This is a YouTube video titled "Ecommerce Ugly Talk NYC - Content Is the Real Product, Community Is the New Competitive Advantage" recorded in August 2025. The content features a discussion primarily between two speakers, including one named London, about ecommerce business strategies focusing on content production and community engagement as key competitive advantages. The conversation explores how building relationships with customers and leveraging organic content drives brand success in a saturated market. There is no indication that Manish Chowdhary is a participant in this dialogue.
You have to have a plan even before you launch. In fact, London was telling me, even though he sells these amazing vintage equipment and recording and all that cool gear, but your real business is content. Content production. And put an excitement. Can you talk about that? Which is most people think that they are in the E commerce business to sell widgets, but we have an E commerce founder that doesn't believe that. In fact, that is not his strategic competitive advantage. His competitive advantage is something else.
Yeah, and I actually think it's the case with like most iconic brands in history is they're just fucking awesome storytellers. So I mean we just approach that as like our, you know, our top job and we spend most of our time thinking about how to stand out in a super saturated market. And that is a content business. But instead of selling content, we're selling these electronics that we design and that's ultimately what it all comes back to. But I mean content top of funnel, organic content is everything to us.
But you're also using your community to design your next product as opposed to whipping that in your head or even chatgpting it. I don't know if that's a term and Maya was telling us earlier, which I'm going to come to Maya in just a moment. London, how are you using this community and doing things that don't scale, which is so different than everything we heard maybe two years ago. Go and burn your cash on Facebook or Instagram and hope and pray. And since you don't know what your true cost is, you don't even know you're making money. But the bank will give you a loan at zero, close to zero. And investors will fund you. But things have changed. Tell us about how you're engaging with community that most people would not even think about.
Yeah, so we've benefited from the fact that our company started in 2024 so we never really got to reap the benefits of like ZIRP era funding.
So you have no bad habits?
Well, we've just had to be scrappy from the jump. So we were like, okay, building a brand that isn't profitable makes zero sense to me. So I can't speak to like that version of company building. But we do things like our top thousand customers, like we have on a disc discord channel and like I'll go in and chat with them sometimes for hours and hours on end and just like hear, you know, what do you love? What should we do more of? What do you absolutely hate? Where are we? Like just sucking and we're super super candid with with our customers and communicate like constantly with them in all these different forums. We do. I'll do one on one FaceTimes with customers who are like, if customer's spending $1,000 on kickback, like I think that deserves a 10 minute call. I want to know why they're spending so much money on us. And you can just get these like anecdotal insights that are incredibly valuable. So I mean we. And I guess like one more thing I would just add to this is like, you know, a huge bonus of building these relationships with our customers is it's also this like content machine. So most of our customers are kind of exactly like models that we would hire. Like they look like our ideal customer service. So if they feel a closeness to us, the chance of them making just organic content is so much higher. We don't ask them to do that, but they do and that drives a ton of traffic for us. We don't spend any money on apps.
So you're asking your customers to shape the future as opposed to ChatGPT.
