Tony Rabinovitch has worked in his family’s food business since he was a kid, so I asked him the obvious question: what’s it like spending 24 hours a day with your family?

“I say it wasn’t 24, it was 25, because I woke up an hour earlier.”

Tony Rabinovitch

The Rabinovitch family arrived in Toronto from Ukraine in 1993 and started making perogies 2 years later, for a single deli. Today Tony runs that business, Pelmen Foods, and it carries 3 brands: Pelmen in Canada, Holy Perogy! in the U.S. and Big Yum, which takes the family’s dumpling know-how into mainstream frozen snacks. Tony also gets 2 or 3 acquisition offers a week, and he deletes them.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t have any other experience,” he told me. “Everything that I know in this space, I learned on the job.”

How Pelmen Foods started with $300 and one deli

The business began as a favor to a friend. In January 1995, Tony’s father, Jeff, put down a $300 deposit on a pasta roller, a dough mixer and a small freezer chest. A family friend had been making perogies for a local deli and needed someone to cover the orders for a couple of months while she was away in Israel. She never came back for the business, Tony later told Canadian Packaging, so the family kept going, first with her recipes and then with their own.

Jeff was an electrical engineer who had spent years repairing bakery equipment, and he was between jobs. The first kitchen was a small apartment in Toronto’s north end, where Tony pinched dough next to his parents, his sister and his grandparents.

The family never wrote a business plan. They had one customer, a recipe and every reason to make it work.

“We joked about it the other day,” Tony said:

“The best business plan we ever had was not having a business plan, rather than actually just doing it, getting your hands dirty and actually doing the hard work.”

He started college because that’s what immigrant parents expect, switched to night school, then dropped out. “I said, I have a real business career that I can grow.”

That apprenticeship paid off when the company scaled. In his 2012 interview with Canadian Packaging, Tony walks through the new production line machine by machine, down to the freezer times. Few founders know their operations that well, and it makes every hiring and buying decision sharper.

Working with family: the 25-hour day

Those 25-hour days came with an upside: focus. “When you’re in it together as a family, there’s kind of no way out, and you have to make it work,” he said.

When I told him it sounded like having all your eggs in one basket, he agreed right away: “A hundred percent, as a team. There was no fallback if the business failed. Everyone’s savings sit in the same basket, so nobody drifts off to a side project.”

The hard part came when the company needed to grow. Tony took the lead on investing money the family had earned from the business, and that scared everyone, including him. He and his father disagreed about how things should be done. His advice to anyone building with family is this:

“If you feel that you’re at a breaking point where it’s either my way or the highway, the highway can be scary, because then you’re losing a family, not just a partner or a friend.”

The same weight also pushed him forward. “Your entire family, not just your staff and employees, but also your extended family, depends on you,” he said. “It doesn’t make it easy, but it definitely pushes you harder.”

Why Pelmen Foods left the deli shelf in 2010

For about 15 years, Pelmen sold mostly to Russian and Eastern European delis. In 2010, the family decided that shelf was too small. The company moved into a new 15,000-square-foot facility in Toronto’s west end, bought new equipment and went after national grocery chains, according to Canadian Packaging.

The boldest change was the bag. Frozen perogies traditionally came in clear plastic, and Tony wanted packaging that looked like a brand. Pelmen switched to a printed, resealable bag in 9 colors. Some long-time customers disliked the new look, and the company lost a few of them. Stores welcomed it, and Pelmen landed on the shelves of Pusateri’s Fine Foods, one of Toronto’s upscale grocers.

“It hurts to lose a few long-time customers,” Tony told Canadian Packaging in 2012. He made the trade anyway, and he priced for it. Pelmen’s perogies were 60% filling and 40% dough, which Tony said was the reverse of the industry average and supported a premium price.

How Holy Perogy! and Big Yum take one kitchen to new customers

Pelmen is the family’s Canadian legacy brand. For the U.S., Tony launched a separate brand with its own name and look: Holy Perogy!. The Nibble named it a Top Pick of the Week in 2022 and noted that the family chose the Ukrainian spelling, “perogy,” on purpose.

Next, Tony wanted to move beyond perogies, and that needed a brand of its own. He describes Big Yum as engineered from scratch. “It was meant to appeal to your typical all-American consumer,” he said.

Big Yum’s lineup includes Crispy Breakfast Bites (egg, cheddar and bacon in a crispy shell that goes into the air fryer for 8 to 10 minutes), Asian-inspired Mini Dumpling Bites and Crispy Pie Bites.

Tony described the dumplings to Frozen & Refrigerated Buyer as “ethnic for the masses, not the ethnic market.” The magazine noted that the 5 dumpling flavors, including Kimchi Pork and Sweet Miso Vegetable, don’t duplicate what’s already on shelves.

The plan is for Big Yum to keep growing as an umbrella brand. “At some point you might see Big Yum cookies,” Tony said, with more categories to follow.

He’s on a well-proven path. Hamdi Ulukaya grew up on a dairy farm in eastern Turkey and, in 2005, bought a 100-year-old yogurt factory in upstate New York with loans of less than $1 million. His goal, NBC News reported, was to bring the yogurt of his childhood to everyday shoppers. Chobani launched in 2007, and by Ulukaya’s count it was a $1 billion business 5 years later. Greek yogurt went from almost no U.S. sales to more than a third of the yogurt Americans eat.

Why immigrant founders are built for this

Tony never had a backup plan. “It was just kind of an unspoken rule in our family,” he said. “I saw what they had to go through to make a good living for themselves, for us as kids. It was second nature. You don’t think about it, you just do it.”

I’m an immigrant too, and I recognized that instinct right away. Moving countries teaches you to be resourceful and to make decisions with limited information, which describes most of a founder’s week.

Why Tony deletes 2 to 3 acquisition offers a week

When I asked which company Tony looks up to, he said he doesn’t have one, since every company has its own story. His goals are concrete: make good-quality food, take care of his employees and the community, and provide for his family, including his future grandkids and great-grandkids.

6 lessons from 3 decades of building Pelmen Foods

Most founders reading this start with more than the Rabinovitch family had in 1995: more money, more connections and a lot more software. What carried Pelmen was simpler: doing every job, making the hard calls together and reinvesting in the product.

Used equipment, a family that wouldn’t quit and 30 years of steady reinvestment add up to a company buyers email every week. Tony’s answer is to keep cooking.

About the Author

Assel Beglinova writes about ecommerce and DTC trends, growth strategy for consumer brands, and how sellers fund their expansion and manage cash flow as they scale. Her work covers the financing questions every consumer brand founder runs into, from revenue-based financing to inventory planning to keeping enough working capital on hand to act on growth opportunities. Assel is the CEO and co-founder of Paperstack, a platform that provides working capital for consumer brands.

The post The 25-Hour Day: How One Family Grew Pelmen Foods Into 3 Brands appeared first on BYVI.

The most generous recommendation you ever gave is, right now, working against you. The place closed months ago, and your guide keeps sending strangers to a locked door, each one quietly deciding your taste can no longer be trusted.

Almost none of them will say a word. They just trust you a little less, and the one asset you can’t rebuild drains away at a rate no dashboard will ever show you.

What people actually buy from you is the belief that your judgment still holds – 64% of consumers engage most with reviews they trust as genuine. A guide frozen on the day you published it slowly makes a liar out of you.

Key Takeaways

Why Should Travel Creators Stop Doing Free Travel Agent Work in Direct Messages?

Look at where your saves and DMs cluster. “Where did you eat.” “Which route did you take.” “Is that hotel worth it.” That is demand. Real, proven demand. People are telling you exactly what they would pay for.

But answered one at a time in DMs, that demand disappears. Each reply is a tiny planning session paid for with your time. The follower gets a plan. You get a heart emoji. The recommendation lands in their camera roll, where it earns you nothing.

And this is real work with a real price tag. U.S. travel agents earned a median annual wage of $50,160 in 2025, much of it from commissions and service fees. You do the same job in your DMs. You just skipped the part where you get paid.

The timing makes it worse. A post went up, blew up, went viral, but died in a day. The DMs never end. American Express found that 54% of travelers plan major trips three to six months ahead. So the person asking about your hotel in month six is completely normal. And you are answering her for free, again.

Count it for one week. Every planning DM you answer, one tick mark. By Sunday you will know exactly how much unpaid travel agent work you are doing.

Why Must Travel Creators Run ROI Tests on Software Subscriptions and Digital Storefronts?

This one really gets me, because it is so backwards.

A creator with 20,000 followers is often paying $29 a month for Stan Store, plus Linktree, plus a stack of editing tools. During our Georgetown Ventures cohort this year, I sat down with a young travel creator. She was about to drop $200 on a landing page. It wouldn’t even do half of what she needed. All of this before she had made a single dollar.

I won’t tell you to cancel this tool or that one. Instead, ask one honest question about every line on your card statement. Is this tool actually making me money back? Or is it just keeping the lights on?

Most of what creators pay for are storefronts. They hold your stock, they don’t earn for you. Nobody discovers you through a link-in-bio page. It waits for traffic you have to bring yourself. And it bills you whether or not anyone shows up.

The numbers make this urgent. The median creator makes around $3,800 a year, usually from very limited channels, and the creators we’ve talked to are living exactly that reality. Linktree’s own report found that 68% of part-time creators made less than $1,000 a year from creator work. You cannot ask that person to pay a stack of subscriptions before she earns a penny. The math just doesn’t work.

Let me show you. Paid month to month, that Stan Store plan runs $348 a year. Against $3,800 in income, that is close to a tenth of everything you make, spent on a shelf. 

