Dave Rekuc
@DaveRekuc
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President & COO @bambuearth
New Jersey, USA
Joined July 2009
You've probably heard people say that DTC businesses are bad cash businesses. Many operators badly misunderstand this when they start out. I certainly did. I've been working hard to get a better understanding of it and wrap my head around why and how. Here's what I've learned.
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@SeanEcom @mbertulli I fail to see how active litigation is incompatible with a takedown request for IP infringement.
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BeReal but it's connected to QuickBooks and it posts your latest p&l.
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Got the best news this morning - I'm officially cancer free!.
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@mattyglesias Before congestion pricing you could afford this two bedroom in NYC on a barista's salary with a single roommate.
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Worried about the GA4 update?. Don't be. Just follow this 47-step guide to replicate a task that currently takes you 4 seconds.
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After revealing that we moved our ad account over to be entirely cost cap (now cost per result) campaigns, I've gotten more questions on that than anything I've ever posted. Here's how we've used exclusively cost cap campaigns to scale to as much as $40k Facebook spend in a day.
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Landing page research hack. Go to /sitemap.xml on any Shopify store. That gets you the list of each of the sitemaps on that store. Go to /sitemap_pages_1.xml to see /pages specifically (often used for LPs). It's like ads library for landing pages except it's comprehensive.
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I wanted to go over a finance concept that is at the backbone of creating profitable DTC brands. Contribution margin (CM). Let’s take a look at:. - What it is.- 3 frameworks I use with CM to drive profit.
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Here's the harsh pill that 90%+ of meta-driven DTC brands need to swallow. - 1DC.- Get rid of the 3p attribution tool.- aMER is truth.- Exclude all customers.- There are 2 audiences - prospecting & full funnel.- GTFO of your ad account, make better ads, funnels, & products.
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I recently asked to see 5 to 10 of my follower’s financial statements for their DTC businesses. I want to walk through one of the first exercises I like to do when I get a P&L. A way I can quickly see to the core of a business and see how it runs.
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“What is my store's ideal MER?”. I’ve heard this question before and I think too many brands wind up simply choosing an arbitrary number where the finances “work out.”. But, I think there is a more logical way to break this down and arrive at an ideal MER for your org.
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"I'm in the arena" I whisper to myself as I smash refresh on ads manager and stare at Shopify live.
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We just hit our highest revenue month ever for Bambu. The result of 6 straight months of almost 16% compounding month-over-month growth. This is far from an overnight success. We had a really difficult 2nd half of 2021, specifically with acquisition.
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Drop your brand and I'll give you 3 ideas for offer tests you can run to try to dramatically improve gross margin per user.
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Uncommon truths about offer testing:. - Offer testing is a limit function. 95% of brands are very early on the curve (have lots of remaining upside). - The bigger the gap between product margin and gross margin, the more opportunity for win/win offer sculpting. - Pick & pack.
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Me (the marketer): ARE YOU PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR MIND? SHIPPING CUTOFF WAS WEEKS AGO, ORDER NOW. Me (the person): I should start my shopping soon.
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Strong beliefs loosely held:. - Turning your website into an app has zero or negative marginal value. - DTC businesses are not tech companies. Use off-the-shelf tech. - Any new brand needs to be expert in it's primary demand channel in-house for the first x million. - Collected.
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Over the years I've shared quite a few frameworks for how I think about DTC. I'm often asked for links to old threads, so I thought I'd make a canonical thread of threads!. A greatest hits album if you will.
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Just saw @Shopify's editions - definitely jam-packed with new features & releases. Quick run down of the features that immediately jumped out at me.
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I wanted to cover a topic I feel is typically misunderstood in DTC - discounting and the impact it has on profitability and future pricing power.
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“How much can we spend on advertising?”. I’ve heard this question before and I think it results in bad or arbitrary targets. The better question to ask is:. “When does my next dollar of advertising stop making me money?”.
