Guys come into dropshipping and fall in love with a new product or store right away
Literally have the game backwards
They saw the guys with brands and thought they had to that too
End up doing all this overthinking and other bs and start wasting energy and time
This isn’t the typical business model my G
Run ads first
If it hits cool, now go setup the backend
If not, keep it pushing
You don’t need warehouses, bulk, or a branded product
You just need a day or two of your full focus
And if it doesn’t work, basically keep trying, but don’t be dumb, take learnings and improve every time
This is the hardest part though… that feeling after a failed launch hits different… it puts a lot of mfs into permanent gulag
If you’re just starting out in ecom and only have limited capital
Don’t even think about MRR or peptides my G
Get you nice little seasonal offers and extract until you learn the ropes
Mothers day is coming up and could probably put you in a 6 figure position if you move quick
Our cost per link click and CPA was rising beyond our profitability thresholds for one of our brands and we needed to get back to baseline FAST
We were dealing with a more aware market after an initial phase of unawareness, so the approach had to become a bit more authentic
Here’s the workflow that turned our ad account around and ended up adding to our creative flywheel to unlock gems ever since
Scraped and sent 1,000 emails to IG accounts in niche daily
Offered free product in exchange for video review, skit, etc post on socials, many declined or tried to get compensation…this was a volume game
We still got people every single day who were interested. Best case scenario the product could be sent out for under $10-$50
It was bigger brand and we could afford to maybe slide them some cash. But it was an off-season and we were being surgical with the payroll at the time
To our surprise we sometimes had creators w thousands and even hundreds of thousands of followers accepting a free product and sharing it
Besides we had already had the product seeding content outperform the $500-$1000/video content multiple times in past for our other brands so I knew it wasn’t worth the squeeze
Not everyone ended up sending the videos and posting, just part of the game, we had to follow up a few days after delivery and every couple days after that in a friendly non pushy manner so they didn’t get annoyed
What we did receive was super great authentic homemade non AI content and great awareness via organic reach from the accounts that posted. Some sales too
From there we sorted all the hundreds of videos and images in folders by tier A, B, C. We found the most rockstar creatives and brand content this way
This workflow could single handedly turn a drop-shipping store tight on capital to that branded image feel as well. It takes probably 3-4 weeks to start seeing the fruit on this one
Not all submissions were quality, but who am I to judge. Submissions I’ve put in the C bracket have went crazy the in the ad account. So we always try to use everything
Sometimes we guided them sometimes we didn’t. Allowing them to freestyle yielded the best and worst at both ends of the curve
We typically would guide them with certain things like visual concepts or hidden gems such as making sure they call the product the brand name and not the generic product name
As this creates a major moat in the google search auction, market share, and buyer psychology
When the searches from people seeing ads on meta go to your brand search ads as well instead of only boosting the generic market, you can out bid anyone
Sometimes we let them freestyle sometimes we took a more script based or technical approach
Our in house editors are extremely cracked and cook crazy creatives with the raw footage, voiceovers, and all the content from all these folders
For mashup concepts with multiple creators and b-roll we ran those from our brand page
For concepts that only had a single creator we used partnership ads to run those from our creators pages
We would just send a request and DM them about it and some of them were more than happy. Some ads never published. Numbers game
After all the efforts. Our ad account experienced a crazy revival, I saw the lowest cost per link clicks, CPAs, and highest engagement metrics I’ve ever seen
It allowed us to scale in what we previously had written off as an off season
Once our competitors saw how deep the moat had gotten, they got bullied out and just quit
Initially we started this to get creatives but ended up getting so much we didn’t need to keep sending out free goods
So we changed it to a full fledged affiliate program outreach strategy, creators could generate sales with their code and take a chunk of the revenue
Youtubers, instagramers, tiktokers started promoting, generating sales, making content, and bringing brand awareness 24/7
Trench lessons
I showed one of my ad accounts to a friend
He couldn’t believe his eyes
$350k spent on 1 creative in 30 days
He showed me his ad account
