Ryan is the Co-Founder of Tru Earth

Purpose driven direct to  consumer brand builder.

Ryan has:

✅ Helped Grow Tru Earth to more than 160,000 active subscribing customers
✅ Together with Tru Earth's Changemakers, eliminated more than 165,000,000 plastic-containers from landfills..
✅ Donated more than 33,887,227 loads of laundry detergent to those in need.
✅ Grown multiple premium subscription boxes to multi-million dollar businesses.
✅ Written content has been read by more than 100,000,000 readers.

Connect: 
Facebook https://m.facebook.com/theryemckenzie/
Twitter: @RyeMcKenzie

About Tru Earth
Tru Earth® based in Vancouver, Canada is a leading eco-friendly household product company committed to eliminating plastic from landfills and oceans. At its core, you’ll discover that Tru Earth, is actually a movement (#TruEarthMovement™). The Tru Earth team joins more than a quarter million equally committed people in more than 50 countries to combat the 645 billion plastic household product containers dumped in landfills and oceans globally each year. 

Our customers are #TruChangeMakers™, disrupting the multi-billion-dollar household product industry, reducing carbon emissions by up to 94% and caring for the health of the planet and their families. 

Tru Earth’s suite of products and planned launches come with our pledge to provide #TruChangeMakers with laundry, bathroom and kitchen products they need to make a substantial impact on the health of our world. To do ourpart, we promise to match all first-time subscriptions by donating to families in need across the globe. Because at Tru Earth, we know many small hinges can swing very, very big doors.

Ryan Mckenzie

Every founder on this app is losing their minds over AI tools right now. ClaudeBot this. Moltbook that.

Half of it is slop. The other half you’ll never really use.

But every new drop makes you feel like you’re falling behind. The pace of AI right now is a shiny object machine. And it’s pulling operators away from the stuff that’s been working all along.

I run an eight-figure business. This is my entire AI stack: 

>Open ChatGPT in dictate mode
>Talk through 50 half-baked ideas
>Tell it to organize my brain
>Grab competitor copy, dump it in
>Ask what persona they’re targeting
>Hop on a call
>Let Granola take notes
>Pull action items 

That’s it. 

Free plan. No autonomous agents. No tools I don’t trust accessing all my stuff. 

Don’t let the timeline make you feel behind.

Everyone wants the sophisticated play. 

The sophisticated play is getting good at boring.

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Co-Founder Tru Earth | Saving the planet, one strip at a time.

Before Tru Earth I was running this outdoor adventure brand, and with it came a revenue glass ceiling I didn’t even realize was there.

I thought anything over a million dollars a year was incredible. Like, why would you need more than that?

Then I met Matthew Bertulli at a mastermind. Told him my goals. That it was gonna be a slide of the desk business. Just a nice little thing.

All he said: “Think bigger.”

Two words. And something clicked.

Most of what holds you back is your own self limiting beliefs about what’s reasonable. And you don’t even want to shed those beliefs sometimes.

Because your life is comfortable and you’re afraid that if you change those beliefs, something you really like about your life might change too.

Seven years later and I still think about that conversation.

CEO @ Lomi & Pela Case - Follow me as I talk about building my brands.

Everyone's calling Ads in Chat GPT the next Facebook Ads.

It's not.

The people using ChatGPT today are the same people who used to search on Google. Same audience. Different platform. 

The pie didn't get bigger. The searches migrated.

So if your Google Ads performance has been declining for 2 years and you can't figure out why: your audience is still out there, they just moved. And now there’s a way to follow them.

The data angle is real. Facebook had behavioral tracking. Google had intent. ChatGPT has both. 

People literally tell it their problems in plain English. Every conversation is a targeting signal.

If OpenAI builds their ad product even halfway well, the targeting should be strong. Early conversion data already looks solid.

Everyone is talking about this like a gold rush, but it’s a recovery play.

Most of what you’re seeing is demand that already left Google. Now there’s a channel to go get it back. 

If you're spending on paid search and watching returns erode, pay attention. This doesn’t “change everything.” But it does explain what already changed.