So here is the shift. Stop paying to own tools, and only pay for what actually pays you back. Hold that thought, because I am going to complicate it in Step 5.

Why Should Travel Creators Build Dynamic Digital Travel Guides Instead of Static PDFs?

Back to that creator from Georgetown Ventures. She had the right instinct. She built an entire travel guide in Notion and sold it for around $50 or $60 a copy. Her taste, packaged and priced.

Then she told me the thing that got me.

A restaurant on her guide had closed permanently. She had no way to tell the people who had already bought it. Some of them came back to her. Your Notion isn’t legit, it’s not updated, this is old information. She felt awful. Guilty. She had personally recommended that place. That is why they trusted her. They showed up, and it was gone.

Meanwhile her guide was still out there, still selling, slowly going wrong. She couldn’t fix it. And she was still answering “is this place still open, do you still recommend it” in her DMs. Months later. For free.

How Do Outdated Static Travel Guides Cause Travel Creators to Lose Audience Trust?

Everybody worries about the big public blowup. What I heard was quieter. Honestly, it stuck with me more. It’s a trust leaking out one bad recommendation at a time.

When a buyer shows up to a closed restaurant, most of them never complain. They just trust her a little less next time. And she has no idea it is happening. She can’t check every place every day on a PDF. She can’t push a fix into every copy she already sold.

I’ll be careful here. We are still digging into how common this is in our creator interviews, and I don’t want to overclaim. But we have heard it enough times that I stopped treating it as a fluke.

What Are the Benefits of Selling Dynamic Digital Travel Itineraries for Content Creators?

That is when it clicked for me. Taste was never the problem. She had the taste, the beautiful experiences, the audience, all of it. She just had no way to keep any of it alive.

So if you are going to sell your itineraries, and you should, sell something that lives. Put your guide at a link, connected to the posts that made people want it, with your places on a map. When a restaurant closes, you fix it once. Every buyer sees the fix. Your guide stays right. Your name stays trusted.

One more thing. It should stay visibly yours. Your words, your photos, your opinions. Let AI organize your recommendations and keep them current, but your voice is what people are paying for. Sprout Social found that 64% of consumers engage most with genuine, unbiased influencer reviews. The organizing can be automated. The taste has to be you.

How Can Travel Creators Earn Recurring Commission Income From Direct Itinerary Bookings?

This is the “get paid to travel” part, and it is simpler than people think.

Your followers are going to book that hotel anyway. They are going to book that tour anyway. The only question is whether your name is attached to the booking. For most creators, it isn’t. They watch your Reel, screenshot your DM, open a booking site, and the commission goes to nobody.

And the demand is bigger than most creators realize. Expedia’s 2025 Traveler Value Index found that 61% of travelers now find trip ideas on social media, up from 35% in 2022. And 73% say an influencer’s recommendation influenced a booking. Those travelers are already in your DMs. They just can’t book through you.

When your recommendations live on a map with booking built in, the flow changes. Your follower reads your guide. She taps the hotel you actually stayed at. She books it right there. You earn from that booking. Nothing changes for her. Everything changes for you, because you have stopped doing free travel agent work.

This is exactly why we built Nowy the way we did. It’s free for the creator. We only make money when she does, when a traveler books through her map with partners like Priceline and Viator. If she doesn’t earn, we don’t earn. The risk comes off her and onto us. And more than 20,000 travelers already use Nowy to plan trips. Your recommendations land in front of people deciding where to go.

Think about trips you have already taken. Every post in your back catalogue becomes inventory. A place on a map that can earn while you are at your day job. For a part-time creator, this is what getting paid to travel actually looks like. The last trip helps pay for the next one.

Why Should Travel Creators Invest in Tools That Build Audience Ownership and Data Control?

Now, an honest correction. Someone once pushed back on my “only pay for what pays you back” line, and they were right. I said it a little too absolutely.

Not every upfront cost is a waste. Some are exactly what you should be spending on, even before they pay off. For me, the real line is a different one. Does this expense make me more dependent on someone else’s platform? Or does it make me own more of my business? Those are two completely different things.

The best example is an email list. Absolutely invest in one, even before it pays off. On Instagram, a page your size reaches about 5.5% of its followers per post. Email open rates average just under 40%. Your own list reaches roughly seven times as many of your people. No algorithm can take it from you. That is owning your audience instead of renting it. Totally worth paying for, right? The math works.

Same idea with data. If a tool shows you what is converting and what your audience actually books, that is control over your own business. Worth every dollar.

That is also how I think about our own paid tier. Nowy is free to start. Anything you would ever pay us for should pass the same test. Does it make you own more, or see more? If it only keeps the lights on, don’t pay for it.

What Is the Complete Monetization Playbook for Travel Content Creators Using Nowy?

When I was a kid in Guangzhou, my father said the same three words before every trip. “Now we go.” That is where Nowy‘s name comes from. It is the feeling right before a trip, when everything is possible. Your followers feel that when they watch your Reels. That is what they are trying to buy from you.

So here is the whole playbook. Notice where you are doing free travel agent work. Run the ROI test on your tool stack and cut what only holds stock. Package your taste into a guide that lives and updates. Route the bookings back to you. Spend real money only where it makes you own more.

You already have the taste, the trips, and the audience. Keep it alive, and let the value come back to you.

Then go take the next trip.

FAQs

About the author

Branda Fan is the Founder and CEO of NOWY, an AI travel platform that turns the travel content people save on social media into personalized, bookable itineraries. NOWY is backed by TEDCO and part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. As a seasoned technology entrepreneur, Branda is also the Principal of Data Pacific, a consulting firm specializing in data analytics and technology delivery for federally funded university research programs. Before founding her companies, she spent over a decade building technology for federal agencies, including as a Solutions Architect at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the General Services Administration. NOWY takes its name from her father’s three words before every trip: ‘Now we go.’

The post How to Get Paid to Travel and Monetize Your Itineraries appeared first on BYVI.

Tally asks its new users one simple question during onboarding: where did you find us?

Marie Martens and Filip Minev founded Tally in Ghent, Belgium in 2020. For years, it grew mostly through word of mouth and the “Made with Tally” badge on forms people filled out. Then, in the spring of 2025, more and more new users started answering that onboarding question with “ChatGPT.”

By June 2025, the team reported that ChatGPT had become their “#1 referral source,” with over 2,000 new users signing up via AI tools in the previous months (and that was only the ones they could track). At the time, Tally had 8 people, 4 of them part-time.

In April 2026, at $5M ARR, they wrote that their viral loop “is no longer our biggest acquisition channel. AI-powered search is.”

By September, Tally had crossed $6M ARR and 2.5 million users with a team of 10, and 43% of new users were discovering it through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI assistants.

That’s a tiny team winning attention in the place where buyers now make decisions. And the way they did it is good news for every founder who can’t afford a content team.

The tiny-team advantage in AI search

Early-stage founders tend to assume AI search belongs to big brands with big budgets. But the data points somewhere more encouraging.

In 2025, Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to see what correlates with how often a brand shows up in Google’s AI Overviews. The strongest signal was branded web mentions, meaning how often people talk about you across the web, with or without a link. Backlinks, the thing founders used to pay agencies for, came in far lower at 0.218.

There’s a second reason to start now. In 2025, University of Toronto researchers asked 4 AI assistants the same questions and compared their answers. For well-known brands, the assistants recommended the same names 76% to 81% of the time. For niche players, that dropped to 71% to 76%.

For a startup, that gap is a huge opening: AI’s picture of smaller players is less settled, so what you publish and what people say about you this year can still shape it. (The study is a preprint that hasn’t been peer reviewed, so treat the numbers as a rough guide.)

Being talked about is something you earn by being useful to people, one conversation at a time, and that’s work a founder can do better than any agency.

Founders often ask me for the trick to showing up in AI answers. I always give them the same one:

Become the most helpful brand on the internet for your ICP.

Google’s own guidance lands in the same place. Its guide to AI search boils everything down to one question for site owners: “Is this content that my visitors would find satisfying?”

Be where your users ask

Tally’s team spent years showing up in the forums, Reddit threads and blogs where people asked about forms and survey tools.

In their words, they “invested for years in showing up in those places by sharing what we learn, answering questions, and being human.”

When ChatGPT’s spring 2025 update turned web browsing on by default, all of that history became source material. In Tally’s view, those years of real recommendations are why AI tools started sending people their way.

Their April 2026 update says it best:

“Both of these channels, word of mouth and AI search, are powered by the same thing: our community. Happy users sharing the word, recommending us on Reddit, supporting us online, and now even organizing meetups.”

The mix keeps widening, too: Tally says ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and AI Overviews “continue to grow as referral sources.”

The lesson for founders is simple. The conversations you join today become the answers AI gives tomorrow. Google is clear that faking this doesn’t work: its guide says that seeking inauthentic mentions across the web “isn’t as helpful as it might seem.”

So skip the paid Reddit posts and the review swaps. Answer real questions, as yourself, under your own name.

Publish what only you know

The second thing small teams have is data nobody else has seen.

Tally has shared its numbers in public almost from day 1. Every milestone goes on its blog, from a revenue table that starts at $0 in September 2020 to its upgrade rate (about 1% of badge signups eventually pay). In 2021, the founders told Failory that building in public helped them get noticed by other founders.

Google’s guide tells site owners to avoid anything a generative AI model could easily produce. If ChatGPT could write your post, it has no reason to send anyone to read yours.

Start with what you already have: onboarding data, churn reasons and the questions customers ask on every demo call.

Make your product easy for AI to read and use

Getting recommended by AI is the first win. Tally also made its product easy for AI tools to read and use.

