Podcasts about D2C

Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR launched in mid-August, spiked to a million downloads a day, is still pulling 300K downloads a day and 1.1M DAU, shows $2 of IAP revenue in the last 30 days.Every one of those 12 million monthly downloads comes from a viral toy trend: RMS "Real Magical Stuff" mystery dumplings, unboxing videos on TikTok and YouTube doing 47M, 70M and 82M views each, and a developer that named the app so precisely ("mystery dumpling" + "unbox") that it sits as the first Google result when a kid searches for the toy. The monetization is textbook ultra-casual pumping: interstitials triggered by action count starting at 15 and dropping to two or three, a permanent MREC on a 10-second refresh sitting on top of the "claim free legendary pack"Felix runs the math: mostly Indonesia and Tier 2/3 traffic, only 33K DAU in the US, so somewhere between $18K and $29K a day in ad revenue, call it $1M a month and roughly $900K banked since launch.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 – Cold open: 70 million views on a dumpling unboxing video01:32 – What Mystery Dumpling Unbox ASMR is and why $2 of IAP is the wrong way to look at it02:29 – Gameplay walkthrough: interstitials on action count, a permanent MREC, Google billboards and four ads per screen11:07 – The toy behind it: RMS mystery dumplings, Amazon, €50 diamond editions and a safety recall12:50 – The numbers: 1M downloads/day spike, 300K/day now, 1.1M DAU, 12M downloads a month, all Tier 2/315:23 – Felix's Panini FIFA theory and the $18–29K/day ad revenue estimate20:32 – Zero paid UA: TikTok, YouTube, Google search #1 and how ASO did all the work29:07 – Fake 4.7-star reviews, the ultra-casual category and the Miniclip cloneThis 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 Lancaric⁠Matej 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

 Tushar Garg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Flyhomes, a next-generation residential real estate financial solutions company that empowers agents and loan officers with exclusive buy-before-you-sell solutions, enabling buyers to move before they sell with less stress and more certainty. He has led Flyhomes through multiple funding rounds to Series D, evolved the company from a D2C model to a B2B2C platform, and expanded into innovative financial products and nationwide wholesale lending. Prior to founding Flyhomes, Tushar held roles at Microsoft and McKinsey.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Grubby -  the award-winning plant-based meal kits and ready meals delivered to your door -  went from a £23M valuation and rapid growth TO around 140 VC rejections, losses of more than £1m in a year and a point where the founder says the business was probably only weeks away from “game over.” BUT... if you need some inspiration from someone who has been through this and successfully turned things around then you're going to love this convo with founder Martin Holden-White - an unusually open conversation about what it REALLY takes to turn around a scaling D2C consumer brand. Today, the picture looks very different! Grubby is heading towards roughly £6m revenue, growing around 25%, has recorded approximately six profitable months this year and is close to achieving its first break-even year. Martin shares what had to change to get there: the down round, cost cutting, greater financial transparency, bringing in stronger financial leadership, acquiring manufacturing and recipe IP from Allplants, launching ready meals and becoming far more disciplined about how growth is funded.  What You'll LearnHow Grubby went from a £23m valuation to being weeks away from failureWhy Martin now looks back at that £23m valuation as “completely bonkers”What changed to take Grubby from £1m+ annual losses towards break-even while still growingHow acquiring Allplants' manufacturing and recipe IP accelerated Grubby's move into ready mealsWhy Martin wishes he had hired a Financial Director much earlierKey Topics DiscussedGrubby's journey towards approximately £6m revenueThe danger of valuations becoming detached from business fundamentalsRaising around £6m and navigating an extreme down roundWhat happened after roughly 140 VC rejectionsCutting technology and marketing spend to change the economicsHow existing investors helped save the businessFounder dilution and protecting crowdfunding investorsThe physical impact of founder stressWhy Grubby shares its P&L internally every monthBuilding a more financially disciplined growth modelAcquiring manufacturing and recipe IP from AllplantsReady meals growing to around 20% of the business£50-ish customer acquisition costs and reducing reliance on paid socialUsing AI for menu optimisation, forecasting and waste reductionPartnerships as a route to product discovery and growthWhy Martin wishes he'd hired an FD sooner  Pasted textCommunity and review requestIf you learn anything from this chat, PLEASE share the love by sharing this episode with another founder building a challenger brand, a colleague or a mate or anyone trying to work out how to build a sharper, more focused growth model.AND! Don't forget to FOLLOW or SUBSCRIBE to Brand Growth Heroes on your favourite podcast app, and even LEAVE A REVIEW - both of these actions make a MASSIVE difference to our mission to help more founders just like you.IF you leave a review with your name and I can find you on LinkedIn, I promise to write to say thanks!*** Thanks to Brand Growth Heroes' podcast sponsor — Joelson, the commercial law firm ***If you're a founder, you already know how much energy goes into building the perfect product, creating standout branding and connecting with consumers.But scaling a CPG business also brings legal complexities that can make or break your growth journey - from contracts and regulatory compliance to protecting your intellectual property.That's why we're proud to partner with Joelson, the leading commercial law firm with 10000s of hours experience supporting the founders of scaling consumer brands, just like you.Joelson works with brands like Little Moons, Trip, Eat Natural, Bear Graze and Pulsin, and advised the innocent founders on their landmark sale to Coca-Cola - and they still work with them at JamJar Investments today!Joelson is offering a FREE LEGAL CONSULTATION to all BGH listeners (https://joelsonlaw.com/contact/bookings/ We HIGHLY recommend you take them up on it, you'll learn a LOT. (Don't forget to let them know you booked becauase you listened to Brand Growth Heroes)********Follow Brand Growth Heroes to learn more from fab founders scaling Challenger Brands:Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/brandgrowthheroes)LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/brand-growth-heroes/?viewAsMember=true)Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@brandgrowthheroes)Find out more about the programmes and courses Fiona runs here (https://www.brandgrowthheroes.com/mini-mba-2026)Join the NextGen CPG WhatsApp group for founders leaning in to the value that a leadership approach to engaging with AI can unlock for businesses like yours. https://mailchi.mp/fionafitzconsulting.com/building-ai-native-challenger-cpg-brandsCreditsThanks to our Sound Engineer Gyp Buggane at Ballagroove.com and the entire BGH team. 

