Brett Bone

Ten years ago today I co-founded Simple Modern Since then the company has exceeeded a billion dollars in sales and 60 million orders. It has been more than I could have ever dreamed. Here's me sharing in 165 seconds what I've learned over the past ten years.

This has been a huge unlock for us @simplemodernco. We used to attribute all performance marketing to DTC, which crushed its P&L and — as @TaylorHoliday says — suffocated growth. Holdout experiments showed us that Amazon and wholesale saw MORE lift than .com from our marketing.

Lets go! We need more quality finance content in consumer world--excited to listen in! @MehtabKarta and @drewfallon12 are great follows

Great stuff from @MehtabKarta ! At @simplemodernco we’re focusing on 5-6 initiatives in 2025 that all fall in the high impact quadrants. Constraints lead to clarity and focus, which leads to high performing teams.

Excited for our new Brand, @trevihydration — especially with my good friend @Corbin_Wallace at the helm!

@PrestonRuther10 This is on point! We’re stepping into brand marketing at @simplemodernco feeling uncomfortable with measuring the impact. Have you done any work to apply this thought process beyond DTC, to Amazon, wholesale, etc?

CFO: what's with this ad? it has driven ZERO revenue. are you crazy? CMO: actually, it's one of our best performers CFO: in terms of WHAT? CMO: engagements, especially follows CFO: how does that relate to revenue? we're focused on profit. wasting money doesn't support this focus CMO: look at our results. revenue growth is re-accelerating, and our EBITDA margin is nearly doubling. something's working CFO: no way it's because of this ad CMO: i think it is—not just this ad, but the campaign. it's great for our brand and earning high-quality engagements like follows CFO: heartily disagree. our growth is due to COGS savings and new products CMO: true, but this has also contributed significantly. we've measured how these engagements lead to long-term growth in the types of high-margin purchase behaviors we want more of CFO: what are our "highest-margin purchase behaviors"? CMO: purchases from people who search for our brand name or enter our URL directly. brand is likely the primary purchase driver CFO: fair, but how is that different from ad clicks leading to purchases? CMO: it's different. while both are valuable, purchases from ad clicks often focus on product, price, or promotions, whereas branded searches indicate the brand brand is a bigger driver CFO: are you saying revenue from ad clicks is bad? CMO: not at all. but we've relied too much on purchases via paid clicks to drive growth—nearly all our growth came from them in the last two years CFO: really? hmm. but what's your point? CMO: as shown (shares the measurement data), revenue per session and lifetime value from ad clicks are lower than from branded organic searches CFO: where's this data? why haven't i seen it? CMO: i send it weekly in slack. CFO: (embarrassed) ummm, busted? CMO: all good—maybe now you'll open it. this campaign helps balance our approach, generating an emotional connection and reaching people we'd never hit with our conversion-optimized spend. it fills the funnel in a measurable, precise way. and yes, as an added benefit, it increases our direct response efficiency and effectiveness, but the under-appreciated and more important benefit is that it has measurably driven more of those high-margin purchase behaviors we want CFO: how do you know? CMO: we see how follower growth drives incremental revenue from organic search, direct sessions, and organic social referrals over the following six months. we can quantify revenue and ROAS just like our direct response campaigns CFO: why haven't i seen this data? CMO: it's in the same report i send you weekly CFO: (scans report for two minutes... awkward silence) this is awesome. keep doing what you're doing CMO: (surprised) excuse me? CFO: actually, spend more CMO: well, look at you—this is quite the surprise. appreciate the excitement, but i'm testing and scaling in a way that aligns with the process we follow CFO: let's speed up that process a bit, shall we? CMO: gladly

@MattiSchroder Love this. At @simplemodernco we coined a metric called aMPER—acquisition marketing profit efficiency ratio. Really, it’s just another way of looking at the same thing: profit per new customer.

I believe MER is a ridiculous metric. You can have a seemingly good MER while hemorrhaging money on customer acquisition. And how do you even know your MER is good in the first place? Instead, I track profit per new customer (NC): (NC revenue - tax - variable cost - ad spend)/NCs It’s still blended in terms of ad spending, but at least your revenue from existing customers can't cover up that you’re lighting money on fire on acquisition.

Great thoughts @drewfallon12! We’ve found water bottles at @simplemodernco to be kind of like apparel in that consumers carry them like an accessory. Accordingly, we’ve seen a ton of impact from leaning into drops.

The biggest check written in ecom is the one to purchase inventory. That means building best financial, operational toolkit to inform those decisions. We're cooking something...

@PrestonRuther10 Outstanding thread from @PrestonRuther10 We’re thinking through some of these same questions at @simplemodernco, and I found this helpful!