Its site has an llms.txt file, a plain-text map written for AI tools. It describes Tally in 2 sentences, then points to the help center, the API docs, pricing and integration guides. Its developer docs go further: they’re available as a single plain-text file, so an AI agent can read the whole API reference in one go.

Then Tally let AI assistants use the product directly. Its free MCP server, along with connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, lets people create forms, edit them and pull in responses without opening Tally.

In August 2026, Tally crossed 1 million AI tool calls in a single month across Tally AI and its MCP server.

One caveat before you spend a sprint on this. Google’s guide says Google Search ignores llms.txt and similar files, so they won’t move your Google rankings. Treat them as a bonus for the other AI tools and agents that read them.

How to show up in ChatGPT answers: 5 steps for startups

You don’t need a content team or a big budget for any of these. You need about 2 hours a week and the knowledge already in your head.

Then check what AI actually says about you. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your buyers ask, using a private chat mode with memory switched off, so your own past questions don’t skew the answers.

Become the answer AI gives your buyers

Big companies have budgets, content teams and, often, agencies. Early-stage startups have something more useful in AI search: founders who talk to customers every day and know things nobody else has written down.

In 2020, Tally was 2 founders in Ghent with a free form builder and no investors. Today, 43% of its new users arrive because an AI assistant recommended it.

None of that took a big team or a big budget. It took years of answering community questions, sharing numbers only Tally had and making the product easy for AI to read and use. You can start on all of it this week with the knowledge already in your head.

And if you keep showing up, AI search won’t be able to leave your product out.

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post How Tally Turned AI Search Into Its Biggest Growth Channel appeared first on BYVI.

One founder funded early inventory with venture capital. While the company was still generating only a few million dollars in revenue, that founder owned less than 20% of it, which was too little equity to raise the larger round the business needed to scale. Another brand, also doing a few million in revenue, negotiated favorable payment terms with its manufacturer and used debt exclusively for inventory. At $10 million in revenue, its founder still held majority ownership and was well positioned to raise venture capital for the run to $100 million.

Working capital gets trued up when a brand sells. SRS Acquiom’s working capital study found purchase price adjustment provisions in 92% of the deals it studied that closed from 2022 through the third quarter of 2024. Buyers’ initial claims against sellers came to a median of 0.26% of transaction value and an average of 0.88%. Even the average is small next to the gap between owning under 20% of a company and owning a majority of it, and that gap opened years before anyone calculated a closing adjustment.

I work on the capital side of e-commerce and CPG. From there, my view is that a profitable exit gets structured in working capital long before there’s a buyer. How you finance inventory, marketing and the stretch between paying suppliers and getting paid decides four things: what the owners keep, what’s owed against the company, what margins its history shows, and how complicated it looks from the outside.

Key Takeaways

How Does E-Commerce Inventory Financing Impact the Cap Table and Founder Ownership?

The most expensive capital you can use for inventory or predictable marketing is equity. E-commerce brands typically place inventory orders two to three times a year, so paying for them with equity means selling ownership again and again for the same recurring expense. Debt for a production run gets repaid from the sales that inventory generates. Equity sold for the same run comes permanently off the owners’ share of whatever the company is eventually worth. Physical-product founders also tend to hold less after a Series A. Carta’s Founder Ownership Report 2026 puts median founder ownership at 30.5% in physical industries, against 37.5% in digital ones.

Equity has been created for you to experiment and try, so I’d reserve it for new channels, new products, specific hires and international expansion. Inventory and advertising with a predictable return are repeatable activities where you know exactly what they cost, and I’d fund them with non-dilutive capital. An early-stage brand still searching for its hero product may need to mix debt and equity for inventory while it experiments. Once a brand reaches several million to over $10 million in revenue and has enough data for lenders, I’d move inventory fully to non-dilutive capital. At $5 million to $50 million, you’re past that point.

Why Should E-Commerce Founders Price Venture Debt Warrants at Exit Value?

Part of what you pay for venture debt is equity, so part of its cost only shows up at exit. Venture debt works best right after an equity raise, because lenders size it against the round you just closed. It usually sits as the senior facility with a first-lien position, so any junior capital you add later sits behind it.

The interest is fixed and easy to model. To find the true cost of capital for a venture debt deal, you also need a dollar figure for the warrants. With penny warrants, you get that figure by forecasting your equity value. A 2% warrant costs you $200,000 at a $10 million valuation. If the company grows past a $100 million valuation in five years, the same 2% costs more than $2 million when you sell.

These facilities also usually carry covenants on cash balances, revenue milestones or burn rate. Make sure each one is livable in an ordinary month as well as a strong one. Tie the facility to a specific growth milestone so you know what the warrant is buying.

What Are the Financial Risks of Taking Unused Upfront Capital in E-Commerce?

Founders often take the full pre-approved amount purely for a sense of security, which I compare to maxing out a personal credit card. It’s easy to forget that the moment you take capital upfront is the moment you start paying for it. Brands that take the maximum without an immediate use can end up remitting 20%, 25% or even 30% of daily sales while the money sits idle. That hurts most in slower seasons, and those months go into the financial history a buyer will eventually read.

One rapidly growing brand took a $1 million loan when it needed $300,000, because it was approved and optimistically assumed its growth would cover it. It was remitting 25% to 27% of daily sales, and that remittance quickly doubled from $250,000 to $500,000 while the brand paid heavily for capital it wasn’t using. A consumer brand doing more than $20 million took excess capital just in case. Its daily remittances drained the bank account and trapped it in a cycle of needing to borrow more.

I analyzed the cash flow of an apparel brand that was struggling to remit 25% of its daily sales toward a million-dollar loan. I set up a 60-day draw schedule and refinanced the remaining balance over a longer payback period. The remittance wasn’t as severe after that, and the business kept more cash in its bank account.

Before you accept the next offer, ask what you’ll do with the cash. If you do nothing with it, work out how much it costs your business to keep it in the bank account. If you are not using that capital in the next 30 to 45 days, you shouldn’t be taking it upfront. A large cushion only makes sense when it’s deployed right away, for example to negotiate bulk discounts on raw materials.

How Should E-Commerce Brands Negotiate Working Capital Terms and Remittance Caps?

Line up your accounts payable with your capital flows. Say your factory terms ask for a 20% to 30% deposit, with the remainder due 60 days later or on shipment. Take a first tranche for the deposit and a second for the final payment, and hold off on drawing marketing capital until the goods arrive. For a $10 million apparel brand, I structured a credit facility of slightly over $1 million. We deployed $300,000 immediately and deferred the remainder for 60 to 90 days, which saved the business from carrying capital costs it didn’t need yet.

Remittance caps matter most when you’re growing fast. Shopify Capital sets its daily payment percentage by each borrower’s risk profile, and there’s no cap on the remittance. A brand paying 17% of daily sales can watch that payment double in dollars during a growth period, which penalizes it for its own growth. With any provider, ask whether the minimum is sustainable in slower months and how the maximum is calculated. Then negotiate the cap with your own historical data as the evidence.

The biggest mistake we see is evaluating capital partners purely on headline terms. In the Federal Reserve Banks’ 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, 60% of employer firms borrowing from online lenders said their costs came in higher than expected, against 37% of small-bank borrowers. Origination, underwriting and admin fees, wire fees and fees for changing your bank account all belong in the total cost before you compare offers. Check whether the funds are restricted to marketing only or inventory only. Check, too, whether wholesale revenue counts when a draft order is created in Shopify or only once payment lands. For a production run, a flat fee is often more useful than an APR, because knowing the true dollar cost upfront lets you confirm the run is profitable before you place it.

How Do Unplanned Inventory Sell-Outs Impact E-Commerce Margins and Operations?

A sell-out might look like a celebration from the outside, but from the inside it puts massive operational pressure on the team. A $5 million wellness brand went viral and sold out on Amazon, which dropped its search ranking and made visibility hard to regain. A wellness brand at about $10 million had a marketing agency so efficient that inventory sold faster than anticipated. The company had to order restocks urgently and pause all expansion into new channels to keep enough stock for its core DTC customers. I count an unplanned sell-out as a financial failure. Rushing a restock by air and spending extra to win back disappointed customers can slash another 20% to 30% off overall margins.

When ads outperform and stock drains faster than planned, slow down some promotions to preserve the inventory while you make each sale more profitable. During a supply chain delay, I advised an apparel business to cut its promotional discounts. The higher margins let it afford expediting replacement inventory by air from a different manufacturer.

Unapologetic optimism, the way I mean it, is the discipline of preparing for volatility without letting it paralyze decisions. New import tariffs once raised landed costs overnight for one of our brand partners. Most finance leaders in that position were cutting marketing and freezing inventory orders. We modeled the tariffs holding, dropping or expanding, and aligned a flexible capital plan that could adjust to each outcome, so the team kept ordering at scale. When the market stabilized, it was one of the few brands still fully stocked, and it captured meaningful market share while others scrambled to restock.

How Does a Consolidated Capital Stack Reduce Risk for E-Commerce Lenders and Buyers?

From the outside, a business with several capital providers can look riskier than it is in reality. One CPG brand we worked with sold across Amazon, Shopify and wholesale. Each capital provider it tried would underwrite only one channel or offer factoring on wholesale orders. That left it with three or four lenders, each with its own repayment schedule. Once its capital was based on the total performance of the business, it consolidated into one source. It could then say yes to a few strategic retail partnerships without giving up the inventory it held for DTC.

A channel-specific lender can panic over a slowdown in its own channel, put additional stress on your cash flow and set off a domino effect with your other providers. If Shopify is 30% of your revenue, a provider underwriting only Shopify is missing 70% of your performance. Consolidating can lower your borrowing cost, but it creates a severe operational vulnerability if the single lender doesn’t understand how your cash moves. Quarterly subscription payouts and the unprofitable months you expect in the off-season are the kinds of patterns it has to understand.