Suck It Up is Tactile Games' new eat-and-grow hole game, and three months after soft launch it's doing ~$30K a day in IAP — about to overtake Lily's Garden as the Danish studio's biggest title (and Lily's Garden made well over half a billion). Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg walk the game: a Hole 'Em All-style timed core with the smart differentiators (live animals that jump and hide in levels, a level-based "album" of collectible objectives, and an untimed Zen Garden mode that conveniently makes the "no timer, no stress" creatives true), then the category detective work — the whole thing traces back to Donut County's 2017 Steam trailer, which Voodoo copied into Hole.io (still 300K downloads a day today after a revival), and now Hole 'Em All, Moon Active's Hole Stars, ironSource's Holey 3D, Grand Games' Jelly Hole, and a spiky Hong Kong "Hole Busters" are all fighting for it. Felix's ad-mon read: interstitials only from level 35, rewarded from level 50, eight placements, ad revenue likely under 15% — a deliberate IAP-first, retention-first setup (D1 probably north of 50%, 36 minutes a day). ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Suck It Up — Tactile's new hole game02:40 The core — timed levels, live animals, and the Zen Garden "no stress" mode06:40 Album, no-ads pack & the slim feature set09:20 The numbers — $30K/day, about to pass Lily's Garden11:00 The category — from Donut County's trailer to Hole.io's 300K/day14:50 Who's in the hole race — Hole 'Em All, Moon Active, ironSource, Hole Busters19:40 Ad-mon — interstitials at 35, rewarded at 50, retention play24:30 The UA — 60 playables, Unity works, and Facebook is goneThis 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

Shirts are 2x the market. Pants are 200x less crowded. Dhruv Toshniwal bet on the category everyone treats as an afterthought, and built The Pant Project into a ₹120 Cr run-rate D2C brand. Dhruv grew up around a 50-year-old textile business, Banswara Syntex. He studied finance at Wharton, spent four years at Oliver Wyman in New York, then came home to build something of his own. The first two brands he tried inside the family business didn't work. The third idea was pants. The Pant Project started as a custom-made pants brand in the middle of COVID. It got stuck around ₹30 Cr. Then ready-to-wear took off, and today it's 85% of the business, doing about ₹10 Cr a month in net sales. In this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast with Akshay Datt, Dhruv breaks down how Indian men actually buy trousers, why comfort beats logos in bottom wear, and what it takes to grow a D2C brand without burning cash. What you'll learn

AppLovin's CEO published a blog about "ad quality tools" — and buried in it is the real move: MAX will stop exposing user-level ad data, because competitors have been using the mediated stream (who saw which ad at what price) as training data for their own bidders. Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news and reads between the lines: AppLovin's biggest advantage is that everyone mediates on MAX, and anyone training on that data erodes it — so the vault is closing, and this won't be the last ban. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Friday news — three stories and the weather00:45 AppLovin's blog: ad quality tools, not data collection04:20 Reading between the lines — protecting MAX's data moat05:50 Sega x Netflix: Crazy Taxi, Sonic, Stranger Than Heaven07:20 Games make movies now — the pipeline flipped08:00 Oakever sued: lost to Hungry Studio, fighting Avia Games10:15 The weather — Meow Doku #1 on both stores

A general smacks a soldier so hard he turns into a chair — and then into Mel Gibson. That's a real Top Force ad. Century Games isn't testing AI creatives anymore; it's running the whole portfolio on them: Lord Rush pumping out roughly 5,000 ads a month across every era in history (Spartans, pirates, Egyptians with AK-47s), the King Shot slap-skit upgraded so the guy saves a princess first, fake "watch an ad" callouts on a game with no ads, and the same skit shipped with the actor's nationality swapped per region. 107 AI creatives: Block Blast's genuinely clever "frame anything into a level" trick, Last Asylum's Attack-on-Titan-style spot with no end card (you don't need one — slap a playable after it), a new Lilith 4X scaling from 100K to 200K downloads a day on golden-AK "mushroom budget" ads, Dream Games lifting Travel Town's strawberry micro-drama wholesale, 37 Games' Walking Dead-alike, Top Heroes' Rock-from-Wish mermaid genie, and Supercent's Bulldozer Master doing 200K downloads a day on Truck-Star demolition and the "I own a mine, you can too" meme. Jakub's closing puzzle: how do King Shot and Lord Rush both scale on identical creatives? Matej's answer: nobody cares. It's mobile.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Everything is AI — and the dying friend05:10 Block Blast — frame anything into a level07:25 Century's AI push — King Shot skits, Lord Rush at 5,000/month15:55 Top Force — Mel Gibson from Wish, toy soldiers, instant localization18:50 Last Asylum's anime spot — you don't need an end card20:10 Lilith's new 4X — golden AKs, 200K downloads/day32:15 Supercent — Pizza Ready, Smashdown tests & Bulldozer MasterThis 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

