Podcasts about D2C

So there was a guy walking around the conference in a praying mantis outfit, so naturally we invited him on the show! What a smart move that was. Callum Turner with SPUR joins the show to talk through the popular AI tool that is complete Quality Control for each step of your D2C site! Working behind with customer service tickets all the way to your checkout. SPUR has you covered and let's just say we talk about a lot of bugs!   Always Off Brand is always a Laugh & Learn!   eTail episodes are brought to you by TALKOOT! Go to https://talkoot.com/ to find out how you can scale your content, copy, story telling. Faster Product Content Operations for the AI Era!     FEEDSPOT TOP 10 Retail Podcast! https://podcast.feedspot.com/retail_podcasts/?feedid=5770554&_src=f2_featured_email   GUEST Callum Tuner  LinkedIn: ​​https://www.linkedin.com/in/callum-turner/ Website: https://www.spurtest.com/ Huge Shout Out to everyone at eTail for the great support and giving us the place to record at their great events.    QUICKFIRE Info:   Website: https://www.quickfirenow.com/ Email the Show: info@quickfirenow.com  Talk to us on Social: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quickfireproductions Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quickfire__/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@quickfiremarketing LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/company/quickfire-productions-llc/about/ Sports podcast Scott has been doing since 2017, Scott & Tim Sports Show part of Somethin About Nothin:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/somethin-about-nothin/id1306950451 HOSTS: Summer Jubelirer has been in digital commerce and marketing for over 17 years. After spending many years working for digital and ecommerce agencies working with multi-million dollar brands and running teams of Account Managers, she is now the Amazon Manager at OLLY PBC.   LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/summerjubelirer/   Scott Ohsman has been working with brands for over 30 years in retail, online and has launched over 200 brands on Amazon. Mr. Ohsman has been managing brands on Amazon for 19yrs. Owning his own sales and marketing agency in the Pacific NW, is now VP of Digital Commerce for Quickfire LLC. Producer and Co-Host for the top 5 retail podcast, Always Off Brand. He also produces the Brain Driven Brands Podcast featuring leading Consumer Behaviorist Sarah Levinger. Scott has been a featured speaker at national trade shows and has developed distribution strategies for many top brands. LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-ohsman-861196a6/   Hayley Brucker has been working in retail and with Amazon for years. Hayley has extensive experience in digital advertising, both seller and vendor central on Amazon. Hayley lives in North Carolina.  LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayley-brucker-1945bb229/   Huge thanks to Cytrus our show theme music "Office Party" available wherever you get your music. Check them out here: Facebook https://www.facebook.com/cytrusmusic Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cytrusmusic/ Twitter https://twitter.com/cytrusmusic SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6VrNLN6Thj1iUMsiL4Yt5q?si=MeRsjqYfQiafl0f021kHwg APPLE MUSIC https://music.apple.com/us/artist/cytrus/1462321449   "Always Off Brand" is part of the Quickfire Podcast Network and produced by Quickfire LLC.  

TikTok Shop does far more than generate in-app sales; it can also drive millions of impressions that boost revenue across Amazon, D2C, and physical retail. This social exposure creates real pricing power. SmartScout's alum Michael White leveraged TikTok traction to sell his product for $65, while competitors remained stuck at $45. The data proves this spillover effect. Every million TikTok views can generate $16,000+ in off-platform Amazon revenue, with some brands earning up to $6.70 elsewhere for every dollar made on TikTok. This halo effect breaks down into three buckets: Direct (in-app sales) Indirect (immediate off-platform purchases) Untraceable (long-term brand awareness and word-of-mouth). Even major retailers such as Walmart now actively ask suppliers for their TikTok strategy because social buzz directly drives store foot traffic. Ultimately, winning brands are comfortable breaking even on TikTok Shop knowing the real margin expansion will show up on their Amazon and retail balance sheets. Episode Notes: 00:09 - The TikTok Shop Halo Effect 00:45 - The Power of Impressions 01:01 - Anecdotes from the Frontlines 02:05 - Measurable Data Points and Studies 04:13 - Categories of the Halo Effect 05:45  - The Walmart Perspective and Offline Retail Impact 06:12 - Strategic Losses and the Flywheel Effect 07:20 - Tools, Feedback, and the Road Ahead Related Post: Amazon Brands with Successful TikTok Shop Grow 5.2x faster Scott's Links: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scott-needham-a8b39813 X: @itsScottNeedham Instagram: @smartestseller YouTube: www.youtube.com/@smartestamazonseller2371 Newsletter: https://www.smartscout.com/newsletter-sign-up Blog: https://www.smartscout.com/blog

DESCRIPTION Welcome to The Ecommerce Braintrust podcast, brought to you by Julie Spear, Head of Retail Marketplace Services, and Jordan Ripley, Director of Retail Account Management. Today, we're tackling a topic that has evolved from a conference panel talking point into one of the most significant media budget shifts in digital advertising: Amazon DSP for non-endemic brands.  Historically, brands that don't actually sell physical products on Amazon's marketplace have questioned why they should buy Amazon media. Today the conversations we're having with brands are very different.  Joining us today to unpack why 2026 is the turning point for non-endemic media buying is our very own Director of Retail Media at Acadia, Ross Walker.  Let's dive in!    Quote: If you're a non-endemic brand and you're hitting a point of consistent diminishing returns with your traditional media channels, that's the first signal that you should consider testing into a new media channel like ADSP. Ross Walker   KEY TAKEAWAYS In this episode, Julie, Jordan, and Ross discuss: Endemic vs. non-endemic, simplified: It's really just "sells on Amazon" vs. "doesn't sell on Amazon" - the jargon is mostly industry inertia. Amazon DSP has hit parity with The Trade Desk: Years of building out premium CTV/STV, audio, digital out-of-home, and owned-channel inventory means Amazon can now support the same kind of full-funnel programmatic buys as legacy DSPs. The real edge is commerce data, at a lower cost: No other DSP has Amazon's depth of purchase-intent signal, and Amazon has intentionally kept platform and audience fees low to win market share while it can. Premium CTV reach is a genuine unlock: ADSP now reaches roughly 80 million authenticated CTV households a month through partners like Netflix, Disney+, and Roku - inventory that used to be exclusive to players like The Trade Desk. Attribution is no longer the weak link: Tools like Amazon Marketing Cloud, the Amazon Ad Tag, and conversion APIs let non-endemic brands tie a Netflix or Roku impression directly to a D2C sale, lead form, or sign-up - solving a measurement gap that's plagued programmatic for years. Endemic brands get more flexibility too: Brands that do sell on Amazon can now send DSP traffic to their own site or other retailers (Walmart, Ulta, Home Depot), though the richest behavioral/custom audiences are still reserved for traffic that stays on Amazon. Signals to know it's time to test ADSP: Diminishing returns on Meta/Google/Trade Desk, or an audience with strong, specific purchase intent are both green lights to start testing. What still differentiates DSPs going forward: As capabilities converge across platforms, the real differentiator becomes each platform's unique owned audiences and media properties (e.g., Amazon's Prime Video, Walmart's owned data via The Trade Desk).

TikTok Shop is not just another sales channel. For modern consumer brands, it can become the attention, proof and demand engine that drives growth across the entire business.In this episode, Jordan West breaks down the lessons from Bloom's TikTok Shop strategy and what founders and operators can learn from its approach to creator volume, product launches and cross-channel growth.Jordan explains why brands need to move beyond an obsession with on-platform ROAS and start measuring the broader halo created by social commerce — including Amazon sales, D2C traffic, branded search, retail lift and other measurable signals.You'll learn:- Why TikTok Shop is creator commerce with checkout attached- How creator density helps brands discover repeatable winning angles- Why creators need guardrails, not overly restrictive scripts- How TikTok Shop can drive demand for launches and hero products- Why the halo effect matters when evaluating profitability- What brands should measure beyond direct TikTok Shop revenue- How creator content, TikTok Shop, GMV Max, Amazon, D2C and retail can work as one growth flywheelThe opportunity isn't simply to generate more TikTok Shop revenue. It's to build a system where creator attention produces measurable demand across every channel where customers choose to buy.Need help scaling your TikTok Shop?Visit https://socialcommerceclub.comSubscribe for more TikTok Shop, GMV Max and social commerce strategies.

Thirteen years in business. Nearly 700 wholesale accounts. And the biggest shift Rachel O'Neill of Loftipop made this year was admitting her wholesale business was being run like a D2C channel.If you started in direct-to-consumer and layered wholesale on top, this episode will feel familiar. Rachel came into Paper Camp with a thriving business at Loftipop and left with major enhancements: separate pricing logic, a leaner product line, and a strategy built around the retailers she already has.In this episode, you'll learn:Why wholesale is not an extension of your D2C business — it's a separate model with its own pricing, margins, and rulesHow Loftipop added 60 accounts in the 6 months after Paper Camp, growing from 690 to about 750Why Rachel discontinued SKUs that were still selling — and why she felt "so much lighter" afterwardHow to run channel-by-channel margin math before keeping a product in your wholesale catalogWhat it looks like to nurture current retailers — email outreach, direct mail, and consistent touchpoints — instead of only chasing new accountsHow staying open to change, 13 years in, became the shift that moved her whole business forwardFrom the episode:"The biggest takeaway is that your wholesale business is not D2C. We came into wholesale thinking it was just an extension of our D2C... it's actually a whole separate business model and strategy." — Rachel O'Neill"If you're serious about wholesale, it's 100% worth the investment. In terms of numbers, we've already made our money back and more." — Rachel O'NeillPaper Camp is currently open for enrollment, which only happens twice a year!SIGN UP FOR PAPER CAMP NOWYou can view full show notes and more at http://prooftoproduct.com/456Quick Links:Free Wholesale Audio SeriesFree Resources LibraryFree Email Marketing for Product MakersPTP LABSPaper CampMentioned in this episode:Paper Camp is now open for enrollment!Enroll now in our next round of Paper Camp: http://prooftoproduct.com/papercamp

Welcome to this episode of The New Warehouse Podcast. Kevin is joined by Ariane Mary Kemper, co-founder and COO of eGourmet Solutions. The cold chain 3PL specializes in frozen and refrigerated fulfillment.The company began 20 years ago as a frozen-food retail business. Today, eGourmet has five U.S. locations. It reaches 80% of the U.S. population in one day and 100% in two. Kemper shares lessons on D2C economics, actionable data, AI, and transportation waste.Learn more about Pallite here.Get to Intralogistex! Follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.Support the show

RSVP and Join us for the Dear FoundHer... Virtual Open House and Networking event on August 20th! Bootstrapping a beauty brand to eight figures before bringing on outside investors sounds impossible until you hear the two financial tools that made it work.Elina Wang, co-founder and CEO of ESW Beauty, joins Lindsay Pinchuk on Dear FoundHer to break down exactly how she built a skincare brand now sold in more than 19,000 retail locations across North America, including Target, Walgreens, Whole Foods, and CVS. Factoring and PO financing kept her cash moving while retailers paid on their own terms, and those two tools became the real financial turning points behind the brand.Elina shares the bad hires that slowed her down, the late shipments from overseas suppliers that forced her to rethink timelines, and the moment she overbought inventory out of fear and what that did to her cash flow.Elina shares her decision-making behind scaling a business while bootstrapping the business, including why she waited years before spending on D2C marketing and what made Whole Foods her first true anchor retailer. Managing rapid growth meant learning these lessons in real time, not reading about them first.Press play to hear Elina's three actionable tips for any founder trying to grow without a safety net.Episode Breakdown:00:00 Elina Wang's K-Beauty Family Business Roots03:47 Launching ESW Beauty From Scratch05:13 Landing Kohl's and Her First Retail Win06:58 Building Community Before Chasing Sales09:53 Finding the White Space in Skincare14:19 Target, Whole Foods, and Anchor Retailers16:14 Bootstrapping With Factoring and PO Financing19:36 Bad Hires, Late Shipments, and Cash Flow20:39 Turning Personal Brand Into Business Growth29:34 Three Tips for Founders Starting OutConnect with Elina Wang:Follow Elina on InstagramFollow ESW Beauty on InstagramSubscribe to The FoundHer Files Follow Dear FoundHer on Instagram Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Surface Noise had a lot of flavor this week, but these Bonus Trax are sure to put the last spicy touch on the vinyl meatball of this messy, messy episode on Vinyl Community Podcasts!