Asset-based lending suits wholesale- and retail-heavy brands. For a seasonal brand, though, the borrowing base shrinks as you sell through peak, at the exact moment you need working capital for fixed costs and new production. One founder had a multi-million-dollar limit and still couldn’t access the capital to rebuild stock after a busy season, because availability was tied to a percentage of depleted inventory and receivables. Banks typically advance up to 65% of eligible inventory’s book value, according to the OCC, so the limit on a term sheet can sit far from what you can draw in a given month. Some facilities add a preapproved seasonal over-advance ahead of peak. All of those scenarios have to be discussed with your lender, backed with historical performance, down to your lowest and highest inventory levels through the year.

What Financial Data Do Lenders Require to Evaluate E-Commerce Cash Flow Quality?

All of these structures depend on a lender reading your business correctly. In banking, I kept seeing systemic lending gaps. A DTC beverage brand doing over $3 million in revenue was declined despite healthy margins and steady cash flow. The bank saw no hard assets, since the brand outsourced manufacturing. It also saw seasonal swings from summer demand and marketing spend that looked like an expense. To a risk model designed for factories and equipment, the brand looked unstable. Through a commerce lens, it had consistent sell-through, strong contribution margins and healthy cash flow timing.

What I look for is cash flow quality: the predictability, timing and sustainability of how money moves through a business. Growing brands typically put 15% to 25% of annual revenue into marketing, a top-three cost alongside inventory and shipping, so you have to show that spend working as an investment engine. Bring two to 10 years of history showing it’s a deliberate, long-term allocation that consistently generates profitable sales after all costs. Show how ROAS behaved at different milestones, say at $5 million versus $25 million in revenue, and know the minimum ROAS that still yields a profitable sale. Depending on product, AOV and subscription model, some brands stay profitable at 2x or 2.5x. If scaling the budget drove ROAS down to where new sales lost money, a lender is right to push back.

How Can E-Commerce Brands Restructure Their Existing Capital Stack Before an Exit?

At $5 million to $50 million, you’ve already made most of these decisions at least once. Your cap table, your daily remittances and your lender list show which way they went. The equity already sold stays sold, but the next production run doesn’t have to come out of it. The remittances and the lenders can still change before a buyer looks. The apparel brand remitting 25% of its daily sales moved onto a 60-day draw schedule, and the CPG brand went from three or four lenders to one.

About the Author

Assel Beglinova writes about ecommerce and DTC trends, growth strategy for consumer brands, and how sellers fund their expansion and manage cash flow as they scale. Her work covers the financing questions every consumer brand founder runs into, from revenue-based financing to inventory planning to keeping enough working capital on hand to act on growth opportunities. Assel is the CEO and co-founder of Paperstack, a platform that provides working capital for consumer brands.

The post M&A Trends in Ecommerce: Structuring Working Capital for Profitable Exits appeared first on BYVI.

One rural says it all: “Road grooming ran past our driveway and nobody told us when. We found out when we heard the plow.” That line sits on the LocalXP homepage, and if you’ve ever lived somewhere small you already know how this feels. The closure, the detour, the farmers market that moved: the information existed, it just lived somewhere in a Facebook group, in a thread you weren’t in.

Tom Pischel lives in that reality. Erin is a town of 11,981 people in Wellington County, rural, about 80 kilometres northwest of Toronto and close enough to the Kitchener-Waterloo tech corridor to feel the pull of it.

When a December storm hit, Pischel watched his neighbours coordinate across scattered posts and group chats, and he decided the scatter itself was the problem. As he told the Wellington Advertiser in January 2026, important local information “is often scattered and difficult to follow in real time.”

Most founders would file that under “annoying” and move on. Pischel filed it under “build.”

The web designer who kept building for his neighbours

Watch this founder for the lesson in his track record: LocalXP is his third swing at this problem, and each one got sharper.

Tom Pischel is a front-end designer with about 6 years of product experience. His first project, Dwellcome was an app that helped newcomers to Canada find community resources like halal butchers and daycares.

Then in May 2024 he launched AltGrocery, a free map of thousands of independent food businesses across Canada: farmers markets, local grocers, distilleries. He built it in two weeks after watching the “Loblaws Is Out Of Control” boycott flood Reddit and noticing there were, in his words, “no directories for those looking for alternatives to well-known grocery chains.” He kept it completely free, both for the businesses listed and the people using it.

Notice the through-line:

Same founder, same instinct, 3 angles on one problem: community information is real, valuable, and badly organized.

AltGrocery even lives on inside LocalXP now, as one of the example map layers in the product. Tom absorbed the earlier work rather than abandoning it.

And that is the true signature of a founder who keeps returning to the same problem because he can’t ignore it.

The pivot from points to notice

The most instructive part of the LocalXP story is what changed between that January write-up and the product today.

The early version leaned hard into gamification. You’d earn points for visiting a business, attending an event, or helping a neighbour, redeemable for rewards like a free coffee.

Fun, sticky, and the kind of thing a designer loves to build.

But somewhere between the storm and the current site, Pischel demoted it. The homepage now says: “XP is a single feature, not the platform,” and verified check-ins are “not the default experience.”

What moved to the center instead? Notice. Scheduled closures, grooming windows, market days, trail status, detours. The stuff residents need before they leave the house, rather than the stuff that makes an app feel like a game.

That kind of restraint is rare, and it’s worth crediting. Pischel had a feature he clearly loved, the points and the rewards, and the maturity to set it aside the moment his community showed him what they really needed.

He shipped, he listened, and he let real use rewrite his plan. What the town wanted was simpler than a game: to be told what’s happening on its own streets.

Pischel had the clarity to hear that over his own clever idea, and the confidence to rebuild around it. Choosing the quieter, harder job over the fun one is the instinct that separates founders who serve a community from founders who just launch at it.

Why the small town is the moat

The instinct in startup land is to build for the biggest market you can describe on a slide. Pischel did the opposite, and it works in his favour.

Living in Erin means his feedback loop is literally at his front door. The municipal clerk who says “we post closures on Facebook, half the town never sees them” could be someone down the road from him. He can watch a program run, see what confuses people, and fix it by the weekend.

It also gives him a wedge the giants ignore. A town of 12,000 is too small for enterprise GIS pricing and too real to be served by a generic Facebook group. LocalXP is explicitly built to be “affordable for small communities and BIAs, not enterprise GIS pricing,” and it’s designed so a municipality, a utility, a business district, and a tourism group can each run their own layer on one shared map.

The design carries the same local logic. On LocalXP, one business keeps a single profile that can surface on the downtown map, the weekend market, a festival overlay, and a trail program at once, instead of rebuilding four separate listings. A bakery updates its hours once and stays current everywhere.

For a small main-street shop with no marketing budget, that’s the difference between showing up and staying invisible, and it’s the kind of unglamorous work you only think to build when the shop owners are people you actually know.

Bootstrapping this company also keeps him honest. Pischel funds LocalXP with rental income and paused his paid design work to build it, so there’s no investor clock pushing him to overstate the market or rush a launch. He can afford to get it right for one community before offering it to a hundred, and that patience is its own advantage.

The gap Tom is building into

The market case here rests on a documented collapse. Between 2008 and October 2025, 603 local news outlets closed across 388 communities in Canada, and only 264 new ones launched and survived. The local newspaper that used to run the closures, the market times, and the road work is, in hundreds of towns, simply gone.

Something has to hold that civic information, and right now the answer is “a dozen Facebook groups and a PDF.” That’s the vacuum LocalXP is walking into.

Rural towns like Erin sit right in the blast radius of that decline. When the shared source of “what’s happening here” disappears, the town doesn’t stop needing one. It just makes do with worse until someone builds a better one. Pischel is betting the better one is a map the community can trust and, crucially, own.

What this means for your startup

You don’t need a rural town or a mapping product to use what Pischel is doing. The moves are portable.

Start closer than you think

Tom’s whole approach fits in one sentence: live where the problem lives, ship to your neighbours, and let their real needs shape what you build. LocalXP is still early, with guided pilots running now and subscriptions opening soon, and whatever comes next, the way he got here is a playbook any founder can run. He turned a place most founders would drive right past into the one advantage nobody can take from him.

The best market research is a life lived close to the problem. You can’t outspend that, and you don’t have to. You just have to start where you already are.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post Why a Solo Founder Bet on His Town Instead of the Big City appeared first on BYVI.

Maor Shlomo built Base44 by himself, went from $0 to $1 million ARR in 3 weeks, grew it past 400,000 users, and sold it to Wix for $80 million about 6 months in, without raising a dollar. No co-founder, fewer than 10 people, sole shareholder. That’s the screenshot every founder saved this year, and the proof text for a genuinely huge shift: solo founders now make up 63% of the C corps formed through Stripe Atlas in Q2 2026, an all-time high.

That same Stripe post carries a second, quieter number. The typical solo founder, the one right in the middle, made 23% less in their first 6 months than the typical founder a year earlier.

The top 10% made 19% more. So the money is splitting: the average founder is sliding while the best pull away, and the gap between them is the widest it’s ever been.

In 2022, the top solo founders made 34 times as much as the typical one in their first 6 months. By 2025 they made 61 times as much. The boom is real. So is the fact that most of the people inside it are earning less than solo founders did a year ago.