Ben Lord, Founder and CEO of Softlimit, has been in and around the music industry for over 30 years and in ecommerce for the last sixteen. A touring drummer (Falling Forward / Elliott / Sharon Van Etten / Mascott / Bird of Youth / Phantom Family Halo / Kilowatthours), he's also released records through independent labels (Initial, Revelation, Temporary Residence Ltd., Jagjaguwar), and worked in Atlantic Records' New Media Division during the launch of the first digital music store.He later led campaigns at Bond Strategy and Influence across entertainment verticals before spending the last decade building Softlimit, a Shopify Premier Partner Agency helping brands like Sacred Bones, Temporary Residence Ltd., Polyvinyl, Moon Juice, Misen, and The Perfect Jean grow their ecommerce revenue.Music still sits at the center of his life, and he works closely with label heads, agents, and artists.In This Conversation We Discuss:This conversation draws on Softlimit's January 2026 whitepaper, "Built-In Demand, Broken Infrastructure: The Music Industry's Revenue Gap," co-authored by Ben Lord and Martina England, which explores how independent labels can close the gap between fan demand and captured revenue by adopting DTC ecommerce practices.[00:00] Introduction[01:17] Helping the music industry master D2C[01:54] From touring drummer to agency founder[02:53] Why agencies walk away from music clients[04:03] Why label stores are glorified merch shops[05:59] When clients show up with the prescription[06:56] Conversion and AOV wins for music clients[07:24] Fixing broken filters and legacy platforms[09:23] The cost of selling through third parties[10:33] Why music isn't like other big catalogs[11:51] How labels lift conversion rate and AOV[12:31] Cross-sells built on product relationships[13:55] Label-curated "you'll like this too" picks[14:55] The Shopify tech stack behind the wins[15:33] Cleaning up messy product data[15:50] Migrating legacy CMS data and using Rebuy[17:14] Why indie labels hesitate on email and SMS[18:51] Turning fan data into more tour sales[20:48] Fan clubs and new streaming rules[21:28] The indie music industry is growing up[22:32] First steps to think like a D2C brand[23:39] Capturing first-party data at live shows[24:21] Your fans are your customers[25:10] Final thoughtsResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeTake the stress out of commerce https://www.softlimit.com/ Follow Ben Lord https://www.linkedin.com/in/benlord/ 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!

He was making $10 a post from Adidas on Instagram in 2013. Today, Bill Rom and his partner Josh are running a bootstrapped apparel brand doing $220 million this year — and projecting up to $400 million next year. Bill breaks down the exact financial wake-up call that let them scale aggressively, why they still do 10-15% of their own screen printing at $200M+ in revenue, and how they became a genuine culture moment (mascots, memes, and Aiden Ross wearing their shorts included).Inside the episode:The fractional CFO hire in 2022 that revealed they were making just $60 in profit on every first purchase — and why that clarity changed how aggressively they'd spendHow their average new-customer value climbed past $400 in the first 12 months, and why that number justified riskier channel betsThe in-person activation playbook (spin-to-win wheels, velocity challenges) they started back in 2016 that Bill calls Gen Z's biggest unfair advantage todayWhy Baseball Lifestyle 101 now outsells Nike and Adidas per square foot at Dick's Sporting Goods, and how that pushed them into a $600K/month YouTube and linear TV strategyThe "asymmetrical bet" rule Bill uses to decide when it's smart to lose money for 60 days in exchange for a 10x return in 90How building relationships with creators like Eric Sim (rather than paying for one-off deals) landed them a shoe collab with Adidas—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters:[00:00] Intro — Brett Curry sets up the live NYC interview with Bill Rom of Baseball Lifestyle 101[02:16] Meet Bill Rom — $220M this year, $340–400M projected next year across D2C and wholesale[02:40] The breakout moment — From Instagram media account to apparel brand; the College World Series fire marshal story[04:53] Knowing your numbers — The fractional CFO, $60 first-purchase profit, and scaling from $5M to $220M+[06:51] Beyond first-purchase math — Cohort analysis, LTV climbing past $400, and running your own race[10:29] What they got right early — Building an email list, posting hourly for five years, and in-person activations[14:59] Sponsor break — OMG Commerce[16:08] Why YouTube is the future — Evergreen content vs. TikTok, 80K subscribers, and YouTube as the #1 streaming service[19:46] Going big on commercials, CTV & linear — Working with Jacques and the "spend 10x your creative cost" rule[21:33] Investing in culture & creators — Jackson Olson, Eric Sim, King Ajuko, and building content muscle in-house[25:11] The Adidas collab — How it happened and why they won't let top creators go to Nike or Adidas[27:26] Asymmetrical risk for asymmetrical returns — "Lose money for 60 days to 10X in 90" and wrap-up—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:Bill's LinkedIn: /bill-rom-54653744/ 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

Scaling a CPG brand isn't just about finding more ways to grow – it's about knowing which opportunities are worth pursuing. Hero Bread is taking on some of food's most entrenched categories with baked goods and pasta that deliver the taste and texture of traditional carbs with zero grams of sugar along with added protein and fiber. With products now in more than 9,000 retail locations, including Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, Publix, Sprouts and Wegmans, the brand has built significant momentum – and attracted investors including Tom Brady, Kevin Durant, and The Weeknd. In this episode, Hero Bread CEO YC Cheng shares hard-earned lessons on scaling a CPG brand, including why the company walked away from a major foodservice opportunity, how D2C helped fuel retail growth, and why adding SKUs can actually hurt the business. He gets candid about the hidden costs of expansion – from inventory and logistics to opening new doors – and explains how founders can make smarter decisions about where to place their next bet.   Show notes: 0:20: YC Cheng, CEO, Hero Bread – Hero Bread CEO YC Cheng discusses his background as a founder, operator and investor and how the company built a CPG business around a simple proposition: make bread that delivers the taste and texture consumers love with more protein and fiber and fewer simple carbohydrates and sugars. YC explains why Hero shifted from foodservice, including a partnership with Subway, toward D2C, how direct consumer relationships helped fuel retail growth, and why the brand resonates with consumers across nutrition, weight management and gut health—not just a single dietary niche. He also discusses partnerships such as Auntie Anne's and the importance of creating better-for-you products that seamlessly fit into existing routines. YC also explores the economics of D2C bread, Hero's retail strategy and growing product portfolio, and the challenges of launching new SKUs. He shares how consumer data and retail execution work together, why Hero takes a disciplined approach to trends and innovation, and how the company balances growth with profitability as it scales. Brands in this episode: Hero Bread, Subway, Auntie Anne's, Panera Bread, Once Upon a Farm, Dose

