On this episode of DTC Pod, Oren joins Ramon to discuss what it takes to build a product and take it to market. They cover topics including product development, pros and cons of dropshipping, getting started as an entrepreneur, building around niche audiences, testing market demand for products, pre-sale, validating through Tik Tok and IG organic, building vs. buying your business, dealing with manufacturers, nailing unit-economics, and much more.

5:31 - The fastest way to get started in E-Commerce

Drop shipping is great for people who first want to get into just general entrepreneurship. Cause you don't have to actually make or develop a product. You take something that already exists and, and you sell it and you don't even have to have the factory that's shipped right from it. That's the name drop shipping.

6:00 - The Dark-side of Drop Shipping

But the downside of that is that usually it ends up being pretty low margin cuz you're making something that a hundred other people could also be selling. and then also you're not making anything that has any real future branded value, right?

10:00 - Business Hack: Validating your idea on TikTok

But I think the real indicator, this is why I love kind of TikTok for this, and you can also do similar things on reels and YouTube now, at least for the time being, is if you just post variations of a handful of the same videos that will perform that showcase your product kind of again and again, and continue to tweak it. And you'll see accounts like this that have those where it's like 10 very similar video, they're kind of testing to hit it, and you consistently start getting, okay, if I post something like this, I'm getting five figures of TikTok views and then I'm getting, starting to get tens of subscribers per that, then you're, you have a product that I, that I can you, you, you can say is, is validated enough to consider expanding it.

14:00 - When you should buy, *not build* a business

My friend's wife did this and she bought an existing business for I think it was 40 or $50,000, which you could finance and things like that. And it was existing, it was doing a couple thousand dollars a month, and she didn't wanna build it, she just wanted to run something and grow it. She didn't wanna have to have the initial idea and go through what we talked about of validating it. And so they spent that money, that's not a crazy amount of money. And then now it makes significantly more. I think they're doing, nine, 10 k a month off of it.

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Oren Schauble - DTC Product & Brand Advisor of Consensus Holdings
Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io
Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated