Carla Penn-Kahn, co-founder of Profit Peak, shares her entrepreneurial journey, from growing up in a business-driven family to scaling multiple ventures, including a well known e-commerce business, before transitioning into software. She reflects on lessons from banking, early failures, and building customer-centric businesses. The conversation explores her insights on founder-led sales, product-market fit, fundraising, and the evolving e-commerce landscape. Carla’s experience in operating and exiting businesses informs her conviction in Profit Peak, a profitability-focused ERP for e-commerce brands. She candidly discusses challenges, including breaking into software as a non-technical founder, prioritizing customer needs, and resisting premature scaling. Her take on startup culture, investment strategy, and the future of e-commerce sheds light on what it takes to build a resilient, high-growth business. This episode offers invaluable lessons for entrepreneurs navigating their own journeys.

Carla Penn’s entrepreneurial journey is deeply rooted in her family history, shaped by generations of business-minded individuals. Growing up in an environment where business discussions were commonplace, Carla developed a keen sense of enterprise early on. Her first exposure to finance came through an internship at Credit Suisse, where she was offered a full-time role at 19. While she built strong financial and M&A expertise in banking, she always saw it as a stepping stone to something greater—building her own ventures.

Her initial forays into entrepreneurship, including an online farmers’ market, were met with failure, but she treated these as stepping stones rather than setbacks. She later scaled "A GiftWorth Giving," a successful hamper business, before acquiring and growing "Everten," Australia’s first homewares e-commerce business. Under her leadership, Everten amassed 60,000 loyal customers and navigated the complexities of early e-commerce in Australia, including logistics, supplier relationships, and customer acquisition.

Carla’s ability to build strong customer communities set her apart. She emphasizes the importance of trust, authenticity, and solving real pain points—principles that later influencedProfit Peak. While operating Everten, she identified a critical gap in e-commerce analytics: a lack of real-time, SKU-level profitability insights. Recognizing that existing tools were inadequate, she and her team built an internal solution to solve this problem. When multiple retailers expressed interest in paying for the tool, it became clear that a bigger opportunity existed.

In a rapid transition, Carla and her team sold Everten and shifted full-time into developing Profit Peak, an ERP designed to help e-commerce brands scale profitably. Despite being a non-technical founder, she views this as an advantage, ensuring that product decisions are driven by real customer needs rather than engineering whims. Profit Peak’s approach focuses on financial intelligence, leveraging deep data insights without unnecessary complexity.

Carla’s fundraising experience was unusually fast and effective. By strategically positioning her startup and leveraging her existing network, she secured venture capital interest even before formally launching the fundraising process. However, she is critical of the overemphasis on fundraising milestones in startup culture, advocating instead for a focus on customer traction and sustainable growth.

She also challenges conventional wisdom on product-market fit, arguing that it is never static. Instead, founders must continually adapt to market shifts, competition, and macroeconomic factors. ForProfit Peak, early signals of product-market fit include strong referral-driven adoption and becoming indispensable to customers’ operations.

On the future of e-commerce, Carla foresees greater consolidation among brands, a shift towards profitability over pure revenue growth, and an increased focus on omni-channel strategies. She advises founders to be disciplined in prioritizing product development, saying no to misaligned opportunities, and building with good people who can weather inevitable challenges.

Her final advice to founders is to measure success not by raising capital but by achieving meaningful milestones—such as customer love, sustainable growth, and industry impact.

This episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone navigating the intersection of commerce and technology.

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