We Were Supposed to Talk Tactics
I recently sat down with Andrew Faris on the E-Commerce Playbook podcast.
Rob Fraser
March 2, 2026
I recently sat down with Andrew Faris on the E-Commerce Playbook podcast.
We were supposed to talk tactics. Margins, channel mix, inventory strategy. And we did, a little. But the conversation kept pulling somewhere else. Somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
I ended up saying things I’ve thought about for years but never fully articulated. The kind of stuff that lives in the gap between what founders talk about publicly and what they actually experience privately.
Here are six of those things. The ones that stuck with me after we hung up.
1. Entrepreneurship is a trauma response.
I didn’t coin this. I saw it on Twitter years ago and I’ve never been able to shake it. Every time I share it with a founder, they laugh. Not because it’s funny. Because it’s true.
Most of us started building because we had something to prove. For me, it traces back to being an overweight kid who figured out that being great at things earned you attention. Acceptance. Something that felt like love.
That chip on your shoulder is powerful. Brent Beshore calls it dirty fuel. It will drive you further than most people think is possible. It built my cycling career. It built Outway.
But the fuel that builds you will eventually burn you.
At some point, the external validation loop stops working. You’ve proven what you set out to prove, and you’re left standing in the middle of something successful, wondering why it feels hollow. The transition from “I want to show the world I’m great” to “I just want to be great” is the hardest shift most founders will ever make. And it’s not optional. It’s the only way to keep going for another decade without losing yourself.
2. The network I built almost killed me.
Everyone tells you to build a network. Surround yourself with people ahead of you. Get in the rooms. Join the communities.
So I did. DTC Twitter. Conferences. Group chats. I built relationships with people running bigger businesses, growing faster, doing things I thought I should be doing. And the network was genuinely valuable.
Until it wasn’t.
What happened slowly, then all at once, was that I started operating like them instead of like me. Implementing their strategies. Adopting their metrics. Chasing their version of success. I stopped running the playbook that had gotten me into those rooms in the first place.
That was the irony. The reason those people found me interesting was because I was building something authentic. Then I diluted the very thing they were drawn to by trying to become more like them.
The simple insight that took me two painful years to learn: you’re already in the room. You don’t need to change to stay there. And if you do change, you’ll lose the thing that got you invited.
3. I would have traded the business to feel healthy again.
This is the one I don’t think enough founders talk about.
There was a stretch in 2022 and 2023 where we were unprofitable, implementing every tactic the internet told us to use, and I was getting sick every three weeks. My body was keeping score of the inauthenticity.
I remember driving home from work one day and thinking: I would trade this entire business for the opportunity to just feel good again.
That’s not a metaphor. I meant it. I had built this company to avoid getting a real job, and it had become the worst job I’d ever had. Losing money, not having fun, not serving the consumer the way they deserved. And I was physically falling apart.
That drive home was the beginning of the reset. In July 2023, I wiped the table clean. Cut the team. Killed the software. Ripped out every bell and whistle DTC Twitter had told me to install. Went back to basics.
The business responded immediately. Two consecutive years of record revenue and profit followed. Not because I found some new tactic. Because I stopped using everyone else’s.
4. I stopped trying to compress the timeline.
Where I am today is where I wanted to be three years ago. It just took longer than I thought. And the pressure to get there faster? Nobody was applying it but me.
This is one of the most destructive patterns I see in founders. We look at someone two or three years ahead of us and try to collapse the distance overnight. We take on risk we don’t need to take. We sacrifice margin for growth. We make decisions in the name of speed that end up costing us years.
My cycling career should have taught me this. You can’t compress the timeline it takes to make a national team. You train, you race, you lose, you adapt, you come back. It takes as long as it takes. Trying to rush it just gets you injured.
Business is no different. The compounding only works if you stay in the game long enough to let it compound.
I used to have revenue targets tied to specific years. Now my goal is simpler: be in business for 20 more years. That reframe changed everything. Because when the timeline extends, the pressure to perform on someone else’s schedule disappears. And the work gets better because of it.
5. We play business on hard mode. That’s the point.
Socks are a product people are conditioned to hate from childhood.
Think about it. If you celebrated Christmas as a kid, socks were the punishment gift. The big box that looked promising, and when you ripped it open, disappointment. Then you become a teenager and start choosing clothes that signal something to the world. Your shirt, your shoes, your jacket. Socks? You don’t think about them. Nobody does.
So you enter adulthood having been trained to believe socks don’t matter. You buy them reluctantly. You’ve never been introduced to the idea that they could actually be better.
That creates a fascinating business problem. We’re not competing against other sock brands. We’re competing against the belief that socks aren’t worth caring about.
It’s a low-margin product. You have to sell enormous volume. The supply chain is specialized and difficult. No first-time entrepreneur is going to wake up and say, “I’m going to start a sock company.”
And that’s exactly why it works.
Playing on hard mode is a competitive moat. The difficulty filters out the tourists. Ten years in, we’re still obsessed with making a better sock. Still finding ways to innovate in a category most people ignore. The $60 billion global sock market doesn’t care that socks aren’t sexy. It just needs someone stubborn enough to keep solving the problem.
6. You can be content and ambitious at the same time.
This is the one that gets misunderstood the most.
When I say I don’t care about hitting a specific revenue number, people assume I’ve lost my edge. That contentment equals complacency.
It’s not that. It’s the opposite.
The founders I admire most are the ones you can’t shake. They’re not chasing external validation. They’re not reacting to what other people are doing. They have this almost unsettling internal focus. You can talk shit and it might hurt them, but it won’t change their direction. You can’t compete with them because they’re playing their own game.
That’s what clean fuel looks like in practice. Not the absence of ambition. A different source of it.
My mantra with the team now is simple: when we’re winning, we’re not geniuses. When we’re losing, we’re not idiots. We just need to do our best and the market will reward it or it won’t. But if we’re serving the consumer, improving every day, and having fun doing it, we’re doing it right.
I don’t want to build the biggest sock brand in the world to prove something to someone. I want to build it because the work is interesting, the problem is worth solving, and I’m not done getting better.
That’s enough. It always was.
This conversation went places I wasn’t expecting. If any of this resonated, go listen to the full episode. There’s a lot more in there about how we structure cash flow, why we ship by air, what the Custom Lab business actually looks like, and how we think about brand in the age of AI.
Listen to the full episode here →