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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. Here's a lazy retention strategy. Send every shopper the same abandoned cart email and hope it works. Most brands still do that and it makes no sense. Your shoppers are not the same. They look at different products, different colors, different price points, and they all need a different reason to come back. Instant does the opposite. It looks at what each shopper actually did on your site, then sends the email. That person should get the right product, the right message, the right offer. It's like you had somebody manually writing the perfect follow up for every single shopper, except it all runs automatically. That's why brands like third Love, Neuro, Kind Patches and TRX all trust Instant and why brands are using it to drive millions of dollars in incremental revenue. We're talking 3 to 5x increases. Go to instant one Sharma and check it out today. All right, welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. So last few weeks have been interesting, different podcast types and one thing I'm getting as pretty much consistent and common feedback is everybody likes the kind of the breakdowns or going deep on something. So I'm going to try to continue this trend where, you know, instead of focusing on multiple things within a single episode, I'm going to just go deep on one thing per episode. And you know, if you have ideas for what those things are, send them over. I'm also always kind of thinking of different ideas based on conversations I have with brand owners, with marketers, at brands, with different people on the agency side, with people on the SaaS side, just kind of all different parts of the ecosystem. And of course then me as a human marketer going through and doing the things, I'm always thinking of ideas that could help whoever listens to this thing basically jump ahead of others or kind of learn things faster or basically get a couple of nuggets that help you out. So that's kind of how I am always thinking about the podcast is really like, all right, what could I talk about that would be helpful and, you know, allow you to do something. You can listen to it now, you can do it later today or do it tomorrow, right. And it should ideally make you money. So that's kind of my classification. If you have ideas for that, DM them to me on Twitter or email them to me. Nicknick Co Just Nik Co for today's episode, I want to talk about the bootstrapped 0 to 1 how you get started kind of playbook. And you know, this is something that a lot of go to market agencies might hate to hear me talk about because I'm going to basically give you the shortcut of how to do it yourself. Now, I'm also still technically an agency guy, right? I sold Sharma Brands, but I'm the chief Growth Officer at Lunar Solar. So, you know, hopefully they don't get mad at me for this episode as well. But you know, I really think that if you're, if you're somebody who is bootstrapped 0 to 1, you're not really hiring agencies in the first place. So this kind of, this is a different customer. Now there's a lot of brands that I've worked on and other agencies have worked on too that are launching, but you know, they might have venture funding, they might have like it might be a second time founder who's putting some money into it. So they've got those resources to go and do these things. And part of what you're also getting with an agency is agency, right? Like you're getting the project management, you're getting the qa, you're getting the strategy, you're getting the thinking. So this isn't necessarily a dig on agencies by any means because agencies aren't just hands to do work, right? There are also like a lot of other layers on top, or at least the good ones are. But today's episode is a great one. If you know either you're completely bootstrapped, you know, you're looking to do something on a shoestring budget, right? I'll tell you all those tips and, or let's say you're just looking to test something on the side. Maybe you've got a brand that's already cooking, you know, that might be your main thing. This might be a fun way to just test something on the side. So yeah, that's what I'm going to go through. And if you've got questions, shoot them to me by email, DM them to me on Twitter. I'll try to help you out there. And yeah, all right. Let's get into it. So this, this podcast was actually inspired by somebody who emailed me from a couple of episodes ago where, you know, they were basically going off the AI episode and kind of basically saying, like, hey, I'm. I'm like a one to three person team. I'm trying to figure out how to go to market and how to. How do I do all these things, like, do I have to go hire a web agency and pay, you know, six figures for a website? Do I have to go do these exp things? Do I have to use this kind of tech? Do I have to use, you know, this or that? And so that's what today's episode's inspired by. But the one thing I want to start with is, you know, everybody kind of starts with like the brand and the website. But the one thing I want to start with is even before that, which is kind of like the wedge. So, you know, before you touch the website, before you hire a designer or before you even think about, like your colors. Right. What is your wedge? Like? What in a crowded category, what is the clear, the sharp, the reason that somebody's going to pick you over the other 47 options that are available in your category? It might be innovation in within, you know, using an ingredient like David Bars got the. Their secret ingredient for protein armor came. You know, their ingredient was basically colostrum. They were kind of first to market. So for them it was technically innovation. It could be update, which is an energy drink. You know, they use paraxanthine, which is a, like an altered version or an