Travis

@MehtabKarta Thanks Mehtab, you’re a legend!

Consumer brand operator reading list! My definition of a good book is that it can immediately improve margins or revenue. No academic garbage :) Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman Default operating system for the companies in our portfolio. Implementing EOS fixes most issues at most businesses. Never used a formal management system? Start here. It’s faster to deploy than Scaling Up and a better fit for companies with lower revenue per head. Scaling Up by Verne Harnish EOS is a simplified version of Scaling Up. I prefer Scaling Up for companies with higher revenue per head. It also makes sense for larger companies. In consumer…this probably means companies doing over ~$50m - $75m or so. Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam Pricing should be designed into the product from day one. The book walks through how to figure out what customers value, what they’ll pay, and how to package and tier accordingly. If you’ve never had a thoughtful approach to pricing, this is a great book. Topgrading by Bradford Smart Topgrading is a great step-by-step instruction manual on how to hire and not mess it up. Every time we implement it, our success rate with hires goes up. The only downside is that the book is poorly written and too long. I’m guessing to please the publishers.. Scaling Compensation by Verne Harnish Reduce churn. Attract the right talent. Align your team around what matters. You’ll cut compensation-related discussions by 80% after launching a comp philosophy, and this book is a step-by-step guide on how to do it. Pair it with whichever operating system you run so your values flow into how you pay people. The Purchasing Advantage by Omid Ghamami One of the best books ever written on supply chain! I mean just go and look at the cover of the book. You can tell it’s going to deliver tremendous value because of how ugly it is. The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt Lean manufacturing principles wrapped in a story. It is gimmicky. If you run any operation with throughput constraints... manufacturing, fulfillment, customer service... this will reframe how you think about bottlenecks. I don’t love how the book is written. What could’ve been 50 pages is 300. The core content is excellent though, and plenty of people enjoy the story format more than a textbook. To the author’s credit, I guess there are a lot of textbooks on this... Profit First by Mike Michalowicz We don’t use Profit First at any of our companies. The system is about idiotproofing a business more than running it well. That said... if you’re new to running a business, don’t have a financial background, or keep ending the year wondering where the money went, Profit First is a great way to idiot-proof things. You allocate revenue into separate buckets (profit, taxes, owner pay, opex) the moment it comes in, instead of paying yourself whatever’s left at the end. It forces discipline. The Kevin Hillstrom Books (Merchandising, Customer Development, Fix It) Three short, tactical books. You can read all three in a day or so. I like these books because they’re short and to the point. There’s no dumb filler. They’re extra relevant to you if you run a business with a lot of LTV or a lot of SKUs, especially something like apparel. Kevin’s blog is the OG e-commerce resource online. It’s full of gold. Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and Joe Knight No financial background? Read this. Double Your Profits by Bob Fifer You’ll find at least one thing that saves an insane amount of money. This is what I recommend whenever someone asks me how to quickly improve margin without a massive overhaul. — Here are a few turnaround focused books. I am including them because I think a lot of the advice is applicable to early-stage brands with less than $100m in revenue as well. They’re about focusing on what matters, managing cash, and how to operate when you are very constrained. Corporate Turnaround Artistry by Jeff Sands Loaded with tactical advice you can implement immediately. I recommend it alongside Double Your Profits for anyone that wants to expand their margins. Corporate Turnaround by Donald Bibeault A foundational classic. Bibeault’s quotes about what makes a great turnaround manager are some of my favorites in business literature. With that said maybe some of this is kind of redundant if you’re reading the Jeff Sands book and I think Jeff’s book is better. Reversing the Slide by James Shein Good tidbits, especially around legal basics. Less tactical than Sands. Still worth the read. Turnaround Management Association textbooks Two solid primers. One on management and strategy. One on the law. Less tactical than I’d like. Still worth picking up for comprehensive coverage of the space.

@rokhladnik TikTok does this. The exact same motion on a regular video triggers a click on ads, you can test it yourself but it’s true.

