going to school from computer science. I'm gonna build it from scratch. And and we built something from scratch that allowed us to run not only seven different ecommerce sites on a single platform, but also allowed us to run about a 100 different ecommerce kind of landing pages. And this was at the time so this was 2007, when SEO and organic rankings was very different than it is now.

And you could really game the system, through domains and and really stuffing keywords into domains as well as into, into your pages. So so that's the game we played, and and we were selling mattresses online. And we we had a lot of success, and and grew it, and and it was ultimately bought by Mattress Firm. And and so I I made my way to Texas, after that as a tech cofounder and worked for a company called Living Direct and and led up ecommerce development for them. They're in Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

At the time, it was Demandware. And we really grew that business through optimization of the buying journey. And we had two main big wins that really changed everything for the business in a lot of ways from an online buying. There were some other wins in other parts of the business as well. But on the online experience, the first one was estimated delivery dates.

And it sounds pretty simple now, but it was at the time with Amazon just released kinda this prime two day delivery. And we had warehouses across the country. We had three warehouses across the country, and we could actually get our products, which were small appliances. So we're talking about mini fridges, keg graters, wine refrigerators. We could get them to most of the country in two days.

So we were able to actually compete with Amazon, but no one on the Internet was showing this. So we used our APIs for UPS and showed a delivery date, and that was killer. The other thing we did, and now this seems obviously very simple, but we made a highly optimized mobile experiment experience, by going responsive. We tried a couple off the self shelf solutions, which would mobilize your site, and it didn't work. And and we said, hey.

Let's build a responsive site. And we started selling this to the business, in, like, July, and they kept telling us no. They kept telling us no. Don't do it. This is too risky.

And then finally, in September, they said yes, literally giving us two months to get it done, before Black Friday. And it was a huge success. Like and what that allowed us, not only we had a mobile experience, which was okay, but it then allowed us to do mobile advertising on Google, which just opened up. So there was a whole new avenue of of advertising that opened up for the marketing team. And and those were kinda two big things.

And and along the way, we're always doing optimization and experimentation. Our team our development team was actually built off an experimentation first mindset. Can we experiment with something? And then that gives us the direction that we're gonna go. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants.

More than 50,000 clients already processed over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com. Yeah. Let me let me pause you there because I I feel like you gave me a lot of really good stuff I wanna go deeper on. Yeah.

We'll get to your later what you're doing in your career in a moment. But I one one of the things you said that I I really wanna stop on is the context of the moment. So we kinda take for granted a lot of things in today's ecommerce experience. We we do. We take advantage, you know, the Amazon Prime effect that happened back in, I guess, it was '20 the 2012, 2013 kind of timeline.

Yep. We we we take advantage we take for granted the mobile and responsive design and things of that nature. Your example, when you were at the mattress company that later got sold, by the way, to Mattress Firm, like, that was the predecessor to what Purple became, an online ecommerce experience for mattresses. So these things that that when you were doing them didn't exist and and you had strategies to compete, I think is really important. So kinda take a moment and really think about what it was like in the room in these moments where you had to make these big bets, which ultimately then they were they were bets.

Today, they're table stakes. Yeah. It's it's a great question. What it always was is I have this constant thing inside me that I'm going to fail, that my team is going to fail. And and so I'm always thinking, what is that next big thing that will take us to that next level?

Because if I'm not making that bet, my fear is I'm gonna fail. I'm gonna be on the street. I'm gonna lose my house. And it's, that's none of that's real, but that's what I feel inside me. So I'm always looking around.

What are other consumers or what are other stores doing? Not even that I'm competing with, but what is the rest of the world doing, and what are consumers expecting? So I'm always browsing and putting myself in other people's shoes, whether it's looking at now, like, on Reddit and saying like, hey. What's going on, in this era? But at the time it was, hey, I'm on my phone in New York City or I'm in New York City.

So this was for the mobile example, and everyone's using their phone when they're on the subway, which is really, like, when you're living in Austin, Texas, okay, you kinda see people on your phone. But to see, like, basically, a 100 people on their subway on the phone as cell phones are coming out. And this was a big market for us because we sold portable air conditioners. We're like, oh, shit. These people could be shopping right now, and we're not even in there.

So, like, really being highly empathetic to what the customer is. And and for the shipping example, it was, hey. Amazon's out there selling a similar product. Everyone's even at that time, everyone was shopping on Amazon. We all we're all early adopters.

