# Nick Stagge

Nick Stagge is an entrepreneur and writer who shares lessons on e-commerce marketing, brand positioning, and building businesses.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/nick-stagge/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nbstagge
- LinkedIn followers: 33,689
- Topics: ecommerce, b2b-marketing, ecommerce-marketing, brand-positioning, entrepreneurship
- Based on 15 dated posts, latest 2026-10-06

## Summary

Nick Stagge is most useful for operator-focused essays on e-commerce positioning, retention, and B2B brand voice.

- Best for: A B2B e-commerce marketing agency or campaign focused on positioning and retention.
- Not for: Consumer subscription-box direct-response campaigns needing video, product demos, discount codes, or performance tracking.
- Check first: Confirm sponsorship policy, rates, audience data, and whether they offer paid placements.

### Takeaways

- Speaking to everyone makes a brand invisible, so a sharper niche is better.
- Recurring revenue is not the same as recurring relationships; churn can replace a customer base.
- B2B buyers are still people, and plain language signals confidence.

## Main ideas

- **Speaking to everyone makes a brand invisible**: Stagge argues that growth is constrained less by market size than by message clarity. When a company says its product is for everyone, the website fills with vague promises about efficiency, innovation, and growth, and the brand starts to sound like every other company in its category. Narrowing the audience sharpens the language and makes the product's value obvious. They apply this directly to agencies: full-service positioning produced sameness, and conversations and results improved once the focus narrowed to one buyer.
- **Recurring revenue is not the same as recurring relationships**: Stagge lays out the standard case for subscriptions: predictable revenue, a product embedded in the customer's routine, and loyalty that builds through repeated fulfillment. They then describe the pressure the model creates. A subscription turns each purchase into an ongoing agreement with expectations of reliability and consistent value. Dissatisfaction accumulates across multiple billing cycles instead of ending at one purchase. Churn is the mechanic they say is most misunderstood: subscriptions only work when a customer's lifetime value significantly exceeds the cost of acquiring them, and convenience can start to feel like a loss of control.
- **B2B buyers are still people, and plain language signals confidence**: Stagge contrasts the traditional B2B style—dense technical language, acronyms, feature lists, and a deliberately sterile tone—with a newer approach that borrows clarity, personality, design, and occasional humor from consumer marketing. The old approach assumed business buyers were purely rational and that creativity would undermine credibility. The result, they argue, was interchangeable messaging in which words like “innovative solutions” lost nearly all meaning. Substance still matters—reliability, performance, return on investment—but Stagge treats clear and personable communication as a sign of confidence rather than frivolity, especially because buyers now research online long before a salesperson is involved.
- **The market has to pull, not be pushed**: In recounting twenty businesses that failed or faded, Stagge says the pattern was usually a slow fade rather than a dramatic collapse, and each time they doubted whether they were cut out for the work. What changed at The Grounded Company was not the idea or the market timing. They sold the service before building the company, so there was a client before there was infrastructure and proof before there was belief. They describe the newsletter as being about the honest middle between starting and succeeding, the part nobody puts on LinkedIn.
- **Unplugging is a stated priority, not a productivity tactic**: Alongside the operating essays, Stagge writes short personal posts about deliberately spending more time unplugged, outside, and alone with their thoughts, leaving the phone behind and walking with no soundtrack or notifications. They say the habit makes them feel more at peace and more connected, and that they find more fulfillment in the opposite of the hustle-and-grind advice they encounter. It is a recurring register in their public writing rather than a claim about marketing.
- **An idea Stagge amplifies: Reyn Soffe on balancing brand and marketing**: Stagge's post endorses Reyn Soffe, but the views described in it are Soffe's, not theirs. Stagge says they have followed Soffe's work for years and describes him as combining creative instincts (design, photography, thinking) with marketer traits (analytical, logical, inquisitive). They say Soffe has been teaching them about uses for AI in creative work, the evolution of consumer personas, and the growing importance of brand differentiation and soul.

