0:00 - Introduction and the importance of brand in an AI-driven market.

1:01- Carla's journey from investment banking to e-commerce entrepreneurship.

2:30 - Scaling and exiting e-commerce businesses.

3:52 - Profitability, cash flow, and the evolution of e-commerce.

5:32 - Introduction to ProfitPeak and its role in business optimization.

6:17 - Impact of COVID on business models and team dynamics.

8:11 - Growth strategy and hiring at ProfitPeak.

9:13 - Sustainable growth and working dynamics with her husband.

11:09 - The impact of AI on e-commerce and strategic adaptation.

13:43 - Leveraging AI for efficiency and cost management.

15:08 - Valuations, market perceptions, and venture capital experiences.

18:45 - Leadership, recruitment, and the introduction of one-day trials.

20:24 - Weekly habits and metrics for e-commerce founders.

23:12 - Future plans and excitement for moving to the US.

‍

Carla:

Because I think in this AI first world, your ability to build margin is in your brand. It's not necessarily in your product because everyone can manufacture the same product, but your ability to charge more for the product than Temu is in your brand.

Kaga:

Hello and welcome to Now or Never. A podcast designed to let new founders learn directly from proven founders.  It’s brought to you by UntilNow. We’re a design-led innovation studio that works with startups and scaleups to build breakthrough brands and digital products.

In this podcast we’re joined by Carla Penn-Kahn, Co-founder and CEO of ProfitPeak, the profit optimisation platform for retail. We’ve worked with Carla before on a big brand refresh for ProfitPeak but we hadn’t previously had the opportunity to talk about her journey which is both remarkable and impressive in equal measure. We cover a lot of ground from the hype around startup valuations to what it’s like to mix work with family members and of course, what’s in store for ecommerce in 2026. Hope you enjoy the episode!

Kaga:

Hello Carla, nice to have you in today.

Carla:

Thanks so much for having me.

Kaga:

I think, we've obviously worked together, but I think for the listeners, it would be good to hear a little bit about your story, beginning and then up until where you are today.

Carla:

Yeah, I'd love to share that. So I started as an investment banker. I was one of those crazy people didn't take a gap year and decided to study full time and work full time. Once I got an internship, turned into a full time job. And through that, I learned a lot about retail and I saw e-commerce starting to emerge in the US market showing my age.

And through that experience, I then saw MYER float on the ASX. And we saw e-commerce as being a really big opportunity for MYER when it went on Roadshow. And everyone around me in the office was like, ⁓ MYER's probably never gonna sell online. And I was like, this is the time where you find an opportunity that other people can't see, and you can see it, and you need to run with it. And so I quit my job and bought my first e-commerce business a couple of literally days later.

So I had four different e-commerce businesses over about 12 years.

I guess what we would do is we'd find a business that was run by a mom and pop style operation. They were probably using a warehouse or a Kennard's storage, but weren't very sophisticated, didn't want a lot for their business. And we would take it over, plug it into our infrastructure, which was quite sophisticated because my family have a background in packaging and distribution. And so I leveraged all those insights to build really good infrastructure, learnt my way through Google Ads, eventually learnt my way through Meta Ads and Klaviyo and basic scaled them and sold all four of them at the end.

Kaga:

So that process obviously we're not showing your age, but that process was over a period of what 10 years?

Carla:

Yeah, pretty much. So was like a mini PE use my own personal balance sheet to buy businesses and then reinvested cash over time.

Kaga:

Was that sequential? Was that like one business after the other? Or were you running some in parallel with each other?

Carla:

They were running in parallel all of them at one point and that became very overwhelming. So we'd really be about the opportunity of exiting. And every time we exited it was to someone who was in an adjacent category or a competitor. So we'd get the business to a size where a competitor needed to take us out of the market or saw opportunity in what we had built and they could obviously make it accretive to their financials and take us over. And so at one stage we had all four, a team of 90 and we were sending 20,000 packages a week out of our warehouse.

Kaga:

my gosh. When we last spoke, you said that the founder bug runs in your family. and the packaging and logistics side of it. Is that the founder story or is there more to it?

