Andrei Rebrov 🚀

Finsi

Chief Agentic Officer and Co-founder

Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator

Entrepreneur In Residence

Primary Venture Partners

As an Expert, I provide strategic advice and guidance to the investment team and founders within the Primary portfolio and broader network. Experts enjoy access to early-stage businesses, emerging trends and technology, and an expanded network of exceptional leaders and resources through a top-tier seed-stage firm.

Expert

Workspace6

Member

MACH Alliance

MACH Ambassador

Berkelyn

Business Operations and Product Innovation, Technical Advisor

Deck of Scarlet

CTO & Co-founder

Scentbird

- Architecture & Infrastructure decision making
- Product engineering (Development, Testing, Operations)
- Product business development
- Search engine optimization
- Building engineering culture according agile approaches

CTO / Co-founder

Libi & Daughters

Technical Advisor

Precious Payload

Advisor

As the CTO and Co-founder of Scentbird, a leading subscription-based ecommerce platform for fragrances, I have been responsible for the architecture and infrastructure decision making, product engineering, product business development, and search engine optimization for over 10 years. I have also been a MACH Ambassador at MACH Alliance, a group of independent tech companies that advocate for open, composable, and cloud-native software, since November 2022. In addition, I have recently joined Libi & Daughters, a family-owned online retailer of natural and organic beauty products, as a technical advisor.

My core competencies include Java software development, agile practices and engineering  management. My mission is to improve engineering and coaching skills to help teams deliver in time and make customers happy. I am passionate about building innovative and scalable solutions that enhance the online shopping experience and empower consumers to discover and enjoy new products.

Revel is shutting down their rideshare in NYC and is focusing on EV Charging. Sad but a right thing to do.

I really liked their service because I like Tesla cars, but in NYC where speed is everything you can't compete just on an assumption of people loving car brand (especially since love to Tesla recently dropped pretty significantly).

People will wait in line for the sandwich they love because that's the exact sandwich they are in love with. But transportation is just a way to get from point A to point B.

Know your strength, don't afraid to pivot. And good luck to Revel team!

Co-founder @ Finsi | Improving retention through data since 2014 | ex-CTO @ Scentbird

Tired of GenAI content on LinkedIn? Want to now right away if you need to skip it? I have a solution for you!

I spend a lot of time on LI and really want to read useful stuff and not some ChatGPT copy and paste. That's why I created LinkedIn AI Detector plugin for Chrome.

So, just go to the Chrome Plugin store, search for Finsi.ai LinkedIn AI Detector, add your ChatGPT key and that's it!

That feeling when you see someone from BattlBox in your CRM and you know that your email will be reviewed by John Roman eventually

Running an e-commerce biz? DTC drama got you down? Let the cosmos (and a touch of SaaS) guide your hustle this week. Here’s your totally scientific horoscope for navigating the wild world of online retail:

Aries (March 21 - April 19)
Go ahead, Aries, launch that shiny new ad campaign like the impulsive firebrand you are. Mars is cheering, but maybe don’t blow your budget on a questionable SaaS tool because it “looks cool.” 🙄

Taurus (April 20 - May 20)
Congrats, Taurus, your snail-paced supply chain tweaks are finally paying off. Venus says zhuzh up your site’s visuals, but don’t get so stubborn you ignore your team’s ideas. They’re not all terrible.

Gemini (May 21 - June 20)
Oh, Gemini, flitting between TikTok, Insta, and X like a caffeinated butterfly. Mercury’s got your back for viral content, but pick ONE platform before you crash and burn. Multitasking isn’t that cute.

Cancer (June 21 - July 22)
Cue the violins, Cancer—your sappy email campaigns will make customers swoon. The Moon’s all about feelings, but don’t cry over bad data. Analytics are your friend, not your therapist.

Leo (July 23 - August 22)
Strut your stuff, Leo. The Sun’s begging for a glitzy product launch or influencer flex. Just don’t let your ego write checks your ROI can’t cash. Humility isn’t the worst, you know.

Virgo (August 23 - September 22)
Virgo, you’re out here color-coding your inventory spreadsheets. Mercury loves your obsession with details, but stop overanalyzing every 1-star review. Not everyone gets your genius.

Libra (September 23 - October 22)
Venus wants your site to look like a Pinterest board, Libra, but balance it with actual strategy. Partnerships are hot, but indecision is so last season—pick a lane already.