6 behaviors I see in founders who stay healthy while scaling:

1. They focus on fewer things 
Running 30 initiatives = zero progress 
Focus is doing less, better

2. They chase asymmetric opportunities 
One big swing beats 20 small tweaks
Incremental wins rarely change a business

3. They optimize for signal, not activity 
Busy feels productive 
Outcomes are what matter

4. They update their thinking at each stage 
What works at $1M breaks at $10M 
Every revenue stage needs new mental models

5. They hold contradictory ideas at once 
Scaling is complex 
Black-and-white thinking doesn’t survive it

6. They build teams that make decisions 
Approval loops kill momentum 
Great teams have agency

The pattern: healthy founders remove complexity

My ADHD brain has 40 tabs open at all times.

Here’s what I do to manage:

- One task at a time. Not “mostly one.” Literally one.
- Physical Pomodoro timer on the desk. Something I can see counting down.
- Dedicated workspace. If you work where you relax, your brain fights you all day.
- Clear the desk every morning. A cluttered desk is a chaotic brain.
- Every notification off. Shopify, Stripe, email, Slack. All of it.
- Phone on permanent sleep mode. Five people can reach me. Everyone else goes to voicemail.
- No email or Slack during a focused block. They can wait.
- No open tabs. I used to have dozens running at all times. MinBrowser fixed that.
- Facebook ads? Go straight to Ads Manager URL. Never through the feed. I've lost hundreds of hours to that scroll.
- Freedom app to block sites during Pomodoro sessions. Even when you get tempted, you can't access them.
- Physical notebook for random ideas. Write them down, close the loop, come back later. Otherwise your brain opens a hundred tabs internally and none of them close.
- Take breaks. Parkinson’s Law is real: work fills the time you give it. If you sit at your desk for 8 hours straight, the last 4 are garbage.

Your brain isn’t broken. 

It just needs a system that works with it instead of against it.

This is first world advice.

If you can’t pay your bills, “build a machine that produces value” won’t help you eat.

You need revenue. Fast.

Maslow’s hierarchy applies to business too.

At the bottom: survive. Solve a problem someone will pay for right now.

Once you’re stable: yes. Build the machine. Think in systems.

Applying $10M thinking to a $10K problem gets you neither.

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Building a durable company means stacking real pillars underneath it: DTC, third-party marketplaces, retail, international. 

Four years is enough time to get somewhere. Rarely enough time to build something.

When you’re growing that fast, you’re holding on by the skin of your teeth. The train goes wherever it wants. You’re just hoping not to fly off the caboose.

Every region needs localized packaging, localized payment gateways, localized language.

You can build fast. Just know the difference between building something fast and building something that lasts.

Two things changed the trajectory of my career.

1. Hitting rock bottom.

- Built a ringtone subscription business. It collapsed.
- Had just bought a house, a condo, and signed an expensive lease.
- Owed the government a pile in taxes.
- Put the tax money into a “regulated” forex opportunity.
- Forex collapsed too.
- Bailiff showed up to seize my SUV.
- I was driving around screaming from stress.

2. Choosing commitment.

- Standing in the shower one morning. Full messaging framework for Tru Earth just clicked.
- The product seemed too cheap to scale. But at that moment, the entire positioning downloaded.
- Voice-noted the whole thing before I dried off.
- That messaging carried Tru Earth for years.

If you can, choose #2.

But if you’ve already hit #1, the clarity that comes from survival mode is real.

The bottleneck isn’t taste, intelligence or creative systems.

Most people online are so vanilla. They don’t expose their interests or say anything controversial. 

They just share business stuff.

Look at Hormozi. Grows his hair, grows his beard, always wears a tank top, works out like a motherf*cker. Says a lot of controversial stuff. I bet you half of it he doesn’t even mean. But people align with it.

Because when everything starts looking the same, nobody’s attracted to you because they don’t feel like they have anything in common with you outside of “I'm this hard working, grinding” guy.

My kids already say everything’s AI this, AI that.

We're heading back to a place where people follow and listen to people who are clearly real. You’ll get verified by being authentic.

Founders sand off every edge that would make someone actually give a sh*t about them.

You've got maybe 1000 days before AI levels this whole playing field.

A friend of mine runs a supplement brand doing solid numbers in the US.

About six months ago he started noticing something unusual in his analytics. Consistent traffic from Canada. Not paid. Organic. People were finding him through social media and word of mouth across the border.

He was excited for about ten minutes.

Then reality set in. His US-based 3PL wouldn't ship north without brutal surcharges. The few orders he managed to fulfill took two to three weeks and arrived with surprise customs fees that destroyed the customer experience on delivery.

So he watched the traffic. Every week. Canadian visitors showing up, bouncing at checkout, leaving.