There are fewer than 100 board certified veterinary nutritionists in the country. Megan Sprinkle is one of them. She is also the host of Vet Life Reimagined and head of veterinary affairs at Golden Child, the vet-formulated fresh food brand. I had the pleasure of appearing on Megan's show earlier this summer, so it was a treat to return the favor.We got into the inflection point facing veterinary care, the thin nutrition education most vets actually receive, whether "vet-formulated" means anything, and how you build a pet food company from day one. Megan brought a frame I keep thinking about: she has always moved toward what she wants, never away from what she doesn't. Give it a listen.In this episode:Why Megan knew the exam room was never her destination, and how a broad definition of "veterinarian" opened every other doorThe nutrition education gap, in her words: two hours of small animal nutrition lab at Auburn. Not two credits. Two hours.Enrichment and gamification of feeding, from zoo nutrition to companion animals, and what Farmer's Dog acquiring Woof signalsMy thesis that the vet channel is the next frontier for non-therapeutic brands, and Megan's healthy skepticism about "vet-formulated" as a buzz termInside Golden Child: building from the who, the drizzles, shipping frozen D2C, and an overwhelming response from vetsWhy there is no single fix for access to care, and the two-clinic story that reframes the whole problemBuilding better community for pet parents, and a nutrition hotline to make those 90-ish experts more reachableChapters:00:00 Welcome Megan Sprinkle02:00 The inflection point in veterinary care03:20 Never wanted clinical practice05:40 Moving toward, not away11:25 Marine mammals to zoo to nutrition19:00 Farmer's Dog buys Wolf, and enrichment in the bowl21:30 The nutrition education gap26:40 The vet channel and the "vet-formulated" question32:10 Building Golden Child from day one46:45 The product line: diets and drizzles48:40 What she would change: no single solution54:30 Community for pet parents and the nutrition hotline59:25 Parting words01:00:25 Peony, and why food is love

A cat shoots a tree. The tree doesn't fight back. Numbers go up. That's the entire game and it's already past Office Cat's peak, #2 among all idle games on IAP revenue, and doing an estimated $250K a day once you count the ads. Nobody on the crew can explain the trees. Nobody needs to.The lesson: cats always have good CPI, one-stat simplicity keeps it Western-casual, and Treepla knows how to monetize a cat idler better than anyone. Just add LiveOps before it runs into the ground.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Idle Cat Gunner — why are the cats shooting trees?04:05 The core — one stat, no enemies, a time-gated DPS check06:35 Gacha always rolls D, skins, fish tank, pets & the modes10:15 Rebirth, 5-minute ad boosts & the buff package13:20 Step-up offers, auto-upgrade and the $50K spend depth19:45 The numbers — past Office Cat's peak, ~$250K/day adjusted28:45 The creatives — trees bully cats, cats get machine gunsThis 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 LancaricDo you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

India was about to have its first-ever peptide party with fifty guests, a mystery venue marketed only as "not a hospital," and a menu of collagen, glutathione, and copper peptides. Then the Karnataka Food Safety and Drug Administration started asking questions, and the party was cancelled overnight.On this episode, The Ken's Sudeshna Ray joins host Rachel Varghese to unpack the peptide craze that's crossed over from Silicon Valley biohacking circles into Indian gyms, Instagram DMs, and D2C wellness brands, and the murky, largely unregulated supply chain, that runs through China, that gets these substances into the country in the first place.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hal Smith says lowering clients' customer acquisition cost on Meta and Google is a focus of his agency, H Street Digital. He cites 5 performance levers, starting with the offer.Hal founded the D2C-focused agency in 2020 after stints managing political fundraising campaigns. "I learned the importance of the right message," he told me.In this episode, Hal shares his approaches to ad messaging, testing, targeting, and, yes, reducing CAC. For an edited and condensed transcript with embedded audio, see: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/5-levers-drive-cac-says-ad-proFor 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

Century Games has found a 4X creative direction nobody else is using yet, and the crew is betting the whole category copies it within a month.Matej Lančarič, Jakub Remiar, and Felix Braberg run September's creatives. They retire Golden Goblins from the top slot (with the sharp lesson from Idle Zombie Miner: copy a dying game's creatives and you die with it), pass through the Idle Lumber studio's gross-but-working Top Tycoon fish-sushi concepts, SayGames' Tower War and its new Pocket Sort, the Pantheon clones everywhere, XP Hero's continued "steal the 4X creatives back" campaign (Last Asylum's, King Shot's "no ads," feeding crocodiles, even Smash Fest), and Butcher Hero's peak (grindy, no new content, and every second Reddit post is how to hack the APK).Century's Top Force runs civilization-style mass-battle creatives — armies, numbers, control-the-troops, a Lords Mobile flashback upgraded with toy-soldier visuals — that look nothing like the industry's hunting-bears template, and Century got there by testing ~500 unique concepts. The crew also covers Last Beacon (the renamed Endless Sea, pre-registration, trying every concept ever made), Cube Land's creative glow-up (200 new, revenue up), the Wool Crush wildcard (yarn + arrows + bus jam + save-the-cat in one, 2,000 creatives on an old game)Two conclusions: it's now hard to find a creative that isn't AI (the show is splitting into two AI episodes and one "normal" per cycle), and watch whether Top Force's mass-battle concept spreads. The crew's bet: it willThis 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

