The Consumer Operator

Here for one thing: translating what AI, channel shifts, and changing consumer behavior actually do inside companies — not what the headlines say they do. From the seat. Less hype. More what I'd actually do.

@Budgetdog_ Dive in. Make a folder with nothing personal or sensitive, point Cowork at it, and just try real tasks. The prompting confusion clears up after a few of those. There's no separate skill to learn first.

Best way to learn Claude cowork?

@boringmarketer Honestly the formatting isn't even the worst part. Most of them don't have a point. They just agree with you in more words.

AI replies feel like they are all over X right now

I do this work. The demand is real — the title is mostly marketing. "Advise on strategy, prioritize the schedule" is advice-as-deliverable — the check-the-box version. His #1 driver is "real ROI" — that comes from getting into the workflows and owning the change, not a strategy doc.

Met a guy recently making $4 million ARR as a fractional Chief AI Officer. This model is NOT beginner friendly but it’s extremely lucrative. -identify opportunities for AI implementation at the department level -advise CEO on AI strategy -identify AI trends before competitors -prioritize AI implementation schedule Target clients are CEOs of $10-100 million businesses. He pays 4 fractional CAIOs working under him 6-figure salaries so he has overhead, but the margins are still extremely high compared to most service businesses. He has potential clients on a waitlist because he can’t hire talent fast enough. 100% of his lead are inbound/referrals because 1) he gets real ROI for clients 2) he posts on LinkedIn daily 3) he jumps at every speaking/media opportunity paid or unpaid This is the highest level of the AI consulting game.

@clayyroy The niche was never the moat. Every category here is a repeat-purchase consumable with weak incumbents. Everyone already knows these are good categories. The niche is the easy part. The real bet: do you build a brand that compounds, or just rent demand through paid traffic?

@umzrs Yes. And in incumbent consumer businesses it’s not optional — the execs are too time-poor and low-urgency to keep up. The real value of that person isn’t staying current. It’s translating current into where the business actually points AI.

Hire an AI-obsessed person Someone who will doomscroll on AI stuff. It doesn't matter if you have a passion for it. If you have other responsibilities to do in the business, things will slip through your hands This person will catch it and let you know what matters most to your business.

@brycent AI is the only productivity tool that makes you busier the more productive it makes you!

I can confirm that AI has made me busier Which forces me to automate more things in my life with AI I'm sure that's both a good and a bad thing.

They’re not really separate buckets. The DTC pull-back is upstream of the rest. Pull out of wholesale and you lose shelf, lose discovery, and the product engine drifts toward what sells direct — retro and basics, not newness. The “design miss” is mostly a channel decision showing up two years later.

@GrowthGauntlet @JonahLupton It would be nice to know how much of the declining sales is due to design misses and brand reputation among those wanting to be cool vs DTC misstep. I guess majority of people who buys shoes buys what is available in stores.

The collapse of $NKE is quite remarkable... down -70% from the highs... growth has flatlined... revenues peaked a few years ago... revenues down almost -20% since then... margins continue to get squeezed... gross margins are expected to fall below 40% for the first time in a long time. Looking at the charts... $NKE is approaching the .786 fibs from the dot com lows to the ATHs... back in 2021 the market cap was $270B and the stock was trading at 50x earnings... management was pretty stupid for not doing any acquisitions of emerging apparel and/or footwear brands... some of which are now crushing them. I will admit that $NKE is starting to look a little interesting at these prices... I think it's close to a bottom... however I think management has been dogshit for many years... it's now a turnaround story and I have no idea if Elliott Hill is the right person for the job... he's spent 30+ years at $NKE so I'm inclined to say he's not the right guy because he's been part of this sinking ship. $NKE still trades at 25x EPS which seem too expensive for a company with flat revenue growth and compressing margins... with that said... the sell side thinks EPS bottoms out in FY2026 at $1.50 per share and starts to improve... getting back to $2.50 per share in FY2028 which would be a 29% CAGR over the next 2 years which might justify the current P/E multiple. Anyone out there bullish on $NKE? if so, why? Can $NKE get back to top line growth and margin expansion? What will turnaround this company? Do you think Elliott Hill is the right person to fix $NKE? Please share any and all thoughts on $NKE -- this is a fun company to bash because they've done almost nothing right for 5+ years.

GoPro isn't a special case. It's a pattern. $GPRO, $COOK, and $SBDS all had a hot product and mistook it for a brand. GoPro's big expansion bet was the Karma drone — it flopped. Solo tried to fake a platform by buying unrelated brands. When the core product cooled, there was nothing underneath. $YETI and $SN did the opposite. YETI used the cooler to earn the right to sell drinkware, bags, a whole lifestyle. SharkNinja turned vacuums and blenders into a machine that can enter any home category. The test was never whether the product is hot. It's whether it buys you permission to be somewhere else when it cools. A hot product is an event. A brand is a platform.

