John Timmerman

The best thing you can do in business…. Is be a good person.

@Seanfrank Alo is eating their lunch

Lululemon was THE brand. It was worth 40 billion dollars. It was worth more than Honda. But you can’t stay hot forever. Wishing them the best with this turnaround.

Founders don’t lose money because of traffic. They lose money because of structure. I’ve reviewed hundreds of DTC ad accounts over the years. The pattern is predictable: Revenue growing. Ad spend growing. Pressure growing. But conversion rate stuck below 1%. CAC creeping up. Margin slowly compressing. That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a funnel architecture problem. When your model only works if spend increases every month, you don’t have scale. You have exposure. The real leverage comes from: • Increasing revenue per visitor • Engineering higher AOV • Fixing product page psychology • Removing checkout friction • Building retention systems Better ads amplify results. They don’t fix weak foundations. If your margin feels tight even though sales are strong, look at your funnel before you touch your budget. Traffic is rented. Conversion systems are owned. #DTCBrand #EcommerceGrowth #ConversionRateOptimization #FounderMindset #GrowthStrategy

Every February I see the same pattern. Brands look at January numbers, see traffic holding and spend continuing, and assume February will bounce back. It usually doesn’t. Not because demand disappeared, but because January quietly exposed the cracks in the system. Higher CAC. Weaker offers. Lower conversion rates. Post-purchase leaks no one wanted to look at. February isn’t the problem. It’s just the month where excuses stop working. If traffic were the solution, January would have fixed February already. The brands that win this part of the year don’t chase more clicks. They fix the system underneath the spend. If you want to see where your growth is actually breaking, start with conversion rate. 👉 thegoodmonster.com/cvr-calculator/ That’s where real leverage is.

I keep seeing the same pattern with ecommerce founders lately. Ads are still getting clicks. Traffic doesn’t fall off a cliff. But revenue slowly starts to disappear. The first reaction is always the same: change creatives, tweak audiences, increase spend. Almost never works. In most cases, the ads didn’t stop converting. The funnel did. I wrote an article breaking down where conversion rate quietly leaks revenue post-click and why scaling ads on a broken funnel only makes the problem more expensive. Before touching your ad budget, calculate how much your current CVR is actually costing you. 👉 Use the CVR calculator: thegoodmonster.com/cvr-calculator/ #ecommerce #growth #cro #founders #digitalcommerce

February always tests discipline. Every year CPMs rise. Every year CAC gets tighter. And every year the same mistake shows up waiting. When CAC spikes 20 to 40 percent hesitation becomes expensive. The brands that protect margin do not wait for conditions to improve. They adjust structure creative and offers early. If February hit your CAC that is not noise. It is a signal. This video breaks down what is actually happening and what needs to change now.

One of the biggest MER mistakes I see isn’t in ads. It’s what happens after the checkout. A customer buys, the order is done… and then nothing. No cross-sell. No upsell. Weak post-purchase experience. At that point, your acquisition cost never really pays itself back. When we audit brands, this is where MER usually gets capped: • No logical cross-sells tied to the original purchase • No upsell path to a higher-value version • Email and SMS that talk, but don’t actually help • Zero strategy to earn the second order If you want a wider MER, stop obsessing over the first conversion. The real leverage is turning one purchase into two, then three. Ads bring customers in. Post-purchase is where efficiency is built. #ecommerce #dtc #marketingefficiency #MER #retention #postpurchase #lifecyclemarketing #customerlifetimevalue #shopify #growthstrategy #scalingbrands #founders #operators #johnspeaks

One thing I’ve learned is that MER only becomes confusing when teams forget why they’re measuring it. MER tells very different stories depending on the phase you’re in. 📈 When you’re in an investment phase • You’re putting money into organic, YouTube, or new channels • MER compresses for multiple quarters • You’re trading short-term efficiency for long-term leverage 📊 When you’re in an optimization or reporting phase • You need clean numbers for boards and equity partners • Fewer channels matter more than experimentation • MER should stabilize and become easier to read ⚠️ Where I see teams struggle • Trying to invest and optimize at the same time • Expanding channel mix while expecting MER to stay flat The fix is rarely inside ad platforms. It’s choosing the phase you’re actually in and aligning the channel mix to that reality. MER only works when it’s evaluated in context, not in isolation.

