You Really Need to Know Your Numbers

I’ve struggled to find a focus for this newsletter the past 2 years. 101 ideas and jumping

I’ve watched brilliant founders with incredible products crash and burn. I saw talented teams with years of experience struggle to build sustainable businesses. Meanwhile, some seemingly "average" brands were quietly building empires.

What was the difference?

The answer became obvious once I stopped looking at the obvious things.

Great products don't make great businesses.

I've seen incredible products with years of graft launched by passionate founders that fail spectacularly. Beautiful packaging, innovative features, celebrity endorsements… none of it mattered when the unit economics were broken.

Take the direct-to-consumer mattress wars. Casper had an incredible product, brilliant marketing, and massive funding. But their customer acquisition costs spiralled while their lifetime value couldn't keep pace. Despite being first to market in a huge category, they struggled for years because the economics never worked.

Going DTC is a hell of a lot harder than the best selling author tells you, the podcast host tells you… the linkedin EcOmMerCe GuRu tells you… it’s even harder when you don’t know your numbers.

Great people don't make great businesses either.

Some of the smartest, most driven founders I know have built impressive revenue machines that can't sustain themselves. They hire world-class teams, execute flawless campaigns, and generate millions in sales… while slowly bleeding to death.

The problem isn't talent. It's focus.

They're optimising for the wrong metrics. Revenue growth. Customer acquisition. Brand awareness. All important, but not the foundation.

Great numbers? That's the secret to DTC success.

Not vanity metrics. Not hockey stick growth charts for investor decks. Real numbers. Economics that actually work.

The brands that thrive long-term have one thing in common: they get intimate with their numbers. They know their true customer acquisition cost (not just ad spend). They understand their real lifetime value (not theoretical projections). They can tell you their contribution margin by customer segment, by channel, by geography. They scale with confidence because they know their numbers.

Most importantly, they make every growth decision through an economics-first lens.

For the past decade and a half, that's where my focus has been. Not growth hacking. Not viral marketing strategies. Not the latest ad platform du jour.

Economics-first business strategy.

Clients hire me to give them confidence in the numbers they're working from. To help them build lean. To ensure they're using the right data, the right tech, the right economic foundations.

You can't scale what you can't measure accurately. And you can't measure accurately if your economic foundations are built on quicksand.

When you start with economics, everything else falls into place:

The brands winning in 2025 aren't necessarily the most creative or best-funded. They're the ones that cracked the economics code first, then scaled intelligently.

Every week, I'll share extra economics lessons that separate thriving DTC brands from those burning cash. Real insights from working in real P&Ls with real consequences.

No fluff. No vanity metrics. No "growth at all costs" mentality.

Just the economics that actually matter for building businesses that last.

Because while everyone talks about DTC success stories, most brands quietly struggle with profitability, and the survivors aren't the loudest or the most funded.

They're the ones who got their numbers right.