Katja Wendel ist Marketing Director bei DēLonghi Germany und verantwortet das Marketing für DēLonghi, Kenwood, Braun und nutribullet. Vier sehr unterschiedliche Marken – und Katja hat exzellente Antworten auf die Frage, wie daraus mehr entstehen kann als viermal Marketing nebeneinander.Mit Olli & Martin spricht sie darüber, wie DēLonghi Rollen, Marken und Technologie neu zusammendenkt.Elf Jahre BSH (früher Bosch-Siemens Hausgeräte), globale wie lokale Verantwortung und ein ausgeprägter Technologiehintergrund prägen Katjas Blick auf Marketing. Bei DēLonghi stellt Katja gemeinsam mit ihrem Team Gewohntes infrage: Rollen werden neu definiert, Kompetenzen zurück ins Unternehmen geholt, Ideen zwischen Marken und Ländern geteilt und Technologien dort eingesetzt, wo sie Menschen tatsächlich schneller und besser machen.Gleichzeitig bleibt die entscheidende Frage: Was muss trotz aller Skalierung unverwechselbar bleiben?Danke an Dr. Mirjam Jentschke, CMO von Smeg Deutschland, die Katja in der Folge überrascht.KEY TAKEAWAYS:Rollen neu verhandeln – sie können in einer sich verändernden Organisation nicht statisch bleiben.Marken individuell führen UND gemeinsame Fähigkeiten, Learnings und Systeme konsequent teilen und skalierenKI für Geschwindigkeit und Varianz nutzen und gleichzeitig Differenzierung weiterhin durch echte Menschen, ihre und ihre Urteilskraft schaffenThemen unter anderem:(00:10:09) Marketing-Organisation der Zukunft(00:17:10) Effizientes Steuern von Multi-Brand-Portfolios(00:24:25) Auflösung des KI-Dilemmas im MarketingLinkedIn:→ Katja Wendel→ Olli Busch→ Martin Boeing-MessingKeywords: De'Longhi, Connected TV, Pause Ads, TikTok Shop, Creator Squads, Retail Activation, Affiliate Marketing, UGC, D2C, Product Information Management, Translation Memory, Human-in-the-Loop, Agentic Workflows, Community Management, Retargeting, Consideration Funnel Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eine Marke will auf Amazon einen Gang höher schalten. Wo geht sie hin? Inhouse aufbauen, Agentur beauftragen, Software kaufen, Freelancer holen oder selbst etwas mit KI bauen. Früher war das im Kern eine Budgetfrage. 2026 ist die Antwort auf diese Frage eine andere. Doch woher kommt die Verschiebung? Warum verändert sich die Landkarte?Yarin spricht mit Timo Daedrich, der etablierte Markenhersteller beim Einstieg in D2C und E-Commerce begleitet. Es geht um die Stimmung im Markt und darüber, woran die Entscheidung zwischen Inhouse, Agentur und Tool aktuell wirklich hängt.Alle Themen der Episode im Überblick: Yarin & Timo stellen sich vor (00:00)Was D2C für einen Markenhersteller wirklich bedeutet (02:50)Stimmung im Markt: Unsicherheit hemmt die Investitionsfreude (05:15)Marktplätze als Vehikel für den schnellen Start (09:58)Die größte Hürde ist politisch: B2B gegen D2C (13:15)Shop, Amazon oder weitere Marktplätze: was zuerst? (15:51)Die Landkarte: inhouse, Agentur, Tool oder Broker (18:30)Was KI an den Erwartungen an Agenturen verändert (21:46)Wo KI heute wirklich funktioniert und wo nicht (23:46)Ziele, Kompetenz, Budget: woran die Entscheidung hängt (28:40)Kundenströme zwischen Tool und Agentur (31:46)Was am Ende beim Menschen bleibt (35:24)Links & Ressourcen:Timo Daedrich auf LinkedInTimo Daedrichs WebsiteYarin auf LinkedInCORTUA – KI-gestütztes Amazon Ads System für den gesamten Produktkatalog. Jetzt Erstgespräch vereinbarenFragen & Anregungen:Für Fragen und Feedback hinterlasse einen Kommentar bei Spotify oder auf YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ADFERENCEMail: vitamin-a@adference.com

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Coffee N°5, Lara Schmoisman chats with Oliver Garfield, former COO and Co-President of Cos Bar. Oliver dives into the remarkable history of Cos Bar, founded in Aspen by his mother, Lily Garfield and how it evolved into a premier luxury beauty retailer. From building scalable infrastructure and navigating early-stage growth to mastering retail education, brand positioning, and digital trends, this conversation uncovers what it takes to scale a luxury beauty brand while maintaining customer trust and capital efficiency. • Key Topics Covered:The founding story of Cos Bar in Aspen and its evolution into luxury beauty retail.Lessons in scaling early-stage businesses, managing cash flow, and building operational infrastructure.The role of retail partnerships, sales education, and staff training in driving brand success.How beauty retail is shifting across D2C, social media, wholesale, and prestige vs. mass-market lines.Key considerations for early-stage investing, brand positioning, and working with beauty incubators.• About Oliver Garfield:Oliver Garfield is an experienced retail executive and investor who served as Chief Operating Officer and Co-President of Cos Bar, the original luxury multi-brand beauty retailer founded by his mother, Lily Garfield. Growing up alongside the family business, Oliver played an instrumental role in modernizing Cos Bar's operations, expanding its retail footprint, and building scalable processes across physical and digital channels. Today, he brings deep expertise in luxury retail strategy, capital management, and early-stage brand development. 

