The wait is over …

But this isn’t your typical “announcement.”

Yes, we launched a brand-new show.

Yes, it is the highest-production, deepest-researched, most narrative-driven, most over-delivering on truth, drama, and humor project we’ve ever undertaken.

And yes, there is a new sponsor.

However, none of that matters if it doesn’t serve you.

That’s why we want to introduce you to Operators Titans + the Operators Masterclass on Channel Expansion …

🔥 Sean Frank reveals just about everything (in all its glory)

🦸‍♀️ Katy Mimari x Matt Bertulli share 10 lessons from 21 years

🤓 Aaron Orendorff invites you to lock in first access today

Sean Frank

CEO, Ridge

Two years ago, me and some friends started a podcast.

It was a direct rip-off of "All In."

Except we ONLY talked about ecom.

No politics, no world events. Just boring ecom operations talk.

NICHE IN

Now that podcast is a real company.

Four fulltime employees and millions in revenue this year.

All while I only work 2 hours a week ;)

That podcast became a network-

We have multiple weekly shows, this newsletter, and quarterly online events with speakers.

Recently, we hired Aaron Orendorff to come in and run things.

He is an equity partner and has creative freedom.

His goal-
Help us reach more builders.

That was less than 30 days ago.

Today we are ready to announce the newest project from the operators network.

OPERATORS TITANS E001

Our first guest is Katy Mimari. She runs Caden Lane. It is a beast of a business.

You can watch her episode here.

This time, a direct rip-off of how I built this.

Where 9 operators and Marketing operators are freeform + conversational, this show is

- narrative driven.
- Highly produced
- Punchy
- Researched

We want to tell the untold stories of the best builders of our generation.

Not the same vc backed cos, not the same dtc darlings.

We want to go deep with the real people building the brands you see in your feeds.

I want to thank everyone who is a part of the operators fandom.

My friends who supported us, my enemies who get weaker every day, and our wonderful sponsors.

Applovin, WHO IS IN THE SP500 AND I HAVE GREATLY DEFENDED, has come in to sponsor these first episodes of titans. They are a mobile gaming ad platform - the ads you see on Candy Crush and Words With Friends (etc).

I have spent millions on applovin since last q4, and any way I slice it - the ads work. Haus holdouts, Northbeam reads, our post-purchase survey questions.

They are serving ads to over 1B daily active users in a unique and hard-to-reach cohort.

Plus, they just opened up international and I'm ripping.

If you want to try it, they will give you free $5000 when you spend $5000.

But you have to go to our page to get the code.

It will not be released until Applovin opens Axon its self-service ads manager on October 1st.

If you sign up, we will send you our code. We have 100 of them.

Aaron is so good that we are not just offering you codes.

We are making a channel guide, hosting a masterclass online, and releasing more titan eps.

SO MUCH VALUE

Thank you to every other sponsor who took a risk on us.

And aaron isn't done.

He is launching two more shows in the next 12 months,

We are looking for more guests, more hosts, more everything.

We want to find the untold stories...
and shine some light on them

(And knock off more podcast formats)

This is niche content, we aren't talking millions of views.

We want to build the go to industry specific network.

Amazon operators, branding operators, lawyer operators, influencer operators, creative operators, data operators to FORKLIFT OPERATORS- we will have a show for you!

This is our first time making a good podcast. It would mean a lot to me and aaron if you listened to it.

If you want to help us build, please write back.

THE (TITANS) FEED

Operators Titans E001: Caden Lane With Katy Mimari

Matt Bertulli

CEO, Lomi & Pela Case

How One Founder Tore Down Her Brand to Rebuild a +$100M DTC Baby Empire: 10 Lessons

Katy Mimari didn’t start Caden Lane because she saw a gap in the market. She didn’t have some grand vision of disrupting the baby industry or a problem she wanted to solve.

She just wanted to run a company, any company.

Then work out the details from there.

Twenty-one years later, her scrappy approach has turned into over $100M in annual revenue, with ambitions to hit $500M in the next five years.

