7 Moments That Got Me to 28
Personal note this week.
Seven years ago I was selling frying pans to strangers at a trade show. Today I turn 28.
In between those two sentences there's a wife, a team of nine, and brands that now trust us with more in a month than I ever imagined. Most days I still can't quite believe either end of that.
First, I was planning to give you 28 tips. But I'm not going to do that.
Most listicles are filler, and your inbox has enough of those already.
Instead I want to walk you through the handful of moments from the last ten years that actually changed how I think.
The kind of thing I'd only really say out loud on a birthday.
Some of it is about building a business. Most of it is about getting out of my own way.
Selling pans.
That trade show was part of a three-month internship at a tiny cookware startup.
Two founders, a few interns who all quit within days, and then just me, handed every job at once.
Email, ads, content, and standing at a booth pitching pans to people who mostly wanted to reach the next stall.
I had no idea what I was doing. I loved it anyway.
That's the first thing I'd tell any founder.
Confidence is a souvenir from doing the work. It shows up after you start, never before.
Whatever you're waiting to feel ready for, you won't. Begin badly and let it catch up.
The car the salesman told me not to buy.
To afford my first car I pulled brutal waiter shifts (16h+) and bought a 20-year-old BMW for 2,000 euros.
Nobody thought it was a good idea. The salesman himself tried to talk me out of it, said it was a terrible decision for a broke university student. The legal-minimum insurance alone was 1,800 euros a year, and it only covered damage to the other car.
Maybe they were right on paper. It also made me feel free, and I've never once regretted it.
A few years later I put 12,000 euros I didn't have on a payment plan to join a coaching program, terrified the whole time.
Both decisions got called reckless. Both changed my life.
The bets that scare you and make other people wince are usually the ones worth making.
The safe choice has a price too. It's just not visible in the moment.
The year I hid.
For the first full year, I pretty much hid this business from everyone. Friends, parents, all of them.
I'd land a client, make a few grand, and still lie awake waiting for the floor to give out.
What if it failed in front of everyone? What if they all realized I was a fraud?
I wish someone had told me this sooner.
Nobody is watching as closely as you fear, and the few who are will respect that you tried.
That same fear is what keeps founders off camera, out of their own ads, and quiet about the brand they've built.
The market can't fall for something you're hiding.
Good enough, shipped.
My instinct has always been to make everything perfect before it goes out.
For years I thought that was having standards. Mostly it was fear wearing a nicer outfit.
The lesson, in my own work and in every brand I've watched scale, is the same. Done and out beats perfect and waiting almost every time.
The raw phone video outperforms the polished studio ad. The offer you ship this week teaches you more than the one you polish for three months. Keep the high standard. Just move the finish line to shipped, and let the market sand the edges.
The week it cracked.
In May last year we lost three clients in a single week.
Twenty percent of our revenue, gone in five days.
I felt it in my body before I understood it in my head. Numb legs, a tight chest.
The voice in my head said I'd been faking it all along and the mask was finally slipping.
So I did a scary thing. I asked my team for the truth, anonymously, and braced for the worst.
What came back was support, respect, and belief. I read those answers three times.
The distance between what I believed about myself and what was actually true had never been wider.
My thoughts aren't facts. When the spiral starts, stop trusting the story in your head and go get the real data, from your team, from your customers, from your numbers. The story is almost always worse than the truth.
Getting out of my own way.
For a long time I was the bottleneck in my own company, and I called it being thorough.
Tagged in Slack a dozen times a day. Reviewing every report and sitting in on every call.
Then I started asking my team "what do you think?" and going with their answer.
We wrote down how we actually do the work, so the standard stopped living only in my head.
The day a teammate ran a client call without me (and didn't tell me until afterward, because it simply went well) I felt something better than control. I felt free.
Your business can't grow past a founder who insists on touching everything.
At some point the highest-leverage thing you can do is get out of the way.
The dragon.
If I could hand the version of me who wanted to quit one note, it would say two things.
Stop trying to be perfect, and keep going. And the bigger the dragon, the more epic the story.
Every season I was sure would break me...
the lost clients, the months I couldn't pay myself, the nights I wanted to quit and shrink back to something small and safe...
became the part of the story I'm proudest of now.
The hard chapter you're in the middle of right now is the reason your story will be worth telling. So keep going.
The honest version.
That's the honest version. Seven moments instead of twenty-eight.
They're the ones that actually changed me.
Looking back, the thread is almost embarrassingly simple.
Every one of them was me being scared and doing the thing anyway.
The fear never fully left. I just stopped letting it drive.
None of it happened alone. Joanna, you backed me before this looked like anything, and two months ago you married me in the middle of all of it. Thank you.
To my team of nine, you carry this further than I ever could on my own, and you make me look better than I am.
To every founder who has trusted us with your brand and serious money (combined over a million a month) I don't take that lightly for a second.
And to you, for opening these every week. That still amazes me.
Here's to 28.
The bigger the dragon, the more epic the story.
This one was personal. Most weeks, Ecom Growth Insider is tactical: unit economics, creative, CRO, and the numbers behind scaling a DTC brand. It lands twice a week, free, written the same way this letter was.