There is going to be a marketing role positioned for DMs, Messenger, SMS — not for customer service, but for understanding how to turn these into efficient acquisition channels.
It's not your potential customer's job to do the research. It's on you to make it easy for them to consume it.
When I think about the perfect business: high AOV with low purchase frequency, OR low AOV with high purchase frequency. Ships cheap. High margins. Consumption encourages repurchase. Easy ability to create new variants for exclusives and drops.
You just spent 12-15 months on the product — you need to spend at least half that time thinking through messaging, creative, and platforms. As the brand, it is YOUR job to develop the strategy and use agencies as extra hands to execute.
The real marketing funnel starts with the first time someone sees an ad and goes all the way through purchase, customer service, and to the point where someone makes a repeat purchase.
Advertising is like flirting. You want to make sure that if you're going to ask out the person of your dreams that you give yourself the best possible shot. Similarly, when spending on advertising, you want to do the most you possibly can to get this new visitor to become a customer.
Before looking at hard numbers on a test launch, make sure that your incoming traffic was unbiased. If you drove traffic from your most engaged customers, that's probably not the best read. Cold traffic from social platforms is a more unbiased source.
Even the best brands cannot JUST live on their own today. Haus ended up being a focal point for the largest alcohol companies. Hint ended up on the watchlist for Coke and Pepsi. They still need strategic and tactical marketing execution to keep growing and retain market share.
You won't be able to tell the difference between CPG brands and good restaurants in a few years. An omni-channel restaurant flywheel: restaurants, pop-ups, merchandise, product lines, advertising, content. Carbone on Shopify is the signal.
Ad platforms give you the opportunity to start the conversation with a new customer, but they shouldn't be the only thing in your planned customer journey. 99% of brands will need a proper journey after the social ad.
When you initially start a brand, your first 1,000 orders are precious. Even when scaling and doing millions in revenue, you HAVE to be just as obsessed with the customer's experience as you were on day one. Every decision should flow through: 'Will this help customers?'
In the '70s, George Silverman created word-of-mouth marketing. He noticed that even if multiple people had a bad reaction to a product, the few with a great experience could overshadow them — they could even convince those who had a bad experience it was still a good option. That's the power of evangelists.
Dr. Karam launched his skincare brand with a conversion rate just under 5% at a $250 AOV — bootstrapped, with a small team, using the frameworks from this newsletter.
The first 30 days after launch are all about listening. Customer service messages, Instagram DMs, comments left on ads, and reviews will all tell you what people really love. This is the hardest part because you want to go really fast, but this 30-day period gives you learnings you might otherwise miss.
Apple's store employees are never paid a commission or incentivized to sell. It's all about driving education and finding the right fit. Apply it to your marketing messaging — the best ads today are education, and because of it, they don't feel like 'ads'.
Good products don't win today. Good products to great products are equivalent to comparing 1-week shipping to 2-day shipping.
When the barrier to entry became lower, the ability to launch brands centered around a single product diminished. When you have no real WHY as to why a customer should stay loyal, it eventually becomes a race to the bottom with price.
There must be a reason for the product to exist. If you're launching the 17th version of something and not solving for anything new, then no agency can change that. It's like signing a music artist — if the sound isn't unique enough to stand out, why would you sign them?
Force yourself out of the discount mindset. When you can't pull the lever of a lower price, you're forced to pull the lever of 'I need to educate this person why the price is worth it.' Do that.
A good product never gets properly distributed without good marketing. And good marketing is driven by good stories. It's also the cheapest way to market. People get attached to stories, they share good stories, and they stay comfortable with stories they relate to.
Launching products into routines, especially with un-innovated categories, is always a great idea.
Whoop's referral model is genius: give the hardware free, get 12 new customers, and save the $1,200 you would've paid an advertising platform to acquire them.
99% of companies should start with routes outside of paid marketing before turning that function on. Today, everyone loves to launch and go straight to paid media for their first $10K-$100K in revenue. That's usually wrong.
If I don't lower my prices or offer a steep discount, what is my customer getting out of paying more? Focus on bringing them UP to that level of education — don't discount yourself to bring your brand DOWN to their level.
