Dry Soil

The fence was ticking.

That’s the first thing you check. The little click of the charger, the light blinking on the box. Solar panel, battery, all of it humming along. Everything said the fence was working.

Teddy leaned on it anyway and went to eat something he wasn’t supposed to. An electric fence doesn’t shock a horse through the wire alone. It shocks through the ground. The pulse runs through the animal, into the dirt, and back to the rods by the charger. If the dirt near the grounding is too dry, the circuit won’t close well. At 7,400 feet in the high desert, the dirt is very dry.

So I had a fence that looked electric, sounded electric, and was mostly a suggestion. It took me an embarrassing number of weekends to figure that out.

I see a lot of brands like that fence.

The launch sold out. The TikTok did numbers. The press is good. Every light on the box is blinking. And the question I care about is underneath all of it: is there ground? Do people buy it a second time? Does it move off a shelf in a town where nobody has heard of the founder?

EZ Bombs is a good example of the question. It was TikTok Shop’s top food product last year, went from zero retail doors to more than 8,000 in about 18 months, and just raised a $25M Series A. That’s real. Social commerce has become a way to show a retail buyer velocity before they commit a shelf. The thing I’d want to watch is what reorders look like when the algorithm moves on to someone else.

Viral attention is the charger ticking. Repeat purchase is the ground.

I fixed the fence by driving more ground rods, deeper. In the driest months I water around them, which feels ridiculous and it works.

The horses stay in now. Teddy still checks.