Carla:

No, so I'm actually a fourth generation female founder. So my great grandmother had a retail store that she started on her own in the 1940s, 1950s in South Africa. My grandmother then had her own gyms. So when she moved to Australia, she started running a gym franchise. And then my mother was actually a tech, an engineer in the 80s. She built a tech business. She merged with the NASDAQ. like a listed company. And while she was doing that, my father had a packaging and distribution business, which he ASX listed and exited. And then my mom eventually helped him with that business as well. So very entrepreneurial background. Always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur. It was ingrained in me from when I was a baby.

Kaga:

That's remarkable. And always knew that you were surrounded by multi-generational founders. And I guess before startup rhetoric and hot takes and buzzwords around these were small businesses growing into franchises and just going through hard work. That's outstanding. Okay, well there's a lot for us to talk about today. think...one thing I wanted to ask you about, and I was talking to Fra about this, was cast our mind back to 2010 and that period now to today, it's a very different environment now. What do you think holds true today to did back then and what do you think is remarkably different now?

Carla:

Yeah, so what holds true is obviously running a business that's profitable and cash flow efficient. And that's true for every business, whether you're in e commerce or you're in retail, or even whether you're running a design studio, right? Businesses have to make money, they have to be cash flow efficient to grow. That hasn't changed since 2010. But when I started in e commerce in 2010, I could generate 80 % of my revenue organically. So I only pay or 20 % of my traffic. And we still had a $15 million turnover business then. So that is a highly profitable growing business. When we exited in 2023, we were paying for 80 % of our traffic and we only had 20 % organic traffic. And so that makes for a very different profit scenario for ecommerce business especially. And so you really need to be able to grow your margins over time to justify the paid expense in acquiring customers.

It's certainly more competitive now in that space. And is that where the idea for ProfitPeak came from?

That's exactly where the genesis of ProfitPeak came from. It was like, how do we manage product marketing and margin in sync rather than three separate teams or juggling for cash flow?

Kaga:

Okay, well it makes sense now for you to tell us about ProfitPeak.

Carla:

Sure. It feels funny telling you about ProfitPeak because you really helped me build the ProfitPeak story for my audience. But essentially, ProfitPeak is a profit optimization platform for Shopify brands, both in an omni-channel capacity, so both online and in store. And it's really about bringing teams together, working in a single data environment, using AI to get out of dashboards and spreadsheets and really be forward looking, but also in a cognitive sense. So when I talk about cognitive

I mean, when product marketing and margin need to move in sync, you need to be across then financials, inventory and marketing in real time. And there's typically three different data sources in a fragmented business sitting in spreadsheets and no one actually understands how they work together to grow a business. They all kind of fight against each other for cashflow. so ProfitPeaks Genesis and what it solves for customers today is brings it all together so it all moves together. So you actually grow profitability over time and you're obviously use marketing to sell more product.

Kaga:

Fantastic. a lot of founders are subject matter experts that have identified a problem and they zero in on that problem and become relentless. And you know the rhetoric and the narrative around that and then they solve that need for the rest of us. It sounds like it certainly wasn't overnight for you. It's something that these different disparate areas of running e-com or running retail were probably problems that you were aware of or they rose at different points. When was the aha moment? How long did it take for you to realize that this is something that you could tackle?

Carla:

Yeah, so coming out of COVID was the aha moment because in COVID, even though you were paying to acquire customers, customers were spending. So everyone was stuck at home. We were mostly in the home kitchenware and kids category. So everyone was spending money on their home, money on their kitchen and money on their kids to keep them busy. know, AOV was like sky high. And then coming out of COVID, we realized cost to acquire customers had really increased significantly. And as everyone's mortgages went up, AOV started falling. So we had to look at our business model and say, you know, how do we get it back into a profitable state? And what does that take? And equally, what I found is my buying team and my marketing team were constantly arguing. And why they were arguing is because marketing would say, hey, all of our best sellers are out of stock. And then the product and inventory team kept saying, no, but we actually have 15,000 products in stock. Why is it that you need these 200 specific products in stock and then they would come to me and I'd be like, well, we don't have cash flow to buy these 200 products again until we move some of these 15,000 other products. And that's when I realized we had a complete disconnect in our team.

Kaga:

and from there, you started bootstrapping?