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We ran a one-day gift with purchase (GWP) yesterday and had 10x the sales of an average day. That's great, but it's a one-time win. My first thought is - if this is such an appealing offer, how can we apply this to our evergreen campaigns?. Here's a little bit of my analysis.
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Tim Cook: Nice email list you've built there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.
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A thread on the practical applications of CLV and some of the misconceptions around the metric. First, when marketers reference CLV, they're often actually talking about CLR (customer lifetime revenue).
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I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to turn a small DTC business into a successful financial asset that you *hold*. I wanted to share because I think, too often, the finance side of DTC isn’t talked about very openly and it puts up barriers to new folks learning.
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The reason why agencies, saas, courses etc get dumped on on DTC twitter is their customers are here in the conversation. The reason DTC brands don't get dumped on in this space is their customers aren't on DTC twitter. It's really that simple.
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Meta ad account started overspending badly around 6-8am EST today. Have everything paused. PSA to double-check your accounts this morning.
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Just had an extremely successful a/b test. Surprise free shipping for new customers in checkout. CVR +45%.Revenue +15%.Gross Margin +5%. However, since we bring in 45% more customers with this approach. My projected total gross margin (in dollars) we collect over 1 year is.
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Find a good struggle, people you trust, and enjoy it. You'll miss these days. For professional fulfilment, a good struggle is more rewarding than reaching a goal. So many of us are living through the best-of-times right now and don't realize it.
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This is my framework for thinking about value capture for DTC brands. It's about maximizing financial capture. Part CRO or LTV optimization but is more holistic than that. Let me explain.
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nobody:. no one:. not a soul:. not even other marketers:. email marketers: EMAIL IS NOT DEAD.
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It strikes me that many of the largest brands in the world have something in common: they made a luxury price point accepted by the mass market. Starbucks - $6 latte.Nike - $150 basketball shoes.Apple - $1000 phone, $2000 laptop, $300 earbuds.Lulu Lemon - $100 yoga pants.
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Alex won't say it, but it's Attentive. They will withhold your owned SMS list from you when leaving.
another day, another story of a brand who's being refused access to their sms list. this is one of the more interesting stories not being talked about in ecom right now. it's a weird flex by a company that's fashions itself the "industry leader" but in truth is consistently.
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There are not words to express how much better 1 Password is than LastPass.
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when you drop in a new ad that is eating all the spend but the performance isn't there yet
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$META crushing after hours with earnings call. - $28.65b revenue vs $26.76b expected.- $2.20 EPS vs $2.01 expected.- Lowered expense guidance by ~$10b.- Ad impressions up 26% YoY!. Hot damn, Zuck's back baby. Now gimme that refund.
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I've been hoping and hoping to see bigger revenue numbers on my Shopify dashboard. Today they increased the font size of the revenue number on the dash. ✨wish granted✨.
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@colinmort The merchant services agreements for processing major credit cards prohibit the merchant from passing through the costs of processing. They can probably only get away with charging this since it can be removed on request. Otherwise they could lose their ability to process cards.
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Really been enjoying having @KnoCommerce post-purchase quizzes lately. My recent questions:.- What do you like about our brand? What do you dislike?.- Was their anything that almost stopped you from purchasing today?.- Favorite skincare brands besides Bambu Earth.- Do you.
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The new Shopify admin home page is terrible. The front-and-center card with store KPIs is awful. - Total sales only shows net and no longer has a version without returns shown. Looking at returns on a daily basis is pointless and arbitrary. - $7.6k in sales instead of the full
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- ad spend is ripping.- smashing our current product launch.- got a sample of a product in development and it's my favorite product of ours, ever. It's a beautiful, sunny September day folks.
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Closed Q1 with revenue up 127% YoY and the bottom line up 148% (estimated, not closed yet). A strong LTV is the backbone to being able to drive that kind of profitable growth. Despite >100% YOY growth, 51% of our revenue was from repeat customers this past quarter.
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Everyone's talking about Travis Kelce's old tweets, but honestly I don't see the problem here.
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DTC marketers: wow I'm really pushing upsells hard. Airlines: lmao n00b.
