How To Start a DTC, E-Comm business in 8 Hours or Less.

We live in an e-commerce economy. Whether through Amazon, Squarespace, or Shopify, I would venture that most people, particularly if they're millennials and Generation Z, do 80 or 90 percent of their shopping online right now, as opposed to driving to a store to buy just about anything. There’s no doubt that the number has risen since 2019, when millennials did 60 percent of their shopping online, and that’s largely due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

The crisis has also hit businesses in unprecedented ways. Because of COVID-19, a lot of brick-and-mortar retail has dried up, and while economists are optimistic about a rebound, growing traffic back to stores is going to take a lot of trust from consumers. Now more than ever, businesses need to sell directly to consumers through a website. People say COVID-19 is accelerating trends that were already in motion, which reinforces my belief that ECommerce — and starting a brand sold specifically via ECommerce — is the future. 

Through my experience in the advertising world, and in founding and developing the photographer-to-brand platform The Hub, I’ve helped many brands with their marketing. I’ve seen their challenges up close, and been able to help in a variety of ways. In the past couple of months in particular, it's been really cool to help take a product to market, and my clients have been selling thousands or tens of thousands. One just sold their millionth product, while another is almost 2x first-purchase profitable through Facebook ads: For every dollar she spends on Facebook ads, she makes almost two dollars from customers, which is out of control.

The life cycle of any ECommerce business is so much faster now than it was a decade ago. It doesn't mean that the work is easy, but it does mean you have your answer about whether your product will pop within a year or two. And while I’ve played the long-investment game, replete with all kinds of self-doubt and hesitation, I decided to build an eCommerce site for a product, scale it, bring it to market, and have it be profitable — as fast as possible. 

I gave myself a weekend to do it. It ended up taking 8 hours, because I know all the shortcuts. Here’s what I learned, why I was humbled along the way — and why I’m excited to do it again as soon as I can. 

How To Build a Brand in 8 Hours or Less

There are many hard parts to starting a business, but in my experience the hardest part during the first two or three years is finding product-market fit: You need to find a market that really wants and needs your product and you need to understand why they need it. I think there will be a whole generation of entrepreneurs that reverse engineer brands by running ads with different messages about the same product and letting the market tell them what they want.

I began my process on a Saturday. While my first idea ended up being an illegal one, I read an article once about how entrepreneurs need to be naughty, and brush up against rules or even bend them a little bit, if you're going to succeed. 

Ultimately, I didn't do it, so I don't mind admitting it: I thought, since people really care about their immune responses during COVID-19, maybe I could hack into a supply chain, get a whole bunch of vitamins to repackage and sell at profit. I wanted to ask a friend to make mock-ups of four different pill bottles that have completely different names and looks and feels, thereby giving me four entirely different brands, for which I would spin up four entirely different websites to see which one sells the best. Down to the name and the branding, there was nothing that wouldn’t be crowdsourced. We would let the market speak. 

But repackaging pills you did not manufacture is trademark infringement. And even if you create an LLC to protect yourself, certain aspects of trademark infringement or fraud allow companies to pierce the veil and come after you individually. (There’s also the immorality of it all, which we’ll get to another day.) But that thought reminded me of the need to find a product that could have outrageous margins, that people really felt they needed.

Ultimately, I called a friend who owns a textile company in Brooklyn and has been making really beautiful fabric face masks. I told her that I would love to sell her masks in advance and bake the turnaround time into the shipping, so that I could give her a week or two head’s up so she could manufacture the masks. It was in no way taking advantage of the pandemic: If my best friend had a supply chain that made really cool bracelets, I would have sold those. I just needed access to a product that was affordable and already had economies of scale. I had that access through my friend, who said she would get me pricing by that evening, so I took a guess that she would charge me six dollars a mask and built a site on Squarespace with that information. 