Like, hey. Yeah. I got this from Amazon two day prom. Fucking amazing. Right?

Like, why can't we do that? Like, what what's stopping us? And just this inane curiosity, just constant curiosity due to, like, an absolute fear of failure. I love it. Yeah.

Imposter syndrome and fear of failures are really strong drivers of and motivators. Yeah. And and it's just curious and and just constantly researching, constantly looking at and and it's my ADD just constant, like, okay. What else is out there? Like, what's going on?

We're very we're very similar in that mindset except for you have way better hair than I do. Other than that, I I really I like the way you think about it. So you were so early in your career, you had two your first two stops were, one that got sold to Mattress Firm. The second one got sold to Ferguson. And for people in North American fur market, Ferguson is massive.

Massive. And and by the way, so is Mattress Firm. So you're two for two. You think you walk on water. What's next?

Well, that yeah. So so I got a nice exit from both of these, from Living Direct, and and I was looking for a job. And and I was, recommended to talk to this guy that one of, the executives of the company I worked at, worked with before. He was a good guy. And, and the company is called, at the time, it was it's really complex, but it was Pure Works, and they ran a site for Mellanox that, basically sold computer components.

And, yeah, I think I'm walking on water. I think I can do anything. And what happens is I get to a site that is much smaller. There isn't as much going on. So the impact I can have is actually, like, remarkably small because it they just the complexity isn't there.

And I actually recruit some people, to work beside me, and I think I'm being relatively successful. And then, I think one of the complexities of this is Mellanox. I knew when I was taking the job was designed to be that website, and ownership was designed at one point to then be taken over to the by the Mellanox team. The complexities don't matter as much as I got laid off, and then as I'm told, a few weeks later, they sold to Mellanox. So I was it was it wasn't necessarily my fault.

It wasn't anyone's fault as much as there's an acquisition, and they didn't want me a part of it, and they didn't wanna give me a payout. At the time, I've I was blaming myself and, like, I'm I'm a fuck up Sure. Whatever. But that that's life. Yeah.

Well, we don't we don't have to dwell on it, but the point of the story is there's so many ups and downs in ecommerce. I mean, this is such a such a a hit or a miss business. It's a little bit like producing video games in a way. Totally. I I think that's right.

And I think, the the quality of the opportunity is really hard to evaluate until you're inside. And and I think that's a skill that I don't know that I, was as important until that until I, like, really looked at that. Like, what what happened? And and it I mean, it was only five years later that I was able to really understand what went wrong and and where did I fail in this. And it it was I I shouldn't not have taken that job and but that's life.

That's nice. Well, what I love about your your LinkedIn profile, and I'd encourage our listeners to go check out your profile, because what you do is fairly unique in in your experience. You list the company and the duration, which is normal, but you also explicitly list failures first on your LinkedIn profile. And you describe a little bit of your learning journey and what you didn't get right. I think that's so humble and so interesting in the way that you kinda describe your journey there.

Because most people do the exact opposite. They brag about everything they could possibly associate themselves with. So I thought it was really refreshing. Yeah. Thank you.

I actually only list failures. I don't think I have a single success on my LinkedIn. There there is no success. Yeah. That's exactly.

There's no success. Hey. So I actually have, like, a huge problem with LinkedIn, in the, in the sense that you never hear anyone on LinkedIn say I messed up. I didn't do this well. And it like really bothers me and it whitewashes what a career journey is Because we've all had failures.

We all even, like, people that go up, they've all done things wrong. Even Bill Gates. Like, if you really don't, they'll talk to you about his failures. But we're also afraid because we're all always looking for that next job, that next thing to, like, really talk about and air out our failures. And so that that's my way of, like, going against the grain and and using LinkedIn in a different way.

Love it. And and granted, I'm not looking for a job now. I see recruiters come on my page and then they immediately leave. So, like, I It's working. It's working.

They're they're they're you're you're keeping yourself focused on your on your day job. That's great. Totally. No distractions. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I actually had a therapist once tell me because I I'm always like, should I be doing something else? Should I be focusing on something else?

And the therapist is like, why? What are you chasing? What do you care? Like, do you have enough? Is your family happy?

Are you happy? Like, don't care about that next thing. Just just be. And I was like, fuck. That's hard.

