Events + on-sites in 🇧🇬🇩🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸, hoarding domains, 2025 is eCommerce

While spring break has already kicked off at home, the event season is far from over.

Today’s issue covers:

1. Upcoming events I’m looking/speaking at over the next few months

2. Summer travel (and where to find me if you want to connect)

3. Is domain hoarding still a thing? (letting go of domains for the first time in over a decade)

4. Ecommerce is king online in 2025 (or the stumbling B2Bs)

1. Ecommerce & Retail Summit, Webit, WordCamp (more to come)

After a busy few weeks of events (I recapped a handful in the previous editions), next up is a Tuesday keynote for Capital’s “Ecommerce and Retail Summit.”

I’ve been lucky to collaborate with great people across my companies, partners, clients, investments, and broader tech circles - from North America to Asia, and from Latin America to Australia.

With robot bartenders serving me lattes in San Francisco through holograms in retail parks to VR shopping apps we’ve built for Oculus, the next generation of ecom and retail looks futuristic - and I’ll be discussing this on-site on June 10th.

Get your tickets and let’s brainstorm commerce innovation live. Capital brought up EnduroSat and Founders Fund for their Digitalk event I covered last week - there’s more to come next Tuesday 😉 

Next up, Webit 2025 on June 26: Business, Technology and People in the era of AI and Web3.

3,500 attendees are expected to visit the global event in Sofia. Having sponsored the October edition, this time the organizing crew has invited speakers from Cisco, Atlassian, Accenture, Yettel, BCG, Qualcomm, Oracle, Visa, and other global leaders attending the conference.

After the summer break, WordCamp Sofia is rumored to host 500 WordPress professionals, partners, vendors, and consultants - one we traditionally support (similarly to the WordPress meetup and birthday organized in May).

With another dozen of events in the pipeline, I may introduce new additions our marketing team has on the radar (depending on logistics and the attendee list).

Plus, upcoming webinars and round tables for our communities.

2. Upcoming travel: Germany in June, UK in Aug, US pending

I’ll be in Berlin the week of Jun 16 and the UK around Aug 15. Travel dates are still TBD, but I’m lining up some meetings with partners in the region.

My time is limited, but I’ll try to squeeze in a couple more 1:1s between existing client and partner demos.

I had a couple of US trips postponed - and one was due in June overlapping with Berlin, so next up is likely the first half of September. While the summer break is pending some downtime for a week or two, travel arrangements are coordinated around that.

If you are building anything exciting or want to connect over the summer, hit Reply and let me know.

3. On domain longevity and importance in 2025

Last year, I owned over 150 domains, spread across several registrars.

It’s been an old habit of mine since the early 2000s. Domains carried a ton of value for ranking purposes, reliability, keyword indexing, and other neat purposes.

But with everything that happened between Google’s HCU update in September 2023 and the mass adoption of AI (both searches and programmatic SEO), domains have been a less leveraged asset to scale and bootstrap from the get-go.

A decade ago, a 5-year-old dot-com domain with 10 articles could have ranked in top 10 for some strategic keywords. Nowadays, a 15-year-old domain with a thousand articles will get limited visibility in most cases, discarding some key categories that are skill scaling well.

Now, we still get decent traffic for DevriX, Growth Shuttle, CEO Hangout, and several other domains. I’m also working with a programmatic partner on boosting some directories in the meantime.

However, the changing landscape of search just looks different today. My portfolio has decreased by approximately 20-25 domains (and counting), whereas easy lift opportunities no longer make much sense.

4. 2025 is an Ecommerce year

Most traditional B2B categories we work with (and partner up with) have been seeing diminishing returns from traditional web - SEO, organic social, and paid ads. This has been going on for two years, and recovery isn’t here yet.

I’m 10000% confident that an uptick is coming soon - but maybe not before mid-Q4 or the start of 2026.

There’s social fatigue going on and SEO is simply not working out. AI-driven search doesn’t attribute brand awareness and not supporting traffic to B2B estates.