extracted version from caffeine that doesn't have the crash. So it could be something like that. It could be innovation in the sense that, you know, like Jolie brought bringing the filter head to the shower. It could be innovation like 8 Sleep actually building software on top of a mattress pad. So there's all these different ways to kind of have your wedge. But the thing you really need to get clear on both with your brand and going into the exercise of building what that brand looks like or how it comes to life and the identity and the tone of voice and the messaging and also as a team is what is our wedge? What is the reason that people are going to come to us? Is it price? Is it that we have access to get into places that our competition just cannot get into distributions? Our wedge? Is it that our, you know, is it that like, my dad owns the factory and because of that we get dirt cheap pricing on materials and production, which gives us more room to spend on marketing. And that's why we can get ahead. So you got to really figure out your wedge. Both from an internal standpoint, like, what is our reason as a team we can win, but also from the consumer standpoint, like, what's the reason I'm going to go buy this product over the other. And to be honest, most brands, like just don't have one, you know, like majority of Expo west brand. So Expo west is like a food and beverage trade show, natural food trade show, that happens everywhere in Anaheim. It just happened. And like, you know, 80% of the brands there are kind of just revolving in and out every couple years. 20% of the brands like stay and, you know, you see them every year, but 80% are just coming in and out. And it's basically like people just trying things, but they got no wedge, right? It's like we have adaptogenic protein chips. Okay, but like, who's asking for that? And like, why would somebody come and pay $10 a bag for that? So anyways, think about your wedge, right? Another thing that I would also add in here is think about the wedge for each channel. So for example, what is, you know, if for all the channels that you plan to sell on, and maybe it's just direct to consumer to start, so maybe that's, you know, your wedge on that channel to start is just. That's the only place we're available, which is totally fine. But let's say you're launching TikTok Shop, you're launching Amazon, you're launching, you know, Nordstrom.com, you're launching, whatever it may be, right? You sort of have to think, okay, well, what's the reason Nordstrom is maybe a little bit different because it's a marketplace that people might already be on. But if you've got Amazon, you've got TikTok Shop, you've got your dot com, you're sold in Target, you're sold in, you know, Vitamin Shop, like wherever, and you're selling on your own website. Then the one thing you can really control, right, is your own website. And you always want to think about too, like, what's your wedge with that sales channel? What's the reason people will come to your own website? And you might think that's a crazy thing to thing to think about because initially when you launch, your website is the only place to buy. So it's not really a concern. But as you grow, you have to think strategically about what does each channel do differently and why does that channel have its own wedge? And I Say this because there's literally a brand that I have worked with and that was a really tough thing for them to answer is like, well, why would somebody come to your website over Amazon, over Target, over, you know, cvs, over whatever. And if there's no answer to that question, then, you know, you're, you're kind of just like spending dollars on ads that get, you know, like, it's just not efficient. And consumers aren't dumb, right? They want to know that there is a reason for that. So something to think about there. Anyways, this whole wedge thing, it's not your mission statement and it's not, we use better ingredients, right? It's the very specific, concrete thing that makes people stop scrolling. It's a lot of times problem solution, messaging. It's the thing that no one else is solving well and, and explaining how you solve it in a way that's super obvious. So if you can't really say it in a sentence, I would say you don't have it. And if you don't have that in a single sentence, I would say don't, don't move forward with the idea and sort of get to that next stage. Because, you know, all the nicest website branding, apps, tech stack, emails, sms, everything you can think of is all good. But like, if the core thing at the end of the day, which is what the product is that people are buying is not delivering and, you know, doesn't have a wedge, you're, you're going to spend, you know, you're going to spend money to get to the point where somebody's got the product in their hand, you know, all the vendors, all the acquisition costs, et cetera, the shipping. And then somebody's going to get the product and be like, oh, well, I'm never buying this again, and neither am I going to tell anybody about it. So you're just going to be swimming upstream. And that's a very real problem that happens a lot, almost too much. So be careful of that. The next big part is the website. So I'm, I'm also, I'm speaking on this episode from a standpoint of like, there, there's literally a brand that I'm about to start working with that's been around for 15, 20 years, has not been able to, you know, kind of get to that next level. And I'm gonna basically run this exact playbook. So this is the playbook that I made that we're gonna run. So I'm just sharing it with you. And this is, you know, me, I'M an Indian guy, I'm cheap. I like things done efficiently, quick, on my own terms. So that's basically what this whole episode is. All right, Part two is the website. So this is your storefront, your sales team, your brand experience, all in one, right? People