28 Years in E-Commerce Now Pivoting to AI & Automations

Hello fellow AI founders & enthusiasts!

Finding this local group has got me fired up!

A Bit About Me

Born in Los Angeles, proud Filipino, and now soaking up the sun in Scottsdale, AZ. My wife and I spent four straight years living the nomad life in a motorhome and traveling internationally before settling down. We're now first-time parents to our 1-year-old boy named Miko "MacGyver." Yes, that's his real middle name – I was obsessed with MacGyver! We also have a 14-year old Silkie Terrier named Chloe who's still kicking.

My wife and I traveled full-time for four years in a motorcoach and saw half of the country, as well as a dozen foreign countries. COVID forced us to settle down in Austin, TX, when certain states started to tighten up their borders.

Hit the big 5-0 this year (half a century, folks!). My wife is 13 years younger than me and doubles as my business partner. I've weathered some serious storms – nearly filed for bankruptcy once and dropped out of college just six months shy of completing my Computer Information Systems degree because of boredom. The school moved at a glacial pace, and I was already earning a great living in tech.

My Journey

I've been in the e-commerce trenches for nearly 30 years (internet dinosaur status confirmed). Built multiple successful brands, survived Amazon's rollercoaster (including a full-blown account suspension right before my wedding... nothing tests your crisis management skills quite like that), and made pretty much every mistake possible along the way.

Truth is, I've been knee-deep in automation for decades before it became the hot thing everyone's chasing. My e-commerce operations relied heavily on connecting inventory management systems, order processing workflows, vendor management tools, and CRMs. I've hired coders to create custom apps and scripts to bridge operational gaps that off-the-shelf solutions couldn't handle. One could say I was forced to learn integrations and automations simply to keep my businesses from imploding.

From 2016-2018, I ran an online coaching program/community, helping hundreds of entrepreneurs launch and scale their e-commerce businesses. The pattern became crystal clear: the businesses that succeeded weren't necessarily the ones with the best products or marketing. They were the ones who got their operational house in order through documented processes, strategic hires, and smart automation.

From 2020-2023, I ran an e-commerce consulting agency helping established brands scale by focusing on the boring, mundane, or commonly neglected areas. Email marketing, inventory planning/forecasting, profit optimization, customer relations, process improvement – the unsexy stuff that drives profit. I scaled back client work in late 2023 when my wife and I welcomed our first child to focus on our new family.

My passion lies in helping businesses implement AI and automation that delivers real ROI, not just tech that looks impressive in demos but falls apart in real-world applications. My North Star is profit – plain and simple. The two metrics I obsess over are lowering customer acquisition costs and increasing customer lifetime value. Everything else is just noise.

I've dabbled in M&A (mergers & acquisitions), but prefer consulting for equity gigs.

I still own my e-commerce brands. It keeps me in the loop, though I spend very little time "in" the business, thanks to what I've automated and outsourced, which gives me the freedom to explore this new path.

My Strengths

My formal education was in Computer Information Systems, with a focus on coding. I was building computers and setting up networks before most people had home internet. After almost three decades of exposure to many different business models, my strengths lie in:

Education and complex problem-solving
Systematic thinking
Business strategy
Sales (getting on calls and closing high-ticket engagements)
Guerilla marketing
Organic marketing
Scaling agencies and online courses

Current Focus

I've been delving deep into AI and automations, soaking in as much as I can, to see where my next adventure lies now that family life has settled down a bit. I have a strong passion to educate, so that's an itch I'll need to scratch.

My son is growing like a weed and requires increasing energy and creativity to keep entertained – probably a sign he'll be a smart cookie!

My wife and I have been exploring our next business venture. Top contenders include:

An educational company teaching individuals or companies to use AI effectively – not just handing out prompt collections, but teaching people prompt engineering, advanced automations, and how to generate income in the space.
An AI and automation consulting agency for established e-commerce brands, helping systematize and automate customer service, data management, reporting, price optimization, etc.
Admittedly, I also have a strong desire to branch out from e-commerce since I've been in it for so long and believe that my accumulated skillsets can serve a variety of other industries.
In my previous agency, I also enjoyed partnering with other agencies, specifically generating high-ticket clients for them in exchange for a percentage of the contract or by white-labeling their services. I would attract clients through my own marketing efforts, conduct sales calls, and sign them up. I stayed on board to oversee projects and also helped nurture clients to help combat churn. I would also continue to offer additional services throughout the relationship.

Current Projects

On the tech/AI side, here are some projects I've been working on:

- An automation that generates standard operating procedures from raw inputs, stores them, notifies connected parties, and tracks revisions—still figuring out how to handle the insertion of screenshots for the steps that would benefit from them. Screenshots are just so specific, however, that that's going to be a challenge since our SOPs are ideated from scatch.

- An AI-driven project manager I can interact with via Slack – not just for status updates, but one that performs the full duties of a human PM, setting up projects with tasks, due dates, assignees, dependencies, and balancing workloads automatically.

- An automation powering an algorithmic trading system that evaluates products across our online sales channels and advises which specific products generate the highest investment returns. It ranks products, notifies me what to replenish, when, and why, then handles vendor orders and tracks status.

In closing, I've learned that the difference between struggling and thriving businesses often comes down to operational excellence and strategic automation. The businesses that win aren't necessarily the ones with the fanciest tech stack – they're the ones who've identified exactly where automation delivers the highest ROI and executed relentlessly on those opportunities.

I'm looking forward to connecting with fellow AI & automation enthusiasts who understand that technology isn't about shiny objects, but about creating systems that deliver tangible results. Whether you're just starting out or you've been building systems for decades, I'd love to learn from your experiences and perhaps share some hard-won wisdom from my own journey.

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