It took me about two hours to build a nice, seemingly optimized site that had a good shopping experience, and another hour or two to build a brand — from the name to the logo to the whole aesthetic. This part, if you’re not letting the market speak, can be personal: You might want to name your brand and pick the brand colors. There are certain things where, even as an entrepreneur listening to the market, you may choose to say, “Screw the world, this is my decision,” especially so you can speed up the launch process and put something out into the world. As Y Combinator says, “Just fucking launch already.” I knew I wanted to publish the simplest version of the website and the product, get feedback, and then build on top of it. 

So that’s exactly what I did.

How to Introduce Your Product to the Facebook Feed — and Listen Accordingly

To market the masks, I downloaded maybe 80 really provocative images from unsplash.com which is a royalty free website for images that I highly recommend for any purpose. I found all kinds of images about Donald Trump to craft ads relating to how his administration has addressed the pandemic, and images of the Statue of Liberty wearing a mask to run to New Yorkers as well as other location-specific photo ideas. I also started an Instagram, and bought 10,000 followers from Russia, as well as fake likes and comments for $150 total. (Some of my friends commented on top, so the Instagram looked like it was this big, successful thing.) 

I started selling the masks for $19.99, plus shipping, and started running ads which were performing incredibly well. Facebook has gotten incredibly sensitive, so some of my more provocative ads were rejected, but I was still able to get clicks for under 20 cents a click, which is very low. I also ran traffic to very specific geographies, based on my research of where certain COVID-19 hotspots were at the time. The copy in the ads would be very customized — “Jacksonville is spiking, have you protected yourself?” — and I ran those against people who were fans of the Democratic party and liked certain Democratic candidates. Yet even though I was able to buy traffic, it wasn't converting into sales as well as I wanted. 

The complete funnel of an ECommerce sale includes several steps: People visit the site, then a smaller number of people view a product, of which a smaller number of people add it to cart. From there, fewer and fewer people view their cart, initiate checkout, and ultimately complete checkout. For me, a lot of people hit my site and viewed the mask… and then stopped.

There are typically two reasons why kinks form in the hose at various moments of the ECommerce process: Either you haven't given your consumer enough information on why they should pay for this particular product, or your product is too expensive for what it is. Both elements came into play for me: I was getting a lot of comments on the ads from people wanting to know more about the masks, so I called my friend and got more information on the fabric and how the masks were constructed so that I could add as much detail and information as possible, which helped a bit. But a lot of the comments were also worried about price gouging, and that I was charging too much money for something that people really need, especially given that COVID-19 is literally life and death. 

I had no interest in making a large profit off of something people genuinely needed. I was just trying to find arbitrage in the funnel. But as it turned out, my friend was ultimately going to charge me nine dollars a mask, so my margins were very thin as it is. I also needed to be first-purchase profitable because these masks are reusable. (If you are selling a product with repeat customers, it doesn't matter if you're not first-purchase profitable.) As a result, I edited the website and started selling my friend’s masks in packs of three or five, and adjusted the marketing accordingly so that now the great thing about the masks were their patterns that allowed consumers to be fashion-forward with how they protect themselves. I also ran ads that told customers that masks make great gifts to protect friends and family.

Even though I lowered the per-unit price, I was still getting comments about price-gouging. At the time, my ads were running me around $15 per mask, which meant I couldn't sell the product unless I was willing to lose money on each unit of product I sold. So after about eight hours, I shut the project down and refunded the money of the people that did buy the masks.

The Time Limitations of My 8-Hour Business

We live in this world where you can spin up a ECommerce company in about a week if you know what you're doing, and move more patiently and slowly than I did. The only part that takes time, and thoughtful talent and energy, is building your supply chain and making a good product. But if you're borrowing someone else's product, you can create the funnel in a weekend.