treat this like a template that they fill in, unfortunately, which is the wrong way to go about it. Now, the way I like to think about the website is essentially think about like Rodeo Drive in LA or 5th Avenue in New York, right? These are iconic streets and they're all competing for people who are just there to walk down the. Walk down 5th Ave and see which window pulls them in. So, you know, these websites need to be just as good as your 5th Ave storefronts from a design and development standpoint. They should be like every piece of the website needs to earn its spot, it needs to be fast, it needs to be clean. The design, the copy, the layouts, the content, the modules, the way that everything works together needs to be intentional. Meaning you should be able to answer why every single element of the website is the way it is. Right? You should have a reason for that. Mobile first, obviously, you want to make sure the homepage has one job, which is just to get people to understand what you sell and why they should care within three seconds and, you know, kind of the rest of the things with the website that come with it. So making sure it's, you know, got a good, got good merchandising, it's got a good navigation. Like I would definitely not ever settle for the default Shopify navigation, right? You want to be able to guide people through with navigation through a story, not just product categories. You want to make it kind of editorial, kind of fun. Like Parachute Home is a really good example, one of my favorites that we've built. Same thing goes with your cart. You know, you want to make sure you have a custom cart. You don't want to have what's default, which is add something to cart, go to a separate URL that's entirely a cart with nothing else on it, no value, nothing. And then you actually go to checkout. You want to make that a lot more efficient. Landing pages, listicles, the ability to not only put those up and build those, but also do those in a way that you're, you know, like again, none of this is using agencies. This can entirely be done basically two ways actually. One is you find a theme like either on the Shopify theme market, which you could just Google Shopify themes for sale and you'll find it right there. There's also a handful of other probably great marketplaces. You can go find themes from that, you know, companies out there exist that just build and continue to update themes that are really easy to manage and edit. So you can go that route where you basically pick a theme that's maybe, you know, 65, 70% of the way there. And then you could either work with a developer, you could either work with Claude or Manus to basically, you know, figure out how you do that, or you could just kind of do it yourself basically. So the other way to do it is you kind of piecemeal a couple of different options. And basically my recommendation in this other option, part two, or option two rather is essentially, you know, find a freelance designer who really understands web design and really web design slash, like conversion rate, slash performance marketing. Because you don't just want somebody who understands web design, you want somebody who understands how to think about consumer journey as well. And then I would pair that with maybe like a offshore developer either in Ukraine, in India, in Sri Lanka, in Serbia, those are all countries I've hired from and have great success. So either find a theme and then you know, either use a developer on top to kind of get that last 30% of customization work with one of the AI models to do it yourself. Or option two is you don't kind of go off of a theme, but you work with a designer and basically do a full custom design within Figma and then work with a developer to do a full development. And if you do the second option, depending on, you know, how senior level your designer and developer are, which again, depending on what you're trying to build and how you're trying to come to market, you know, you don't have to have a, the equivalent of a six figure website right at launch, right. So it could cost you anywhere from maybe 10k on the low end for decent designer, decent developer to build you a decent website. And by decent I mean like solid website. Like I would approve of that website all the way to, you know, if you get like a super cost, the equivalent of a six figure website, you could probably get that down for like a third the price if you kind of piecemealed it yourself and did all that, the third option is like that, paying that six figures and that's where you get the design development. But also all that strategy and thinking there. My thinking personally, as I guess somebody who already knows this, so I have somewhat of an advantage, but if I didn't, the way I would basically go about it is work through it with something like Claude, right? Like here are a ton of websites that. Well, actually I've even used Claude to audit websites and be like, audit this website like Nick Sharma, the DTC guy would, based on everything he's put out on the Internet and it will give you a full audit. So I would probably just tell Claude, yo make me a wireframe based on how Nick Sharma would for here's the, you know, the brand brief or the product brief and then start editing it from there. Work with, take that wireframe. Once I feel good about it from a content and layout and module standpoint, bring that to a designer, get them to kind of design that up and then push that over to a developer. And then with the developer, work on integrating the tech stack. You'd have to set up the subscription, the analytics, the pixels, the. All that kind of stuff. So that's how I would go about it. Landing pages, I would, I would do. Okay, there's a couple things you could do. So I've actually been just kind of as a curious person myself trying to figure out how I can spin these