The brands that work invest tens of millions (or more) annually in branding - and household names simply conquer every single channel. I often compare them with influencers - athletes, Fortune 100 CEOs, actors, prolific singers: no matter if they are on TikTok, Instagram, or LinkedIn, the audience will follow. But that exercise isn’t reproducible for general businesses.

The same principle we see with diminishing results for professional services, higher-tier finance contracts, or publishing. It’s a tricky space where owned audience brings the strongest results. Subscriptions, memberships, customer lists, BDRs, field sales, tradeshows - they generate strong results with digital generating additional touchpoints for familiar faces.

Ecommerce is still working pretty well even in this mixed economy. The tariffs brought fear and uncertainty, but ultimately, most dashboards we look at across our portfolio are trending up and to the right.

Digital is still busy and buzzing with different audiences that aren’t focused on B2B relationships or high ticket deals. In other words, CEOs, lawyers, CFOs, CSOs, CIOs are less tempted to use social for sales and busier integrating AI to automate processes internally and meeting clients, prospects, and partners on-site.

But hundreds of other cohorts, working corporate office jobs, stay-at-home moms, college graduates, freelancers and solopreneurs, aspiring influencers, bloggers, photographers, event managers, are still spending a good chunk of time online. And selling shovels in a gold rush is working just fine: commodity goods before the tariffs hit, courses on social presence or personal branding, different craft or DIY courses, presents for holidays, personal items for home (from groceries to small electronics and garden equipment).

We scale campaigns in-house for clients selling tyres for cars and trucks, selling spare parts for trucks, acquiring subscribers for niche newsletters, attendees for webinars, and other specific activities. Longer funnels and high demand items are working well - that’s been consistent even during the slow Q1 seasons and traditionally expected to grow well end of Q3 and all of Q4.

In hindsight, social is a goldmine for e-commerce. And new channels for B2B are up for grabs: existing platforms that calibrate and fine tune to the B2B experience or new networks transforming how we all do business and sales in B2B.

➡️ If you want to rebuild your playbooks over the summer and get ready for a stronger end of the year, I have 4 spots available for the Strategic Growth Circle.

🔃 And if you have a scalable channel and product-market fit that should be amplified to infinity, our Experimentation as a Service retainer model has grown a couple of brands by nearly 40% in 2025 alone.

Mario

💼 If I ran LinkedIn for 90 days. I will ban all low-quality AI comments, kill repetitive lead-gen templates, let users create “Circles” for better filtering, and launch local LinkedIn meetups. Video feeds get their own tab, while real B2B communities finally get the spotlight they deserve. Add $10M to fund real journalism and you’ve got a platform built for long-term professional growth.

💼 LLMs are no substitute for real B2B insight. Trust in B2B data is everything. I’d never trust AI overviews to get the full story - too much nuance, too much potential bias. If you’re serious about B2B, go beyond the chatbot summaries and dig deeper into the source data.

📰 GTM & PMF Pivots in 2025. Some of the best business pivots don’t follow the rules- this piece nails how PMF and GTM strategies are bending the old playbook in 2025.

🔖 Follow email rules in China. Learn how the country's privacy law affects consent, storage, and processing in this guide to PIPL requirements.

🔖 Align your ads for better results. Coordinate messaging across ad platforms using this cross-channel PPC strategy.

🔖 Meet HIPAA rules with AI tools. Secure clinical data while improving workflows using these compliant AI options.

🔖 Keep your data pipelines consistent. These top real-time ETL tools streamline processing across platforms.

🔖 Most CEOs quietly wrestle with self-doubt. Around 71% report imposter feelings, but some use this to a strategic advantage in leadership.

🔖 Legal structure steers long-term priorities. More businesses are choosing models like trusts to reflect a mission-driven focus.

🔖 Effort links to stronger investment outcomes. Leaders can use effort-based psychology to raise engagement and returns.

