klaviyo
(23)
Andrew Bialecki and the rule that kept him in the inbox
Before Klaviyo became a public company, Andrew Bialecki had to answer the customers before he could write the code. His next bet is that software can learn to give people that same attention.
CustomersAI and the expensive art of recognizing a stranger
Larry Kim built a business around finding customers. Its most revealing turn came when he started asking whether the names it found belonged to the right people.
The Checkbox That Became a Business
Dataships began with a privacy tool that customers barely noticed. It found its market when the founders asked a more pointed question: what happens to a paying customer after the checkout box is ticked - or missed?
From Climbing Copywriter to AI-Era Operator: Jen Rapp Keeps Creative Close to the Business
She learned brand storytelling at Patagonia, performance discipline at DoorDash and public-company theater at Klaviyo. Now Superside's Chief Customer Officer is trying to make creative work faster without sanding away the human judgment that makes it worth seeing.
Your Ecommerce Brand Probably Doesn’t Need a Separate CDP
Klaviyo now handles much of the customer-data work that once justified a standalone platform. For ecommerce teams, Segment should solve a specific data problem - not satisfy a vague fear of missing infrastructure.
HubSpot Wants the Budget Klaviyo Built Its Empire On
HubSpot's newer commerce triggers now chase the same DTC-brand spend Klaviyo turned into a $1.2 billion business. For a brand already running HubSpot as its CRM, the choice comes down to building inside the system of record or bolting on the best tool for the job.
The Boston Agency That Spent 27 Years Building Trust - Then Bought Five Companies in Two Years
For 27 years Verndale sold one thing: the platform build nobody else wanted to own. Then a Dallas buyout firm handed it a checkbook - and a Boston services shop turned into a roll-up.
Klaviyo’s Price Problem Is Also Its Moat
Reviewers call Klaviyo expensive far more often than Mailchimp. Ecommerce teams keep paying because the real contest is not software cost - it is what each subscriber is worth.
The Agency That Named Itself BAD - and Made Good Brands Go Bad
A Georgia agency built a brand around a word every marketer is trained to avoid. Behind the joke is a 150-person shop managing a quarter-billion dollars in ad spend.
Klaviyo Crashed Braze's Party With SMS And Push
Klaviyo built an empire on ecommerce email. Its move into SMS and mobile push has now pulled it onto Braze's turf, and the fight is narrowing to one prize - the Shopify brand that wants everything in one place.
The Email Platform That Earns Its Premium
Mailchimp is the cheaper, friendlier default. Klaviyo makes its higher bill defensible when a store can turn live shopping behavior into timely, profitable messages.
Stephen Campbell
Stephen Campbell is the CEO and co-founder of Revamp (YC S23), a San Francisco AI startup that stitches together Klaviyo and Shopify data to build smarter customer segments for eCommerce brands and agencies. A USC computer science graduate and former Airtable engineer, he built Revamp with longtime friend Amin Akhtar to turn days of manual data wrangling into insights that generate in seconds. He is known for a lean, capital-light approach to building - his 'raise early and raise small' philosophy - and for helping seed the Bay Area's generative-AI community through The GenAI Collective.
Revamp (YC S23)
Revamp is a San Francisco startup (YC Summer 2023) that builds AI agents for eCommerce retention marketing. It plugs into Klaviyo and Shopify to turn scattered customer data into smart segments and then writes genuinely 1:1 personalized emails - drawing on signals like location, weather, purchase history and browsing behavior - so D2C brands can lift email revenue without hiring an army of copywriters.
The 12 Best Email Marketing Platforms for Businesses in 2026
A field guide to the twelve email marketing platforms worth a business's money in 2026 - from Mailchimp's all-rounder ecosystem and Klaviyo's ecommerce muscle to Brevo's generous free tier, ActiveCampaign's deep automation, and beehiiv's creator-first newsletter engine. Email still returns roughly $36 to $42 for every dollar spent, and the tool you pick decides how much of that you actually keep.
Katherine Brodie
Katherine Brodie is the Chief Marketing Officer of Frances Valentine, the New York fashion house co-founded by Elyce Arons with her best friend, the late Kate Spade, and Andy Spade. Brodie joined in January 2025 after roughly two decades spent building direct-to-consumer engines for design-led brands: eCommerce at Kate Spade, digital marketing at C. Wonder and Club Monaco, eCommerce at Reese Witherspoon's Draper James, and VP of Marketing & eCommerce at Rifle Paper Co., followed by a VP of Marketing post at CAKE. At Frances Valentine she runs a marketing operation that behaves less like a department and more like a production studio - video-first storytelling, creator-style content, and a community organized around color and joy. The strategic bet is contrarian by industry standards: while most fashion brands chase shoppers under 35, Brodie's team has built a viral social presence around women 50 and up, with Arons herself as the on-camera personality. The approach has coincided with rapid growth for the brand across e-commerce, its expanding retail fleet, and wholesale.
