How to grow an E-commerce business fast

Okay, we're rolling. So if you clicked on this video, you're probably struggling with a few things. But the primary thing that you're probably struggling with is maybe consistently growing your business. Maybe you're starting an e-commerce business of some kind and you're trying to figure out what you need to do to get it to grow in the first place. And I'm going to tell you a few things that you probably don't want to hear, But what I won't tell you is that digital businesses can't grow quickly because they can. Now, honestly, all kinds of businesses can grow quickly. However, 90% of them don't grow very quickly. And that's just the reality of the game. If you're building a business, if you're servicing customers, you shouldn't be doing it just because you're looking to make a ton of money in the short term. It's very short-term minded. Uh, it's not what's going to be ultimately really helpful for lots of people. Uh, and in the long run, that's what makes businesses super successful and that's what businesses need to have in order for them to continue to exist. So if you're watching this video, you're probably either looking to start an online business of some kind and figuring it out. Uh, maybe you scaled a business already, maybe you're doing $1 million a year already, uh, and you keep hitting like a plateau where you get to $100,000 a month in revenue, $200,000 a month in revenue, and your profit margins get worse. Your ad spend increases. You're spending more and more money on advertising and marketing, and the business itself just isn't growing. And maybe you've had a business in the past and you've grown a ton and then your revenue has gone down. So I'm making videos for, for honestly anybody that's making less than $1 million a month in revenue. It still applies to all businesses. But if you're anywhere below that range, that's currently what I have experience helping e-commerce businesses with. So I can speak to it with a decent amount of understanding. And if you don't know who I am, I run essentially a marketing company. Now we do a lot more than marketing, for the e-commerce businesses that we work with, that we partner with, and some that we invest in as well. But the— I completely lost my train of thought. Hang on a second. But essentially we're responsible for somewhere around $7 to $9 million a month worth of revenue for these businesses. So we help them with their advertising, their marketing. We help them generate that revenue. Now, one thing that has become evidently clear to me over about 5 years of running Flax as a company, which is my marketing company, one thing that has become incredibly clear is the importance of the quality of the product. A bunch of people are probably going to be clicking away from this video right now. That's fine because lots of you probably don't want to hear someone, another person talking about product. But if you want to really scale an e-commerce business very quickly, you just have to have a really good product. And most people think they have a good product. They go, yeah, my product's cool. You kind of develop this bias that stops you from seeing the problems that your products might have or the issues with the product, the fundamental product itself. But if you look at all of the biggest businesses, in the world, they've created some sort of really innovative product. Apple created the iPhone. Google has had a series of products but had the best search engine product essentially. Even Walmart, their product was the fact that you could go into their stores and buy lots of things at incredibly discounted prices and you could kind of buy anything that you needed. Similar with Amazon, just a digital version of Walmart. Um, and again, lots and lots of the biggest companies in the world, they've had some sort of innovative product. Tesla, for example. Um, they've just had a really good product and that is what's allowed them to scale. And lots of the time the development and the creation of the product is what you don't see for these businesses. That takes a really, really long time to do and do really well. Um, but that is the thing that will ultimately make you the most money if that's what you're looking to do. If you're just making to look as, if you're just looking to make as much money as you possibly can, then you're still going to need a really good product in order to actually do that. And that itself is where most people go wrong. They kind of get a product together, maybe a suite of products, and they start selling them online and then they never really improve them. And it blows my mind that people will hire a company like mine and have us handling the marketing, and then they won't go and spend tons of their time just developing, developing their products and improving upon their current products. They'll spend a little bit of time, but they'll be super worried still about the marketing. And how about this creative and this strategy? And it's like, that's our job to do. Like, if you're working with a company like mine, we're handling all of your marketing, we're handling all of your advertising. You, you hire us so that you don't have to think about those things and worry about the day-to-day. And so that when you see an issue or you see an opportunity for something, you can feed it back to us, but not so that you can try to be staring at your ad accounts every single day and trying to make tweaks along with us. It's just pointless. It's a waste of time. Instead, if you're running any sort of e-commerce business, you should be spending most of your time just working on the product because that's what most people will not be able to do for your business. You can hire all kinds of help. You can get experts in lots of categories, but you should never take your eyes off your product development. And I was auditing a friend's business recently, maybe 2 months ago now, and I was actually speaking with their head of product and he was like, hey, I'm having XYZ problems. I need to build these dashboards so we can get insight into our customers. And I was like, well, have you just looked and they're a service business. And I was like, have you just looked at the Slack channels where you're communicating with your customers themselves? And he was like, well, no, not really. And I was like, oh, interesting. By the way, this is the head of product, not the CEO or the CMO or anyone in like, like the super, super senior management roles. And I just opened up his computer an hour later. I made him go and get his computer and I opened up his computer, opened up his Slack and he had all of the client channels muted. And I was just like, you're the head of product and you're trying to spend all your time creating these dashboards to