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Tim Shea's data analytics company has clients that include the NBA, UFC, Princess Cruise Lines,
and Reddit. He started the company solo, scaled to five employees during Covid, then went back
to solo — by choice. He calls VC "another form of poverty." He calls his current setup "crushing it."
Tim Shea is the founder of Latticework, a retail and DTC data analytics company focused on
50–100M brands. With 25 years in data analytics, he's helped major brands decode the
difference between the customer who buys once on Black Friday and the customer who buys
every single month for two years straight — and figure out exactly how much they can afford to
spend to acquire more of the second type.
What he covers:
→ Why your data is stuck in 20–30 different platforms the moment you start growing — and why reassembling it every Monday is killing your team
→ The "Moneyball for retail" framework: finding the counterintuitive, high-leverage metrics hidden inside your company's history
→ True North metrics: the 1–2 numbers every early-stage founder should optimize everything around — and when to switch them
→ LTV broken three ways: Black Friday buyers who don't come back for 12 months vs. January buyers who purchase every month for two years
→ Athletic Greens' CMO on payback period: average customer stays for two years at $99/month — do the math on what you can spend to acquire them
→ Why paying $1,000 to acquire a customer is not crazy — and why a finance-background CEO freaks out while a marketing-background CEO gets it
→ The AI + data future: pointing Claude at Snowflake, skipping the BI dashboards, and building custom scenario tools that show "$50K opportunity if you bend this curve by 1%"
→ Why Tableau and Looker are becoming obsolete — and what replaces them
→ Five companies in, solo again: why he delivers the work himself instead of building a team of junior folks
→ The "scarlet letter" of entrepreneurship: why big companies won't hire ex-founders
→ Why VC is "a whole other form of poverty" — and why debt, crushing it, and buying other businesses are all legitimate alternatives
→ When to call Tim: when your CFO is spending 4–8 hours a week jamming spreadsheets together every Monday morning
🔗 CONNECT WITH STU
Instagram: @stu
Website: https://startupswithstu.com
📌 CHAPTERS
00:00 – Intro and how "Latticework" got its name
03:00 – What Tim does: retail and DTC data analytics for $50–100M brands
07:00 – The universal startup data problem: stuck in 30 platforms, reassembled every Monday
11:00 – Moneyball for retail: finding the counterintuitive high-leverage metrics
15:00 – True North metrics: what to optimize for at each stage of growth
19:00 – LTV 101: why you don't have one LTV ratio — you have three types of customers
24:00 – Athletic Greens' two-year average retention and what that means for acquisition spend
28:00 – AI + data: pointing Claude at Snowflake, killing the BI dashboard era
32:00 – Tableau gets a hug, then gets replaced: the new world of custom AI dashboards
36:00 – Growing up in Boston, moving to LA, discovering entrepreneurship the hard way
40:00 – Five companies in, back to solo — and why he's delivering the work himself
44:00 – The "scarlet letter" of being an ex-founder in a corporate job interview
47:00 – Lifestyle business vs. VC: why crushing it is a legitimate option
51:00 – Stu's PE exit story and the "bootstrapped" label he didn't expect
55:00 – National Parks Baseball Resort and how past skills stack into new ventures
58:00 – Now you have a friend in the data analytics business
⚠️ Note: Timestamps are estimated from transcript flow — swap to actual timecodes before publishing.
#entrepreneur #startups #founderstory #dataanalytics #retail #dtcbrands #moneyball #ltv #ecommerce #latticework
