The profit engine, in writing.
No fluff. The same thinking I use to run my own ecommerce brands.
The three-phase system for escaping the dropshipping grind
Most ecommerce founders try to fix the wrong thing first. Here is the order that actually works, build the margin, own the brand, then step back.
We were paying $100 a month for this
A $100/month subscription did one tiny job. I rebuilt it for free in a few hours, then kept going. Here's the small dashboard of tools that came out of real problems we kept hitting.
Two parents at the pool
I watched two exhausted parents in survival mode at swimming lessons and it reminded me: you're comparing the inside of your own life to the curated outside of everyone else's.
The unsexy bit of using AI nobody's making reels about
My accounts admin now finishes her morning report in 5 minutes, not 90. The win wasn't the clever AI script. It was two boring weeks of building a second brain for the business first.
I'm a fake surfer
I own two surfboards and can't surf. The reason I never paddle out is the exact same reason good founders never build their own branded products, and it's not what you'd think.
Now, take a peak at one of my branded product stores
One store does $175k revenue and $8k profit on pure dropshipping. The other runs branded products and makes $237k profit. Same dashboard, same structure, very different result.
Consumer confidence, oil prices, wars... and your sanity
When the news gets crazy and revenue dips, panic is the wrong move. Here's how I use my numbers to tell the difference between a me problem and a market problem.
See behind the scenes of one of my dropshipping stores
I opened up one of my real dropshipping stores on camera and showed the actual numbers. No $50k month screenshots, just where every dollar goes before profit shows up.
$98k in revenue, less than $100 in profit: the dropshipping margin trap
A student did $98,000 in revenue in a month and kept less than $100. Here's why thin dropshipping margins quietly kill businesses, and how to see your real numbers.
Your staff make mistakes... let them
As a dad I keep catching myself jumping in to solve my kids' problems. The same instinct, in business, is exactly what builds a team that can't function without you.
Use this to see your actual numbers
Knowing the framework is one thing. Knowing your own numbers is what changes the decisions you make. Here's the stripped-down dashboard I use to stop flying blind.
What should you do with the profit?
Reinvest your margin into ads and profit dollars go up, until they don't. Here's the peak most founders never find, and why scaling revenue can quietly destroy your profit.
I pulled my ad budget out of thin air (and had no idea if it was right)
An agency asked me for my marketing budget and I made up 10% on the spot. Here's the unit-economics model that finally showed me where the real lever in an ecommerce business actually sits.
Blue pill or red pill?
In December 2017 my dropshipping store did $732,000 in sales and I was broke. Here's the day I realised it wasn't a mountain I'd climbed, it was a ceiling.
Dropshipping isn't the end game. Here's what is
Dropshipping is a brilliant way to start an ecommerce business and a terrible way to finish one. Here's why, and the move that actually builds something that lasts.
If I had to start an ecommerce business again tomorrow, here's my 4-week plan
If my business disappeared overnight, here's the exact 4-week plan I'd run to rebuild it. The part that actually matters comes after the first 30 days.
Why Escape Velocity exists
Running a business while life is happening is brutal when the whole thing depends on you. This is why I build ecommerce businesses that run without me, and why I teach it.
What I found after 50+ founder chats
I had honest, cameras-on conversations with more than fifty ecommerce founders over ten months. The real problem was almost always the same four things, and none of them were what you'd expect.
Stop flying into the window
My wife's routine knee surgery went wrong and I became her full-time carer for eight weeks. The business kept growing without me, and here's why that wasn't an accident.