Here's a game that breaks every mobile rule and prints money doing it: Idle Obelisk Miner looks like a DOS game from 1995, has no tutorial, no ads, and almost no marketing — and it's doing an estimated $100K a day on just 4-5K downloads. One developer, a fanatical community, and unit economics nobody else can touch.We break down Idle Obelisk Miner (by Checkbox Entertainment) — a one-man-hit-wonder in the same family as The Tower and Level Devil. They cover the deliberately old-school design (mono Sound Blaster music, pure text, "here's the game, figure it out, we don't care if you don't"), the deep idle systems (mining, crafting with crit chances, drones, prestige, the obelisk DPS-gate, event automation), why it plays like an "unfolding game" that keeps moving your engagement to new mechanics, and the extraordinary numbers: ~$100K/day IAP on ~4-5K downloads/day, pristine tier-one traffic, ~$13 revenue-per-download (versus ~$3 for Golden Goblins), and an ARPDAU multiples above The Tower — all built on a spend-depth the crew estimates at ~$40-50K. The story behind it: solo developer Alex William Olds in Northern Ireland, an "anti-mobile-game" philosophy (no ads, no pop-ups, purchases quarantined in a dedicated store), a 57K-member Discord and a 14K/40K-weekly Reddit, three years of flatlining before the feature set finally hit and retention went positive, and a steady migration of hardcore players from The Tower. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 A one-man-hit-wonder like The Tower — Idle Obelisk Miner02:30 "Here's the game, figure it out" — the no-tutorial design06:15 Mining, crafting, drones & the obelisk DPS gate14:30 The unfolding-game design and why prestige works here16:55 Why an idle game with no ads is the right call17:40 The numbers — $100K/day on 5K downloads24:00 Build it for yourself — the one-man-wonder thesis27:30 The community engine — 57K Discord, stealing Tower playersThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investorsFor an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SAPlease share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Customer acquisition is getting harder.E-commerce growth has slowed, consumer confidence remains under pressure and businesses are having to work much harder to justify where every pound of marketing budget goes.So what does profitable growth look like when acquiring the next customer is becoming increasingly expensive?In this episode of The Fractional CFO Show, Adam Cooper is joined by Daniel Dunn, CEO and Co-Founder of Paper Planes, a growth agency and technology platform helping D2C and e-commerce brands use data-driven postal marketing to acquire, retain and reactivate customers.Dan's background spans Disney, data and insights consultancy dunnhumby, Tesco Clubcard strategy and managing major brand marketing investment before co-founding Paper Planes.That experience gives him an interesting perspective on one of the biggest challenges facing founders today: balancing customer acquisition and business growth with profitability and return on investment.The changing economics of customer acquisitionDan explains why the environment for e-commerce and D2C brands has changed significantly since the growth experienced during the pandemic.For years, businesses could increase marketing spend across channels such as Meta, Google and paid social and see relatively predictable growth.Today, that equation is becoming more difficult.Customer acquisition costs are under pressure, consumers have more choice and founders need a much clearer understanding of which marketing activity is genuinely creating incremental growth.That means moving beyond top-line revenue and asking better questions about marketing ROI, profitability and where the next pound of investment should go.Marketing needs both creativity and dataOne of the central themes of the conversation is Dan's view that marketing is both an art and a science.Great creative still matters. Brands need campaigns that attract attention, communicate effectively and stand out in crowded markets.But creativity needs to sit alongside data-driven decision-making.For founders working with more limited budgets, understanding the return generated by different marketing channels becomes particularly important. The objective isn't simply to spend more. It's to understand what works, remove ineffective spend and continually improve how capital is allocated.Acquisition versus customer retentionWe also explore the increasing focus on customer retention and reactivation.Businesses naturally spend a lot of time thinking about how to acquire new customers, but Dan argues that many overlook the value sitting within their existing first-party customer data.Once a business has paid to acquire a customer, there is an opportunity to build that relationship, increase customer lifetime value and encourage repeat purchases rather than continually paying to replace them with someone new.For founders focused on sustainable and profitable growth, the balance between acquisition and retention is becoming increasingly important.Why diversification mattersAnother major theme is marketing diversification.Many growing businesses become heavily dependent on a relatively small number of channels, particularly Meta, Google, email and paid social.That can work extremely well, until performance changes.Dan's advice isn't to abandon successful channels. Instead, businesses should understand which parts of their existing marketing spend are generating the strongest returns and continually allocate a small proportion of budget towards testing something new.His recommendation to founders is simple: every quarter, try a new channel.Testing doesn't necessarily require a larger overall marketing budget. It can mean identifying ineffective expenditure, reallocating it and using controlled tests to understand whether another channel can deliver incremental returns.Over time, that creates a more diversified and resilient customer acquisition strategy.First-party data and direct mailThe conversation also challenges some assumptions around direct mail.With hundreds of billions of emails being sent globally every day, getting attention through an inbox is increasingly difficult.Dan explains how modern postal marketing has moved well beyond traditional batch-and-blast direct mail.By combining first-party data, customer segmentation, marketing automation and personalised campaigns, physical mail can become another measurable channel within a wider customer acquisition and retention strategy.The principle is broader than direct mail itself: founders should be prepared to test different routes to market rather than automatically allocating budget to the channels everyone else uses.Growth, profitability and financial decision-makingFrom a financial perspective, this creates an important question.When does marketing spend represent genuine investment in growth, and when are businesses simply buying increasingly expensive revenue?For founders, CEOs and finance leaders, good marketing decision-making requires visibility beyond revenue alone.Understanding customer acquisition costs, marketing ROI, retention, customer lifetime value and incremental returns can help businesses decide where growth investment makes commercial sense and where capital could be deployed more effectively elsewhere.That becomes particularly important when economic conditions are difficult and cash, margins and profitability are under pressure.Running an agency when clients expect moreDan also shares his experience of building Paper Planes and how agency-client relationships are changing.As technology makes it easier to start businesses and competition increases, clients have more alternatives and increasingly high expectations.For agencies and other service-based businesses, delivering expertise alone may not be enough.Dan talks about the importance of customer service, maintaining close relationships, understanding what clients actually need and creating a genuinely human experience, while still balancing the time and resources required to deliver that service profitably.It's a challenge many agency founders will recognise: providing exceptional client service without allowing over-servicing to undermine client profitability.Where AI genuinely changes the equationWe also discuss AI and where Dan believes it is creating genuine value rather than simply adding more hype.For Dan, one of AI's biggest impacts is making information and data more accessible, much faster.But access to information isn't the same as good judgement.AI still needs quality data, experienced interpretation and human scrutiny if businesses are going to make good decisions from its outputs.Dan also considers how differently he would build Paper Planes if he were starting again today.His approach would be to stress-test what AI can achieve first, before deciding where additional people, technology, marketing investment or external support are genuinely required.It's an interesting lens for any founder thinking about operational efficiency, resource planning and how to scale a business in an AI-enabled world.In this episode, we discuss:• The rising cost of customer acquisition• Business growth versus profitability• Marketing ROI and better investment decisions• Data-driven marketing and measurement• Customer retention and reactivation• Customer lifetime value and first-party data• Diversifying marketing channels• Testing and learning with limited budgets• Direct mail alongside digital marketing• Agency profitability and client experience• AI, automation and operational efficiency• Building a more resilient growth strategyIf you're a founder, CEO, agency owner, e-commerce operator or finance leader trying to understand how to grow without simply throwing more money at customer acquisition, this episode offers a practical perspective on making marketing investment work harder.Business Book BonusDan recommends How to Make a Billion by Richard Harpin, drawing on Harpin's experience building businesses including HomeServe.For something completely different, he also recommends The Rest Is History podcast as a way to switch off from business and maintain some balance.About The Fractional CFO ShowThe Fractional CFO Show, hosted by Adam Cooper of ACC Finance Solutions, features practical conversations with founders, CEOs and senior operators about the financial and commercial decisions behind building better businesses.We explore business growth, profitability, cash flow, financial strategy, leadership, operational performance and the decisions founders face as their businesses scale.Subscribe to The Fractional CFO Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform for future episodes.

