I told a founder recently that the thing I sell has a ceiling on it, and that we
By Ted Gibson · September 16, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I told a founder recently that the thing I sell has a ceiling on it, and that we would hit that ceiling well before he got to the number he wants.
The honest version is that advertising against non branded search on Amazon can take most wellness brands to somewhere between five and fifteen thousand a month, and it can do that fairly reliably, because you are competing for demand that already exists and there is a finite amount of it. Everything above that comes from people typing the brand name into the search bar, and you do not buy that on Amazon. You buy it through content, and affiliates, and social, and PR, and all the slow expensive things that happen somewhere else entirely and then turn up in my numbers looking like organic growth.
I put a competitor's branded search volume next to his on the call, which is a fairly brutal way of making the point but it makes it in about four seconds.
I have gone back and forth on whether saying this out loud is good business, because it clearly costs me something in the room. But the alternative is taking a retainer against a target I already know the channel cannot deliver on its own, and then spending eighteen months explaining why, which is a worse job and a much shorter relationship. I would rather tell someone where the edge is before they walk at it.