Call me a hater but I think living in a world where both trillionaires and global poverty coexist is a sign humanity has failed as a species

Meta ad volume is a hot topic lately, so we pulled active Meta ad counts across 10 verticals: 💍 Accessories/Jewelry 🍼 Baby/Kids 💄 Beauty 👗 Fashion/Apparel 🥤 Food/Beverage 💊 Health/Supplements 🛋️ Home/Furniture 🍳 Kitchen/Cookware 🐾 Pets ⛺ Sporting Goods/Outdoor

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 👇

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

Europe Discovers Buc-ee's | StockX Launches Live Shopping | 2026 Seguno Discount Report x.com/i/broadcasts/1pJdRRPkW…

One thing missing from the “they should pay the Obsession crew bonuses” conversation: The reality is that it’s a “sexy” industry. More people want to work in the film industry than there are jobs available. That’s not good or bad, it’s just the reality. And when that’s the reality, the supply (aka workers) outweighs the demand (aka jobs). This is true for any other “sexy” industry (eg professional sports, fashion, music, etc). They are also — for the most part — bad businesses. If indie filmmaking was a money maker, there would be more indie blockbusters. But the reality is that most lose money. A $300m windfall covers the costs for all the other films that lost money. Would it be nice if the entire crew got a bonus because of the films success? Sure. But who would even pay that? It was a $750k budget, then sold for $15 million to Focus Features. Should the crew get part of that $15m even though they didn’t risk anything? The investors took the risk, the crew took the job. And they took a job that likely hundreds of other people also wanted. Should Focus Features pay the crew a bonus? Why? They didn’t make the film. Their responsibility was marketing and distribution. They took a $15m gamble ( probably another $15m marketing it). It feels “unfair” when something’s a smash success like this and not everyone gets to share in the success. But the reality is that’s how “sexy” industries — that are also bad businesses btw — like this work. If you want to work in a wildly competitive industry, don’t be surprised when it’s cutthroat.

Most major cities are concrete jungles, meanwhile Atlanta

I see your profile picture. That’s Johnny Cash. My hero too. Arrested seven times. Smuggled 668 amphetamines across the Mexican border in 1965. Took every drug there was and drank like I did. Cheated on his first wife. Slept with more woman than I ever did. Hit bottom in a cave in Tennessee in 1968 trying to crawl off and die. And then he got up. He got clean. He spent the rest of his life singing for prisoners and addicts and the people the country threw away because he knew he was one of them. That was the whole point of the Man in Black. He wore it for the poor and the beaten down. He wore it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime. He wore it for the ones who never heard a word of Jesus. He wore it for the addicted and the dying. He wore it as a standing witness that no one is past saving. You picked his picture. You did not pick his message. Try listening to the words.

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.

The word of the year in ecom is “incrementality.” But what is it? How do you test for it? And when does it go wrong? @Seanfrank and @KatyMimari gave away the insider playbook w/ @MAustinHarrison (Co-Founder, @northbeam) … - 50M threshold; MTA 10M - Ridge’s testing workflow - How to avoid false results - “Run longer tests” is wrong - What’s working right now

Question to the ‘walkable city’ advocates who hate cars: If you go to the grocery store and have eight bags (or even four bags) of groceries, how do you get them home? You push around a little cart or something? Sounds bad.