Arturs Sevselevs

5 years ago, I was selling Aircrafts to airlines. Today, I run an email marketing agency that's generated millions for DTC brands. Here are 9 lessons I learned along the way: 1. Hire slow, fire fast

Money twitter timeline rn

Organized our first ecom meetup in BCN yesterday Was 🔥

Come join me & 50ish clients of ours next Tuesday, 14jul Barcelona 19:00 DM for signup link. Free for ecom owners / operators

Conference szn in Budapest Bcn next week Hmu if u in town – at Budapest, Hungary

Looking for a new closer for ecom email marketing offer. DMs open.

Launching in few days. DM me to get your spot.

GM GM GM

Read this today ⬇️

I went from selling airplanes to running a retention agency working with 160+ ecom brands… People always ask how we scaled it past most agencies in the space and it's genuinely one thing... We never went generic Most agencies hit $30-50k/mo, panic about growth, and start offering "everything" Ads, SEO, social, retention, branding, full-service whatever they can sell You end up competing with 4,000 other agencies offering the same generic stack to the same generic brands And the founder becomes the bottleneck for every deliverable because no one on the team is actually expert at anything We stayed locked into one thing (email retention) and went obsessively deep on it Klaviyo segmentation, deliverability infrastructure, lifecycle architecture, post-purchase nurturing, multi-channel expansion past email, the technical stuff most agencies outsource because they don't actually understand it Depth compounds in a way breadth never does When you're the deepest operator in a specific space, brands stop comparing prices and start asking when you can take their account The 160+ brands didn't come from chasing leads. They came from being known as the guy who actually understands retention at a level most don't Most agencies will never make it past $50k/mo for the same reason most ecom brands never make it past $200k/mo They're trying to do everything instead of becoming undeniably good at one thing

Spots are filling on this. One of the brands we did this for grew their returning customer revenue 3,157% year over year. That's the entire system going inside the community, free for the first 100 people. Once the 100 is full, everyone after pays for it. If you run an ecom brand and want one of the free spots, DM me "ACCESS" before they're gone.

In WW2 the Germans studied fighter planes coming back covered in bullet holes and added armour wherever the holes were… Made total sense. Except they were studying the WRONG planes The ones that came back survived. The bullet holes on them were in the spots a plane could take damage and still fly home The armour needed to go where there were NO holes, because the planes hit there never made it back to be studied That's survivorship bias and ecom founders fall for it constantly You see the agency owner flexing his morning routine and fancy office on LinkedIn and you think "every successful agency owner has a personal brand, that must be the move" You're only seeing the ones loud enough to be seen. The hundreds of operators quietly making more than him with zero online presence don't show up in your feed because they're too busy making money to post about it Same trap shows up everywhere in ecom: - "Everyone's selling this product so it must work" - "TikTok is the only channel that matters now" - "You need a subscription model or you're dead" All of it is just survivors talking. You never see the graveyard of brands that did the exact same thing and died Stop copying what's visible and start testing what works for your specific brand What you see is just whatever survived long enough to be seen

I'm letting 100 ecom operators into our entire retention system for free and most agency owners would tell me this is a stupid move… We've spent years building a backend that took one of our clients from $50k/mo to $1m/mo+ in 24 months on email retention alone - 100s of email templates - swipe files for every flow type - the audit checklists we run on every new account - plus the full course I just filmed in studio All of it sitting inside one Skool community 11 operators on my team running 35+ live ecom accounts will be posting inside Tips, tests, what's working this week, what isn't. The kind of stuff most agencies keep locked inside private Slacks because they think it's the moat The community of operators using the templates is the real moat btw. Templates are just files anyone can copy First 100 people in get the entire thing free forever. After that it goes paid for everyone Pretty much giving away years of work to anyone who wants it If you're running an ecom brand and you want in, just DM me "ACCESS" and I'll send you the link Only 100 spots though so don't sleep on it After that it's locked

Founders keep paying Meta to find customers their own brand is literally losing… Acquisition cost climbs every quarter. Repeat rate stays flat. The Founder sees revenue plateau and pours another $50k into ads thinking that's the fix It ISN'T. The customers Meta delivers are walking out the back door before they reorder and nobody's fixing the back door Brand at 15% repeat rate needs to acquire 7 customers to get 1 to come back. Brand at 40% repeat rate only needs 2.5 We took TryBello from 10% repeat to 40% over 24 months. Total monthly revenue went from $50k to $1m+ in the same window The acquisition channel didn't change. The product didn't change. We just stopped letting the customers leak out after the first order Most ecom founders have never audited their repeat rate properly. They look at Meta dashboards every day and their Klaviyo dashboard once a month If your repeat rate has been under 25% for 6+ months, more ads is the most expensive way to ignore what's actually broken Fix the back of the funnel and watch what happens when the customers Meta delivers actually stay

Most retention "courses" are one guru recording videos in 2023 and selling them in 2026. The Skool community I'm launching this week is the opposite shape. My team of 11 operators running 35+ live ecom accounts will be posting inside... Tips, what's working, what isn't, the actual conversations we have internally about retention every week. Plus the full course I just filmed in studio, 100s of email templates, swipe files, and checklists we use internally on every account. That's the system that helped us take one of our clients from $50k/mo to over $1m/mo on retention work alone. First 100 people in get it free forever. After that it goes paid for everyone. 100 spots. DM me "ACCESS" if you want one.

