Ecommerce Conversations

By 2017, nine years after launching his t-shirt company, Ugmonk, Jeff Sheldon had expanded into posters and workspace products. Gather, Ugmonk's modular desk organizer, had just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign with two shipping containers of custom manufactured organizers en route, to send to customers. "There's no way my parents were going to let two shipping containers show up at their front door. So I used a 3PL. It was a very bad experience. We ran into every problem imaginable.

Patrick Coddou launched Supply.co with his wife, Jennifer, back in 2015. The company, which sells razors and shaving supplies, is bootstrapped — no outside investors. He has little patience with the concept of lifetime customer value or paying more to acquire a customer than he can recoup on the first purchase. That approach has produced, in five years, a profitable, mid-seven-figure-revenue business that, until recently, had just two employees: Jennifer and himself.

The progression for most direct-to-consumer entrepreneurs is to conceive a product idea and then locate a manufacturer to produce it. But Jaime Schmidt took the opposite approach when she launched Schmidt's natural deodorant in 2010. "I started in our kitchen with batch sizes of maybe 20 deodorants on the stove. The product turned into a business idea. So I kept the manufacturing in-house. I liked the control, which was born out of my love for making."

Ecommerce entrepreneurs understand the need for multiple revenue channels.  Relying exclusively on, say, Facebook or Amazon or Google can lead to disruptions. And that's what happened to Allen Walton's company, SpyGuy, which relies on Google Ads for most of its traffic and revenue.

Having founded and sold multiple ecommerce companies, and having worked for numerous ecommerce startups, Web Smith believes broad economic trends determine entrepreneurial success as much as tactical execution. Successful entrepreneurs, Smith asserts, must be polymaths — possessing extensive knowledge across multiple subjects — to understand opportunities. And that's the purpose of 2PM, his latest company.

I asked Sam Parr, the founder of The Hustle, an email newsletter with curated business and technology news, how he has grown his list to over 1 million subscribers. “It’s fricking hard,” he said.

Entrepreneurs tend to become emotionally entwined with their businesses. "It's my baby," an entrepreneur might say when describing his company. But not Rohan Gilkes. "There's no emotion," he told me. "I have no babies. I build businesses for the cash flow."

Aaron Marino says he hates to read. He's bad at grammar and writing, he claims. But he's really good at making videos. "I had a fitness center that didn't work out," he told me. "I started making YouTube videos in 2008 with no idea that I could ever make a buck on that platform." Fast forward to 2020. Alpha M, Marino's YouTube portal, which focuses on male grooming and fitness, has 6 million subscribers. It has spawned multiple ecommerce businesses, including Pete & Pedro (haircare), Teige Hanley (skincare), and Enemy (sunglasses).

What's the most competitive product on Amazon? Smartphone cases. What does Matt Atschul's company, Smartish, sell? Smartphone cases. And it thrives.

Kurt Elster's "The Unofficial Shopify Podcast" has been downloaded more than 1 million times. His agency, Ethercycle, helps Shopify merchants drive revenue and profit. And his newsletter at KurtElster.com contains tips and strategies to scale a Shopify store. "I eat, sleep, and breathe Shopify. I even have a Shopify license plate," Elster stated.