A job-search app shipped a Flappy Bird playable that ends with "there's a relevant job for you." Two years ago that would have made zero sense. This month it's the trend: non-gaming apps are flooding the playable space, most of them vibe-coded with AI in an afternoon.Matej Lančarič and Ondrej Mosberger are joined again by Robin Kuyer (Unity PlayWorks) for the "everyone brings playables" format — with the bold creative twist of reversing the order. https://lancaric.substack.com/p/h1-2026-brutally-honest-ua-report?r=7qqafMatej's Brutally Honest UA report puts playables at 40-60% of creative spend, up from 30-40% a year ago, as AppLovin, Mintegral, and the SDK networks keep growing. Robin brings the "Frankenstein" playable (Wool Crush: arrows + yarn mechanics + save-the-cat, every popular concept stacked into one ad — plus his spreadsheet method for engineering ideas from what's trending), the non-gaming wave Ondrej closes with a Fumb Games playable vibe-coded in Playable Maker (30 iterations and the next version does it in three) and a clean memory-game hidden-object playable that respects the player's intelligence.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Playables are 40-60% of creative spend — the Brutally Honest data06:25 Wool Crush — the Frankenstein playable and the spreadsheet method11:20 Non-gaming apps take over — Indeed's Flappy Bird, finance, cleaners19:40 Hero Wars — the open-roam level playable and how to iterate it25:05 Supercell's playable — lost seven times, should a playable let you lose?29:40 Sunday City — GTA timing, Grove Street, and the double-hook debate38:30 Cozy Florist's AI merge & the cats-with-guns wildcard44:50 Vibe-coded in Playable Maker + the memory-game playable that trusts youThis 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

A hide-and-seek game where you paint yourself to blend into the map, made by two people in two months, just made $60 million. That's the winner of this quarter's Steam Scanner — and it's the one idea on the list mobile genuinely can't clone.The closing caveat matters: it's survivorship bias — 20K+ games hit Steam a year — and Steam's discovery means a Mecha Chameleon never gets brute-forced by three Voodoo clones in a month. That's the whole difference between the two platforms.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 The Steam Scanner is back — Q2, smallest to biggest04:20 Taskbar Hero — an idle RPG in your taskbar (and the widget hint)08:00 Supermarket Chaos & Oaken Tower — the tidy-up trend and an idle PvP tower12:00 Idle gacha, Solarpunk & the evolve-into-a-crab roguelite18:20 Librarian & Rome's Dead — high-budget cleaning and Roman survivor-slop22:10 Vampire Crawlers, Paralives & the co-op casino-debt game27:20 The winner — Mecha Chameleon, $60M by two people35:30 Survivorship bias and why Steam can't be brute-forcedThis 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 LancaricDo you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

In today's episode on 7th Sept, we explain what Sugar Cosmetics' 80% valuation drop reveals about the economics of India's D2C beauty market.Sign up for the FREE insurance masterclass from Ditto

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Find the Cat 2 — now in color02:40 Cat-as-ornament hiding and 70-cat hard levels04:20 Shorter levels, more interstitials — the pacing change08:15 The meow is the whole game13:00 Rewarded ads, 260-second Google formats & the Mintegral fix18:00 The numbers — 125K downloads/day, 350K DAU, vs Find the Cat 124:40 Felix's ad-scaling thresholds and the banner decoy28:30 The creatives — AI doctors, 17 playables & find the IP infringementThis 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 LancaricDo you have UA questions nobody can answer? Ask ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Matej AI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the First UA AI in the gaming industry! https://lancaric.me/matej-ai

Newzoo says the global games market hits $213.9B in 2026, with mobile the largest platform at $121.1B and — for the first time in a while — the fastest-growing one. And that mobile number is still missing the $10-15B earned off-platform that the trackers can't see. Three stories this Friday, plus the weather.Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news. First, Newzoo's 2026 Global Games Market forecast (via Michiel Buijsman, August 25): $213.9B total, up 6.1%, with growth across all platforms and regions; mobile at $121.1B (+6.8%) ahead of console ($46.9B, +5.1%, anchored by GTA 6's November launch) and PC ($45.9B, +5%, moderating after a record 12% in 2025). The mobile growth is coming from deeper spending per player, Chinese publishers gaining share abroad, and expanding D2C — and Felix layers on the off-platform caveat from the recent FastSpring/Chip episode, meaning mobile's true size is meaningfully larger than reported. The player-side forecast is the strategic one: 3.7B players in 2026 (+4.4%) but growth slowing to ~3.2% through 2029 as penetration flattens at ~62% of the online population — so future growth depends on retaining and monetizing existing audiences, not adding new ones. Second, Makers Fund closed its $250M Fund IV (bringing AUM to $1.5B), the San Francisco games-VC behind Dream Games and Voldex — exactly the kind of capital the industry needs flowing to the next generation of studios. Third, AppsFlyer secured a $400M credit line from Bank Leumi on top of a June transaction that valued it at $2.7B (Google, Meta, Unity, and Moloco as minority investors, and liquidity for long-time backers like General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs). Felix's finance read: they bought out investors who wanted out after the IPO failed, came up short on cash, and took on debt to fund growth toward being big enough to go public.Then the weather: Smash Fest leads US iOS free downloads, Meow Doku is #2 (and #1 on Google Play, beating Roblox), Block Out and Magic Sort (both Grand Games) follow, and Royal Smash vs Smash Fest is now a live fight for the biggest smash game.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Three stories and the weather — Friday news00:40 Newzoo 2026 — $214B market, mobile $121B and growing fastest02:30 The off-platform asterisk — mobile's real size03:30 Player growth is slowing — retention is the new growth05:10 Makers Fund closes $250M Fund IV06:20 AppsFlyer's $400M credit line — the post-IPO read08:00 The weather — Smash Fest, Meow Doku, and the smash-game fight---------------------------------------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