Sheldon Poon, Founder of Drive Marketing, helps established brands go from Wholesale to D2C through performance-driven advertising grounded in data, technology, and human expertise. He is driven to build a company that reflects his values—one where people enjoy their work, have flexibility and autonomy, and continuously learn from and teach one another. In this conversation, Sheldon introduces The A.I.D.A. Framework—Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. He explains how businesses can eliminate friction across the customer journey, use clean data to improve AI-powered campaigns, and balance automation with human strategy. Sheldon also discusses why genuine relationships are driving B2B growth, how AI is reshaping internships and early-career development, and how Drive Marketing helps successful wholesale brands build direct customer relationships without jeopardizing their valuable retail partnerships — Go from Wholesale to D2C with Sheldon Poon  Good day, listeners. Today, I have Sheldon Poon as our guest. He’s the Founder of Drive Marketing, a Montreal-based paid ad agency specializing in performance-driven marketing with a heavy emphasis on using data to make informed strategic decisions. Founded in 2013, Drive Marketing positions themselves as a technical-first partner that bridges the gap between business goals and technical execution. So they’re not a creative agency. They are a technical agency improving your ads. Sheldon, welcome to the show.  Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I’m happy to be here. Yeah. Great to have you here. And my first question is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in the business? How are you contributing to human flourishing?  That’s a very big question for a small ad agency.  It is.  Yeah. So when I first started the company, I kind of, like a lot of entrepreneurs, right, it came from me kind of looking at my life and where I was in my career and kind of getting frustrated at what I was seeing with my day-to-day job. So I was in a very, very privileged position. I was able to take a bit of a sabbatical from my day job where they held my position, which was great, because if everything went downhill, I could always just jump back to my job.  And I was like, “You know what? Like, I have an opportunity here. I’ve always wanted to start a business.” But because I had been working for somebody else for almost, at that point, I think like a decade and a half, I had a lot of experience, and I saw a lot of things that I was like, “This is what I don’t want.” So when I started my company, my internal mission and vision was to build the company that I would want to work at, to build the company that is kind of true to myself and my values, and something that I would enjoy going into day to day.Share on X And then what does all that mean? So the company that I wanted to work at, as I started working and hiring people, what I found was I wanted to have flexibility in my schedule. We treat everybody on the team as an adult. Everybody’s responsible for their workload. And as long as they meet their deadlines, I don’t care when you’re clocking in, clocking out. I’m a night owl. I like working till like midnight, 1:00 a.m. I don’t like doing mornings, so I’m often coming into the office late.  A lot of my team are doing the same thing. Some of them are early risers, and they like to leave early to have their afternoon free. So as long as everybody’s more or less—everybody’s on top of their tasks and more or less working during the day so that we can have our interactions and meetings, that’s perfectly fine. Another thing I think that's core to what I wanted to build was that I've always been very passionate about learning and teaching. In another life, I was teaching high school.Share on X  And when I started building the company, one of the things that we made very clear when we’re hiring is that everybody on the team learns because they’re passionate about what we’re doing. And everybody on the team teaches. Even if you’re just an intern coming in, we need to know your perspective because you’ll have a different perspective than me, who’s been doing this for like two decades, where I’m kind of blind to maybe some of the newer stuff that’s happening or some of the stuff that’s like on the ground.  And I want to know when I talk to our interns, when I talk to our juniors, like, “Hey, guys, what are you seeing?” Like, you guys are—you guys are like 20 years younger than me in some cases. Like, I want to know what’s going on with the kids. My personal, like, kind of like personal why of this is that it’s not so much about the end goal. I want to make sure that I enjoy my day-to-day, I enjoy what we do, and I’m not going to pull my hair out going into the office. So, like, I think we built something where everybody on the team is excited to work on stuff because they’re doing the work that they would want to be working on.  They’re learning the stuff that they would want to be learning, and then they get to implement it in a way that is impactful for the company, for the client, for what we’re doing. And my challenge as a leader is to figure out, okay, how do we take that exciting stuff and make it so that it generates money for the company so that we can all continue doing this? Yeah, this is very inspirational. I love it. You’re tapping into people’s curiosity, desire. I like the learning organization idea as well. So do you have a framework for this? Because this podcast is all about frameworks.  Yes.  How can someone create something like that? What are the steps to create it?  So it’s not one framework. Like I said, I’m very passionate about a lot of different topics, and one of the things that’s a personal interest of mine is just business. So, like, looking at business case studies, and from that you start seeing what works and what doesn’t. It’s a lot of different frameworks kind of layered on top of each other for various reasons. For the practical ad side, what we do for our clients strategically, there's a framework there that we like to use called AIDA. So attention, interest, desire, action.Share on X  Very standard funnel. The idea is that the reason we like using this is because when you break down the customer journey, this process is just logical. It’s been proven time and time again. If you’re going into Marketing or Business 101, this is one of the first things that you’re going to learn about. Like, what is a funnel? A funnel is, you know, the client’s never heard of you before, and you do something to grab their attention.  Now they’ve heard of you, but that’s not enough. You have to have many touch points, and you have to build interest. So, like, once they’ve heard about you, you got to make sure that it’s a good fit and they’re interested in the pain point or the thing that you’re fixing for them in their lives. And then if you hit them up with that interest message often enough, they’ll start imagining how their life is better with your product or service, and that creates desire. And then once you continue hitting them up at desire, as long as you don’t have any friction between the desire piece and the final call to action, then you’ll get that action at the bottom.  And the thing that people talk about, like, there’s a lot of people that talk about this framework, but I don’t think they’ve studied it properly. Because when you actually look at the history of it, this framework was first introduced in 1898 in a magazine that was talking about ads. This framework arguably predates the term marketing. And when you think about how that framework looks in modern day, it’s changed a lot, right?  When you were running ads in the early 1900s, you could get away with saying whatever the heck you wanted and making whatever wild promises just to get people’s attention. The way that you did it was you maybe had, like, some sort of print or some sort of, like, literally talking to people, getting them to show up to a convention or an expo back in the day, and having those interactions with their audience.  Fast-forward over 100 years, and it looks very different how you grab attention today. Paid ads. People talk about SEO. People talk about viral content. It’s very much changed. What hasn’t changed is the framework. So what that tells us is that human behavior, right? So the framework is based on human psychology: attention, interest, desire. These are all things that are, like, within the human experience. That has not changed. What’s changed is the other end. The technology has changed, so how you implement that.  So the strategy is still the AIDA that we use, right? But our tactics are constantly changing. Now we’re looking at AI. The new thing about ads is that Google just announced that they’ve added an extra option next to PMax, which is the AI option, so that you can actually start showing up in Gemini. So now this has changed our tactics. But our strategy is still based on this human psychology. That's the framework over on kind of the front end.Share on X And then, like I said, we have a bunch of other frameworks. I don’t know how much you want me to get into it, but for hiring, for internal processes, for all sorts of things.  Yeah. No, no, no. I love it. I love the AIDA. It’s been a long time I heard about it, and I love the simplicity of it, and I think it still works. So you mentioned something that really interests me. You said that you grab the attention, interest, building the desire, and as long as there’s no friction in the desire, then you’re going to get—the call to action is going to work. So what do you mean friction, and give me some examples of what it could look like.  So when you’re talking about AIDA and you’re talking about funnels, especially when you’re talking about online, it’s all very, very quick, right? So there’s a couple of terms here. So when you’re at top of funnel, your main thing is—it’s called a funnel because at the top it’s very, very wide in terms of the audience you want to hit up, and you want to try to get out to as many people as possible. So a lot of people, when they’re thinking of marketing, they’re thinking of the top of funnel, whether they realize it or not.  Further down is you’re trying to get a more complex message across. So the practical way to think about it is at the top you’re trying to run ads that’s just very flashy and getting people to stop the scroll. So if they’re on Instagram or something, you literally want them to stop, and you want them to read a quick thing that gets them to click. Once they’ve clicked on it, they’re ending up on a landing page, and that landing page has information that hopefully connects to the audience in a meaningful way, and they’re interested in reading more.  An example of friction would be if you click on an ad that’s purple, and then you end up on a landing page that’s black and white or red. That difference in color, that difference in style creates a friction point that psychologically, it makes the person pause and go, “Wait, did I just end up on the wrong page?” So when you have, like, a very close alignment between each of those levels, it reduces the friction and increases the chances that people will go down.  So the most important friction point that people need to be aware of is, like I just talked about the top of funnel, the opposite end, the bottom of funnel, is where there's the highest intent.Share on X So you can imagine at the top of funnel, because people have never heard of you before, their intention to buy from you is probably very low or very limited because they don’t know you yet. But once you’ve done all that work to get to know them and create a relationship with the brand, you’re at the bottom of funnel, and that point is critical.  You need to make sure that by the time you’ve warmed them up and everything’s ready to go and the target person is very interested in taking that final step, that somebody else doesn’t come and grab them. For example, like, the very real-world example. If you think about some of the biggest marketing companies in the world, so let’s take McDonald’s and Burger King as examples, right? Because everybody knows those brands. If McDonald’s has taken so much effort to be on billboards and be in front of you, and you’ve seen the brand and you know it, and you’re walking down the street and you’re hungry, and then at that moment of intent, as you’re walking around downtown, you’re like, “I could go for a quick burger right now,” and you know that you’re looking for a McDonald’s, but as you’re walking, you come across a Burger King, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s close enough.”  And then you’re going to walk into the Burger King and do the transaction there. Online, what that looks like is when somebody is doing that final search. So let’s say Summit OS is selling T-shirts, and you’ve done a bunch of work and people love the brand and they’re looking for a specific type of T-shirt that you sell, but they can’t remember quite exactly what it is. They’re like, “Oh, I think it was Summit OS something T-shirt.” And then when they type that in, somebody else’s sponsored ad comes up.  Well, now they probably grabbed that traffic that you took all that time to warm up. If you end up on the landing page, when you scroll down to the bottom, okay, I want to buy this T-shirt. I’m happy with everything that I’ve seen, but now you’re asking for an email, you’re asking for, like, a bunch of things. You click on a button, it doesn’t work. Those are extra friction points that prevent a person from taking action. When you’re looking at the entire funnel, you got to make sure that from a technical standpoint, from a user experience standpoint, from a getting-in-front-of-them-in-the-right-moment standpoint, everything hits, especially in this digital economy where everything’s very, very fast.  So anything that goes wrong, anything that creates a question, anything that creates a frustration point or any opportunity for somebody else to come in and grab that traffic at that moment of intent, those are friction points that you want to address and you want to track and you want to find. And you can imagine how there’s a lot of complexity in that. There’s a lot of testing, there’s a lot of work to make sure that that doesn’t happen.  That’s fascinating. Do you have a process for how you do this, how to eliminate frictions?  Yeah. We have a team that does QA and walks through the entire thing and has to do constant testing because what we’ve seen is a lot of other agencies are using AI tools and shortcuts. And lo and behold, a lot of these tools don’t work and they give back false positives, false negatives, and it’s not as good as just taking the time to go through the funnel yourself and make sure everything’s working properly. And it sucks because it’s a lot of work, but that’s how you get the best results, is just by having someone double-check it.  And it’s not to say that we don’t use automation. Like, we use a ton of automation, we use a lot of tools. But the final QA is a lot of the time us and the client going through, like, “Okay, everybody, before we hit go, let’s just all go through this before we spend, like, you know, 10K on this and just make sure that everything’s working properly.”  Yeah. Love it. Love it. So you’re building this ad agency, a technical agency, so you focus on making the flawless experience. What drives growth in your business?  That’s a good question. That’s something that, honestly, we’re struggling with a little bit. So if anybody’s following me on social media, I’ve been doing a short series. I’m probably going to finish it off soon, but it’s called Watch Sheldon Struggle to Grow His Agency. And it’s literally how I’ve been trying to figure out how to crack lead generation for ourselves and our journey through, like, where we were maybe about a year ago to where we are today.  And we’re still trying to answer that question for ourselves in terms of, how do we get more leads and more clients in a very difficult economy, in a very difficult time? And we’re trying to figure that out. And people can look up our case studies. I think we’re quite proud of the work that we’ve been able to do, and having that technical know-how has given us a huge advantage in terms of performance numbers. And that alone, in the past, through my network, was enough to keep us busy because people would just seek me out whenever they had a problem with their technical stack or their ads.  I’d say in the last maybe 18 months or so, like a lot of other agencies, the word-of-mouth stuff has kind of dried up, where people are kind of, like, holding back their spend. We’ve had a bunch of contracts that were put on hold because of the economic situation around the world. Nobody knows what’s going on. Everybody wants to hold back spend. Everybody wants to sit and wait. So even though people are still contacting me, the flow of projects has slowed down because people are more hesitant to pull the trigger and go. It’s also taking longer for us to have these conversations. Because that organic piece kind of slowed down, we’ve been trying to find inorganic pieces.  I’ve been doing more networking. I’ve been trying to figure out building out our own funnel, which we should’ve done years ago. The thing that’s driving growth for us right now is probably the things that are not scalable, right? In the age of AI, when you’re working with a business, you want to be working with a person. Like, nobody wants a partner who’s just a machine. So doing the things that are not scalable means really doing the things that are human, having human interactions, having human conversations, going out for coffee with people, meeting people at conventions and workshops and, you know, like, literally just getting our name out there in a way that is more human and just having real conversations.  And despite all the other testing that we’ve done with the cold emails, with the ads, with this, that, and the other thing, like, that seems to be the thing that’s working the most, is just kind of putting my name out there and saying to people, like, “Hey, if you have a problem, come talk to me. We’re not necessarily going to have a contract together, but hopefully we can have a quick coffee and I can at least get you past a technical hurdle.  I can give you some insight into what you’re struggling with and give you a hand.” And that kind of goodwill has led to more conversations and more contracts and new contracts than anything else that we’ve done. For our clients, because our clients are more direct-to-consumer, so they’re usually bigger brands that are selling a quick product, quick service to the general public. They’re not B2B, they’re B2C. On that front, it’s literally what we just talked about, following the AIDA playbook, making sure the funnel’s good, making sure the ads are firing, making sure the data’s there, and then that’s how we get our crazy numbers, like 12X return on ad spend, you know, 14X return on ad spend.  That’s just following the system and doing the work. So for our clients, we have it under control for their growth. For our own growth, for the B2B side, that’s where I’m realizing that, like, we need to step away from all this AI noise, and people are trying to do these AI BDRs and all these things, and it just doesn’t work because people want to have a real human conversation.  Yeah. No, I totally see the same thing. The easier the automation, the more it just becomes noise.  Exactly. It’s democratized automation, which means that, like, it’s no longer the thing that stands out. You have to do something different.  Yeah. And people are becoming resistant, and they recognize if something is AI-created, and they just tune it out, right?  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.  Yeah. It’s fascinating. How much of your time is actually spent on networking and doing the human things as opposed to running your business?  I’m very fortunate that my team mostly runs the day-to-day at this point, so I’m spending most of my time doing all the other stuff. So, like, trying to do the networking, trying to get our name out there, and then everything else is just admin and paperwork. So in terms of actually running the day-to-day of the company, our head of operations, Brent, does a fantastic job of running the team.  Jack, our head of marketing strategy, does an amazing job of making sure the ads are firing properly. Whenever I get involved in the day-to-day, they get annoyed at me because I’m like, I’m coming in, I don’t know what’s going on, and my hair’s on fire. I’m trying to do X, Y, Z, and then I jump out and I just create chaos. So most of the time they’re telling me, like, “Yeah, listen, go out and talk to people. We don’t want you at the office. We don’t want you doing the work.”  So how fast is your product evolving?  Oh, constantly. I mean, the way that I explain it to people, right? A lot of people right now, especially running ads, right? Because that’s our core product, that’s our core service, is running ads and making sure that we maintain that competitive advantage for our clients. Because of the advent of AI, everything’s constantly changing. Already it was a very technical space because a lot of people seem to think that whether or not your ads do well, they think it’s a creative exercise, and I think it was up until about eight months ago.  But today, I would argue that it’s skewed, and it’s more of a technical exercise. Because these ad platforms are running AI algorithms, the quality of the data that you feed into it now is more important than ever. And like I said, there’s been a lot of changes in the last few months to the point where now it’s no longer about how good your content is. It’s about how good your targeting is, how good the data you’re feeding it is, how good your audience is kind of reacting to it, and then making intelligent tweaks to your content based on the feedback that you’re getting back from the AI.  So these are things that are constantly evolving. Like I said, even though the strategy doesn’t change, the tactics and the technology is a constant change. So the AI thing that I was talking about where Google just released or just opened up the option to do advertising with AI responses, that’s less than, I think, three months old. So that’s the new thing that we’re now testing with our clients to see how is this working, how is this working.  The other thing too is that the way I describe it, a lot of people now—the new thing that we just noticed within the last few months—is that people are saying, like, “Oh, I can just use an AI agent to set up my ads.” But these AI agents are based on large language models, right, the LLMs. And the way that large language models work is that they’re trying to give you a statistically accurate response, which is great for certain things, not so great for other things. So the way I tell people is that if you were to take an LLM, again, which is what most of these agents are based on, you were to graph all the possible responses for accuracy, what you would end up with is a bell curve, right?  And on the bell curve, you have on one end, you have these are all the answers that are definitely wrong. And on the other hand, these are also answers that are, like, they’re novel, but we don’t know how accurate they are. And then in the middle, at the top of the bell curve, right in the middle is the statistical most accurate response that it thinks it can give you. So it’s always going for that statistical middle with these LLMs. So when it’s setting up ads and it’s doing strategy, it’s going for what is most likely the safe result, right?  The least interesting.  It’s the least interesting.  Yeah.  Now, when you’re running ads, right, it’s a race. My background is in software and computer science, so when I’m doing coding and I’m using Claude Code, I want statistical middle. I don’t want it trying new things with my code. I don’t want it to be a bad programmer like a junior, but I don’t want it to be doing stuff that’s so advanced and novel that it’s not tested, it’s going to break. I just want the middle, right?  Engineering middle. But when we’re running ads, it’s a race. And if you’re in the middle of the pack in a race, you’ve lost. So one of our big advantages is that we’re using a lot of AI for automation. We’re using a lot of automation tools to do our day-to-day. But when we’re coming up with a strategy and building out the ads, it’s a human that’s doing that because we want to be at this far end that’s going to be ahead of everybody else. We don’t want to be middle of the pack.  So from that sense, it’s constantly changing to keep on top of these things to figure out what’s new, what’s going on. The ad platforms are changing constantly because, you know, the way that we interact with the internet is changing constantly. So, like, yeah, it’s constant, it’s a constant race.  So, but doesn’t that also bring you back to the creative part?  It does.  How to be creative, maybe not design-wise, but some other way?  It does, but in a way that I think a lot of creative agencies don’t understand. Because a creative agency will focus on the story, and they will focus on, you know, telling a good story, and they are thinking, if I can put it this way, they’re thinking very linearly. So one of the big mistakes that we see, like I talk to a lot of other agency owners, and every once in a while I help consult on the side, just to give them some advice in what they’re doing, what’s working and what’s not.  And one of the things that I see a lot is that a lot of these agencies have not understood how the new PMax campaigns and how the new Advantage+ campaigns work, so they’re working against the AI algorithm. So a lot of these other agencies, they’re more content than they are technical. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to tell a good story from the content, and then what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find the demographic that they think will match with the content. So they’re content first, right?  So what they’re trying to do is, if they’re putting together a story for a product, they then in their heads think, “Okay. Well, I think I need to go for, you know, women living in suburbs that are between this age and this age and this income range and are interested in XYZ thing, and that’s how I’m going to set up the system, and then they’re going to see my ad, and then there should be a connection there.” That’s not how it works anymore. So in that setup, I can see how it’s super important to understand the story and get all that done.  The modern way that we’re doing things that’s different is that when we’re building out our content, we work with the content agency or we work with the marketing team to say, “What is your interest piece that’s going to get people to stop scrolling? What’s the interest piece that’s going to get people to want to read more? How do we build that desire for them? And then give me those in different assets, different pictures, different videos, different texts, different descriptions, different headers.”  What we then do is we take all of that content, and we put it into an asset library on PMax. So what we do is instead of telling PMax to look for XYZ demographic, we don’t tell it to do any of that. We let it go broad, and it does the opposite. What it does is, and of course, this is after the caveat. We’ve already set up the landing pages. We’re collecting all the data. We’ve tested all that. The data modeling is solid, so the entire funnel, all the micro actions, everything, we know that is being fed cleanly into the system, because that’s important. What the system’s then going to do is it’s going to, like, not just A/B test, but it’s going to take every combination that it can think of with all the different assets, with the videos, the text, the this and that and the other thing, and it’s going to start testing all the different combinations quickly.  And mixed in there is all the interest, attention, desire, everything. The algorithm is then going to figure out, based on all the data points that it has on us, it has, like, 57,000 data points, I think, Meta has on us. When a user has this pattern of data, they seem to resonate with this combination of assets. This pattern resonates with this combination. So bit by bit, what it does is it will start creating audiences for you that resonate with different kind of, like, asset packages. And then lo and behold, what we see is that emergent is the attention content all gets grouped together, and now we have an audience that’s ready for attention.  The interest piece, this is all the content that we had flagged for interest. Here’s our interest audience. And then the AI is basically working to figure out for you, not based on anything other than random data points and patterns, what is the audience for you? And then it’ll be able to then say, “Okay, now that we have a pattern to look for, we have, like, another 100,000 people that match this pattern and we can start advertising to them. And that’s the proper way to do it. But the thing that people are uncomfortable with is that it’s a black box. We don’t know what their demographic is. We don’t know where they live on the internet. We don’t know what their interests are. We don’t know any of that. It’s just random data points and math that has created this audience for us. And if you were to extract those people and put two or three of them next to each other, you’d go, like, “I don’t understand why these people have anything in common.”  But somewhere in the data, the data is signaling that they are going to resonate with your content. So this is what I mean. Like, the content is still important, but I think it’s skewed, like, a little bit. I’d say, like, now it’s, like, 60% data and math and 40% content, whereas before, it was much more heavy on the content side.  Very interesting. And this is how your platforms will find the lookalike audience based on your sample audience?  Exactly. Exactly.  Yeah. That’s fascinating. So other than the lead generation, what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business?  Other than that, we’re just having a lot of fun with all these new AI tools. I’m getting a few members of my team working with Claude. A few of us are working with ChatGPT. We’re trying to see, like, what these platforms can do, what are the things it can automate. I think one of the really cool things is now something that used to take, like, weeks to create code around, it can be done in an afternoon.  So it’s like, as soon as we identify a business problem, something that my team has to do, like, you know, three or four times a week that slows us down, now I can tell my devs, like, “Hey, guys, like, this is a business problem that we have. Can you guys just come up with a quick tool to do?” And we can build it, and we can just have it. So we’re trying to experiment more and more with how we can kind of speed up our development process.  And because we’ve been developing for so long, there’s a few things that are kind of like the—a few of the standard ways to run a development team that are now starting to be questioned because these LLMs are getting better and better at taking over some of these mundane tasks, that we’re starting to revisit what is our QA strategy when we’re actually coding. Like, what’s a more important skill set? One of the things I think that we’re trying to navigate right now is what is our hiring process for interns going forward?  So in the past, when we were looking for juniors and interns, the skills that we were looking for was like, what is your ability to figure out the answer to this question, right? Given a complex question, given a complex task, how are you going to be able to figure out how to solve this? Because of the rise of LLMs, finding the answer is no longer as important as asking the smart question. And the challenge that we’re facing right now is that asking a smart question requires critical thinking. A lot of critical thinking requires experience. The best critical thinkers have decades of experience behind them. How do you get that from an 18-year-old who’s coming from school?  They literally have no experience. That’s why they’re coming to us as interns. So we’re trying to figure out, like, okay, how do we square that? And we’re very proud of the internship work that we do. It’s a way for us to give back to the community. We work with a lot of the colleges and universities in town. Like I said, I myself came from having taught high school, and I’m very passionate about education, so I want to do good by that industry, by those students.  But we’re having a bit of a hard time because we don’t want to necessarily disadvantage them, but we’re also trying to figure out how do you find a good critical thinker among kids with no experience. So that’s probably the thing that we’re trying to figure out right now.  Yeah. That is fascinating. And that is a big issue for young people coming up, how to get those internships. Internships are harder to get, and probably this is the main reason for it, because people use technology to replace the inexperienced people.  The bar has definitely gone much higher. And again, we’ve experienced this as well, where, like, we’ll have a task, and we can ask an intern to do it, and they’ll kind of, you know, grudgingly figure it out and do it. But if it’s a critical task that needs to be done, that same exact task can be handed off to an LLM, and it’ll just get it done. Yeah. It won’t be amazing quality the way that, you know, a senior developer will do it, but it’ll be good enough, and it’ll be probably better than what the intern can do.  So if you’re only looking at the task from a purely productive lens, well, I’ll get a better result from the LLM, so then the intern has no purpose. We’re having to reshape the way we think about this, where if we are truly building an internship program, at that point, it’s not about the productivity, it’s about the learning that the intern gets out of it. So it becomes a teaching thing. So we have to be okay with handing off this task to the intern, knowing that an LLM could probably do a better job.  But they need to learn how to do it first so that they can rise above it. And I think what we’re seeing right now is that companies are not mandated to teach. They don’t care about the learning of the intern. They care about the production of the thing. And in the past, it was cheaper to get the intern to do it because there was no other option. But I think companies are realizing, like, well, we can just have the LLM do it, and it’ll be better and faster. Why do we need the interns? And that’s why these opening early positions are not being handed out anymore. The problem with that is that you don’t get senior-level people without training them up as juniors, and we’re giving all of that learning opportunity to machines.  Yeah.  So what does our future look like with that gap? What does the future look like for these kids coming out of school? Like, these are all obviously much bigger questions than my company can ever answer. This is a bigger societal question, but this is what we’re seeing kind of on the front lines, having a very strong internship program. We’re struggling with this idea, like, where is this next generation coming from?  That’s scary. That’s very scary. So who are the ideal clients that, if they listen to this podcast, you want them to contact you? Yeah. So basically, our biggest successes are with brands that are very strong on the wholesale side and are already in retail stores. So a lot of times what happens is you have a company that does an amazing product. They’re already in Walmart, they’re already in Costco, they’re already at Winners, and they have built up a very successful wholesale B2B business. They then launch a Shopify store, and they want to start getting the brands and start building a relationship directly with their consumers.  And then they’re realizing, like, “Oh, this is a different game, and we’re struggling.” And then at that point, it’s easy for us to come in and help because they have a strong offering already. They have a wholesale side that can drive their growth. And our job is to make sure that we start help building out that direct-to-consumer side by making sure that all of the data is mapped out properly. We like working with companies like that because they already have a very good idea of their marketing, why their product is successful.  They know which products are successful and not, so we can skip a lot of the learning part, and we’re just putting a megaphone on their existing brand and their existing offering in the most efficient way possible to make sure that, you know, right away out of the gate, that their D2C business is going to be just as strong as their wholesale business.  Yeah. Oh, that’s fascinating. So essentially, you pick those companies that have a good product already because it’s tested in wholesale channels and the Costcos and Walmarts and the Amazons of the world, and you help them tap directly the consumers through very targeted advertising.  Exactly, exactly. And then once we have that basic foundation set up, then we start doing interesting things like, how do we get the newsletters out? How do we help them get their marketing team to have more of a direct relationship with their end customer? Because when you go to a Costco or you go to a Walmart and you pick up a product, what happens is that the retailer holds the relationship, right?  It’s a way to help them offset that. And it’s kind of a tightrope that we have to walk because we recognize that the relationship with the wholesaler is still key. So whatever we do, we have to be conscious that we’re not going to upset that balance.  Yeah.  And that everybody’s winning, everybody’s making money, everybody’s growing, nobody’s getting upset with one side or the other. So because we’ve had experience working with national brands, we are positioned to understand what that relationship looks like. We know from our client side what it’s like when they’re talking to the Costco rep, what it’s like when they’re talking to the Walmart rep, what those subtle differences are in culture, and what we need to be aware of because, you know, we want to make sure that nothing that we do on our side jeopardizes that relationship.  Yeah. And then the big companies—what they want is they want to commoditize you, and they want to control the relationship, the brand. They want their white-label brand on top of your product. Yeah.  Which is their right. I mean, they’re the retailers. They’re the big guys.  Yeah. If you don’t build your own brand, then you’re going to slip into the white label because you have no leverage over the big, big stores. But if you have a strong brand, you have leverage, and then the whole relationship works better. So it’s very interesting. Okay.  So if people would like to learn about how they can do that, how they can go from wholesale to D2C, and would like to learn about how you can help them, where should they go and how can they contact you?  Yeah, so there’s a lot of information on our website, so drivemarketing.ca, so the Canadian extension. Yeah. And then I think I’m the only Sheldon Poon that’s really active on LinkedIn. I think there’s one other one that’s maybe in Hong Kong somewhere, but that’s not me. He’s, I think, an older guy. So if people look me up on LinkedIn under Sheldon Poon and just message me, I’m pretty active there and I try to answer everybody.  And what I love is helping people out. Even if people have no intention of hiring us, I’m like, “That’s totally fine.” Send me your questions because I like to be able to help and answer and know what people are struggling with because it helps our work. It just gives me an opportunity to have conversations with people.  Awesome. So if you run a brand that has already cracked the wholesale channels, but you want to build your direct-to-consumer, you know, hit up Sheldon on LinkedIn, Sheldon Poon, and have a chat with him. As you can see, he’s a great person to chat with. And if you enjoyed this show, then stay tuned because every week we have a couple of entrepreneurs who are building great companies who come and share their frameworks with you. So Sheldon, thanks for coming and sharing your wisdom, and thanks for listening.  Yeah. Thank you. This was great. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.  Important Links: Sheldon's LinkedIn Sheldon's  website

