Do you have time to feel like 💩?

Show Notes

Dan came on this week fresh off a marketing conference in Denver — Smart Marketer Live, run by Ezra Firestone and Molly Pittman — and a week out from a sixty-hour haul to the Philippines, so we were catching him mid-transit. What I liked is that he didn't lead with tactics. He led with the fact that the opening keynote wasn't about meta ads at all, it was about checking in with yourself first. Half the room was women, which he said completely changed the vibe, and I kept pushing him on what he actually went there to get. His answer stuck with me: at a good conference you find the thing you weren't looking for.

Then we got into the weeds on something I find genuinely fun, which is the unit economics of a small order. Dan's got a store where someone buys a $7 thing, pays for shipping, and he still loses a dollar on it — because shipping a two-ounce part in a three-by-three box is surprisingly expensive, and the app only guesses the rate. I went full engineer-brain on him: does it have to be in a box? Can't you flat-rate it in a USPS envelope? He talked me through why you can't just jack the shipping charge — it tanks conversion — and why he tries to run shipping income at near zero on the P&L, because he's not trying to make money on freight, just cover it. The fix, he figures, is the upsell-at-checkout move you've felt a hundred times on Shopify: you might like this shirt too. If it works five percent of the time, it plugs the leak.

We spent a good chunk on Amazon, too — FBA versus FBM, why he runs almost everything fulfilled-by-Amazon for the conversion bump, and how their logistics network is both an enormous cost center and, I'd argue, the whole moat. Which is how we wandered into the news of the week: Bezos killing the Washington Post endorsement. About 250,000 subscriptions gone, which is roughly a tenth of the paper. Dan and I landed in basically the same spot — it's his paper, an org-level endorsement does shade the rest of the reporting, and what about the lone dissenter on the board who gets lumped in with a vote they didn't cast? The Blue Origin meeting two days prior is the wrinkle that makes it murkier, and neither of us was in the room, so we left it there. Meta news about the news, as Dan put it.

Lighter stuff: a Meow Wolf just opened five minutes from me — opening day, packed, got the season pass — and I genuinely think it's the closest thing to standing inside a video game. Go if one's near you. We also got into Hawaiian food because I eat myself silly out there on poke and kalua pork, and I had to plant a big no asterisk here, I am out over my skis flag the second I started talking about taro and Hawaiian history, because I am not a student of it and I wasn't about to pretend otherwise.

But the line I actually wanted to bring back was Dan's, from a keynote by Gabby Bernstein — a speaker every woman in the room knew and most of the men were going come again? She asked the room of entrepreneurs: do you have time to feel like 💩? Which is really a way of saying you can change it — change how you feel about it, or change the thing making you feel that way. Her other one landed for me as a manager: just because I'm good at it doesn't mean I should be doing it. I do too much of "I'll just knock this out because I'm good at it" when it shouldn't be my job at all. We riffed on inviting your demons in close enough to know them before you can show them the door — call it woo if you want, but functionally I think it's true. So that's the question I'll leave you with: you've got the time to change it, so do you really have time to feel like 💩?

— Sean