One thing I’ve learned the hard way: you can’t look at MER without looking at ops. I’ve seen teams celebrate a strong MER while the business was quietly bleeding underneath. Orders arriving late. Packages damaged. Customers asking for refunds weeks after the sale. On a dashboard, marketing looks efficient. In reality, profit is slipping. 📦 Ops issues turn into returns. 💸 Returns turn into margin loss. 📊 And if you’re reviewing MER week to week without fully accounting for refunds, you’re looking at an inflated number. This is why I don’t treat MER as an ads KPI. It’s a business metric. Marketing can drive demand, but ops decides whether that demand turns into profit. If marketing and ops aren’t aligned, MER tells an incomplete story. Not wrong — just misleading. Whenever MER looks “off,” my first question isn’t about bids or creatives. It’s about fulfillment, delivery, and returns. That’s usually where the truth is.

I see this mistake all the time when teams talk about MER. They try to “fix” it inside ad platforms. Change bids. Change creatives. Pause channels. Push harder on Meta or Google. But MER isn’t built there. The first thing I look at is how MER is being calculated. If you’re dividing revenue only by media spend, you’re missing the real picture. Real MER is total marketing revenue divided by total marketing cost. Media, creators, production, software, and sometimes even team costs. Once you look at it that way, a lot of things make sense. Channel mix matters. Investing in YouTube, organic, or new platforms will compress MER before it pays off. Organic almost always looks “inefficient” before it lowers blended CAC. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It means it hasn’t matured yet. The best operators don’t chase ad-level efficiency week to week. They manage systems, timing, and blended cost across the whole funnel. When MER looks off, the question usually isn’t “which ad failed?” It’s “which investment hasn’t had time to work yet?” If you want me to take a look at your numbers, comment M.E.R. and I’ll review your case.

One of the first numbers I look at when something feels “off” in growth is 90-day LTV. When that metric starts to trend down, it’s almost never an email or SMS problem. It’s usually telling a much earlier story about who you’re acquiring and why they bought. I saw this a lot after Q4. Brands discounted hard for BFCM, drove a ton of volume, and celebrated the revenue spike. But many of those customers only converted because the product was 40–50% off. They never came back. In Q4, that’s explainable. Outside Q4, it’s dangerous. When 90-day LTV keeps falling in Q1, it usually means you’re paying for lower-quality traffic or forcing first purchases with discounts instead of demand. At that point, no “retention hack” fixes the problem. Retention only amplifies what’s already there. Good LTV is built upstream. Right customers. Right product. Clean acquisition standards. Then retention systems do their job. Scaling spend while 90-day LTV is declining doesn’t fix growth. It just makes the correction more expensive later. That’s the metric I’d be watching closely right now.

Stafford is 1,000,000% the MVP. Unreal.

I see this signal show up more often than people realize. Orders stay relatively flat, but customer support tickets keep climbing. When that happens, it’s rarely a “support problem.” It’s an operations and margin problem showing up early. More tickets mean more time, more headcount, more logistics work, more returns, and eventually more negative reviews. All of that quietly compresses margin, even when revenue looks stable on the surface. This is why I always tell teams to track support tickets monthly alongside orders. If tickets rise without order growth, something in production, fulfillment, or product quality is breaking down. And the longer it goes unnoticed, the more expensive it becomes to fix. Revenue can look fine. Margins usually aren’t. Catching this early is one of the simplest ways to protect profit before it turns into a bigger reset. #ecommerce #dtc #operations #margins #profitability #customerexperience #returns #logistics #shopifybrands #founders #marketingleadership #scalingbusiness #unitEconomics