Chubbies' nine-figure acquisition and ten-figure IPO didn’t happen by chasing ROAS. Focusing solely on short-term revenue almost cost us everything. Changing our marketing metrics to focus on long-term profit transformed our growth quality and became a key driver of equity value Here are the mistakes, lessons, and actions you can take today btw, I was the '1-day-click-revenue-or-nothing' guy for embarrassingly too long, but my loss is your gain, so here are: 1) Three mistakes and lessons 2) Three ways to update your thinking on the topic, and 3) Three actions to consider today let's do it Three mistakes and lessons 1. Maximizing Revenue and ROAS has little connection to growing fundamental equity value. Increasing them doesn’t always grow cash generation since there's no incorporation of the costs to get that growth 2. Beyond product, team, and execution, asset value came from a growing base of organic acquisition (the Brand). Performance marketing mattered, but Brand drove value 3. Revenue growth is great for the ego, but it's more about quality of growth than quantity. Ultimately, your growth story must show evidence of, and a clear path to, sustained long-term profit growth Three ways to update your thinking on the topic 1. Brand vs Performance is a false dichotomy. When building a house, foundation vs finishes isn't even a debate. You want a house, and it's obvious that you need the foundation, framing, plumbing (the stuff you don't see) AND the stuff you DO see, like the facade and the finishes. Brand is like a house—you need all the parts. Without a foundation (Brand), there’s no facade or finishes (Performance), no matter how much you want to focus on the sexy, visible stuff 2. It's not just about equity value, it's about architecting your success criteria around building a machine that, with each passing year, spits out more and more cash after going through every single line in the P&L. Revenue and ROAS play no role here 3. While there are blips where you find increased efficiencies, performance marketing alone always gets more expensive over time. Brand is the only way to bring acquisition costs down over time Three actions to consider today 1. Take an hour tomorrow to do some soul searching. Ponder this question: Are your current measures of success as closely tied to fundamental business quality and equity value improvement as possible? 2. If the answer is NO, meet w/ the team to plan how to gradually shift the KPIs that define success and drive compensation. 3. Long-term profit comes from being memorable, not tinkering with Ads Manager. Ask yourself: What makes your brand bold, fun, and unforgettable? This builds organic acquisition and turns you from a flash-in-the-pan to a generational asset hope this helps ✌️❤️🤘

Proud to work for a company that stands for values like Generosity and Togetherness. Today we announced the next chapter of @simplemodernco through a refresh of our brand identity! Check out this letter from our CEO highlighting our story and how we arrived at our new look.

Simple Modern is one my favorite success stories in eCom, look at this traction: 2017 ~$10m 2018 ~$20m 2019 ~$40m 2020 ~$60m 2021 ~$80m 2022 ~$95m 2023 ~$180m 2024 ~$225m What's amazing is it's bootstrapped! What's more amazing is est. earnings this year $40-50m! 🐐🚀🙌

@iamkawawong @lifeofbi @simplemodernco At our scale today we have an ABL with Chase, backed by receivables and inventory.

@iamkawawong @lifeofbi I’m on the Finance team @simplemodernco - in the early days: solid unit economics and a basically negative cash conversion cycle on Amazon. We would also factor our receivables with Target, etc, getting $0.80 on the dollar.

Pumped to have @drewmarc live tomorrow along with @brettbone from @simplemodernco and @andrewbcase from @noonbrew to talk pricing. Such a cool topic that overlaps with finance, marketing, math, psychology and culture. Everyone has to make calls on pricing, and yet so often it's ignored as a strategic lever...let's fix that.

@mikebeckhamsm This was my fourth week at @simplemodernco , and I remember thinking, having just left a safe, comfortable job: “what have I done?!” But it was really special watching the team rally and come together to get through it.

