$40M in eCommerce sales | Founder of novaalab.com | Sharing how I scaled a profitable brand to 8 figures in revenue
Joined September 2012
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My ecom journey building NovaaLab:
2020: $234K
2021: $1M
2022: $4M
2023: $7M
2024: $10M
2025: $14M (total)
On pace for $20M in 2026.
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Did the math last quarter.
Every 1% of repeat net sales adds roughly $150k of net profit per year for us.
Not revenue. Net profit. Pure EBITDA.
Same 1% added through new customer acquisition would cost us $400k in ad spend.
Retention is just acquisition without the Meta tax.
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Pascal Le Marechal retweeted
Spent 18 months optimizing our checkout.
Bumped conversion from 1.8% to 2.1%.
Same window, fixed our product page copy. CVR went from 2.1% to 3.4%.
The checkout wasn't the bottleneck. The promise was.
Most founders test what they can measure. Not what actually moves the needle.
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The founders I know making $30M all share one habit.
They look at their P&L every Monday morning.
Not quarterly. Not annually. Every Monday.
The founders I know stuck at $5M look at theirs once a year with their accountant.
Same effort. Different relationship with the numbers.
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Pascal Le Marechal retweeted
Most DTC brands at $5M obsess over branding too early.
New fonts. New packaging. Rebrand consultant.
Your customers don't care. They care if the product works.
Spend on branding at $20M when you have a base to defend.
Below that, branding is procrastination with a Pinterest board.
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Got an email this morning from a customer.
"Hi, I love your product. Just wondering if there's any way you could lower the price by $50? It's a bit out of my budget but I really want it."
We sell a $149 device.
The audacity. The honesty. I respect it. I will not be doing it.
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Klaviyo emails generate more profit per dollar than Meta ads.
Nobody talks about this because email isn't sexy.
You don't get to call yourself a "performance marketer" on LinkedIn for setting up a winback flow.
But the math doesn't care about your job title.
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Pascal Le Marechal retweeted
April 2024. Annual review with my accountant.
"Congrats, big year, you grew 40%".
Cash in the bank: barely moved.
That's when I realized I had no idea what was actually happening in my own business between January and December.
Now I track 3 metrics every Monday. % MER. % Discount. % Net margin.
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Audited our Meta account last month.
38 active ad sets. 7 doing 80% of conversions.
Killed 25 in one afternoon. Reallocated budget to the 7.
CAC dropped 18% in 3 weeks. Same spend. Same offer.
Most DTC ad accounts aren't underspent. They're under-managed.
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Cost me millions to learn this.
For 4 years I looked at my P&L once a year with my accountant.
Thought my brand was a cash machine. It wasn't.
Started tracking % MER and % discount rate weekly. Same revenue. 2x the cash at year-end.
Annual reviews are for taxes. Not for running a business.
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Pascal Le Marechal retweeted
Revenue is a vanity number.
The cash machine of a DTC brand hides in 3 metrics most founders don't track weekly:
% MER. % Net margin. % Discount rate.
Drop the first and third. The second grows automatically.
That's it. That's the whole game at $10M .
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3 metrics matter more than revenue at $10M .
% MER: how efficiently you turn ads into sales
% Discount: how much you bribe customers to convert
% Net margin: what's actually left for you
Lower the first two. The third grows alone.
Stop optimizing for the deck or your X account. Start optimizing for the bank account.
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Pascal Le Marechal retweeted
Revenue is a vanity number.
The real cash machine of a DTC brand hides in 3 metrics most founders don't track weekly:
% MER. % Net margin. % Discount rate.
These are my North Stars at Novaalab. Here's why 🧵
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Revenue is a vanity number.
The real cash machine of a DTC brand hides in 3 metrics most founders don't track weekly:
% MER. % Net margin. % Discount rate.
These are my North Stars at Novaalab. Here's why 🧵
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My job as a founder isn't to chase revenue.
It's to find the sweet spot of % MER where the brand becomes a cash machine. Then adjust spend dynamically based on seasonality and CAC.
Lower MER, lower discount rate = higher net margin.
Math doesn't lie. Decks do.
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Most founders look at their P&L once a quarter and panic.
We look at these 3 numbers every Monday morning.
Boring. Repetitive. Profitable.
Stop optimizing for the deck. Start optimizing for the bank account.
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