Scorpio (October 23 - November 21)
Sly Scorpio, Pluto’s whispering about sneaky pricing hacks or exclusive drops. Your gut’s spot-on, but don’t play too secretive with partners. Trust is worth more than your mystery vibes.

Sagittarius (November 22 - December 21)
Dreaming of global domination, Sag? Jupiter’s hyping international expansion, but your logistics better keep up with your wanderlust. Test small, or you’ll be crying over return fees.

Capricorn (December 22 - January 19)
Saturn’s got you grinding, Cap—SEO and loyalty programs are your jam. But cutting corners to save a buck? That’s how you tank your brand’s rep. Play the long game, cheapskate.

Aquarius (January 20 - February 18)
Aquarius, you’re out here reinventing e-commerce with AI ads and quirky loyalty schemes. Uranus loves the chaos, but don’t scare off your normie customers. Not everyone’s ready for your revolution.

Pisces (February 19 - March 20)
Pisces, your dreamy branding stories are giving Oscar-worthy vibes. Neptune’s all in for eco-friendly flexes, but keep an eye on cash flow. Stars don’t pay your bills, dreamer.

What’s your sign, and are you actually following the stars’ advice? Drop your DTC wins (or cosmic fails) below.

Retention is like weight loss. It's hard to measure progress and requires discipline.

I was listeting to Modern Wisdom podcast with Rory Sutherland yesterday and among many great phrases I liked one the most:

“I think companies that are owned by private equity, companies that have short-term time horizons, are obsessed with quantification, and it's always easier to quantify and measure acquisition of customers than it is to actually measure retention of customers, because retention of customers is harder to measure, but it's also slow.”

So, let's talk again why retention matters, few data points:

- A 1% increase in customer retention can lead to as much as a 5% positive change in a firm's financial standing, while nearly 80% of future profits may derive from just 20% of existing customers. 

-  E-commerce brands face higher failure rates than general small businesses (which average ~50% failure within five years). For e-commerce specifically, rates hover at 80-90%, often within the first 1-2 years.

- In 2022-2023 as in-person retail rebounded, e-commerce growth slowed to 7-8% annually, and failure rates held steady or rose slightly due to inflation, supply issues, and competition (e.g., "race to the bottom" on pricing).

- Common failure reasons exacerbating short lifetimes include poor marketing, lack of market fit, high acquisition costs, and ignoring retention—tying back to your prior query on retention investments.


Let's me translate the last paragraph:
- A lot of people considered e-commerce to be a game of arbitrage. It's not.
- A lot of people thought that marketing is just just buying some traffic on Facebook. It's not.
- A lot of people thought that consumers need yet another protein powder. They don't.
- A lot of people for reason think that retention is equal to bombarding customers with e-mails and text messages daily. It's not.

Stop being lazy. Get up and learn about your own business. Don't know where to start? It's more or less simple:
- Track your key business metrics - CAC, LTV/CAC, churn, profit and monitor anomalies
- Track your conversion funnel and optimize it.
- Talk to your customers or at least read reviews and CX emails.
- Improve daily.

There is no Ozempic for retention. You need a healthier life style.

Hey folks, who is going to eTail™ East next week? Looking for a company for the #ConferenceRunningClub. Jamie Smith are you around?

Don't call yourself customer centric if you operate within siloed departments.

For a very long period of time, subscription businesses made the same mistake over and over: one group was responsible for acquiring customers and another for retaining them. Now we are more or less past that, and growth teams own LTV/CAC as their key metrics. But did we solve the retention problem? No, doesn't look so.

Here's the brutal truth: multiple teams within your organization interact with customers at various steps of the customer lifecycle. But they just don't pass the customer properly between each other. Wanna see an exaggerated example? Grab a coffee, because I'm sipping mine right now.

Early morning, you're scrolling Instagram. You see a beautiful reel about fresh Colombian coffee. Click. You land on the website. What the hell? The promotion is for Brazilian coffee! WTF!? But you're late for work.

On your way to work, you open Facebook. Same brand. Despite the disconnected ads, you decide to buy. You complete the quiz, follow recommendations, and agree to a medium roasted coffee. Mmmm, can't wait for that fresh morning espresso.

Three days pass. Five days. Seven days. Finally, the box arrives. You were promised three days. You open the box. What the fuck? Why is this a dark roast?

