Hey everyone,
Welcome back for another bite to chew on.
When Tero Isokauppila launched Four Sigmatic in 2012, the mushroom coffee market didn't exist.
In fact, he had to buy his ingredients from obscure websites in Germany because nobody was selling them.
And the market confusion was even worse.
Fast forward to today, and mushroom coffee is a $2 billion global category.
But the path from 13th-generation Finnish farmer to CEO of a global wellness empire wasn't a straight line.
Tero was candid about the “stupid” mistakes he made early on and admits that he made his life unnecessarily difficult by trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gate.
His advice to founders today? Radically simple, yet incredibly hard to execute: do less, but do it better.
On the Menu:
The $10M rule of one
The 90% retention secret
Don’t try to DIY unknown problems
If AI isn’t driving 25% of your revenue, you’re already behind
Liquid IV, ThirdLove, Neuro. The best brands we know see anywhere from 20% to 50% of sales come through win-back email campaigns.
That’s not luck. It’s the product of brands building retention into their acquisition stack early, and using AI to supercharge their flows with timing, personalization, and creative at a scale that humans just can’t replicate.
Here’s why this matters: over 95% of paid traffic doesn’t buy on the first visit. That means the majority of visitors bounce with no purchase and no opt-in.
Even your past shoppers will disappear without the right system in place. That’s the blind spot for most brands, and AI-powered identification and email is the connective tissue to solve it.
When you plug in Instant, every shopper gets a bespoke experience:
Deliverability goes up because no two emails are identical. Gmail can’t punish you when every subject line is unique.
CTR goes up because people actually recognize the product they just viewed and feel like you’re speaking to them, not “to a list.”
Conversion rates increase because the timing and offers are tailored to the exact behavior of that shopper.
And all of this compounds. More traffic → more opt-ins → more personalized flows → more revenue → higher LTV. It’s the unfair advantage that top brands are leaning on.
The numbers back it up:
Karen Kane hit $1.1M in incremental revenue in 90 days with Instant.
Nakie tripled their retention revenue and unlocked $230K in incremental revenue in 30 days.
Kind Patches garnered $375k in incremental revenue in 50 days with Instant.
On average, Instant AI clients are seeing 61x ROI and 2-3x more incremental revenue from flows in the first 15-30 days.
Book a demo by February 10 and see firsthand the new standard for what retention should deliver.
The $10M Rule of One
If Tero could hit a reset button on day 1, he would rip up his original playbook.
He admits he was young and stupid.
Why? Because he let ambition kill his focus.
Most founders have the omnichannel itch. They think that being everywhere = selling everywhere. Tero scratched that itch immediately, launching with:
3 channels (Retail, DTC, Amazon)
8 products
3 distinct avatars
It looked like a massive launch, but under the hood, it was a complexity nightmare.
Because when you start with that much variety, there’s a risk of diluting your positioning. You trade a sharp spear for a dull net, and it creates a friction tax on your growth:
Divided focus: You can’t master one channel because you’re busy juggling three.
Audience confusion: Customers don't know exactly who you are or who you are for.
New Playbook: The Power of One
Tero’s advice to operators today is strict. You have to earn the right to complexity.
Until you hit, let’s say, $10M in revenue, stick to the rule of one:
One avatar: pick one specific customer
One product: sell them one core solution
One channel: master one distribution method
Complexity acts as a friction tax on your growth, and it makes it unnecessarily hard to grow a business. Don't build a maze before you've built the entrance.
The 90% Retention Secret
Most DTC brands spend a fortune acquiring customers who buy once and never come back, but Tero dropped a stat that stops most operators in their tracks:
Over 90% of Four Sigmatic customers rebuy.
He’s the first to admit they’re not great at acquisition. But once a customer is in, they rarely leave.
A big part of this comes down to nailing the basics: having a great product people want to buy.
But provided you have this covered, here are 3 operational levers he uses that help build that kind of loyalty:
1. Don't separate growth and retention
Most brands treat acquisition and retention as two different functions. At Four Sigmatic, they work towards the same goal.
If you acquire customers with a gimmick or a misleading offer, retention never stands a chance.
What you can do: Force Growth & CX into the same room
Schedule a bi-weekly cohort review meeting.
The Growth Lead presents the new angles/offers being tested. The CX Lead predicts the downstream issues (e.g., "If we sell it this way, they will cancel because of X").
The goal is to align expectations before the ad spend hits.
2. Humanize the Support
Most brands train their CS teams to apologize and deflect. Tero trained his to hunt for gaps.
Automated bots can solve "Where is my order?" tickets, but they can't detect nuance. Human agents, on the other hand, can figure out if a churn problem was a flavor, pricing, or packaging problem.
What you can do:
Audit your flaws. Use your human agents to tag the specific "suck" point.
Admit them. Instead of hiding the flaw, own it. Tero found that saying, "Yeah, our shipping is slow right now because we're a small team," builds more trust than a corporate apology.
Customers tolerate flaws from humans. They punish flaws from corporations. By admitting you aren't perfect, you lower the bar for churn and raise the bar for brand loyalty.
3. Be Generous on the Exits
This one’s counterintuitive. They make it incredibly easy to cancel, while most subscription brands hide the cancel button behind three confirmation screens and a phone number.
The logic: If you make it hard to leave, people will hate you on the way out.
The win: By being generous when people want to pause or cancel, he preserves the relationship.
When they are ready to come back (and they often do), there’s no bad blood. Being generous on the way out makes customers comfortable coming back in.
Don’t Try to DIY Unknown Problems
Some problems in business look simple.
But most of the time, they aren’t.
Tero learned this the hard way when launching his omnichannel strategy.
He hired retail experts and e-commerce experts, but neither understood how the other channel worked, let alone how they could work together.
The mistake was trying to solve a high-leverage, unknown problem without the right expertise.
Certain challenges (like omnichannel strategy or price-pack architecture) compound over time. Getting them wrong will give you massive debt over time. And learning on the fly is often expensive.
Go for the Pros
How Tero suggests you solve this is going straight to the most experienced person you can find in that domain.
You may not be able to hire a VP or SVP-level operator from a large company full-time. But you can often hire them for a short consulting engagement.
The upfront investment might be high (they usually charge a high hourly rate), but once you get the knowledge, the upside lasts for years.
A true expert can set the structure, define the role of each channel, and teach you the nuances so you can execute efficiently afterward.
The rule is simple: Some problems are one-time problems, and those are worth paying the best person you can find to solve correctly.
Pay for the experience once. Let it compound.
Sum It Up
Tero admits he made his life unnecessarily difficult by trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gate.
The lesson? Complexity is a tax. If you try to build a maze before you build an entrance, you will stall.
On growth: Strip it back. One avatar, one product, one channel.
On retention: Stop hiding your flaws. Humanize your support and let people leave if they want to, so they’ll come back when they're ready.
On strategy: Stop guessing. If you don't know how to solve a high-leverage problem, hire someone who does. Growth isn't about doing more things. It's about doing the right thing, one specific time, until it compounds.
For founders chasing the next big growth hack, the most powerful move might just be the discipline to say "no" to expansion until you’ve truly earned the right to say "yes."
Let us know how we did...
All the best,
Ron & Ash