Shiv Narayanan

Your favorite multi-touch attribution tool/dashboard is never going to tell you this. Customers build evidence piles, not funnels. Welcome back to day 51/100: one lesson a day on building a $100M+ consumer brand. Watch how someone actually buys. They see your ad and ignore it. Two weeks later a friend mentions the brand. They read Reddit. Watch a review. Check Amazon. Forget about it. Open an email. Search your brand name and finally buy when their kid does something that reminds them about the thing they were looking at. It ends with that brand search. Google probably gets most of the credit. If your data is solid and software decent you’ll see some of the breadcrumbs. But Google mostly gets the credit even though Google did almost none of the work. The ad named the problem. The creator made it feel relevant. The product page explained how it worked and the review handled the scary objection. The friend made the decision feel safe. And since I covered this a couple of days ago, the moment/trigger (why now) is really what got the sale. Every touchpoint did a different job. Most brands do the opposite. They repeat the same claim everywhere and call it frequency or “congruency”. The customer sees more content and learns NOTHING new. I've spent more money on that mistake than I want to admit. Frequency that was really just repetition, not helpful. Try this instead. Write down the beliefs a customer has to hold before they'll buy. Usually three or four. Write down all of the objections that person will need to overcome. Write down all the moments/triggers you can think of that might lead to the sale. Think about the psychological state a person is in when they finally make the purchase. (This one is huge) Assign each one to the channel or asset best equipped to prove it. When you make a new ad, ensure your team has a strong thesis as to where in the journey that ad is going to live. This is a very, VERY good practice to have in your company. Not every ad has to close. Not every email has to educate. Then audit the pile from the customer's side. Which belief has no proof? Where are you still asking them to take your word for it? Where are the gaps? Stop asking which touchpoint got the last click. Go find out what the customer finally believed.

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I’ll probably get some heat for this one, but here goes... For years I’ve noticed frustration in how some CPG founders and industry commentators talk about investors (VC / PE) on Twitter/Linkedin Honestly? As an investor myself, It never bothered me. I get it — we pontificate on trends, we’re often wrong with little public accountability, and we definitely do WAY less work than founders But recently, a successful founder friend told me they weren’t writing publicly about their journey, worried they’d be criticized for publicly defending investors and sharing positive experiences That concern really bummed me out...but I also totally understood why they hesitated Here’s what I think the cynical investor rhetoric gets wrong: Criticizing investors in general terms is detrimental to the ecosystem that we ALL need to be healthy • CPG already has a limited number of specialist investors • That scarcity raises the cost of capital • More investors = more funding, more founder leverage in negotiations, and ultimately more ownership and control for founders Do some investors give unclear feedback, move goalposts, or get aggressive in tough times? Of course Nobody expects thanks for that — and bad behavior shouldn’t be excused But remember that these are people who are regularly told they’re crazy or stupid for investing in CPG They have conviction and something to prove, and if their returns aren’t excellent they lose their jobs / firms — and then even fewer brands would get funded So no need to go easy on us when we do something stupid, but perhaps we can all paint with a bit less broad a brush — I’d have said the same if investors were complaining about “CPG founders” after the Better Bagel fiasco 🙃 After all, a healthier ecosystem helps founders most of all

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Four CEO calls since Jan 1. Living in 2 crazy different realities. The last call of was with a fast-growing business with an unbelievable growth curve. The conversation went like: Can you build a finance team for what’s coming our way? What ops and IT stack is going to support growth or become a bottleneck? The other three calls were very different. Those CEOs had spent the last 3–6 months listening to friends. Trying to think their way out of lagging P&L and tightening cash flow. Over-leveraged in a bad market, hoping timing would fix structural issues with blind optimism. Their question was, “How can you help us get out of this mess?” I believe deeply in redemptive work, but here’s deal the last minute, high risk work has about .001% change of success. Not because we can’t, but probably because you’re not willing to make the changes and moves that need to be made to flip the script. Here’s a better thought: If you’re starting to sniff that something is off, that’s the moment to make the call to re-right the ship. Yes, bringing in a competent team costs money. Yes, it is often not only keeps you not just in business but growing at a stronger pace. Not because it’s dramatic, but because you need a team of pilots steering the cockpit instead of guessing at the instruments.

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Y Combinator just deleted Canada from its investment list. 17 years and hundreds of startups later, the world's top accelerator told Canadian founders to incorporate somewhere else or stay home. As of November 2025, YC's standard deal terms dropped Canada from permitted investment jurisdictions. Now it's US, Cayman Islands, or Singapore. Canadian founders who want in have to flip their corporate structure before they apply. Garry Tan, YC's CEO (born in Winnipeg), said he loves Canada but told founders to "just convert to Delaware C Corp." This isn't new. It's the same pattern I've watched for years. Brilliant IP comes out of Canadian universities. Over $50 billion in annual R&D investment. But more than half of that IP gets assigned to foreign companies because the capital and infrastructure to commercialize it isn't here. We're world-class at invention. We systematically export the value. The pre-traction funding gap forces founders to go elsewhere. The risk-averse VC ecosystem won't write first checks into IP-based companies before revenue. So innovators either die waiting or leave. YC didn't create this problem. They're acknowledging what's already true: if you're serious about building a globally competitive company, the path of least resistance runs through someone else's jurisdiction. This isn't about patriotism. It's about structural design. Canada built an innovation system optimized for research output, not commercial capture. And now the best accelerator in the world is making that explicit in their deal terms. The question isn't whether founders will incorporate elsewhere. They will. The question is what happens to the ecosystem when the best ideas are structurally required to leave before they prove anything.

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🚨BREAKING! Shopify just made B2B native for every plan. This changes the game. For years, if you wanted real B2B on Shopify, you needed Plus. Or you duct-taped together apps, locked storefronts, and managed wholesale pricing in spreadsheets. That era is over. As of today, merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced get access to native B2B features at no extra cost: → Company profiles for wholesale buyers → Up to 3 custom catalogs with tailored pricing → Volume discounts and quantity rules → Vaulted credit cards and payment terms No plugins. No patchwork. One admin for DTC and wholesale. The numbers back it up. Merchants using Shopify B2B see up to a 4.1x increase in reorder frequency vs. DTC orders. Up to 33% more self-serve orders within six months. And up to 20% higher reorder rates across the platform. The global B2B eCommerce market sits at $36 trillion. For most brands, the opportunity doesn't start with enterprise contracts. It starts with a retailer asking about wholesale pricing, a bulk order request, or a conversation at a trade show. That's exactly the kind of moment Shopify is now equipping every merchant to capture. For anyone running both DTC and wholesale (like we do at GothRider), the real unlock here is operational: one source of truth, Flow automations that work across both channels, and no more parallel systems eating up time and margin. If you're on Shopify and haven't explored B2B yet, today's the day.

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