eCommerce Evolution

In the DTC space, there are always headwinds.

Supply chain issues. Amazon account shutdowns. Meta or Google ad account issues. 

And new headwinds pop up daily.

That's why I love this conversation with Aaron Nosbisch so much. Aaron and my buddy Nick Shackelford run Lucyd - a social ad agency that focuses on CBD and Cannabis products, and now Brez, a very tasty THC drink that's legal in all 50 states.

At Lucyd, Aaron and the team grew from nothing to one of the largest CBD agencies in the world. And the road was anything but easy. The story is a crazy one and even involved Aaron emailing Mark Zuckerberg directly when he was getting nowhere with Facebook support.

At Brez, they're building a THC brand publicly. The wins and losses are right there for everyone to see. 

This interview is fun, inspiring, and insightful. Here's a look at what we cover:

• Why "hacking" your way to solving difficult problems isn't the answer. Being really, really good at the fundamentals is the answer.
• Why building in public is more fun and likely less risky than building in private. 
• What being "mission-driven" looks like for a CBD/THC brand.
• What's working on with X (Twitter) advertising, and what should we expect next year?
• The two ways to innovate. 
• Plus more!

Cody Wittick is the man. College hoops player. Agency owner. Podcast host. And, now, new dad!

Most important for this discussion: Cody knows how to scale DTC brands with influencer marketing. 

In this episode, we discuss the right and wrong ways to build an influencer marketing program. We talk about winning creatives and who's smarter: media buyers or the machine. And highlight the parallels between running a business and being a father. 

What was my favorite part of the conversation, you ask...? 

How to use influencers to build a creative flywheel.

I'm convinced you need enough quantity and quality of creative on a weekly basis to scale on all of your most important platforms. 

And in the episode, we talk about how. Enjoy!

This year was an AMAZING year of podcast guests.

Today, I wanted to reflect on and recap 12 of my favorite lessons from this year.

1. Creative Thinking as a Competitive Advantage - Million Dollar Mindset (Ep 231)

This episode was the most shared episode of the year. It ended up in a few forums and got a lot of love. 

What helped Will and the team grow Organifi from $18M annually to over $100M? It wasn’t just hard work. It was creative thinking and problem-solving.

Learn the secrets of Moneyball, the Hollywood Black List, and more!

2. You Can 13X Through Creative, Data-Driven Marketing - Brendan Bannister (Ep 221)

In a similar vein to the podcast with Will Hughes, this interview with Brendan Bannister was a banger. Brendan ran paid media for William Painter during their years of meteoric growth. We talk about the power of design and simplicity. 

3. What You Don’t Know About Your Customer Is Costing You. The Missing Piece to Your Attribution, CRO, and Marketing Is Customer Insights - Trevor Crump (Ep 250) / Jeremiah Prummer (Ep 262) 

I’m completely sold on the idea that when done properly, customer surveys uncover tremendous insights that will shift how you advertise, position, and optimize your products. I cover my 4 favorite questions to ask in post-purchase surveys. 

4. Why Your Price Is Likely Wrong and What to Do About It - Byron Myers (Ep 255)

The way you set your initial price is not the way you determine your optimal price. There’s an optimal price for rev maximization and one for profit maximization. 

How does demand and conversion rate shift when price increases or decreases? After you get some data, you need to get scientific. Chart out your demand curve and conversion rate to find your ideal price. 

This isn’t static, though. You should be testing at least 2 times per year or likely every quarter. 

5. Customer Value Optimization Trumps CRO Every Time. And It Informs CRO. - Drew Sanocki (Ep 245)

Not all customers are created equally. You have some whales (your most valuable) and some minnows (your least valuable). 

What’s more important than almost anything else you do is identifying whales and attracting more of them. 

This is a key part of understanding that there are only 3 ways to grow your business:

1. Get more new customers
2. Get each customer to spend more (raise your AOV) 
3. Get customers to buy more often (increase LTV) 

6. Organic Growth on YouTube. 3 Types of Content. - Liz Germain (Ep 234)

YouTube is the 2nd most visited site on the planet. 

Users spend a TON of time on the platform. If you’re good at creating content, you can build a large following and drive awareness and traffic for your brand. 

In this episode, I talk to YouTube pro, Liz Germain, about the 3 types of content you must create to build an organic following.

7. Brand is Everything - Person Rutherford (Ep 260)

Want a huge exit? Want all of your advertising efforts to improve? Want greater retention and higher LTVs? Want to charge a premium? You need to focus on brand building.

The good news is you can do this profitably.

If you want customers to seek you out by name, tell others about you, and feel pride in associating with your products, you need a BRAND. 

Preston Rutherford, one of the co-founders of Chubbies who had a 9 figure IPO, knows all about this. Brand building can’t be done overnight. It’s a long play, but it compounds over time. 

