Stephen Mercer

I built a men's grooming and lifestyle brand from a Shopify store to $4.2M ARR over four years. Bootstrapped. No VC money. No acquisition debt. Just a product people wanted, a small team, and a lot of iterations.

We were acquired in late 2023. I spent the six months after that decompressing and writing down everything I'd learned, mostly the things I wish someone had told me earlier.

Most DTC content is either too fluffy (5 "strategies" that aren't strategies) or too narrow (advice that only works at $100M scale). I write for founders in the $500K–$5M range, because that's the stage where the operational decisions actually matter and nobody's paying enough attention to them.

The topics I come back to: email and retention (because it's where 30–40% of revenue comes from and most brands underinvest), cash flow (because growth kills more DTC brands than bad products do), and hiring (because getting this wrong at the $1M stage costs you 6 months and a year's worth of lessons).

I'm not building another agency. I'm not selling a course. The newsletter is the thing. It's where I think out loud.

By the numbers

Currently

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