Carla:

Yes. So from there, I literally whiteboarded with Derek, who's our founding engineer, all the different data sources we had in our business, why they weren't connected and how we could connect them in order to solve the problem. And once we whiteboarded it, we were like, we can do this. And we thought it would be really easy to build. I think everyone thinks everything they do, even an ecom founder thinks it's going to be really easy to build. But about two months in, we were like, this is actually a really big project, we better hire someone else. And so we started as a team of five, Dave, my husband, and Derek, our director of engineering now and two other engineers who are still with us today.

Kaga:

Okay, so you started with a team of five and we do want to ask some questions around working with a husband and that dynamic.

Carla:

You've seen it.

Kaga:

How big are you now?

Carla:

We are 24 now.

Kaga:

Wow.

Carla:

So we've grown a lot since November 23.

Kaga:

Okay, I'm curious, what's the process from Profit Peak, from Dave yourself, and specifically you, what do you go through when you consider the next move of growth for your company in terms of who you're to hire and how do you go about finding that perfect fit?

Carla:

Yeah, so even though we're venture funded, I still act like a bootstrap founder because my first business was bootstrap. So I'm always thinking about what revenue do we need to just justify this next hire. And so that's always a starting point for me because you don't want to have to get in a position where you have to keep raising just to raise for the sake of raise. And we've seen a lot now in the public markets with so many venture funded businesses now trading at tiny multiples compared to where they listed. Figma is a great example right now of that. And I don't want to be one of those founders because the founder doesn't get the exit when it lists. They get some money off the table. But ultimately the valuation you get in the private market is so much higher than you get in the public market. So you really don't want these crazy valuations in my opinion and you don't want these crazy rounds. You want to actually build a real business. And so yeah, I think about what revenue milestone we need to hit to justify the hire and how that impacts burn for the business in terms of where we're at. And I also think about where is there like a burning hole or like a missing link in the business. So recently we had a bit of an epiphany and we're like, we're a data business and we don't actually even have a data engineer. We have amazing engineers who have data experience, but no one's actually a data engineer. So it made sense to go, okay, the next logical hire is a data engineer. And we've hired someone amazing who's come in and it was like, how did we live before this? And that's also one of those moments where you go, maybe as a founder, I was being too cheap, I should have done this earlier. But it's about building sustainably.

Kaga:

And those moments where you find the burning hole, like is there a like process and methodology, is there something because we're all guilty of working our hardest, trying our best, and hindsight is 20-20, we don't know what we didn't know. But then when you're looking and mapping out forward, do you plot where you are going to have to expand into, where your weaknesses are? Is there something that you do as a regular cadence or is it something that's more organic?

Carla:

Yeah, I would say I do have like a 12 month forecast and I put my high as in line with revenue growth into a 12 month forecast. But the reality is, is everything changes. I've never built a tech business before. And I'm not a technical founder. So seeing the data engineering gap was only as a result of feeling the pain with sitting with the engineer. I couldn't have forward-projected that.

⁓ So I have a plan to hire 12 people this year and hey, if revenue grows that might be 30 people because we obviously have to build in line with where we're growing revenue but equally we may only hire six because you with the way the world's moving and AI and the shifts one stage I had an assistant. I actually don't need an assistant anymore. I've built agents around some of my workflows that I don't need an assistant. So potentially as well with some of the coding tools coming out we may not need the junior engineers I forecast now in 6 or nine months time. Scary reality.

Kaga:

That is a scary reality.

Fra:

Let's talk about the relationship like in, you your husband working together. Like we obviously we experienced firsthand and it was awesome, I thought it was great. It was very good to see both sides on how you saw the question you were asking from a different perspective. What is it like to be in your shoes?

Carla:

Yeah, it's easy and it's hard at the same time. It's easy in the sense that we completely understand each other's conflict styles, the best way to put it. So I know how to manage him really well in a conflict situation. And it's not even a serious conflict situation, it's just two different opinions, two very strong opinions as co-founders. And so he probably feels exactly the same way. He knows how to manage me equally on the conflict side. So it stays really healthy. But there's definitely times where some of our team are like, right, we've gone off track guys. Like, let's come back. It actually happened yesterday in our GTM stand up. But also we have very different strengths. He's a creative. He's very much also gets very, very deep and like dives into the nitty gritty. I'm the complete opposite.

picture, numbers, strategy. And when you start to get nitty gritty with me, I like gloss over it and give up. So we have very, very different strengths and weaknesses. complimentary. Yeah, complimentary, but equally it can also be combative in the sense that I'm like, why are you fussing over the tiniest little font on the page? Like, let's just ship important thing. You guys experienced that.