He described it as watching revenue walk out the door through a window he couldn't open.
We connected him with Breakthrough Fulfillment. 

They had him fully operational in Canada within two weeks. Freight forwarding to local warehouses, next-day delivery to Toronto, Vancouver, and other major cities. No surprise duty at the customer's door.

Within 90 days he had added a revenue stream he had been accidentally ignoring for over a year.

The part that stands out is how common this pattern is. Brands generating organic Canadian demand without realizing it, then losing those customers to a logistics problem they assume is too complicated to solve.

If you are doing real volume in the US, check your geographic analytics. If Canadian traffic is showing up and not converting, the demand already exists. The infrastructure is the only thing missing.

https://lnkd.in/eGUqzqCe+M+LinkedIn&utm_campaign=3pl+feb+wk2

If this sounds familiar, comment below or send me a DM. I will connect you with the team.

www.breakthrough.studio

Breakthrough Studio - Premier 3PL Services | Streamlined Logistics Solutions

Every upgrade feels like a flex for about two weeks.

The office, the car, the lease on a bigger warehouse.

Then it just becomes another bill. Another thing you have to feed every month whether the business is up or down.

The best thing I ever did was start asking "does this make my life easier or does this just make me look like I'm winning?"

Most of the time it was the second one.

Social proof is NOT dead. Stop listening to your timeline.

That’s just bad advice from brands who don’t understand the difference between a 1.5 and a 4x ROAS.

I spend $50K+/month on static ads. And it comes down to one thing: 

Matching the right trust signal to the right stage of awareness.

This changes everything about how you allocate ad spend. 

The same testimonial converts at 4x in one ad and barely breaks even in another. Because nobody asked: does this buyer even need convincing yet?

I broke down exactly which signals belong where here:

Social Proof Isnt Dead Youre Just Using It Wrong 

Landing pages are basically first dates.

You can say all the right things, look great, check every box.

Then you make one claim that's slightly too big and the whole thing falls apart.

Believability is more important than impressiveness. Always has been.

Entrepreneurs don’t like to admit this:

The janitor probably has a better life than you do.

For a few months after I stepped away from the day to day at Tru Earth, I'd be at the gym in the morning and my brain would start screaming at me:

You gotta get to your desk. You gotta get to your desk. You gotta get to your desk.

And I'd be standing there mid-set going... What desk? I don't have a desk to get to anymore.

That voice wasn't rational. 
It was just years of training. 
Years of being always on. 
Years of every morning being about the next fire, the next hire problem, the next thing that needed me specifically to figure it out.

You don't realize how much that costs you psychologically until you stop paying it.

When you're in the middle of it, you think everybody operates like this. You think this is just what it takes. 

- Managing people who won't be in the same room anymore because they don't like each other.
- Solving problems with no clean answer.
- Carrying decisions home every single night and pretending you're present with your family when your head is still at the office.

And then there's the janitor.

The janitor:
- Shows up
- Checks every box on the list
- Walks out at 5 o'clock
- Doesn't think about it again until tomorrow

No mental load. 
No 2am problem solving. 
No Slack notifications at dinner.

A lot of entrepreneurs look down on that. 

I think that's wrong.

Not everybody should be an entrepreneur. Not everybody values the same things. And the person who doesn't take work home with them? They're arguably wealthier in the one thing every founder eventually realizes matters most...

Time. 

And the ability to actually be present inside of it.

If you’re building something right now and you feel this weight every single day, I’m not telling you to quit. I’m telling you to notice this.

Because the cost is real.

My kids are only young once. It's been really nice to just be there. Not thinking about tomorrow's fire. Just hanging out with them and soaking it in.

This is what life is all about.

Nobody tells you the weird part about stepping back from the business you built.

You go from "I'm the CMO of [brand]" to "I'm... working on some stuff."

Your identity was the company. Now you have to figure out who you are without it.

It's a better problem to have than most. But it's still a problem.

I’ve built businesses that did $100K months and ones that did $0 months.

The operator who walks out of the $0 month is someone you couldn’t have built on purpose. 

That only comes from surviving it.

Most operators are optimizing against themselves.

Your open rate went from 18% to 23%. You called it a win.

But 23% against brands your size, in your category, on your platform could be bottom quartile.

You don’t know. And that’s the real problem.