So, yes, it it is good. Yes. It it it is really hard to be satisfied, especially in what you just described, your professional curiosity. You're always looking to do things differently. So those two things are in conflict with each other, not to make this a therapy session.

They're completely in conflict. Completely. Because I'm always like, there must be something better out there. Always. Like, yes.

At all times. Yes. Well, take us take us down to your what you're doing now with MobileOne, because I think it's a really cool use case. And what I specifically like about it is that I think two things have to be true based on what you shared with me. Number one, there has to be enough complexity for them to even have a return on aggravation of working with you guys.

And number two, there has to be enough volume and meaningful amount of traffic that you can actually make an impact. I find it refreshing when people can paint with such clarity their ICP as to who they can actually help because most companies do like most people's LinkedIn profile that says, we're for everybody. We're the greatest thing since sliced bread. So talk us through a little bit of kind of Mobile ONE, what you're doing there, and what the company is. Yeah.

So Mobile First, we call it digital product growth. And our north star is revenue per visitor growth. We've worked with ecommerce sites that are running a a a site that's trying to sell something to you. Our ICP is gonna be someone that's over, doing over $10,000,000 in in revenue because that's when they get the most return on this. And then our ICP is usually gonna be under a 100,000,000 in online revenue.

And that's because at that point, you should probably think about actually developing this skill in house. And there's enough stores in there where there's plenty of opportunity. And what we do, what our business is is finding insights through your business intelligence, through talking to your customers, through really evaluating your business, and then evaluating those insights through experiments, through on-site AB tests. So for those that don't know what AB test is, we take your control. Let's say your product details page is it is what it is.

And then we say, hey, what if we change these few things, and what is the impact? What is the revenue per visitor impact? And for us, learnings are great. We wanna increase your business because that is what drives you, and that's what keeps us around. And so most of our clients have been with us over four years, because the ROI of these changes is huge.

And so it's a lot I I I like to describe it to friends. Like, what do you do? It's like, I play video games with other people's websites. Oh. I like that.

Because it it it's hard to describe if you're not in marketing, if you're not in ecommerce. But a lot of what it is is really being highly empathetic to your customer. And and this sounds so generic, oh, be customer first, but it's it's not just customer first. Like, what are the customer problems they're dealing with? And why are they looking for this, and why are you the best solution?

What do we need to accentuate? And to get there, we need to run surveys. We need to run actually talk to the customer and get them on your site, see what's working. Just I think one thing that I like to really clarify in this industry is friction does not matter. Tell me more about that.

That is the exact opposite of what everybody else says. So tell me why that matters. Okay. So, Jason, how long have you been using the Internet? Oh, jeez.

Thirty years? Thirty years. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I had Freenet when I was a kid. I I think, like, I had a dial up modem, and and I could bring up the Cartoon Network when I was a kid, and and I was ecstatic. And it was there was no images. Most people have been using the Internet over twenty years now.

Even on their phone, they've been using over ten. If they wanna get something done, they will figure out how to get it done. If they wanna buy your product, they will make it happen. It's your job as a site owner, a site operator to pull those emotional strings so they want to get this done. So they want to focus on making sure this happens.

Friction is there. It's it's the friction's from the outside that their kid's yelling at them, that they're they have to get food on the table, blah, blah, blah. Your website works fine enough. There may be some opportunity to really uncover what are the right product information and how do you organize the page so people can find that product information. There's probably friction.

What are your USPs? Why should they buy this product? Why should they buy this product from you? Like, why shouldn't they go to Amazon? How are you explaining that?

And that is where the opportunity is with 98% of websites. I'm sure Shopware has templates that reduce friction for most buying habits. And as does Shopify, as does Salesforce Commerce Clouds, as does Magento. That's not the problem. The problem is why buy, and that's what we explore.

I see. So, yeah, you are, you're very much into the psychological game of of what are people thinking, what are they feeling, and how do we use this to advance our cause, which is why you play video games with people's websites. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

That that that's exactly right. And there's, of course, always friction, but that's just such a minor thing. Right on. So talk to me a little bit about, MobileOne's business model. So anybody who's in the model where they they they are are basically saying we can improve your, conversion rate and and whatever those KPIs are, usually have some sort of a shared success model.

How does mobile one think about it? Yeah. So we so our our KPI is revenue per visitor. Reverative. Yeah.

