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
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#buildinpublic #analytics #data #shopify #ecommerce #saas #solofounder #okiela