up real quick. And I, I built my own kind of Listicle app which actually anybody can access. It's just, it's on write nik co so W R I T E N I K co and you can write listicles with AI and just spin them up and put them on any kind of publisher domain. So I plan to do a lot of that. And then secondly to that, that same process I just mentioned, you know, build a wireframe with Claude, move that to a designer and then get it developed. I would just run, I would basically create like three landing page templates in Claude as a wireframe and then move those to the designer, get them developed. And then I would have basically three full landing pages in Shopify that are fully developed that I could go in and you know, as somebody with very not very, but like not no development or coding skills, I can go in, duplicate the pages and then swap all the content for different products, different offers, different messaging, different angles, different, you know, Personas, et cetera. So all that said, that's kind of the website piece and how I would approach the website. You know, again, 10 to 30k. 30k is like you're building a ridiculous website. Most should probably be like 10 to 15, maybe 17, 18K. And you know, you're getting something that feels really custom, it feels clean, it feels like very heavy on the brand side, but also is very thought through from a performance and conversion standpoint. And again like the thing that just popped in my head is just me reiterating to you to use tools like Claude or you know, Chad GPT is like the guy you go to get a drink with after work, but Chad GPT is not your coworker. I would make sure you're jumping on Claude for stuff like this. Time for the Retention Tip of the week brought to you by Instant. Here's a stat that should make every e commerce operator uncomfortable. Roughly 98% of your site visitors leave without buying and you can only email the 2 to 5% who opted in and are actively cookie everyone else Ghost. You spent money to get them to your site and they vanished. Now the issue here isn't your email content or your flows. It's actually your ability to recognize and reach these first party shoppers Post cookies Most brands are only sending abandoned cart and browse abandonment emails to a tiny fraction of the people who actually abandoned. The rest are invisible to Klaviyo because they switched devices. They cleared their browser or their cookies naturally expired after one to seven days. This is where being able to recover and re engage those shoppers becomes critical. If you can reach five times more of your site visitors, you're dramatically expanding the pool of people who enter your highest converting flows. Site abandonment Cart abandonment Browse abandonment Price drop alerts. That's not incremental improvement, that's a step change in retention revenue. This is literally what Instant was built for. Their tech brings you more shoppers. Bah, no cookies required, required and feeds them into your site abandonment flows automatically. Some brands are seeing up to 10x more shoppers enter these high intent flows. Check it out for yourself at instant 1/sharma okay, next thing I want to talk about paired up with the website is the tech stack. So you know, in the tech stack, just keep it lean. All right? There's a lot of noise about tech stack and what you should use. And look, there's definitely some things that are amazing. A lot of the tech stack that you, you know, things that you hear about, it's not like everything is bad, but it's not true that you need to have everything right at the beginning, right? Like you might hear about attribution tools, incrementality testing tools, you know, the next big forecasting tool, whatever it may be like, you don't need that stuff right at the get go. You basically need your Shopify platform set up and optimized. You need email, you need sms. At least SMS collection. If you're not gonna get started with SMS right away, some brands like prefer not to, which is totally fine. You can turn that into like a moment where it gives you another reason to message people later. But make sure you start collecting those numbers on day one. Basic analytics subscription. If you have that reviews and you know, that's like pretty much all of it, maybe a cart upsell product in there. So you have a nice looking cart, but for the most part that's pretty much all you need. You don't need, you know, you don't need every little thing. And don't let the marketing that the SaaS industry pushes kind of get to your head about that because if it's up to them, they would have you thinking that you need every single app all the time running at, you know, full capacity, but you really don't. You just need to make sure you got the basics as you start to generate revenue and you hit, you know, new revenue targets, whether it's, you know, 5k a day, 10k a day, 20k a day in revenue. I like to think of the daily number. Cause it's just easier. Then you start to think about, okay, well how do we incorporate tools like this or tools like that or things like catalog management or things like, you know, maybe we should try using generative X. Right. All right. But I do want to touch on email and sms. So this is kind of your owned channel. Besides your website. This is the other real estate that you own. Difference is this is more of a push method, meaning you can push it to them, whereas a website requires you them to come to you. Right. You can't like push your site unless you've got some way to put a push notification either through maybe like an app clip situation or wallet pass. But I feel like the wallet pass companies have kind of died out. I don't know, seems like maybe nobody really used them. I never once used a wallet pass and I had one for a handful of different brands. So maybe that's died out. Maybe the app trend makes a comeback with how easy it is to build apps, but I don't know, that's yet to be seen. But email and SMS is a thing that you own. Yes, you have to spend a little bit of money to send SMS messages or based on your klaviyo list size. However, it's much cheaper than like just running ads. So couple things you want to make sure you have is basically automated flows on email and sms. So you know, these kind of run in the background and make you money while you sleep. This is the welcome series. Your abandoned cart, Abandoned checkout, abandoned. You know Site, post, purchase, win back. They should all be built, tested and live before you drive. Like serious traffic blows my mind. How many brands will start their journey spending on paid ads but will not have a proper email form capture on their website, nor will they have emails that they're actually paying attention to, right? Like when you start your growth funnel is not just ads and website. Most people think it's just ads, but it's really ads, website, email form, capture or capture form and then the actual like emails that they get. Because most people are just gonna, you know, think about your conversion rate. Let's say you start and your conversion rate's 2%. That means 98% of people are bouncing and not making a purchase. Let's say your email capture rate is 3%, which is the average on Klaviyo. That means 97% are bouncing without you even getting their email. So that's why I specifically mention the capture form. Because if you use something like Alia, which I talk about all the time and you'll hear why, because you can capture 10 to 15% of traffic that comes to your site. Their pop ups are just engineered to be better. So let's say you even capture, you know, 8%, right? That means you're capturing a lot more traffic, you have a lot more opportunities and shots on goal to now send emails or text messages and follow up and get that sale. And when you get that sale, that makes your entire acquisition funnel and your total, you know, blended acquisition costs go down a little bit. So you not having automated and proper email infrastructure set up while you're driving traffic, you're just lighting money on fire. And everybody kind of chases that high when it comes to the Facebook side of things. For some reason, people don't like to chase the high as much when it comes to the Klaviyo side of things. But you need to like, don't let yourself spend on ads without doing that. And then the same thing goes with campaign emails. So as you're building this, you know, these are basically your regular cadence of send. So product drops, content, education, promotions. I always like to think about what can you send here that somebody can bring up later at a dinner table conversation. That's kind of like my barometer of like, what is a good thing to send is what can you tell somebody that turns into a good dinner table conversation. So don't just send emails to send emails, right? That means you're just sending kind of like bs. And that's not something that somebody's going to bring up at the dinner table. But as you're building your email list, you want to make sure you're sending them things of value. I'm going to reiterate that point again. But you're making your make sure you send them things because those are again, more chances somebody's going to get to learn your brand better, get to know you better, get to know your products better, why they're great, and or maybe figure out a reason that they should be consuming your or using your product. And then the last piece I'll mention here is kind of the subscription piece which touches on the website, also touches on the email SMS piece. But if you have a natural replenishment cycle, like if you're a supplement brand, if you're a beauty personal care brand, you know, if you're helping people to do something that's done on a routine basis, if it's a protein powder even, you know, you kind of know what it's going to take until people run out or when they're going to run out. So whether it's based on, you know, pushing subscription, which is generally what you want to do, both from a standpoint of making your life easier as an operator and also your company valuation, subscription is the ideal goal here. Otherwise you can use email, SMS and some level of remarketing ads, you know, kind of retargeting existing buyers to basically remind them to purchase. The more you can push people to subscribe, the better, which is why you want to sort of treat that, you know, funnel one, number one might be getting people to buy once. Funnel number two might be getting to convert people from becoming buyers to subscribers. And you might need again that other another offer and another kind of like strategy as to how you do that. It might not just be as easy as, you know, now you should subscribe and it might not even be the second purchase, to be honest. Like when I was at hint, we learned it was the third purchase that was the subscription that gave us the best LTV customers. So it was really about like funnel number one was get the single purchase funnel. Funnel number two was get the single purchase on a specified or kind of narrowed down flavor profile. And funnel number three was turn that into a subscription. Now next part, content and creators. So content is the best type of funnel. There's a brand, it's called the Pause Life. It's by this doctor named Dr. Mary Claire and she is a beast when it comes to selling product. And the reason is because she has the best content in her category. There's another great example of this of a brand I helped launch with Dr. Amir Kharam. His brand is Karam mdskin.com and it's a skincare brand. And again, he crushes it because his content as a creator, he's a doctor and a creator. Same thing with Dr. Mary Claire. And what they both do exceptionally well is just put out a ton of content. And what does that do? Well, a natural byproduct of them putting