Scott sits with Christian, founder of Autopilot, about his extensive study on Amazon's AI shopping assistant (Alexa / Rufus) and how generative recommendations are fundamentally changing how products get discovered on and off Amazon. Christian explains that AI-driven shopping isn't just a replica of traditional search results, it also represents a distinct "third shelf" alongside organic search and paid advertising. Through a study analyzing over 110,000 search listings and 13,000+ Alexa recommendations, Christian discovered that 64% of Alexa's suggestions actually fall outside the top 10 organic search results. While top organic spots hold an advantage for the primary recommendation, deeper AI suggestions heavily favor long-tail products backed by strong star ratings (4+ stars), high sales velocity, and concise titles optimized for AI truncation. Furthermore, running PPC ads offers only a tiny chance of forcing an AI recommendation if the listing lacks strong underlying signals. The big takeaway is that AI discoverability operates as a holistic 360-degree ecosystem. Off-Amazon content on target sites, D2C stores, and deal forums heavily feeds engines like ChatGPT and Google AI. To win in the long run, brands must optimize their data infrastructure and create "agent-friendly" D2C content that AI bots can crawl, validate, and convert into citations and recommendations. Episode Notes: 00:00 – Christian's background 01:30 – How analyzing 15,000+ brands led to founding Autopilot 03:00 – Amazon unifying Rufus and Alexa under one shopping brand 04:30 – Why AI recommendation is Amazon's "third shelf" 06:00 – Methodology behind the 13,000+ Alexa recommendation study 07:30 – Alexa picks 09:30 – PPC reality check 11:00 – Category variations: Apparel vs. Health & Supplements 12:30 – What signals drive AI picks (ratings, sales velocity, title length) 14:30 – ChatGPT & Google Shopping 17:00 – Optimizing off-Amazon content for AI crawlers 19:00 – Tracking AI visibility using tools like Gumshoe, Peek, and Profound 21:00 – The scale of AI shopping: Over 100 million daily product searches 22:30 – How to connect with Christian and access the study report Related Post: Amazon Accelerate Coupon Code: Save $50 With SmartScout How to Reach Christian: Website: autopilotbrand.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/umbach Scott's Links: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scott-needham-a8b39813 X: @itsScottNeedham Instagram: @smartestseller YouTube: www.youtube.com/@smartestamazonseller2371 Newsletter: https://www.smartscout.com/newsletter-sign-up Blog: https://www.smartscout.com/blog

We are joined by ad monetization guest Katerina to break down Smash Fest and the clone explosion surrounding it. We cover the physics-based cannon core (each ball is a move, run out and buy five more — match-3 logic on a physics engine), the detective work tracing it back to Toon Blast's "Cannon Fest" event (spotted by Game Refinery back in November 2024, and run by Peak as both playables and creatives — someone put two and two together and realized it worked), why Smash Fest was abruptly pulled from Google Play right as it scaled to ~300K downloads/day, and the seven-studio clone wave (Royal Smash by Cypher Games, Carnival Knockdown, Knockout, Knock Fever, Stack Smash by Tripledot, Carnival Blast, and more). Katerina digs into the monetization — Smash Fest's fairly basic setup (one rewarded placement, interstitial every fourth attempt) versus Royal Smash's smarter double-your-coins rewarded flow — with estimates landing around ~$130K/day in ads for Smash Fest, and the crew guessing the true total (IAP plus ads) could push toward ~$1M/day given a reported ~1M DAU. Then the UA reality: Smash Fest scaled ~300K downloads/day on ~50 creatives and essentially one great playable, ~90% AppLovin — while Royal Smash is catching up fast with 10x the creative volume, more channels, better LiveOps, and a monetization edge.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 A new physics-puzzle category — and the controversy03:00 The core loop — cannon physics, each ball a move07:00 The detective story — it's Toon Blast's Cannon Fest event10:30 Seven studios clone it in one month12:30 Why Smash Fest got taken down as it scaled16:30 The monetization breakdown — ~$130K/day in ads23:00 A new category: physics puzzlers take over from Angry Birds28:00 The UA reality — 50 creatives vs Royal Smash's 500This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Katerina Maliaran, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

In this episode of the People of Packaging Podcast, Adam Peek sits down with Olivia Abrams, CEO and Co-Founder of TickMitt, to chat about turning personal adversity into an innovative, life-saving product line!

In this episode of Retail War Games, Jeremy sits down with former NFL offensive lineman, National Champion, and Co-Founder & CEO of Momentous, Jeff Byers. Jeff shares his journey from playing alongside Heisman quarterbacks to launching and scaling a premium performance nutrition brand trusted by elite military units, professional sports teams, and top athletes.   Jeff breaks down how Momentous built brand trust by starting in the Department of Defense and professional sports before expanding into D2C and mass retail. He also discusses the critical role of ingredient sourcing, innovation over "me-too" marketing, and why long-term brand defensibility beats quick performance marketing plays.  