The number everyone screenshotted hides a second number

Most people share the 63% as a win for solo founders. Flip it around and it reads as a warning. If solo founders are 63% of new companies and the typical one is earning less, that’s not more opportunity to go around. It’s more founders fighting over the same customers: more people building, the same number of buyers, smaller slices for everyone.

The good news and the warning are the same fact seen from two sides. When anyone can ship software in a weekend, “I built a product on my own” stops being impressive the moment 100,000 other people did it this quarter too. Building used to be rare enough to set you apart. Now it doesn’t.

When everyone is AI-native, AI-native stops being an edge

Stripe found top-decile solo founders were about twice as likely as median founders to build AI-native products, and the obvious takeaway is “go build AI-native.” Except the same analysis notes the AI-native advantage doesn’t come from a few breakout apps at the very top. It shows up across the whole distribution, from roughly the 50th to the 95th percentile. AI-native is table stakes now, not an edge.

Think about what that means for the weekend build. The tool that let you ship a working product in 2 days is the same tool a hundred thousand other founders used the same weekend.

The build was never going to be the moat. Marc Lou, who’s launched 35 startups solo, says: the next generation “will be no-code people focused on solving a problem, shipping crazy fast with AI, and cracking distribution on social media.” The moat moved. It sits in two places now, and the best founders grab both.

Speed wins the market

Base44 is a speed story before it’s anything else. Shlomo didn’t out-engineer the field. He got a rough product in front of people, found what worked, and captured a category in weeks: $0 to $1 million ARR in 3 weeks, 140,000 users in 7. By the time competitors had a serious answer, he’d sold the lead to Wix for $80 million.

When building is free, the first founder to reach real customers at scale gets a head start everyone else has to spend money to erase.

That head start is worth more in 2026 than it’s ever been, because it’s more perishable than ever. The clone that used to take a competitor 6 months now takes a weekend, so the window where being first actually means something is short.

You either use that window to grab share, sign customers, and become the default answer, or you lose it fine-tuning a product nobody’s tried yet

Shlomo used that head start to grab the market, then took the exit before the moat question even came due. Speed didn’t just win him the market. It won him the option to leave on top.

Brand keeps it

Speed opens the lead. It doesn’t hold it, and most founders aren’t exiting in 6 months. Something has to make customers stay when a cheaper copy shows up next Tuesday, and the most reliable something is a brand a competitor can’t fork.

Pieter Levels is that lesson stretched over a decade. He runs a portfolio that publicly reports around $3 million a year with zero employees, on a famously boring stack of PHP, jQuery, and SQLite.

What isn’t boring is the audience of roughly 600,000 he built over 10 years of shipping in public. When he launched Photo AI, it did a few thousand dollars in week one and grew to six figures in monthly revenue inside 18 months. The code was ordinary. The people who already trusted him were the whole engine, and they’re the reason a hundred identical AI photo apps never took his lunch.

Speed and brand aren’t rival strategies. They’re two halves of the same job. Speed wins you the market before the crowd arrives. Brand keeps you there once it does. Base44 leaned on speed and sold fast. Pieter Levels leaned on brand and keeps growing year after year. Most founders who want to still be here in 3 years will need both.

The playbook I’d run right now

The good news buried in Stripe’s data is that the winners aren’t winning on pure luck. They share habits you can copy today, and none of them require a bigger team.

Win it fast, then make it stick

The boom didn’t do the hard part for you, and that’s the assumption founders keep tripping over. When building gets cheap, your edge has to come from what’s still hard: getting there first, grabbing the market, and earning the trust that keeps it.

And that’s the good news. Effort still wins, and the founders willing to put it in have a bigger edge than ever.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post Everyone Can Build Now: Speed Wins the Market and Brand Keeps It appeared first on BYVI.

Conagra Brands’ third Future of Frozen Food report sizes the U.S. frozen food market at $93.5 billion in annual sales. It names four forces behind that growth: protein, restaurant-style food at home, family-style meals and breakfast at any hour. The report skips consumer surveys. It builds on Circana sales and consumption data, then adds on-pack claims, social trends and search. Observed sales are the kind of evidence I want brands judged on when they ask for capital.

Conagra posted nearly $12 billion in net sales in fiscal 2025, so it can absorb a slow launch or a stockout. A bootstrapped brand reads the same report from a very different cash position.

I finance consumer brands, so I read each trend as a cash flow cycle first and a product opportunity second. Each one changes when you pay your co-packer, how long product sits in a freezer, when your ads run and which channels your revenue comes from. If the capital behind a trend doesn’t match that timing, you pay for it in lost customers or lost ownership.

Key Takeaways

Why Do Traditional Banks Decline Commercial Loans for DTC Frozen Food Brands?

When I worked in banking, I kept seeing strong consumer brands get declined. One was a DTC beverage brand doing over $3 million a year, with customers who loved it, healthy margins and steady cash flow. The bank saw no hard assets, because manufacturing was outsourced. It saw seasonal swings from summer demand. It also read marketing spend as an expense instead of a growth investment.

To a risk model built for factories and equipment, the brand looked unstable. Through a commerce lens, it had consistent sell-through, strong contribution margins and healthy cash flow timing. The bank’s model couldn’t see what I call cash flow quality, which is how predictable, well-timed and sustainable the money moving through a business is.

That systemic lending gap catches frozen brands too. E-commerce brands at $5 million to $7 million in revenue are often called too asset-light for a commercial loan. They rely on 3PLs and overseas manufacturing instead of owning collateral. A frozen brand running on a co-packer and a cold-storage 3PL owns just as little. When a bank does lend to a CPG brand, expect a personal guarantee, in-person appointments and months of waiting.

Covenants that require inventory on hand don’t fit either. The bank wants product sitting in the warehouse as collateral, while every week a pallet sits in your freezer costs you money.

The offers that show up after a bank says no can look cheap until you add up the total cost of capital. That means origination, underwriting and admin fees, wire transfer fees, and even fees for changing your bank account. Check the permitted use as well, because some providers only let you spend the money on marketing, or only on inventory.

What Are the Financial Costs of Inventory Stockouts for High-Protein Frozen Food Brands?

Conagra’s data puts high-protein frozen products at $12 billion a year, with volume up 11% in the 52 weeks ending October 19, 2025. Growth like that can outrun a production plan, and I consider selling out a financial failure. It’s like driving a customer all the way to your store, only for them to find out they can’t buy your product. From the outside it might look like a celebration, but inside it puts massive operational pressure on the team.

One wellness brand doing around $10 million had a marketing agency so efficient that inventory sold faster than anticipated. It had to order restocks urgently. It also paused every expansion into new channels, just to keep enough product for its core DTC customers.

When a brand sells out unexpectedly, it has to rush the restock through expensive air shipping and spend extra to win back disappointed customers. Together, that can take another 20 to 30% off overall margins. CAC climbs, often because community members feel left out when their friends got the product and they didn’t. You end up working twice as hard to get back where you were. Meanwhile, fixed costs like warehouse rent keep piling up with no revenue to cover them.

If ads are outperforming and draining inventory faster than planned, I’d slow down some promotions on purpose. You preserve the stock you have and make each sale more profitable, which helps cover the cost of expediting the restock. In the meantime, keep the community engaged and warm for the next batch to arrive. I advised an apparel brand to cut its promotional discounts during a supply chain delay. The higher margins let it afford to air-freight replacement inventory from a different manufacturer.

How Should DTC E-Commerce Brands Align Working Capital with Seasonal Frozen Food Demand?

Takeout-style frozen food is a $14.3 billion category, with families and younger shoppers driving its growth. A lot of that demand lands on specific dates. Conagra found frozen game-day favorites selling about 14% above their weekly average during the football postseason. Potato skins ran 42% above average in February 2025.

Dates like those raise the stakes on one of the most common cash flow problems I see in e-commerce and CPG. Revenue, marketing and inventory fall out of sync, even while sales look healthy. I’ve seen brands invest heavily in inventory ahead of demand and overlook the marketing. The product then moves slower than expected, and they end up running deep discounts just to free up cash.

Your capital should run on the same calendar. Negotiate a 20 to 30% deposit with your manufacturer, with the balance due 60 days later or on shipment. Draw one tranche for the deposit and a second for the final payment. Hold back the marketing capital until the goods arrive. A corporate card with a 30- to 60-day float can carry the launch ads until the new stock is selling. If you won’t use capital in the next 30 to 45 days, don’t take it up front, because you start paying for it the moment you take it.

Just because your business qualifies for a million dollars doesn’t mean you have to take it all. One fast-growing brand took a $1 million loan when it needed $300,000, because it was approved and assumed growth would cover it. Its 25 to 27% daily sales remittance quickly doubled from $250,000 to $500,000, and it paid heavily for capital it wasn’t using. Compare that with a $10 million apparel brand where I structured a facility of slightly over $1 million. Only $300,000 went out immediately, and the rest was deferred for 60 to 90 days. That saved the business from carrying unnecessary capital costs.

Before you push ad spend into the postseason, do the math I’d want before Black Friday. Work out the minimum ROAS that still gives you a profitable sale, and check whether the spike in CAC leaves room for net profit.

How Does Revenue-Based Financing Impact E-Commerce Cash Flow During Seasonal Revenue Spikes?

When demand comes in waves, I prefer repayment tied to a percentage of actual sales. If sales go up, you remit more, and if they go down, you aren’t stuck stressing over a fixed payment. One $10 million snack brand faced a summer cash crunch. For brands whose DTC sales lean on Q4, revenue-based financing or a B2B channel can offset that kind of seasonality. Business clients often agree to upfront payment terms and larger orders.