All agitated, you pick up your phone. You open the website, hoping for a quick chat response. You fill in all your details... and BUMMER! Real agents are only available from 9 till 5 Pacific time. You're in NYC, and you're definitely upset.

Whatever. You agree to submit an email. And a miracle! Notification 5 minutes later: the coffee company responded. What? They're sorry you're upset. Here's $5 off. How about sending my coffee? Ah, that's another bot. You respond back so they don't close the ticket.

After a while, a CX agent finally gets in touch. Promises to fix the problem. A week later, you get an answer: Due to unpredictable events, they ran out of medium roast. Since they had an oversupply of dark roast, that's what they sent you. Seriously?

I can keep going with this story, but you get the point. If we look at department KPIs, things look great:
- Ads convert.
- People click.
- Quizzes completed.
- Subscriptions made.
- Shipments shipped.
- Delivered.
- Inventory optimized.
- Tickets closed fast.

But somehow, revenue is not growing. Ever wonder why?

You have to stop operating in siloed departments. Start looking at your data holistically. It’s not rocket science.

Think you need an expensive analytics setup to do it? Wrong!

Think you need a data scientist to do it? Wrong!

You just have to make it a priority. Seriously. And if you don't know where to start? Ping me. I'll show you the damn path.

🚨 Remember when acquiring an e-commerce customer cost $48? Those days are GONE. It’s like remembering dial-up internet, feels like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?

Yesterday I saw a post from Drew Fallon about % of e-commerces sales getting to April 2020 level and decided to ask Manus what happend to the CAC in the meantime. Buckle up, this is a wild ride.

The Journey from 2019 to Today:

2019: Life was simpler. CAC averaged $48. Facebook ads were cheap. Targeting was, dare I say, almost *too* precise.

2020: Pandemic hits. Everyone goes digital. My inbox exploded, and so did CAC. Jumps 28% as competition explodes.

2021: The gold rush continues. Apple drops iOS 14.5. Targeting becomes harder. CAC grows another 23%. We all felt that pinch, admit it.

2022-2024: The "new normal" settles in. Growth moderates but NEVER stops. We're now at $110+ per customer. Ouch.

The Plot Twist:

This isn't just inflation. It's a fundamental shift in how digital commerce works. Think of it as e-commerce Darwinism.

Three Insights That Surprised Me:

1️⃣ Geography is destiny: West Coast brands pay 25% more than Midwest companies for the same customer. That's non-sense to me.

2️⃣ The privacy tax is real: iOS changes ALONE added billions to collective acquisition costs. Thanks, Apple

3️⃣ Winners adapted fast: Top performers shifted focus from acquisition to retention 2x faster than laggards. Basically, they stopped chasing shiny objects and focused on who they already had.

The Bottom Line:
If your 2025 marketing budget assumes 2019 CAC rates, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. You might as well be planning for flying cars.

Smart brands are already pivoting to lifetime value optimization, retention marketing (duh!), and regional cost strategies. It's time to get creative, people.

Your turn: What's the biggest change you've seen in *your* acquisition costs? 

#Ecommerce #MarketingStrategy #CustomerAcquisition #DigitalTransformation #BusinessGrowth

When you move fast you break things. And my current work around win back emails reminded me how I sent 2000 emails by mistake.

These were early days of Scentbird and obviously a lot of things were we doing manually. For example, most of the workflows where:
- Download something from database as CSV file
- Write a script that uses that as input
- Run the script
- Profit!

Almost vibe coding =)

One of these scripts was sending emails using Mandrill, I believe it was an email with tracking numbers.

So, I wrote the script, checked it, commented the line with actual API call to Mandril and run it a couple of times to see if it's working fine. 

Indeed it was, but I actually didn't commented the line, so...

I almost had a heart attack when I went to Mandrill and saw that we sent all these emails. We got a couple of people reaching out to us including our batch mates from Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator class we just finished.

No harm no foul, but the feeling stuck for a while. It was actually the least harmful major mistake among much more that came later. 

We all make mistakes, so next time someone you know fail - cheer them up! Happy Friday!

Everyone has a dashboard, but for most of the companies it's has no value. DTC brands are drowning in data, not insights. 

You're staring at fancy charts all day, feeling productive. But is that data actually telling you what to do next? Or is it just pretty pictures?

I see companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on dashboards. They look great. The team feels like they are on top of it. But when you ask the team what they changed based on the dashboard? Crickets.

