The D2Z Podcast

Brandon talks with Kevin Kline, Director of Agency Partners at Recharge, a recurring payments and retention optimization company. They talk about the recent Shopify Editions report which dives into Shopify solutions for merchants, creating strong communications after the sale, and how to optimize every part of the ecommerce journey. They go into the psychology of today’s customers and their ecommerce expectations, reducing friction with the customer experience, and focusing on lifetime value. 

They also talk about technology integrations in the Shopify ecosystem and the importance of partnerships within the industry, as well as the role of agencies in the ecommerce space, and how to measure success with your content in new channels like TikTok. 

Links:  

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com and https://www.electriqmarketing.com.  

Find Kevin Kline on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-kline-a327341b/and find Recharge at https://rechargepayments.com/. 

Find more information on EEE at https://eeemiami.com/. 

Brandon talks with Roman Yoffe, Founder and CEO of Absolute Web, a digital commerce agency. They talk about creating and sustaining a founding team for start-ups, specialization and the importance of focusing your practice, and recent DTC platform trends. They go into the business of Shopify, what to expect with the tech companies in the Shopify ecosystem, and how to make companies resilient during economic uncertainty. 

They also discuss the EEE eCommerce event hosted by Absolute Web and what to expect from this exclusive event, including a keynote by Kevin O’Leary. 

Links:  

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com and https://www.electriqmarketing.com.  

Find Roman Yoffe at on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/romanyoffe and find Absolute Web at https://www.absoluteweb.com/. 

Find more information on EEE at https://eeemiami.com/. 

Brandon talks with Benjamin Mitchell the founder and CEO of Privé Creative, a performance marketing creative agency and studio for digitally native DTC brands. They talk about building a founding team and start-ups, scaling businesses, and the importance of honing your practice so you can be confident with your service offering. 

They also discuss entrepreneurship, taking the plunge into creating your own business and seizing opportunities. They go into how to build empowered teams and structured processes so you can scale easier, and dive into performance marketing and conversion strategies. 

Links:  

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com and https://www.electriqmarketing.com.  

Find Benjamin Mitchell on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmitchell1/  and find Privé Creative at https://www.privedesign.co/. 

Brandon talks with Michael Charleston, Sr. eCommerce Product Manager at Nordic Naturals, an award-winning omega-3 fish oil and other foundational nutrients company committed to delivering the world’s safest, most effective nutrients essential to health. 

They talk about the technological side of building a strong omnichannel brand at various levels of development and maturity. From the front-end focus of start-ups, where the focus is on launching products and customer acquisition, towards growing an established brand with equity where activity expands to increasing subscriptions and building retention, finding the right software integrations for the entire customer journey is key. 

They explore the value of investing in customer service as a vital part of brand experience and the importance of transparency and simplicity to drive a return and strengthen relationships for high lifetime value with the company. They discuss collaborative team empowerment as key to creating long-term success in a company, with the perspective of delegating business objectives with full strategic and operative ownership to get the best out of your team. 

 
Links:   

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com and https://www.electriqmarketing.com.   

Find Michael Charleston on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcharleston/ and find Nordic Naturals at https://www.nordic.com/ 

Brandon talks with Pranay Prakash, Founder & CEO at Windsor, an AI video-marketing platform that helps D2C brands acquire, grow, and retain customers through an AI video-personalization tool that enables brands to level-up customer communication from email to mass personalized video at scale. Using their tech, a founder or marketer can record a single video and send out millions of personalized copies to their customers in seconds. 

They talk about the fundraising component of entrepreneurship with a venture-backed technology innovation company, and the value of the age-old advice that the best way to learn how to swim is by jumping in. They explore how to balance the skill sets and roles of being a creator (operations, team curation and product development), a financial manager (securing capital, managing spend, and reporting to investors), and salesperson of your vision, culture and product across customer, employee and investor contexts. 

They discuss the opportunities for app developers to grow in the Shopify business model, which goes beyond the product platform into investment in Shopify-app development, contributing to entrepreneurial innovation and increasing the value of Shopify for everyone. 

 Links:  

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com and https://www.electriqmarketing.com.  