Yeah. We don't have a shared success model because, it's it's complex. So advertising. I love advertising because you can you give money to Google, and they'll report out how much your ads made. And you can have a shared success model off that.

And there's there's a judge jury that that everyone believes in. With revenue per visitor, experiments, the impact that we're having, while the tool that we're using for experiments Optimizely as an example can show what the revenue per visitor increase is. What is the impact of that long term? Does it, let's say you have run an experiment that increases revenue per visitor by 5% that impacts every product details page, so it's a 100% of revenue. Well, once that runs, is it gonna stay 5% forever?

Probably not. Right? Because there's we have this idea of degradation in in in our calculations, it will be 5% less every month, basically. So in eighteen months, that experiment's worthless. But that 5% is an estimate over kind of what we've done over all these years of of and so each experiment is different.

The revenue impact that we have, it it's a little more of an art than science at times. We can say, hey. Here's the revenue. Here's the RPV increase due to this experiment. But how that changes your business over the long term, we're not always gonna know.

So for you to paint me on a shared model, we're actually gonna be have an adverse selection. And and so we don't wanna be adversaries with our partners. We want to be compliment. So we have retainer model. It's either six to twelve months, and and we really need at least six months to get started.

But what we do, we start with an an audit, which is really lets us know, talk to your customers, break down your business, break down your business intelligence, and then we start running experiments in month two. And then it takes a few weeks for these to run. So you don't start seeing the impact of this till month three or four. And that's when you, and and once you get that first experiment or two win, then you're like, oh, okay. I see how this stacks on top of each other.

I'm finding myself kind of thinking about you in as an agency in a lot of ways. Yeah. That's exactly what we are. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. But you're a tech enabled service company. Is that also a fair way to think about it? Yeah.

So you utilize a whole bunch of different people's technologies. You bring them to bear. You analyze it, and you drive change over time. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Now but you differentiate yourself from other agencies in the fact that you only do mobile optimization or no. Do you do more than that? Well, we do. Tell me where I'm wrong. Yeah.

Yeah. We do all so it's mobile first, not mobile only. We Yep. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And but we do a lot of we really focus on RPV growth for ecommerce's for ecommerce companies. We Yep.

Don't focus on advertising at all. We're not a full service agency. So we don't have anything for Google hours, Facebook, anything like that. We are specialist in this, and and we call ourselves, product growth, people. So product growth managers, product growth director, and we're really we think of ourselves as product managers.

So big companies, Google, Facebook, Netflix, they all have product managers that are responsible for a KPI and are measured off that KPI. And what you are bringing in when you bring in us is you're bringing in a team that is responsible for RPV, revenue per visitor. And we're doing everything we can, and we bring outside smarts and and which is really nice having an outside person responsible for this because we're not concerned about the day to day fire that the CMO has. We're not concerned we don't get caught up in the politics of of everything that's going on. Oh, how do I, how do I move up in this company?

Who do I need to talk to? What we don't have any of that. Yeah. It's we have this amazing focus on what is our job at hand, and it's to increase RPV. And it's it's really nice having a focus team, and we can also bring outside insights.

This is one of the things that I've seen when I've worked at companies is you just eat the same dog food all the time, and it's so hard to bring in new ideas. Like, it's so hard. And you're trying to go to these conferences, and then it's just crap. And it's so hard. It's nice to have an agency kinda constantly mining for new ideas, talking to a bunch of different companies and and using kinda like, oh, wow.

Here are some trends that we see that are making a big difference. You know, one of the one of the reasons I was excited to speak with you is and I'm getting to I'm learning more through this conversation, but there's people who are bucking the classic trends of ecommerce. K? And so in my world, Shopify has really set the standard on the way people price, package, deliver, monetize payments, you know, all these kinds of things. But that's a one size fits all box that doesn't fit all.

And so where Shopware is having success is when we are pricing, packaging, and delivering simply different. And again, it's a smaller addressable market, but when we find our people, they value us and and they love it. And I think the same is true with you. You've you're essentially nonconforming to a lot of norms. Just look at your LinkedIn profile.

You're listing failures as opposed to bragging about successes. The way you price is not a rev share, it's a retainer. The way that, you know, it another example is I actually really like your website. I think it's really clean. So for the listeners, go to mobile first then check it out.com and look at the reviews section.

