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You and 4,835 subscribers are going to enjoy this newsletter or you’ll be voluntold to make IKEA furniture with my wife.

Welcome back friend!
And a big welcome to the +252 new readers this week!

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0.2x, 2x, 20x

What if we started thinking about our goals with a different order of magnitude? What would our lives look like?

Picture your Amazon business after a year of 0.2x thinking. Tightened ACoS. A/B tested three hero images. Negative-keyworded your branded campaigns. Margins up 5%. You feel productive. Year-end, you look the same as you did at the start, just with cleaner spreadsheets.

Now the 2x version. You opened Canada and the UK. Hired a VA. Launched four new SKUs. Making double the money. Still answering Seller Central messages at 11pm, still the bottleneck on every decision. Bigger job. Same job.

Now 20x. Different physics entirely. You don't get there by launching more SKUs, opening new marketplaces, or hiring another agency. You'd have to become a different kind of thing entirely. A brand people google by name the way they google Anker for chargers. A company big enough to get acquired for nine figures, the way Procter & Gamble bought Native deodorant in 2017. A business that has a life of its own once you step back from it.

A few weekends a year we flirt with 2x. We almost never sit with what 20x would actually require of us.

Here’s a real life example like getting in shape: The 0.2x version is walking more and drinking water. The 2x version is a trainer, a meal plan, three gym sessions a week. The 20x version is redesigning the life that made you out of shape in the first place. The job that keeps you at a desk. The commute that kills your evenings. The friends you only see over beer. Same body, same goal. Three different bets on what the problem actually is.

Now try the thought experiment yourself right now.
Close your eyes and go.

The IVS

Big thanks to my friend Anthony Nguyen from Adscrafted. Adscrafted automates the entire loop in the IVS, below. It tracks your keyword ranks, monitors CVR by placement, adjusts bids, and tells you when to pull back.

When he’s not doing PPC, you’ll likely find Anthony playing pickleball, spending time with his kids, or blowing out his knee playing hockey.

How to Use PPC to Drive Organic Rank

Step 1: Launch. Run Broad+ and Single Keyword Campaigns (exact) on your target keywords to start building rank.

Step 2: Watch CVR. Track your conversion rate by placement. Push spend toward your highest-converting placement using placement modifiers: Top of Search typically converts best, and higher CVR is what signals Amazon to rank you higher. If rank stalls, note your CVR and beat it (better images, price, reviews).

Step 3: Rank check. Once you hit page 1:

• Top 3 and stable? Cut ad spend. You'll stick.

• Position 4+? Keep running ads to maintain.

Step 4: Profitability check. If PPC on that keyword isn't profitable and you can't rank organically, stop spending money on it. Move budget to keywords where you can win.

Repeat for every target keyword until organic sales carry the weight.

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Did you pay any tariffs? Get your money back.

The Supreme Court ruled IEEPA tariffs unlawful. CBP is refunding $166 Billion (with a B).

As of April 20, CBP opened CAPE inside the ACE Portal: a bulk system that strips the illegal charges off your entries, recalculates what you actually owed, and pays you back with interest.

What to do:

1. Have your customs broker pull entries with HTS Chapter 99 codes on Form 7501

2. Enroll in ACH Refunds or your refund gets held

3. Log into ACE, open the CAPE tab, upload up to 9,999 entries per CSV

Refund lands in 60 to 90 days. Don’t sit on this before the govt changes their mind (again).

Stay Or Go Season

Every year around this time, Costa Rica turns into a yes-or-no question for the expats here. Are you staying or are you leaving? It happens like clockwork. The kids usually know before we do. We start asking the boys who's bouncing this year, because their friend group is the early warning system.

This year is going to hit a little different. Both of them are losing some of their inner circle. We've been lucky for a long time. They've had a tight crew of friends, five-plus years for some of them but this round will suck a little more for the boys. You watch your kid build a life with people, and then a chunk of those people are suddenly off to Texas or Canada or wherever home was before.

So why do people leave? A few things I see every year. Costs, obviously. Costa Rica isn't cheap anymore. Prices keep climbing here just like everywhere else, and at some point the math stops working for some families.

The high school thing is another big one as some parents want their kids to have the American or Canadian high school experience. Homecoming, prom, a graduating class bigger than 15 kids, all that jazz. The international schools down here are great, but they're small. I get it.

Divorce is quieter but it's there. And here's where I see something a lot of families miss. They came down to Costa Rica thinking the move itself would fix what was already cracked. Bad marriage, kid struggles, whatever it is. The move was supposed to be the reset. But you land in a place where you know nobody, you're suddenly with your spouse 24/7 with no built-in escape hatch, and the issues get bigger. The country ends up taking the blame for what was already broken before the plane landed.

