😯 Cody Plofker reveals how he plans to achieve 1–3% OpEx

🤩 Matt Bertulli gives 10 lessons from building $100M brands

🤑 Sean Frank explains how to get double digit growth on Meta

And you’re invited to our Q4 workshop.

Cody Plofker Advisor, Jones Road

How Are We Going to Run Winks at 1% OpEx?

Before we launched Winks, I said my goal was to hit 1% OpEx. It might be more like 3%. But still …

I know that sounds crazy.

AI is going to play a huge part. We set a simple rule:

We’ve already automated a bunch. Inevitably, some things still need a person, and payroll is what slaughters OpEx.

A US hire costs 3-4x what the same person costs in LATAM, so we’re hiring contractors through our exclusive recruitment partner, Proppel. Just like I did at Jones Road.

They find great people, we stay lean, and the money we save goes into scaling instead of headcount.

We’re currently hiring a Graphic Designer with them, and I’m super impressed with the quality of their talent, as usual.

Their candidates are fully vetted. When they present them, you can see their experience and portfolio like the CV above.

Plus, we can hire candidates as contractors, so we don’t have to pay agency fees every month. You pay a one-off fee, and that’s it, the hire is part of your team with a 3-month guarantee.

They’ve been a great partner for us at Jones Road and now at Winks. Right now they’re offering the Operators audience 10% off your first hire.

Matt Bertulli CEO, Pela + Lomi

10 (of 100) Lessons on Building a $100M Consumer Brand

I’ve spent 19+ years building companies.

Bootstrapped an ecommerce agency to over 100 people. Sold it. Then built Pela Case + Lomi with my Co-Founders.

I made every mistake in the book.

• Fired people too late
• Prioritized CAC over LTV
• Nearly ran out of cash

If I can do it, you can do it.

And I want to help. I’m sharing 100 lessons I’ve learned about building a $100M consumer brand. Here are the first ten.

1. Choose a Big Pond

You need to be in a massive category or in a category with high compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

It’s impossible to build a $100M brand in a $200M market. Because you will never own the majority share of your category.

The best brands in the world top out at 20% to 30% share.

When we started Pela, compostable phone cases was a niche within a massive category.

People thought we were crazy.

We focused on our niche for years. When the time was right, we expanded, added products, and reframed from “compostable phone case” to “everyday products that don’t poison you.”

Plus, a lot more angles.

Same product. Same brand. Endless TAM.

2. Build a Brand

I’ve thought about SaaS more than once.

• Fat margins
• No inventory
• Zero shipping

Consumer is tough. You spend money on inventory months before anybody pays you. You eat returns, damaged units, support tickets …

Then you go earn that same customer again next quarter.

It’s a hard way to make a living.

So why do it?

So many old companies in consumer.

Software is disruptive by nature because it owns workflows. Workflows get replaced. Somebody ships a better one and your customers are gone by the end of the quarter.

Consumer brands own identity.

Nobody changes their identity in a quarter. People carry those around for decades or even for life.

That’s why I’m still doing this 19+ years in.

3. Pay Yourself Right Now

I get to see inside a lot of consumer companies.

Coaching clients, M&A processes, and operators who tell me the real story after the podcast stops recording.

I’ve sat across from founders doing $80M who couldn’t make payroll without pulling on a line of credit. I’ve watched brands grow so fast the wheels came off.

Most of those problems are symptoms of one thing. Their unit economics don’t work. No amount of scale fixes them.

Then there are $30M brands that hand their owners millions in free cash (distributions) every year.

Consumer brands are really hard to sell.

You’re better off pulling out as much cash as possible right now than you are building for an exit.

4. <$20M, You Are The CMO

Founders (CEOs), hear me when I say this …

You are in charge of growth.

The early days are about obsessing over your customer so you can do better marketing (assuming your product doesn’t suck). That’s where your best ads will come from.

I ran ads myself at Pela far longer than was comfortable. Wrote briefs. Sat in every creative review.

I wasn’t the best marketer in the room. But I had an obsession with our customer. I read customer support emails. Read every review, social comment, always mining for new ad angles.