I have a slightly different angle on this. I barely scroll FB/IG, but lately I’m noticing a lot of “accidental clicks” on my iPhone Even imperfect scrolls or swipes on ads push you straight to a PDP Feels like click volume might be getting inflated with lower intent traffic, which could also explain CVR drops Would love more clarity from @Meta on what’s changed over the last couple of months and is heavily affecting delivery Also, Meta will report on Q1 2026 earnings today Judging by our portfolio, they should be up more than 30%

Where did brands spend their money in Q1? What was the iROAS of every channel and tactic? What about the median MER and contribution margin? Let me show you:

@TaylorHoliday This is awsome! I would love to see the distribution of brands by their CM % in buckets, like is it normally distributed around 30%? Really interested in this!

@ToriiRowe How much spend?

EARLY TEST RESULTS: 5 days into an A/B test: Attribution Window Test 7DC vs 7DC1DV1DE Same brand, same creative, same audience 7DC measurement only: Cost per purchase: $131.13 vs $109.96 Purchases: 107 vs 142 CPM: $21.51 vs $13.59 Cost per 1k accounts reached: $63.78 vs $47.17 Wider window is converting higher on 7DC-only measurement And it's hitting way more net new customers on lower CPMs Running this another 15-20 days to see where the gap closes Only about 20k on each campaign right now cut out today and day one. But if this gets close or one wins by only a couple dollars do you stick with the wider window just for the net new reach expecting this to bring in more long term?

@MehtabKarta yeah at this point don’t even run an ecom brand if you can’t handle making 5-star products and engaging content. The rest you can outsource, but those two functions you either have or you don’t.

I get asked a lot for an all-in-one growth agency but I don't know anyone I would feel good recommending because I think growth REALLY is the company/founder's responsibility and it's hard to assess how much performance is due to PMF/excellent product VS marketing team in some cases. You are usually better off hiring niche agencies that can solve a specific problem for you and avoiding agencies that bullshit about potential results. You can find these agencies through referrals/word of mouth/forums like eCommerceFuel/X

@herrmanndigital I have a feeling it's one person doing this. The odds of finding this many people doing cc fraud is very unlikely. They get a batch of stolen cc's use them all to random addresses with new names so they look like real orders. Repeat. Pull the IPs that are placing the orders.

We are seeing a higher rate of fraudulent orders on a DTC site all coming from Meta. It's gotten so bad that for every 5 orders, roughly 2 are fraud. Meta doesn't really have an answer here that we're not already doing. We've tried new ad accounts and even those are getting hit with it. The future of DTC is having to constantly fight back against bad actors using AI. We see it with duping websites, creative. We see it with bot traffic. As far as I'm aware Meta nor any ad platform has the capabilities at scale to fight back on behalf of the brands. What are you all doing in your own spaces to handle this? It's incredibly discouraging because this stuff is impacting ad performance, it's no question.

@typesfast Real and true

The solution is for the U.S. to stop being one of only two countries in the world that allows foreign companies to import goods without any presence (legal or physical) in our country.

@drewfallon12 I literally thought this was a joke.

ALLBIRDS REBRANDS TO NEWBIRD AI TO PURSUE AI INFRASTRUCTURE MARKET No this isn’t a joke. About two weeks ago, Allbirds officially ended its run as a footwear independent by selling its brand and assets to American Exchange Group in a $39m asset sale. Today, the company is announcing a $50M convertible financing facility to pivot its business model toward AI compute infrastructure. The company will change its name to NewBird AI, with a strategic focus on becoming a fully integrated GPU as a Service (GPUaaS) and AI native cloud solutions provider. Initial capital from the new facility will be used to acquire high performance GPU assets to meet the surging demand for dedicated AI compute capacity. if the market crashes and you didn’t sell your stocks, you will look back at this exact moment

@chuckiegregory Really helpful post. I design products thinking about how we visually sell the differentiation in short form video. and I wanted to launch a polo brand because polos suck!! I’ll be buying the launch!

When creating a new product always ask relentlessly how can you stack as many cheat codes in your favor. Formulation, packaging, market, etc. I’m making a polo. How can I make the buttons a cheat code? Coconut shells. Not plastic. Making a supplement. How can I niche down to make it resonate better? Drink. How can I give free bonus that will be scroll stopping in marketing… Cocktail shaker. Every point in the decision process of creating a new product should yield a cheap code. Branding, packaging, formulation, niche. And when you stack those you get so many advantages that marketing is easy. I’m launching boxes next week. Talk triggers are everywhere. Tree sap band. No synthetics. Ball pouch. Hemp material. Lowkey branding. Micro gaps for airflow. Zero ride up leg. Makes your bulge bigger. Fertility founders story. Niche to men. And so on. The magic in that is in the end you present a product that hammers them with so much value that you instantly feel like the most thought out product in that category. Stack the value props. Cheat codes.

