Last Wednesday night I was staring at Okiela’s own dashboard....

Last Wednesday night I was staring at Okiela’s own dashboard.
Big green number on the screen: “True Profit: $43,750”.
Looked great. Very “under control”.

But I knew that account had never uploaded a COGS file.
No CSV, no Excel, no template.
Just a raw orders file.
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In the code I was doing what’s pretty “standard” in our space:
if COGS is missing → assume 30%.
You see that number everywhere. It sounds reasonable.
But that 30% was being applied to every SKU, every order, every decision for a real founder.

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Some products have 60–70% margin.
Some are basically break‑even.
Showing one “True Profit” number on top of that, with no hint it’s a guess, felt wrong.

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I imagined a shop owner opening Okiela, seeing $43,750 and thinking:
“Let’s scale ads.”
“Let’s kill these ‘unprofitable’ SKUs.”
All based on a number I made up.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I opened my laptop and thought:
“Right now I’m shipping a polite lie that everyone accepts. I don’t want to be that guy.”

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So we pushed our roadmap back almost two weeks to fix ONE thing:
Tell the truth about what the system knows, and what it’s only estimating.

Now, if you haven’t uploaded COGS:
-The card says “Estimated profit” with an amber badge and a small line saying we assume ~30% COGS.
- Upload your real COGS → it flips to “Net profit” (green).
- Reconcile with payouts → it becomes “Verified.”

The engine didn’t change much.
The honesty did.

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Okiela is still far from perfect. But slowing down to stop pretending “guessed” numbers are “true” is one decision I feel genuinely good about.

When you look at any dashboard (including mine), one simple question is worth asking:
“Is this number measured, or just estimated?”

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Thank you, truly <3