Thanks for having me on the show! And I promise I wasn’t just trying to show off my British accent 😉

I spent the whole day with a potential distributor in Barcelona. They’ve been doing business the same way since 1980. Different products, different brands, but one thing hasn’t changed. Relationships. Their competitive advantage isn’t software or AI. It’s that they know their customers, understand their market better than anyone, and have spent decades earning trust. They have a team that genuinely cares. I’m sure technology helps them work faster and operate more efficiently. But it doesn’t replace the reason brands choose to work with them in the first place. It reminded me that business is still surprisingly simple. People open doors for people, and over time those connections compound into opportunities you could never have created alone. The tools will keep changing. The human part won’t.

New tote bag in the works.. To put on pre-order or not to put on pre-order, that is the question 🤔

Ending a career you’ve trained for since childhood is brutal. In 2021, I left pro tennis. I had moved 4,000 miles away from home at age 13 to train in Europe, sharing an 8-bed room in an attic with other tennis-crazed teens and very little adult supervision. I reached somewhere in the top 0.01% of tennis players globally, and was able to travel the world and see some awesome places before I even became an adult. But it became clear after several years in tour that I didn't have the talent nor the physical stature to make a decent living from it, and I had run out of funding and sponsors to continue. When I stopped, I felt incredibly lost and even depressed for at least a year. The structure of 6 AM daily wake-ups and hours of training vanished. I had no stage to play on, and had to completely reinvent myself. Building Cancha became my lifeline. It allowed me to grow as a person and dive into business, entrepreneurship, and product design. I don’t know you personally, @MatthewGattozzi, but I feel this. You’ve done an incredible pivot, and I have the deepest respect for people who manage to reinvent themselves like this.

Woah, literally all shopify stores are down?!

When an idea strikes while traveling, I have to pour it all out on the first piece of paper I can find. It’s all short hand writing that no one else can understand - heck I can’t event understand it if I wait too long to decipher it or type it up into obsidian. As digitally native as I try to be these days, there is something about working things out through writing. It lets you think through early-stage thoughts and problems before they crystallize into ideas.

Do unscalable things. Don't be a 'button masher' as @austriker27 calls it. Listen to us chew the ecom fat at: podcast.underdogecom.com/

Claude managed agents is super expensive. One test run to check it was working cost me almost $2 🤯

This is what no one wants to mention about starting your own consumer brand: **Logistics: you’re shipping here, there, and everywhere, and things almost always go wrong along the way. A ship that offloads your container right before departing because it’s too full, rates that suddenly skyrocket, tariffs, and customs which decides to take more than a month to do a ‘random inspection’ (🤯) You have to prepare for the unexpected, and not let it rattle you when it does. **Inventory: you always either have too much or too little, never the perfect amount. Either you’ve got products you can’t keep in stock or you can’t move them fast enough and it’s killing your cashflow. You have to analyze your stock position constantly and keep reforecasting, but predicting a sudden boom on TikTok Shop or a random celebrity mention that goes viral is anyone’s guess. The only real answer is staying flexible. **Finance: financing a young growing physical products business is brutal. We’re up 100% year over year, and that means double the stock requirements. Sales from last quarter need to finance double the inventory for next quarter. That only happens through profitable acquisition and a constant battle for financing that won’t break your unit economics. **First order profitability is everything. It’s only when you realize you were losing $1.20 on average per new customer that you understand why you were tens of thousands in the red at year end. Every unprofitable sale is another step in the wrong direction. Growth matters, but no one is bailing out unprofitable brands anymore. You only have to look at Allbirds, from a $4b valuation to a sale at a 99% reduction of that, to see how quickly the smoke clears. I’m not writing this as someone who has it figured out. The economics of consumer brands, especially hard goods like Cancha, are extremely difficult to make work. Six years in, countless mistakes, and I’m still learning. I write this because while I’m proud of where Cancha is and where we’re going, I’m also transparent about how hard building something like this really is. There are no cheat codes, no tried and tested formulas, and I don’t pretend to have the answers. We’re battling through these problems every single day. What matters is your perspective, humility in your decisions and, most of all, no regrets about how you got here.

Can someone explain why @Shopify still doesn't allow selling plans (pre-order, subscriptions, etc) with bundles? Shopify Bundles app was launched over 3 years ago, there are a 1000 other bundle apps out there, pretty much every store out there is offering some kind of bundle - wouldn't this be a complete no-brainer?

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.

Sometimes it feels like the real thing holding us back is all the noise. New ad platforms, the latest software, the countless communities, the empty viral tweets, AI doomsday rhetoric. We all want to stay ahead of the curve, but I’ve come to the conclusion that most of brand owners (me especially) would make more progress by just putting our heads down and focusing on doing the basics better: product, content and finances.

For a small brand owner like myself who still handles quite lot of our customer service, this is mind-blowingly good. I didn't touch this conversation one bit. Customer wanted to add something to their order, @commslayercom's AI edited the order and sent them a payment link for the difference, customer paid. All in 16 minutes. My team is offline as it's a Sunday. I'm traveling. Usually, a customer request like this would sit in the inbox until Monday afternoon, likely after the order already shipped. $102 order bump with zero input from my side. Oh, and I'm only paying $29/month for this. Kudos to @karri_tweets and his team. It's not perfect every time, but the the real world utility of AI in 2026 is becoming more and more undeniable.