Fra:

Yeah, no, it great. was great. I want to ask you, in terms of what you've seen in the future, basically, what's your take on how AI is changing the e-commerce space? Obviously, SaaS, you're working in the industry, but also the e-commerce in general.

What do think is going to happen?

Carla:

I think there's going to be a few different shifts. I think the first shift is everyone's thinking about how they get ready for, know, chat GPT and Claude being like a main search engine. I think everyone should not just put their tickets there. Google and Gemini are not going to let, you know, open AI and Claude or any other players, you know, take them down. They can't afford to. And so I think while everyone's thinking about how they tackle it organically, I think they need to start forecasting what it's going to happen when these channels start monetizing the traffic. we've already heard chat GPT is looking at a 4 % transaction fee, which will be stacked on top of your Shopify fee, which is already for most customers around 2%. So that's 6 % for a sale coming from chat GPT into Shopify. And everyone thinks, oh, well 4 % isn't that much because you you pay 10 % for affiliates and you pay data. But ultimately chat GPT is not going to be a one click to conversion step in a journey. It's going to form part of an overall journey that potentially started with TikTok and Meta, how to Google ad maybe in the mix or from Gemini ad in the mix, plus you're have your chat GPT 4 % transaction fee, then your Shopify fee and everything else in your tech stack. So can your business actually afford that extra 4 % fee? And that's just the beginning. Like Google Ads when I started out in 2012, I think I was running Google Ads, I was paying like $3 to acquire customer. At the end I was paying $68 to acquire customer. So we have to assume that that's gonna happen. So brands really need to think about how they're gonna manage margin. in order to be able to afford these changes coming in the AI world. So that's one. The second is obviously around AI efficiency. So what does that create for your business? Do you still need to, you know, have a junior analyst or a junior accountant on your team? Because a lot of the manual work can now be automated with agents. I still very much believe that you still need a senior accountant, you still need a senior data person, and you still need an agency working because someone has to put that data and overlay that human understanding and that experience. But what really scares me is if the juniors aren't getting the experience, how do they ever become the people who sit on top of the AI agents that are giving all the recommendations and the strategic outputs? So that's also kind of scary. And I think about my kids, like how are they going to get the grounding they need if they never get the experience the people running the agents need today to run them? So that would be the other theme that I'm looking at. And then for us as a business, it's about how do we leverage AI to maintain and manage costs because we're up against some uni student who can spin up an AI agent in two minutes and build a prototype in Lovable and then we are obviously all constantly thinking about defensibility, like what's defensible in our strategy.

Fra:

Awesome. Well, thank you. Thanks for sharing that. ⁓I think it would be also interesting to understand you were talking about this before in terms of like you have, you come from a different background. Not all founders have gone through the same journey that you have. So your appreciation for profit and margin and understanding like how to make business profitable is much higher than someone that just started as a founder, first time founder. What do you think founders get wrong? And also VC and PE. I'm interested about your perspective on that aspect because assuming based on your background it will be quite different.

Carla:

Yeah, definitely. think everyone I talk to, talk asks me, especially if they're a founder or an aspiring founder is what was your val? Like, what valuation did you get? And I'm like, does it really matter? It's paper money. I'm not worth that. Like, I'm not even worth anywhere near that. The investors given me this valuation in the hopes that in 12 months time, I've grown into it and then we can raise it a higher valuation. And it means nothing. At the end of the day, what you should be asking me is what do your customers think of what you're building? Is your is your customer utilization of product growing? Is your customer base growing, like those are the metrics that actually matter. And VCs obviously have. projected that they're fixated on three times in value every time a founder raises and founders are always looking at this next raise and the AFR Young Rich List had all these founders in it this year in Australia who have raised these massive rounds but I bet you if they went to sell their business it wouldn't be worth 10 % of the valuation on the Rich List that they received. And so everyone kind of anchors around the wrong metrics and I think...it's going to become more prominent that people shift their mindset because the public markets are clearly not pricing these businesses anymore like the private markets. So it'll be interesting to see, for example, what happens when Canva eventually floats. What's going to happen six, 12 months down the line like it has for all the other businesses like Klarna, Figma, there's so many of them that you can call out. Klaviyo is another one in our category where the valuation is going to massively decline because the private markets were able to float it at their val. but the public markets no longer think it's valued at that level. You're being judged every hour of every day by the public markets. Yeah. And then for a founder that resets what you're worth it. Also, if your team never took money off the table or all their money off the table, when you listed suddenly, do they want to stay working with you because their ESOP is not actually worth what they thought it was. And should they go and work at another startup and get in at ground zero again, where their ESOP is going to be worth a lot more. So then that impacts employee retention. and we're seeing a lot of that.

