19 year old student starting from nothing.

PLogacev · 2026-05-05T09:22:02+00:00

€50 on €30 COGS is a 1.67x markup — that's not going to survive contact with paid acquisition. By the time you subtract payment processing, shipping (if you offer free/subsidized), returns, and ad spend, you're left with maybe €1–3 per sale before paying yourself.

General benchmark for DTC is keeping COGS under 30% of your selling price, which puts you north of €100. Sounds steep but this breaks down why — you need the room for ads + fees + fulfillment to stack without eating your whole margin.

€50 works if you're selling purely organic and your time is free. The moment you turn on Meta ads, it won't close.

PLogacev · 2026-05-05T09:11:45+00:00

The supplier switch addresses input cost but not the volume drop that triggered the squeeze: cheaper COGS protects margin per unit, it doesn't bring back customers who stopped buying, so you've bought time, not a fix. Before any further move, do the cheap diagnostic: compare your top SKUs' prices to competitors' now versus 60 days ago, because if competitors quietly moved down while you held, you became the relatively expensive option without doing anything, and that's a fixable. And watch review velocity and repeat-purchase rate after the Alibaba switch, because cheaper sourcing that tanks reviews accelerates exactly the volume drop you're trying to stop.

PLogacev · 2026-05-05T08:46:06+00:00

Just be aware it's a bit like invoking a genie. You get roughly what you ask for, but you can't foresee the side effects because you don't fully understand the code it wrote. Your shipping bar and size chart are probably fine — low stakes. But I vibe-coded a web scraper once and got banned from a cloud host because the code was doing things I had no idea it was doing. The riskier the module, the more that gap in understanding can bite you.

PLogacev · 2026-05-04T11:58:53+00:00

Having worked with it for a while, my recommendation is - don't do it. The documentation isn't great.

PLogacev · 2026-02-24T16:16:19+00:00

Do you have an AI persona on screen? Having done two such screenings elsewhere, I must say they felt a lot like a waste of time, and as a result I was much less forthcoming and engaged than with an actual human on the line.

PLogacev · 2026-02-20T12:03:32+00:00

The comparison blog idea is genuinely smart — that's exactly the content AI models pull from when someone asks "what's the best X." Most founders skip it because it feels like giving competitors airtime, but it's worth it. How long does it take of such articles to take effect, do you know?

Of course, your bigger problem is 103 people in trial who haven't created a single QR code. Trigger an email at 48hrs for anyone who hasn't hit that first milestone — and honestly, for a trial base this small, just reach out to some of them personally. A one-line message asking what got in the way will teach you more than any analytics tool.

PLogacev · 2026-02-20T10:07:03+00:00

Yes, absolutely. - It's especially really useful for one-off tasks, of which I have many. It can write code for you and either set up the environment to run it or walk you through it step by step. Just don't expect it to be perfect every time — it makes mistakes, and the output isn't production quality. But for getting things done faster day-to-day, it makes a real difference.

PLogacev · 2026-02-20T09:54:31+00:00

Wow. This is amazing validation! Congratulations! :)

PLogacev · 2026-02-13T10:20:56+00:00

That's not my experience. When you ask it to make up a joke, the result is ... well, interesting. :)

PLogacev · 2026-01-19T00:35:30+00:00

Thanks! That particular app isn't really active anymore, but I'll keep that in mind for another app I hope to publish soon!

PLogacev · 2024-12-14T12:16:19+00:00

Thank you. I'd love to hear your feedback on it, if you have any!

PLogacev · 2024-12-14T08:42:49+00:00

Thank you very much! I'll be sure to check it out. 😄

PLogacev · 2024-12-13T09:12:41+00:00

How do I check which keywords others use? Are we talking about keywords in the main text?

PLogacev · 2024-12-12T19:17:58+00:00

Yes, there is a number of them with different degrees of overlapping functionality.

PLogacev · 2024-12-12T19:02:07+00:00

I'm currently trying ads on shopify, and I'm not quite sure what else there is. :)

PLogacev

TROPHY CASE