out a handful of videos to, you know, call it like a dozen videos a week, is they very quickly understand what people actually want to know and what people care about. And so what I think everybody should learn from them when it comes to bootstrapping and going with the brand is whether it's you as the founder or whether it's like you getting a talking head. The more content you put up, the faster you're going to get out of that. You know, call it like a learning phase of knowing what it is that people want to know about your brand or your products or how they should be kind of told about them. Volume is key here, right? It's not about getting like a handful of creators to post something because they've got followers. It's about getting a ton of creators to post all different types of things and sort of figure out, you know, what types of different use cases or pain points or formats or, you know, is it lifestyle versus, you know, nicer stuff or is it the comparison or is it the unboxing? Like, you sort of have to just think about all the different possible angles and attack them and figure out what works and then double down on what works. So think of it like a March Madness bracket, right? You've got all these ideas for angles, different videos and whatnot, and then you basically just pit them against each other until you basically get to understand what is it out of all the different angles that from a volume standpoint, you basically narrow it down to one thing. And this is. I know I've mentioned this before because I was there, but this is how essentially Vayner also thinks about finding the super bowl ad for the brands they work with, whether it's like Oscar Mayer or Pepsi. You know, like, they start with maybe a few thousand pieces of content across social, and then as they narrow it down to concepts or angles or formats of content that are continuing to perform and do well, they bring those pieces of content to larger formats or larger screens until eventually the final winner of the. Of the whole thing is basically what you see as the super bowl commercial. So, yeah. So all that to say A little bit of a rant, but all that to say content and creators. That is like a big focus that you need to focus content. You should figure out how to get content efficiently, low cost, you know. For example, if you're a food and beverage brand, you should go find out every possible event you could go donate product to in exchange for content. Like, every event does that, because who doesn't want food and beverage? And if you're a food and beverage brand, it's an easy way for you to get in and get content. Right? It might be having a network of creators that you just know that you can work with and reach out to, et cetera. Like I talked about on last week's episode, it might be doing a brand partnership at an event because that allows you to film some more content, et cetera, et cetera. But you can kind of figure it out. Essentially, you need to figure out a content engine. The best way to think about the reason you need to also do everything I've mentioned is if you don't, you're just paying the delta of not doing the work. You're paying that to Facebook as more ads and to be in more places, and you're paying a higher CPM because you're less well known and your content gets less engagement. So think of it that way. You're either doing it yourself or you're just going to be paying Zuck to do it. Quick one is packaging and unboxing. So I say quick one only because it's got a cute couple key components to think about. But you should really think about this from a experience standpoint. I found too that you almost don't want the person creating the brand unless they have a real eye for this and a real, you know, vision behind this. You don't want them to think about the packaging because packaging is one of those things that it's like one of the last things you choose. So you're usually at this point, you're thinking about the margin, how much room you have to spend on acquisition cost, yada, yada, yada, right? The contractors you're about to start paying, the Facebook costs, you're about to start paying. So a lot of people skimp out on this. And I think it actually hurts your brand, especially in the early days, to not have decent packaging. So the box, the inserts, whether it's a card, a note, a discount, you know, a note to leave, a review, a referral, offer, whatever it is, it's like free marketing real estate. And every package you ship is an Opportunity to drive some sort of a message. So use that in the insert the box. Again, doesn't have to be super expensive, but it should be intentional. And again that's something I mentioned before, but it definitely goes with the box. And then the last piece is the packaging tape. Also the fit, like make sure your product fits nicely. You don't want it to get there and you've got a cute little jar and it's just falling through the box, right? That's a bad look. It just feels cheap, it feels lazy. And no one likes lazy. Let's be real. Last one again I just mentioned is the branded packaging tape. So huge, huge effect when people see that, right? It feels very premium, very custom, very high class. But if you source it properly, it's not expensive, it's pretty cheap. Paired with that is all of your shipping 3 PL logistics. You know, two day shipping is like an expectation. So work backwards from that. You know, if you're shipping nationwide, trying to do two day, I would recommend you get a spot on the west coast and the east coast. My friend Jimmy, for example, he's got a warehouse in Utah and one in Delaware. So he gets two day pretty much everywhere. Also understand things like shipping zones, your average packet weight, package weight, your package dimensions, your shipping carriers, your, you know, all of these things are things you should know. They shouldn't just be things