Hey, A founder told me something a couple of weeks ago that I keep coming back to. They sell online and through their own stores. At one point they turned the ads off. Online sales fell. Everybody expects that. But then... the shops went quiet too. Sit with that for a second. It's the most valuable number in their business, and it exists by accident. No report inside Meta or Google can produce it. The platforms simply measure something else. A platform measures attribution. It tells you which...
3 days ago • 4 min read
Hey, Have you heard that on the 1st of July the EU removed the €150 duty-free threshold? If you ship into Europe, your landed cost changed three months ago. And most brands I talk to still haven't repriced. Here's the mechanic. It's stranger than a flat fee. A €3 duty now applies per four-digit tariff heading. That's charged per product category, not per parcel. So one parcel with three different product categories carries €9. Bundles and mixed baskets get hit hardest. Those are usually the...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Hey, Here's a combination that should be impossible. Every team on the account was hitting their target. Paid was buying new customers at the agreed cost. Email was sending on schedule. Nothing broke anywhere. And the business was still getting smaller. Each and every month. I was on a call about this account a few weeks ago. The agency partner who runs its paid media had found it himself. That's the only reason anybody found it. His words: "we've been getting new customers all year, but then...
10 days ago • 4 min read
Hey, Everyone in your category is bidding for the same attention. Same two platforms, same competitors, same limited pool of people. But there's another way in. And almost nobody in DTC uses it. You rent a fanbase somebody else spent decades building. Decades. It goes on your product, and you pay for it out of sales. I recorded an episode on this with David Born. He's worked in licensing for about twenty years. Some of that inside Warner Bros. Consumer Products, on the side of the table that...
15 days ago • 1 min read
Hey, Five founders said a version of the same sentence to me in one week. "It's the lowest the bank account's ever been, but we're not going backwards. We're just kind of hovering." A board game brand said it more plainly. He'd gone too aggressive on stock, and the money for anything else was simply gone. A jewelry brand widened it out. "People stopped shopping. It wasn't just us, it was everywhere." Then the line I keep coming back to, from that same founder: "I keep constantly spending...
17 days ago • 4 min read
Hey, Writing this from Italy. I flew the whole team in for the week. Everyone under one roof. Last year it was Greece. This year it's Italy. Apart from a small food poisoning I got, it's been better than I expected. And I already expected a lot. We ran a bunch of in-person workshops. Recorded content. Did an ad challenge where everyone from the team recorded ads for the company. And decisions that normally sit in Slack for two weeks got made in an afternoon. But... that's not even the best...
22 days ago • 1 min read
A founder said this to me last week about his own company. About people he likes and rates: "The team that got us to five won't get us to ten." He wasn't being harsh about them. Everything he said was fair. And he'd clearly been carrying it around for a while before he said it out loud. If you're somewhere between two and ten million, this email is the one I'd most want you to read this month. Why everything works until it doesn't Up to about three to five million, a founder can absorb almost...
25 days ago • 5 min read
Hey, Quick one, and the easiest Q4 win on the list. For about eight weeks a year, a large share of your traffic is people buying something they will never use. Your product page wasn't written for them. It answers the questions a user has. Which variant suits me, how does it feel, does it work for my situation, is it worth it to me. A gift buyer can't answer a single one of those. They don't know the size. They don't know the preference. They're buying for someone whose exact requirements...
30 days ago • 2 min read
A client emailed me the morning after our call to say he'd gone through his own tracking setup, and that he'd found something. Then he wrote the sentence that this whole email is about. "I would like to agree how we handle that before we publish rather than after." Most people would have pushed the fix live and dealt with the fallout on Monday. He saw the second-order problem before he touched anything, which is the only reason this story has a good ending. What he'd found was this. His...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read