Steve Rekuc

@dtcindex It's like too many consumer are listen to @sircalebhammer and @DaveRamsey

Consumers didn't have much confidence in the second half of July. Future purchase sentiment dropped below the last 3 years for that time of year. Spender sentiment dropped from a record high on June 8th to by far the lowest value we've seen for this time of year. @dtcindex

Also thanks to @JeremiahPrummer

Thanks to @CommnThreadCo @KnoCommerce @TaylorHoliday

@andrewjfaris @TaylorHoliday Ask about TTS Incrementality and Amazon Cannibalization :)

Recording with @TaylorHoliday for the first time in awhile on Friday. Anything you want to hear us talk about?

Happy to be on the podcast again.

@dtcindex @TaylorHoliday @CommnThreadCo @KnoCommerce and thanks @JeremiahPrummer

Consumer sentiment seems to hold the trend of last week: Future Sentiment below the last 3 years Spender Sentiment continues to drop Now, Economic Sentiment is also on the decline. More in @dtcindex Thanks @TaylorHoliday @CommnThreadCo @KnoCommerce x.com/RSteveData/sta…

You just listed on Amazon. Is it actually growing your business or just cannibalizing .COM revenue? I looked into this for 4 brands and the conclusions varied.

@sarah_carusona I pretend to be sophisticated, but it's arithmetic once you have the aMER model.

@RSteveData well now we're just getting fancy

Stop optimizing for contribution dollars. Yea, I said it. And I mean it. You (and your media buyer) know the ROAS you see on Meta doesn't tell the whole story. You both know there's halo to Amazon, Google, email. So you tell your buyer to keep spending as long as daily contribution stays positive. For a while it works. Topline up, bottom line up. No fancy attribution models, no incrementality math. You're bought into the "halo effect" and you've got other things to worry about. Here's where it goes sideways. Your contribution is being propped up by repeat purchases. Meanwhile you've gone from breaking even on first order to losing so much you won't make it back for 12+ months. It's hidden. You're not watching CAC, aMER, or first purchase contribution. Just the blended number. For a few months you're fine. Then the loss on new eats the profit from repeat, and you're not feeding enough new people in to keep repeat growing. This isn't a made up story. I've seen it across several brands. It's not that the founder or buyer is lazy. The founder has other fires. The buyer is hitting the targets they were handed (they need better ones... see linked post in comments). The fix: read your LTV:CAC in the context of payback period and the founder's goals. Set targets there. Then hold the buyer to those, not to a blended figure that lies to you.

@Polymarket Chatbots perform better when you curse at them.

JUST IN: Tech employee receives email from HR after company review flags 114 instances of profanity in his Claude chats over one week.

@TaylorHoliday The start of exit readiness as a service

We have four brands that are currently in a process to sell their business. They are looking to have conversations with founders who sold their company to PE specifically. If you are open to a private, intimate group conversation trading war stories please DM me. Will be great networking for all involved. cc: @_ian_jordan

We saw a wild swing in consumer sentiment data in the last month: Future purchase sentiment dipped to its lowest level for this time of year. Spending sentiment went from an all-time high to the lowest level for this time of year. These are pointing towards a consumer pull-back. More in @dtcindex Thanks to @CommnThreadCo @TaylorHoliday @JeremiahPrummer @KnoCommerce

@CoryOnBrand Haha. That would be a ridiculously wide margin.

@RSteveData Oh I thought this was a single brand hah

How Incremental is TikTok Shops? I've been wrestling with that question for a few months and came up with results for brand from 119% to 300%. Still working through the process and will post more when I have it figured out.

@oliviaakory That's a good point. I think those same assets are pumping in Meta, AppLovin, and other platforms in those holdout regions.

@RSteveData I also wonder if brands light up gmv max around the same time they start taking these creator assets and running them in other platforms like meta, if some of the fuzziness is a question of whether the value exists in the creative assets running across other platforms v gmv max.

Calling the ecom braintrust especially TikTok Shop experts. We've been seeing a few puzzling TT GMV Max results that just don't align with our customers intuition. For the test results coming back softer than expected, I'm hearing 'but when we turn up GMV Max, business performance improves.' And you all know your business better than I do, which is why I take this very seriously. So what are the hypotheses on why might this be happening? Is there something about the functionality of this product that I am missing? For context, the testing methodology is classic geo-experiment: turn off GMV Max ads in part of the country, leave on in others, compare aggregate sales (dtc, amz, and tiktok shop) in the treatment vs holdout regions. We've looked at this many ways on our end but we also don't get spend or impression data by market back from TikTok so it's hard to run a comprehensive audit.

@CoryOnBrand Yes, expect it to vary from brand to brand. All have been over 100%

@RSteveData That is a very wide margin

@oliviaakory Delayed on some of the data pull. Hope to have this by tomorrow.

@oliviaakory Still working through that to make sure we have it correct; I will share when the big dogs at CTC approve.

Refreshed Data on Incremental Attribution 🚨 Tyler Horner compared Haus experiments running Meta Incremental Attribution v Meta campaigns using standard attribution, then calculated the performance ratio for each test. Each dot is one experiment: above 1.0× means Incremental Attribution performed better, while below 1.0× means standard attribution performed better. The geometric mean is the typical result across experiments, using an average designed for ratios so a few extreme results do not drive the takeaway. TLDR Incremental Attribution has improved over time and now outperforms standard attribution.