Ed Hallen co-founded Klaviyo in 2012 with Andrew Bialecki, off the back of a dinner in Boston where an Australian entrepreneur selling suits online told them he spent three hours a week manually emailing his customer list. They offered to automate it. Thirteen years, a 2023 IPO, $1.2 billion in revenue, and almost 200,000 brands later, that same core idea still runs the company.

Now Chief Strategy Officer, Ed is the person inside Klaviyo thinking hardest about where it goes next. Nathan caught him live at K:SYD in Sydney, fresh off a keynote to more than 600 retailers. Klaviyo is one of Add To Cart's two major sponsors, and this conversation still went straight at the hard stuff: pricing, attribution, AI, K-Social, loyalty, and the single most underused feature on the platform right now.

Chapters:
[00:00] Why most brands have not actually left Klaviyo to build their own
[03:05] What changed in the K:SYD room from 2025 to 2026
[05:00] The Boston dinner with an Australian suit entrepreneur that became Klaviyo
[08:00] One-to-one as the next frontier and why send-time personalisation is only step one
[10:00] The competitive moat: data, outcomes and being channel agnostic
[13:00] Vibe coding, MCP and Claude: how Klaviyo thinks about an open platform
[18:42] K-Social, walled gardens and converting Instagram followers into owned audiences
[20:30] Attribution honesty: why Klaviyo Attributed Value should sometimes go down
[22:39] The pricing change explained: contacts emailed vs active profiles
[26:30] Why disengaged customers are a segment to message differently, not delete
[29:00] Composer, AI as a starting point and where humans still own the work
[31:00] Why Klaviyo is not building a loyalty product (yet) and what "small L loyalty" looks like
[34:00] The most underused feature on Klaviyo, and it is not the newest one
[36:00] The Australian brands Ed says are using Klaviyo well
[37:00] What Klaviyo looks like in five years, and the part that will not change

Brands and tools mentioned: Klaviyo, Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, Composer, Customer Agent, Marketing Agent, K-Social, Claude, MCP, Instagram, WhatsApp, RCS, Tiger Mist, Incu, Budgy Smuggler, July, P.E Nation
This episode is brought to you with thanks to our partners:
🛍️ Shopify → https://www.shopify.com/au
📧 Klaviyo → https://www.klaviyo.com/au/
Connect with us on LinkedIn:
👤 Ed Hallen → https://www.linkedin.com/in/edhallen/
👤 Nathan Bush → https://au.linkedin.com/in/nathbush
👤 Rosa Willis → https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-clara-willis-23761066/
🎙️ Want to be a guest or sponsor on Add To Cart? → https://www.addtocart.com.au/contact
📩 Sign up for the free Add To Cart newsletter → https://newsletter.addtocart.com.au/subscribe
💬 Join the Add To Cart Community → https://community.addtocart.com.au/feed

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Justin Babet thought he was building a sports nutrition brand. Then he looked at who was actually buying. Visit Playbook #629 at addtocart.com.au 🎙️

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PYRA had brand recognition but zero customer data when Sam Moore took it back. Every email, every sale from three years of Culture Kings had gone to their platform not his. Here's how he rebuilt from nothing. Playbook #625 at addtocart.com.au 🎙️
#ecommerce #onlineretail #marketingstrategy #marketing #pricing #materials #trywithmirra #customised #shipping #scale #ecommercemarketing #growthstrategy #e-learning #strategy #ecommerceaustralia #production #market #fashion #retail #fashionretail #trybeforeyoubuy #fashionecommerce #onlineretail #onlineshopping

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For most of my career in e-commerce, the performance marketing conversation was about audiences. Which targeting, which lookalikes, which exclusions. The media buying was the strategy and the creative was just the fuel you fed it.

That made sense in 2017. It doesn't hold up now. Meta, Google and TikTok have all moved the same way: the audience targeting levers that used to separate good media buyers from average ones have been absorbed into the platform. The machine finds the right person. What you actually control is what you put in front of them when it does.

Which means creative has moved from execution to strategy. The brands pulling ahead aren't trying to make better ads. They're building content production systems. The question isn't whether an ad is good. It's whether the pipeline has enough creative in it to keep finding what works.
In this Playbook, we break down why creative now does the targeting that media buyers used to own, how to treat your content engine as a system and find the blocker that's choking your output, and why volume only works if new creative gets a genuine test. Featuring lessons from Justin Babet at Chief Nutrition, Simon Beard at Culture Kings, Alice Williams at Ovira, Mike Halligan at Scratch, and Paula Mitchell at Freedom.
Brands and tools mentioned: Chief Nutrition, Culture Kings, Ovira, Scratch, Freedom, Meta, Google, TikTok, Klaviyo
This episode is brought to you with thanks to our partners:
🛍️ Shopify → https://www.shopify.com/au
📧 Klaviyo → https://www.klaviyo.com/au/
Connect with us on LinkedIn:
👤 Justin Babet → https://au.linkedin.com/in/justinbabet
👤 Nathan Bush → https://au.linkedin.com/in/nathbush
👤 Rosa Willis → https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-clara-willis-23761066/
🎙️ Want to be a guest or sponsor on Add To Cart? → https://www.addtocart.com.au/contact
📩 Sign up for the free Add To Cart newsletter → https://newsletter.addtocart.com.au/subscribe
💬 Join the Add To Cart Community → https://community.addtocart.com.au/feed

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