I've been the brand, the agency, and the software company

I’ve worked in commerce from three different sides of the same table.

I was the operator inside a brand. I was the partner inside an agency. I was the founder of a software company that sold to both.

People treat these like three different careers. They’re not. They’re three different angles on the same problem: a brand has more signal than time, and most of the work happens in the gap.

Inside the brand

Inside a brand, the bottleneck is always headcount and attention. The data is right there (you can pull whatever you want, you own the account), but nobody can look at it long enough to act on it.

You learn that the constraint is the operator’s calendar, not the data. This is the lesson that brand-side people overrate (they think it’s only a calendar problem) and that agency-side people underrate (they think they can solve the calendar with a deck).

Inside the agency

Inside an agency, the bottleneck is access. You can see ten brands at once. You know exactly what works because you’ve watched the experiment run ten times in parallel. But you don’t own the calendar of any of those brands. You can recommend; you can’t execute.

You learn that pattern-matching across brands is a real superpower, and almost nobody on the brand side has it. You also learn how thin the agency value-prop is when the recommendation is right but the execution doesn’t happen. Half of agency work is invisible to the brand because the brand never did the thing.

Inside the software

Inside a software company that sells to both, the bottleneck is something else entirely: adoption. You can build the perfect tool. You can save the operator twelve hours a week on paper. They still won’t use it, because the existing process (broken as it is) has been load-bearing for three years.

You learn that a product is not a product; it’s a behavior change wearing a product as a costume. Most B2B software dies on this rock. Mine did, for a while.

The triangulation

Sitting across all three, what I notice now is that almost every “ecommerce problem” I see is actually a problem of which vantage point the person doesn’t have.

Brand operators don’t have the cross-brand pattern. Agency partners don’t have execution authority. Software teams don’t have ground truth on adoption. Each of these can be patched with a smart consultant, a smart agency, a smart product, but only if the patcher knows which leg of the triangle is missing.

That’s most of what I do at Clankers now: I walk in, ask which of the three vantage points the brand is missing, and build the system that fills it in. Usually it’s not the one they thought it was.

Most of the time the brand thinks it’s a data problem. Almost never is.