Sarah Levinger consults with ecommerce brands on marketing psychology. She says shoppers' emotions drive ad performance, and success comes from aligning messaging with those feelings.She did that with a D2C maker of hop-flavored teas, lowering acquisition cost by 30%. She shares that example and other ad tactics in this episode.For an edited and condensed transcript with embedded audio, see: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/emotion-led-ads-cut-costs-30For all condensed transcripts with audio, see: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/tag/podcasts******Practical Ecommerce helps online merchants improve with expert articles, podcasts, and webinars. Founded in 2005, we're an independent publisher, unaffiliated with any ecommerce platform or provider. https://www.practicalecommerce.com

One concept is eating the entire Forex creative market right now: a "fat guy" gets slapped, abandoned, or humiliated, then rises to power. It was everywhere last month — this month it's on steroids, and every big Forex game has its own version. The crew runs 123 AI creatives in 30 minutes to map where AI creative is actually heading.Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg speed through the month's AI creatives and surface the patterns. Golden Goblins still wins with clever non-AI hooks (power progressions, the tag meme) rather than full AI. King Shot's "no ads" theme has spread through Forex, puzzle, and everywhere else — often paired with the now-ubiquitous slapped-guy power fantasy (complete with a one-to-one "Henry Cavill from Wish" character). Playrix's Township and Gardenscapes are flooding feeds with flower-team and egg-overload AI creatives, one-to-one across the portfolio. The through-line: the concept is an old mafia-boss power fantasy reborn through AI — and it's everywhere because, chaos and all, it seems to be working.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 123 creatives in 30 minutes — buckle up01:55 Golden Goblins — winning with clever non-AI hooks03:00 King Shot and the "no ads" theme everywhere04:10 The "fat guy getting slapped" power fantasy — on steroids07:55 Playrix — Township & Gardenscapes' AI flood14:45 Top Heroes' chaos — poop filters and cratering revenue27:00 Pixel Flow & Meow Doku — AI creatives done right29:50 123 creatives in, Mr. Fat Guy leads the packThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Derek Halpern shut down the biggest business podcast in the space, walked away from millions of dollars in cashflow, and started a turmeric company with $30,000 split three ways.  Eight years later Truvani is in more than 14,000 retail stores, including 4,200 Walmarts, it shipped 450,000 units in a single month, and it has never raised a dollar of outside capital.  We break down the sampling strategy that built demand before the product ever hit a shelf, the one paragraph on why most good D2C brands die in retail, and how he decides whether something is worth winning.   Links mentioned in the video: ► The eight-step plan to a million-dollar business: https://capitalism.com/100K Derek is running the same three-part system I mentor clients through on the way to their first $100,000 a month. The whole model is laid out in one video: ► How we take a business from zero to $100,000 a month: https://capitalism.com/model   (0:00) Why he shut down the biggest business podcast in the space (1:56) "I was an accidental teacher": the real reason he quit (3:52) Just under $1 million in year one, one course, one employee (5:37) It wasn't a protein company. It was a turmeric company. (7:15) August 2017: three people, three skill sets, one phone call (8:00) The pre-sale that broke the plan: 5,000 bottles ordered, 35,000 needed (9:09) What leaning on an influencer partner costs you later (10:57) Turmeric to bone broth to protein, still not sure who they were (13:00) Facebook banned them over hemp, so they reformulated in eight months (14:05) The three parts of the seven-figure system, running inside Truvani (15:25) Going into retail with zero retail experience (16:35) A year and a half of not knowing what kind of company they were (17:05) The one thing they did know: no weird ingredients (18:00) Hiring a retail consultant and asking him the dumbest questions (19:00) Expo West cancelled the day before the flight (19:44) The zag: doubling down on retail while everyone else ran online (20:45) The bottom-shelf photo that forced them to build a flavor line (21:52) The clean-brand detour: deodorant, toothpaste, lip balm (23:00) 100 doors to 2,000, and the 76-store chain that unlocked Sprouts (23:21) One paragraph on why good D2C brands fail in retail (24:47) Killing "more for more" and putting the whole ad budget into samples (25:50) Why Truvani won in retail: a million samples before the shelf (28:36) Selling out on purpose vs. selling out by accident (30:45) Pent-up demand, and where to see the eight-step plan (33:16) Proof of concept as the number one guiding principle (33:46) 200 gifts to 50,000 gifts in a single year (36:46) Why he would rather you buy on Amazon than Shopify (37:54) Retail has the best price, and that is on purpose (38:46) End caps, secondary placement, and earning shelf space (41:01) $30,000 total, 12,000 doors, zero dollars raised (42:57) Revolving credit lines vs. the fixed-term trap that killed brands (44:48) Chess, pushups, and a dad who made him pay the bet (47:00) Winning is eventual, and most people quit at the first failure (50:55) How he decides whether something is worth winning (52:03) Big opportunity, a better product, and numbers that work (53:00) Why they killed the deodorant and the bone broth (54:54) Free shaker cups on an end cap, because nobody said he could (57:48) "We don't do content. We just buy ads." Does he still mean it? (58:44) "I hate remarketing," and the 90% net-new rule (59:52) People buy because they believe what you believe (1:02:00) No gums, no flow agents, and a year of hand-filled bags (1:04:10) The market caught up, and most people still don't care (1:05:54) The delectable-treat Trojan horse: sell the brownie (1:07:37) 40% of their buyers had never taken a protein before (1:09:20) 4,200 Walmarts, and 450,000 units in one month (1:11:35) What changes when private equity sees you in the Nielsen reports (1:13:42) Hot Takes: discounts (1:14:53) Hot Takes: Walmart (1:16:44) Hot Takes: tariffs, pea protein, and black swan events (1:20:18) Hot Takes: influencers (1:21:16) Hot Takes: capitalism (1:23:36) Does he miss the limelight? (1:27:00) Cashflow vs. enterprise value, and why he walked away   DISCLAIMER: The information contained on this podcast channel and the resources available for download/viewing through this podcast channel are for educational and informational purposes only.

Vy Nguyen bought his father's mattress factory in 2010 and spent 15 years doing everything the industry said not to do—building his own supply chain, skipping outside funding, and refusing to cut corners on materials. The result is Avocado Green, the largest organic mattress brand in the US, with 1,000 employees, more than 600 wholesale partners, and a billion-dollar target in its sights. For more on Avocado Green Brands and show notes click here Subscribe and watch Shopify Masters on YouTube!Sign up for your FREE Shopify Trial here.

He sido testigo cercano de uno de los incendios que han asolado #ESP en los últimos días de julio del 26. Afortunadamente, no puedo considerarme afectado, pero he visto de cerca la evolución del incendio de Castellón que, a fecha de hoy, no está todavía completamente extinguido. Y mientras pasábamos de la sorpresa al miedo y de ahí a la resignación y ahora ya al olvido, no he podido evitar preguntarme cómo se comportó nuestra infraestructura digital durante la catástrofe y, sobre todo, qué sabíamos sobre ella en la zona más afectada. Así que hemos dado un vistazo a las fuentes de información pública y hemos reunido unos cuantos datos. Salvo la pérdida por fuego de uno de los dos repetidores de #TDT que cubren Vall de Uxó no se conocen mayores afectaciones a los servicios digitales durante el incendio, aunque, como sabéis, no hay una fuente oficial al respecto. No se reportó tampoco fallo en el suministro eléctrico. El servicio satelital #D2C de #StartLink, que se activó en los mismos días para los incendios del centro de #ESP, no apareció aquí. La pregunta clave que nos debemos hacer ahora, en lugar de dejar que todo lo pasado se olvide directamente, es cómo se comportará la #InfraDigital que cubre un territorio poco poblado que se inserta directamente en uno mucho más denso ante otro tipo de emergencias y qué podemos hacer para mejorar esa #Resiliencia. Nuestra solidaridad con los afectados, más de 15.000 personas llegaron a ser desalojadas, y nuestra admiración para los equipos de emergencias, en particular los provenientes de la industria de la #InfraestructuraDigital.He sido testigo cercano de uno de los incendios que han asolado #ESP en los últimos días de julio del 26. Afortunadamente, no puedo considerarme afectado, pero he visto de cerca la evolución del incendio de Castellón que, a fecha de hoy, no está todavía completamente extinguido. Y mientras pasábamos de la sorpresa al miedo y de ahí a la resignación y ahora ya al olvido, no he podido evitar preguntarme cómo se comportó nuestra infraestructura digital durante la catástrofe y, sobre todo, qué sabíamos sobre ella en la zona más afectada. Así que hemos dado un vistazo a las fuentes de información pública y hemos reunido unos cuantos datos. Salvo la pérdida por fuego de uno de los dos repetidores de #TDT que cubren Vall de Uxó no se conocen mayores afectaciones a los servicios digitales durante el incendio, aunque, como sabéis, no hay una fuente oficial al respecto. No se reportó tampoco fallo en el suministro eléctrico. El servicio satelital #D2C de #StartLink, que se activó en los mismos días para los incendios del centro de #ESP, no apareció aquí. La pregunta clave que nos debemos hacer ahora, en lugar de dejar que todo lo pasado se olvide directamente, es cómo se comportará la #InfraDigital que cubre un territorio poco poblado que se inserta directamente en uno mucho más denso ante otro tipo de emergencias y qué podemos hacer para mejorar esa #Resiliencia. Nuestra solidaridad con los afectados, más de 15.000 personas llegaron a ser desalojadas, y nuestra admiración para los equipos de emergencias, en particular los provenientes de la industria de la #InfraestructuraDigital.

Alexander Morabbi Wulsch is a Danish entrepreneur and business leader. Previously, he has held leadership roles in several companies across sectors including design (URU Design) and digital marketing/social media (Nordic Social).Alexander's background also includes earlier ventures, after a stint in banking he launched an e-commerce business selling socks online, before eventually co-founding Nordic Social which was sold to PE in 2023. Today, he is the CMO of OMHU, one of Europe's fast growing D2C brands.In This Conversation We Discuss:[00:00] Introduction[01:56] Starting young in Ecommerce [02:55] Joining brands as an early as employee[03:44] Lessons from a failed first business[04:52] AOV then versus now[05:23] Unit economics simply explained[06:51] Sponsor: Klaviyo[09:00] Bundling and upselling on big-ticket items[10:18] Leaning and maximizing social first strategy[11:47] Why doubling down beats spreading thin[13:08] Building influencer teams in today's market[14:04] Sponsor: Intelligems[15:59] Remembering the zero discount policy[17:26] Training customers to anticipate sales[18:50] Sponsor: eFulfillment Service[20:25] Discovering the long customer journey[22:32] Learning curves of a European brand in the US[24:49] Callouts[26:05] Navigating culture and politics in business[28:22] Difference of Brand and product led growthResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeHome of the TEDDY Sofa omhucph.com/ Follow Alexander Morabbi Wulsch alexander-morabbi-wulsch-4486b3113Get your free demo klaviyo.com/honest Book a demo today at intelligems.io/ Lower scale costs today eFulfillmentService.com/honest If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Here's a first: we reviewed the copy, not the original. Colony Flow is an ant-themed "destroy the picture" puzzler that's doing an estimated $150K/day — and it's currently being sued over. The crew digs into the game, the monetization trick underneath it, and what the lawsuit might mean for the entire copycat economy.We break down Colony Flow (by OneSoft/ABI Games) — a sort puzzler in the "destroy the picture" genre where a colony of ants slowly carries colored cubes off a picture into your bench. The standout is the monetization: the ants are deliberately slow, which creates constant friction that the game resolves with a rewarded-video (or premium-currency) speed-up. We cover the standard sort-puzzler feature set , the numbers (~100K downloads/day rising to ~200K in July, ~$150K/day IAP with likely 40-50%+ on top from ads), and the UA (~600 creatives, ~90% AppLovin and Mintegral, zero Facebook — because blended campaigns just don't work there). The through-line: the copy is outscaling debate, the friction mechanic is genuinely smart, and this lawsuit could set a precedent for the whole clone economy.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 We're reviewing the copy — the lawsuit setup02:40 The game — ants destroying the picture04:00 Why the ant pathfinding points to Pixel Flow06:10 Slow on purpose — the friction-into-rewarded-ad mechanic09:00 Blockers, fake "daily rewards," and the feature set13:00 The numbers — $150K/day and the Famfinity lawsuit20:00 The creatives — 600 ads, AppLovin & Mintegral, no Facebook29:30 What the lawsuit means for the copycat economyThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiarPlease share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

The crew breaks down Sensor Tower's big H1 2026 report, digs into why downloads keep falling while nobody seems to want new games, and asks whether ad revenue was ever going to save anyone. Plus a Warframe live service masterclass and the arrow craze that Kress would very much like everyone to stop talking about.Topics Covered:• Disney Solitaire cannibalizing Solitaire Grand Harvest • Where the diligence went on the SuperPlay deal and who is left • Washington State suing Playtika and Aristocrat over social casino• Sensor Tower H1 2026 with downloads down 12% • The 4X surge stalling out while puzzle keeps compounding• The D2C debate and whether the market ishealthier than it looks• AppLovin and AdMob running two-thirds of gaming ad revenue and what that consolidation does to CPIs• Why the top ad revenue games are smaller than anyone expected• Warframe as the live service masterclass Destiny never pulled offCHAPTERS:00:00 – Intro & welcome (Jen, Kress, Phil, Mishka)01:00 – Mishka's Greece trip & DoF event updates (Seattle Roundtables, Gamescom, Grand Slam, Supper Club)08:00 – Playtika update: Solitaire Grand Harvest cannibalized by Disney Solitaire12:00 – M&A Masterclass callback (Chris Petrarca) & licensing math on Disney deal14:00 – Washington State's gambling lawsuit vs. Playtika — social casino legal risk17:00 – Sensor Tower H1 2026 report: overview & app discovery is "broken"20:00 – Direct-to-consumer (D2C) web shops: how big is the impact really?23:00 – D2C by genre: 4X, social casino, Marvel Strike Force example25:00 – Genre trends: strategy down, puzzle up, Block Blast highlight26:00 – The "Arrow" hyper-casual craze — Block Blast install decline29:00 – UA costs spiking: ad spend up, downloads down30:00 – AppLovin & AdMob's growing duopoly over UA33:00 – Social casino's steepest genre decline & D2C revenue shift36:00 – Top publishers by ad revenue (King, Easy Brain, Huuuge)39:00 – Sensor Tower report wrap-up & praise42:00 – Warframe/Digital Extremes: Destiny comparison & live-service execution44:00 – Warframe monetization model breakdown45:00 – Digital Extremes' mobile SKU built with Finland's Nitro Games46:00 – Warframe mobile growth numbers (PC halo effect)48:00 – Squad RPG/gacha mechanics critique — mobile "solved this years ago"50:00 – Why no Western studio has cracked mobile shooters (Fortnite, Roblox Rivals)51:00 – Warframe's marketing-driven themed content drops52:00 – Shoutout: Christopher Dring's podcast52:00 – Outro & next week preview (Castle Clashers, Capcom)