## Work to read

- [The Promise and Pitfalls of Subscription Commerce](https://nickstagge.substack.com/p/the-promise-and-pitfalls-of-subscription)
- [The Most Dangerous Phrase in Business](https://nickstagge.substack.com/p/the-most-dangerous-phrase-in-business)
- [When B2B Brands Start Acting Like Consumer Brands](https://nickstagge.substack.com/p/when-b2b-brands-start-acting-like)
- [I Started 20 Businesses Before One Found Its Footing](https://nickstagge.substack.com/p/i-started-20-businesses-before-one)
- [LinkedIn post on Reyn Soffe and the From Hype to Revenue event](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nbstagge_ive-had-a-marketing-branding-crush-on-activity-7510745608895381504-t5Y_)
- [LinkedIn post on unplugged walks and anti-hustle priorities](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nbstagge_last-nights-sunset-did-not-disappoint-activity-7512612635272548352-Wwco)

## Brand relationships

- **The Grounded Company** (owned_business)
- **Honey Headphones** (owned_business)
- **Grounded (early online magazine)** (owned_business)
- **Adapted** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Klaviyo** (mention)
- **Commerce Catalyst** (mention)

## Partnerships

Nick Stagge's posts do not include a published sponsorship policy, media kit, rate card, audience specification or partnership inquiry page. The visible commercial activity is their own writing and operating work: Substack essays on e-commerce and B2B marketing, LinkedIn posts, and work at The Grounded Company. The posts describe one collaboration: an event, "From Hype to Revenue," presented by The Grounded Company with Klaviyo and Commerce Catalyst. Nick used a LinkedIn post to point readers to a session by Reyn Soffe and a free registration link, not to announce a speaking slot or paid placement. This signals an event partnership, not a stated sponsorship format; brands should ask directly about terms, deliverables, timelines and how to get in touch. A brand planning a campaign should treat Nick first as a company operator and publisher whose writing is the reachable asset, without assuming a defined sponsored-placement offer.

## Alternatives

- Ibraheem Hamzat: Choose Ibraheem Hamzat when the agency's deliverable is a diagnostic sequence rather than a positioning essay. The agency needs a focused niche and a proof-point content plan, and Hamzat's posts model that shape: start with the unit economics (average order value, customer acquisition cost, conversion rate, repeat purchase behavior, lifetime value), map the journey from traffic through post-purchase, then separate symptoms from constraints before recommending an intervention prioritized by impact, confidence, and effort. An agency that wants its niche claim backed by a repeatable first-90-days diagnostic, and is willing to build it from its own operating data, gets a closer match than Nick Stagge's essay-led approach. A second post makes the same argument in narrative form: a weak offer can surface as a conversion problem, weak retention can make acquisition look expensive, and the answer is often upstream of where the symptom appears.
- Alejandra Salomon: Choose Alejandra Salomon when the agency's chosen niche is retention and lifecycle email or SMS for DTC brands, and it wants a collaborator who speaks from inside that function. Her posts argue that a churn problem is often an acquisition or product problem in disguise: if one channel, offer, or message produces worse repeat rates, more winback flow will not fix it. She recommends tagging customers and showing cohorts so the conversation with leadership shifts from "retention can't fix this" to "here is where the behavior starts to change." A second post lists what email and SMS cannot save — a product that did not match the marketing, slow shipping, a subscription harder to cancel than to start, service that treated the customer as a problem — and concludes that retention is the result of the whole customer experience, not a department. For an agency that wants proof-point content built on retention diagnostics rather than positioning theory, this is the more specific fit.
- Mohammad Ashraf: Choose Mohammad Ashraf when the niche is subscription or DTC commerce and the proof points need to be quantitative. Both posts build a diagnostic story around a measurable outcome. One follows a subscription brand that deepened its discount in stages from 10% to 25% to lift take rate; average order value and first-order lifetime value dropped as expected, but LTV never recovered. The obvious suspect was the discount, but the actual driver was units per transaction declining independently — so reversing the strategy would have undone something that was working and left the real problem in place. The second maps a full cancellation journey into four phases with different causes — day 0 to 4 (never really wanted a subscription), day 4 to 18 (canceling over taste after trying it), day 18 to 27 (gave it a real shot, did not feel it working), day 27 to 30 (reminded the next order was coming while product still sat at home) — and reports that rewriting the pre-charge reminder to show value and flexibility lifted retention in that phase by roughly 10 percent without extra spend. An agency whose niche claim rests on subscription economics and cohort evidence can reuse this pattern directly.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/