Percentage-based repayment has a weak spot on the way up. Shopify’s standard U.S. loans are repaid as a percentage of daily sales. I see their lack of a remittance cap as a major limitation for fast-growing brands. At 17%, the dollars you send back double when your sales double. That faster repayment drains cash right when growth needs it, so you get penalized for your own growth. Shopify’s early-access Capital account lets eligible users adjust their rate within set thresholds, so read the exact agreement you’re offered.

Ask any provider how the maximum remittance is calculated, and whether the minimum is sustainable in a slow month. You don’t want to pay a full month’s worth of remittance in the first week because the structure was too aggressive. When you negotiate a cap, your own historical data is your strongest evidence.

How Can DTC Frozen Food Brands Finance Multichannel Expansion Into Grocery and Wholesale Retail?

Family-style eating shows up in pack size. In Conagra’s numbers, value-size frozen products bring in $18.6 billion, over 41% of frozen-aisle sales, and grew 9% in three years. To win family dinners at that scale, a DTC brand will probably need grocery or wholesale, where cash arrives on a very different schedule than Shopify payouts.

One CPG brand I worked with had strong repeat customers, great margins and steady month-over-month growth, and it sold out every launch. It still kept hitting cash gaps. It paid suppliers 60 days before receiving inventory, then waited weeks for platforms like Amazon to release payouts. Its revenue was spread across Amazon, Shopify and wholesale. The other capital providers it tried would only underwrite one channel or offer factoring on wholesale orders. That left it juggling three or four lenders, each with its own repayment schedule.

Once its capital was based on the total performance of the business, it consolidated into one source and could focus on growth instead of juggling repayments. Around the same time, it faced a choice. It could say yes to a few strategic retail partnerships, or it could save inventory for DTC and cut marketing to conserve cash. With capital that saw the whole business, it could do both.

For a retail push, ask whether a provider counts all your channels. If Shopify is 30% of your business, a provider that only looks at Shopify misses 70% of your performance. A lender that only sees one channel can also panic when that channel slows, even while a retail launch is lifting the business overall. Also ask whether wholesale revenue counts when a draft order is created in Shopify, or only when payment lands in your bank account.

If retail becomes a big share of revenue, asset-based lending starts to fit. It typically advances up to 80% against eligible inventory and receivables. For a seasonal brand, the weak spot is the borrowing base, meaning the amount those assets let you draw. It shrinks as you sell through inventory in peak season, right when you need working capital most. One founder had a multi-million dollar limit and still couldn’t use it to rebuild stock after a busy season. Availability was tied to a percentage of their depleted inventory and receivables.

Should E-Commerce Brands Use Equity or Debt to Finance Experimental Frozen Food SKUs?

Conagra’s occasion data has frozen breakfast up 5% over five years, against 3% for frozen food overall. High-protein handhelds, bowls and breakfast sausage are gaining momentum, especially among Gen Z and Millennials who want convenience and flexibility at any hour. For a brand that already makes frozen food, a breakfast SKU is a natural extension. Until it has sell-through data, though, it’s an experiment, and experiments call for different money than reorders.

Non-dilutive funding works best for repeatable activities where you know exactly what things cost. That covers the inventory orders e-commerce brands typically place two to three times a year, and ad spend with a predictable ROAS. Equity was created for experiments like new products, new channels, specific hires and international expansion. It’s also the most expensive capital you can put into inventory.

One founder used venture capital for early inventory and owned less than 20% of the company while it was still doing a few million dollars in revenue. That left too little equity to raise the larger round needed to scale. Another founder at a similar size negotiated favorable payment terms with their manufacturer and used only debt for inventory. At $10 million in revenue, they still had majority ownership.

If equity isn’t in your plans at all, the experiment needs its own guardrails. Prototype the breakfast line cheaply. Then release it as a planned limited drop to existing customers by email, ideally in a slow season when growing lifetime value matters more than acquisition. Planned scarcity is the one kind of sellout I’m comfortable with, as long as your core products stay reliably in stock.

Sell-through from that drop becomes your evidence for the full run. Lenders want to see that the business is viable over 12, 24 or 36 months. They also want the math on how a specific amount, say $500,000, turns into top-line revenue.

How Should E-Commerce Founders Model Financial Projections and Repayments for Frozen Food Production?

I’m unapologetically optimistic, and I encourage you to be so too. To me that optimism is a discipline. Volatility is part of the game, and if you plan well and stay adaptable, uncertainty can become a competitive advantage. Before you commit a production run to any of these trends, model conservative, most likely and optimistic outcomes and see what each does to your unit economics. If you’re weighing a lump sum, project the repayments against your seasonality. You need to know you can still cover fixed costs in the slow months.

Then look past the rate card at the people. Will the person who first reached out still be your contact after the deal closes? Or will you re-explain your business to a new department every time you need support? You’ve built this brand on your own revenue. The partner who funds its next stage should understand how your inventory moves through the year.

About the Author

Assel Beglinova writes about ecommerce and DTC trends, growth strategy for consumer brands, and how sellers fund their expansion and manage cash flow as they scale. Her work covers the financing questions every consumer brand founder runs into, from revenue-based financing to inventory planning to keeping enough working capital on hand to act on growth opportunities. Assel is the CEO and co-founder of Paperstack, a platform that provides working capital for consumer brands.

The post The $93.5B Frozen Food Boom Is a Cash Flow Problem for DTC Brands appeared first on BYVI.

I flew to San Francisco for YC Startup School 2026 with something I didn’t have a year ago: a product real people actually use. Having a real product changed everything about this trip.

Here’s what the sessions, the hallway run-ins, and 6,000 founders in one place did to the way I think about building, and why I came home to Ottawa readier to go bigger on my own terms.

Why I live on Twitter/X, not LinkedIn

Two lines from the stage stuck with me before I’d even left the building. Boris Cherny joked, “Maybe don’t listen to the LinkedIn influencers.”

Alexandr Wang’s session put it plainer: “Top advice: ignore LinkedIn.” My takeaway landed fast: more Twitter/X, less LinkedIn.

Strange thing to write in a piece you might be reading on LinkedIn, I know. But it’s the honest version.

The reason I’ve been able to track AI closely and pick up new tools quickly is Twitter/X. It’s the platform I’ve used longest and most consistently, and it’s where people share what they’re trying before it gets sanded into polished content. I spot a tool early, then I find out if it’s any good by throwing it at a problem I already have.

The room didn’t make me a builder

The bigger takeaway from the trip, though, was confidence. And that’s really what I want to hand to anyone reading this who doesn’t have the “right” background and is wondering whether to build anyway.

Startup School didn’t turn me into a builder. Building had already changed who I was by the time I showed up. Over the past year, AI stretched what I could do alone. The people I met stretched what I thought was worth doing.

What my YC Startup School experience actually gave me

Last year I applied to Startup School and got rejected. I flew to the Bay Area anyway, went to the events around it, and found my way into the community.

That trip forced me to face something: I had years of product experience and pages of ideas, but nothing I could point at and say, ‘I made this.’

One year later, I came back with Joe Speaking. It started as a fix for my own English-speaking problem. I was user number one, and it got me the language score I needed. Since then it’s reached more than 1,700 users through purely organic growth, 130 of them paying, and it became my first iOS app.

At Startup School I met people from top universities, research labs, and big tech. Plenty were younger than me with resumes that read better than mine on paper. A year earlier, that would’ve had me quietly questioning whether I belonged. This time I just felt proud. I didn’t need a famous school, company, title, or investor to explain who I was, because I’d put something real into the world and people were using it.

Building became my credential.

Startup School didn’t give me that. It helped me see I’d already earned it. While I was drafting this, Paul Graham posted the line that sums it up: confidence comes from evidence.

Here’s my evidence from one year. I went from product person to someone who can turn a personal problem into a shipped product, then debug it, distribute it, support it, and improve it.

Even while wandering around San Francisco, I shipped 1 iOS release and 3 web releases remotely, acted on feedback from 3 users, and burned through roughly 4.4 billion tokens. That pace still feels a little unreal to me.

There’s no magic prompt

Boris Cherny’s session explained why some people get so much more out of tools like Claude Code. There’s no magic prompt. His advice was to treat the model empirically: give it hard work, give it a way to check its own output, watch where it breaks, then adjust the prompt, context, tools, or workflow. Then run it again. The loop is the skill, not any single line you paste in.

That’s exactly how I got better. Not by hoarding prompt templates, but by testing tools against problems I genuinely needed to solve and letting the results grade me. A template promises a shortcut, but the model, the task, and the tools keep shifting, so what worked last week quietly stops working.

Running that loop against my own real problems taught me what to actually change when the output missed, and the feedback was honest because it was mine.

AI didn’t take my job off my plate. I still had to decide what to build, understand users, judge the output, and make the tradeoffs. What it did was amplify my agency.

One person still isn’t enough

The trip reminded me that one person still isn’t enough for everything. Tools made me faster. The people I met changed what I thought was possible, and brought the judgment, trust, and perspective no tool can provide.

Permission to build what you actually want

Most conversations gravitated to giant markets, hockey-stick growth, fundraising, and whatever’s trending. That energy is part of what makes the place worth it. My path just looks different.

Joe Speaking is a product, an experiment, and a way to learn all at once. I built it because I needed it, not because the problem was fashionable or easy to pitch. I literally put my own name on it.

Because AI has dropped the cost of execution, I have more room to follow that instinct. But more freedom raises the stakes on choosing a direction.

AI can make me faster. It can’t tell me what to care about.

What I took from Peter Steinberger’s talk was permission:

Afterward I caught a few minutes with a YC partner, walked through my background, why I built Joe Speaking, and what I want to explore next. The product has grown further than I expected and become genuinely useful to a group of people. But I’m not going to jam it into a story built for YC or fundraising before I understand what the bigger company should even be. I might apply later, when the product, the opportunity, and my ambition actually line up. For now I’m fine saying: not yet.

