New e-commerce brands fail because they do fake work. Treadmill syndrome. You're technically running, you're sweating, but you never actually get anywhere. Checking stats. Redesigning the logo. Rewriting the product page. Testing another app. Messing with AI. Doom scrolling for inspiration. Basically doing everything but the 1 thing that matters: acquiring customers. There's 3 ways to do that: > pay for them > create content, or > partner with someone who already has them. The Brolletts business I run with my son is heavy on partnerships. So I gave myself a rule. I can't close the laptop until I've reached out to 5 people I could do some kind of deal with, today or down the road. Every single day. 5 isn't a lot. You can hit 5 before your morning coffee gets cold. Do it for 30 days and you've made 150 introductions. Some pay off today, most pay off later, and the pile just keeps growing. Pick one channel. Give yourself a number you can't skip. Then measure your day against it. If you can't point to what you did today that put your product in front of someone new, you might just be on a treadmill.

I'm going to be reposting these all day today.

Big night tonight! Cannot wait for first pitch.

Share Econ sauce from $100M/yr in rev. 100 views. 2 likes. Accidentally rage bait sports fans before the Rays win the World Series. Go viral and get hate comments every 30 seconds. Theres no app like X.

15 or so years ago I heard Dan Kennedy talking about his Renegade Millionaire concept. The core principle was that Renegade Millionaires had autonomy. They work when they want, where they want, with whom they want. It’s the ultimate form of freedom. And it’s still the biggest flex in 2026.

Small biz friends: you’re getting hosed by costs at every turn. It’s ok for you to price test too. Go do it tonight.

Literally feels like I'm playing the game on God-Mode right now. It's been 2 hours and I am salivating from how much I've done so quickly (or that Duet has done).

Ooooooh! Been waiting for this one. Thx @AnthropicAI

I agree. We sat front row in the outfield opening day and spent $40/ticket. Now that same seat is $2,000-3,000 They couldn’t sell it 6 months ago. Love the Rays. Rooting for them all the way, but actual fans are getting priced out of the WS.

And why I love @Shopify early adoption of agents. This is month 1. Wait till end of year 1. And look at that AOV! 🤯 (Also note that I still have brands who can’t shoot and send me a vertical video so there’s still a lot of brands playing catch up)

Small biz consumer brands have been hit the hardest over the past few years. And they're not fighting back. • META Ads - more expensive. • Volume of creative needed - more expensive or more resources. • Agencies and freelancers - charging more. • SaaS - more expensive. • Inventory - more expensive. • Tariffs and import duties - new line item. • Good affiliates and partners - higher rev shares. All of this eats at the margin of a new and small consumer brand. Yet here is where it gets interesting. While they are getting squeezed, they are the only ones NOT raising prices. I looked at the top 25 selling products on Grommet in Q4 2025. Not one has increased prices for this Q4. Not one! Maybe it's fear that they'll lose some out on conversions. Maybe they're mad about getting 1-2 emails from mad customers (vs the 100s who are still happy to pay for and get their product). If you're a small biz going into Q4 and looking for a small win to increase margins, start by price testing. $17.99 -> $19.99 $39.99 -> $44.99 $79.99 -> $89.99 (or $99.99) You should've tested all summer, but you might as well start testing now.

I see 40-50 new eCom brands every week that want to launch on Grommet. Most don't fail because their product doesn't work or can't sell. They fail because of math. In the past 2 weeks, nine new consumer brands told me they CAN’T launch on Grommet (or run Meta ads or go into retail). Not because they didn’t want to launch, or their product wasn't awesome or they didn't have any inventory. It's cos they have no margins. I get why it happens. New brands buy inventory in small quantities, or are hand making products themselves, so their COGS are ugly. And there’s all the other costs that add up but they never looked at till it was too late. Look - if you need to be profitable at a 10% or 20% margin, you're cooked. Meta doesn't care how good your product is. Neither does an affiliate. Neither does a buyer at a retailer. 60% gross margin isn't greed. It's the entry fee for the game you're playing in 2026. You have to be able to run ads. To seed products to influencers. To pay affiliates and partners that can drive volume. Math isn't as fun as product design, but broke inventors don't get the same glory as a founder who understands his numbers.

It’s getting absurd how fast @Shopify is adopting AI and agents. Literally not a single good reason to be on any other platform for new and emerging consumer brands.

All the highlights in my career happened because I never waited for permission to do the thing: > Sold 1,000 copies of a hip-hop album my senior year of high school, with no label and no distribution > Spent $10k of my own money recording a Reality TV pilot, then raised $53,000 on Kickstarter in 30 days and got 4 episodes on Amazon Prime > Won an Emmy Award for a documentary we filmed in the Dominican Republic with iPhones because our camera gear got confiscated at customs > Made a drink-based nootropic and coffee creamer because they didn't exist yet. No formula, no mentor, no idea what I was doing. That one bombed commercially, and I still learned more from it than anything that worked (plus I got cases and cases of coffee creamers, lol) > My son wanted to create his own brand of baseball sunglasses. We had no connections, no manufacturer, no funding, but did it anyway. We were selling them online 30 days later and got them to players on the Savannah Bananas who wore them in front of 80,000 people! > My son and I wanted to create a backpack brand, knowing nothing about sewing or fabrics or tech packs. We cold emailed cool brands we liked and they were stoked to help us get started. First drop sold out in under 2 hours > I wanted Mark Cuban and some of his top products in a Grommet Gift Guide. Found a brand he'd backed on Shark Tank, emailed them, and had the deal done in a week. There are no gatekeepers. The only gatekeeper is you.

Founders don't lose to a better product. They lose to the reply that never went out, the yes that took three weeks, and the idea still sitting in ChatGPT

Email isn't cooked. 1) AI summaries will filter emails, not delete them entirely. The newsletters people open, reply to and click are the ones that will get surfaced. The ones nobody reads get flushed. Your engagement signals become your distribution with the AI models. 2) So the drop hits the ad-model news roundups hardest. They were already competing for attention they never earned, and now an AI gets to tell the reader that. 3) Which is the argument for owning more than an inbox slot. Product, community, live events. Email gets them in the door and keeps them opening and ready for the next thing. People have called email dead for 25+ years. I've heard this song and dance before. It keeps changing. It doesn't go away.

I asked one founder for a photo of a customer using his product outdoors. He texted it back before I finished my coffee. I sent a similar request to another brand that same morning. He's still 'looking into it.' That was in July. Same request. Same day. One of those founders will do $1M+ this year. Can you guess which one?