Why I Said Yes to Nudge

At Found.ee, an artist told me about the number of TikToks they had to produce every day. What they really wanted was to make music. They didn’t want to be stuck producing a set number of short videos.

That moment stuck with me, because this was the person I wanted to build for. I never wanted to make marketing lazy. These artists care deeply about their careers and about their fans. The goal was to let them do sophisticated marketing in less time, and to bring them closer to the people listening. A fixed daily quota keeps the calendar full, and it can leave the artist with less energy for the work their fans came for.

That common thread could also be found at Soundrop and later, when we pivoted to Show.co. My favourite part of the job was showing artists what was possible and watching them react. You could tell it made their lives easier. That reaction is what I kept wanting more of, and every tool we built was an attempt to earn it again.

Ecommerce founders, I find, are cut from similar cloth. They put something into the world, just like musicians do. Most of them never signed up to sift through spreadsheets, reports and analytics dashboards. They care about their product and their customers. Yet a growing brand quickly turns its founder into a part time analyst, with Amazon open in one tab, Shopify in another and a stack of reports in a third. Every hour spent there is an hour away from the product, the team and the customers.

That’s why Nudge pulled me in. I didn’t know much about ecommerce, but I recognized who we were building for and why we were building it. Nelly reads the signals across Amazon and Shopify and tells a founder what to do next, so the hours go back to the work they love. The goal is close to my heart: do sophisticated work, in less time, that brings a founder closer to their customers.

I’ve spent years giving people their time back to do the thing they love. Now I get to do it for founders and their commerce teams.

Decode the why. Drive the buy.