Starbucks has had its issues but the coffee category overall keeps growing globally.
$BREW is broader than any single name - it's the whole coffee and energy drink ecosystem. International expansion is still a major growth driver, especially in emerging markets where per-capita coffee consumption is growing fast.
Added as a global consumer play with defensive characteristics.
Every month around the 28th I used to play the same awful game in our team Slack channel.
i'd post a screenshot of our company credit card statement and start tagging people. 'who renewed this extra Notion workspace?' 'what is this $49 charge from some random AI tool?' 'why is this $400 Meta Ads bill mixed in with our GitHub seats?'
we are a team of 12 and were running over 20 different subscriptions (Sentry, Figma, OpenAI, Vercel, Linear, Slack, plus our Google and TikTok ad accounts).
EVERYTHING was tied to one shared corporate card.
when you do this a few things inevitably happen:
a dev tests a tool, forgets to cancel, and it quietly bills us for six months
a team member leaves but their specific dev env subscription stays active because we don't know which one is theirs
marketing ad spend gets completely tangled with basic infrastructure costs making project ROI a nightmare to calculate
I realized our saas spend wasn't out of control because we used too many tools. it was out of control because no one owned the payment paths.
Plus if an ad account got flagged or a large charge bounced the main card would get locked. suddenly our AWS or OpenAI access would be at risk over a billing issue with some random marketing tool.
so we completely rebuilt the payment structure. instead of one card we split our payment lanes.
Every core team member or specific project now gets a dedicated sub account and a specific virtual card. Marketing gets one card strictly for Meta Ads and another for Google Ads. Engineering gets a lane for server costs and GitHub. if a specific project ends we just kill that specific card. no more hunting down who signed up for what.
i ended up looking for something that could handle separate virtual cards, spending limits, and exportable records. I’m using a buvei card for that part right now mostly because it fits the payment-lane setup better than dumping everything onto one shared bank card.
But the bigger change was the workflow itself. stop putting every tool and ad account on the same payment method.
We aren't necessarily spending less money now but every single dollar finally has an owner. if a tool isn't being used the person holding that specific card budget feels it and cancels it. my monthly reconcilation time dropped from 4 hours of detective work to maybe 15 minutes.
at what MRR or team size did you guys officially move off the 'one shared founders card' setup? and do you issue virtual cards per employee, or strictly per software vendor?
Hey guys,
Lately I’ve been thinking about trying to buy podcast reviews because my current approach is no longer enough to grow my show. I’ve relied on asking listeners at the end of every episode and posting clips on social media for years, but it feels like that’s simply not working for me anymore. It’s just hard to get people to actually open their podcast app and write a rating, and I know there are other ways to improve rankings in the charts just that I’d like to try this out.
I have searched online and found that options like running paid ads, setting up guest appearances, buying podcast reviews, and doing email outreach can help get more eyes on a show. The problem is that many of these methods take a massive amount of time or money to set up properly. Is there any particular site that you rely on, consistently use, and find affordable and easy to work with when it comes to getting safe ratings?