That’s probably the cleanest summary of my trip. Call it a refusal to perform ambition for other people. I’m plenty ambitious. I just won’t fake a version of it to fit someone’s slide.

Building for myself means starting from a problem I understand deeply, listening to users, and seeing how far it goes before I call it something bigger. Feeling a little out of place might’ve been part of finally finding my own lane.

> be joe.

> always build for myself and be my own first user. even the product name has “joe” in it.

> build to solve my own problems, not to optimize for yc or fundraising.

> twitter is still on my phone dock.

> on my own track.

Thank you @steipete ! pic.twitter.com/octq3iwkQq

— Joe Hu (@hubeiqiao) July 26, 2026

Staying on your track doesn’t mean thinking small

Authenticity can turn into an excuse, though. “I’m staying on my own track” should never quietly mean “I’m scared to think bigger.” Startup School pushed me here, hard.

Alexandr Wang framed this as a once-in-a-civilization moment. The question I walked out with: what kind of world do I want my work to help build? I’m good at spotting a concrete problem and shipping a practical fix. I’m still learning to connect those fixes to a much larger vision.

Sam Altman argued that coding agents have raised the ceiling for small teams. They let a tiny team chase work that used to be out of reach, not just do the familiar stuff faster.

Blake Scholl made that tangible in the physical world. He came from software, not aerospace, and still built toward an economically viable supersonic airliner. His story was a reminder that better technology doesn’t hand us a better future on its own. Someone has to build the products that carry it forward. I’ve long been drawn to products that bridge the physical and digital worlds. I don’t know the exact shape yet, but Startup School pushed me to look past whatever’s directly in front of me.

Later, at a fireside with Vinod Khosla, it got even blunter: dream bigger, take more risks, accept that you might fail. For me that means pushing my own path further than I first thought possible, instead of copying someone else’s company or someone else’s definition of winning.

“How hard can it be?”

Jensen Huang’s session gave me another handle on confidence. NVIDIA didn’t start with the right technical approach. When the team finally admitted that, they bought textbooks, learned what they had to, and rebuilt. His point was simple:

Great founders don’t already know everything. They’re willing to face reality and go learn.

He described the attitude he still brings to unfamiliar problems: “How hard can it be?” The honest answer is usually “harder than you think.” But picturing every future ordeal in advance can rattle you enough to never start. So start. Learn what today asks of you. Then build toward tomorrow.

And that felt personal. Last year I didn’t know how to build the product I now run. This year, users occasionally wake me up with support messages. New problems, sure, but problems I’m grateful to have. Resilience isn’t repeating the same idea forever or pretending everything works. It’s facing what’s real, learning fast, adjusting, and continuing. Not knowing something isn’t a permanent identity. You can learn your way there.

The best of the YC Startup School experience happened between sessions

The talks were great. Some of the meaningful stuff happened in the gaps. At a Google DeepMind after-party I met Logan Kilpatrick and showed him what I’d built with Gemini Live. Telling the builder what I thought, face to face, beat any feedback form I’ve ever filled out.

I first met Nolan Lwin at Founders, Inc. We crossed paths again at Startup School, then at a coffee shop he recommended, where nearly everyone around me was grinding on a YC application. Everyone but me.

Coming back from the restroom, someone stopped me: Mark Nakatani. We’d tried to meet at Startup School and missed each other, only to collide there by accident. I also finally met Nelson Lee in person after knowing him through X for years.

There were real conversations, new friendships, after-parties, and even builder hotpot. Some of these meetings probably felt ordinary to the other person. To me they carried years of context.

When you’ve followed someone’s work, used what they built, or traded posts for a long time, meeting in person changes the whole thing.

Help first, the network builds itself

Sam Altman also talked about how the best networks grow from genuine curiosity and helping people, not from treating every chat as a transaction. That matched my whole trip. I didn’t walk into rooms hunting a target. I shared what I was building, listened to other people’s stories, asked questions, and let the unexpected conversations happen.

It’s how I think about a personal brand too. To me, a brand is the memory people build from what you do over and over, not a polished profile or a job title.

Sometimes helping is sharing what you know or making an intro. Sometimes it’s honest feedback, or just caring about what someone’s trying to build. Writing this is one of those ways.

I’m early, and I haven’t figured it all out. But maybe the honest version of my journey helps someone start sooner, feel less intimidated, or trust their own path a little more.

I want what I publish to make me more useful and more honest, not just more visible.

What San Francisco gives me, and what Ottawa does

In San Francisco, especially at a YC event, ambitious ideas feel normal. Conversations open with agents, models, infrastructure, distribution, and products that were impossible a year ago. Startup thinking leaks into ordinary places. That density is powerful, and it’s still a bubble. Step outside it and plenty of people have never meaningfully used an AI agent, and plenty of businesses are only starting to grasp what today’s tools can do.

There’s an insane amount of alpha in:
– People in SF leaving SF to see how people and companies around the world are using AI (hint: most are still using it primarily as search)
– People outside SF spending even two weeks in SF to see how people and companies are operating here…

— Akshay Kothari (@akothari) July 21, 2026

So the right rhythm for me might be to visit San Francisco now and then, soak up the ambition, meet people, then go home to communities where the problems and the level of AI adoption look completely different.

I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if I’d moved straight to the Bay instead of staying in Ottawa. Maybe I’d be more connected, or building faster. Maybe I’d have optimized too quickly for the conversations right around me. Ottawa gave me distance, and time to explore freely and find my own direction. That distance cost me access. It also gave me room to become different. San Francisco shows me what’s possible. Ottawa reminds me how much of the world hasn’t reached that future yet.

I also met a lot of Canadians on this trip, a surprising number of them from Waterloo. It left me chewing on Canada’s talent story. How do we create more places where ambitious builders keep bumping into each other? How do we give them better reasons to take risks and stay long enough to build the next wave of communities?

I don’t have a tidy policy answer. But as an immigrant building here, I want Canada to be more than a place that grows and attracts talent right before that talent leaves. I dig into that more here: Canada helped Joe become a builder. Does Canada know how to keep builders?

What I’m taking home from the YC Startup School experience

Last year I flew to the Bay with ideas and uncertainty. This year I flew home with a product, real users, more confidence, and friends from around the world. Startup School felt like a reward for the previous year’s work, and a reminder that a personal win doesn’t have to follow anyone else’s template.

You don’t have to chase every trend or reshape yourself for investors and algorithms. Start with something you actually care about, keep learning, help people, and build something you’re proud to share.

I still don’t know exactly what I’ll build next, or who I’ll be when I’m back in San Francisco. But I know how I want to keep going:

• Be real.
• Be yourself.
• Help others genuinely.
• Think bigger.
• Stay on your own track.

Thank you, Y Combinator, for putting this many ambitious, thoughtful, and generous people in one place.

About the Author

Joe Hu is the founder of Just Joe Technologies, a one-person, AI-powered studio based in Ottawa, Canada, where he builds products with AI and shares the journey publicly. His first iOS app, Joe Speaking, started as a fix for his own English-speaking problem. He writes about building as an explorer, builder, and founder at hubeiqiao.com and posts on X @hubeiqiao.

The post How YC Startup School Rewired the Way I Build appeared first on BYVI.

The hardest part of building something new is never the part everyone assumes will be hard. I keep coming back to this, and Travis Kalanick’s new venture is the cleanest example I’ve seen in a while.

After roughly 8 years of near-total stealth following his 2017 exit from Uber, Kalanick’s company Atoms just raised $1.7 billion in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Uber (the company whose investors forced him out) joining as an investor and Ben Horowitz taking a board seat.

The pitch is enormous: use software, sensors, and robotics to automate the physical economy across food, mining, and logistics

Travis Kalanick is back.

After 8 years of building in stealth, he joins Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to tell the story of his latest company, Atoms, and its vision to digitize the physical world one industry at a time:

01:32 The a16z & Uber backstory
15:36 Different… https://t.co/CmHLuzWYBR pic.twitter.com/hjzHk1vkBf

— a16z (@a16z) July 22, 2026

Ask most people what the hard part of an automated kitchen is, and you’ll hear the same list:

• The computer vision.
• The robotic arms.
• The supply chain.
• The capital.

Every one of these sounds hard because it is hard, and because it’s what makes it into the pitch deck. So that’s where the money and the engineering attention go.

The hard part turned out to be everything nobody puts on a slide.

The machine that slows down when it has to bag your food

Atoms’ flagship food system, the Bowl Builder, takes an order straight off the point-of-sale, dispenses and weighs ingredients, adds sauce, lids the bowl, labels it, drops in utensils, and closes the bag. On paper it can assemble up to 300 bowls per hour.

Except it can’t, not when it also has to bag them. The moment bagging enters the workflow, throughput drops to about 200 bowls per hour. Kalanick’s own word for the bagging problem, on the TBPN podcast, was that it’s “surprisingly hard.”

Look at what that means. A company that just pulled $1.7 billion in a single round, run by one of the most operationally aggressive founders of his generation, loses a third of its output to the most unexpected step in the whole process. And it’s not the sensing. Not the dispensing. Not even the sauce. It’s the bag.

That’s the “fries in the bag” problem: the step so ordinary nobody budgets it any respect, right up until it’s the exact thing standing between you and shipping.

Why the boring problems are the hard ones

There’s a reason this pattern repeats. The glamorous problems attract attention, talent, and money precisely because everyone can see them coming. They get scoped, staffed, and de-risked. The boring problems don’t get that treatment, so they arrive undefended, and they arrive late, usually after you’ve already committed to a timeline and a number.

A bowl is a rigid, predictable object. A plastic bag is not. It’s floppy, it clings to itself, it doesn’t hold its shape, and no two are quite alike. Everything a robot is good at (precision, repetition, hard geometry) is exactly what the bag refuses to give it.

This is what quietly reshaped how I think about leadership, and about finance specifically.

The leadership lesson hiding in the bag

It’s tempting to treat “hard problems” as the big strategic ones, the market, the model, the fundraise, and hand the messy operational stuff to someone else. That instinct feels like leverage. It’s usually the opposite.

The leaders who actually ship are the ones who stayed close enough to the work to know where the real friction is.

Not because they insist on doing everything themselves; that doesn’t scale and it isn’t the point. It’s that you cannot fix what you’ve never gotten close enough to see. Kalanick knows his throughput drops on the bagging step because someone in that organization got close enough to the machine to watch it happen and put a number on it.

Delegation doesn’t work against this. Good delegation is how you build a company. But hand off a problem before you understand it and all you’ve really done is arrange for someone else to discover it for you, later, and usually at far more cost to the business than if you’d caught it early.

I sit in finance, which makes this personal in a specific way. Every model I’ve ever built has a “fries in the bag” line item: the assumption everyone waved through because it seemed too small to matter. The onboarding step that quietly determines whether a customer ever activates. The reconciliation process that works fine at 50 transactions and breaks at 5,000. The manual handoff between two teams that no dashboard captures because it lives in the gap between them.

On a spreadsheet these look like rounding errors. In the business they’re the difference between a plan that holds and one that doesn’t.

The costliest surprises I’ve seen were never the risks we named and argued about in the boardroom. We had those covered; that’s what boardrooms are for. The expensive ones were the steps so ordinary nobody thought to ask whether they’d actually work at scale.

What Atoms actually confirms

It would be easy to read the Atoms story as a victory lap: stealth genius resurfaces, raises a fortune, takes on the physical world. And maybe it turns into that. Horowitz is betting that reshaping the old, heavy parts of the economy needs a founder with range across software and mechanical engineering, and that Kalanick is that founder.

But the part of the story I keep pointing people to is the honesty about the bag, not the $1.7 billion. A founder with that much capital and conviction telling you, plainly, that the humble step is the one giving him trouble. Read it the right way and that’s a good sign: someone got close enough to the friction to name it before it showed up in the numbers on its own.

The strategic bets are real, and they’ve earned the attention they get. But the thing most likely to cost you a third of your output is usually sitting one step downstream of where everyone is looking, dressed up as a task too simple to fail.

Before I sign off on any plan now, I ask myself one thing, and I’d pass it to you:

What’s your “fries in the bag” problem, the boring step you’ve already handed off, assuming it would sort itself out?

Better to go find it yourself than to read about it later in the P&L.

About the Author

Daniel Zhao is Head of Finance at Landbase and a multiple-time founder, most recently co-founder of LavaReach (acquired). He started his career as a CPA, building the financial rigor that still shapes how he operates, then moved from the ledger into the parts of a company where the numbers are actually made or lost: revenue, operations, and go-to-market. That path, from accounting fundamentals to B2B revenue leadership, gives him a rare vantage point on how startups really grow, and where they quietly break.

The post Every Startup Has a “Fries in the Bag” Problem Most Founders Miss appeared first on BYVI.

A shopper opens ChatGPT and types “best standing desk under $400 that ships in two days.” Thirty seconds later they have 3 recommendations, a comparison, and a checkout button. They never visited a search results page. They never saw your ad. The agent already decided, and if your product wasn’t in its consideration set, you lost a sale you never knew existed.

This is agentic commerce, and in 2026 it stopped being just a demo. AI agents are completing real purchases inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Amazon Rufus. AI platforms are projected to drive roughly $20.9 billion in retail spending this year, nearly quadrupling 2025.

The funnel is collapsing into a single conversation, and the new question for founders is brutally simple:

The part that’s good news for small teams is that agents don’t reward ad budgets. What they do reward is clean data, trust signals, and being present in the right feeds.

First, understand how an agent actually picks

AI shopping agents don’t “rank” pages the way Google’s blue links did. They assign confidence scores, every product gets scored on how well it matches the shopper’s stated criteria, and the agent recommends what it can stand behind.

To score you confidently, the agent needs 3 things:

1. Structured data it can easily read
2. Trust signals that prove you’re legitimate
3. Validation from sources it already trusts

Your Google Merchant Center feed and your organic SEO are still load-bearing. AI commerce is a new layer on top, not a replacement.

Step 1: Get into the feeds, all of them

You can’t be recommended if you’re not in the pipe. There are several entry points, and they’re cheaper to set up than most founders assume.

Underneath them, 2 open standards now move the money and the data.

1. The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP): co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, now with 25+ partners — standardizes agentic checkout and powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.
2. The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): from Shopify and Google, with a Tech Council that now includes Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe — covers the broader journey from product discovery through post-purchase.

You don’t need to implement either by hand; your platform increasingly does it for you. But knowing they exist tells you where the rails are going.

Step 2: Make your product data machine-perfect

This is where most stores quietly lose. Agents read fields in a specific priority order, and gaps get filled with guesses, or with a competitor who left no gaps. Stores with 99.9% attribute completion are seeing 3–4x higher visibility than stores with sparse data.

Work the fields in order of impact:

Step 3: Use JSON-LD schema on every product page

The feed is one layer; your live product pages are the open-web layer that AI crawlers read directly.

Implement Product, Offer, and Review schema in JSON-LD, it’s the preferred format because it keeps structured data separate from your HTML, so AI parsers extract it cleanly without inference.

This is the difference between an agent reading your specs and an agent guessing them. Validate it, and make sure every product has it. This is a one-time engineering task with compounding payoff.

Step 4: Win on trust signals, reviews are now ranking fuel

Reviews stopped being social proof for humans and became input data for machines. The ChatGPT feed spec explicitly accepts review count and average rating fields, and agents weight them heavily when deciding who to recommend. Amazon Rufus synthesizes review sentiment and Q&A directly. Fresh, plentiful reviews give the LLM the recent, specific evidence it needs to recommend you with confidence.

Tactically: turn on post-purchase review requests, make leaving a review frictionless, and feed your review count and rating into your product feed. A product with 400 reviews at 4.7 stars beats an identical product with 12 reviews every time an agent has to choose.

Step 5: Build third-party citations (this is your Perplexity edge)

Perplexity in particular prioritizes citations from Reddit, expert blogs, and editorial sources over your own marketing copy. Agents trust what other credible sources say about you more than what you say about yourself.

This is where bootstrapped and founder-led brands have an unfair advantage. You can get mentioned in niche communities, founder newsletters, and subreddit threads in ways big brands can’t fake.

Get your product into legitimate “best X for Y” roundups, answer honestly in relevant Reddit threads, earn reviews on independent blogs. Every credible third-party mention is a citation an agent can lean on.

Step 6: Exploit the rich-media gap before everyone else does

The ChatGPT feed spec accepts video and 3D model links, and almost nobody is using them yet. That’s a textbook early-adopter window. Richer media gives the agent more to understand and more confidence to recommend, and right now adding a product video or 3D asset is a near-free way to stand out in a field of plain image feeds.

Step 7: Write conversational content that matches how people actually ask

Agents answer questions, so publish content shaped like the questions buyers ask:

• “Is X good for small apartments?”,
• “What’s the difference between X and Y?”
• “Best X for beginners on a budget?”

Clear, factual, comparison-friendly pages give agents quotable, citable material. Agents reward specificity, not adjectives, so skip all the fluff.

Step 8: Measure what’s working

You finally have instruments. Google launched Search Console’s Search Generative AI performance reports in June 2026 (initially to a limited set of sites) surfacing impressions and pages appearing in AI experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode. Watch which products show up, test feed changes, and double down on what lifts your presence. Treat it like any other channel: instrument, iterate, compound.

The 10-Minute Checklist to Get Recommended by AI Shopping Agents

Pin this somewhere visible:

• Google Merchant Center feed live and clean
• Shopify Agentic Storefronts (or your platform’s equivalent) enabled
• ChatGPT feed + Perplexity Merchant Program submitted
• Titles loaded with brand + type + feature + differentiator
• GTINs and full attributes on every product (aim for ~100% completion)
• Shipping time and returns as structured, parseable data
• Product + Offer + Review JSON-LD schema on every page
• Review count and rating flowing into the feed; review requests automated
• Third-party citations seeded (Reddit, roundups, expert blogs)
• Video/3D media added where the spec allows
• Feed price = storefront price, inventory synced
• Search Console AI report monitored monthly

The takeaway

Agentic commerce rewards the unglamorous work: complete data, real reviews, clean feeds, honest third-party presence. None of it requires a brand budget, which is exactly why disciplined small teams can out-rank incumbents in the agent’s consideration set.

Over the next few years, the brands that win will be the ones the machine can read most clearly, and that’s the opportunity in front of you. You don’t need a bigger budget, just better data than the competitor sitting one row away in the results.

So start today. Clean the feed, sharpen your titles, turn on reviews. Every field you complete gives the agent another reason to choose you.

The AI agents are already shopping. Make sure they find you first.

About the Author

Assel Beglinova is a CEO and Co-founder at Paperstack, a platform that provides working capital for e-commerce sellers. With her expertise in revenue-based financing, Assel helps merchants achieve their growth goals and thrive in the competitive world of e-commerce.

The post How to Get Your Product Recommended by AI Shopping Agents appeared first on BYVI.