Kaga:

There's a lot there to unpack, but there's one thing that, before I forget, popped up in my mind, and it's in line with it, maybe slightly tangential, but I think myself and when others look at you and your history, they see a very strong, capable, battle-proven founder who's...

Carla:

I'm blushing.

Kaga:

who has actually grown, bootstrapped and developed verified businesses that have had had successful exit and moved out of it. But there was a point in your last, in your trajectory prior to Profit Peak where you joined, I think, Blackbird, like the Young Giants program. And I'm interested in like sort of at that stage, off the back of talking around VCs, VALs. mantras, know, how people approach this. What did you feel that you needed to get from that? And what was missing in your sort of pathway?

Carla:

There was a few things. I actually remembered a conversation I had with my parents years earlier where they said early on in their fintech journey when they were developing the banking software, was the Rothschild family wanted to give them venture capital funding and they didn't take it. They were like, no, we want to retain 100 % ownership of the business. And I remember my parents saying when they merged with the NASDAQ listed business and mind you got an amazing result for themselves. They retired like younger than I am today for the first time. But you know, they I remember them saying that it would have been such a bigger result had they taken funding. And even if they only owned less, not the full 100 percent, because they would have had capital to expand at a much greater rate and gain more market share before others came into the market. Because even if you're category defining, which I really believe we're category defining, there's only a limited amount of time before someone else disrupts your category definition and comes and competes with you and undercuts you on price, right? So you need to build distribution and scale and to do that with your own capital is hard, especially in tech. So that's something I thought about. The other thing was like I've never built a tech business. Yes, my parents have built a tech business, but that was 20 years ago. Like my mum looks at the way we develop now and she's extremely jealous because she's like one button used to take me two days to code. I mean one button I can do it in lovable if I really want or in figma and then just push it across right. So it's changed so much so I didn't really have anywhere to turn for advice. So I thought why not join speak to some mentors get some advice and I realized as well that my three month build was quickly turning into like a year build for like an MVP and did I want to remortgage my house to fund this when I just paid it off with the other business sale or did I want to be a little bit more comfortable now with two kids in private schools? So that's kind of where the mindset was.

Kaga:

I think it's prudent and I also think that it's a really good lesson for anyone listening to take away that strategically being category defining and building what I think what I would call it is a temporary monopoly because it's never permanent right? So we are building your business and you've got that insight accelerating to a point where you can grow that market share, build your brand name and get people to understand that's what you do and what you stand for is critical to future success. Otherwise, especially today with AI and the speed of development, people are jumping at your heels quickly.

Carla:

Totally. And distribution is key because distribution means you have easy access to future capital, but equally you can say, hey, now let's shift gears, let's retain our equity and rather build at a slower pace, but more sustainably. So it gives us the optionality to get to either a point of profitability or a point where it's really easy to raise capital.

Fra:

So. you think based on this VC should change their approach into like their investment?

Carla:

No.

I don't think so because for them it's they get the exit often at IPO. So at that point they don't really care. I mean even if they don't admit it I'm sorry to say they don't care once they've got the exit they've done what they need for their fund they've returned it three times or whatever it is already. But at the end of the day then it's the founder left carrying the shares in their team and the valuation hits them and they're the ones who've put in the 10 years or 12 years of work to get it to this point the VC's done at that point.