Email is the fastest product research department your brand will ever have, and 95% of DTC founders are using it as a discount megaphone instead. We ran a survey campaign for one of our clients asking customers two questions: "What product should we make next?" "What are you struggling with that our existing range doesn't solve?" The brand used the answers to actually build new products. We used email to validate the demand before manufacturing a single unit. The winners got shipped + the losers got cut at ZERO cost. That brand went from $50k/mo to $1.029m/mo in 24 months, with the new SKUs (the ones the existing customer base literally asked for) now driving a meaningful chunk of repeat revenue. Most retention agencies will never recommend this because it requires the founder to actually ship new products, not just iterate on email subject lines. Your existing customer base will tell you exactly what to build next if you ask them. They almost NEVER get asked.

The retention methods that actually work in DTC right now are NOT the ones being posted on Twitter. The good stuff stays in private Slack channels between operators who run real accounts. What's working in the second week of November isn't what was working in May. The flows we shipped last quarter are already getting refined again based on what the data is showing this month. None of that conversation happens publicly because most agency owners are terrified of giving away their edge. I'm opening up that exact conversation to 100 people. My team running 35+ live ecom accounts will be posting inside one Skool community. The actual tests we're running, the flows that are working this week, the things we tried that didn't. Plus the full course I just filmed in studio, 100s of email templates, swipe files, and checklists we use internally on every account. These are the same methods we used to take one of our clients from $50k/mo to over $1m/mo in 24 months First 100 people in get the entire thing free forever. After that it goes paid for everyone. 100 spots. DM me "ACCESS" if you want behind the curtain.

Took a beauty brand from $50k/mo to $1.029m/mo over 2 years on email retention work alone, and the part nobody on retention Twitter will publish is what we actually did to get there… If you're running a DTC brand under $500k/mo and your email program is doing under 25% of revenue, this is the playbook (and yes, it's going to make you uncomfortable about your current setup). When we picked up Trybello in 2023, the account looked like 80% of the brands we inherit. There was no flow segmentation in place, no post-purchase nurturing past the initial welcome email, no replenishment logic for a product that ran out every 45-60 days And the entire email program was 5 generic campaigns a month going into the default Klaviyo template. Repeat rate was stuck at 10% and deliverability sat at 56% (which means roughly half the emails the brand was sending never landed in an inbox). The previous setup was making $2.5k/mo from email. That's almost nothing for a brand at that revenue scale. The agency before us had been "running email" the entire time. Here's how we actually rebuilt it: - Flow segmentation by purchase count rather than just engagement (a 1x buyer in abandoned cart needs completely different copy than a 4x repeat buyer who already trusts the brand, and most agencies don't even split these segments) - Zero-party data collection inside the email flows themselves - surveys at day 35 asking what customers were struggling with, then using the answers to actually launch new products the existing customer base was already asking for (this is the part most agencies skip because it requires founder-side product decisions, not marketing work) - Multi-channel expansion past email into WhatsApp, SMS, customer phone calls to top buyers, and Direct Mail to the highest-spend cohort (no other "email agency" we know of actually picks up the phone) - Full deliverability foundation rebuild covering DNS records, domain authentication, sending schedule, and IP reputation - the boring technical work that nobody wants to do because it doesn't make a slide look good Why doesn't every agency do this? Because it takes 60-90 days of foundation work before the dashboard starts moving, and most retainers are written so the agency gets paid the same whether they touch the architecture or just hit "send" on a Tuesday calendar. Whilst your current setup is iterating on subject lines for the 11th week in a row, the brands actually pulling away in retention are doing the unglamorous architecture work in the background and watching the compound do the math for them. The Trybello numbers over 2 years: Email revenue jumped from $2.5k/mo to $257k/mo (a 10,200% increase), and the repeat purchase rate climbed from 10% to 40%. Per-campaign revenue increased from $150 to $4,000, a 26x jump tied directly to the segmentation rebuild. Deliverability recovered from 56% to over 98% inbox placement. Overall monthly brand revenue went from $50k/mo to $1.029m/mo. I'm putting the full course (filmed in studio, with 100s of email templates, swipe files, and checklists we use internally on every account) inside a Skool community I'm launching this week. First 100 people in get it free forever. After that it's paid for everyone. DM me "ACCESS" if you want one of the spots

You DON'T own your email list… Most ecom founders treat their Klaviyo list as their most valuable owned asset. What you actually have is a rental from a SaaS platform that can be revoked, suspended, lost in a migration, or destroyed by one wrong sender domain config (and most brands have never once exported a backup). A Klaviyo account suspension wipes your entire retention business in 24 hours. You lose the list, the flows, every segment you spent 2 years building, and the brand goes back to depending on Meta to find customers from scratch. Klaviyo suspensions happen more often than founders realise. Authentication issues, billing problems, deliverability flags can lock the account for days at a time, and brands that haven't backed up their list are one bad week away from losing 6 years of subscriber data they spent real money to acquire. The fix is roughly 5 minutes a month. Open Klaviyo, export your full profile list to CSV, store it in cloud storage with proper backups, and repeat on the 1st of every month. That single ritual turns a rented list into an actual owned asset the brand can rebuild from if anything ever happens to the account. Whilst your agency is reporting on open rates and revenue attribution, almost none of them are checking whether the underlying asset they're optimising against could disappear next Tuesday. The same operational audit process we used to take a print-on-demand brand from 13% to 22% of revenue from email in 60 days (and into a multi-7-figure exit) is now inside a Skool community I'm launching next week. Course filmed in studio, 100s of email templates, swipe files, checklists, plus the team posting daily. First 100 people get in free. After that it's paid. DM me "ACCESS" if you want one of the spots.