8. You Can Achieve Exit Velocity on YouTube - Jacques Spitzer (Ep 243)

This was the episode I personally heard the most comments about. It’s PACKED with ideas on how to think about YouTube and how to make it work for your brand. We discussed a bunch of important concepts. One is “People don’t have short attention spans; they have short consideration spans.”

9. Amazon Is Trying to Go Beyond Search for Product Discovery. Maybe They’re Making Modest Strides. - Liz Saunders (Ep 253) / Brandon Young (Ep 251) / Gracey Ryback (Ep 249) 

Product discovery is still primarily driven by search. With the Amazon influencer program and initiatives like the Inspire tab on the Amazon Mobile app, Amazon is trying to “inspire” new product discovery. It seems to be going OK, but just how much new product discovery this generates is TBD. 

10. Stop Obsessing Over Vanity Metrics. Focus on Core Metrics. - Rabah Rahill (Ep 222) / Preston Rutherford (Ep 260)

What are vanity metrics? How about ROAS and Revenue? Both important to be sure. We look at both metrics all the time. But they aren’t CORE. So, what is the core of your brand? Well, Preston Rutherford lays it out! 

11. Retention Marketing Is Your Key to Stability and Profitability. - Nick Flint (Ep 248)

Few things can impact your brand as much as email and SMS. In this episode, we covered 8 email tests to make, plus one of our favorite all-time emails that a client ran. 

12. Are you experimenting with AI? - Steve Chou (Ep 233) / Fred Vallaeys (Ep 256) 

AI likely isn’t replacing members of your team. It shouldn’t be replacing you. But it should be assisting you. 

• Writing better email subject lines
• Working on better SEO titles and bullet points
• Transcribing and summarizing meetings and more

How is your finance stack?

We all love to talk about our tech or marketing stacks, but the financial side gets less attention.

Heck, you might not even know for sure what your finance stack is! 

My guest today is an eComm legend, Bill D'Alessandro. Bill is the founder and CEO of Elements Brands. He's built or acquired 8 brands and sold 7. 

Before his time in eComm, he spent 5 years in the investment banking and private equity world. 

Talking about ad creativity or the latest case studies on scaling with Facebook ads is more of a dopamine hit than talking about finance. BUT, knowing what levers to pull, what to do, and what NOT to do as it relates to your finance stack can instantly add $100s or thousands to your bank account. 

Here are the 4 components of your finance stack that Bill and I dive into today. Trust me, this interview is fast-paced, interesting and guaranteed to put more cash in your bank account.

1. Banking
2. Credit Cards
3. Working Capital
4. Debt

You don't need to be a CFO or a CPA to get value here. You just need the 80/20 of how to optimize your finances. Here's a look at what we cover in this episode:

• Why it's not always best to maximize assets and reduce liabilities; for example, accounts receivable are an asset, but they're also NOT cash in your bank.
• When it's "OK" to use Debt and when you shouldn't.
• What's essential and what's not when it comes to a bank?
• How 2 simple shifts in credit card usage can add $10s or $100s of thousands in your pocket…money you will NOT receive a 1099 for.
• Why working capital is the blood of your business. 
• A few simple tips for accounts payable - when you do this right, this is the cheapest form of "debt" you can use
• Why Merchant Cash Advances so commonly start a death spiral and what to do if you're in this trap.

What do you do when you grow 25% YoY but realize you’re losing money? 

How do you adjust when what has always worked in the past stops working? 

What steps do you take when your cost to acquire a new customer is skyrocketing, and nothing is bringing it down?

If you’re like some brand owners, you keep doing the same stuff but try to do it better. 

Sometimes, you need a larger shift that starts with asking better questions and understanding what problem you’re trying to solve. 

This interview with Anthony Mink, CEO and Co-Founder of Live Bearded, was super fun and energizing to record. 

Live Bearded is an 8-figure brand that experienced something pretty dramatic but also not uncommon in eCommerce. Their new customer acquisition ads stopped working across ALL ad platforms. 

We know the brand well; we’ve been running Google and YouTube ads for them for years. Seeing their CPA skyrocket across all channels (Facebook, IG, YouTube) and then helping it come down to the lowest it’s ever been was inspiring and insightful. Especially while spending more than ever on top-of-funnel efforts. 

Ultimately, they discovered they had a fundamental positioning and messaging problem. Their offer was good (basically a free sample), but the way they positioned their product had taken them as far as possible. They needed to reposition! 

In this episode, we uncover that journey, and it’s PACKED with valuable lessons.

Here’s a quick look at some of what we cover:

• How you first have to clearly define the problem before you can solve it. (This is a step entrepreneurs usually want to skip.)
• How positioning is likely the most powerful lever you can pull in your business.
• The power of Stories, States, and Identities in your marketing
• The power of Brand and how Nike has it, but Hyatt doesn’t.
• The concept of Better Your Best (and NOT Better Your Meh).
• The messaging that cut Live Bearded’s CPAs in half.
• Plus more!