track statuses of your clients when you could just look at your product every single day. You could just read the messages in the channels, which is essentially where most of the communication is happening. And then as a result, where you're delivering the product itself and you could just read those messages and then figure out what needs to be improved. You don't need like these crazy automations and dashboards to be able to do that. And that's one small example. But the CEO, CMO, like no one else was even looking at the product either. Like, and it's crazy that they were spending all their time focusing on marketing and nowhere near enough time focusing on the product itself. And but for some reason, that's what everybody does. And I don't get it because there's all of like, there's so much opportunity to just solve more problems for the world. There's so many problems that people are experiencing that they want solved and they'll pay to have solved. And most people spend 80% of their time figuring out how to sell their product instead of just 80% of their time figuring out how to make it better. And all you need to do is listen to your customers, test the product yourself, and be creative and try to make something new. That's one of the reasons why people that— people will try dropshipping as a business model. And that's not a bad business model. It can work. But most people will just get some crap from China and they'll start selling it online. And what will happen, what you see lots of people when they're showing their dropshipping results off online, what will happen is they'll get tons of sales. In a month, their revenue will go like this. They'll post their Shopify screenshots everywhere and they'll flex, flex on everybody at how much money they're making when in reality their margins are very, very small because they're spending so much money on advertising. And even if they have good profit margins, what happens is that business dies really quickly because when you're running a business with a bad product, you don't have a strong customer base. So you spend all this money on marketing and you get all of these customers and all of this revenue coming in, and then these customers don't keep buying from you because they didn't like the product in the first place. They weren't blown away with the product. And I encourage you to look around you in your life, the products that you think are really, really phenomenal, phenomenal, and the companies that you keep buying from and trying to model some of the things that they're doing with the way their customer experience works, with the way they're unpackaging or unboxing experience is, or with how useful the product is. Like, Apple is really, really truly a great example of a company that makes good products that solve lots of people's problems, and they make the process of buying and unwrapping and setting up those products really enjoyable as well. So they get as many people to actually use their products as possible, and then people start using the product and go, wow, this thing is really good. And unfortunately, it seems like Apple has not been innovating as much since, since Steve Jobs died. But these companies are big for a reason and they're successful for a reason. And lots of people don't like the fact that there are these big corporations out there. But that's a, that's another conversation. But yeah, like all you have to be doing is listening to your customers, listening to people around you. And instead of going out there and doing competitor research and staring at what other people are doing all day long and trying to figure out how you can copy them, you should just look at your product itself. You should figure out what flaws it has, what problems it has, and you should just work on improving those problems. And you should create as many iterations as you can of your product if you want it to be really, really good. So if you want to build an e-commerce business and you want, you want it to grow really quickly, you actually need to spend less time on marketing and less time on tactics and less time watching videos like this, and instead more time on making the thing that you're selling way better and then figuring out what other problems your customer has and maybe creating more products for them as well and offering more products. And you don't have to create every product yourself from scratch. Part of your product as an e-commerce business is your customer experience. It's the speed in which you ship products. To people. It's the unboxing, it's the branding itself. It's everything post-purchase. It's the second the money leaves the person's account, the second their credit card gets charged. It's, it's everything after that, every single touchpoint. And it's not just getting a product sent to someone and then focusing on the next customer. Because if you can watch, you can watch a video that I have on YouTube from a few months ago. I talk about how we at the time were responsible for about $5.9 million a month in revenue. And I talk about what— how we've been able to do that, like what trends I've seen. And the entire video is just talking about how you need returning customers and that ultimately is what's going to create lifetime value for you. But yeah, this has turned into a rant. I'm saying the same thing over and over and over. But if you spend 80% of your time focusing on your product you'll be able to grow a business really, really quickly. And the businesses we've worked with that have grown the fastest have better products than everybody else. Essentially, they have a better offering than anybody else. They can ship faster, they can give you better prices, or they can charge you way more because they have a much, much better product than anything else out there. Or they're selling something completely unique, completely new that they've invented and made themselves. And that's what's allowed them to grow really, really quickly. But if you want customers to come back to you and you don't want to hit $100,000 a month in revenue and then just have your margins decline, decline, decline, decline, decline, you need to keep working on improving your product and you've got to be real with yourself about the quality of your product as well. That's every business's problem. And it's likely yours as well if you want a business to grow quickly. Quickly, then just make a good product and it will. So there's my rant of the day. I'm probably going to post some more videos like this, to be honest, because the high-produced ones that we make are cool, but they spend— they take 50 hours and there's lots of just things that I want to just straight up share and rant about on YouTube. So I'll try to make these better. But thank you for watching and bye-bye.