If you're not investing in your brand's growth, you're investing in its death.

Sounds dramatic, but it's true. Most e-commerce brands don't get beat by competitors.

They get beat by Stacknation.

Today I'm going to unpack why brands that stop innovating, eventually flatline, how to recognize

when you've hit market maturity, and what smart founders do to keep growth alive.

Let's start by talking about the myth of stability.

This is the founder mindset of, I'll just keep milking this one skew.

This one skew is profitable. I'm making

$5,000 or $10,000 a month. But the reality check here is that there's going to be rising

costs over time. Ads are going to get more competitive. Shipping could increase. Fees on Amazon

seem to always increase over time. And customer interest fades. We see this a lot with my own brand

and we're selling design-specific skews and products. A design that might be trending and popular

in 2024 may not be as popular or trending in 2025. And competitors can catch up,

especially if you're selling a product that's trending or maybe even considered somewhat of a fad.

You may have the first-to-market advantage, but usually that doesn't last for very long.

Coasting in business is like standing on an escalator that's going down.

If you're not climbing, you're going to be losing ground.

Every product on Amazon goes through a type of S curve, or at least most of them do.

And it looks something like this.

You introduce the new product, people get excited about new stuff. There's good explosive growth

maybe in the first few months or even years. Then you reach market maturity, where demand

is stable and you might find kind of a sweet spot of as far as you can optimize your ads.

...