Every founder I know who got to $100M was (probably still is) deep in marketing.

You can hire a media buyer. You can hire an agency. But you can’t outsource obsessing over your customer.

5. Care About Little Things

Paid ads is rent that goes up 20% per year.

Meta works. Until it doesn’t. Then Google works. Until it doesn’t. Working and breaking is the cycle of paid media.

You need something else to work with your ads.

At Pela we focused on word of mouth.

Every month, >30% of our revenue comes from people who heard about us from their friends or family.

Why? We care about our customers.

This is boring work. It’s about small iterations on product. The unboxing experience. The support conversations with our team. All the little things.

It’s slow, expensive, and hard to see immediate pay-off.

But it compounds. People search our brand name instead of a category term. Traffic shows up with no CAC attached to it.

The rent of ads goes up. As long as we take care of customers, referrals go up, too. Branded search with it.

I’m not telling you to turn off your ads. Ads work. Ads are how most brands get large.

But ads should pour gas on the fire. Question is, have you already built a fire?

6. Create Leverage

There are only 8 points of leverage in a consumer brand:

1. High gross margin
2. Low OpEx; <15%
3. Cash conversion cycle
4. First order profitable
5. High lifetime value
6. Strong organic
7. Exceptional product
8. Large or growing TAM

Pela started with one: big TAM. Every year we picked a new one and went to work on it. Took us 7 years to get to 7/8.

The game isn’t easy; although it is simple.

Stack as many as you can.

7. Hire for Right Now

I’ve seen it happen a lot.

Brand does $20M. Founder is tired. So they go hire a VP of Marketing (or a CMO) out of a $200M company.

Great resume. Big logo. Everybody’s excited.

12 months later growth is flat. Why?

At $200M that person had a team, a budget, and a brand that already meant something. At $20M they have a Shopify login and need to be willing to have their fingers bleed a little.

Same title. Completely different job.​
​
There’s an order to this. Many founders skip steps and get burned.

Zero to $10M, it’s you. All of it. Every job. Maybe a co-founder or two. But it’s really all you.

$10M to $50M, you hire the 5 or 10 people who do the things you physically can’t do anymore: ops, product, and maybe some help in marketing if you’re good at building this kind of machine.

$30M+ is when you begin building real specialists into the team.

• Marketing
• Finance
• Supply chain

Past $50M you start hiring people to lead. My advice? Hire for the company you have right now.

8. Accept (Or Change) Your Category

I built two brands. Pela Case and Lomi.

Lomi has a subscription. You buy the machine once, and then you need the stuff that goes in it. Forever.

Really good LTV. The math works beautifully.

Pela Case? Our LTV sucks. Always has.

People buy a phone case every 2-3 years. That’s it. We get maybe 20% cross-sell at a max. Most customers come for one product and leave only to return 3+ years later.

It has been much easier to scale Lomi.

For subscription to work, two things have to be true. People consume your product on a predictable cycle. And they need a reason to stay.

We didn’t even try to build subscription into Pela.

Not every weakness is worth fixing. Some of them are just the category you picked. Accept it or change it.

9. Get Past 20% Returning Customers

If your 12-month repeat customer rate is under 20%, every dollar of growth has to be bought again next quarter.

We hit this wall at Pela. Revenue climbing. Repeat pretty flat. That’s the downside of selling phone cases.

Every conversation on our team was about CAC. How to get it down, which agency to hire/fire, what creative to test next.

None of that was the problem. We went back to the product.

• Better materials
• More categories
• Reasons to return

We now sell AirPod cases, watch bands, and other accessories. Went from 150 SKUs to +16,000.

We had to work our ass off to get LTV up.

But once repeat got above 20% inside 12 months, CAC mattered less because the same customer now paid us twice.

If you can’t get somebody to buy twice, you might just need more stuff to sell them.

10. Fire Them, Today

You have someone on your team you need to fire.

So why haven’t you?

I’ve got two rules that have never failed me when thinking about whether I should fire someone or not:

1 - Would I feel relief if they resign?
2 - Would I hire that person again today?