@youderian Thanks for sharing. Solid plan

Here's a detailed breakdown of my personal investment portfolio. Why am I sharing? I deeply believe you should be building your personal balance sheet alongside your business. So I'm going to be talking about investing, portfolio breakdown, stock picks and tracking my performance vs. the S&P each year. Here's my allocations and positions as of Jan 2026: 63% index funds. Mostly US total market, about 15% broad international, zero bonds. Boring and intentional. Moving toward 20-25% intl given the difference in valuation metrics. 12% crypto. Primarily Bitcoin and a little Ethereum. Still believe in the original thesis as a non-institutional store of value. A little unnerving it's acting more like a risk asset than digital gold lately, but I like the fundamentals long-term and it's a meaningful diversification play. 11% real estate. One rental property. Honestly not a great pure investment, more a house we love that we're renting out that we hope to retire to one day. 9% cash. I like having a cushion, especially with markets at such highs. Half of this is earmarked for a "big bets" fund when I find something with high conviction. 3.5% individual stocks. Shopify and Cloudflare. Both companies I have high conviction in from being in the eCom space. Less than 1% private investments. Three small bets on companies I believe in. Don't do a lot of private investing, especially the last few years. Sold Tesla this Jan. Original thesis was the strength of the core product, cars, but the company's shifted to robotics and self-driving bets I haven't done the homework on. Plus key man risk with Elon increases every year. At a trillion+ valuation, felt like a good time. Sold Airbnb. Made a knee-jerk investment without real conviction. After setting up my own AirBnB this year, realized I'm not as bullish on the company and owner experience as I thought. Calculation note: I don't include my primary residence, physical possessions, or my business in net worth or investment #s. My house is consumption, not investment. My business is illiquid and potentially volatile. I think it's cleaner to track what you have in actual liquid investments or income-producing properties. That's the baseline. Will report back end of year on how it performed vs. the S&P. To come along, follow me here me for regular tips on building financial mastery as an entrepreneur + how the 2026 investments pan out.

@irabukht Above the fold of a PDP/landing page. Then work our way up and down the funnel.

@JohnnyTimbo Such a clear breakdown. Where do you fix leaks first?

I keep hearing the same thing lately: “ads aren’t working like they used to.” But when we audit accounts, the issue almost never starts in Meta or TikTok. In most cases, we’re seeing 10–25% of conversions lost because of basic funnel problems. PDPs trying to say everything and ending up unclear. Checkout friction like missing payment methods, slow load times, or unexpected shipping. And no post-purchase strategy, which quietly leaves 20–40% of potential revenue on the table. Here’s the part most people don’t want to hear: Running more ads on top of this doesn’t fix performance. It just scales the leak. Every time we simplify PDPs, remove checkout friction, and design a real post-purchase flow, ad performance suddenly “comes back.” Same traffic. Same creatives. Better economics. If your AOV or conversion rate feels capped right now, this is where I’d look before touching another ad.

@sir4K_zen Not realizing anything under the fold is only collecting crumbs.

@JohnnyTimbo Spot on. Fixing the funnel first makes all the difference. What's the most common issue you see with PDPs?

I remember the moment it became obvious. During COVID, money felt like it would never stop coming in. Demand was high, ads were printing, and every growth lever seemed to work. So brands did what made sense at the time: we hired faster, stocked more inventory, expanded ops, and kept pushing spend. For a while, it looked smart. Then the environment changed. Demand normalized. Margins compressed 20–40%. Inventory sat. Cash tightened. The only way to move product was discounting, then came layoffs and painful resets. What hit me wasn’t the downturn. It was realizing how much of that “growth” was never real in the first place. It wasn’t strategy. It was momentum. The dangerous part is seeing the same pattern try to repeat itself in 2026. When spend goes up, ops get heavier, margins stay flat, and discounts become a dependency, the business is already drifting into risk. Scaling on top of that doesn’t fix anything. It just makes the correction more expensive later. The lesson I took from that period is simple: When growth feels easy, discipline matters more than ever.

One mistake I see all the time when brands try to scale is confusing higher spend with healthy growth. Revenue starts going up, everyone feels good, and the instinct is to press the gas harder. But when I look closer, contribution margin hasn’t moved at all. That’s not a marketing problem. That’s an operations problem. More spend can hide a lot of things. Bloated software stacks. Payroll that grew faster than revenue. Fixed costs that never adjusted. Ads can bring in more sales while the business itself gets weaker. Real scaling is simple. When spend goes up, contribution margin should go up with it. If that’s not happening, pushing harder just burns cash faster. Before increasing spend, this is the check I always do first.

hot take: US workers + founders are getting way too comfortable. i run multiple companies. ~$4–5M rev. real clients (billion-dollar ones). 90% of my team is in latin america. US leaders = great context + leadership. LATAM team = hungrier, do more, complain less, stay longer. entry/mid US hires? more entitlement. more money. less grind. faster job hopping. AI + low unemployment is about to humble a lot of people. employees: if your value > your cost, you’ll always have work. if not… different story. founders: don’t sleep on global talent. hunger is undefeated.