The Orita Podcast

Built From Skratch: Leading an Athlete-first Brand Through its Next Chapter

In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Ian MacGregor, CEO at Skratch Labs. Pro cyclists kept complaining about their sponsored drink mix, so Ian and his partner Alan started making something better in secret. Fifteen years later they still haven't raised a dollar of outside money, and Ian thinks that's exactly why the brand still means something. • How a career-ending injury led Ian from the peloton to a company built around a water bottle with a sponsor logo on the outside and a homemade formula on the inside • Why Skratch has said no to major grocery distribution deals and what the cost of that discipline actually looks like in practice • The open book management philosophy Ian uses so every person on the team understands the P&L, not just their own KPIs • Why Ian is pushing his team to use AI as a tool to think better, not a shortcut to skip the thinking, and what he worries gets lost when the learning loops disappear • How Skratch thinks about building capabilities in-house versus partnering, and why the long-term view only works because they never took outside money • What Ian believes is coming for authentic brands as consumers get better at filtering out bullshit product innovation 👥 Meet the guest Ian MacGregor, CEO at Skratch Labs 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Secret Drink Mix: How Skratch Started in the Peloton [05:52] Staying Athlete-First When the Market Pulls You Wider [08:48] The Booster Problem: When Your Best Product Isn't Your Top Seller [10:43] Channel Strategy: Being Where Your Customer Buys [12:29] Going International Too Early and What It Cost [14:12] Food vs. Supplements: Why Transparency Has a Price [17:38] R&D as a Separate Line Item: How Skratch Protects Long-Term Bets [20:25] How Consumer Expectations Have Shifted Over 15 Years [26:27] Open Book Management: Why Every Person Sees the P&L [29:53] Using AI Without Outsourcing Your Thinking [33:38] The Rendering Problem: How Finished Output Narrows Thinking [36:22] Build In-House or Partner: How Skratch Decides [38:25] Why Authentic Brands Win as Consumers Get Smarter [43:40] Aaron and Ian Flip the Mic: Empathy, Compass, and What Enough Looks Like 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

The Expand Mindset: Scaling Customer Growth in Klaviyo's AI Era

In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Sam Moorhead, Director of Customer Growth at Klaviyo. Sam has spent 15 years learning what separates a seller who closes from one who just checks boxes, and his answer has nothing to do with scripts. • What a PE-backed turnaround taught Sam about radical transparency that HubSpot never could, and how he brought it to Klaviyo • Why showing up to a discovery call without a point of view is just telling your customer you're ready to waste their time • The one question Sam teaches every rep to ask, and why the preamble matters more than the question itself • How Klaviyo is using AI to close the gap between what a CEO sees coming and what their frontline team is actually doing • Why the marketers leaning into AI right now are the ones getting promoted, and what that means for everyone else • How great salespeople bring product insights to engineering in a way that actually gets built 👥 Meet the guest Sam Moorhead, Director of Customer Growth at Klaviyo 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] From Finance Major to HubSpot BDR [04:12] PE Turnaround vs. Founder-Led Growth: What Changed [06:23] Radical Transparency: How Much Is Too Much [09:18] Building Teams That Get to Performing Fast [13:02] Onboarding New Reps: Frequency Over Big Training Days [16:17] Platform Selling: Why Discovery Has to Come First [18:43] How AI Changed Call Prep and Why Point of View Is Everything [21:46] The Why Now Question Done Right [24:14] Give and Get: How Elite Sellers Write the Prescription [28:15] What Customers Get Wrong About Doing It With AI Alone [32:28] Input Metrics, Gong, and Coaching With Real Data [35:10] The Wedge Between CEOs and Frontlines Is AI [39:23] When to Pull in Leadership to Multi-Thread a Deal [42:20] How Sales Should Bring Product Insights That Actually Get Built 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