My two biggest regrets of my operating career are people I kept too long. And I know why I waited … firing sucks.

I kept finding reasons to do it later.

Now I know the cost is too high.

My best people are watching. They will only tolerate the B-player for so long. Then they’ll get poached by someone else with a more savage team.

You can’t build a great company if you’re too chicken to let people go. It’s just part of the game.

Accept it and play it fully.

Sean Frank CEO, Ridge

Double digit improvements on Meta

The algo can only make you rich if you feed it good data.

But platforms LIE
Easy solution.

​Northbeam Apex feeds your Northbeam data into Meta’s ad algorithm. So Zuck will optimize your spend against Northbeam instead of using platform-reported kibble.

They A/B tested Apex campaigns against default. Native reporting is beta.

well duh

You are feeding the world's most accurate ad performance data into the world's best ad algorithm.

Apex is included at no cost for Northbeam customers.

THE FEED

​12 Hard-Won Lessons We Wish We’d Learned Sooner​

​Incrementality Testing for Black Friday: What to Spend?​

​How to Start a Supplement Brand: Operators Build E3​

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, the five top stories in commerce and DTC.

1. Barilla Group Acquires Goodles: Food Business News

Barilla Group acquired innovative mac & cheese brand Goodles for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2020 by Jen Zeszut and Paul Earle, Goodles quickly emerged as a credible threat to incumbent brands with its nutrient-dense pasta, fun flavors, and excellent packaging.

As of today, Goodles controls 7.8% of US spending on shelf-stable mac & cheese. The company was backed by L Catterton, Springdale Ventures, and several other institutional investors.

2. Medici Brands Secures $250M: PR Newswire

Medici Brands, the parent company of David Protein and HallPass, raised $250M in Series B funding at a staggering $2.25B valuation.

Launched less than two years ago by RXBAR’s Peter Rahal, Medici’s revenue is now north of $300M and the company just unveiled its newest brand, HallPass. Greenoaks and Valor Equity Partners co-led the Series B round, with participation from Peter Rahal, ICONIQ, and Imaginary Ventures.

3. Nestle Sells Mainstream VMS Unit: Food Dive

Swiss consumer goods giant Nestle just sold its mainstream vitamins, minerals, and supplements portfolio for $1B. Nature’s Bounty, the #2 overall VMS brand in the United States, was included in the transaction + six other established brands.

The unit generated $1.2B in sales in 2025. The buyer is Yellow Wood Partners, an investment firm specializing in buying and turning around “unloved” brands.

4. Funday is Coming to America: SmartCompany

Australian better-for-you candy brand Funday is launching in the United States. The brand will debut at nearly 1,300 Target stores with five different products on September 13th.

Founded in 2020 by Daniel Kitay, Funday surpassed $100 million in revenue over the past 12 months in Australia and New Zealand. Funday contains no added sugar or sugar alcohols, and includes a dash of fiber and protein.

5. Good Culture Expands Leadership Team: Nosh

Fast-growing cottage cheese brand Good Culture expanded its leadership team after selling a majority stake to L Catterton in January. Kirk Jensen, who spent six years at Sovos Brands and helped scale Rao’s to over $1B in net sales, just joined Good Culture as Chief Operating Officer.

The company’s products are distributed in over 13,000 stores and velocities are 2-3x the category average. Jensen will help Good Culture keep up with rabid demand.

 Q4 Workshop (Encore) 

After three hours of holiday preparation content from the absolute best of the best in ecommerce two weeks ago …

I have never received so many requests for the recordings.

So we’ve scheduled an encore workshop for this Thursday Sep 10th from 4–5pm EST.

​​​​How to Scale, Spend, and Sell More This Holiday Season​​​​

It’ll only be one hour, with a much smaller group so we can workshop together.

Sean Frank + Connor MacDonald (Ridge); Connor Rolain + London Spilker (HexClad); Olivia Kory (Haus) + Jonathan Ramos (AppLovin).

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

P.S. (Disclaimer): Special thanks to Proppel and Northbeam for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

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