Bridges and Experiments
A Week of SBA Insights, Ecommerce Trials, and Narrowing the Path Forward
I am currently in a liminal period between my previous job as an analyst at a long-only fund, and whatever comes next. I tweet ~daily stream-of-consciousness reflections about my work and thoughts and then aggregate them here weekly. This helps clarify my thinking and documents my process, while hopefully sparking discussions with others. Sign up to follow along, and feel free to reach out to discuss anything of interest.
4/22/25
Topic: SBA loan brokers
Watched a webinar with Heather Endresen from Viso Business Capital today. It walked through the entire search process from sourcing to close. Made a good case for working with Viso as an SBA loan broker on an exclusive basis. Basically - they help you figure out how to find a deal that has a high probability of getting done. Provide tools/models to assist in your analysis. Offers deal review (even pre-LOI). They know exactly what the banks want, with Heather being a veteran in the business (before Viso, she launched Live Oak’s Search Fund SBA vertical). It seems like this would be a really useful resource for a first time searcher. Best part? Nothing comes out of your pocket. The bank pays when the deal closes.
What’s the catch? What am I missing here? Who are some other SBA loan brokers that are worth following to learn more about the space?
4/23/25
Topic: Ecom, AI agents, $PINS ads for demand testing
I’m starting to get a faint sense of what this AI-native solo operator thing could look like. Not just “automation,” but actual leverage—an agent where I riff ideas and outputs start getting created downstream: creatives, copy, campaign structure. I’m not close to that yet, and I don’t have concrete plans to build it or really even know what’s out there, but it’s starting to shape up conceptually. Right now it’s all still super manual and time consuming but I get the strong sense that it shouldn’t be.
Supplier tracking is still mostly in a big Google Sheet—15+ columns deep with cost data, communication methods, notes. It’s fine for now, but feels clunky and is a lot to maintain with several ongoing conversations with suppliers. Something like Air Table could be a better fit. Still structured like a spreadsheet, but with more function—automations, reminders, filters, maybe even letting suppliers update their own info through forms. Add Zapier or Make into the mix and I could streamline a lot of this. Not exactly AI, but definitely more fluid than where I am now. But I don’t know the cost (time or money) of doing all that. If I find some success here and keep testing products like this, could be worth the investment.
On the marketing side, Pinterest testing continues. Saw one pin get 0.93% CTR and another get 0.38%. Nearly identical design, just angled differently. Is that real or just noise? Probably both. But the variance highlights how messy this is at small sample sizes. I’m trying not to read too much into any one result. A couple clicks changes it a lot.
I have a basic Carrd landing page set up, but there’s not much there. No preorder option. No real next step for the people who do click. Just a sort of meaningless email sign-up that no one is going to actually put their email into with so little to go on. But at least it gives them something to click-through to for the data.
Through this whole process—ads, design, messaging suppliers, maybe ordering a few samples—I’ll be surprised if I burn through more than a few hundred bucks per test. The real risk is if I do a full MOQ stock order and it flops. But hopefully the upfront testing helps me avoid that. So maybe I spend $500 per product tested. By the tenth product, odds are I’ll either, a) have something that’s working and has indications of demand—based on CTRs, sample feedback, whatever—or b) I’ll just be a lot sharper at the process than I was the first time through. But I don’t know if I’ll end up doing that many or just stop after the first. Not committed to this ecom thing, still just experimenting at this point to get a feel for what that process would look like. Want to go at least one iteration.
4/24/25
Read Living Fearless by Jamie Winship. A lot of it reminds me of The Release of the Spirit by Watchman Nee—might reread that soon. I’m thinking a lot about how I speak. Trying to speak truth. Not just in tone, but in what I choose to talk about. The directions I take conversations. The way I talk to myself. I still struggle to live out a lot of what those books are talking about.
Walked. Sat alone outside at a coffee shop for about an hour. Left my phone in the car. Nothing came out of it. It felt weird. Harder than doing work. Probably worth doing more.
Had a call earlier. Went to a networking event in the evening. I showed up. Wasn’t fully there.
