My revenue keeps growing but I'm still losing money. Why does that happen?
Growth hides a broken unit economics model: if your CM3 per order is negative, every additional order digs the hole deeper, and topline just makes the loss bigger and faster. Usually the leak is a stack of small costs the founder never fully loaded in - RTO, reverse logistics, COD handling, discounts and rising ad CAC - so a product showing 65% gross margin quietly ships at negative contribution. Fix the per-order math first; you cannot out-scale a model that loses money on order one.
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4 resources, 2 India-specific, 4 link-checked.
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✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
A structured framework for CM1/CM2/contribution margin thinking that applies directly to a D2C brand regardless of market, the concepts are identical whether you're shipping from Mumbai or Miami.
A data-backed India newsletter deep-dive arguing that gross margin is the single strongest predictor of which D2C brands reach EBITDA positivity. Exactly the kind of India-specific pattern-matching that explains why revenue growth and profit diverge here.
The most concrete India-specific breakdown of what a returned COD order actually costs - forward + reverse shipping, packaging, product damage, blocked capital and wasted CAC - with a formula and calculator. RTO is the biggest hidden line in Indian CM2, and this is the resource that makes it real.
The cleanest plain-English starting point from the platform most Indian D2C brands actually run on. It nails the core idea - contribution margin is what's left after the variable costs of selling one more unit - and gives you the formula before you get lost in CM1/CM2/CM3 jargon.