MacCoy Merkley
MacCoy Merkley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Portland Leather Goods, the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. A former wedding photographer, he answered a Craigslist ad for a digital media specialist in 2018 and went on to help scale the company from roughly $3.5M to more than $100M in annual revenue. He is known in direct-to-consumer circles for a product-first, no-nonsense approach to marketing, heavy use of Meta advertising, strategic discounting, and a very active personal presence on LinkedIn and X.
Polar Analytics
Polar Analytics is a multichannel AI analytics platform for ecommerce and direct-to-consumer brands, built to unify scattered marketing, sales and CRM data into one dashboard on top of a warehouse-native data stack. Founded in 2021 by David Dokes and Charbel Seif, it centralizes 45+ data sources, tracks metrics like CAC, ROAS, MER and LTV, and layers AI agents and a Model Context Protocol connector so merchants can query live data and act on it. Polar serves 4,000+ brands across 45 countries and has raised roughly $28.5M, including an $18M Series A led by Chalfen Ventures in November 2024.
Maverick
Maverick is a San Francisco AI startup that generates personalized videos at scale for ecommerce brands. A merchant records one short base video, and Maverick's generative AI clones the voice and reshapes it to greet each customer by name across email flows - welcome, post-purchase, abandoned cart and more. The platform layers on inbox-placement optimization and automatic subject-line A/B testing, and plugs natively into Klaviyo. Founded in 2021 by Eitan Winer and Debarshi Chaudhuri, Maverick sells the idea that online shopping should feel a little more like being recognized by name at your neighborhood store.
Eitan Winer
Eitan Winer is the co-founder and CEO of Maverick, a San Francisco startup that uses generative AI to send personalized videos and AI-optimized email at scale for ecommerce brands. Raised in La Paz, Bolivia and trained in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford, he spent eight years building products at mobile gaming company Pocket Gems and ran an alpaca-apparel store on Shopify before teaming up with engineer Debarshi Chaudhuri in 2021. Maverick records a merchant once, then uses lip-sync and face-sync models to generate thousands of customer-specific videos, aiming to make online shopping feel as personal as walking into a store.
Ethan Choi
Ethan Choi is a Partner at Khosla Ventures leading the firm's Growth Fund, where he writes checks between $15M and $70M into cloud infrastructure, SaaS, enterprise, and consumer internet companies from Seed through Series C. Before joining Khosla in 2024, he was a Partner at Accel, where he backed Klaviyo (now NYSE: KVYO), 1Password, and Pismo (acquired by Visa). His investing philosophy pivoted from metrics-first to founder-first — he now spends 90% of his diligence energy on the people rather than the numbers. A former LDS missionary who spent two years in South Korea, Choi is an unusually direct voice on AI's disruption of white-collar work and the coming robotics inflection point.
Chase Dimond
Chase Dimond is a partner at Structured, a full-stack ecommerce marketing agency, and one of the most-followed email marketing experts on the internet. He co-founded Boundless Labs in 2018, grew it into a 7-figure agency generating $35M+ in email-attributable client revenue, and sold it to Structured in 2020. Today he runs a media empire with 750,000+ cross-platform followers, a 100K-subscriber newsletter with a 46% open rate, and has helped ecommerce brands collectively generate $200M+ in email revenue. Shopify named him the #1 influencer to follow in ecommerce.
Zaymo
Zaymo is a YC W24-backed B2B SaaS company based in Lehi, Utah that turns static marketing emails into interactive mini-apps. Built on AMP for Email technology and deeply integrated with Klaviyo and Shopify, Zaymo lets ecommerce brands embed one-click purchasing, subscription management, review collection, and gamified elements directly inside the inbox — no redirect required. Customers report 12–15X ROI, 24–52% reductions in subscription churn, and conversion lifts that static email simply cannot match.
Val Geisler
Val Geisler is a lifecycle marketing strategist and VP of Partner Programs at Digioh, best known for founding Fix My Churn and creating the 'Dinner Party Strategy' — a behavior-driven email onboarding framework that has powered 209% conversion lifts for SaaS and ecommerce brands. With 12+ years at the intersection of customer empathy and marketing systems, she has built advocacy programs at Klaviyo, grown retention email to 25% of company revenue at ByHeart, and hosted the Ecommerce Marketing School podcast. Her philosophy: emails are relationships, not broadcasts.