1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Deepak Shukla: Pearl Lemon started in a tiny flat in Amsterdam while I was basically trying to figure my life out. I realised I could drum up leads faster than most people simply by being annoyingly persistent, so I built a business around that scrappiness. And instead of becoming a tidy little agency, I just kept launching things. SEO, PR, cafés, home repairs, whatever looked interesting. It’s messy, weirdly effective and nothing like the textbook version of how you’re meant to do this. But that’s exactly the point.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1–2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Deepak Shukla: One big turning point was realising Pearl Lemon grew faster when I stopped trying to make it look like a traditional agency. The moment I treated the company like a testing lab and started launching experiments, PR, SEO, cafés, home services, whatever felt interesting, everything accelerated. The messy stuff ended up teaching us more than any neat strategy deck ever did.

The second turning point happened when I moved to Italy. I stripped the business down to fast decisions and simple communication. No overthinking, no endless tools, just speed. Profitability jumped almost immediately. The lesson was pretty clear. Momentum wins. Most people lose because they move too slowly.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Deepak Shukla: Right now most of our revenue comes from three places. SEO still drives a huge chunk because we rank aggressively for our own services and treat our website like a sandbox. Every experiment we run on our own pages becomes something we can take to clients with actual proof, not theory.

The second is pay-per-lead. We leaned into it early, long before most agencies took it seriously, and it forced us to master fast testing, ruthless targeting and constant optimisation. What I learned is that quality control matters more than scale in this model. If you get that part right, it prints revenue.

The third is email outreach. Not fancy funnels, just high-volume, well-segmented, quick iterations. The trick in our category isn’t copy. It’s speed. Test ten angles, kill nine of them by lunchtime and double down on the one that moves. Most people take too long to adapt, which is why they never really make these channels work.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2025 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Deepak Shukla: I see search in 2025 and 2026 as Google, AI assistants and every other discovery platform blending into one big decision engine. So we stopped writing long SEO fluff and focused on clearer, sharper content that models can understand instantly. We also tightened our site structure so AI tools don’t guess who we are or what we do. The main shift is simple, we create content that works whether a human reads it or an AI summarises it.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Deepak Shukla: We keep repeat customers by doing something most people forget, we actually talk to them. Not through a fancy nurture funnel, just real check-ins, quick videos, small updates that show we’re paying attention. People remember the feeling of being seen more than any clever automation.

We also share a lot of behind the scenes content, the messy tests, the wins, the stuff most companies hide. It builds trust because customers feel like they’re part of the process, not just buying from it. The other thing that works well is giving them small, fast wins early, something they can feel quickly. Once someone gets a result within days, not weeks, they naturally stick around. Advocacy comes from momentum, not perfection.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Deepak Shukla: If I had to hand a playbook to an ecommerce founder one step behind me, I’d tell them to double down on two things. First, speed. Test more products, more angles, more audiences than feels comfortable. Most people fail because they test one idea for too long and convince themselves it’s data. Second, build a boring backend. Clean ops and clean fulfilment make you more money than any clever ad trick.

What would I stop? Chasing every new tactic someone posts on Twitter or TikTok. Ninety percent of it is noise. Stop polishing your brand deck and start obsessing over repeat customers and contribution margin. The game is won in the unsexy parts, not the hype.