The lifetime value, AOV, category purchased, referrals driven, coupon usage rate, and repeat frequency matter far more than CPM, CPC, and site traffic. You could acquire cheap customers all day only to realize they'll chargeback and clog your support inbox.
Too many companies create content without even asking their customers if they'd care for it, and it takes 12 months of expenses to realize 'Oh, people don't really care for this.' Just ask them.
When launching, the hardest part is zero to one. I define 'one' as where you understand why your product sells, who it sells to, what customers use it for, how it benefits their life, and you're comfortable in operations to hit the gas.
Feastables and Jolie focused their post-launch windows entirely on solving problems, learning from customers, collecting UGC, getting reviews, looking for bugs, optimizing the website — not running ads. The brands who launched and ran ads immediately sat with a few reviews, entirely focused on lowering CPAs.
There's a special bow on the relationship when someone is an early customer and there's genuine interaction: 'How did it work out for you?' or 'Thank you for being our 73rd customer.' It shapes the DNA of the team and the brand.
Focus on educating people, not just your paying customers. For those who become customers, make sure they have the best possible experience. Your CPA, LTV, AOV — all the acronyms play out in the long run when you deliver an exceptional experience.
Getting proof that what you're putting out into the world is actually needed, and convincing the first 1,000 or 10,000 customers to try you out is, hands-down, the hardest part of building a brand.
You can't begin to push heavy on most marketing channels until you've established a clear product-market fit and built a community of early customers. Otherwise you'll be one of those brands spending outrageously on paid media to get your first set of customers.
I think we're done with the days of scaling acquisition dollars without scaling everything else. For every dollar invested in customer acquisition, you should also distribute some equivalent into resources, supply chain, technology, and more people.
Dirty Lemon drove revenue through influencer marketing. Native crushed Facebook early. Dollar Shave Club did well with content recommendation widget ads. Casper added subway ads. Roman sponsored sporting events. They were all first movers in new places, and it kept pushing the industry forward.
The brands who think like creators are going to win in the long run.
With many brands pushing past their first $1 million in sales, they usually have a good product, decent awareness, and a decent site. But they all still lack the middle of the funnel — where someone is aware of the brand but hasn't made the decision to purchase.
Call the people you owe money and ask for extended payment terms. Call the people who owe you money and ask to move the payment date up. You'll miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
The most vulnerable eCommerce businesses are the ones doing $4-10M in revenue with a low MER and high inventory cost — basically brands that are tight on cash flow.
Just like a brand will never say 'We are the second-best shampoo on the market,' none of the platforms you use will ever tell you to go look at your data in different ways. The dashboard is never good at telling the full story.
Blume is a bootstrapped superfood mixer brand founded by Karen Danudjaja, pretty much run solely by her. They'll do 8-figures this year, with no funding, no team, and all hustle.
Three things are true in life: Death, Taxes, and every successful celebrity brand would likely be successful on its own, even without the celebrity attached to it.
There's a lower barrier to creating content when the DNA of leadership is content, versus living in an Excel sheet with goals of direct traffic and Facebook ad spend numbers.
If you think of your brand as an airport, with terminals for each department (operations, marketing, retail), think of Customer Experience as TSA in every terminal. CX isn't just customer service — it's gathering data, insights, information, and patterns that can be applied to every area of the business.
If you have a product but can't get people to buy it, you have one of three issues: not enough people know it exists, your creative doesn't entice them to convert, or you've priced it too high for natural supply and demand.
Just because Tesla would like to charge $250,000 per vehicle doesn't mean they can. Yes, their cars fetch a premium based on quality, technology, branding, and status — but it isn't 10X. It's more like 1.2–1.5X other models on the market. There is still an upper limit for what the market is willing to pay.
Revenue is a worthless number to track — it's just a vanity metric. It's like celebrating raising money. Instead, understand the impact of every dollar of income: for every order, how many CX tickets are created, how much labor, shipping, packaging, and overhead contributed to make that order a success?
Conference hack: when you arrive, go to Twitter and see who's tweeting around the event — the hashtag, live quotes, posts about being there. It's an instant way to see who's in the room and connect by liking or replying with something valuable.
If you run the ads to acquire the first 1,000 customers yourself, you'll understand what messaging actually drives customers. When you ship the first 1,000 orders, you'll understand the most optimal way to pack. When you respond to the first 1,000 customer service issues, you'll understand how to improve the product.