Five years ago, our company almost died. The experience was one of the most formative memories from 8 years of building Simple Modern. We started SImple Modern in 2016 by selling on the Amazon marketplace. We were fortunate to quickly gain significant market share. Our products ranked near the top of major search terms, and we quickly grew to sell over a million bottles/tumblers per year. We are a 100% bootstrapped company. As a result, we were always cash-strapped. We funded our growth through inventory financing with a local bank. What started as a $25,000 line of credit had grown to millions of dollars by 2018. We believed the holidays would be huge, so we invested every available dollar in buying inventory. That summer, we built more products than ever before. The stage was set for a huge Black Friday and Cyber Monday. One week out, everything looked great. Our year-over-year comps had us growing at 300%! We had several major deals scheduled with Amazon. I went to bed on the Sunday before Black Friday feeling optimistic. Monday When you sell on the Amazon marketplace, you develop the habit of checking Amazon's selling portal (Seller Central) regularly. Most people wake up and check their text messages and email. Amazon sellers wake up and check their sales on Seller Central. I woke up Monday morning (4 days from Black Friday) and logged in to Amazon. At the time, an innocuous little flag icon was at the top of the page. The flag turned red if you had a message from Amazon. Our flag was red. You DID NOT want a red flag. Amazon only sent us messages when there was an update to our account status. I looked at the message we had received. Our account had been suspended by Amazon. The message from Amazon didn't contain any details. They had determined that our account violated their policies but gave no specifics. I broke into a cold sweat. I had heard horror stories about this happening to others. Because the Amazon marketplace has hundreds of thousands (millions?) of sellers, it is hard to prevent policy violations. Amazon's solution was to deploy algorithms to scan the site for infractions. We had offended one of the algorithms, apparently. Amazon's standard operating procedure was to send you a note (paraphrased by me): "We know you did something bad, but we aren't going to tell you what it was. You will tell us all the bad things you have done and how you will avoid doing them in the future." That was the appeals process in a nutshell. It would be like being arrested without being told why and then placed in jail until you both confessed and repented to a crime you may or may not have committed. I recalled horror stories of sellers that had been suspended for months. I checked our sales for the day - they were at ZERO. I logged onto Amazon and searched for our items. Nothing Overnight, our brand disappeared from Amazon. Amazon made up >90% of our company's sales at the time. We had bought a massive amount of inventory with debt to have a huge holiday selling season. Houston, we have a problem. I alerted the team. I was concerned but not panicking. I tried to keep it light by joking about finding a new place to live now that the bank would probably repossess my house. We felt confident that we could submit an appeal and get things cleared up. We hadn't violated any of Amazon's rules, so we had nothing to fear. Right? We put together our appeal that day and submitted it in the afternoon. I was unsettled but hopeful when I went to bed Tuesday night. Tuesday The next morning, our appeal was denied. Things were getting more serious. That morning, we made a few changes to our listings that we thought might have aggravated Amazon's algorithm and resubmitted our appeal. Surely, it would get approved this time. An Amazon manager looked at our appeal after our account manager elevated the situation. They found old ASINs of ours that had been hijacked by Chinese sellers. These blackhat sellers had attached adult products to some of our discontinued products. Appeal denied. My initial thought: "You have got to be freaking kidding me." I began to spiral. I felt like I was in a Greek tragedy. Our account manager said we had time for one more appeal before everyone left for Thanksgiving midday on Wednesday. She suggested a total catalog rebuild. At the time, we had 3 people in our company who worked on Amazon. Me, @Corbin_Wallace , and @jbryanporter . Bryan was traveling, so I called Corbin. We were going to have to rebuild the product catalog overnight. An aside: I learned after the fact that Corbin (who was in New York) had tickets to see Hamilton with the original cast that night. He never mentioned it to me. Instead, he just asked how he could help. That's what an amazing co-worker looks like. At 5pm on Tuesday, we were less than 60 hours out from Black Friday. We began a total catalog overhaul. It was going to be an all-nighter because we had almost 1,000 items we sold on Amazon. Everyone on the team who did not work on Amazon had gone home for the night. Around 6, one of our teammates sent a message on Slack asking if they could help. At first, I said "no" because we were the only three people who understood the Amazon system. After a little bit of thought, I realized there was a way to break down some tasks that didn't require any special knowledge. A few minutes later, another teammate got online and offered to help. Then another. Then another! By 9, the entire team had organically gotten online and reached out to see if they could help. Everyone in the company had individually initiated and volunteered to help without being asked. It was an amazing cultural moment in the history of our company. The team was willing to do whatever they could to help. We worked for the next several hours, rewriting every piece of copy and every product description. At around 3 in the morning, our account was suddenly reinstated! It was one of the most relieving moments of my life. To this day, I don't know what happened. We don't know why it was suspended or reinstated when it was. Wednesday I left the office at 8am on Wednesday morning. On the way out, I saw some employees from a bank we shared our office building with. Their look said it all - I must've looked like a truck had hit me. I was exhausted. The story has a happy ending. We had our biggest holiday ever. We didn't get blown up. I learned 3 things from the experience: 1. We don't control what happens to us, but we do control our response to them. 2. The defining cultural moments in your organization happen during adversity. 3. You have to diversify your revenue sources. Today, our goal is for no external channel to make up more than 35% of our profit. We love the partners we work with, but the unexpected can happen. To build a resilient business, you need diversification.

@the_alex_d_ AI

ChatGPT is a time-saving machine. But you need the right prompts. So I built "50 ChatGPT Prompts for Amazon FBA" What's included: 1. Product research 2. Branding 3. Sourcing + more And for 24 hours, it's 100% FREE! Just: 1. Reply "AI" 2. Follow me (so I can DM you)

My favorite new product just dropped—check it out!

@adrian_horning_ Great work! Would love to check it out.

Zillow's gonna hate me but....I wrote a script to scrape the listings from the search results, and download them as a csv 🤯 Drop a comment 👇 + like and I'll send you it + directions on how to run it (must be following)

@MehtabKarta Great thoughts! Will definitely use this with our team.