Omnisend’s Benchmark Calculator pulls real data from 150,000+ ecommerce brands and shows you where your email and SMS actually stands, not just whether the numbers are trending in the right direction.

Open rates. Click rates. Revenue per email. Benchmarked against brands running similar send volume and similar categories.

This is the difference between “our emails are improving” and “our emails are beating the top 20% of brands in our space.”

Q1 just ended. Before you commit to a Q2 plan, you should know where you actually stand.

If your benchmarks are coming up short, sending more isn’t usually the fix. Getting on a platform with the flows, segmentation, and automation infrastructure to actually convert is.

Omnisend’s US merchants average $79 in revenue for every $1 spent. The Benchmark Calculator is free.

If your current ESP can’t even show you how you stack up, that’s already your answer.

Run your numbers here: https://lnkd.in/dddMBgx8

Use code RYAN30 for 30% off your first 3 months.

Already on a paid plan elsewhere? Omnisend handles the migration for free. Automations, templates and flows. All done in 5 days.

And yes, I’m a proud Omnisend partner.

Open article: Recommended by Ryan McKenzie by omnisend.com

A friend of mine owns this little café I like to visit from time to time. 

And man, this guy’s got it figured out...

A couple real estate investments. His future is set. He runs the café because he wants to, not because he needs it to work perfectly.

And something clicked for me sitting there.

That’s the actual goal.

Not the flashy milestones. Not scaling to 9 figures for the sake of saying it. Not even the massive paydays.

The goal is having enough resources working for you that you can take risks and fail without everything coming apart.

I think most founders get into this game thinking about success. But they forget that things change.

Products lose steam. Business models stop working. Algorithms evolve.

It’s easy to feel untouchable when things are good. But what happens when it all stops?

That’s when you need to be okay starting over.

The café owner had it right. He built enough outside the business that he could operate without any desperation. No panic. No survival mode.

And it made me realize: I need enough resources outside of my main thing to keep going on my terms. Because everything ends eventually.

But if you’re prepared for that?

That’s freedom.

Co-founder & CEO @ Revenue Roll

3rd-generation entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of Tie.

Tie helps ecommerce brands de-anonymize their highest-value web traffic with names, email addresses, advertising IDs and demographic attributes. We’re trusted by brands like Macy’s, Cozy Earth, Crunch Fitness, Caraway, and Baby Brezza.

On average, our customers de-anonymize up to 90% and grow their cart abandonment list by 225%. Join them: meettie.com.

Michael Diesu

2 weeks ago, we announced a program called Tie(d) Together. Obviously I’m a little biased, but it really is one of the most generous bonus programs I’ve ever heard of at a tech startup.

The way most startups think about incentive alignment, especially financial incentives, does not work.

Startups are a 10-year, or longer, journey. The average employee tenure at a startup is about 2 years.

Which means as a founder, at least half of the company you have today will not participate in the value they create for your company outside of their salary.

As we place loftier goals on our team, that misalignment sounds more and more like a terrible deal for employees.

So, we went back to the drawing board to see how we can do better at Tie.

Here’s how the program works:

For every $1M in ARR we generate above our annual revenue goal, we create a $100K bonus pool for the team. It scales with no ceiling — the further we exceed the goal, the larger the pool.

We pay out based on tenure, then role (C-suite and officers are excluded) and OKR completion. The longer you stick around and help the company exceed its goals by delivering on your OKRs, the more you get to share in the proceeds directly.

No more waiting 10 years to get paid for helping the company win.

It’s a simple promise that forces alignment across the board — from setting the right goals to begin with to elevating a culture of delivering outcomes.

Over time some smaller details may change as we expand the team and learn more about how this impacts the way we work (the core structure will always stay the same), but to say I’m excited about this is an understatement.

Hopefully this starts a movement among early-stage startups to share the rewards with their team sooner.

“We hit $100M ARR in 2 months!”

I’ve seen more headlines like that recently than I can count.

And don’t get me wrong: ARR is great. But it’s not the real measure of business health.

Net revenue retention is.

And right now, it feels like the only thing that matters in startups is achieving an insanely high ARR number on an even more insane timeline.

NRR is something I’m focused intensely on improving this year at Tie, because a business that doesn’t keep customers and gets them to purposefully spend more over time is a dying business.

Here’s a challenge we’ve been working to solve at Tie:

Sales wants to close more, and larger, deals which require more customization. 

CS wants smoother implementation which requires more predictability.