A studio in Gaziantep had the idea in November, started building at the end of December, ran a marketability test in January, and by July they're doing an estimated $300K/day. That's the Cube Land story — and we love it!We break down Cube Land Puzzle by RotateLab (Turkey) — a 3D voxel "destroy the picture" blast puzzler where you rotate a pixel-art object (a gummy bear, a Rubik's cube, a piano, a submarine) and blast matching cubes off it into number-tile slots. They cover why the 3D layer makes it a near-perfect iteration on This Is Blast / Pixel Flow (the rotation adds real strategy and satisfaction a flat conveyor can't), the deliberately light-but-solid feature set (standard blockers, Crown Tournament, Skylift, a journey milestone track, ~650 levels), and the numbers: ~$90K/day IAP visible on Sensor Tower (the hosts estimate the true figure at 1.5-2x that, roughly $150K IAP + ads for a likely ~$300K/day total, with a DAU spike toward ~700K and strong Japan traffic). Plus the UA machine: internal playables, ~90% of spend on AppLovin⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 The game — Cube Land, a 3D blast puzzler04:00 Gameplay — rotate, aim, blast the picture apart07:30 Blockers, Crown Tournament, Skylift & the 650-level saga12:20 The studio story — RotateLab and the earthquake pivot14:00 Idea to scale in 6 months — the timeline18:20 The numbers — ~$90K/day IAP and the ~$300K estimate24:50 The creatives — 200 in 30 days, internal playables27:40 Why Meta can't compete for hybrid gamesThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

“Although, can you ever have too many cushions?” “Ask my wife, it's definitely no.” Welcome back to eCom@One with Richard Hill! In this episode, Richard Hill sits down with Moise Abubakr, Head of eCommerce at Rockett St George, a brand celebrated for its bold and personality-driven homeware. Together, they dig into the secrets behind building and protecting a truly unique brand, the power of niche marketing and how to keep your story consistent across all channels from product and creative to email and paid media. You'll also hear Moise Abubakr share practical strategies for high-performing email marketing, insights into understanding your customer psychology, how to approach working with agencies, and how to leverage both D2C and marketplace partnerships like their recent collaboration with Next. Whether you're looking to sharpen your brand identity, supercharge your email CRM, or future-proof your marketing strategy in the age of AI, this episode is packed with actionable advice you won't want to miss. Time stamps:  00:00 Protecting and Growing Unique Brands 04:47 Importance of niche branding 08:30 Benefits of an agile in-house team 11:37 Empowering team through ownership 14:18 Working with agencies effectively 18:47 Optimising the welcome email flow 23:01 Improving customer conversion strategy 26:37 Tailoring email messages for audiences 27:59 Using data for customer targeting 33:11 Personalising marketing strategies 37:07 Understanding AI in Marketing 41:00 Expanding product range on marketplaces 43:11 Partnering with Next for expansion 45:51 Importance of community for brands 49:33 Encouragement to subscribe

Melissa Palmer inherited a wholesale beauty brand from her mother and rebuilt it into a nine-figure omnichannel business—with direct to consumer, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and more than 1,500 Ulta locations each playing a role in how OSEA Malibu finds and keeps customers. For more on OSEA Malibu and show notes click here Subscribe and watch Shopify Masters on YouTube!Sign up for your FREE Shopify Trial here.

Welcome to this episode of The New Warehouse Podcast! In this episode, Kevin chats with Leo Rodriguez, Vice President of River Plate Inc. River Plate is a Southern California 3PL with 34 years of industry experience. They specialize in e-commerce fulfillment, retail distribution, hazmat beauty products, and parcel management. Together, they explore the complexities of multi-channel fulfillment, how growing brands can protect their margins, navigate retailer compliance, and transition smoothly from D2C to retail.Learn more about Pallite here.Learn more about Big Joe's AP44 here. Follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.Support the show

Some months the creative trends are wild. This one, Matej says it straight: it's quieter — everyone's copying the same big 4X and Golden Goblins playbook, AI is everywhere, and studios are scaling down for summer. But the detective work underneath is where it gets good, including a live investigation into who actually spends the most on UA and who really leads on revenue once you account for the money Sensor Tower can't see.We run the month's creatives and end up somewhere more interesting than the creatives themselves. They cover the copy-paste economy (Golden Goblins reskinned with bears and trees as AppQuantum's new Animal Valley; Idle Zombie Miner cloning the original one-to-one), Pantheon's ~9,600 creatives iterating on a single three-year-old winning concept, the "revenue down but DAU up" signal that reveals hidden D2C web-shop money (Raid Rush, Monopoly Go), the sad death of Match Villains (UA turned off, ~30% DAU lost in two months)The honest through-line: the creatives are converging, so the edge is in the data — reading DAU vs revenue, spotting the D2C dark pools, and knowing who's really winning.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 A quieter month — and why that's still worth watching02:40 Top creatives by impression share — how to read the tab05:10 Golden Goblins reskinned — Animal Valley, bears and trees09:40 Pantheon's 9,600 creatives and the D2C revenue tell12:30 Match Villains is dead — UA off, 30% DAU gone16:40 The data detective — who spends the most on UA24:50 The revenue ranking and the D2C "dark pools"31:20 Playrix's AI flood and the Simpsons diminishing returnsThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investorsFor an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Performance marketing gets you noticed, but it can't scale you forever. Marcelo Kertész, CMO of MANSCAPED, turned a brand built on awkward jokes into the number three electric grooming brand in the US. All this while outmaneuvering competitors decades older by knowing exactly when to shift gears. He breaks down "The Great Rebalance" from D2C conversion campaigns to full-funnel brand building, why zooming out from seven-day attribution windows to six-month brand performance changes everything, and the difference between consumer insights and human insights. These are the emotional truths data alone can't capture. You'll also learn why listening to consumers with intention beats letting the "popular vote" make your decisions for you.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Take Minesweeper. Add Sudoku logic. Put cats on it. Congratulations, you've just made $200,000 a day..We break down Meow Doku by Oakever, the cat-puzzle that came out of nowhere to shake up a category that hadn't changed in a decade. They walk the game (it's Minesweeper crossed with Sudoku — one cat per color, per row, per column, cats can't touch — simpler than Minesweeper and endlessly satisfying), the pure ad monetization (100% ads, no IAP, ~80%+ from interstitials, a clever cooldown timer that tightens the longer you play), and the numbers (~400K downloads/day, 2M+ DAU with huge US and Japan share, an estimated ~$200K/day and climbing). Then the portfolio: Oakever (real name Learnings / Beijing Lexing) is a fully bootstrapped, Singapore-based Chinese giant with a ~200-300 person R&D team, 70M MAU, a billion cumulative downloads, five straight years of 100%+ revenue growth, and a claim to being the #1 Chinese game company by ad revenue on Meta and Google. And the twist that makes the whole thing a masterclass: MeowDoku isn't original — it's a cats reskin of "Queens Master Sudoku," a game that sat dormant making almost nothing for a year and a half until Oakever found it, added cats, and out-executed everyone on UA. Plus, this game is a LINKEDIN GAME!!⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 The game we've wanted to cover for 3 years03:30 Minesweeper meets Sudoku — the core rules06:30 Why it's simpler than Minesweeper (and better)10:20 100% ads — the cooldown timer trick14:30 The numbers — 2M DAU, ~$200K/day22:50 Inside Oakever's monster portfolio27:30 The bootstrapped Chinese ad-revenue king36:40 The twist — it's a reskin of Queens Master SudokuThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investorsFor an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiarPlease share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

What if Bombay Shaving Company's biggest opportunity is already in front of it, but the founders are not seeing it clearly? In this episode, Shantanu Deshpande (Founder & CEO, Bombay Shaving Company) sits down with Aditya Sehgal (Founder, Asgard. World and Ex-President & COO, Reckitt), along with Deepak Gupta (Co-Founder & COO, Bombay Shaving Company), to unpack what it really takes to build a large Indian consumer brand for the next decade. At the centre of this conversation is Bombay Shaving Company's next big question: Can a grooming brand from India become a ₹4,000 Cr business, and eventually build products strong enough to compete globally? Aditya breaks down why India may still be behind China in innovation velocity, why local manufacturing is not just a financial decision but a strategic one, why AI will completely change how teams are built, and why money follows opportunity, not the other way around. What you'll learn from this episode: - Why 10-year-old startups learn and adapt faster than 100-year-old FMCG giants - How the "XEMES" innovation formula works and why India's "jugaad" mentality might be holding it back - What the 2x2 AI Decision Matrix is (Repeatability vs. Sensitivity) and what tasks to automate - Why taking a lower margin to build local manufacturing is a massive strategic moat - How a non-tech executive built a fully functional app in 8 days just by using AI If you're building a consumer brand, D2C business, retail company, or India-first startup, this episode gives you a sharp look at what it actually takes to build beyond the next quarter and create something that can compound for years. Navigate your way through these chapters: 00:00 Coming up 01:20 Introduction 02: 40 How They Built the Business 08:17 Breaking Down the XEMES Framework 16:15 Scaling Without Losing Quality 21:49 The Playbook for Building a ₹4,000 Cr Brand 27:42 How AI Will Transform Every Company 37:08 Closing Thoughts

Trong tập 119 của Vietnam Innovators (Tiếng Việt), host Từ Ân sẽ cùng trò chuyện với anh Phạm Chí Nhu, Nhà sáng lập & CEO của Coolmate - một trong những startup thời trang D2C nổi bật tại Việt Nam hiện nay.Trải qua hành trình 7 năm đầy thăng trầm, Coolmate đã không ngừng thích ứng và thay đổi để khẳng định chỗ đứng vững chắc trong lòng người tiêu dùng Việt với hàng triệu sản phẩm được bán ra mỗi năm; đồng thời, nỗ lực để vươn mình ra thế giới.Cuộc trò chuyện tại Vietnam Innovators sẽ mở ra bức tranh chân thực đằng sau sự bùng nổ truyền thông, những bài học xương máu về quản trị chất lượng sản phẩm khi tăng trưởng nóng, cho đến bài toán tối ưu hóa chuỗi cung ứng đầy thách thức tại Việt Nam.Bên cạnh đó, CEO Phạm Chí Nhu cũng lần đầu chia sẻ sâu sắc về chiến lược "đem chuông đi đánh xứ người" tại thị trường Mỹ qua nền tảng Amazon, định hướng mở rộng đầy tiềm năng tại các quốc gia Đông Nam Á, và khát vọng tái định nghĩa cụm từ "Made in Vietnam" trong thập kỷ tới không chỉ dừng lại ở gia công giá rẻ mà là bảo chứng cho những thương hiệu bài bản, tử tế và phát triển bền vững.—Đừng quên có thể xem bản video của podcast này tại: ⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠Và đọc những bài viết thú vị tại: ⁠⁠⁠https://vietcetera.com/vn/bo-suu-tap/vietnam-innovator⁠⁠⁠Nếu có bất cứ góp ý, phản hồi hay mong muốn hợp tác, bạn có thể gửi email về địa chỉ ⁠⁠⁠hello@vni-digest.com

Pokémon Champions launched on mobile doing roughly $300-400K/day. Two days later it was collapsing. It's now around $80K/day and falling — a textbook shark fin from the biggest IP on the planet. We cover the wins on this podcast, but we also cover the failures, and this one is genuinely fascinating.We break down what went wrong with Pokémon Champions. The game is essentially Pokémon Stadium (the N64 classic) rebuilt for mobile — a pure battler with no exploration, no gyms, no story, no breeding, no catching Pokémon in the wild. The gacha is neutered into a "pick one of ten" system with no randomness at all. And the killer: Pokémon Home import lets players bring their existing collections straight in from Pokémon Go and other titles, so many players arrived on launch day with everything already unlocked — what Jakub calls "Web3 interoperability in play," and a total economy destroyer. Monetization is cosmetics, a battle pass, and ranch refresh tickets. That's it. The crew also contrasts it with the Pokémon apps that genuinely print money (TCG Pocket at ~$15M/month, Pokémon Sleep at ~$150K/day and ~$150M in three years, Pokémon Go spiking on the 30th anniversary), and picks apart the UA: ~300 creatives that are really about 7 concepts, almost all 15-21 seconds, cut from a year-old trailer.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Why we're covering a failure02:40 It's Pokémon Stadium, rebuilt for mobile07:05 The neutered gacha — pick one of ten11:26 The shallow monetization: cosmetics and a battle pass12:30 Pokémon Home import — the economy killer14:35 The numbers — shark fin, Japan-driven, 16% US17:06 The Pokémon apps that actually print money19:59 The creatives — 300 videos, 7 concepts, all too shortThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investorsFor an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SAMatej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiarPlease share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Unity just made direct-to-consumer payments free for every developer on its IAP SDK. No take rate, no fees. So what's the catch?I sat down with Steve Ganem, VP of Product at Unity, to unpack the real strategy — and it turns out the story isn't about payments at all. It's about data.Steve brings a rare vantage point: 19 years in games (EA, Activision's Tony Hawk franchise, 11 years running his own studio through the free-to-play transition), then a decade at Google Analytics. In this conversation we cover why "free" is a rational move rather than a giveaway, why going D2C without Unity could actually cost developers ad signal, the conversion tradeoff most coverage skips (web checkout is harder than Face ID), and how this connects to Unity's advertising business and its AI platform, Vector.Whether you're a developer weighing D2C, a PM modeling the conversion math, or an investor watching Unity's turnaround, this one goes well past the announcement.

