Happy Thursday!

I sat down with my friend David Perell for a long one, and we basically just reverse-engineered how I think about brands. The fridge, Hint, Judy, influencers, landing pages… it's all in there. I pulled the biggest ones below.

Vendor of the Week

Postscript — the SMS engine every brand I've helped launch is running.

Every brand I have worked on launching uses Postscript. There's a reason. It's the best product in the category and it's not particularly close. The team ships, the platform is built for operators and not for marketers who like dashboards, and the AI work they've put into replies and conversations over the last 18 months has pulled them further ahead of everyone else still treating SMS like a broadcast tool.

That's the whole problem with most SMS programs. The welcome series fires, the cart abandon goes out, the drop blast goes out, and the brand calls it a retention channel. But the real money in SMS lives in the replies, the back-and-forth, the question that comes in at 11pm that nobody is awake to answer. 82% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because they couldn't get an answer over SMS. That's the leak.

Most brands have no idea where their leaks are. The audit fixes that. Postscript will go through your program, surface the quick wins you can implement this week, flag the cost savings hiding in your send strategy, and give you the strategic recommendations most ESPs would charge a retainer for.

Get a free SMS audit here.

See Everything. Trust the Data. Build the Brand.

Most people looking to understand DTC go read someone else's article about DTC. I just go to Whole Foods.

I have a vending machine fridge in my apartment. It's full of product. Every week someone comes over, tries something, and tells me what they actually think. That feedback loop — unfiltered, no agenda, real humans — has been one of the most valuable things I've ever built. It's free research. The internet finds it funny. Brands send me product to get in it. And it reminds me constantly that the answers you need are almost always right in front of you.

David frames this as "the world as a museum." I'd just call it: stop looking for a book to read when you could be looking at what's actually working.

The Hint story is the blueprint here. We were paying $3-5 per click to a product landing page. I came from an arbitrage world where I was getting two-cent clicks. So the question became: what if we told a story instead of selling a product? We wrote the "Sweetie" article on The Hustle. One founder, one demeaning conversation with a Coke executive who called her sweetie and said Americans love sweet. That's a story. We put it up, drove traffic, got six-to-ten cent clicks, and 15-20% of people who read the article went straight to the Hint site to purchase. Two months of hockey stick growth. And we never led with "here's a deal."

That's story-based selling. You're not selling flavored water. You're selling the reason someone should care that this brand exists.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

The Biggest Takeaways

• The world is your research lab. A vending machine fridge, a basketball game with bad seats, a walk down the beverage aisle at Whole Foods. The best operators are running constant passive research on what's working. If you're only looking at dashboards, you're missing half the signal.

• Story-based selling beats product-based selling. The Hint "Sweetie" article drove more growth than any ad campaign they ran. You're not selling a product. You're selling the reason the product exists and why that should matter to your customer.

• Test cheap, then pour fuel. Every decision at Hint — TV ads, messaging, creator partnerships — was validated first on Facebook. Cheap, fast, tight feedback loop. Then they took what worked and scaled it. Never go into a $100K creative blind.

• Influencers are content creators, not billboards. Find people who genuinely love your product and let them tell that story in their voice. No brief. No forced caption. The authenticity is the entire asset. Ship cold. See who talks about it unprompted. Those are your people.

• Social proof needs to sell. Match your press logos to your audience's media diet. Use reviews and quotes that describe outcomes, not adjectives. "Helped me kick the habit" is a thousand times more useful than "amazing product."

That's all for today

It's Thursday, and it's all downhill from here. Go walk around somewhere you've never treated as a research environment and see what you notice.

Nik