Launching a ton of creatives all the time complaining they didn’t spend etc
Scaling what’s already spending, converting, and milking it dry > scaling creative and all these other random “hacks”
This rule always applies but especially in the early life of any ad account
You obviously still need to be uploading in fresh concepts but it’s more for longevity and new unlocks rather than instant returns
More often than not increasing budget on what’s already converting nicely will yield the instant returns, until it doesn’t, then you spam creative
Creative volume over increasing budget is 100% necessary for certain brands or niches especially at scale but not every ad account does this apply to
Another thing is there are many variables such as seasonality, industry, demand, market fatigue, TAM, etc, other than creative that play factors in whether someone is going to convert or if there’s even space for all of your concepts or spend in the auction and Meta knows this and they price accordingly
There is never one specific way to play the game
Some guys run creative heavy, some product heavy, brand heavy, narrative heavy, script heavy, seasonal heavy etc
Some only focused on milking one source vs omni channel pushes
Beauty of the game though is everyone runs a different class w different perks
There’s too many different ways to run numbers
Addicted to finding new winners every single week
Managing a wide portfolio of brands
Will have AI run all of them eventually
Bulk coming this week for this supplement brand before hyper scaling
Batch of new brands already launched
The leverage is where you create it 💡
If you choose to keep scrolling instead of mastering one skill or business model it’s never too late to choose differently
Dropshipping is still one of the fastest ways to escape the underclass btw
- 1 SKU w search volume trending up
- 1 shopify account
- 2 ad accounts, meta + google
Worry about MRR, private processing, and all the burnt out sauce you see online after you know what you’re doing
A lot of faceless industries/niches that nobody talks about where pulling in 10-30k+ daily profit is a cookie cutter bottomline with a few years of compounding
99% get bored somewhere along the line and start chasing new opportunities because they need the quick dopamine
Few
You can make a lot by trenching and grinding 24/7
But the real gains are made in knowing when to exit, enter, and rotate markets
There’s a crossroads during the bootstrap path where you must shift your mindset to that of the VC, PE, and the funds in some ways
Or things will eventually become and feel no different than a job with diminishing returns
Money doesn’t think about you or know anything about your background
Thinking about it emotionally or trying to force it into your hands is useless
At the macro levels many of the micro level stressors are comically written off
Knowing when to exit, enter, and rotate opportunities is the only difference between you and whoever you think your competition is
Data(education), liquidity(purchasing power), speed to execution(energy) become more important as time goes on
Humans are more similar to AI than most can comprehend right now
Nothing ever truly changes
Whoever has the most of those three things rules the next generation of humans
And whoever amongst the current generation of humans utilizes AI and passes it down to younger generations
Will be more fit to survive future generations
Versus the ones who ignore it and think it’s better to just trench all the time
Most think the guys at the top have the biggest egos, usually the opposite
Relevant
Replying to @ecomversace
If you’re paying the agency tax it must be going to the savants
Which is 1 out of every 10 you might prospect
Thorough vetting is required
If you’re not prepared to get bent over by ad platforms + incompetent agencies you must learn the real skill of media buying
In 5 years $100M via ecom is going to be the new $1M
No time to fuck around
Most people don’t realize how new ecommerce and iPhones actually are
Boomer liquidity and kids born in 2010 entering the programmatic auction soon
There’s a reason you see young dudes from all around the world printing cash
Imagine all the older guys that have been in the game for 10 years+ already
Already matured out of the young lifestyle
The money and skills? Compounded
These guys are ghosts
Most people will tell you to build in public post once a day, spend hella screen time on social media, and a bunch of other things
What they won’t tell you is that if your personal/social identity is tied to your business/income/customers in such a manner
You will be/feel limited in business and scale
Liberal chicks still buying teslas bro
The business space is a bubble
Most of us nerds
Only we are tapped in to who the cracked operator behind the scenes is
90% of consumers don’t know or care who founded what they consume as long as they get what they want and the brand resonates
Zoom out
Focus on thinking big
Collecting cash
And protecting capital
There is no time to fuck around
Ghost is the goal