The path from sketching diaper bags in 2004 to building one of America’s fastest-growing baby brands wasn’t paved with perfect plans or venture capital.

It was built on instinct, ignorance-as-superpower, and a willingness to burn everything down when it stopped working.

These aren’t polished lessons from someone who had it all figured out. They’re battle scars from a founder who made every mistake possible, learned fast, and kept moving forward.

1. Scale beyond your own effort, or you’ll hit a ceiling fast

While still in college, running her infant photography business, Katy was pulling in six figures but working herself sick every Christmas and Easter.

She’d stay up until 3am attaching printed photo proofs to order forms, delivering them to schools, even trailering a pony around Texas for themed photoshoots.

That’s when she realized building wealth meant building systems that worked without her.

I learned I need to figure out a way to create a business that’s scalable beyond my own efforts.

I was crushing it and making all this money, but then I couldn’t add more days to the calendar.

It’s not like I knew something that somebody else didn’t know. I just knew that I couldn’t scale beyond what I was doing because I couldn't find more hours in the day.

2. The best education comes from watching, not reading

Katy grew up with a front-row seat to entrepreneurship.

Her mother started daycare centers while in law school, eventually scaling to 13 locations with over 300 employees.

As a kid, Katy sat at a play desk in her mom’s home office, wrote to-do lists for her younger sister who played secretary, and tagged along to banker meetings, insurance negotiations, and property walkthroughs.

Amidst that, she absorbed what textbooks could never have taught her.

I remember walking the properties and [my mom] putting stakes in the ground and talking about the floor plans of the daycare and how they expand out.

I watched her build the first school — literally ground up, brick by brick. And I watched her grow to a very successful company. That’s how I figured it out. Observing.

3. Survival mode teaches you what actually matters

Only a few years after founding Caden Lane, the Great Recession hit like a freight train.

Credit cards stopped processing. Wholesale orders dried up. Store owners called crying because they couldn’t pay rent.

Katy watched revenue plummet as retailers closed faster than she could sign new accounts. For an entire year, she operated with one goal — keep $10,000 in the bank account.

I felt like if I could keep $10,000 in my bank account, I could pay for our rent and our 3PL and I could pay payroll. Three part-time employees. I wasn’t paying myself at all.

That was my magic number.

And when my account got below that, then I was definitely having a bottle of wine in the bathtub that night.

4. Sometimes you have to kill your business to save it

Originally built through wholesale, Katy’s frustration with junior buyers dictating what moms wanted and watching retailers slowly strangle her brand reached a breaking point.

On New Year’s Eve, she sent an email to each of the brand’s partners. The message was simple and brutal — a full shutdown of the wholesale model that had generated millions in revenue and put Caden Lane on the map.

The problem? It was also holding Katy back from the customer relationships she knew she needed.

I wanted to talk to my customer directly. I felt like I knew her better than some of these buyers did. And they weren’t delivering the message like I wanted them to deliver. I wanted to find the fun and the joy in it again.

December 31st, 2016, we sent an email out to all 3,000 or 4,000 stores and said …

“Thank you so much. We really appreciate your business. But we’re going direct-to-consumer now.

5. Ignorance is a genuine entrepreneurial superpower

When Katy made the leap to ecommerce, she didn’t know what SEO was, had never heard of conversion rate optimization, and thought Facebook was less relevant than MySpace.

After launching on Shopify, every inbound link was broken. Traffic and revenue came to a halt for three months.

But because she didn’t know what was “supposed” to work, she just kept trying, kept testing, kept pushing buttons and hoping something would stick. Eventually, it did — to the tune of explosive growth.

When I first started, I just didn’t think anything was beyond what we could figure out how to do.

Today, my brain immediately goes to this could happen and this could happen and this could go wrong.

I want my younger self standing here next to me going, “What are you scared of? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Just do it.”

I want her to literally be right here talking to me: “I thought you were gonna do it. Why aren’t you doing it?”

6. Don’t giftwrap your customers for your competitors

Until Caden Lane hit about $30 million in revenue, the brand was essentially a one-moment company, the hospital newborn photo.