SEASON 4, EP. 248Guest: Ryan Bartlett | Co-Founder & Chairman, True Classic | Los Angeles, CaliforniaWeb: trueclassictees.comLinkedIn: Ryan Bartlett (30,000+ followEPISODE SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYSRyan Bartlett flunked out of Michigan State, went broke trying to make it as a poker pro in Vegas, worked nightclub VIP rooms in Orlando and LA, and then spent a year quietly researching the most saturated, commoditized category in fashion before deciding to shoot his shot. That company is True Classic, now one of the fastest-growing D2C apparel brands in the world.But this episode is not really about T-shirts. It is about what happens when a founder with a service heart builds a company around the belief that the customer experience matters more than the money. Ryan and Bart connect over Ritz Carlton-level service, the Humanality framework, and a story that started with two canceled orders, a TikTok live comment, and ended with five brand new True Classic shirts showing up at Bart's door unannounced.Ryan talks about the parents who believed in him through every pivot, the stepbrother who reminded him of a promise he made at 19 in the Bahamas, the co-founder who ran with the culture from day one, and why he tells his customer service team to throw the 30-day return window out the window. Every time. No exceptions. At all costs.What You Will Walk Away WithAt all costs means exactly that. Ryan's customer service mantra is simple: the customer needs to have a good experience, period. Even if True Classic loses money on the transaction. The word of mouth from one bad experience costs far more than the refund. His team knows this without being told twice.Ritz Carlton service is not a hospitality concept. It is a business model. Ryan built True Classic's culture around the same standard Bart learned at the Ritz. Surprise and delight. Notice, anticipate, over-deliver. CSAT score of 4.97 at all times. These were not aspirational goals. They were the baseline.Parents who believe in you change everything. Ryan credits his parents more than any business school, course, or mentor. They backed every instrument, every idea, every pivot. That unconditional belief became the confidence that let him walk into the most saturated category in fashion and know he was going to crush it.Most people get into businesses they do not love. Ryan's fill-in-the-blank answer is the throughline of his entire story: most people start businesses for the opportunity, not the passion. And when year two or three gets brutal, the opportunity is not enough to keep you going. The love is what keeps you going.It was never about the T-shirt. It was about giving 6 million guys the confidence to leave the house feeling good about themselves. That was always the North Star. The revenue followed the mission, not the other way around.Optimization never stops. Ryan lives in what he calls optimization mode — constantly scanning for things that are a 7 out of 10 and figuring out how to make them a 10. His next chapter is not another product. It is teaching the next generation of D2C founders how to build and scale a brand using what he actually learned from doing it, not from repackaging other people's advice.

Offline-Stores, TikTok Shop, KI-Content und Community-Building: Der E-Commerce fordert D2C-Marken immer wieder neu heraus. In dieser Folge spricht Karo mit Alisa Jahnke, Mitgründerin und CEO der Schmuckmarke Purelei, über den Weg von der ersten 500-Euro-Investition zu einem E-Commerce-Unternehmen mit knapp 70 Millionen Euro Jahresumsatz. Wie hat Purelei den Wandel von reinem Social-Media-Marketing hin zu eigenen Offline-Stores in München, Köln und Palma gemeistert? Welche Rolle spielen die eigene App und das etablierte Subscription-Modell für die langfristige Kundenbindung? Und warum sorgte die erste Live-Shopping-Session auf TikTok Shop bei Purelei für Ernüchterung? Alisa teilt außerdem ihre praktischen Erfahrungen mit KI in der Content-Produktion, verrät die Internationalisierungspläne für die kommenden Jahre und erklärt, warum der direkte Kontakt zur Community und ein strategischer Markenaufbau für Purelei unverzichtbar bleiben. Das Gespräch im Überblick: (1:30) 10 Jahre Purelei: Von 500 Euro zu 70 Mio. Umsatz (9:58) Vom Social-Media-Marketing zum eigenen Offline-Store (18:46) App, Loyalty-Programm & Subscription-Modell (28:57) Ernüchterung beim TikTok Live-Shopping (31:36) KI-Einsatz in der Content-Produktion (36:53) Internationalisierung & Zukunftspläne This podcast uses ad tracking. Learn more via Spotify Ad Analytics terms of service and Podstars privacy policy.

OOC is marketed as "playable anime." There's almost no anime in it. It's a wall of text — an AI-powered dungeon master running an interactive story you steer with your own prompts. And it's doing an estimated $100K a day, 74% of it from the US, on pure AI-generated text. Welcome to the weirdest, most future-facing app the crew has covered.We break down OOC by New AI Entertainment (a subsidiary of Korean AI company VRTN) — and use it as a window into the fast-scaling "AI companion" / LLM-driven-content category. We walk the actual experience (a micro-drama-style menu of isekai and anime scenarios, but instead of scripted choices you type free-text prompts, and the LLM improvises the world like a Dungeons & Dragons game master — Jakub compares it directly to 1970s multi-user dungeons, the text-only RPGs that existed before graphics), why the generative freedom is both the magic and the flaw (you can break the story like the genie-with-infinite-wishes paradox, and the AI has to scramble to hold it together), and the token economy (you burn ~90 tokens per response on the good model, run dry in a handful of replies, and get pushed to refill — with 30% off on web). Then the numbers and the category: OOC at ~$100K/day since a June launch with sky-high US IAP conversion, sitting alongside PolyBuzz, Tipsy / Live Your Story (~$500K/day), Status, and others - all LLM-driven content apps that barely existed two years ago. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 "Playable anime" — and why there's no anime03:20 How it actually plays — you write the prompts08:00 It's a 1970s text MUD with an AI dungeon master12:00 The genie problem — breaking the story13:40 The token economy — pay for the good model20:40 The numbers — $100K/day, 74% US, and the category35:00 Why it's not on AppLovin (and the missed playable play)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 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 Lancaric⁠Matej 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

Cullen Gilchrist has spent 15 years watching food and beverage brands succeed and fail. As CEO of First Run, he has seen enough companies light money on fire chasing growth, distribution, and viral moments to know exactly where the pattern breaks down every single time.In this episode Cullen and Destaney get into why scaling never fixes a margin problem, why repeat purchases are the only metric that actually tells you if your product is working, and why the fundamentals of building a great brand really have not changed in a hundred years. AI, TikTok shop, and D2C have just added more ways to ignore them.If you are building a CPG brand or advising one, this one is worth your time.

