Josh Chin

I'm Josh. When I first started, I offered to work for free for a month and still couldn’t close a single client. 8 years later, I run a 75-person retention agency behind $380M in attributed revenue. The beginning was quite a unique journey: • I spent every dollar I had on courses, books, and food. • Spent 4 months reaching out to brands who didn't care about email. • Couldn't even give my work away for free. I was in college and had no grand plan or startup vision. I just needed to make money so I could eat. I'd been flipping random stuff on eBay, dropshipping, making a little bit of cash on the side. But I saw an opportunity in email marketing and decided to pivot. But I had nothing: • No network. • No connections. • About $1,000 to my name. That was my entire operating budget. And the brands I was reaching out to didn't care about email at all… They were all-in on Facebook ads, doubling down on paid. Email was an afterthought to pretty much everyone. So I spent four months doing cold outreach every day. Reaching out to brands on social media trying to land a single client. And got zero results. Not a single client. So I had a new genius offer: "I'll do it for free. Four weeks, with no charge. We only talk about payment after I've driven results." It felt like the offer nobody could refuse. It turns out, free has a cost. If you're a successful business owner, the risk of handing your email system to a random kid off the internet is real. • What if he messes something up? • What if you lose customers? • What if skimping on a proper hire ends up costing more than paying for one? The opportunity cost of free was too high. And at the time I had no clue of it. I learned something that still shapes me today: For people who've already built something, money isn't the scarcest resource. Time and attention are. • Free doesn't solve for time. • Free doesn't solve for attention. • Free just means cheap. And cheap feels risky. Once I understood that, I stopped competing on price and I started solving for what was actually scarce. 8 years later… ~$380M in retention-attributed revenue. ~75 people on the team. ~60 active clients. It all started with $1,000 and four months of hearing no. The constraint you're solving for might be the wrong one.

If you simply: - Stop letting life happen to you - Refuse the path of softness - Seek friction on purpose - Devote yourself to a cause greater than yourself - Seek discomfort in hobbies and crafts instead - Go learn chess or stuff that you used to think was lame You'll find your drama, your crises, and your action within that purpose, without destroying your relationship or your job to get it. x.com/rajshamani/sta…

How to actually get rich bro: - Understand that we are mimetic creatures who take on the desires of the people around us because we want to fit in. - Recognize that it's within your full control to dictate who is in your circle and who's in your environment, and thereby your desires and your wants. - Pay attention to whether those wants are healthy and productive, because if they are, you've checked both boxes. - Question the universe you live in and whether it serves you. - Remember that a Lamborghini is a nice toy and a dumb purchase. An empty calendar isn't.

If this was insightful, follow @JoshuaChronos for more. I post about retention systems that make your customers more valuable.

Was talking to a friend last week about a brand doing $60M/year off one product... > A functional coffee table book that happens to be recipes > No persona or personal brand behind it > Really good information wrapped in really good design > Hundreds of pages with no digital version anywhere > One physical product carrying the whole business They found an underserved & untapped segment of the US market, then attacked that one product from every angle with strong ad creatives, a strong influencer strategy, going PAM across every channel, and testing aggressively. It still surprises me to this day that there are always segments this big sitting untapped... … Where you can make tens of millions a year from a single product.

If this was insightful, follow @JoshuaChronos for more. I post about retention systems that make your customers more valuable.

Was at an event in Croatia and saw brands stuck at $2-5M/year add 50% to their top-line revenue without any extra effort… > They replicated their offer in the exact same structure, market to market > They translated everything into German/Italian/French with AI > They localized their site, their emails, and their ads The translations are not perfect. But the markets are underserved and untapped, so even a good enough localized version of a UK brand can do really well. What makes this work is that once you solve shipping and logistics (which in Europe is relatively easy), it stops being a strategic effort and becomes a purely operational one of duplicating your sites and ads and funnel exactly as is. Everyone says “focus on one market, one language, get really good, and go deep.” But you can't hit the same scale selling to Italians in English as you can by AI translating the whole thing. Same core team, same economics, everything localized, and an extra 50% to top-line revenue.

Roy Ang is the co-founder and CEO of Stryv, the fastest-growing consumer electronics company in Southeast Asia. Here's what he said about working with us at Chronos: “We achieved a 34X Klaviyo-attributed ROI. Having Klaviyo is so important today to engage with the customer and really grow profitably. Acquisition cost is a one-way street. It only goes up. Turning those leads and customers into repeat purchases, Klaviyo facilitated all of that, which gave us the profitability equation that was essentially game-changing.” What I love most about this one is that it's more about the friendship we've built over the years. A healthy brand + agency rhythm involves a lot of beer, a lot of whiskey, and a lot of trust. If you want to achieve the same results, DM me to learn more or book a call: chronos.agency/appointment/

