how an 8-figure ecom seller burned $500k because he didn't test his offers on FB first...
here's some business flops three founders confessed to this week:
tom is officially banned from buying individual stocks for the rest of his life. the group chat agreed on it. so when he said he wasn't buying spacex at IPO, jacky and tony both immediately bought it. the inverse indicator strategy is now a documented trading system. jacky threw $100K across three accounts, made $7K on day one, and is holding $20K in spacex with house money. tom would've 40x'd if he took the pre-IPO deal their friend offered two years ago. he didn't.
the biggest mistake segment was brutal. jacky had a seven-figure offer for his portfolio of SEO sites and told the buyer to pound sand. two months later google clapped every single one. thought owning fifteen sites in the same channel was diversification. it wasn't. tony rebranded a company doing $100K/month in profit and the rebrand killed it — facebook thought the domain redirect was malicious and nuked their ad account. could've sold for low millions. didn't.
tom's biggest mistake is never dry testing before going all in. the self-cleaning dog bowl: $300K spent, never launched. oat milk chocolate brand with his wife: $200K on inventory before testing if people even buy chocolate online. they don't. his rule now: spend $3K on facebook ads with 3D renders before ordering a single unit. validate first, build second. every business idea has to pass the dry test or it's dead on arrival.
best decisions: tom selling his skincare brand to thrasio right before christmas when the money was flowing. went from $300K/month to $1M/month on amazon during covid, got an offer, almost lost the deal twice, then thrasio swooped in and closed in under 30 days. tony's take profit framework is elite — four pillars of wealth: define your cash flow number, your bank comfort number, your retirement number, and your fuck you money number. write them down now so when someone offers pillar two for a third of your business you say yes without thinking.
claude mythos (fable five) is a beast but will eat your wallet alive. jacky's spending $1K/day on API tokens for his consumer product and doesn't care because one payment form change shipped with fable drove an 80% revenue increase. the move: use fable as the orchestrator and codex as the coder. don't let it iterate unsupervised or you'll burn $500 before you notice.
tony's building a company-wide KPI dashboard from scratch because when he stepped back into vessi nobody had visibility on anything. found out five of six shoe colorways were out of stock because the demand planning team was using days-of-coverage on zero-selling SKUs — circular logic that even AI missed. nobody questioned the data until tony tried to buy his own shoes and couldn't.
ep 7 of NGMI with @itstonyyu and @tomwang24 watch/listen ↓
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