I have never seen a cleaner review section about people talking about their services as the way you guys do. Is a lot of this and by the way, another thing you talked about your services, you're only focused on the revenue perversed or metric and everything else is noise. Every other a lot of other agencies say no. No. No.

We're a full service agency, blah blah blah blah. So I really there's something about the way that you guys are doing things that are simply different. Is there intentionality, Justin, on being different, or is it just simply you are who you are as a company and and and etcetera, and that is the way it is? It it help me understand that. Yeah.

It's it's both. It's who we are, so we're intentionally different. I I think as a company, we hire nonconformists. We are nonconformists. To thrive in in this role, you you must be a nonconformist.

I think, like, what are the differences between working at agency versus a company? And, I I've realized that, like, when I work at companies, I have an allergic reaction to the Kool Aid that you must drink to thrive at that company. And and that is because I'm such a nonconformist. And so everything we do, we wanna see not only just being nonconformist for nonconformity reasons, but what is the market doing and what actually matters? What's actually gonna drive, growth?

And we we're a practice of essentialism. What are the essential things that we need to do to bring revenue growth to our clients? Practice of essentialism. I like that a lot. And and what does that mean?

Is that basically going down to just the elements that matter, eliminating all the noise and saying, like, let's get really, really focused on improving x and doing just that? Yes. And, so when you work in an internal company, everyone's like, hey. My category matters. We work on 30 categories, and and you have a category manager for everyone.

Everyone's like, this matters. This matters. This matters. And and when you're the digital product owner for that, you gotta listen to all these people and and make them happy. Because if you make someone unhappy, tell them that their category doesn't matter.

You'll get a slap on the wrist. I see. But we focus on what is gonna impact sixty, seventy, 80, a 100% of the revenue. Because if we impact 5%, let's say we increase revenue per visitor for something that impacts 80% of revenue, well, that's a 4% revenue per visitor increase. That's huge.

Right? That's that changes a business in in some ways. That that's maybe halfway to their growth goal for the year. But if let's say we increase, revenue per visitor by 20%, but it only impacts 5% of the total revenue, well, that's that's a nothing burger. It doesn't matter.

And and so we don't focus on that 5%. We're always focusing on what is that 80%? What is that big problem? What impacts everything? And and to do that, you have to really be thinking of what is essential.

I like that. You know, there's, if you anyone who subscribes to the All In podcast, they talk a lot about first principles. First principles is how Elon Musk thinks about things, breaks everything down to its core essentials, and then builds everything back up. It sounds a little bit like a similar methodology, where you eliminate a lot of the politics of organizations and you simply say, if the goal is revenue per visitor, here is the path to improving it. And it you may not like the answer, but it is the answer.

And this is how you get the biggest bang. That's that's exactly right. And and so, like, I think an example that we're talking one of our clients right now with is, like, personalization. Everyone's like, oh, I gotta personalize. I gotta personalize.

And and I think personalization is great. But the first question you have to ask is what percentage of of visitors and revenue are you actually gonna be able to impact through personalization? So as an example, if you run an ecommerce store where 70% of revenue is first time customers and people are just it just takes one or two visits to make a purchase, you can't personalize that first visit, really, because you don't know anything about them. You can give them similar products, but that's not really personalization. That's something that's merchandising.

So maybe you're personalizing that second visit, but you still only have a little bit of browsing behavior. You know very little about them. So you're really maybe only personalizing 30% of people. There those are the second time buyers, and that's if you even have them identified. So before you focus on personalization, how do you focus on, like, how do we get more information about our customers so I can actually personalize something?

How do I personalize 80% of my experiences and not 30% of my experiences? That's those that's how we think about problems. Like, how do we impact a large percentage of revenue all the time? You know, it's a little bit like the a o the IoT kinda craze that happened maybe a decade ago where everyone's like, we have to make every device really smart, just like we have to make every experience personalized. K?

So it's a little bit of a similar category. And then we got to the point where we said, hey. Maybe a smart spoon isn't a smart business idea. Not every device needs to be smart, and it's not a good business decision. So I feel that there's parallel there.

Yeah. Totally. Yep. Okay. So one of the reasons that that we reached out to have you on the podcast is you have a very, influential LinkedIn profile.

And so I would recommend people go out and follow you. I think you're one of the 100 authorities on ecommerce rated by a lot of these SEO experts on on LinkedIn profiles. So explain to people what your methodology is for when you post, why you post, and how you drive such engagement with your content. Great question. So, I had this thought in December.