That’s largely because of the sophisticated algorithms on sites like Facebook or Google, which know more about your audience than you ever will. If a seller runs their ads effectively, they can reach consumers with a product that they really really want and break through the noise in a way that shouldn't be possible. And If you want to be rich as an entrepreneur, basing your product marketing around what people want is the way to do it. It’s dystopian, but you can reverse-engineer success by taking bellwethers of market interest and unspooling your brand from there. 

There are certain shortcuts I took during my eight-hour experiment that some people would say are “bad,” like buying followers and bots and likes and comments. I could have built a following up over a couple of weeks, and taken a little bit more time. I could have also built my site on Shopify or another platform that takes more time and coding ability. It’s really all about, how much money do you have? Do you want the cheap version of an ECommerce business, or a peg or two above that? 

It also takes time to figure out what makes your product special in the eyes of would-be customers or repeat customers that really love your product. That's a very labor-intensive, complicated, and nuanced process. But if you roughly know what you're doing, you should have something live within a couple of weeks. (You can also call me and I’ll help you.) Even a site that's just collecting emails is better than delaying a launch: You should be getting feedback and responses from your audience as early as possible.

The Emotional Thrill Ride of Being an Entrepreneur

Every entrepreneur, whether they tell you or not, is shouldering a lot of self-doubt. Are you someone who sees a market opportunity that everyone else is missing, which makes you an absolute genius, or are you a complete fool and you should fall in line and do it the way everyone else is doing it? As an entrepreneur, you have to believe so deeply in the adventure you’re on. There's so much excitement involved in that, but there’s also so much devastation in failure. 

The fact that my mask business “failed” in eight hours wasn’t my fault. It was market economics, and the unit economics of the specific product I was trying to sell. Even so, I went through the entire emotional spectrum of being an entrepreneur. You start out wide-eyed, believing that you can pull this off. Sometimes you find a golden goose and you are first-purchase profitable. Sometimes you get punched in the face and you feel like a failure. 

I went through this entire arc of entrepreneurship in eight hours, which was a useful reality check especially because I went into my experiment thinking about how I've built a profitable ECommerce site for so many clients and I know all the shortcuts. I was cocky: I thought, I am better than the challenge. And I got my ass kicked. 

You have to be a little bullheaded in entrepreneurship. You have to believe that you see something others don't, and that you're destined for greatness. It’s hard to get out of bed every day unless you don't feel that way in some way. But that thinking can sometimes lead you to think that you’re stronger or smarter than the market. In reality, the market has complete control the entire time. You are so lucky as to ride on top of it, and unless you have such profound respect for the power of the thing that you're riding on, you will get fucked. 

That Saturday, I forgot to check my ego at the door, and I went in with a lot of confidence. If I made any mistakes, it was in forgetting to respect the rules of the game. You and I and every other entrepreneur — we all just work here, and the work we do is really, really hard. 

How Long Should Building an ECommerce Business Take? It Depends

If you're smart about it, you can start a company in a very abridged way in a weekend. If you don't, it might take you a month or two to stand up the company of your dreams and start getting feedback from real customers. (Again, call me if you’d like help — I’ve been under the hood for dozens of companies that have sold hundreds of thousands of products.) 

I’ll be honest: Starting a company is risky. It’s even riskier during COVID-19, and capital will be harder to shake out of the investor tree. Yet people are more comfortable than ever to work from home, and more customers are interested in buying things online than ever before. So there’s never been a better time to start a very simple company that listens to the market and reverse-engineers a product based on that. If you can do it in a profitable way where you keep costs down, or you are first purchase profitable quite quickly, why wouldn’t you? Because as risky as starting a business might be, COVID-19 has also accelerated the trend toward ECommerce and direct-to-consumer marketing.

A big tenant of entrepreneurship is, “fail fast.” I did that, definitionally, more than when that term was coined. I don't regret it. I'm going to try it again in other ways. Because failing is part of being a human as much as it is part of being an entrepreneur. I was humbled by it, but also invigorated by it. We should all be so lucky as to wake up on a Saturday and be so excited by something that we can't help ourselves, but to do it.