10 Years Worth Of Ecom Advice In 10 Minutes

I've spent the last 10 years in this e-commerce game building Brands while a lot of y'all were in Middle School trading Pokemon cards and listening to Chief Keef I was in the trenches I remember my first million dollars on the internet when I was 23 years old I sold a business to private equity for multiple eight figures when I was 26 I love this stuff and I'm still doing it today I want to give you all of my lessons distilled into one video learn from my failures absorb the best things I've learned over the years

and take that into practice Buckle in this is all free Uncle Rob got you takeaway number one you need to treat this like a professional sport all my athletes out there are automatically going to get this but if you're not an athlete don't worry some of the most successful people I know found their calling in the game of business you need to go in this knowing that in the beginning you're a rookie you're a beginner I mean you can have a breakout season but it's all about getting in the Reps and keeping an extremely strong

mindset throughout this entire thing listen entrepreneurship comes with UPS it comes with Downs the younger that you can learn to dissociate with all of that and commit to the process the better off you're going to be there's days you are not going to be feeling it but if you can get in and keep creating and commit to process commit to growth that is going to exponentially pay off down the line you see people see people like me right traveling the world making money on my iPhone making money on the computer and they just assume I

was gifted or I've always been like this but the truth is that it's been a continual process since literally day one I didn't know when I got in this game but I committed to it I made it my life much like athletes do right if you're an NBA player that is your job Round the Clock how you eat how you train all the things you do in your off time that matters and you need to treat the Ecom game the same way takeaway number two let's round into some true business stuff here unit economics you

see your business model has to work so with any brand You're Building or product that you're selling the numbers have to actually make sense what kind of margin are you making on your product you see Ecom is simply a game of traffic and conversion how much can you spend to convert a customer and the better margin you have the more you can spend inherently and then there's all sorts of little levers that you tweak around that right how can you eek up conversion 1 or 2% how can you find cheaper traffic I'll talk more about

that later but the most important thing is that you have a sound underlying business at the center of all of it I know guys who have poured into the drink World raised hundreds of millions of dollars with a skew that was fundamentally unprofitable they had to get to like 3 or 400 million in revenue for it to start penciling out cuz they get acquired by someone who could make the product for cheaper that business model ultimately didn't work out and if you're a young Hustler if you're a guy like me I don't raise money I

bootstrapped all my businesses you get those numbers sound from the beginning and you're going to succeed takeaway number three and this is my favorite that's my favorite number so it's my favorite takeaway do not forget this one Ecom is made by finding one thing that works and juicing the out of that don't listen to all the different voices telling you you need to do a million different things all of the money is made when you find Alpha Ecom Alpha let's call it that right now it's Tik Tok when I started on early Amazon you could

put a dollar in the ad machine and make five I know the guys that were early on Facebook ads one of my friends in Puerto Rico he was making $150,000 per day because he was brand new on Facebook ads and nobody has a step by step at that point right you're just getting in there you're seeing that the numbers work on this thing you're seeing this brand new opening and you are figuring that out and I promise you you can tune out every other thing you hear about Ecom Ecom Alpha is where multi-millionaires and even

freaking billionaires are made I mean some of the money that has been made from these early opportunities again Tik Tok being one of those is astronomical it's insane it's out of this world that's where you need to focus when you're starting your career tip number four emotion and storytelling are what ultimately wins out you see in this busy world this digital world there's all sorts of different voices pulling you in every single different direction and that's consumer products that's social media that's how to make money it's this stuff you probably saw ads on this video

right but the ones that succeed are able to communicate their message through a story that evokes emotion because that's what people actually remember if you just throw a product at someone and tell them this thing so good then they're not going to buy it right but if you tell them a story about how this changed so- and so's life right this product solve that person's problem that's the type of information that people ultimately resonate with and will ultimately buy from so cut everything else like stop trying to yell about how good your stuff is just

remember Humanity can be simplified in storytelling and emotion that's how our brains work number five real Freedom comes from systems process and scale AKA real business a lot of you out there dream of being a YouTuber you guys think that's the dream career be able to just shoot content like this make a living and travel the world and all that stuff but the truth is that you're just signing up for a different version of a job I know so many YouTubers that have had a lot of success on the platform they've made some money and