In some ways, we know everything and nothing about our customers at the same time. 

We have mountains of data at our fingertips for every customer interaction. 

But we can’t see our customers. 

We don’t really know what they love, why they buy, or what they’re into—even insights into why they bought from us or how they first learned about us are muddy. 

Even when we think we know, our view is incomplete. 

That’s where KNO Commerce comes in. 

Sure, you have a few different attribution tools. They can be helpful but also confusing. 

And they have biases. 

Sure, you know conversion rate optimization best practices, but every brand and every customer is slightly different. 

Getting customer insights through post-purchase or abandon cart surveys can provide clarity into what your attribution or CRO data is telling you…or, more importantly, what it’s NOT telling you. 

The good news is you don’t have to use KNO to get great customer insights. Any survey tool can work. 

In this episode with KNO Founder and CEO Jeremiah Prummer, we discuss the following:

• 40% of your shoppers buy in less than 1 week of learning about your brand. 60% take longer than 1 week. (This probably contradicts what GA and your attribution tools tell you).
• The biases in surveys and how to work around them?
• The biases in the attribution model.
• How abandoned cart surveys can be a game changer in addition to email flows.
• What questions to ask your customers for the most actionable insights
• And More!

Download The YouTube Ads Checklist Here

YouTube offers TREMENDOUS scale opportunities.

Just ask Dr. Squatch, Purple Mattress, Organifi, and Manscapped.

But it's NOT the easiest platform to scale with. We're one of the top spenders on YouTube ads. We've spent more than almost any agency our size on the platform and learned what works and what doesn't.

In this episode, I break down the 11 factors that determine YouTube's success.

Here's a sneak peak:

• What has to be true about your landing pages before you can fully accelerate on YouTube?
• When should you launch a YouTube ad campaign?
• How to approach YouTube ad performance measurement.
• What creative elements need to be in place?
• What role do email, search, and shopping play in your YouTube success?
• How to think about remarketing and YouTube.

Plus, much, much more.

Few DTC brands have been as polarizing or as successful as Chubbies.

The Chubbies story is a wild one. It started with humble beginnings, selling shorts one by one in parks around the Stanford campus, leading to an IPO.

Four Stanford college students had 3 things in common: 

1. They were tired of working for the man. 

2. They didn't fit the "Abercrombie" fashion mold of the late 2000s and 

3. They loved shorter shorts - BEFORE the short shorts trend. 

And so, Chubbies was born.  

This is a deep dive with Co-founder Preston Rutherford on what Chubbies got right, what they got wrong, and how to think about building a brand.

Here's a look at what we cover:

• Feedback loops. This started when the co-founders were selling their shorts in person. They could immediately read customers' reactions and hear what they liked, what they didn't like and what needed to be tweaked. As the company grew, this shifted to digital and online feedback loops tied to ad creatives, social posts, and user experience.
• Downplaying vanity metrics. We all want to brag about ROAS and revenue. But, these metrics can be misleading. If you maximize ROAS, you sacrifice long-term growth for a sale today. And you get into a trap that squeezes profits and becomes hard to break. 
• Obsessing over core metrics. We should focus on metrics like contribution margin, total profits and branded search growth (as a sign of a growing, healthy brand).
• Building a brand. Want to have a big exit? Want to charge a premium? Want to drive consistent demand? It's all about brand.  

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”

“The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.”

Not sure where I first heard these quotes, but they definitely apply to this week’s episode.

I firmly believe that to grow like no one else is growing, you must do what no one else is doing.

In this episode, I walk through 5 growth opportunities that you’re likely under-leveraging or completely missing.

This is the recording from a recent talk I gave in Austin, Texas, to a group of 1,200 eager Amazon Sellers and DTC brand owners, where I unpacked these 5 growth opportunities.  

While there are a few cases where seeing the video might be more helpful (watch it here), the audio should still be helpful! 

I hope you enjoy it.

How can you make the most of the Cyber 5?

It all comes down to strategy, planning and execution.

Ideally, you’re planning all year and working on the perfect strategies to attract new customers and inspire existing customers to buy more. 

But planning is only part of the success equation. Making adjustments and tweaks based on what’s working and what’s not is also crucial.

On this episode, I’m bringing on a star-studded cast of OMG experts. We talk about Black Friday and Cyber Monday success from essentially every angle. 

We talk about successful email and SMS promotions. We cover do’s and don’ts for maximizing Amazon profits and share insights for getting the most from Google, YouTube and other channels. 

My guests:

• Bill Cover, Google Strategist
• Nick Flint, Email Strategist
• Trenton Bodenbach, Amazon Growth Strategist

What we discuss:

• Top BFCM mistakes merchants make.
• What you need to plan ahead of time and lock in vs. what you can change on the fly during the Cyber 5.
• Or favorite Cyber 5 growth strategies.
• Protecting margin while still driving purchases from customers who expect deals. Can you make a 10% off deal irresistible?