Happy Sunday!
If you're reading this, I hope you had an amazing weekend and got some time to relax. I am coming off the Ecom Founders AI Summit, and today, I turn 30, so I'm fully offline this weekend. Instead of a tactical 7 page newsletter, today I’m going to share 30 things I'd bet my own money on after being in the DTC game for almost 10 years.
Let's get into today’s newsletter!
1. Hope is not a strategy. Every stuck founder is running on hope that the next campaign will save them. Hope isn't a plan. It's the thing you tell yourself when you don't have one. Focus on building repeatable systems.
2. Launch day is irrelevant. The plan for day 2, week 2, and month 2 is what matters. Every brand I've watched burn out had a big launch and no second act.
3. Do less, better. Under $10M/year you cannot run ten channels at 10% effort. Pick one. Go deep. Get good. Then add the next.
4. There is no such thing as "ads not working." You're either running bad creative, bad messaging, bad targeting, sending people to an uninformative landing page, or your product isn't worth what you're charging. The platform is rarely the problem.
5. Advertising is like flirting. You don't propose to a stranger. Don't ask cold traffic to checkout on the first interaction or on your brand’s first CTA.
6. Treat your customer like Kim K on a red carpet. Everything she could possibly need in that moment is right there, ready, before she has to ask. Don’t make it hard to find or stuck within drawers.
7. Driving cold traffic to your homepage might be the worst thing you can do. Homepages were built for people who already know you. Cold traffic needs a page built to convince a stranger.
8. Lead with angles, not benefits, and definitely not value props. "After-school snack every mom can get behind" beats "low-calorie, easy to prepare." Value props are for the internal team drinking their own kool-aid.
9. Top-of-funnel creative should be good enough to perform organically. If it wouldn't earn views on its own, don't pay to put it in front of people.
10. Statics first. CPMs are about a third of video. Test more messaging, faster.
11. Founder-led ads are my personal favorite. People buy from people. Get on camera.
12. Don't think about what you would click. Think about what someone who knows nothing about your brand would click.
13. Match the hero section of your landing page to the ad. Same SKU, same color, same flavor. Familiarity converts.
14. Under every CTA, write the discount code. Auto-apply it through the URL when you can. Don't make anyone scroll to find it.
15. Sell what the product solves, not what it does. Nobody cares your bottle purifies water until they hear what's actually in their tap.
16. Don't send every email to every subscriber. Sunset anyone who hasn't engaged in 18 months. Deliverability is the whole game.
17. Don't use WELCOME15. It's not believable to expire, it leaks everywhere, and it doesn't make anyone feel special. Build something more unique to the individual funnel for better tracking.
18. The first email after someone buys should be plain-text from the founder. Higher opens, real replies, and replies move you to the primary inbox. That's free deliverability you don't have to pay for.
19. The first welcome email is your highest-leverage moment. Load it: UGC, reviews, press, founding story, ingredients, us-vs-them. Don't waste it on a discount code.
20. Your lowest LTV customers came in on the steepest deal. Discounting trains them to wait for the next one… that’s why BFCM requires so much upper funnel work beforehand, not just running prospecting for discount hunters.
21. Most of your best subscribers didn't subscribe on their first purchase. They bought a second time first. Stop forcing the subscription on day one.
22. 20% off your whole site is less attractive than one new product, variant, or exclusive bundle. New beats cheap.
23. Direct mail still works because almost no eCom brands do it. The bar to stand out is on the floor. A beautifully designed postcard in someone's mailbox tells them you're legit.
24. Q4 is a 5-to-10-year game. If you aren't profitable on BFCM, something upstream is broken. Don't blame the season.
25. Do things that don't scale. No public company will hand-write a thank-you card. That's exactly why you should.
26. Brands need to think like creators. Content and distribution first, transaction second. The brands winning in 2026 are the ones making things people want to watch, not just buy.
27. The audience is the asset. The future of holding companies is built around audiences, not industries.
28. Forget short-term revenue. Ask what would make your customer text a friend about you. Then build that.
29. You're building the world's most efficient focus group with a customer acquisition funnel. Every ad, LP, and email is data. Read it.
30. Stay in founder mode. The best founders never leave the fire. Read the support tickets. Watch the session replays. Reply to the DMs, and customer service tickets. Nobody is too senior to know what the customer actually thinks.