There has been a lot of positive change at Equip over this past year. New branding, new product lines, national distribution, and new customers. While we're constantly evolving, the thing that remains unchanged is why we keep showing up every day. With this growth, we decided it was as good a time as any to tell that story.

On paper, $1M in Google spend should return $5.6M. We dug into the numbers across $20M in spend and found that many brands are only getting $4.75M. The missing $850,000 has a name: Hidden search terms. Up until September 2020, Google showed you 90-95% of the search terms your ads paid for. If a term was bad, you marked it as negative and stopped paying for it. Then they hid most of them for "privacy reasons." Now, a big chunk of what you pay for gets lumped into a single line called "other search terms." You can't see the individual queries, just one aggregated row, and that performance is reliably worse than what's still visible. It works in Google's favor to hide the stuff you'd otherwise exclude. We looked at $20M in search and shopping spend to size it: For every dollar you run through Google, they skim almost a full dollar of efficiency off the top. And this problem is only going to get worse as Google hides more data with more automated campaign types. You can't unhide it, but you can claw back efficiency with n-gram analysis. Hidden terms are usually long-tail queries that Google tags as low-volume. You want to aggregate the visible data, find the terms that consistently underperform, and exclude them. You'll usually pull out some hidden queries with the same term, too. It’s not a complete fix to the problem, but it is critical for improving efficiency on Google.

The wild story of how we sold SHOP to SHOPIFY in 12 days.. We were short $500K to close an opportunistic acquisition (T2G). Out of nowhere, I was reminded that we had been sitting on these premium SHOP domains that we picked up years back. Naturally, Shopify (NASDAQ: SHOP), the world’s largest e-commerce tech co., was the fitting buyer. It took about 12 days from reaching out to Harley Finkelstein, @Shopify President to closing the deal. The last minute proceeds from the Shop sale were the final $ needed to close the T2G acquisition, which has since added $1M / year in EBITDA, and has been a big part of our turnaround this year (we recouped our upfront investment in the first 90 days). As far as we’re aware, it was the largest .ca domain sale of the year in Canada. Not huge $ but it was a nice last minute gift (on Xmas eve nonetheless!), and just in time to close our game-changing acquisition. If only it had been a .com instead of a .ca 😅 Stay scrappy, my friends 👊🏼

This is the “K-Shaped” performance phenomenon. Smaller spending brands with smaller AOV are losing ground.

Axon just out-purchased Meta. Some of you know I'm still in the weeds as a merchant myself. Since launch, Axon has driven 18.7% of our revenue. Similar budgets. Similar ROAS. Shopify looking good ✅ #AppLovin #Axon #Shopify #MetaAds #DTC #EcommerceMarketing #ROAS

This little guy started a business 15 years later. Still can’t believe it. The plan: Wimbledon champion The reality: Packing boxes in my living room Life’s funny like that.

TODAY'S AD NEWS IN 60 SECONDS Similar to Interstellar, you may need to watch this a couple times to understand it

Magic Mind wins Mindful’s 2024 Beverage of the Year! 🏆 Thanks to our team and fans for making this possible. We’ll keep delivering the best to keep elevating mental performance. Cheers to more wins ahead!

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.

5 years ago, when I was considering joining @PostscriptIO, the main concern from my personal braintrust was, "can you really build a venture scale business on Shopify alone?" 20,000 customers later, it turns out you can and we did.

SKYLRK: Bieber Goes Hardware | Meta's $115B Wipeout | "Ads Eat Everything" x.com/i/broadcasts/1nGnRRzal…

Our CEO @buysellsmb chats with board member and investor @JTLonsdale on the @AmOptimistShow for one of his first full sit-down interviews to discuss their optimism for Main Street. America is at an inflection point. Small businesses are the lifeblood of communities and the backbone of everything this country was built on. But every year, more owners are retiring than there are young people stepping into ownership, and many are getting bought out by coastal private equity firms. Will shares why it's important to have a country of owners, and how AI may be the best thing to ever happen to small businesses. The vision is not just to "create more millionaires on Main Street", but to make sure these local businesses stay in the hands of their communities. Full episode below. x.com/AmOptimistShow/status/…

If you want to master yaps on video you need the full playbook A. Car yap, literally in your car, pro-tip have the bucees, drink the swig, have some character B. Notebook yap, your video notes are in front of you show them and refer to them C. Whiteboard yap, same concept but delivers authority, this is the yap type with the highest view to follower conversion D. Newsletter yap - this week in my substack I talked XXX establishes you as more intellecual E. "With bro" yap - have someone sitting next to you and you have some interplay F. Graphic yap - 1 visual for every two seconds, supercharge retention this is the playbook, you have maybe 90 days left

We just killed $1M in ARR on purpose. @Aftersell can now be 100% free for merchants using Rokt Thanks. Every $1 you earn offsets your bill until it hits $0. Why would we do this? AI 3x'd our dev velocity the last 2 months. Building software is getting radically cheaper. If we're not passing that on to merchants, someone else will. SaaS pricing is shifting: less for access, more aligned to value. We're going there first. And eventually, Aftersell will be free for all.

Outdoor Voices brought its founder back & relaunched this year. most "founder returns to save the brand" stories are PR fluff. but @ParticlHQ's data shows something real is happening.

The only way to maintain effective and stable teams is by paying your people more than their peers. The only way to do that across the whole organization is to hire people all over the world. The only way to hire people from all over the world is to have a global team of recruiters, local to the regions they source talent from. The only way for those recruiters to be effective at hiring is to have someone who has actually scaled brands & built teams install effective ecomm hiring practices. There you have it- HireTidal.com is the only way to hire.

This looks like a festival lineup 😭😭

Charlotte is the most underrated city in the country and it’s not even close • Affordable • Nice people • Great weather • High paying jobs • Cool neighborhoods • Short drive to the beach or mountains