About me
I build systems that help small businesses outperform bigger ones.
I learned to code as a teenager. I learned marketing behind a bar.
I grew up in Hovden, a small mountain village in southern Norway, and moved to Kristiansand at fifteen: a shy, nerdy kid who had already spent too many nights tinkering with a publishing tool called iPublish.
At sixteen I took a job working nights in a bar. It changed me. People remember how you make them feel. The regulars did not come back because I poured a better drink. They came back because I knew their names, remembered what they liked and made them feel like the most important people in the room. Some of them tipped early in the evening just to make sure of it.
That was my first real education in customer experience, loyalty and sales. It was also where a quiet kid learned to talk to people.
Tips became share capital
The money from the bar became the share capital for my first limited company, built around iPublish, which I started at twenty. Some of my first customers were regulars I had served for years.
In 2008, iPublish became a blogging community and grew to more than 10,000 registered bloggers without a marketing budget. I had no grand plan. I was curious, impatient and more interested in building my own thing than climbing someone else's ladder.
I sold it at 21.
The decade that followed was a series of things I built because I wanted them to exist: Bloggcamp, Social Summer, a conference for digital communication leaders that I ran for four years, and CEO roles across digital media, technology and marketing.
The campaign that changed what I cared about
Early in my agency career, a team I worked with won an international award for a campaign. It looked great. Everyone was proud.
Then I asked what the campaign had done for the client. Nobody had a convincing answer. When I asked the client, the truth was simpler: not much.
That changed how I looked at marketing. Large companies can afford to care about appearances. Small business owners cannot. They sit at kitchen tables at the end of the month, studying the numbers, wondering whether they can hire, invest or keep going.
Those are the people I wanted to work for. I am here for the Fortune 5 million, not the Fortune 500.
An agency built around results, not headcount
In 2017, my wife Nina and I founded Moen & Co to build exactly that. It is a family business, and deliberately so. Since then we have worked with several hundred Scandinavian e-commerce brands across paid media, email, conversion optimisation and growth strategy.
Most stores come to us believing they need more traffic. Often they do not. They need to understand their business and marketing system, find the constraint and fix the basics before pouring more money into a machine that is not ready for it. More traffic only makes a broken system fail faster.
I never wanted a traditional agency, where growth means more people, more meetings and more complexity. We are small on purpose: small enough to care, big enough to get the work done. Instead of adding headcount, I would rather build infrastructure that makes experienced people better at their jobs.
Systems before headcount. Senior judgement before busywork. Results before theatre.
Where I fit in
Christopher Bechmann runs Moen & Co as CEO. My role is Co-founder & Head of Growth. I go in wherever the company needs me next. One month that means product and data, the next it means strategy or operations. I look for friction, remove obstacles and build what should exist but does not yet.
Today Moen & Co works as a growth studio. Our job is not to deliver campaigns; it is to help online stores grow: better results for every dollar spent. We build much of our own technology to make that possible, but the technology is never the point. What it does for the customer is.
I share what I learn
Teaching has been part of my work for as long as building has. For fifteen years we have hosted conferences that gather more than 400 people, along with retreats and private dinners where the industry meets. The job is always the same: translate changes in marketing and technology into something a business owner can use on Monday.
Nothing gives me more energy or better conversations than my newsletter. Every Monday I write a letter to more than 17,000 business owners about what I am learning, building and seeing in the market. If you read one thing I make, make it that one. Sign up here.
I also co-host two podcasts. AI DTC WTF, with Andrew Foxwell and Will Sartorius, is a fortnightly show for DTC operators and agency owners who want practical AI workflows they can put to work the same week. Netthandelspodden, with Marte Klouman, has explored what creates growth for Scandinavian online stores since 2020.
The format changes. The purpose does not: learn in public, explain things plainly and give people something useful enough to act on.
What I believe
- If an idea cannot survive contact with the customer or the numbers, it is not a good idea yet.
- A small, focused company with good systems can outperform a much larger organisation.
- AI should amplify experience and judgement, not replace them with generic output.
- The best way to understand the future is to build a small piece of it.
I live in Oslo. I am still building, still learning, and still more comfortable making something work than making it look impressive.
If you are building an e-commerce company, redesigning an agency around AI, or trying to turn a complicated operation into a system that works, we probably have something to talk about.
The Monday newsletter
Every Monday I write to more than 17,000 business owners about the systems that let small businesses outperform bigger ones. Free, and unsubscribe whenever.