that because they're not sexy and because they're not fun, that you just kind of like leave it to somebody else to do or just rely on a 3 PL to do it for you. You should know you should be able to have that conversation with them and either let them educate you on their numbers for all those things or you should be able to challenge them and be like, hey, why am I paying this, you know, kind of like random technology fee? What does that include? Because that's kind of just how 3pls are unfortunately. And that's just something you gotta do. You can't get ripped off. All right, last thing before we get into like the real last thing is basically your kind of paid media and ad creative approach. And you know, we talked about the content stuff shortly, but you also need to think about the distribution of that content. So there's also obviously like putting it out organically through creators, through your own channels, through email, whatever. But there's also ads and Facebook ads are essentially meta ads is, is where more people are going to start and basically figure out if they've got product market fit or if they've got, you know, something viable Here. So, you know, I'm not going to go super deep into Facebook itself, but, you know, Facebook ads is a key part of it. You want to make sure you've got either. Well, first of all, you, if you're starting from scratch, you need to go and learn Facebook Ads 101 yourself. Refuse to accept that, you know, any founder is too good to go and learn Facebook ads. Because truth is, if you, if that's the way you think, you're about to get ripped off by whoever you hire. Because eight times out of 10, the people that are getting hired, right, like these are people who've got 12 clients. Maybe you're not the number one priority for anybody except yourself. So that's why you need to go learn Facebook ads and make sure that you can understand what's going on on. You can double check things, you can suggest things, you can look at patterns and start to realize things. If you can't do that, then you should not be in cpg. You should really go find something else to do. And then the second piece is thinking about the ad creative. So we talked about the content engine or the content conveyor belt. That is kind of helping you basically tell the story in different ways, but you also need to think about how does that then turn into actual ad creative. So whether it's static images, whether it's video, whether it's ugc, whether it's founder to camera, whether it's testimonials, you need to think about testing hooks, formats, angles, right? The creative, like, testing, it never stops. And the biggest brands today, in fact, one thing they all have in common, that I can tell you, they all have this role of what's called just creative strategist. The idea or the goal of that job, the entire job is literally just coming up with things to throw against the wall, see if it sticks. Because that's just how. I mean, you're probably a consumer of shorts or Reels or TikTok, but like, you can see how fast content moves, how fast trends come and go within content, how fast different formats come and go, right? Like, remember when daily vlogs on TikTok were the thing and we thought everybody, like daily vlogs were going to be. Yeah, well, that lasted like, what, three months and boom, it's gone, right? Like, that's how you need to think about ad creative. Organic content too. At least if it's good, it gets respect. Ads you're walking in with getting, you know, zero respect because you're an ad intruding in somebody's feet. So you have to think about that. Now. The last thing I'm gonna say here, I know I've been ranting for quite a bit, but the last thing I'm gonna say is you need to have some level of hustle here. This is your. You know how Facebook has the learning phase when you start running an ad? This 0 to 1 where you're getting up and running, especially if you're trying to do it bootstrapped or in kind of like in a cost efficient manner. You need to have so much discipline when it comes to speed and you know, kind of how fast you're moving on, testing things and moving away from things that aren't working. You need to be shipping things daily here, not weekly, not monthly. You need to be looking at data constantly. You need to be asking questions constantly. This is the part, this is the hardest part of any brand is 0 to 1. Once you get to 1 it slowly starts to get easier. But the 0 to 1 is where the most time is usually lost. Because you've got to figure out how to take this thing that you think is so great and turn it into something that the majority of people you know or not majority of people, but turn it into something that other people start to think is also just as great and also buy into it with the same vision because somebody could also think something's great, but then if they don't buy into it then you know, you're stuck with like a one time purchaser. And you know it's not easy to build a massive business on one time purchasers unless you're selling like eight sleep mattresses. But even then like I'm a four time purchaser at this point so that was a big rant of like 40ish minutes. I hope today's episode was fun. This is kind of just a dump of a bunch of thoughts that I've had throughout the week as I'm working on this new project and as I bring this thing to life and again find more things that I think could help you speed processes up or build new systems or try new things or get ahead. I will continue to bring them here. And yeah, if you've got any questions, shoot me an email. Nicknick co Hit me on Twitter R. Sharma and you can always join our slack as well. I'm always active in there and yeah, that's pretty much it. I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg retail and E commerce. If you enjoyed this episode. Why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one. Sam.