211. Stop Optimizing for Revenue. Optimize for Profit ft. Cem Atik

About this episode

Cem Atik discusses the importance of optimizing for profit rather than revenue in e-commerce and shares strategies for achieving structural profitability.

Cem Atik is the co-founder and CMO of Harucon Ventures, a firm that acquires minority and majority equity stakes in e-commerce and SaaS businesses doing between one and ten million in annual revenue. Rather than operating as an agency or consultancy, Cem and his team get in with capital, take operational control of marketing and finance, and work to make the businesses they partner with structurally profitable. Most e-commerce brands that come to Harucon Ventures have the same underlying problem: they are optimizing for the wrong things. Revenue looks healthy. ROAS looks acceptable. But unit economics are broken, overhead is bloated, and the margin structure makes scaling impossible. In this conversation, Cem walks through exactly how his team diagnoses and fixes that. From cutting ad spend by 1.7 million euros in a single month to replacing a fulfillment provider that was silently overcharging a brand shipping 25,000 packages a day, the fixes are rarely glamorous but consistently high-impact. The conversation also covers his four-engine growth framework: acquisition, retention, conversion, and profit-first optimization, and why founders who lead with ROAS are measuring the wrong…

People in this episode

Host: Eitan Koter

Guest: Cem Atik

Topics covered

• profit optimization
• e-commerce
• SaaS
• marketing strategy
• unit economics

Keywords

• profit optimization
• e-commerce
• SaaS
• marketing
• unit economics
• retention
• acquisition

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harucon Ventures

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