What's the motivation for them? I mean, I was at a conference recently, I won't say who the founder was, it was a US listed business everyone knows and he was basically talking about how he's the founder, he's the CEO of a US listed company valued at a couple billion. And he was talking about how his early partners now have private jets on the back of him, but he can't afford to fly a private jet, know, because he is sitting with shares in the stock market tied up that have also tanked since that private valuation.

And I was like, ouch.

Fra:

That's crazy.

Kaga:

That does seem quite painful, doesn't it?

Carla:

And it's like, when am going to get my exit? Look, he's probably still very comfortable, but he's obviously made his venture partners a lot more money over the journey than he has seen in cash himself.

Kaga:

Yeah. it's a theory I'm interested in is around this idea of like a conviction founder, right? So you hear this term conviction politicians, it's people who have a strong will and you...you flock to them because you believe in their presentation and their beliefs and values. Do you think that when it comes to being a founder who has a strong belief structure in terms of what you're trying to achieve, is that a recruitment tool for you? Do you look for people to come in and change the world? Or are you a bit more pragmatic when it comes to being like, I know you want to come with us for a part of a time for a journey. You want to.Generous ESOP offering, like how pragmatic are you?

Carla:

hard now with AI. Every time I haven't, I've gone, okay, they've done really well on their test or my director of engineering said that they're really skilled and we've hired them and my gut feel wasn't right. I mean, we exited someone last week, that was that. My gut feel wasn't right three months ago. But technically on paper, he was brilliant.

That was when I went, should have vibe hired. I should not have relied on technical skill. And so that was a really big reminder for me last week that I need to go on my gut. It hasn't let me down most of the time. And technical skill can be faked with AI so easily. And also everyone's resume looks amazing right now. I mean, resumes have never looked better.

Kaga:

Yeah. There's a stat coming out now that...the efficiencies gained by HR departments are always going to be at the behest of the speed of applications from CV production in AI.

Carla:

It's mental. Everyone's CV is perfect. You couldn't be a better candidate. It was written for the job description.

Kaga:

It was. bespoke.

And it's also sent through the night, three CVs for jobs you didn't even know were populated. Totally. It's a strange world. So I think probably the interpersonal skills and being able to judge people on that.

Carla:

That is, and one change we've recently made is bringing people in for a one day trial. So actually saying, come into the office, we'll show you how we work, we'll give you access to our environment, we'll let you have a bit of a play. That has been really successful for us. And I actually learned that from another startup. I heard that Lorikeet another startup in Australia, were doing like two day trials for employees, like come in for two days and we'll see how it goes. And I was like, I might do that.

that we hired had done trials there anyway, so they didn't mind. So someone else had set the standard. And then it goes both ways, right? So they're saying yes because they feel a good fit. So I think maybe we won that candidate over Heidi because he came in and worked a day with us. So he knew what he was coming into. So he had full confidence in his decision. And equally, we had full confidence in our decision because he had had enough time with different stakeholders in the business where everyone was like, yeah, DevOps tick, engineering tick, front end tick. Everyone was really confident.

Kaga:

That's a really interesting concept. I haven't heard about it myself that they try like we

Carla:

We don't even pay them for it and they've been happy not to be paid

Kaga:

that was gonna be one of my pressing questions were so they're not paid but We've done it's very common for people to challenge

That's the AI problem Which then they can you can fudge it with AI?

And then you say, can they leverage AI then to do a really good job of their, like a really good job in the business.

And with this person we exited last week, no, the AI let them down in their job. technically when they did all the tests that we gave them, the AI didn't let them down because it was a predictable test that potentially whatever tool they used within AI knew how to win. But when it's a complex task in engineering where the AI can't solve it, and that's part of our business moat, that's where the human skill comes in.

Fra:

That's fascinating.

Kaga:

Just circling on that same topic, so do you find that it's a mutual test? Like they come in and they get to feel about a little bit more. And so, and because it's just a day, what do you do with them on the day? is it?

Carla:

That was my head of engineering's first comment and our founding DevOps. He was like, I'm not giving someone access to our environment for one day. And what am I supposed to like waste a whole day on this person? I'm like, no, no, you're investing one day so that you don't invest three months and find they're the wrong person. So we actually just need to flip the coin in how we think about this. Because this person we exited, we invested three months and they weren't the right person.

actually investing one day is far better. It's more conversational.