And then there's the slowwwww grind down. This is the one that beats people down the most. The red tape here is real and customer service doesn’t focus on the customer. If you're running a business, hiring contractors, dealing with banks, it can be death by a thousand small things.

A friend of mine isn't down here full time and tried to prepay his internet for the year. Walks in with $700. Just put it on the account. Nope, can't do that. When's the bill due? The 15th. When do you cut me off? The 17th. I'm gone, can I just leave the money? Nope. That kind of thing happens here all the time. Stack enough of those on top of each other and yeah, you start dreaming about a country where you can just prepay the internet bill.

What we've tried to do is build hacks around the annoying junk instead of fighting it or being surprised by it. Residency renewal? Marsha books the appointment online the second the window opens. Gardener flaking so we hire a company instead of one guy, so it's their problem to chase down whoever didn't show up today. You can't beat the system, but you can route around it.

Nowhere is perfect and that's the part nobody tells you when you move. Every country has a version of this. Different paperwork, different excuses, different lines to stand in. You're not picking a perfect place, you're picking which set of tradeoffs you can live with, and which ones still make life feel worth it.

For some of our friends this year, the trade off stopped working. New country, new school, new chapter. For a few it's a fresh start after a marriage ended and they didn't want to wake up looking at the same view. For others it's just time.

We'll miss them.

The boys will miss their friends more and have to settle for talking on Discord.

AWD: Does “Automatic” Actually Keep You In Stock?

The fee math is seductive. Keep 70%+ of a SKU's inventory on AWD auto-replenishment over 90 days and Amazon waives the aged inventory surcharge (which climbs to $6.90 per cubic foot past 365 days), exempts you from the low-inventory-level fee, and layers on more AWD discounts of 20% off storage plus 10% off transport. Four fee categories gone.

But the real question isn't the fees.

It's whether “auto-replen” keeps your listings in stock.

On steady-demand SKUs, yes. Sellers consistently report auto works well for flat, predictable products. The forecast is reasonable, shipments flow, FBA stays topped up.

On everything else, auto breaks in two specific ways.

First, during demand spikes (Q4, lightning deals, viral ad moments), AWD-to-FBA transfers that normally take a few days stretch to weeks. Sellers have watched shipments sit at AWD for a month while FBA went to zero. Amazon's forecast doesn't see your deal calendar or your ad launches.

Second, on forecast errors, the system overcommits. One common pattern: Amazon predicts double the real demand, ships three months of cover, demand drops 50%, and you're stuck holding twelve months of inventory racking up storage fees.

Manual flips both risks. You keep timing control and pre-load FBA before deal weeks or ad pushes. But you lose the waivers, you carry the replenishment work yourself, and if you miss a window nothing catches you.

The Removal Trap

Here’s one super awesome thing I love about AWD: Multi-Channel Distribution (MCD) lets you ship AWD inventory anywhere: your 3PL, a wholesaler, a retail buyer, back to your own warehouse. The fees are nothing like FBA removals.

Real numbers from my own account: I pulled 4,000 units out of AWD for about $375. The same pull from FBA would have cost me roughly $15,000. That's a 50x gap.

Translation: if there's any chance you'll want those units back (liquidation, wholesale pivot, retail channel, prep cleanup), park them in AWD. Once inventory is sitting in FBA, getting it out is a financial bloodbath.

The Rule

Put steady-demand SKUs on 70%+ auto to unlock the fee stack. Keep seasonal, deal-driven, or ad-spiked SKUs on manual. And use AWD as your staging layer instead of shipping bulk straight to FBA, so the exit door stays cheap.

(Side note: GWD, Amazon's new Shenzhen warehouse launched April 9, extends the same auto-versus-manual choice to China-sourced inventory at storage rates up to 45% cheaper than US AWD.)

P.S. Amazon’s playbook for AWD is the same as it was for FBA. Make any other option so unattractive (fees, LOL) that any other option seems like suicide.

Case in point: Do you have any appetite for trying to rank a product to #1 without using FBA? Me neither.

Just Threaten to Cancel

Every premium credit card has a retention department. It's a team whose entire job is to stop you from closing your account.

When your annual fee hits, call the number on the back of your card. Say "cancel" to the phone tree. That routes you to retention.

When they pick up:

"Hey, I'm calling about the annual fee. Not sure I'm keeping the card this year. It is very expensive.”

Then shut up.

What they'll offer: 10K to 50K bonus points, a $50 to $250 statement credit, or a reduced fee. Amex, Chase, and Capital One are the most generous. Check Doctor of Credit before you call so you know what's realistic for your specific card.

Don't screw it up: No lying. No fake competitor offers. No threatening to close if you won't. Banks track this and flag accounts that abuse it.

Works best on cards with $400+ fees. Skip the low-fee cards.

The price on the contract is the price for people who don't ask.

Pick up the phone.

To your success,

Rob & Max