Every dollar you spend on shipping is a dollar less you can spend on customer acquisition or that goes into your pocket. Always formulate or design your product with shipping costs in mind.
If you're the founder, spend time replying to every customer service ticket yourself to see what it's like and what customers actually have issues with.
When launching a brand, your goal should be to get to $5k per day in revenue. That's the milestone that matters.
When eCommerce 'influencers' recommend a tool or agency they haven't personally used, they're deceiving an innocent founder who built trust with them. Don't chase a small referral check. In 25 years, you won't be proud of tricking someone who picked the wrong agency and lost $45k and 5 months.
You never know who's getting paid 10% of your contract value in exchange for recommending an agency. If the product is good enough, you don't need to incentivize someone to make the referral.
As we get closer to Black Friday, check in with your colleagues — everyone is stressing out. Venmo someone $5 for a coffee or have a donut delivered to their apartment.
Your product's organic signals tell you everything about product-market fit: customers organically reorder, write positive reviews, tell their friends, and post on social. If those aren't happening, no amount of marketing will save you.
Unless you have $100K+ of cash that you are willing to spend to see if your brand might work before you can start paying yourself any of the profits, I would say it's better to start something else with lower risk. There is no shame in being a great #2, 3, 4 or 5 at a company.
If you don't have capital, distribution, or some other unique unfair advantage, it's likely better to save your cash, join a brand that you love, and keep building relevant skills and savings before you decide to go all-in.
Everyone can buy revenue, but can you generate a profit? Anyone can unprofitably buy revenue. The best brands in the world want to buy profit, not revenue.
Ben Yahalom believes the most important metric in all of eCommerce is Net Contribution Profit — not CAC, not ROAS. It includes every possible expense: COGS, marketing, payment processing, discounts, expected returns, and all the hidden costs.
Every $50M+ brand I talk to isn't looking for 10x gains. They want to move the needle 1-5% per quarter to keep compounding. That's the game at scale.
Temu already has 17% of the US discount store market. Dollar General was founded in 1939. Dollar Tree in 1968. Temu was founded in July 2022. It's gaining massive market share from brands with a 50+ year head start.
The deepest moat in commerce is always distribution — the ability to reach your customers. Without traffic, stores don't have sales. The platforms that control ads and distribution have an extremely unfair long-term advantage.
Moiz built Native on a single hero product — deodorant — and scaled it with a tiny team. He ran the ads himself past 8 figures in revenue. That's the model more founders should follow.
The goal of any good CMO is to be a capital allocator against underpriced attention. Look at all the potential channels available and allocate based on where you think the highest ROI might be.
Brands can't spend years unprofitably growing a customer list to one day flip a switch and become profitable anymore. Your goal should be first-order profitability ASAP. In 2024, margins matter more than ever.
Jason Panzer of HexClad had never earned more than 7 figures in a single year before age 51 — despite a JD, Ivy League MBA, and 30+ years of grinding. Most of the wealth you earn will come later in your career. Don't rush.
Study affiliates selling competing products and dissect their acquisition funnels. You'll find the savviest, most direct-response marketing. They think all day about better copy, offers, hooks, and channels — learn from them.
With the way our shipping fees worked at Hint, whether we shipped 1, 2, or 3 cases, it was the same price. So why not maximize the ratio of hard costs to AOV?
According to Shopify, 18-to-24-year-olds are the most digitally native cohort and most likely to increase DTC spending this year and over the next several years. As their purchasing power increases, they will spend more dollars online than in-store.
Small brands should do things that large companies can't, like sending personalized notes or small gifts to customers. No big brand will do this. This is your competitive edge.
Q4 is a five to ten-year game. Concentrate on setting yourself up for what happens in your business next year, the year after, and beyond. Think of Q4 as the culmination of a year-long effort — the work done January to July contributes to a successful Q4 harvest.
Focus on net contribution margin and profit first. Spending to grow revenue unprofitably is a terrible strategy for BFCM and Q4. Make sure your brand is making real profit as you spend to grow.
Brands like Thrasio struggled because they focused on Amazon — no first-party data, no flexibility to design, brand, and market. Shopify stores have a much better model for aggregation and long-term brand building.