Nothing unique to Tie, but it is a tricky problem because they’re both focused on what will help them hit their targets.

The question isn’t whether or not to blanket-accept or reject custom deals.

The question is about who owns the outcomes.

From a sales perspective, revenue is revenue. But once that customer lands in onboarding, our CS team has to get the product set up and driving value.

That can be really difficult when you’re working with a non-standard tech stack or any other combination of custom terms.

So we built something called a Deal Desk. Any deal that falls outside our ICP and standard exception criteria, has to have sign off from both Sales and CS.

It’s only fair that since CS’s job is to onboard, retain, and grow customers that they get a voice in which deals we sign… and accountability for the outcomes.

CS and Sales leaders - what do you think? Is this a better solution than letting one side or the other control what deals get done?

The advice early-stage founders typically get about how to scale people is bad. 

"Hire great people, set clear expectations, get out of their way."

You're supposed to write the process doc, schedule the weekly 1:1, hand off the function, and step back. Because the modern leadership orthodoxy says that's what good founders do — trust your team, don't micromanage, give people room to own things.

Six months later, you're noticing slips and decisions being made that may not kill your business, but also don't push you closer to your goals. Now you're back in the weeds.

The new hire is smart. Works hard. But they're making decisions from their own mental model that's usually built at their last company, in a different stage, with different tradeoffs. 

A culture deck and onboarding checklist doesn't fix that.

When our first AE joined Tie, I spent six weeks on the road with him — four trade shows, long car rides, airport downtime. I gave feedback on everything. Probably too much. I was intense in the way early-stage founders are when they know exactly how something should be done and need someone else to do it without them.

By month four, something had shifted. 

He just knew what I'd greenlight. We didn't need to debrief after every call. The was a rhythm that had been built because we'd been in enough situations together that he'd started to think like me.

That's what culture actually is.

Not the values on the website. Not the principles deck. It's the judgment that makes someone make the right call when nobody's watching and there's no rulebook to check.

When you give someone space before the context is there, you're not trusting them. You're leaving a void. And that void often gets filled with whatever they bring from their previous experiences.

This is also where scale breaks down. You can only scale what lives in other people. If the judgment is still only in your head, you can only scale yourself. And that has a very low ceiling.

Six weeks on the road felt like a lot at the time. In hindsight, it was some of the most critical time I spent that year.

Because that proximity and hands-on time was how we built the company to this point.

Identity data won't save a broken marketing operation.

The analogy I keep coming back to: identity data is premium fuel. It's precise, it's powerful, and it's wasted if the vehicle isn't built to use it.

The brands that get the most out of identity data don’t necessarily have to be the biggest. But they do need to have already built a real multi-channel marketing operation — email, SMS, and paid all dialed in, and a lifecycle motion that can actually act on new signals. 

When you hand a brand like that a richer, more accurate identity dataset, every one of those channels improves. Email reaches more of the right people. Paid audiences stop bleeding. And the experience tightens across the board.

When those channels aren't in place, the data just adds complexity to a weak foundation.

I find at Tie, it’s sometimes better when we’re honest with brands that would benefit from having a better “engine” first before they buy from us.

It puts them in a better position to succeed long-term. And it helps us focus only on brands we can truly help.

I know some people would argue against turning down customers but you don’t build a Skyscraper business by trying to be all things to all people.

Every hype cycle creates the same pattern.

A new technology arrives. Capital floods in. Valuations detach from fundamentals. Founders rework their pitch decks overnight. Everyone calls themselves [trend] companies.

Then the cycle peaks. Capital tightens. And suddenly the market asks a question nobody was asking on the way up: is there an actual business here?

Most of the answers aren't great.

What separates the companies that survive isn't better technology or a bigger team. It's whether the core value proposition existed before the trend — and holds up after it fades.

Here's the test: strip the trend out of the pitch entirely. If the business doesn't survive that, you're borrowing against a cycle, not building a company.

Tie is no exception. Brands lose revenue when they can't identify who's visiting their site. That problem existed before AI became a buzzword. It'll exist after. The tools we use to solve it get sharper every year, but the underlying problem doesn't go anywhere.

The companies still standing in five years won't be the ones that raised the most at peak hype. They'll be the ones with a clear answer to "why does this need to exist?" And it needs to be an answer that holds up when nobody's excited anymore.

So, what's the takeaway from this random rant?

Build for the world after the trend dies. That's where the real businesses live.

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