Now

• Building

  Internet Research Unit. Alternative data for ecommerce — revenue, SKUs, tech stacks, and consumer trends across millions of DTC brands. Selling to brand owners, agencies, app developers, and the people financing them.

• Also shipping

  Three Shopify apps, one of them live so far: sonarID (spot the VIPs buying from you), OrderEdit (customers fix their own orders before they ship), and OrderSurvey(post-purchase attribution in the customer's own words). OrderSurvey is in the App Store; sonarID and OrderEdit are waiting on approval.

• Thinking about

  How much of a business you can safely build on top of someone else's platform, and what the honest discount rate is on that revenue.

• Writing

  Short pieces here instead of long threads. Everything that would have been a 12-tweet thread now gets a URL.

• Investing

  Selectively, through Fake VC. Much less than I used to.

• Advising

  Taking on two companies at a time as a fractional CMO. Ecommerce and Shopify only — acquisition, lifecycle, and pricing. Two is the cap because three would make it a job.

• Not doing

  Agency work, campaign execution, hourly retainers, or advising outside ecommerce. The last one is a judgment problem rather than a preference.

Last updated 2026-08-18 — inspired by nownownow.com