AppsFlyer just took attribution off mobile and put it on the open web, and it might be the biggest unlock D2C web shops have seen yet.Josh Chandley talks with Adam Smart, Global Director of Product for Gaming at AppsFlyer, about the company's new web attribution product and its bigger bet on becoming a "Modern Marketing Cloud" spanning web, PlayStation, Xbox, and Oculus.Topics Covered:• AppsFlyer's new web attribution product• The shift from MMP to Modern Marketing Cloud• Why D2C web shops are the biggest day one unlock• Mobile UA mindset vs web UA mindset• Fraud and accountability on mobile vs web• Connecting web attribution to in-app ad networksCHAPTERS: 00:19 Why Web Attribution Matters00:33 Modern Marketing Cloud Vision03:28 Web vs Mobile Measurement Basics03:59 Neutral Attribution and ROAS Truth05:59 Why Launch Web Now08:13 D2C Web Shops and Growth11:49 Day One Studio Changes13:38 Mobile vs Web Mindsets15:15 Accountability and Fraud Reality17:37 Connecting Web and In App Ads19:54 Modern Marketing Cloud Explained23:42 Future of UA with AI28:32 AI Agents and Automation in Outlier29:30 Wrap Up and Where to Learn More

Gossip Harbor is now the fourth-highest-grossing game on the planet — behind only Royal Match, Honor of Kings, and Whiteout Survival. The merge category the crew has been covering for years is bigger and more stable than ever, and Century Games just showed exactly how you stack another winner on top of your portfolio.We break down Hotel Legacy by Century Games (of Tasty Travels fame), using it as a lens on the whole merge category. They recap the state of merge (Gossip Harbor at ~$95M/month and still climbing, Tasty Travels, Travel Town, Flambe, Seaside Escape), walk Hotel Legacy's board and its standard-but-polished feature set (three LiveOps systems, bubble offers, generators, the min-max storing loop), and dig into the genuinely puzzling part: the winning My Perfect Hotel / Last Asylum creative concept that's driving installs isn't actually in the game yet. The lesson: you stack merge games by shipping essentially the same game with a new theme, then testing creatives at scale until you find what to build next.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 The state of merge — Gossip Harbor is #4 globally05:00 The revenue picture — $95M/month and climbing06:46 Hotel Legacy enters at #15 — 50K/day, all tier-one09:00 The "six merge games" player behavior theory10:06 Walking the board — LiveOps, bubble offers, min-maxing17:00 The mystery — the winning creative isn't in the game17:42 The creatives — My Perfect Hotel, Last Asylum, 500 in 30 days27:16 How to stack a merge game on your portfolioThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Check out Oddo: https://www.odoo.com/app/ecommerce?utm_campaign=ecommerce9-thinkschool&utm_source=YouTube-description&utm_medium=influ-mkt

Andrew Youderian disappears into a cave for six weeks every year to crunch data from 300+ seven, eight, and nine-figure store owners — and comes back with the most honest read on the state of e-commerce you'll find anywhere. This year's survey has a few takeaways that sting: AI adoption hit 73% but produced zero measurable financial edge in 2025, Amazon has quietly slipped from growth engine to supplemental channel, and the single biggest profit lever isn't a tactic at all. Brett and Andrew dig into what the numbers actually say — and what operators should do about it before everyone else catches on.Inside the episode:Why Amazon's share of revenue has fallen back to 2017 levels even as more brands sell there — and the "build a brand, sell on Amazon second" shift behind itThe 92% vs. 17% gap: how store owners really feel about selling DTC versus Amazon (and why the P&L explains it — 47% COGS vs. 58%)The AI gut-check: 73% of brands "meaningfully adopted" it, so Andrew pulled their actual sales data instead of asking for ROI — here's what he foundThe financial-mastery cliff: going from a 4-out-of-5 to a 5-out-of-5 on financial fluency jumps net margins from 9.7% to 14.3% and net income growth ~50%The warehouse stat that became Andrew's most viral thread: own your warehouse and grow ~4%, lease or 3PL it and grow 30–35%The optimist vs. pessimist breakdown — conversion rate, inventory turns, and fixed overhead — and what separates the two campsWhy the future belongs to "small, durable brands" — and why the days of hacking distribution are over—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters:[00:00] Intro clip — Andrew on treating AI adoption as a growth tool that didn't pan out in the data[00:26] Welcome & introducing Andrew Youderian of eCommerce Fuel[01:31] Backstory — How Brett and Andrew connected, and eCommerce Fuel's origins[03:41] Inside the annual survey — Methodology and respondent profile[05:27] Amazon findings — Declining revenue share, low seller satisfaction, and P&L economics vs D2C[11:22] The Amazon land-grab era ending — 97% of brands now use paid traffic[17:34] CAC, moats, and the Dan Kennedy quote — Spending more to win the long game[20:19] Amazon as a checkout, not a discovery engine — The 40% off-platform sales stat[24:53] AI adoption findings — No financial edge despite 75% adoption[28:26] The nuance on AI — Vibe-coding pitfalls and where AI is actually helping[31:20] Financial intelligence — Why jumping from a 4 to a 5 out of 5 skyrockets margins[39:43] 2026 outlook — Optimists vs. pessimists, and the future of durable small brands—Connect With Brett:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQmbMwBW8LYDfFAqNqlgTGwWebsite: https://www.omgcommerce.com/Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contactRelevant Links:Andrew's LinkedIn: /andrew-youderian-ba74a623/Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

Voodoo's Path of Kings looks like Skyrim from the surface. It plays more like Tinder. And underneath the swipe mechanic is one of the more clever fusions of gameplay and monetization we've seen — where the gameplay itself is basically the offer pop-up.We break down Path of Kings, the Voodoo mid-core idle RPG they flagged on the Creative Trends episode. They walk it live — the swipe-to-choose mechanic (swipe right and you go straight into a purchase, swipe left and you skip), the Legend-of-Mushroom-style idle core streamlined for a Western fantasy audience, the ads-as-biggest-upgrade loop, the prestige treadmill that resets the map when content runs out, and a genuinely useful tangent on how to actually price a "remove the interstitials" offer (Felix does the ad-monetization math live). Then the numbers and the bigger picture: Path of Kings is doing ~$30K/day and sits right at the make-or-break threshold early Voodoo games have to clear, while Voodoo overall is doing ~$25M/month in IP revenue off Marble Sort and Castle Clashers/Busters — a real mid-core pivot that has everyone talking IPO. Plus the creatives: ~1,384 in 30 days, 100% AI, and gloriously broken (floating horses, dragons you don't sit on, four art styles per video).This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me---------------------------------------If you are interested in getting UA tips every week on Monday, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠lancaric.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & sign up for the Brutally Honest newsletter by Matej Lancaric

SEASON: 6 EPISODE: 34Episode Overview:Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast for entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to grow their business, level up their game and become preferred in the markets they serve.Let's be honest: in today's market, growing your revenue is only half the battle. The real danger? Growing so fast that you break your own business. When your logistics fracture, your software stacks multiply, and your profit margins start bleeding cash, marketing success can quickly turn into an operational nightmare.Our guest today is the man who steps in when guesswork fails. Michael Kleinmann is a seasoned D2C operator, founder, and fractional C-suite executive who has built and scaled multiple businesses to the mid-eight-figure mark. He is a master at turning back-end infrastructure, fulfillment, and supply chains away from boring cost centers and into lethal competitive advantages.Whether you are running an e-commerce giant, scaling a subscription model, or just trying to protect your margins in a shifting economy, today's conversation is a blueprint for logic-driven execution. Please join me for my conversation with Michael Kleinmann.Guest Bio: Michael Kleinmann is a seasoned direct-to-consumer (D2C) operator, founder, and executive advisor with more than two decades of experience building, scaling, and modernizing seven- and eight-figure e-commerce and subscription brands. A true pioneer in the digital retail space, Michael launched Freshpair from his New York City apartment in 2001, transforming it into a category leader with over 30,000 SKUs and even founding "National Underwear Day" before its successful acquisition. In 2012, he repeated his success by launching Underwear Expert, growing it from a massive content marketing platform into a high-performing subscription powerhouse driven by proprietary curation technology.Today, Michael steps into organizations as a fractional C-suite executive, transforming logistics, fulfillment, and operational infrastructure into true strategic assets. He brings deep, end-to-end expertise across product, tech stacks, marketing, and supply chain management, replacing guesswork with practical, logic-driven execution. Throughout his career, he has built a reputation for engineering creative solutions to complex operational bottlenecks—delivering massive freight cost savings, optimizing 3PL partnerships, and turning around struggling business processes.Michael is far from your typical, surface-level consultant. Having worn every imaginable hat over 25 years of hands-on business building, he knows exactly how to align infrastructure with rapid revenue growth while ruthlessly protecting profit margins. He joins us to share his proven systems for navigating the realities of scaling and removing the friction from modern e-commerce operations.Resource Links:Website: https://www.mkinc.com/Product Link: https://www.mkinc.com/servicesInsight Gold Timestamps:02:40 I gravitated towards technology and business04:41 We had just about every hurdle you can think of06:12 I created National Underwear Day08:20 How do you get from zero to 100 with next to nothing or maybe fumes?10:38 I want to hear the problem from their perspective; that doesn't mean that that's what the problem is15:11 There's a lot of analytics that you can get about different things to try to see if B2C makes sense17:03 I was reading this morning that there's 73,000 3PLs in the United States20:35 By moving to a 3PL, you can get your costs lower than if you did it yourself21:48 Amazon is a shipping carrier that you can use separate from selling on Amazon24:42 If you want to pick something easy to do, don't have a direct-to-consumer brand28:40 I think asking for help is difficult33:20 I just went through the whole entire business and tried to simplify everything38:53 I think there's a lot more opportunity, but it's different40:00 mkinc.comConnect Socially:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkleinmann/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@poweredbymkInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/poweredbymkEmail: mk@mkinc.comSponsors: Rainmaker LeadGen Platform Demo: https://calendar.summit-learning.com/widget/booking/JKItVP7WErmCBjU2cCIxRainmaker Digital Solutions: https://www.rainmakerdigitalsolutions.com/

Lilith just did something genuinely new and genuinely reckless. Clash of Critters fuses the coin-looter/social-casino core with a pachinko machine and an idle RPG into one surprisingly clean package, then runs creatives packed with what can only be described as Pokémon from Wish. The crew breaks down whether the boldest iteration in the genre this year will actually fly.We go deep on Clash of Critters by Lilith (the AFK Arena / Rise of Kingdoms studio). They walk the game live — the pachinko coin-looter core that funnels directly into your XP, the auto-leveling idle RPG creatures, the raid/revenge social-casino mechanic lifted one-to-one from Coin Master and Monopoly Go, the card-album and gacha meta — and assess the iteration itself: a male-skewed, Asian-flavored coin looter built on a mechanic that's never dominated the very Asian markets it's aimed at. Then the creatives: ~4,000 in 30 days, heavy AI, Forex concepts, and a batch of blatantly Pokémon-styled ads that ran in Japan and then quietly went dark right before global launch. The recurring "see you in Tokyo" joke writes itself.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 What is Clash of Critters — Lilith's coin looter RPG02:57 The pachinko machine core and the XP connector05:27 The "Pokémon from Wish" creatures and auto-leveling09:33 The raid mechanic and the coin-looter formula19:43 The verdict — a clean iteration missing a front end22:00 The numbers — $200K/day and the Chinese soft launch29:22 The creatives — 4,000 in 30 days, heavy AI, Forex36:47 The Pokémon problem — "see you in Tokyo"This episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Everyone talks about building a brand. Few talk about what actually breaks when growth starts becoming real. This is the very first episode of Founder's Meet, and it's happening in Pune. Shantanu Deshpande sits down with founders building across skincare, AI, home décor, food, climate action, travel, experiences, and consumer brands to unpack the real questions behind scaling in India. From a ₹50 Cr D2C food brand trying to scale to ₹500 Cr, to a SaaS founder questioning India's willingness to pay, to premium brands figuring out storytelling and consumer trust, this conversation brings together the messy but important problems founders face after the first phase of growth. What this episode covers: Why the product and brand need to grow together How storytelling builds trust beyond product claims Why scaling without systems can break a startup What makes consumers forgive, return, and stay Why a real community is more than just followers and comments How founders should think about co-founders, hiring, and equity Why entrepreneurship is not freedom, but accountability If you're building a D2C brand, SaaS company, consumer business, or founder-led startup in India, this episode offers a raw look at the decisions, trade-offs, and uncomfortable truths behind building something that lasts.

Logan Dunn, Head of E-commerce at Wyze, ran 100 ads at once, cut traffic, and watched conversions go up. In this episode, he breaks down the counterintuitive paid media playbook behind Wyze's D2C growth — including why narrow targeting beats broad reach, how in-house creative unlocks faster iteration, and what most brands get wrong about scaling paid spend.

So it turns out when you survey brand marketers, and then their consumers, you all are not on the same page. But if you get on the same page, if you get past logic and really mine the emotional layer of your consumers, you will strike gold. Sarah Levinson is a behavioral strategist for D2C, B2B, for brands small and large, and she has honed survey strategies and deep data analysis to deeply understand what consumers want, and really don't want, from your brand. That can turn your total addressable market into your immediate addressable market, and help you build the consumer relationship that meets them where they are at.

Most brands treat their subscriber portal like a settings page. Turns out, it's actually their highest-risk revenue moment — 70% of subscribers who log in are there to cancel, skip, or bail. Piyush Jain, CEO of Loop Subscriptions, has the data from 1,900+ D2C brands to prove it, and the playbook to stop it.Inside the episode:How OSEA Malibu cut churn from 10% to 5% without offering a single discount — using a free travel kit timed to the exact order where most subscribers were dropping offThe "Mystery Reward" pop-up that intercepts high-intent cancellations in real time — and reduces churn by another 23% for brands using itWhy 20–25% of cancellations happen within days of your upcoming order email — and how Four Sigmatic engineered a 40% save rate on their cancellation flowHow Good Protein drives 25% of total subscription revenue from upsells — and why second-order subscribers are worth 2x more than first-order onesNon-traditional subscription plays for brands outside consumables: from air purifier filter programs to digital membership add-ons—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters: [00:00] Intro — Mystery Rewards & The Portal Churn Problem[00:22] Show Introduction & Guest Welcome — Piyush Jain of Loop Subscriptions[02:29] Why 70% of Portal Visitors Want to Cancel or Skip[04:09] Case Study: OSEA Malibu Cuts Churn in Half With Gift Rewards[06:59] Mystery Rewards — Gamifying the Portal for High-Risk Subscribers[10:55] Streaks & Loyalty Gamification — The Duolingo-Inspired Approach[14:22] Zero-Day Churn — When Customers Subscribe Just for the Discount[19:43] Cancellation Flows — How FourSigmatic Saves 40% of Cancellations[21:42] Increasing Product Consumption to Reduce Churn[25:03] Second-Order Subscribers — Why They're 2X More Valuable[29:13] Upselling as a Zero-CAC Revenue Channel — The Good Protein Story[34:20] Non-Traditional Subscriptions — Air Purifiers, Shoes & Digital Memberships[39:07] How to Increase Subscription Take Rate on the PDP[42:42] Wrap-Up & How to Connect With Loop Subscriptions—Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQmbMwBW8LYDfFAqNqlgTGw Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contactRelevant Links: Piyush's LinkedIn: /piyush-jn/Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