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3 days after they receive an item, I ask customers to rate their experience 1 through 4. Look at how predictive of unique repeat rate and post-acquisition (PAR) this is. Their mind is made up. I have 3 days to create loyal customers. High leverage window of opportunity.
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First discovered I had testicular cancer back in August of last year. Had a surgery, then it spread to my abdomen, got chemo for 9 weeks, then a final surgery on my abdomen. So happy to have this behind me and to be able to tell my kids "Daddy's not sick anymore!".
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The 6 stages of DTC financial success:. 1 - transactionally profitable. Positive CM .2 - above + positive EBITDA .3 - above + positive FCF .4 - above + market rate comp for founders .5 - above + investment repaid in NPV .6 - above + produces a risk-adjusted ROIC.
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Launching our first product in almost three years today. It takes a long time to get this engine started from a cold start, but we've got a torrent of improvements and new launches lined up for the next 12 months.
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Well, Meta spend is up like 140% day-over-day for me by 9am EST. IG reels % of my total spend up 30%.
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If you're printing QR codes on anything, I always recommend bouncing that URL through a redirect. It gives you future flexibility to move where a QR code points without the need to re-print.
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Meta ad spend just went from $250/hr to $3k/hr. CPMs climbing. Believe this is another overspend incident.
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How I react to an a/b test I just started with 5 total conversions:. Increase in CVR - wow, exactly what we want to see, this should hold. Decrease in CVR - it's thin data, this is just sampling noise, shouldn't be jumping to conclusions yet.
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My episode on @andrewjfaris' podcast just came out. We cover:. - Beating cancer.- What attributes make Bambu financially attractive.- Deep dive into offers, value extraction, and LTV.- CCC and working capital changes. It's a dense conversation but was super enjoyable.
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You should not optimize for AOV or CVR. You should optimize for gross margin per session (or visitor).
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Some quick cash management tips for those feeling the Q4 purchasing crunch. Specifically for folks feeling the cash crunch, but don't have great financing options to turn to. CC limits - if you are going to have to pay down a card mid-month during spending peaks, go get more.
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Too easy to get lost in ambitions and forget I'm living the best of times right now.
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In my mind, your email database has 5 primary cohorts. 1 - Not yet purchased.2 - First time purchased (onboarding).3 - Active customer file (repurchasers).4 - Product subscribers.5 - Churning/Churned customers. The cohort they belong to frames your goal with that customer.
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I believe that projecting accurately is a critical skill in DTC. I started a sheet to do a 6-week projection every week. I do 4 versions: 20th, 40th, 60th, & 80th percentile outcomes. I track these 4 metrics:.-Revenue.-Ad Spend.-New cust revenue.-Cash (rev - ad spend).
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Both the most challenging and rewarding year of my professional career. Feels incredible to have clawed our way to this milestone.
Today we crossed our first $1M month for @bambuearth. We’ll do it with ~20% EBITDA and 80% free cash to profit. But 12 months ago we were weeks away from running out of cash and under extreme debt pressure. Here’s what changed….
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Overrated.Conversion rate.Average order value.CCC.EBITDA.The Office. Underrated.Unique product repeat rate.Price testing.Net working capital.Contribution margin.Free cash flow.Cost caps.New Girl. Rated.Net Income.Exit row seats.Starbucks.Parks & Rec.
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2025 predictions:. 1. We hire a full-time chemist (done).2. We hire a Director of Spa Sales.3. We launch 10+ products.4. We launch a rebrand.5. We increase LTV at least 20%.6. We clear our first OTC product with FDA.7. I join the 1,000 lbs club. Looking inward this year.
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Everyone is trying to get their bag. It's ridiculous to take that personally. Brands.SaaS.Agencies.Cold DMers.Influencer price per post.Content creators. Stop crying about their pricing models and work on your own. If it's so egregious the market will produce an alternative.
