Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦

Co-founder of MPM Brands, Yakety Pack, & Tru Earth. eComm, SaaS & 3PL is my jam. Powering $100M+ in sales, subscriptions & shipments.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

@ChrisSpoke If you figure this out, you let me know.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

@harleyf 100%! Been using Claude for a bit now, and cannot overstate how much of an effect it has had on my ability to run my businesses (yes, multiple).

The worst part of my day is when I run out of tokens... 😆

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Two ways to math this one:
1. Each real SKU is a per pick cost. So a bundle of 6 widgets is 6 different picks. Its also 6 different storage bins.

2. Have your 3PL pre-build a bunch of the bundle so they can pick as one. Cost can usually be done hourly or per bundle and is likely cheaper if you make/sell a lot.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

End of May.

Two moments on the work side that mattered. Henry & Sons shipments started going out clean. CanShip added UniUni and ShipWizmo to the carrier mix, which sounds small until you've spent a quarter trying to bolt one on yourself.

Two more months of build-in-public posting taught me what hits and what doesn't on here. Posts about the moments out-perform posts about the framework, every time.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

@ecommilan Surcharges like this are usually the carrier writing back something undelivered or got missed. Worth pulling the carrier's reason code, half the time its a billable address the 3PL can dispute on your behalf. We've clawed back chunks of these.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Last Sunday of May.

The grass finally got tall enough to hide the road hockey balls we lost in March. Going to mow it after coffee.

The detail I remember from a week tends to be inversely proportional to how busy it was. The slow weeks come back in pictures.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

The founder advice I keep coming back to is from operators who've been at it long enough to have weathered a downturn.

Current-success advice tends to be calibrated to whatever tailwind is happening at the moment. The advice from operators who've scaled and then had to figure out how to scale again is calibrated to the actual variance.

Most of what I'm hearing today from people two years in is probably right for a 2026 market. The decade-in voices are right for whatever market is coming after.

The second group is harder to find on social. Worth the work.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Last weekend in May.

Hockey wraps end of June. Lacrosse runs until July. We get five or six weeks of summer before tryouts start and the cycle picks back up. Unless I end up renting summer ice for the boys and their friends, which is also a thing.

Same on the work side. May used to feel like a quieter month and now it's the runway into summer planning.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

The Parent Power-Up expansion was the deck the kids didn't know we were building.

Same format, flipped roles. Kids draw the prompts, parents answer. The first pull at our house had one of my boys asking me what I'd been most embarrassed about at his age. That was the bridge we hadn't realized was missing.

Building things that work in both directions is harder. Worth it.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Friday notebook review.

Started doing this in January. The pattern that keeps showing up: what I thought would matter on Wednesday usually didn't, what came in mid-week often did.

The Monday plan was never wrong, the week just kept teaching.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

@speeze DTC obvs

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

@lucyhargreaves4 Building a Canadian WMS platform as we speak. Build Canada!

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Inventory accuracy at BTS is where we're spending most of our planning time right now.

The 3PL space talks about it like it's a solved problem. The difference between a 95% accuracy SLA and a 99% one is bigger than it sounds at brand-volume scale.

We're not at 99 yet. The path there is what we're working on this quarter.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

The number worth tracking that almost nobody does.

Same-day fulfillment percentage broken out by what time the order came in. The daily aggregate hides the operational tell. Morning orders and afternoon orders are two different stories.

The afternoon number is usually where you'd find the bottleneck.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

🇨🇦 Canadian DTC is small enough that a "good month" can be couple thousand orders, not tens of thousands.

The math doesn't transfer down from US playbooks. The brands I see scaling here are not trying to be a smaller US brand.

They're solving for actual Canadian wants and needs.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Memorial Day in the US. Regular Monday up here.

Half my inbox is dark today. Doesn't change anything about how the week works on my end. Does mean less noise to push through this morning, which is the closest thing to a planning day Monday ever gets.

Going to use it for the Tuesday brief instead of triaging email.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

One of my boys drew three cards in a row from the YPC deck last night that all hit the same nerve.

We talk about gaming a lot in the house. We don't actually talk about it the way the cards push you to.

That second layer is the part you can't shortcut with screen-time rules.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Sunday morning, kids still asleep, coffee number two.

Used to spend Sundays trying to get ahead of Monday. Doesn't work, never did. The week is going to do what it's going to do regardless.

The Sundays I remember are the ones where I just let it be Sunday. Tomorrow the house wakes up.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Half the founder advice I read is about how to be busier.

The good half is about how to be less busy without being less effective. Haven't fully figured it out, but the move that helped most this year was treating Friday afternoon as a hard stop.

Saturday morning is the cushion.

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

@RyeMcKenzie Big time! Don’t gas out boys and girls

[Kevin Hinton 🇨🇦 @KevinDHinton]

Lacrosse tournament this weekend.

Two or three games in a day, short breaks in between, no real practice time. The teams that win these aren't always the most skilled. They're the ones whose coaches taught them how to reset between games.

Same shape on the work side. The reset is the muscle, not the original plan.