@ron_ecomm @Peter_Quadrel the more 7dc dropped, the higher % of your 7dc attributed sales were actually not link clicks.

@Peter_Quadrel What does it mean if it's 20% drop vs 8% drop. Hope that question makes sense. What makes something drop more than the others

Seeing about a 8-20% drop on visual 7DC ROAS for rolled out accounts. Not a bad time to test incremental attribution if you're higher AOV and are spending $3K+ per day.

@ConnerFleming13 @Meta Saw the same thing for us on the 31st.

If you are seeing a massive drop in CVR since yesterday April 4th.. Check placement spend. If you are normally FB feed and FB reel heavy, meta did a complete flip to Instagram reels and feed. Did the exact opposite if you are IG heavy. I have no idea what the hell @Meta is doing. It seems like all bot traffic.

@TaylorHoliday Data like this is what I live for

I think this is a good visualization for the impact of TWO major Meta items in March. 1. An overspend bug that occurred on Sunday 3/16. Spend spiked against 0 reported value. (lots of refund coming) 2. The changes to click based attribution This graph specifically focuses on 7 figure stores. 1 day click - 1 day view always maps closest to aMER, this remains true following the change. But click only attribution is diverging further from reality and previous and is becoming less correlated. This is problematic for optimization on a click only basis.

@IstvanicMarin Take a look at Spend on Facebook Reels, our spend doubled and the CPM doubled with CVR being like 1/5th of normal on FB Reels.

In literally EVERY ad account, my CPMs have drastically increased yesterday compared to Monday Without exception Didn't dive into breakdowns, yes, but something definitely feels off Anyone else noticed the same thing?

@ecom_cork @runtraffic I wouldn’t worry about the fees too much, we were in Canada and moved our payment gateway to the USA to save like 0.5% of rev, but leave tha meat on the bone until you are above 8 figures, imo

@runtraffic Wer’re Canadian and got big here first

Has anyone split their Shopify stores between US and Canada? Currency fees killing us, also can’t do upsells in US Obviously more operational complexity. But savings and potential revenue approaching 7 figs plus per year. What do the big dogs do?

@MehtabKarta @RTNToronto It’s all a show here in Toronto haha. Like one of these locations may have ‘profited’ maybe $50k per year with zero free cash flow. They are just spending our property taxes on headlines at this point.

@RTNToronto This is so embarrassingly stupid. Do these people even realize what net margins grocery stores run at?

#BREAKING: Toronto city council has approved a plan to launch 4 city-run grocery stores aimed at providing more affordable food, prioritizing lower-income areas.

@theisaacmed @NotZainAgain This is awesome, you guys have a really unique perspective.

Why did @NotZainAgain and I start a podcast a few weeks ago? Mostly for fun. We have a lot of friends that run really cool businesses and brands. We both really enjoy yapping with folks. We wanted to bring them on and get their story and learn along the way. I really appreciate everyone who was one of the first guests and listeners. 100 subs on a baby channel feels nice.

@herrmanndigital They don't even have the setting in standardized reports across accounts. 7dc roas was like the most important platform metric for so many brands, very confused on this rollout.

Meta has rolled out their updated attribution settings to many accounts yesterday. This resulted in 30-50% increases in CPA in platform. But Northbeam showed zero changes. If you see a banner at the top of your ads manager it was likely you were updated. Go to your attribution settings and if you see this you're on the "new" attribution. My questions are how this is going to play into optimizations. Now that Meta is reporting less conversions on "link clicks" will that impact performance and learnings? I feel the comms on this were extremely vague and poor by Meta.

@brad_ploch randomness 🎲

its been an emotional couple of weeks

@AaronOrendorff @9operators @FoldesCraig @BenFlohrOG This is really cool

Let’s f****** go 🤬 x 🤖 new @9operators loading … - @FoldesCraig - @BenFlohrOG - AI OPERATORS