A colleague invested in a brand that raised $2M, spent $400K on a branding agency, $1M on inventory, and when they went to market, couldn't find any product-market fit. Gone are the days of spending a long time developing something and launching with no prior testing.
The main ingredients for testing a new brand: a website or landing page, content and traffic, and an email flow. Set aside $5K to $25K depending on how much you want to validate. Spend $500 to $1,500 on ad templates in Figma that you can continuously modify, export, and test.
There are 3 main levers it takes for something to scale in DTC: a good product with problem-solving benefits, awareness that the brand exists, and incredible performance-marketing acumen. You can't just have two of the three.
If you had a brilliant product idea during COVID, within 12-24 months, 5+ copycats were undercutting your price. When we were at the 'CPG Zone of Genius' — high demand plus great PMF — you didn't need to do 12 out of 12 things right. Now you need to do 13 out of 12.
When I asked a room how many people have tested advertorials, only 3 hands went up. When I asked how many were seeding product to creators and then spark ads, 2 hands went up. Most people aren't doing the stuff that works.
Tariffs are driving up landed costs, compressing already thin margins. Now you must rethink sourcing, pricing, and profitability levers before it shows up in your P&L.
Ask for extended payment terms with vendors, agencies, and SaaS companies. Put idle cash into a high-yield savings account. Use credit cards strategically — need a 30/60 day float? Use a card for that. Don't need float? Use a 3% cash back card, tax-free.
It's much cheaper to spend $500/hour on consulting calls with seasoned executives than to waste $45,000 on something that doesn't work. [email protected] will get you to 95% of those people.
The fastest-growing brands focus on three core things: performance marketing savagery, ensuring the brand name is being built and staying cool, and product innovation. For anyone who says 'We can't do that, it's off brand,' I ask, 'Do you like revenue?'
To validate demand before fully launching, make a landing page with a fake brand, run Meta ads, and use an 'Order Now' button as the conversion event. 30% conversion to checkout is great; for email collection, double that to feel validated.
If consumers on any platform say your product doesn't work or doesn't deliver on the promise, no amount of advertising or beautiful email flows will convince a potential customer to spend money with you.
The speed of execution to find something new is only one of the ingredients to find new scalable levers. The other two are the willingness of a team to run tests fluidly without requiring leadership and budget approvals, AND for the team to have the DNA to be scrappy and resourceful.
Rarely do I ever see a pretentious marketing team find arbitrages in 2025. They are always looking to copy what other brands are doing, they push back on what their agency partners want to test in the name of 'budget and approvals,' and then they wonder why eCommerce won't work for them.
During COVID-19, fashion face masks were up 31,933%, electric bikes spiked 367%, and jigsaw puzzles grew 387%. E-commerce penetration saw a 32% YoY increase, the biggest single-year jump in a decade.
When the travel ban was lifted in November 2021, poker chips were up 4,468%, checked suitcases jumped 300%, and Dutch ovens surged 673% as consumers left their homes immediately.
Just whatever you do, as you build top of funnel this year, do not get suckered by sales people who claim they can make your upper funnel awareness explode. They are mostly selling a scam — not because their product doesn't do what it says, but because it's likely not going to move the needle for you.
If you do nothing else, just test 1 opinionated, provocative funnel before the end of Q1. You might unlock the carpool lane to customer acquisition.
If you have a great product that delivers on its promise, you have a reason to exist, you're competitive, and you genuinely care — that gets you the foundation. Check off these 8 things: elevated creative, testing with rigor, focusing on LTV not CPA, strong visual identity, universal understanding of business results, top of funnel, marketplace presence, and email execution. That gets you 85% there. The last 15% is hustle, grit, and serendipity.
Paid media is like stretching a photo from the corner — the more you expand it, the more blurry it gets. Bringing organic traffic and new audience pockets to your brand only helps your paid media work even harder for you.
For a competitive analysis before launching, go to your competitor's site, put something in your cart, wait for the retargeting ads to pop, and look at those comments. Those are comments by people who likely also haven't purchased — you'll see what people are actually thinking. All good data points for constructing your test.