then they ultimately burn out because they don't learn how to build a real business in the process on the other side of that one of my best friends I don't need to mention him here but he runs a faceless YouTube channel he has 35 Plus people working for him he puts out four videos per week all he has to do is show up and do the voice over he's got over 2 million Subs it's a profit machine but he doesn't have a YouTube channel what he has is a modern Media company and that right there

holds true for everything when I was building my first company genius I was trying to do everything myself life changed when I hired a couple of my like very close friends we didn't know what we were doing at the time everything changes when you start to delegate and focus on bringing in Talent you see by the end of Genius when we were doing over 30 plus million a year my workload was less than ever the cliche is that I got to work on the business not in the business but the truth is that at that

point if you build a machine that's making you money you can really do whatever you want right it's just a question of how much do you want out of your own life number six having a good product is critical but it's not everything now at this point you can refer back to number three to know why it's not everything right there's a ton of great products over the years that we've never heard of because they never found that one thing they never found that means of scale but the magic is when you have something that

can become part of the culture or something that can become a staple in someone's life and then you have that infinite traffic hack right that was genius in a lot of ways it was something that the market needed natural formulas clinically dos and then I had that Amazon piece of the equation and that's what made it attractive to institutional buyers zoom out eight years later and the brand is still going strong right even if it's not being ran well and that really is the beauty of this Ecom thing you can do that from really nothing

but I think it's incredibly important to get the product component right right off the Jump I like this rule called the 3% rule this is Virgil oblo and his basic idea it kind of lives in between don't reinvent the wheel but still innovate you need to be able to make something 3% better and that's really it and there's so many stale Industries to to disrupt right so many conglomerates so many old school players that have brought something to Market that doesn't appeal to gen Z or doesn't appeal to Millennials or simply needs a facelift that

is the infinite Alpha in this e-commerce world not to mention new ideas are coming to Market all the time number seven datadriven decision-making this is counterintuitive and I wanted kind of an aggressive highlight for this one data is important but I've realized in this e-commerce world that people marry data and the truth with all of this like the the saying is that you're supposed to let data make all of your decisions but what I've come to see being in this game for 10 years people can manipulate data to tell whatever story they want to tell

themselves I think too many Ecom entrepreneurs get away from trusting their gut the longer you've been in this game the stronger your intuition becomes but you'll be shocked even in the beginning when you're just starting out fresh eyes right you have this intuitive sense of what the market wants or what kind of ads might work or what kind of video might go viral all of those things are inherently natural to you right and so don't blind yourself by pulling in a billion different data points and trying to brainwash yourself to say that you do have

the good idea trust your gut and move forward with that number eight do the small things well and this again ties back to my anchor of three once you find something that works putting the pieces around that and building a system or a machine is what's ultimately going to set you free so doing all of the little details around that whether that be setting up the proper infrastructure for your creators right like maybe you need a Discord or maybe you need your Dropbox properly organized or or maybe how you set up your slack internally with

your team whatever it is as the leader you need to make sure that you are doing all of the small things well because that's going to reciprocate out to your team and that's going to help you scale I built a company where we were going too fast and that's actually my my next point for you but during that time I took my eye off all of the little things I was like oh we can get to those later whereas with genius we were growing incredibly fast but I still took time to care about all of

the small things all of those little details and that ultimately made my life a lot easier down the road it made my life a lot easier when we were trying to sell to private Equity make sure you're committed to all of the small details in the early going and number nine my last point for y'all go fast and break I know that's kind of goes against the last thing I said but the truth is that in this e-commerce game things move incredibly fast and you need to be shooting shots when I again talk back to

point number three finding that thing that works how do you find that thing that works you got to think about it like a venture capital approach a venture fund will raise a million they'll invest $100,000 in 10 different companies nine of those will go bust and the 10th one ends up being Google or Facebook and they make a billion dollars 10 times over that's the approach you need to take in this game you need need to attack it with speed you need to be trying new things and ultimately that's what's going to enable a level

of success and that's what's going to help you break through if you guys want quite literally Limitless sauce I've got million-dollar brand Club that's where I'm bringing back the ideas that work that's where I'm setting strategies setting plays helping people build their own e-commerce Empire going from zero to a million dollar brand I'm investing in some of these student Brands and we're truly just getting started top shell forever love y'all