So it's, you know, these are the challenges we're facing. Have a look at the code where we're facing the challenges. Do you have any ideas on how we overcome this? You know, rather than actually overcoming it in that day, because that's impossible. It's do they have ideas on how they can overcome the challenge? And then that sets the framework for going, yeah, they're thinking about it in the right way. Or if they don't know, do they admit they don't know and they're to work towards a solution, which tells you they're the right person? Or do they just say they know everything and then you actually know they're the wrong person?

Like if someone is technically brilliant and knows everything, that's when I now run. Because the answer isn't there if we're category defining. So you can't know everything. There has to be a gap between what you know and what you will learn when you're in the business.

Kaga:

It is interesting. And they need to have confidence in uncertainty.

Carla:

Totally.

To be able to operate in that environment and know that I don't know all the answers, but I know.

I will figure it out and I have the fire in me to push up against a wall and push it down because that's what it takes to build a startup. You've got to push the wall down. So if you don't have the fire to push the wall down, you're not the right person for a startup. I'm going to have to exit you.

Kaga:

think one for listeners, what habits or numbers should every e-commerce founder, I think it's great to focus on them, should they be reviewing weekly?

Those are so easy. So everything is your three lines of profitability, CM1, CM2, CM3. You should be reviewing those every single week. You should know that you're running a profitable business, but equally running a profitable business doesn't mean you have enough cash to invest in your next product drop. So you should be looking at your cash conversion cycles. You should be looking at your cash at bank and you should be looking at your runway as well. That is really, important. Ironically, I don't think you should be looking at ROAS and that's going to be controversial because is ROAS doesn't mean anything to your business long term. It just means that the algorithm's favoring you right now from a revenue perspective. The other thing I'd be looking at as well as an e-commerce founder is a lot of quantitative and qualitative data that you can find about your business. So one of the things that we've built into ProfitPeak with Sherpa is it can actually deep dive into sentiment around your brand, your products and your business in the market and compare it to competitors.

You can also do that in a very basic way naturally through chat GPT or Claude or any of the AI platforms out there, but has sentiment shifted towards your business? Are there any negative reviews on Reddit for your business, which impacts obviously sentiment in chat GPT when someone goes in there to search around your brand and your product because they resource information from Reddit? Is there any new incumbents in your category that you should be across and following? Has one of your competitors launched a new line?

Like being across all of those actually gives you a better idea to forecast out future revenue than the numbers or ROAS says today. So I think that's really, really helpful. Like being able to say, you know, I'm Princess Polly, how do I compare to White Fox, Baby Boo, all that Fashion Nova, all our competitors in market and wear sentiment positive and negative and what are the opportunities for our brand?

Because I think in this AI first world, your ability to build margin is in your brand. It's not necessarily in your product because everyone can manufacture the same product, but your ability to charge more for the product than Temu is in your brand. I know you guys agree.

Kaga:

Okay, well, I think that's great fit for us. I would love to know. sort of, I think we'd both like to know, like, what are the things you're most excited for, both for Profit Peak, but also personally, over 2026?

Carla:

Interesting. haven't even thought about the personal aspect, which is crazy. But we are planning to relocate to the US, which is a massive decision that we have made as a family. Yeah, the US is out is going to become our core market. And it's if we're really going to invest and make a splash, can we do that on a different time zone without our head fully in the game? Unlikely. And yeah, we just have to do it. And our founding A.E. from Australia has agreed to come with us as well, which is really exciting. and we've just hired our first US hire to join us on the sales front as well. So that's all really exciting. So US launch, moved to the US, that's huge, both personally and professionally, but I think of it more as professional than personal. And I just hope my kids like Miami. Miami? Miami.

Kaga:

It’ll be warmer than New York.

Carla:

I would never go to New York. My sister-in-law lives in New Jersey and I saw her doing snow angels with a glass of wine this weekend and I was thinking, I'd much rather my position on Coogee Beach right now. Even with the sharks.

Kaga:

Well, thank you so much for coming in today, Carla. It's been fantastic to talk to you. Yeah, loved having you on the podcast.

Carla:

Thanks for having me.

Kaga:

We hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening. Follow us on Linkedin and Spotify to stay updated with new podcast releases and we’ll see you again soon.

‍