Book a call here: chronos.agency/appointment/

We're accepting a new group of DTC brands for a free audit of their Klaviyo account. This is for you if you're a DTC brand doing $5M+/year, growing into 8 figures, and something in your email and SMS feels off but you can't name it: - Klaviyo says email drives 25% of your revenue, Shopify says it's closer to 12%, and you've stopped trying to figure out which one to trust - Your list grows every month, but the people actually clicking your emails don't - You're 90 days into “segmentation” and still can't answer the only question it exists for - Every big sale is followed by three dead campaigns, and someone on your team keeps calling it a deliverability problem - A third of your list has gone quiet, so you send more winbacks, and each one brings back less than the last If any of that sounds familiar, keep reading. The audit is a 25-minute strategy deep dive with me, and you leave with immediate actionables you can deploy right away. If you've already built out an email, SMS, and retention system, we run a comprehensive audit on top of it. Here's what you get: - A full deck, handmade by our team, built around your account - The three strongest levers to pull to increase profits over the next 90 days - A forecast going forward, with a breakdown of your data and how we think about growth - A full instruction sheet for you to keep - A recorded set of instructions (which is the audit call itself) If the audit makes sense as a fit, this is what the full done-for-you side looks like: - A dedicated strategist who runs the account and thinks on your behalf - A full production team behind the scenes handling copy, design, deployment, and QA - You're getting a strategist, a campaign manager, a copywriter, a designer, and a QC team without hiring five people So if you want to see where your three biggest levers are, book a call below.

Was going to gatekeep this, but f**k it. I just put together the actual retention audit we use to score brands. The same one we run on real DTC brands before we touch a single email. What's inside: → The 5 drivers we score every account on → A 55-point deep-dive that shows exactly where the revenue is hiding → How we model moving your email revenue share from where it sits today to where it should be → How that LTV lift translates into annual EBITDA profit → What that profit means for your enterprise value at exit Now it's yours for free. Just: 1. Repost this tweet 2. Comment “AUDIT” And I'll send it over. (Make sure you're following me so I can DM you.)

Ecom North is running summits in four cities this year. Getting in isn't as simple as buying a ticket. > Applicants will be pre-vetted (~20% could get rejected) > 80% of attendees will be founders and brand owners > Capped at 10 sponsors for every 1,000 attendees > The speakers are operators in the weeds today > Plus, you get direct access to vetted service providers, investors, and VCs Four cities, four dates: 1) Singapore on August 4, 2026 2) LA on September 17, 2026 3) Toronto on October 29-30, 2026 4) Melbourne on December 8, 2026

> I started Chronos with free audits as the attraction offer > Became one of the earliest Klaviyo-dominant agencies in the game > Staffed the entire team outside the US > Spent 8 years building the agency > Worked with 600+ different clients > Audited thousands of accounts as a team > Personally saw hundreds myself > Scaled to 75 team members servicing 60 active brands > Drove $380M+ through retention marketing strategies > Now sending 700+ campaigns a month across DTC brands of all sizes

Built this seasonal discount email for Ancient Remedies.

THE PLAYBOOK BEHIND A 36% REPURCHASE RATE LIFT IN 90 DAYS 📁 The single shift: subscription │ ├── 📁 Lever 1: Strategic subscription offers │ └── Make subscribing the obvious choice │ ├── 📁 Lever 2: Subscription flows │ └── Build the path from first purchase into the program │ └── 📁 Lever 3: Churn prevention tactics └── Attack the order 1>2 drop-off directly The receipts: Feb 2026 - 37% repurchase rate May 2026 - 50.5% repurchase rate Order 1>2 churn dropped from 60% to 25% Bookmark this.

We have a supplement brand with a 50.5% repurchase rate. They got there in 90 days. Feb 2026 - 37% repurchase rate. May 2026 - 50.5% repurchase rate. Order 1>2 churn on the subscription program decreased from 60% down to 25%. The single shift that unlocked this was subscription. Strategic subscription offers, subscription flows, and subscription churn prevention tactics.

If this gave you some new insights, follow @JoshuaChronos for more.

Had a friend tell me about this perfume brand that’s doing around $100M/year off Malaysia alone. > They don’t sell through Instagram/Facebook ads to a product page > They sell through sales agents at scale > Think MLM, but it’s moms and dads selling to friends on WhatsApp > 80% of their business comes from WhatsApp peer-to-peer sales > Every customer effectively becomes an affiliate Malaysia is still a developing country, but everybody has a phone and everybody has internet. The default apps people use are Facebook and WhatsApp, and most purchases happen through friends talking about products with friends. They made that happen through WhatsApp. Literally one of the most uniquely positioned brands I’ve heard about because they built distribution around how people already buy. It’s just an interesting way of winning that no one is really focused on.

I came across this $100M Ecom Subscription Playbook article. Here’s the full TLDR:

We have a client doing $5-$6M/month selling physical encyclopedias on a very niche topic… > One core product, scaled very aggressively to a very large TAM. > They've focused on perfecting one channel: Facebook Meta. > They spend 80% of the budget on Meta and one core funnel. They've taken this to an extreme of pure focus, of just one product, one funnel, one channel, and a really large TAM, and have absolutely crushed it. Never would I have thought that such a business could exist.

Built this email for Olivia Jewelry and made sure their bracelets were something moms would wear every morning.