The Partnership Layer: Building Growth Through Better Relationships

In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Val Geisler, VP, Partner Programs at Digioh. Val has worked agency side, vendor side, and brand side, and she thinks that makes her exactly the kind of person AI cannot replace. • How Val followed a nonlinear career from theater to Klaviyo to CPG brand to Digioh, and what the through line always was • Why the gap between a personalized email and a generic website is still the biggest missed opportunity in ecommerce • How to run a jobs-to-be-done customer interview that actually surfaces the real goal, not the surface answer • What Digioh learned when they moved identification and ROI dashboards to the homepage instead of hiding them in a reporting tab • Why the most curious person on the team, not the most senior, should be running your customer interviews • Val's case for why soft skills are becoming the hard skills, and why AI optimizes for correct while humans can optimize for true 👥 Meet the guest Val Geisler, VP, Partner Programs at Digioh 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Theater, Retail, and a Nonlinear Career [01:24] From VA to Klaviyo: Following Skills Over Titles [03:26] Why Val Went Brand Side After Klaviyo [05:49] What Digioh Does in One Sentence [06:13] The Email Personalization Gap on the Website [08:46] Buckets vs. Rabbit Holes: How to Start Segmenting [10:13] Quizzes, Buttons, Replies: How to Collect Real Customer Data [13:11] Jobs to Be Done: Hiring a Product to Do a Job [15:59] How to Run a Jobs-to-Be-Done Interview That Actually Works [19:34] The Most Curious Person Wins: Who Should Interview Customers [28:31] Bringing Customer Insights to a Leadership Team That Wants Numbers [30:49] How Journeys and Dashboards Changed Digioh From the Inside [41:28] What Makes a Partnership Actually Mutually Beneficial [45:04] Soft Skills Are the New Hard Skills: What AI Still Can't Do 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

Tell Me What You Really Think: Product Feedback in Commerce

In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Sean Wendt, Founder at dtcmvp to find out why cold email stopped working and how he had a hunch that honest feedback conversations would outlast any outbound playbook. • How go-to-market changed between the Postscript era and today, and why partnerships now carry weight that BDR teams used to • Why dtcmvp frames every vendor call as a feedback session first, and what founders get wrong when they treat it as a sales shortcut • The real reason shelfware happens, and why talking to the most senior person in the sales process is the single best fix • The gap between what people say publicly about AI adoption and what lean brand teams are actually able to implement • Why AI cannot do the work your team was never going to do anyway, and what that means for how vendors should be building • Sean and Aaron on the Wayback Machine test for spotting marketing companies pretending to be product companies 👥 Meet the guest Sean Wendt, Founder at dtcmvp 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Cold Calling Car Dealerships to Shopify [02:32] How Tydo Showed Sean Go-To-Market Had Changed [03:19] Top of Funnel and Partnerships: What Actually Shifted [06:20] Events Are Not If You Build It They Will Come [09:13] Why dtcmvp Exists: The Empty Calendar Problem [12:49] Do Brands See Through the Feedback Call? [15:53] No Better Signal Than Someone Buying or Not Buying [17:25] How Brands Should Vet 5000 Vendors [19:35] Shelfware: Why Team Alignment Matters More Than the Tool [21:16] The Gap Between AI Hype and What Teams Can Actually Do [23:30] If You Cant Do It AI Cant Do It Either [30:39] Long-Term Relationships vs Short-Term Meeting Wins [34:26] Point Solutions vs Empire Builders: Where Shopify Is Heading [35:44] Claude Doesn't Care About Tabs: The Bundle You Already Have 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel

Higher Than Usual Conversions: AI Voice, High-Intent Shoppers, and the Return of the Phone

In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Philippe Roireau, Co-Founder and CEO of Consio, spent a decade operating eight-figure brands and leading partnerships at Gorgias, Northbeam, and ShipBob before betting that voice was the most underbuilt channel in ecommerce. This episode is the story of why he made that bet, how he found his first customer on a spreadsheet with a manual dialer, and what it looks like to build a vertical AI phone platform from zero base code. • Why every ecommerce brand has a phone number but no strategy for it • How furniture and high-ticket brands became Consio's strongest early verticals • The attribution engine that proves phone ROI before brands commit to the channel • Why the AI value is in tool calls and actions, not just answering FAQs • How a $5M deck brand built a propensity-to-buy score from call transcripts 👥 Meet the guest Philippe Roireau, Co-Founder and CEO at Consio 🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai 🎧 Chapters [00:00] Midwest Man Cannot Pronounce French Name [00:52] From Largest Gorgias Client to Employee Five [02:48] Northbeam, ShipBob, and Seven Years of Pattern Recognition [04:10] The LinkedIn Post That Changed Everything [05:29] Committed to the Vision Before the Product Worked [06:00] Gorgias Plus Northbeam Plus ShipBob: The Consio Thesis [07:18] First Customer: A Spreadsheet, Aircall, and John Roman [10:19] High Ticket Wins: Why Furniture Loves the Phone [11:00] Vision Drift: From Outbound Dialer to Full AI Phone Platform [13:01] Competing With HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho — On Shopify [16:06] The Vibe-Coded Productboard Replacement They Use Every Day [20:11] Revenue Front and Center: How Consio Trains Brands to Trust the Phone [25:47] Three Use Cases Any $50M Brand Can Start With Today [30:32] 500 Calls, One Button, Voice of Customer in 30 Seconds 🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel