Deep Gadkari

Selling on Amazon means paying almost double Shopify’s fees. Brands paying them make 3x the dollars. @youderian and I were chatting about how many founders are second-guessing Amazon right now. So we pulled the H1 2026 books of 7 and 8 figure consumer brands to see if the fear holds up. The fees first: Amazon: ~30% of every sale (15% referral, 15% FBA) Shopify: ~16% (3% processing, 13% shipping and fulfillment) Now the contribution margins: Brands on both Shopify and Amazon: 27.2% Shopify-only brands: 28.9% Almost the same rate, on a business about 3.3x bigger. Even with fees that high. Because the Amazon side barely pays for anything else. Ads: ~13% of Amazon sales vs 22-33% on Shopify Discounts: ~2% on Amazon vs 12% on Shopify The extra 14 points in fees mostly come back as lower ad spend and fewer promo codes. And it’s not because Amazon Ads are better. They do a different job. Meta and Google → create demand Amazon Ads → catch people already searching with a card in hand Which means your Meta spend is quietly buying Amazon orders. That’s good news, as long as you judge the whole company and not your Shopify ROAS. Amazon can’t capture demand you never created. And the cannibalization fear? For brands on both, Amazon sales grew 28%. Shopify still grew 10%, about the same as Shopify-only brands. Before you cut Amazon to save on fees, look at the company-level margin, not the channel P&L.

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Most of your scaling plans suck because you can’t forecast inventory or project revenue properly. Bestsellers out of stock, cash stuck in slow movers, supplier saying next week for the third week. Learn this first instead of just increasing the budget when numbers decline.

The repetition you're avoiding is the only cure for the repetition you're in.

Marketing & advertising folks are meant to have the pulse of the consumer. It’s a daunting task in a plural, diverse country like India. How are you expected to know local sentiment of say Meghalaya, West Bengal or Tamil Nadu if all your life you’ve grown up in Mumbai, Delhi or elsewhere. That’s why successful professionals in that business have travelled all over India and seen the real country side, interacted with its people, know the life in small town India. That helps them speak their language, understand and appreciate their pain points and aspirations. It helps in creating brand ideas that connect at an emotional level to a wide audience based on real insights and human behaviour. Unfortunately there exists an influential group in this domain who have ‘what’s not true for me cannot be true for anyone else’ attitude, living in their own cozy bubble, cut off from reality. The problem is acute if they’ve grown up consuming content mostly or only from the west: literature, fiction, movies, comics, journalism...the works. Being able to think and speak in English only or as default is another trait. Familiarity with an Indian language will be limited for basic conversation and India beyond the metros will be alien. The result: they are unable to relate to every day India - it’s way of life, rituals, festivals and what’s dear to them including faith, traditions and cultural codes. I feel it is marked when it comes to matters of faith and religious festivals: that ‘it’s not important to me so I don’t see what the fuss is about’ kicks in. If rituals are not important to this group they will question why it’s important to others. If they are ok with celebrating, say Diwali with just traditional wear and a feast/party they’ll feel puja and rituals are infra dig. They’d freely give out pejorative labels like sanskari, regressive, bigot etc. to someone whose lifestyle doesn’t match theirs. A lot of the advertising out there is a reflection of this group’s world view.

how it feels driving to your $250k yr swe job after reading the J.P. Morgan study that found out some 20 year olds were making $20M a month creating Roblox games.

We have breached the 1000 pcs/minute mark on our CNC spring coiler! Ours is now the fastest CNC spring machine in the country built by an Indian company. This machine is now comparable to speeds and precision of global benchmarks from Germany and Japan of this category. This was a long time coming. We started at a mere 200 pcs/minute. It took us four years of R&D to get here but we finally made it. Also, this machine can go faster. This is not even its full potential. Proudly built in Bharat 🇮🇳