#general-chat

👋 Hey @Nik Sharma! What are the biggest gaps/opportunities in the shopify app marketplace that are on your radar? I’m an app developer looking to expand into ecommerce and would love to work on problems you care about.

@Nik Sharma @Moiz Ali Who has been your favorite on podcast guest?

If you weren’t so engrained in the DTC world/ecosystem, would you still choose it as your focus/business model when starting a new company in 2024? Do you believe DTC is a good business model? Why/why not?

As you scale, you trade off efficiency in ad spend for total market share. What's the max percentage of your P&L you would allocate for ads? And does this change across the business' life cycle?

Thanks y'all! Love your podcast; our team listens to it religiously 🙈

There's a lot of buzz about AI, but what real impacts have you seen from it in marketing with your brands? Where is it most useful now vs. not quite ready yet? Particularly interested in any success around personalization.

Awesome! How do you raise brand awareness if you’re on shelf and sold online and you have $0 marketing dollars? All my money goes to inventory and we’ve raised $348k and have $1000 in the bank

Why is “retention” still an afterthought for most brands?

As a completely new, bootstrapped brand, what is the best way to get customer number 1 in 2024?

How do you balance the long-term value of brand-building with the immediate ROI of performance marketing in your budget??

Do you have any stories about being in a cash crunch and needing to get creative / resourceful to get through it?

What are the biggest mistakes brand new DTC founders make when starting out? How should it be done instead?

Knowing what you know now, would you go into ecom/DTC again if starting over?

How do you get customers excited about leaving reviews, posting about you on social media, etc.? E.g. what’s Jolie’s secret that allows them to live in the e-commerce utopia of “not being in the business of writing emails”?

Do you think it’s possible to build a successful, profitable new brand today with a product that isn’t completely new/different from existing? Take Liquid Death as an example.

How to prepare for a scenario of reduced personalized marketing because of restrictions on third-party data ?

How do you position or explain a product that doesn’t necessarily “solve a problem” but is more of a want, while not being a product that is a status symbol or makes the customer money?

Do you think there is a future where the introduction of AI into the meta ads auction actually leads to better results for brands? Right now it’s obviously having a negative impact, but assuming that the algorithm eventually becomes smarter and more efficient over time, will we see that in the form of lower CPAs/improved ROAS? Or will we mostly see it on metas P&L? Is lowering the cost of ads something meta even cares about? Or are they making enough from the less cost conscious advertisers that it doesn’t matter if they continue to price out ecom businesses?

Predict a retail bankruptcy in 2024

What are the best strategies for acquiring new subscriptions and how to retain them?

How impactful do you see TikTok Shop (and youtube shop, meta shop etc.) being on the future of commerce?

Are these long lasting channels that continue to grow in market share of online consumer spending, or are they shorter term platforms? Why, and how can merchants better establish themselves in these new areas?

Damnnn these are so good 😂🔥

I'd love to hear your breakdown of how to make the decision to go retail --> when is a good time, is it a net positive for brands, how would you approach it?

@Nik Sharma @Moiz Ali

❤️

If you were to start a DTC brand today, what are the first three things you would do?

If you're a DTC brand with consumable products, how aggressive should the customer acquisition strategy be? Would you recommend aiming to earn money on first purchase, break even, or take a loss?

Hey! 👋 What percentage of marketing budget would you allocate towards top of funnel brand ads versus lower funnel / performance ads? How can brands think about differentiating through creative?

what is the best way to efficiently and effectively scale up creative on Meta? We test new creative weekly but meta favors ads with a lot of historical data, making it a challenge to scale up winning creative tests. It feels like we are dumping a lot of time and money into new creative that Meta ultimately doesn't spend against once moving from a testing campaign into a scale campaign. Curious on your overall thoughts on the evolution of Meta ad manager adn what is working best now.

You want to personally make $300K take-home, after taxes - what business do you go into? DTC/ecom? SaaS? Service/agency? Something else?

How can a newly launched brand with AOV 30$ survive in the D2C world ? We’re amazon only for now but trying to make the switch to D2C, but the math doesnt seem to work. We have 5 SKUs as we are a more like a product brand, product is not a consumable but it wears out so product should be re purchased every 3-4 months

To add onto @Robert’s suggestion: how would you leverage and communicate with with your first 10-20 customers in order to find your next 100 or 1000 customers.

These questions are a whole season. I love this question because I felt like I was the only one just starting out and that I was amongst veterans.

@Suzanne Sinatra there are a TON of veterans and well-funded brands here - it seems it is mostly that (and agencies) based on who’s posting.
I can only listen to the podcast when the topic is something I’m actively working on - otherwise it’s overwhelming if you don’t have a marketing team to implement. I thought I was the only one, but whenever someone posts about this podcast to one of the 3 private WhatsApp or 2 Circle early-stage founder groups I’m in, there are so many comments saying the same. Great info to have access to, but “mind the gap.”

Do Amazon private label sellers need to have a presence on TikTok shop? Are you seeing a sales lift on Amazon from TikTok shop presence/sales?

What are the reasons that you stopped Hoox?

🙌 Hey everyone,
I have a business doing 100k in MRR using only Meta. I see people are bidding on my search terms on Amazon. When should I turn to Amazon? Or should I consider another channel first?
Thanks!

✋
I am a DTC e-commerce founder making six figures in MRR, but I’m from a small city in Italy where there is no culture around this topic. How can I network with valuable people from the US or other parts of the world? What should I do to learn more and meet new people?

Thanks!

@Pietro Pelizzari why don’t you have them on amazon right now? Not a big deal that people are bidding on your search term, but is there a reason to exclude amazon as a channel right now?

Hey @Moiz Ali,

I was (and still am) tempted to go there, as Amazon is probably the main channel for Italian customers to buy food supplements. The only reason we’re not there yet is that I was waiting until we hit the 5k a day mark. Right now, we’re at 3k/day with Meta and Shopify only, and I’m not sure if we should wait a bit more or try Amazon right away.

What do you think? Thanks

I was in the same boat for Amazon. You should just add it. You’re running meta ads anyways and there will be prob 20-30% searching on Amazon first or not buying from you. That’s free spillover sales that’s going to competition now @Pietro Pelizzari