Issue 097: Fixing Your 1x Buyer Problem šŸ‘ˆ

+ The Viral Factor Cheat Code

Lots to cover this week, friendos. Very little time to dilly-dally.

Excited Lets Go GIF

| TWEET Oā€™ THE WEEK

The brand world today revolves around audience, and thereā€™s a number of ways to engage with it and harness it to your needs, on every scale.

On Instagram, simple aesthetic versions of normal products used to dominate, then last year more avante garde ā€œshockingā€ versions of products became the norm, and now we are in the year of multi-function.

Any founder who has a product that can be used in multiple ways and is ripe for content creation can break the mold into accessing audience. By telling their story again and again in video, viral winners can bypass the traffic and notoriety of established players in their industry in a matter of weeks.

Examples:

Cointel - make an eye-catching bag that turns into a jacket. Show it creatively. Repeat in perpetuity.

| YOUTUBE UNIVERSITY

Growing Profitability ft Mark Ritz of Carnivore Snax

| TOGETHER WITH SARAL

šŸ¤” Are you (unknowingly) building your home on rented land?

Building a brand means gaining trust. We buy from large brands as we trust that they will keep their promises.

Yet, too many ecommerce brands are heavily relying on paid media to grow. Thatā€™s fine to get started, but as you scale you need to build a marketing moat around your business.

You need to own your marketing. Not pay Zuck for rented ad-space. Never build a house on rented land.

One great way to diversify your marketing is to build a community of influencers that canā€™t stop talking about you. But influencers are a black box.

You donā€™t know where to start, what to do, which software to use?

That is where SARAL comes in.

Theyā€™ve taken a system that used to work for their agency clients, and turned it into guided ā€œassistant-likeā€ software that any brand can use to:

  1. Find and automate outreach to influencers

  2. Ship products, manage relationships, and build community

  3. Track affiliate performance and send payments

SARAL has everything youā€™d need for influencer partnerships built-into one tool. You donā€™t have to pay for a separate affiliate app, a separate discovery tool, a separate outreach platform, etc.

Theyā€™re offering an exclusive 14-day free trial for W6 readers: Claim your trial here ā†’

Alternatively, get a demo here.

| QUICK SHOTS

  • Khaled B: We combined Sendlane's 'tag' strategy with the hype around Oscars to almost double click rates and increase campaign revenue by 15%.

  • @codyplof: 6 months ago, our growth felt like it slowed to a halt, customer acquisition was down and we came close to our first down month. I was ready to quit. Fast forward to today, we're adding thousands of new customers a day, and growing almost too fast. Here are 5 ways we're doing it:

  • Taylor Holiday: The eCommerce budgeting and forecasting cheat sheet.

  • @BlackLabelAdvsr: Amazon Private Label success is just boring consistency applied to the 20% of stuff that matters. Thatā€™s the secret sauce.

  • Cory Dobbin: Is TikTok about to be banned? A bill proposing a ban is currently on the table following a 50-0 committee vote. The U.S. is cracking down on the app due to concerns over its Chinese ownership and potential national security threats. Here's what you need to know šŸ‘‡

| HERE FOR THE MEMES

| AND IN OTHER NEWSā€¦

| GET LINKED

šŸ“¦ End of an era - today we closed our 50,000 sqft fulfillment center after 9 years. šŸ“¦

This is the conclusion of a two year project to outsource all our fulfillment and manufacturing, which will save us over $1M per year.

This facility was processing several thousand D2C orders per day, and we manufactured 20 different SKUs of Natural Dog Company products - millions of units over the years.

We outsourced manufacturing in 2022, and then finally the fulfillment to a 3PL in Q4 2023.

āœ… How has it gone?

Honestly - it's a huge relief.

The responsibility for operating a building is not small. At the peak we had 25+ people. I got calls about break-ins, literal dumpster fires, HR incidents, and more. All of that brain damage doesn't show up in the financial model.

But what does show up in the financial statements is undeniable.

A 3PL could do almost everything cheaper that we could - lower rent, less headcount per order, better carrier rates.

And since fulfillment was their business, a 3PL could deliver things I was not willing to undertake - 7 days/wk operation, multiple nodes, and investment in automation (shout out ShipHero).

| YOUā€™RE HIRED

Brand

SaaS

Agency

Got a job you want us to list? Let us know.

| THE OUTRO

That wraps this one up folks. Consider yourself fully entrenched in the ā€œknowā€.

Adios! āœŒļø

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