Find Pranay Prakash on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranaygp/ and find Windsor at https://www.windsor.io/ 

This week D2Z Podcast producer Mark Havenner puts Brandon in the hot seat so we can all learn more about him and his journey. They talk about what “the Gen Z” mindset means, Brandon’s approach to business and building teams, and the story of Electriq. They also reveal Brandon is working on a book about his journey as a Gen Z entrepreneur.

Links: 

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com  and https://www.electriqmarketing.com. 

Brandon talks with Richie Jones, CEO & Owner at vvast, a B Corp certifying D2C at vvast scale, where he blends his agency and brand side experience by bringing a market disruption approach for lifestyle, retail and action sports brands seeking low capital EMEA market entry.
 
They talk about the vvast direct to consumer marketing playbook that delivers a comprehensive framework and strategy to scale brands globally. They explore the differences and similarities between the North American and European markets in terms of thought leadership best practices of localization of sales when expanding geographically. They discuss the power of leveraging cultural context and linguistic nuances, and the importance of translation, to reach and connect with consumers in smart and innovative ways in specific markets.
 
Links: 

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com and https://www.electriqmarketing.com.  

Find Richie Jones on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/richiejones/ and find vvast at https://vvast.net/ 

Brandon talks with Josh Fonger, CEO & Owner at WTS Enterprises, a business operations consultancy that helps ambitious business owners develop and implement systematic solutions that optimize operations, enabling them to break free from the day-to-day and generate powerful growth. 

 
They talk about the power of systemizing business operations into a collection of streamlined processes and standardized procedures, enabling delegation, automation, consistency, efficiency, quality, and ultimately, the foundational momentum and clarity to scale. Developing infrastructure through segmentation and documentation extracts the foundational intelligence from the founder, allowing them to mentally elevate above and separate from their business operations, repositioning them to plan, innovate and grow. They discuss the power of coordinating strategic objectives, general operating principles and culture, and systemized operations to attain success. They explore best practices on how to work with teams as a consultant, integrating leadership goals with your plan of action, and including all team members in the process. 

Links: 

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com and https://www.electriqmarketing.com. 

Find Josh Fonger on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshfonger/ and find WTS Enterprises at https://wtsenterprises.com 

Brandon talks with Emilio Di Marco, CEO & Founder at Aument, the eCommerce toolbox to get new sales easily by providing customers with the best practice, product and experience. They talk about simplifying communications tools for small brands and solo-founders to help them make the most of their resources with omnichannel marketing automations, personalizations through email/SMS campaigns, and leverage data, through deliverability, strategy and design solutions. They discuss the importance of customer education, as being key to enable the use of a tool to its fullest capacity, in order to extract the full ROI it can provide. With regards to growth and development, they highlight the value of understanding marketplace pain points and staying focused on solving a problem, and determining how to balance your internal roadmap and objectives with prioritizing customer feedback. They explore the urgency for start-ups to let go of perfectionism and get a product to market, when to scale and hire, as well as the opportunity and challenge of remote work environments.

 
Links:

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com  and https://www.electriqmarketing.com.

Find Emilio Di Marco at on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/emiliodimarco/ and find Aument at https://aument.io/ 

Brandon talks with Monica Sharma-Patnekar, a Brand and Growth Strategy Consultant/Coach at Business with Monica, who helps conscious and creative D2C companies with a clear and focused vision know how to communicate and connect with their real audience in order to grow and scale. They talk about the power of purpose-driven brand strategies to establish loyalty, build trust, create growth and foster longevity. They explore the value of understanding your real customer through empathy and the intimate insights that may be gained with conversation-led market research, with applications to emotional marketing. They discuss caring about the 5 Ps of business principles, niching down, as well as using clear and defined brand purpose as an internal and external tool to attract and align people around meaning and add value to their lives. 

 
 Links: 

Find Brandon Amoroso at https://www.brandonamoroso.com  and https://www.electriqmarketing.com. 

 
Find Monica at https://www.businesswithmonica.com/ and at @businesswithmonica, or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicasharmapatnekar/ 

 
Download “Desires over Demographics” to find the 4 types of questions to ask your customers to reveal their true needs, wants and desires here: https://www.businesswithmonica.com/resources/