Happy Tuesday. Hope everyone has had a great week. I'm going to switch it up and actually start sitting next Tuesdays. It works better with my schedule, and hopefully it will work for yours as well.
Let's talk about some painful lessons I’ve learned over the last few years.. I wanted to reflect on the past few years and share some things I would change or lessons I have learned. These will be a bit all over the place. I don't know how many there will be, but let's get into it.
Before we do, I want to thank today's first sponsor, Insense. Insense is your one stop shop for ad creative and influencer needs. Incense is a combo agency and software platform trusted by over 2,000 top-scaling DTC brands. Because you read my newsletter, you already know how pivotal both ad creative and earned media from influencers are. But it can be really difficult and time-intensive to do it all, especially with a small team. Insense can really help by matching you with vetted creators and influencers, to get you exposure and content for both paid and organic social. You can also easily get spark and whitelisting access, run partnership ads, and more all inside insense. There’s a reason so many brands trust Insense for their ad creative needs. If you book a call before April 24th, you can take $200 off your campaign.
Number One: The first lesson I've learned is that you need product expansion to grow. It sounds obvious, but many marketers, especially in DTC, think they can just scale ads on one funnel forever. The best way and the most sustainable way to grow, is to launch new products that can attract new customers, preferably appealing to new segments of the market.
Think about how musicians do it. They go on tour, but they can't just tour on the same album forever. While a few can, those are very rare. Most artists need to continually come out with new material. Not only do they need new content, but they also look to break into new categories, like Beyoncé doing country, which opens them up to a new genre of fans.
So if you want to grow, you need new products to break into new markets and expand your total addressable market (TAM).
It’s the best and most sustainable way to grow.
Number Two: I would get really good at brand partnerships a lot earlier on. We haven't really done a big one or what I would call a successful one, but I think that is a blind spot. If done properly, brand partnerships can be amazing for credibility and opening up new markets. As brands get caught in the Meta death spiral where they can’t seem to profitably reach new audience, they need new ways to break out, and partnerships are an amazing option. Brand partnerships, if executed correctly, can be a great strategy.
The right one can grow reach, gain credibility into new markets and sub-audiences, and even make a little bit of money. They can be as small as social giveaways to as large as co-created products or collections.
Number Three: Drive down the correct costs only. There's a lot of value in reducing costs, and you should stay as lean as possible. However, you have to be smart about which costs you're driving down. Understand which costs are variable and incremental and which ones are not. For example, ad creative is probably not a cost you should try to reduce; it can be problematic and unsustainable if you cut it too much. You don't want payroll to be too low as a percentage of revenue, but there are some costs you can reduce without hurting your business, like software. Be diligent with OPEX costs and software costs, but avoid cutting marketing or creative costs too much. You need to know which costs are strategic, which ones help your business grow, and which ones increase your profit when you invest in them.
There are strategic costs, and non-strategic ones. Drive down the latter as much as you can and keep investing in the former. But you will inevitably mistake the two, and the only way to find out is to fuck around and find out. Just learn as quickly as you can, and don’t make the same mistakes twice.
Number Four: Only grow as fast as you can sustainably. There is such a thing as growing too fast. It’s very hard to create demand but it’s easier to pull demand forward. The hard thing is knowing which Ike is happening to your business. It’s hard to be honest with ourselves in these moments. So many brands will continue to run sales or promos to help but their numbers and it feels great, but might be only pulling demand forwards. I’m learning to take a longer term approach. I’d rather grow a little slower, but do it a lot more sustainably. You don’t wan the whiplash that happens with crazy growth, followed by the period of catching up before you go into the next crazy growth spurt. Take it from my; it’s so much easier to grow a bit slower an build properly. But that doesn’t sounds good on X.
Partner Of The Week – If you're still using spreadsheets to manage cash, pay bills, or run forecasts, it’s time to upgrade your finance stack. Highbeam Intelligence is the first Agentic Finance Platform built for consumer brands.
It connects to your Shopify, QuickBooks, banks, and more—then spins up expert AI agents like Analyst, Treasury, and Bookkeeper to automate the stuff that normally eats up your day. We’re talking real-time cash flow planning, live reporting, automated reconciliations, and treasury moves that actually optimize your balance—not just monitor it.
Operators at brands like Avocado, State Bags, Branch Furniture, and New York or Nowhere are already running on it. It’s like giving your finance team superpowers—without hiring 5 more people.
Special offer for readers: Highbeam is giving you 3 free months of Highbeam Intelligence. Just connect your data (it takes 5 minutes), and you can start using the AI Analyst right away.
-Cody