Half right. Brand heat has no moat — it only warms or cools. But heat isn't the moat. The moat is what gets a cooled brand another shot: distribution, scale, consideration. Nike at 12-year lows has all three. "Which stage" is the trader's read. "Can it re-heat" is the operator's.

$LULU new 8-year lows $NKE new 12-year lows Retail research analysts built their entire persona pumping the “moat” of these two. Here’s a lesson: Brands have no moat. They’re either getting hotter, or they’re cooling. You win by observing at which stage the brand is at.

@JonahLupton Ha — neither. Operator. The kind who's seen enough brand turnarounds to know the dunk is easy and the recovery is the interesting part. Happy to be wrong. Don't think I will be.

@GrowthGauntlet You’re either a Nike employee or long term shareholder 👀😂

@clairevo The contract is the cheap part to unwind. The expensive lock-in is the operating system around the tool — workflows, standards, retrained people. That's the real inertia. "Keep options open" has to mean staying modular at the workflow level. Not just the vendor.

On topic: there is a mistake I saw large companies make in late 2025/early 2026 which is they picked their coding model provider, chat tool, and harness and put the whole company on it. There was a big leap in model ability and folks felt confident. I have been walking into these teams and they have no idea how good codex is or that notion AI is sick af, of what’s what in the agent world. And now they’re sunk in a contract AND internal intertia while missing out on the best & most efficient tools of the moment. Let me say it again for people in the back: We are pre convergence on tools!!! Keep your organizational options open!!! Consumer (well, enterprise) choice is a gift when everyone is competing for your business and capabilities jump every month. Leverage it.

The DTC vs. wholesale framing is mostly dead. The brands actually pushing commerce forward built operating muscle in one channel and earned the right to expand. Yeti grew up wholesale and built real DTC. Made In and HexClad grew up DTC and earned their way into retail without giving up the direct relationship. Different starting points, same operator problem — sequence the channels, don't try to do both at once

Let’s do the DTC 𝕏 Awards. Who’s genuinely pushing ecommerce forward right now? Reply with your nominations 👇 1. Which DTC brand is setting the standard right now? 2. Which founder consistently shares the most valuable insights on 𝕏? 3. Which brand is most likely to dominate the next 5 years? 4. Which brand has the strongest overall marketing right now? (creative, positioning, retention, social, everything) 5. Which operator would you hire immediately if you could? Curious to see who the industry rates highly.

Over the past six months, more of my work with middle-market consumer companies has centered on one thing: AI. What it is, how to use it, which tools to deploy. Boards want to check the box. Management wants to know if it's real. Both are asking the wrong question: It's not "which tools do we deploy." It's "where are we losing time, and which workflows would sharper inputs actually improve." Find the friction. Find the work where speed and rigor change the outcome. The tool is the last call, not the first. Start with the work.

Two outdoor brands, same script this earnings season. Traeger ($COOK) and Solo Brands ($SBDS) both posting "progress" — better EBITDA, leaner costs, guidance reaffirmed. Both still shrinking on the top line. Cost cuts buy time. They don't answer the only question that matters: is there a path back to growth, or are you just declining more efficiently?

@drgurner Hard work is necessary, not sufficient. The “talented” people I’ve seen at the top of their game work hard AND have unusual judgment about what to work on. Effort without judgment is just exhaustion.

Fyi, a lot of people others assume are 'talented' or 'lucky,' are just very, very hard workers.

@russellbrunson Momentum doesn’t just create paths. It creates the relationships that bring you paths you wouldn’t have found on your own.

The faster you move, the more paths appear. Momentum is the currency of new opportunities.

True until it isn’t. “One channel, one product, one offer” is how you get to $20M. It’s also how you stall at $50M. The brands that scale through that wall are the ones who figured out which second and third things to add, in what order, without losing focus on the first. That’s the actual hard part.

The brands that scale fast aren't doing more things. They're doing fewer things better than anyone else. One channel owned completely. One product obsessed over. One offer tested to death. More is not the strategy.

The job isn’t to build a team that doesn’t need to be managed. It’s to build a team that doesn’t need to be supervised. Those are different things. Management is direction, priorities, talent decisions, and operating rhythm. Supervision is checking work. Stop doing the second. Never stop doing the first.

The best competitive advantage is a team that doesn't need to be managed. It leads itself.

@tomfgoodwin The whole debate was always a distraction. Location was never the variable that mattered — talent density, clear priorities, and operating discipline were. The companies that called everyone back to fix a performance problem are about to learn that the problem wasn’t the couch.

Seems like most people work from the office most of the time now. The final move from 3/4 days to 5 days in has meant the greatest change but nobody talks about it any more Work from home basically died for most normal jobs. Basically “nothing ever happens” is often true