Mark my words: data without intelligence is just noise. It's not knowledge, it's not actionable, and it means you're leaving cash on the table by making blind decisions. Your customers are screaming insights, but nobody's listening.

You don't need a data science team, you need business intelligence team.

They don't just show you 'what happened.' They tell you 'WHY it happened' and 'WHAT to do about it.' They turn your raw data into a strategic weapon. That's how you build a real business, not just a data graveyard.

You don't even need a team to do this. Here is a simple path to test it your self:
- Signup with Airbyte Cloud or hotglue
- Connect your Shopify, Facebook, Google Ads, Klaviyo, Yotpo and Gorgias
- Pull data daily
- Send it to Claude (ChatGPT is stupid)
- Forward response into Slack

There, you did it!

So, are you turning data into dollars, or just pretty dashboards?

I love subscriptions, but this is an abomination

Your subscription business is still bleeding 30-60% of its revenue, even at $100M ARR. And I'm telling you, it's not always about more acquisition. Mark my words: if you're not obsessing over retention, you're just paying for customers to walk out the back door. 🚪

The market has changed. CAC has f*cking doubled since 2020, while average customer lifetime has plummeted to 2.5 months for many brands. Yet, I still see companies - even those crushing it at $100M - dumping money into growth channels while ignoring the leaky bucket. It's not sustainable. It's an arbitrage play, not a business.

For companies at the $100M mark, you're past the startup hustle, but you can't get complacent. Here's where many of you are screwing up, and what to fix:

1. Stop chasing every shiny new channel. Seriously, at your scale, you have data. Double down on the 2-3 acquisition channels that are actually profitable. Focus beats fragmentation every damn time.

2. Leverage data for hyper-personalization. Your email marketing shouldn't be generic blasts. Segment, understand churn reasons, and automate laser-focused messaging. When we analyzed thousands of cancellations last quarter, 7 in 10 shoppers told us exactly why they quit. That's gold you're ignoring.

3. Transform customer support into a retention engine. It's not just about answering tickets. I've seen companies recover 10-15% of churned revenue just by empowering support teams to engage high-value customers proactively.

4. Ruthless A/B testing of your dunning strategy. At Scentbird, we increased active subscriptions by 7% just by showing customers the exact reason why their payment failed. Stop with the generic "Oops, something went wrong" BS.

5. Build a win-back playbook based on cancellation reasons. Top performers wait for the right moment and drop one laser-focused message - no blanket coupons. Result: up to 18% MRR recovered.

Don't do fancy shit. Iterate. Optimize. Retain. It's not sexy, but it builds real businesses.

What's the one retention metric you're obsessing over right now? Let's discuss below. 👇

Showing 10% discount 3 seconds after people visit your website is not a retention tactic. 

The beating will continue until bad website popus will disappear. I guess I will post about this everytime I'm getting ready for the conference. 

Stop showing a popup 3 seconds after I visit your popup:
- It's a poor UX - you distracted me while I was reading
- You discounted your product right away so now I know that I can get a discount and will look for a better one
- I still don't know what you are selling and if I need it
- I'm now much closer to rage quit your website complettely

Do this things instead:
- Make a simple home page that I can comprehend in 20-25 seconds
- Show a popup after 30 seconds (adjust the timing based on tests)
- Make it a quiz, onboarding, product discovery - whatever I as a consumer will perceive it as a value
- A/B test the need for discount, may be you don't need it all
- Install analytics and track it
- Re-visit in 6 months

Is it longer? Yes! 100%.

Is it better? 200% One of our customers recently switched the way popup works - 15% uplift in conversion.

Here is the quick litmus test for AI customer support agent. Forward to it an email from a client who asks to cancel subscription. 

Now check who was unsubscribed - you or the original person. Context is everything no matter when we talk about people or AI. I've seen many consultants who gave advices right away without understanding the company and I see many AI code working perfectly well because it had all the necessary requirements and constraints.

I've been telling people how much I love Workspace6 because how much knowledge I get there all the time. But that's not all. I also get a ton of amazing recommendations. 

For example, I recently was chatting a lot with Terry Whalen all things from AI automation to LTV forecasting. And besides the fact that he is an amazingly smart person he also runs Sum Digital that helps people with media buying.

And here is the thing. There agencies who spend customers' money and there are agencies who help customers with the grow. Sum Digital is the latter. So if you are looking for a new partner or just need a good opinion on all things media - talk to Terry.

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