My revenue keeps growing but I'm still losing money. Why does that happen?
The short answer
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.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
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.
Why we picked it
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.