I I literally just started posting this year. I had this thought December 2024, said, hey. This is gonna be a a wild year. I I don't know what. Just economically, it's gonna be wild.

And and it's kinda come out bare. But, like, between tariffs, I just knew it was gonna be different. I said, hey, I wanna try something. I wanna post on LinkedIn every day. I saw influencers always talk about post on LinkedIn every day.

And I was like, I I never post on LinkedIn. Said, what what is this? Does it do anything? Doesn't matter. And I posted every day through March, and literally no one noticed.

And no one cared. I couldn't even get my wife to, like, like my post. She's like, what are you doing? Why are you wasting your time? And then in March 2025, I had this throwaway post of, like, hey.

Directors of ecommerce are in an impossible position. They're set up to fail. You're, and the lifespan of a director of ecommerce is one point eight years before they're in their next job. And there's all these things of why it's such a hard job to succeed at. And it went viral, and I was like, oh, okay.

There's there's something here. Like, I should keep it listening. And it made me realize that LinkedIn, is not dissimilar to Facebook. I always thought people are going to LinkedIn for insights as, like, oh, people want the biggest insight. And and I think there's truth to that, like, and and you need to provide insight, but people are on LinkedIn to be feel, heard, and understood.

And so now what I do is I take the calls that we have, and I listen to we record all our our calls with our clients, and I listen for the problems that they're solving. Not necessarily the problems that we're solving, but the problems that they're trying to solve. Like, what is inside them that they need to get solved? And I then whether we have the solution or not, I then play that back. Or even better, my best performing post is when I can then take that problem and say, when did I try to have to solve that problem in my career?

What is what's in the memory in my mind? And then I write that story of, oh, great. That's because I would never think of, like, that was worth talking about. So I I listen, and I say, ah, that happened to me. Let me write that story.

And, Yeah. A lot of what I try to do is is just talk about, hey. I I messed up at this problem that you're messing up at too. You so what you're really saying is you're just being a human, and you're being real and authentic, on online, and it's working. That that's my goal.

What I'm doing is Yeah. Best. Yes. Absolutely. Best you can.

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, we all aren't perfect. Well, I found out about you about a month ago from Justin Rinaldi, a friend of ours in the Twin Cities here. Oh, yeah.

And he was on your pod, and I'm like, wait a second. What is this? And I'm like, yeah. This this is interesting. There's there's you guys are having real conversations, so very good stuff.

Yeah. Is is, are they a client? I don't wanna jinx it, but we're definitely in conversations with Justin. We've known them for years, and they're a they're a great company. And and we hope to be lucky enough to have Safety Speed as a client in the future.

And they seem like they're in the your your ISP. So that's that's awesome. Yeah. They're definitely in our ICP. Yeah.

We love we love complex things, b two b, all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's Wonderful. Well, we're at the thirty seven minute mark, so we probably should wrap, but I, you know, I wanna give up the opportunities for folks to engage with you if they have questions or wanna have a conversation with you.

How how do you recommend people get in touch? You can find me on LinkedIn, Justin Ehrenstein. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one. If you wanna send me an email, justin@mobilefirst.com. And, yeah, I I I love to chat, get coffee with you, or or come on our podcast.

You can check out our podcast as well, check-in to check out. We very similar to this. We actually, interview ecommerce directors is kinda our our whole thing. It's a lot of fun. Fabulous.

Well, I'll make some recommendations of folks you should talk to on your pod. Oh, yeah. That's awesome. I'd love to have them. Yeah.

And, actually, on that note, please okay. So this whole concept of Commerce Famous, again, it's if there was a hall of fame for ecommerce, which there is not, who would be in it? And so in your mind, give me a name or two of people that you would recommend I talk to on the Commerce Famous podcast. It's a great question. You can also think about an email Yeah.

I I think, the the one person that immediately comes to my mind is Jason Russo. He shaped a lot of my thinking and, is one of these people that never feels secure and and is always curious of what is that next solution. Super smart guy. I work with him at living direct, and and he totally shaped my thinking of of how to how to optimize sites and and how to understand what the real customer problem is. Very cool.

Well, give me an intro, accepts. Yeah. Absolutely. Amazing. Well, Justin, thank you so much for investing time with us and giving our listeners a little bit of a glimpse into MobileOne and your background and your history.

It was a great conversation. Yeah. Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.