4/26/25
I think I need to begin to narrow down my focus. I have considered a total of ~10+ paths, including backups. Some of the main ones - ETA, ecommerce, newsletter, some other kind of lower cost startup (e.g. home services). I would say over the course of the next month or so I want to focus on doing calls that narrow down my conviction for which one to pursue. I am trying to build a bridge here. I am trying to demonstrate self-sufficiency. What is the highest probability of achieving that in the near term? That may not be my ultimate goal (ETA seems increasingly probable for a medium term goal). But I need to figure out a bridge. And I do not have a ton of time. How much exactly, I am not sure. Still need to do a more detailed budget analysis and consider what living expenses I can cut. I want to find a way to pay the bills without depending on someone else. Trust that God will provide. Be resourceful. Lead. Try something. I feel overly hedged and unfocused right now. There is a tension because I don’t want to rush into the wrong thing either, but I know I am prone to analysis paralysis. And I acknowledge the fear that I won’t be able to figure it out (at least not near term). I take that fear to God. One foot in front of the other.
4/27/25
Topics: supplement biz idea, $PINS ads + ecom
Business idea in the supplement space. Tell me why this is dumb: reach out to health influencers: e.g. sleep influencers with 10-250k followers. Offer to make their ideal sleep supplement (e.g. with x dose of melatonin, y dose of L-theanine, etc.) and handle basically everything for them. Offer them some share of the revenue. Got this idea while looking into the fact that apparently 0.3mg melatonin is ideal dose. That is wildly different than most of what is out there. There are micro melatonin products on the market. But very few blends that include that kind of dose of melatonin, and they are extremely expensive (e.g. > $1/day).
Need to look more into how to study and interpret the $PINS ad data for yoga mats. One has a decent CTR (1%, I think is decent but who knows) but how do I know how much data is enough? What other metrics matter? Should I run another campaign with e.g. pickleball paddles with Bible verses on them? Seems like much better market in terms of the overlap between pickleballers and Christians vs yogis and Christians. Not sure if price point would be high enough. Wonder how those CTRs would compare.
Really interested to connect with more people in supplement space and ecommerce space.
Asked GPT to make me a perfect Deep Research prompt about the Pinterest stuff. Will be interesting to see what it comes up with:
Explain, in detail, what click-through rate (CTR) benchmarks are considered good on Pinterest for different types of ads (e.g., static pins, video pins, idea pins) and how CTR correlates to actual buyer intent and inventory risk. In your explanation, include:
– Typical CTR ranges by ad type and industry (e.g., ecommerce, home decor, fashion).
– How many impressions are needed for CTR data to be statistically reliable.
– How CTR compares to other Pinterest engagement signals like saves, outbound clicks, and profile visits.
– Common pitfalls of using CTR alone to make inventory purchase decisions.
– The relationship between CTR, CPM, CPC, and ROAS on Pinterest, and how these metrics together should guide whether to move forward with inventory.
– Real-world examples or case studies (if available) showing campaigns with high CTR but poor sales, and campaigns with moderate CTR but strong purchase behavior.
Conclude by providing a practical 5-step checklist to evaluate whether a Pinterest campaign’s performance justifies buying inventory, based on CTR and complementary metrics.
4/28/25
This ecommerce thing is a rollercoaster of emotions. Finally got a mat design that had a good click-through rate on Pinterest. But then my landing page is awful so no sign-ups. Plus, not even sure that’s a good approach. Unless I could hire someone to make an elite landing page. No one is going to sign up to be notified, at an unspecified future date, about the release of a mat from someone they don’t know. Suspicious of scams. That’s just way too high friction. So I was like alright well I might as well order some samples now and try selling them on FB Marketplace to get a few initial customers. But then I realized my mat design (generated with AI) doesn’t have the same aspect ratio as an actual yoga mat so I couldn’t order samples with that image. Had to extend it and add a bunch of black space above and below. So now I need to rerun ads on that and see if click through is still good. I may just pivot to pickleball paddles but idek if that is high enough price point.