For a test launch, you need 5 things: a competitive analysis, a landing page, a conversion event, ad creative, and reporting. If everything works, add a survey to the people who converted — and then a company, because people clearly want what you're offering.
iOS 14 forced brands to stop ignoring the fundamentals they should have been building all along: brand story, organic content, and full-funnel creative that works without precision retargeting. The answer to 'now what?' isn't a new platform — it's the work you skipped.
When you are doing 20,000+ orders a month, your focus shifts from customer obsession to operations and top-line numbers. Even when doing millions in revenue, every decision should still flow through the question 'Will this help customers?' — run a sale, do an activation, expand products, ask that question first.
Dr. Karam launched KaramMD skincare with a tiny team — himself, a website developer, an office manager, me as mentor, and a few contractors. Conversion rate was just under 5% with a $250 AOV. You don't need a massive team to launch well — you need the right few people executing on the right things.
Zero-party data is the adjective; first-party data is the noun. Knowing someone's email and order history is great. Knowing what content they consume, how often they use the product, and what triggers them to buy more is much more valuable.
What made me invest in Jolie: the product fits into a routine (everyone showers daily), the category hasn't been innovated, there's room to define the category like JUDY did for emergency prep or Caraway for cookware, and there's a built-in recurring revenue with filter replacements every 3 months.
A Gen-Z celebrity beverage brand had a ~5% subscription rate (vs. the typical 15-25%), but a very high repeat purchase rate. Their best-selling products were on-the-go and single-session — Gen Z values convenience most. Merchandise outside the core product line made up a large portion of sales because it was integrated into the experience, not just tote bags and t-shirts.
My favorite place to take inspiration for building a long-term DTC business is the hospitality industry. Think of your favorite hotel or restaurant — why is it your favorite? What makes you go 'Wow, they even thought of this!' Implement THAT in your business.
YouTube ad revenue grew only 5% in Q3 2022, when the same period a year prior was 84% growth. Amazon took a $6B loss from overbuilding warehouses. When the tide goes out in eCommerce, every layer of the ecosystem — advertising, logistics, SaaS — feels it.
David Friedberg on All-In Podcast: 'If you don't have content creation in your blood, you have to buy a content business, or you're gonna die.' The future of holding companies will be built around audiences, not industries.
Finding product-market fit just means finding a repeatable process to create, advertise, sell, and deliver consistently over time. Under $5M in annual revenue? Pick one product, one channel, one ideal customer profile — master that sales sequence before expanding.
When you're smaller, focus on levers with higher impact. When you're doing $100M or $300M in revenue, focus on 1% increases — those compound massively at scale. But until then, nail the big levers first.
True Classic spent just $3,000 on initial R&D, a landing page, an ad, and traffic — and was profitable from nearly day one. A few months later they were doing $50K/month profitably. You don't need $1M to test a DTC brand. With $10-20K you'll know if there's demand.
White labeling can condense your supply chain timeline from 6 months to 6 weeks. Companies like Lady Burd have pre-set formulas with all the necessary ingredients and testing already done — you just slap your brand on top.
Freight shipping costs are going down as supply chains normalize post-COVID. Products should become cheaper to make and ship to the US. Smart brands will pass savings to customers or invest in higher-quality products — either way, it's a competitive advantage.
You need at least 100 net-new customers whom you've never interacted with to buy and organically tell you your product is good. That's how you know you have a real product. Paying for reviews or only getting feedback from friends and family does NOT count.
$10-30 products work well for wholesale and retail, but poorly as DTC-only given competitive and rising CACs. If you want room to experiment, hire talent, and have a healthy margin for error, sell $100-$1,000 items with strong margins.
The perfect DTC business model checks these boxes: high AOV ($148-165), lightweight and easy to ship, includes a subscription (quarterly refills), one hero product with only 4 options, massive TAM, and a wedge into a huge existing industry. Jolie is the blueprint.
For companies wanting to build new DTC brands, check at least one box: true product innovation (category creation like Jolie or Eight Sleep), high AOV/high margin products ($100-$1,000), or celebrity-backed distribution with real audience scale.
Presidential candidates rarely hire the best growth agencies — they use politically focused shops great at brand building but weak on performance marketing. The man who led Trump's winning digital efforts wasn't from political marketing; he was just a ruthless digital marketer. Performance marketing principles are universally transferable.
