Posts.
Once a week. What I'm seeing that week running a mid 8-figure consumer brand. Wins, mistakes, learnings, and what I'd do differently.
Stop benchmarking your conversion rate
Our site converts at 6.94% during evergreen stretches, everything at full price. The industry range everyone accepts is a feel, not a fact. Why the ceiling is artificial, and where I'd start.
When the cost of execution goes down, the value of judgment goes up
Teams with judgment move quickly. Teams without it look for someone else to give them the answer, a person, a tool, you name it. Where judgment comes from, why AI is raising its value, and what I do inside the company to build it.
Discounting is a patience problem
Marketing gives you four levers, and only one of them moves results in real time. Why every impatient team ends up pulling price, and what happened when we took the fast lever away.
Your page layout isn't the problem
Sitewide conversion is up 61% year over year, apples to apples, from rebuilding the pages where we sell. The surprise: we barely touched the layouts. The lift came from what the pages say and show.
Revenue is a vanity metric
Topline growth can be propped up by discounts, ad spend, and launches instead of real demand. The death spiral brands chasing growth fall into, what it looks like on a P&L, and the way out.
The best Q4s are the calmest
Our most successful Q4s were also the calmest. Why tighter promo windows beat the November 1 creep, why Q4 is decided in the first three quarters, and why the biggest lever you have left is 2027.
Your kids probably won't work 40-hour weeks
The 40-hour week came out of an experiment a century ago, when output was easy to count. AI means the experiment has to run again for knowledge work, and I'd bet my kids won't be working as much as we do.
Discounting works. That's the problem.
Divide your discounts by gross sales. Under 10%, you don't have anything to do. At 30% or more, you have a promotional business. The scale, and why the squeeze is invisible until comps get hard.
Ask your customers where they came from
We ask one question right after checkout: how did you first hear about us? Roughly one in four buyers answers, and it's the cheapest directional read on marketing we've found.
Your baseline decides your Q4
Non-promotional revenue on our own site is up 14% year over year on slightly less ad spend. Why baseline demand is the best predictor of Q4, and the three things we focus on to keep it growing.
You always pay for distribution
Our site, Amazon, and wholesale each do a different job. What each one is for, and when it makes sense to add the next one.
Quantity buys you quality
The difference between high performers and everyone else is less what they do and more the quality they do it with. On the quality loop and knowing which one you need right now.
Overstocking is an unforced error
We ordered 90 days of inventory and sat on 18 months of it. What forecast misses really cost, and why under-ordering beats over-ordering.
You're making your exit harder to reach every day
Most founders are obsessed with an exit, and what they do every day pushes it further away. Four questions tell you what your topline is actually worth to a buyer.
The cheapest good attention left is on linear TV
Everyone's piling into connected TV. The remnant end of linear is some of the best attention left, and the friction is what keeps it cheap.
Copy isn't subjective
Copy feels subjective until you test it. One lesson from a homepage test drove three wins across the site.
We cut our discount rate from 33% to 3%
A bet we made going into this year. What it did to the Q1 P&L.
Where I'd put your next ad dollar
Three operators asked me the same question this week. My answer, plus the caveats about when, how, and what to expect.
Don't try to replace yourself
Why the business-book wisdom doesn't work for small teams
How we cut our Meta CPA in half without touching Meta
We doubled our funnel without changing a thing in our ad account. Here's the math and the lever you actually own.
The brand health signal you should watch
Branded search is the closest free proxy for whether your marketing is building brand. At Groove it moves before revenue does, usually by a few weeks.
Unique CPM is the metric you're missing
Platform CPM times account-level frequency is what attention actually costs you per unique person, and almost nobody tracks it. A $10 Meta CPM at a frequency of 6 is a $60 unique CPM.
Same EBITDA. Different businesses.
Quality of revenue is a business-health question
Discounts aren't a growth strategy
When every brand in the room is relying on discounting to grow, that's usually a good reason not to rely on it yourself. Why quality of revenue is the metric to track, and what the full-price reset looks like on a P&L.
Why Snoop Dogg couldn't save Solo Stove
Snoop's campaign hit 52 million viewers, and it didn't sell fire pits. What the moonshot was compensating for, and why small edges at volume beat the big bet.
Does your team feel comfortable challenging you?
If your team is having side conversations after the meeting, they didn't feel like they could say it in the room. Why deference adds up over time, and why accountability has to come from the top.
Should you start a loyalty program?
A loyalty program works when people were already going to do the thing you're incentivizing. Most brands copy the case study without asking whether their customer actually shops that way.
Stop trying to build brand
Brand is an aggregate experience, built the same way you build a reputation. Why the overnight brands never were, and why product and customer service beat the brand video.
If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?
When people think something came from AI, they trust it less. Why AI belongs in the internal work your customer never sees, and why keeping up is the wrong reason to put it in front of them.
Ad Efficiency Falling Off a Cliff? This is Why.
Every channel has a spend level where more money stops buying more customers. Why the curve bends, what a full-funnel system fixes, and why awareness needs 20 to 30 percent of total spend.
A/B testing is keeping you stuck
Every test starts with a control, and the control is your current thinking. Why small tests keep you inside your existing assumptions, and why one real swing beats a 5% lift on a single page.
The 30-Minute Audit
A simple 30-minute process for finding the quick wins you can't see because you're too close to your own brand. What I look at, in what order, and why the numbers come last.
The middle is where strategy goes to die
Hedging between two right answers collects the cons of both without the pros of either. Why the middle feels safe, and what it costs you.
Before You Go Wholesale
Treat each new channel like a second business model. Why wholesale is the highest-risk one to add, why you hold price from day one, and when DTC is healthy enough to fund the learning curve.
LTV is the most expensive lie in e-commerce
If your model needs LTV to work, you're betting on behavior that hasn't happened yet.
2025 was a great year for Meta
Advertisers should be nervous
Before you add, extract
Untapped value is sitting in the assets you already have
The Hidden Cost of SKU Proliferation
SKU proliferation often increases complexity more than the incremental growth it drives.
Don't Rent a Face. License a Logo.
More brands should stop renting faces and start licensing logos customers already want to be seen with. Why pull beats recognition, and what the right partner does for the rest of your marketing.
Most Teams Don't Have an Attribution Problem. They Have a Judgment Problem.
The system only knows what it can see. Why multi-touch attribution trains teams to stop thinking, and which signals are harder to game and closer to reality.
How to Raise Prices Without Raising Prices
Your average unit retail matters more than MSRP
The Video Ad Creative Playbook
If someone can't tell what you sell in 3 seconds, you've lost them. Why clear beats expensive, why the KPI is branded search growth, and how to structure an ad that works with the sound off.