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Yesterday we had our highest revenue day ever. Well into 6 figures. But, the success of the day was baked months ago. Your big sales days are a reflection of how healthy your customer file is and how well you've acquired and nurtured customers over the last 6 months.
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A few tricks I use over BFCM to maximize sales:. - A plain text email & SMS on the first & last day of sales. - Don't overlap SMS & email. Stagger comms. They act as reminders. - "Only x hours left" always smashes. 3-6 hrs.
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Testing something out. Inspired by Ill Makiage. When a new customer asks for a refund we offer them the choice between a full refund or a gift card for about 2x the amount. Framing it as giving us another chance, try something else.
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has the fed tried a "last chance - interest rates sale extended" email tho?.
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After @RomanEcom's post about changing his optimization setting in his campaigns I've had a lot of questions about whether I choose 7-day click vs 1-day click. This is for the optimization setting, you can look at the attribution of either at any time.
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The most interesting part of this breakneck growth to me is: how on earth did they manage the working capital on the way up?. For fun, let's look at what the working capital demands would be for a reasonably average company that manages it's ops & finance decently.
In 2020 (first year), revenue was $9M. Two years later, revenue grew to $150M with only 55 employees (per-employee revenue of $2.7M). Crazy growth & crazy numbers.
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I don't think CTR provides any value in optimizing Meta ads at all. My top 2 ads for the last year are below 1% CTR. Bad by most definitions. Over $1mm in spend each, comfortably.
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95% of your growth as a professional will come from what you learn while you solve a problem. Directly applicable learning with high retention. 5% will come from non-fiction business content you consume in hopes of a gem. Most folks have their priorities flipped.
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In August we made a move to bi-coastal fulfillment for the purpose of:. 1. Cost savings on shipping.2. Faster delivery times (nice perk, #1 was the priority). We sent our core 22 skus to California for fulfilment from that location for a starting 12 states. Here's the summary.
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Me: my customer is smart, I just need to logically solve their objections. My customer: comments on fb ads "where can I buy".
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Discounting usually produces lower LTVs. But, when you can find a combination of an offer that drives both CVR and LTV, you strike an incredible source of acquisition. We give 50% off a specific kit and you can see the 60-day LTV is an outlier in our data.
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My first move on the P&L is to create a high-level summary of costs on the P&L. - Net Revenue.- Cost of Delivery.- Ad/Marketing Spend.- Contribution Margin.- OpEx.- EBITDA
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This is a (very) crude visualization of spend efficiency and audience size on Meta. The surface area of each circle represents the amount of spend possible. The number represents an index of performance. 1.0 times a 2.0 ROAS is 2.0. 0.7 times a 2.0 ROAS is 1.4. And so on. If
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I've encouraged a few folks to make a document like this this year and it's worth it's weight in gold when you are preparing for next year's Black Friday. It's a simple log of the time, spend, acquired customer revenue, aMER, pace (calculated by timestamps) and notes if you have
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Rough estimate of my CPMs. Email (opens) - $1.58.SMS (received) - $10.Meta - $25. I can email my customers 32 times or get 15 opens for every 1 ad impression. This is why you should default to excluding customers from ads. Very hard to beat the ROI of owned channels.
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Spending close to $100 a minute right now on Meta. We were 20% short of Black Friday spend yesterday, think we'll pass it today. Love days like this, exhilarating to watch. Cost caps are so back, baby (never left).
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1/ A framework I use to think about growth marketing for eCommerce is thinking about marketing efforts as independent or dependent. I find that this gives me a lot of clarity when thinking about the value of a marketing activity’s incremental value to a brand.
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I believe that projecting accurately is a critical skill in DTC. I started a sheet to do a 6-week projection every week. I do 4 versions: 20th, 40th, 60th, & 80th percentile outcomes. I started this a quarter ago. Here are what the results look like for my first 13 weeks.
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Hired someone off @JaiDolwani's freelance network, The Starters. Opened the account, hired who I was looking for to help with extra effort within 24-48 hrs. Did a paid project together rather than drag out interviewing. Quick, easy, low commitment, high quality work.
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