Before coming to Hint, I worked getting 2-3 cent clicks to content on Facebook for Taboola/Outbrain publishers. That background in cheap content distribution was the unlock for Hint's advertorial strategy. Skills from adjacent, even sketchy industries are often the competitive advantage no one else has.
GROW conference is one of the best in DTC/CPG — you have to apply to attend, which makes the curation incredible. They host one in NY and one in LA with completely different crowds. If you can make both, do it — the learning is unique at each.
Pinduoduo pioneered 'team purchases' or group buying — users shop together with friends or strangers to unlock lower prices via bulk orders direct from manufacturers. It grew to $450BN in GMV in 2023. DTC brands should study this social commerce model.
When you're getting a new business off the ground, the two most important early metrics are reviews and repeat purchase rates (for consumable products). Reviews immediately tell you what is and isn't working. They're sacred.
The fastest-growing ad categories on Meta right now: #1 pet products, #2 cleaning supplies, #3 kitchen items. The US pet market was ~$143.6B in 2023 and the global market is expected to hit $427.75B by 2032. Tons of room to build omnichannel brands.
I think of the DTC Jackpot as 7 symbols that all need to align: your product, your positioning & audience, your offer and price point, your ad creative, your email popup/first-party data capture, your email and SMS follow-ups, and your content and brand. Miss one and you lose.
You need at least 1,000 net-new customers who you've never interacted with to buy from you and organically tell you it's good. Then you'll know if you're on the right track. Friends and family reviews don't count.
The number one mistake new DTC founders make, according to Moiz, is not finding a repeatable sales channel. You don't need 10 channels. You need one that can predictably drive revenue — for most founders, that's paid ads on Meta or Google.
9 times out of 10, founders' LTV projections are too optimistic. Work on getting as close to first-order profitability as possible. A lot of times that simply means raising your prices so unit economics actually work.
If you want to understand where the arbitrage or opportunity is within a space, find someone who is DEEP in that world and ask them. They already know what's possible because they know the extent of the possibilities. For brand marketing, that was Dianna Cohen — agency owner turned founder.
Here's how I think about each channel's purpose in the customer red carpet: Ad demonstrates the problem and offers a solution. The offer packages the product, discount, and claims. CRM reminds them of the problem, solution, and promise. Organic social pushes brand messaging and routines. Subscription gets them on the high-LTV flight path.
To calculate Net Contribution Profit, consider every P&L expense — not just COGS and marketing, but payment processing fees, sale discounts, expected returns, and all hidden expenses. ROAS tells you revenue per ad dollar; Net Contribution Profit tells you actual profit on a product-by-product basis with every possible expense considered.
Second-time founders usually find traction quickly because they know exactly what to focus on and what to avoid. Lemme, David, Jolie, Feastables, TrueMed — all founded by second-time founders who knew which levers to pull and what to ignore.
You cannot just have a great product with good performance marketing — you'll spend too much money convincing people that clicking your ad is worth their time. And you can't just have good awareness with a bad product — you'll hit a short ceiling. You need all three: good product, awareness/clout, and performance-marketing acumen.
When I asked a room of 200 marketers how many had tested advertorials, only 3 hands went up. When I asked how many were seeding product to creators for spark ads, 2 hands. The most effective tactics are the least adopted.
Growth sits at the intersection of efficiency and full-funnel marketing. It's not just Facebook ad efficiencies — it's the post-click site experience, the pop-up, organic social, the email list. One of the biggest levers is what happens after the ad.
After you launch a brand, Day 1 is a huge success — family, friends, colleagues all buy, conversion rate hits 7%. Day 2, sales drop 50%, CVR drops to 2%. Day 3, another 50% drop, CVR at 1%. The buzz dies and you're just another brand competing. 'Hope' is not a strategy — you need a post-launch playbook before you launch.
I see 25–50 brands per week. When growth has stalled, it almost always comes down to one of these 8 things: elevated creative, testing with rigor, focusing on LTV not CPA/CAC, strong visual identity, universal understanding of business results, top of funnel, doing the bare minimum on marketplaces, and poor email setup.
Brands that get stuck at $5M or $25-30M/year usually have a TAM problem — they can't find new audiences outside their warm circle. Fix in priority order: positioning and website first, then branding, copy, offers, emails, and product expansion last.