Jyoti Lohman started The Beauty Way, a spa experience and product line to inspire women to pause and be taken care of. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those. [AirVantage Heating & Cooling Ad] Stephen Semple: Hey, it’s Stephen Semple. Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, and this week we’ve got a really fun, great interview so we’re not going to be talking to Dave Young this week. We’ve given him yet another week off for Dave. He’s busy with things at the academy in any case. So we’re here with Jyoti Lohman from The Beauty Way, and we had a conversation and there was just so many things that you shared that it was one of these ones where I really have to get you onto the podcast. So this is going to be awesome. But before we get into a bit of the history of the company, tell me a little bit about where the business is today in terms of the success that’s happening because you’ve gotten into some pretty big places where your product is now being sold. Jyoti Lohman: Yeah, I have. Well, I’m so happy to be here, Stephen. I couldn’t wait for this conversation. We had such a great first connection, and I was excited to be doing this with you, so thank you for having me on. Stephen Semple: Oh, and before you go on to that, the funny thing was we discovered I was literally in Austin, Texas. We got on and did a call and not only that, near Dripping Springs, you’re like, “Oh, I’m near Dripping Springs.” I could have drove over and saw you that day. Jyoti Lohman: I know. I love that synchronicity, right? That was our first thing and I was like, “Okay, this is going to be a good one.” Yeah, that was really cool. So my whole mission here has been to inspire women to create that purposeful pause and to feel nurtured and to feel cared for. And where we’re at now, it’s transformed into these signature Beautyway treatments. I’ve got something at the Fairmont here in Austin. So you can have a Beauty Way manicure and pedicure where we’re not only using the products, but there’s these affirmations that we’re saying. And so these really incredible treatments that are full body and soul. We’re launching in Proper Austin here in May. So this is May 1st, so very shortly here, hopefully in time for Mother’s Day. I am working currently on another signature treatment with Miraval Resort here in Austin and they are a company that’s been around for years and a leader in wellness. So creating these signature treatments that are using the products, but also sort of bringing in focus my mission and my purpose of women taking a moment to really care for themselves and how powerful it is to pour into ourselves because we show up for so many people. I couldn’t be happier about where we are and it’s been a windy road. At first it was just kind of selling online, and I’ve been able to get in touch with these major resorts and create something really from my heart that I know people are feeling cared for. Stephen Semple: And the things that you’re doing for the resorts, they’re a little bit unique for each one, aren’t they? Jyoti Lohman: Yeah. So like I said, this experience has been so cool. So the one with Proper, I’ve worked with their lead therapist and their spa director and it’s over months of really fine-tuning what really connects with that resort and what their purpose is and bringing my purpose together and really connecting those dots. So we’re creating these bespoke really treatments for the different resorts. And I’ll be in Miraval next week and they have a fabric of their own, of their own purpose. And so yeah, we’ll be pulling together what The Beauty Way means. And The Beauty Way is a Navajo philosophy and prayer and they call it walking in beauty and it’s walking in balance, harmony, connection with nature and with yourself. So we get to pull in the essence of and the ethos of The Beauty Way and really connect it back to what the property means. Stephen Semple: That’s really interesting. What year did you start the business again? Jyoti Lohman: I worked with a chemist and so I’ve created all of these formulas side by side with a chemist that I work with. So I started when my daughter was about one years old. So about four years ago I started working on the packaging, working on the mantras, working on the ethos, pulling together the inspiration from my mom and her wisdom in self-care that she really taught me and pulling everything together. And then I launched in November of 2023. So it’s been about two and a half years. Stephen Semple: So there was a few years in development launched in November of 2023. You’re in a bunch of locations, right? Jyoti Lohman: Yep. Stephen Semple: Are you able to share with us what you do in sales these days? Jyoti Lohman: Well, I have so many different ways. I’ve got the wholesale, I’ve got influencer marketing, I’ve got D2C sales, I’ve got all these different ones. So we are on track for six figures this year. Stephen Semple: Nice. Nice. Jyoti Lohman: Yes. That is- Stephen Semple: Cool. Jyoti Lohman: Yeah. Very proud of that. Stephen Semple: That’s very exciting. Jyoti Lohman: Yes, very exciting. Very exciting. Stephen Semple: So here’s one of the things I found that was really interesting that you’ve done. So I’m in this coaching program called The Strategic Coach. It’s a quarterly coaching program for entrepreneurs that’s run by Dan Sullivan. And one of the things Dan’s often talking about is taking your services and either turning or adding a product to it or taking your product, adding a service to it. So there’s this melding of service and product that happens. And you’ve done that with the resorts where you’ve got this spa treatment, and you could have just walked in and said, “Hey, I’ve got this treatment and I’ve developed it and it’s really cool and it’s great for people and people love it.” But you went that step further and went, “Well, let’s create this treatment that’s specific to your spa that’s got all this ritual and things.” How did you land on doing that? Jyoti Lohman: It’s actually an interesting story. And again, I just started with a product, but I knew that this was bigger than a product. The product is sort of the vehicle of how I help inspire women to take that moment and to do these treatments. But I was actually at a spa and getting a treatment and there was this… I did this body scrub research. And so they’re doing this body scrub and they’re using a salt. Mine is sugar and they’re using a salt. And I thought, oh, this salt’s a little rough on the body, but it’d be great for a foot scrub. I’m just thinking in my head. And so she says to me, I say, “Well, I love this salt. Do you sell it in your retail? Can I pick this up? I love the way that it feels and this would be a great thing.” And she says, “We don’t sell this. This is just in treatment.” And I literally had this light bulb go, “Wait, this is a perfect retail conversion. I’m getting to use the products, see how it feels. Instead of looking at something on a shelf, I’m getting to experience this and you’re the expert and now I’ve tried it and it’s amazing. I want to be able to buy it.” And I couldn’t. And I went, “Okay, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Let’s bring these two together.” And what I did was I found, I’m not a therapist, so I don’t know all the logistics of treatment. I know my products inside and out and what they do and how they feel and the connection I want you to have with that. So I found a therapist who had been doing treatments for 25 years and she and I created these spa protocols and it was something I had never heard of. I had no idea this was even a thing. People do do this, but I was not familiar with it and I couldn’t buy the thing I wanted to. And I thought, this is amazing. So I created six protocols where I infuse some breath work, I infuse affirmations and then you can use the products. And I thought speaking from an experience, you get to try them and understand how they work and how they feel. And from a business point of view and to speaking to a spa director, here’s your built-in retail conversion. So that was really kind of blending those things, both of those missions for me. Let’s make some money and let’s be successful here and let’s create these treatments so that people can try it and love it and ultimately buy it. And the way that it smells and the way that it feels, our olfactory is so powerful that when you buy this and take it home and you’re using it at home, it sort of brings you back to that moment of calm and connection. Dave Young: Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. [Using Stories To Sell] Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: One of the things that people don’t realize, scent is really an interesting language because it’s the one sense that is processed differently than the rest of it. It’s- Jyoti Lohman: Totally. Stephen Semple: … very, very highly tied to memory, unbelievably tied to memory. If I bring in theater popcorn and we’re doing an envisioning exercise, something like that, you find yourself, you immediately think movie theater. If we’re popping popcorn, it’s like it’s movie theater or it’s like doing something with the kids, but all of those things immediately come. So it is really interesting that yes, the scent will take a person back to that. But the other thing I find interesting is Dave Young, who I often do this podcast with, he teaches a course at the Wizard Academy just outside Dripping Springs called Portals and the Languages of the Mind. Jyoti Lohman: That sounds interesting. Stephen Semple: And scent is a language. Jyoti Lohman: Yeah. Stephen Semple: So is speaking, so is touching. And what’s interesting is you’re now creating a product which links into- Jyoti Lohman: Sensory. Stephen Semple: … all of those things. Jyoti Lohman: A sensory experience. Stephen Semple: Which makes it very- Jyoti Lohman: Yes. Stephen Semple: And very sticky. You’re hitting on multiple fronts. You’re hitting it here and you’re hitting it here and you’re hitting it here, which really is super interesting, super interesting. Jyoti Lohman: Well, I’d love to take credit that I’ve had this business degree and I’ve studied all the psychology, but it’s really I’m so guided by intuition, and I just had this light bulb that went, oh, my gosh, this will tie back and you can have that experience at home and here’s how we do it. We get you involved and experiencing it. And I created this scent. It’s this really interesting scent and it’s a citrus. Stephen Semple: So you purposely right out of the gate thought about scent when it came to this. Jyoti Lohman: Absolutely. Well, I’m very sensitive to scent, extremely sensitive. If something is very overpowering, I have an immediate headache and it’s kind of always been that way. If my husband’s using a new hand soap, I’m like, “Uh.” So I was really, really intentional with the scent, but I understand the connection that scent has and the power that scent has to make us feel a certain way. And so when I was creating this scent, I didn’t want to do it unscented because I think the sensory experience of the scent is so powerful. So I didn’t use anything synthetic so that it really was a natural scent. And it’s probably one of the things I’m most proud of as the physical product because it’s something that if you’re sensitive to smell, it’s so light and grounding. It’s got these citrus high notes and it’s got this ginger and pink peppercorn that really makes it sophisticated and grounded. So it kind of covers, I want to say, “It’s very universal,” and so men use it. It’s not overly floral or vanilla or it doesn’t overtake the situation, but you feel it. It’s a very clean kind of sensual scent. And so it really ties people back to that experience. And again, I can’t take too much credit for it except for I just really, I tapped into my intuition and as how I experience things and then knowing that there’s sensitivities and people are just getting more and more sensitive to things as we get more and more manufactured kind of sense. So it was a very intentional part of it to be a feel, a smell and all those sensory pieces. Stephen Semple: And the whole idea of marketing a skincare product through spas and things like that. I did a Episode 207, I did a podcast on Dr. Gross who basically had developed a skin peel and they very, very much were like, he marketed through his own practice, but very much were like, “Okay, we’re going to market this through spas and resorts and things along that lines. Have people experienced this and then they’re going to want to come and follow up and buy our product. And yes, it’s an additional line item and all of those things.” So this path of doing it that way has been proven as being a legitimate way to do this. But then you’re also selling online and through influencers. What have you been doing on the online front? Jyoti Lohman: With bootstrapping a business from the get go and not relying on millions of dollars, but relying on heart and hustle. The path I thought was the wholesale piece is something I… I don’t know if I have control over it. I don’t think I have control over it, but I know that I can connect with people one-on-one and talk to them about the product. The D2C space direct to consumer and website is so hard to tap into without millions of dollars for ads and all of this. And so that’s kind of the strategy that I’ve taken is getting into these bigger resorts, having these sensory experiences, building in that retail conversion. And my D2C business has been supported by my client going to these resorts and seeing it. So that’s been a real strategy for me, again, just sort of really looking at how I shop and where my core customer is. So that’s been my strategy there. And then the influencers, that’s a tricky space and I think it’s changing a lot and my brand is, it’s such a tricky space. Stephen Semple: It is. Very tricky space. Jyoti Lohman: And paying for someone to say it one or two times is not going to get you anywhere and you have to align. I mean, it seems so simple, but you really, my brand is so authentic. It’s very founder-led marketing. I’m out there, I’m the face of the brand, I want to connect with people, I want to talk about the mission. And so finding people that are really authentic and not suggesting 16 sunscreens in a week just because they have a big following, it’s hard. It’s hard. Stephen Semple: Yeah, it’s hard. Jyoti Lohman: It’s finding those people that really align. And then I’ve done mostly gifting because part of the authenticity of this brand is that people try it and they fall in love with it. And so a lot of these influencers who want thousands of dollars, I want you to love it. And so it’s a slower game, but I find those people that try it and really get that experience and get the purpose behind it. And that’s been successful with more micro influencers, people that have that like 15,000 following because they’ve created a model where people really actually trust what they’re doing. So that’s been really what’s been successful for me. And it’s also just meeting people and showing up and connecting and being your authentic self and not having to be on. I’m never on. This me, this is what you’re getting. So I think people connect with that. And so I’ve had a lot of people just do things with gifting. Speaker 11: Oh, no, no. Speaker 12: What? Speaker 11: I was enjoying this episode. Speaker 12: Don’t worry. Part two’s coming next week. Speaker 11: It better. Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat, juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90- minute Empire Building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.

How do you protect the human craft of storytelling while navigating a global independent market that is rapidly contracting? This week, Giles Alderson and Phil Hawkins sit down for an incredibly candid, wide-ranging masterclass with Jonathan Yunger—President of Millennium Media and co-founder of Arcana Labs. Jonathan has masterminded massive worldwide features grossing billions of dollars—producing major franchise hits like The Expendables, The Hitman's Bodyguard, and the Fallen series, alongside star-driven indie standouts like Tesla starring Ethan Hawke, Jolt starring Kate Beckinsale, Till Death starring Megan Fox, and The Enforcer starring Antonio Banderas. His latest project, John Rambo (directed by Sisu filmmaker Jalmari Helander), is a masterclass in 99% practical, old-school action cinema. Yet, Jonathan is also leading the charge on ethical, artist-driven tech integration through Arcana Labs—an enterprise-grade ecosystem fully vetted by major streaming networks after rigorous multi-month security compliance reviews. In this episode, we strip away the PR spin to examine how the disruption of streaming windows broke the traditional indie minimum guarantee model, and why embracing assistive workflows is the key to reclaiming creative risk.

Is YouTube the most underrated paid channel for eCommerce brands right now? In this episode, I sit down with Brett Curry, founder of OMG Commerce, to break down exactly how seven- and eight-figure brands should be thinking about YouTube ads. Brett has been running YouTube campaigns for top D2C brands for years, and he reveals why YouTube looks terrible in most reporting tools… and why it's still absolutely worth the investment. Listen in as Brett goes deeper on what a winning YouTube ad actually looks like, why the homepage often outperforms the product page for cold traffic, and how creative fatigue on YouTube compares to Meta. You'll also hear his takes on Google Shopping and Amazon in 2026, why branded search spend may be costing you more than it's worth, and how OMG uses geo holdouts and incrementality testing to prove what's actually working and not just what looks good on a dashboard.  You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://tinyurl.com/4sufbwdk  Interested in our Private Community for 7-Figure Store Owners? Learn more here.