Episode · 2026-01-24
Gen Alpha's "Unplugging"
Gen Alpha's "Unplugging" | OpenAI Takes 4% of Your Sales | Dave Stickland Joins (1.23.26)
Rundown
Dave Stickland joins to discuss building Popsmith, a premium popcorn brand, sharing lessons on retail strategy and founder responsibilities. The episode covers Gen Alpha's shift to offline activities, OpenAI's 4% distribution fee impact on DTC brands, and why SMS should be a primary revenue channel.
Takes from this episode
SMS should be optimized as a brand's primary revenue channel, not treated as one feature among many.
Postcript is the only SMS player in our market who will tell you our goal is to make SMS revenue your number one channel for dollars into your pocket
Founders of brands under $10-20M in revenue must serve as chief creative officer much longer than they anticipated.
if you are below you know 10,000 10 million um and even probably higher probably 20 you know if you are a founder you are probably going to be the chief creative officer the chief brand officer for way longer than you thought
Founders should focus on iterating quality creative rather than posting high volume of static ads.
And I'm like, 'No, bro. That's not what this is anymore.' Like that's not what it is anymore.
Getting into major retailers like Costco requires brands to generate their own demand; shelf space alone doesn't move product.
when the moon units don't move because it's a product on Costco that's not clearly on the front end or something that someone's always looking for. Well now we have to go back and we have to generate demand ourselves
Screen-free family activities like board games provide high-quality bonding that compounds into meaningful family relationships.
It's one to two hours of high quality screenfree family time with my wife and two kids every day... Daily family fun compounds in amazing ways