Almost every game that tried the Backpack Hero setup on mobile failed. Overgeared Hero didn't — it's the strongest adaptation the crew has seen; it's doing ~$100K a day, and it pulled off the thing most Asian-developed RPGs can't: it cracked the US.We break down Overgeared Hero by Craft (Korea) — a mid-core RPG built on a Hobby/RPG chassis (gacha, energy, idle expedition, gear-merge, endless tower, pet dungeons) but with a genuinely novel core: inventory-Tetris roguelite runs where you arrange, merge, and position gear in a backpack, and adjacency bonuses (place items near the right weapon or armor) turn it into more than just Tetris. The standout mechanic Jakub unpacks: your upgradeable starting gear sits outside the recipe book, so meta-progression makes you stronger at the start of each run — a roguelite spend-depth lever that lets them keep raising enemy stats and keep you spending. They cover the numbers (~$100K/day since a June launch, ~20K downloads/day, and crucially 24% of revenue from the US, then Japan at 23% and Korea at 13% — rare US strength for an Asian mid-core), the deliberately simple ad setup (12 rewarded placements, all unlocked at once after floor-one round-six, ~15% ad revenue / ~$19K/day, with LINE in the stack for Japan), and why this audience (hardcore PC-pixel, Castlevania/Shovel Knight/Balatro-adjacent, the players who check a tier list before they play) doesn't want aggressive interstitials and can't be scaled on cheap high-volume traffic. Then the UA: ~2,700 creatives, heavy AI, Hobby-style explanatory/altered-gameplay hooks, a channel mix that finally diversified from Facebook/Unity/AdMob into AppLovin 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 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/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

In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, we look at the proposed $103,000 H-1B fee and what it could mean for foreign tech hiring and international students. We also cover Delhivery's higher shipping charges for D2C brands ahead of the festive season, the Centre's public consultation on reforms to India's examination system, and IndiGo Ventures' investment in AI startup Sarvam as the airline explores AI across its operations.

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.  

Soft Launch Sonar is where we dig through the millions of games brewing in soft launch to find the patterns before anyone else. This time: Century's not-so-secret second account, Supercent cloning Smash Fest twice in a week, Miniclip taking a swing at Forex, and a Smash Fest clone count that's hit 123 with the honest verdict that almost none of it contains a single new idea.Supercent's two near-identical Smash Fest clones (Wackstack and Smashdown) shipped in one week, part of a clone wave Felix now counts at 123 — the Pixel-Flow-sold-for-a-billion gold rush in full swing, with everyone piling in despite zero genre expertise. Combo Games brings a puzzle spread (a promising arrows-with-holes ball game, a bubble-associations game, and the obligatory Cube Land clone "Cube Smash"), Miniclip surfaces a mysterious Forex entry (a Chinese-owned British studio going the other way), Match Villains' UA chart is flatlined (pivoting to LiveOps and profitability), and the crew heaps genuine praise on Total Battle for a slow-and-steady hockey stick that's now doing record revenue by owning its "gate" niche. Plus InnoGames, Say Games, and Gamespark — rumored to be RiverGames trying to wrestle back 4X share with a one-to-one Last War template in King Shot visuals.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 Soft Launch Sonar returns — millions of games, one crew02:20 Century's secret "Innovation" account — merge + Forex only06:40 Top Force Commander — Century's King Shot clone13:00 Supercent's two Smash Fest clones and the 123-clone wave18:20 Combo Games' puzzle spread and the Cube Land clone24:00 Miniclip does Forex + Total Battle's slow-and-steady miracle31:40 Gamespark — the rumored RiverGames comeback playThis 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 Lancaric⁠Matej 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

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.

We break down XP Hero by Supercent: an idle RPG built on the same Alien Invasion core as Butcher Hero, but with far better onboarding and vastly more ads. They walk the deep feature set (a growing hero, monetized cargo capacity and return tickets, boss raids that force you to upgrade a whole team, Legend of Slime-style blessings, gacha chests from the Habby template, a PvP intrusion system, an endless tower, and map-spawning chests), the ad monetization (Felix's counted 47 rewarded placements, an interstitial on a 60-90 second cooldown tied to rewarded views, 53% ad revenue versus Butcher Hero's 32%, landing ~$85K/day in ads on possibly-undercounted DAU — so plausibly $200K and maybe $400K/day total),Then the UA masterclass: Supercent runs a fake-out "no ads / idle lumber / tower-defense" playable that has nothing to do with the game, This is genius, not lazy, because 4X originally stole those concepts from idle RPGs - so Supercent, having finally built the actual idle RPG everyone's been imitating, is just stealing it back. ~1,300 creatives in three days (700 new), heavy AI, AppLovin + Mintegral led, all channels running.⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 XP Hero — Butcher Hero with better onboarding (and way more ads)04:00 The monetized-cargo mechanic and forced backtracking06:00 The interstitial-every-60-seconds cooldown trick08:10 The deep feature set — boss raids, blessings, gacha, tower14:00 47 rewarded placements — Felix reads the whole list18:45 The numbers — 53% ad revenue, ~$200-400K/day22:45 The "no ads" lie and the fake-out playable27:00 Stealing 4X creatives back — the UA masterclassThis 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

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

What happens when a Food Network celebrity chef turns her culinary expertise toward solving a massive supply chain issue? In this episode of Retail War Games, Jeremy sits down with Nettie Frank, Celebrity Chef and CEO & Founder of CITREVE. Nettie shares her wild journey competing on Food Network's Cake Wars and Chopped, managing high-volume pastry departments in luxury resorts, and eventually launching CITREVE—a patented line of freeze-dried, flavor-layered citrus and produce. Nettie breaks down the difference between dehydrated vs. freeze-dried ingredients, how CITREVE reduces restaurant citrus waste from 40% down to zero, and how culinary innovation is reshaping both D2C consumer experiences and commercial food service. Watch the full conversation for a fresh look at CPG innovation, food sustainability, and building a high-growth brand!  

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!

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

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

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.

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!

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)

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.