📰 Streamline CRM and communication. Salesforce’s new Slack integration brings CRM data directly into chats to improve team speed and coordination across workflows.

📰 Another bold bet on fusion. Google is investing $150M into TAE Technologies to support its push for commercial nuclear fusion using AI-driven tools.

📰 AI boosts smarter grid operations. Oracle’s new meter data features reduce false alerts and cut data costs across utility operations.

📰 Corporate espionage strikes HR tech. Deel alleges Rippling sent a fake customer to access private information, escalating tensions between rivals within the recruitment software market.

📰 Geopolitical signals investors shouldn’t overlook. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warns China must choose whether to remain a global trade partner amid rising tensions.

📰 AI’s legal frontier is here. Wordsmith AI raises $25M to grow its legal agents and introduce the new role of legal engineer.

📰 Unified data governance at scale. Actian’s Unity Catalog integration with Databricks simplifies access and enhances data governance across ecosystems.

📰 Sharper code intelligence at scale. Mistral AI’s Codestral Embed outperforms competitors in code embedding precision and search, enabling better developer tools.

📰 Paramount's bold agency shakeup. Ahead of its Skydance merger, Paramount cuts ties with WPP Media in a strategic media reset.

📰 Apple’s AI crisis comes to a head. Once strong in innovation, Apple’s position in AI is faltering amid underinvestment and weak results.

🔔 Insider alert: Over 1,700 new businesses launched on Flippa in May, including 13 seven-figure listings worth $35M and 1,600+ five and six-figure businesses now available for sale.

Let’s see the latest offers from Flippa. Don’t forget to sign up for their newsletter for daily/weekly/monthly offers like these.

Established Careers Website (14 Years in Business): Top careers website with $35,623 annual profit and 2.8M monthly page views, connecting job seekers and employers through content and listings - Placed for $99,000.

14-Year-Old Pet Ecommerce Brand: Ecommerce business specializing in curated dog and cat products, with $534,793 annual revenue and 15,653 monthly page views - Listed for $134,171.

Strange Encounters YouTube Channel: A well-established entertainment channel with over 116K subscribers, more than 19 million lifetime views, and $202,455 annual profit - Available for $300,000.

France’s #1 Comparison Site for Bedding Products: 7-year-old leading content and affiliate website in France with $195K annual profit and strong SEO with 208K monthly page views, focusing on unbiased bedding product reviews - Listed for $787,585.

B2B SaaS App Portfolio with $361K Profit & 4M+ Installs: Includes 4 SaaS applications in printing, scanning, and document editing, 7 years old, 61% profit margin, and 4-star average rating - Listed for $1,250,000

Fast-Growing Australian Skylight Ecommerce Brand: Premium ecommerce brand specializing in high-quality skylight solutions, combining proprietary components and nationwide distribution, with $647,375 annual profit, ~$1,000 AOV 303% TTM growth - Priced at $4,178,782.

Need My Help?

Keeping myself busy - here are the main projects I focus on:

🌐 Scaling enterprises on top of WordPress? DevriX provides martech retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo and we manage high-traffic platforms (hundreds of millions of monthly views), B2B SaaS apps, partnership management solutions, supporting $10M - $250M businesses with scalability, custom funnels, CRO, big data augmentation, AI-driven processes, HubSpot workflows, programmatic SEO - and everything a modern business requires in digital in 2025.

🚀 Work 1:1 with me? At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($1,800/mo) for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($497/mo) for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups.

🌠 Feature your business across the community? The B2B Ecosystem includes this newsletter and 40 other digital properties (directories, newsletters, blogs, SaaS, and social accounts) targeting B2B executives. See how your business can benefit.

📈 International founder looking into US LLCs? Check out doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Suitable for both foreigners and US citizens and both for residents and non-residents.

📊 Into digital M&A? I work closely with Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides the tools to list your business and close the deal.

💼 Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink.