Hard Margins

About Hard Margins

Hard Margins is a weekly podcast for DTC operators building serious eCommerce businesses on Shopify. Hosted by Alex Orley, each episode breaks down one high-leverage idea for growing more profitably, covering customer lifetime value, contribution margin, cohort economics, product portfolio strategy, and retention. No fluff, no vanity metrics. Just the frameworks that separate the brands that compound from the ones that plateau. Brought to you by RetentionX, the integrated growth platform built for Shopify brands.

Publisher

RetentionX

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Apr 2026

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

35 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Customer Maintenance Capex

   Most brands book all their acquisition spend as growth, but part of it is maintenance capex: the cost of replacing customers who stop buying, and it has to be covered before the business grows at all. We split acquisition into maintenance and growth, a...

2. 

   24 Sept 2026

   Customer Equity Dilution

   A brand can add 40% more customers, increase total customer equity, and still lower the average economic quality of the customer base — all in the same quarter. This episode covers customer equity dilution: how to measure the quality of a new cohort ag...

3. 

   16 Sept 2026

   Your Customer Half Life

   If you stopped acquiring customers today, how long would it take for half your existing customer revenue to disappear? This episode makes the case for Customer Base Half-Life as a CEO-level number, what it tells you that revenue, growth and LTV don't, ...

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

10 ratings

Contact Hard Margins

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.