Transcript
A (0:01)
Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e commerce, digital marketing and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at Nick Co Email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics and the insights. All so you can unlock your next hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. If you're a Shopify brand, pay attention. Roku Ads Manager is built for growth marketers and makes connected TV way easier to test. Go to advertising.roku.com Ltd. Supply
B (0:48)
Nick, awesome to have you here. Welcome to Modern supply chain.
A (0:51)
Thank you. Excited to be here.
B (0:53)
Well, first off, maybe give us like two minutes on your background. How did you become the DDC guy? Cause even before we met many years ago, I knew about you long before then.
A (1:03)
Maybe like background, like honestly it's a, it's like every time I think about it I'm like, wow, that's kind of a case study in branding to some degree. It was just really right place, right time. Like as direct to consumer was getting really big and becoming a real thing. There was this interview I did with Adweek because I was on their like young and influential list and in that interview some they called me the DTC guy and then they posted an article about it and then that started ranking. Now if you Google D2C guy or if you ask like Google AI, it's just me which is crazy. But then everybody else started to call me the DDC guy. There was like, there was a couple reporters too at one point who like tried to slander it and they would call me the DTC bro and there was, there was a few articles about that and then that slowly went away. But yeah, no, it started there and then. Honestly, everything I do I feel like is so tied to DTC or E commerce. Like that's kind of my domain expertise or like the one thing I'm really good at. I'm an active investor advisor to a bunch of different brands have helped launch a bunch. I had an agency called Sharma Brands where we did a lot of big brand launches, worked with a lot of brands at their growth stage, helped a lot of conglomerate type companies figure out dtc whether it was a Diageo or Bacardi or you know, General Mills. For me, like DTC feels like a cheat code or a hack or a playground. In my head. I'm just like, this is a crazy opportunity. Why would I not spend all my time in this? So when I started working in the e commerce space, I did ad Tech from 2014 to 2016 and learned all things ad tech and, you know, a lot of programmatic stuff. But seeing how shady that industry was pushed me to get really in love with paid social and paid search. Because while they were also black boxes and didn't have open exchanges connecting a bunch of different systems and things together, it was reliable and it worked and performance driven. If you said you were targeting something on Facebook, like you were actually targeting that thing. It wasn't like if you sign up with a programmatic vendor, they tell you, yeah, we're going to give you, you know, a bunch of sales and then they're secretly just giving you shitty ad placements and arbitraging your cpm. So that pushed me into paid social and then that got me really interested in the. I just kind of. I was doing a lot of stuff where I was helping Internet publishers, like the players you see spending the most dollars on Taboola, Outbrain, a lot of those, like native content recommendations, you know, they'd be spending 200 grand a day on Taboola and Outbrain. And then I would try to help them run similar article traffic from Facebook. So I got really good at clickbait, really. And just knowing like, what's going to get people to click, what kind of copy, what kind of creative. How do you think about that? Like user psychology while somebody's in that experience of Instagram or Facebook. And then that ended up getting banned by Facebook around like 2016, they completely changed the algo. They went super heavy on video, banned clickbait, and that was when like little things was a big publisher and, you know, witty feed, buzzfeed, all these big guys. And then I ended up actually consulting for a beverage founder to help her build her social. Because before I got into ad tech, I was doing social media and I started doing that and then all of a sudden that started driving more revenue for the D2C business for that brand than their own internal marketing function. And all I was doing was just finding a hundred different ways to tell her story in a cool way that felt native to the Internet, but that just started to click really well. And so then I ended up joining that beverage company. And that's basically where I learned e commerce coming in with the knowledge of like paid social and ad tech. And what's possible, which I think was really helpful because a lot of the people that I would meet in E commerce at the time were trying to figure out E commerce, but they didn't understand like how paid media algorithms work and how kind of the user journey works. And how do you think about first party data versus second party versus third party data. So then I joined that company, Hint. I was there for two years, kind of learned everything about E commerce really quickly, that ended up doing really well and we scaled that to mid eight figures within basically a year and a half, two years. And then I came to New York, joined an agency, found that, you know, I wasn't really the guy to sit in an office. So then I started consulting, which turned into my own agency. And that's kind of how I've landed here. Got to meet you along the way,