It created the perfect swaddle, outfit, and name announcement for that lifetime milestone. Moms came, bought the whole package, took their Instagram-perfect hospital photos, and then … disappeared.

I was like, we’re crushing it. Everybody wants Caden Lane for their hospital newborn photo. My brand is big.

What I didn’t recognize at the time was that I was literally packaging up my customer and wrapping her in a bow and passing her off to my competitors because I didn’t have any products to sell to her after her baby was born.

7. The process of not selling can be harder than divorce

In 2021, at a dinner party in Austin, someone casually told Katy her company could be worth $75–100 million.

Like any of us would, she chased it.

Hired bankers. Did management presentations for New York PE firms. Went through financial audits all while planning a wedding the day before Black Friday.

She answered every question, hit every projection, and got multiple offers. Then, days before closing, sitting in Hawaii about to get married, she realized …

I was so distraught because I felt like I’m an idiot if I walk away. This is what people do. This is why you build a company. This is what you’re supposed to do.

My mom said, “You need to think about what it looks like if you keep it.”

I knew in that moment that it wasn’t the right thing. It was my gut instinct. I just knew it wasn’t the right time. It was scary to think that maybe I couldn’t get it to the next level.

Going through a process from beginning to end was exhausting. It was definitely harder than getting divorced.

8. Nimbleness beats perfect planning when markets shift

Katy doesn’t do five-year strategic plans.

She doesn’t map out growth milestones quarter by quarter or build elaborate forecasting models.

However, that’s exactly why Caden Lane survived wholesale’s collapse, pivoted to DTC, scaled through COVID, and continues adapting while others execute rigid playbooks.

When you’re not married to a detailed plan, you can see what’s happening around you and move fast.

My CFO asks me questions like, “What are we doing in the next five years?” And my answer is, “I don’t know.” Living in the moment and then also having a north star to reach for has worked to our advantage.

Sometimes when you plan things out so far, you get in this pigeonhole of this is what the plan is, we’re sticking to it.

It’s worked to our advantage to be fast to market and nimble. We operate like we’re a small company, but we’re a large company.

9. The most important word in leadership is compassion

Growing up, Katy thought being a leader meant being the boss, telling people what to do, being in charge.

Running a company staffed almost entirely by women, many of them moms like herself, taught her something different.

Leadership isn’t about authority or command. It’s about helping people understand what it means to be great leaders themselves.

Compassion makes a really great leader. People who think about leaders being bosses need to grow up.

They think, if I’m a leader, it means I’m the boss. I’m telling people what to do.

But I don’t think that’s it.

You are a shepherd helping them understand what it means to be a great leader. You have to have compassion for them because you have to understand where they’re coming from.

10. Community is the most underrated growth channel

Everyone chases the latest marketing tactic. Whatever keyword is trending in “marketing bro land,” as Katy calls it.

Shiny object syndrome runs rampant.

The strategy that’s powered Caden Lane from the beginning isn’t new or flashy. It’s moms telling other moms what to buy.

It’s treating customers like actual human beings worth knowing. It’s building relationships that turn into word-of-mouth that money can’t manufacture.

Most brands underestimate this because it doesn’t scale overnight.

To this day, I still go to market with the manager of our retail store because I love seeing it. What’s evolving, what’s trending. I was my customer for so long. Now I’m not her. I’m not her grandma, but I could be soon.

More brands should lean into understanding their customers and using their community as really the best marketing channel.

Here’s what nobody tells you about building a nine-figure brand … you’re going to get it wrong more than you get it right.

You’ll question whether to keep going or cash out. You’ll lose millions to mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.

You’ll have moments where $10k in the bank feels like winning; others, where walking away from multi-million-dollar paydays feels like freedom.

If you stay close to your customer, trust your instincts, and remain willing to burn down what’s not working to build what will, you might just build something that lasts 21 years and counting.

Katy’s still not done.

I hope you aren’t either.

Operators Titans: Masterclass

Like Sean said … we aren’t done yet.

Alongside the new show, we’ve also put together the ultimate expansion pack to help you grow during Q4.