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.@RomanEcom gave one of my favorite keynotes in 10 years of running ECF Live. A few of my favorite nuggets: Don't bet it all on the exit. Take dividends as soon as you can. Aim for $2M liquid. You'll de-risk and make way better decisions when your personal life isn't strapped to your business. Read "WHO: The A Method for Hiring." It took his hiring failure rate from 70% to 10%. Distribution > Product. First-time founders are obsessed with product. Second-time founders are obsessed with distribution. Aim for $1M revenue per FTE as an efficiency metric. (Sidebar: way easier remote. Avg rev/FTE for remote teams is $1.25M. In-office cuts that in half per the @ecomfuelco Trends Report) Never let junior team members run free. Maintain guardrails with: 1) Multiple daily check-ins 2) Black-and-white KPIs 3) Standardized, automated KPI reporting If you're not following @romanecom, fix that. And if you're thinking about selling, let him know. He regularly buys and invests in DTC businesses and is one of the good guys in our space.

For 13 years, getting on Shopify was the obvious first move for any DTC brand. But @RomanEcom recently had two separate conversations that changed how he he's thinking about the future of Shopify. Two young founders showed him a supplement brand they'd spun up. Fast site. Multilingual. Fully localized to every market. He asked how they pulled it off so quickly — completely off Shopify. Then a week later, a 26-year-old founder doing $40-45 million in revenue also built entirely without the platform. Their reasoning wasn't cost. It was about agility and control. Full ownership of the checkout and post-purchase flow. Spinning up 100 PDPs a month with an AI-first approach. Shopify was built for humans first — the back end, the whole stack — which makes a truly AI-native org hard to build on top of it. The whole take is worth watching 👇

In NYC starting tomorrow. I’m hosting a brunch for 10 people on the 7th. I had a last minute cancellation. DM if you wanna take the slot. Ideally you do $15M in TTM revenue and you're bootstrapped.

65 day update on Quince Logistics: Our first client: - Shipping ~1,000 orders/day from China to US customers - 50% delivered in 4.5 calendar days. - 90% within 6.2 calendar days (Sundays included). They were averaging 14 days with Yun Express before. Our pricing is the same if not better. We’re now opening it up to brands of any size. No more volume minimums. Sign up here → qls[dot]quince[dot]com

This could send $META below $500 if it happens. The only reason $META is cheap right now is because investors are fearful that Meta is lighting money on fire, without a clear ROI in the near term. This would substantially increase that fear...

We went through 3 CFOs. Every single one told us the same thing: "Cut marketing." They were all wrong. The question should have never been: "How do we spend less?" The question should have been: "How do we spend as much as humanly possible" So we cut everything else: $500k/month in OPEX improved product margins tech spend vendors that weren't delivering And spent 3x more on marketing. The result? Growth exploded. Profitability nearly doubled. The customer acquisition flywheel came back to life. One of the most dangerous things a founder can do is hire smart people and assume they're right...especially CFO's who are bouncing from brand to brand... People from great companies often know their business. Not yours.