One hot take for every year of my life.
This content was originally published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 06.25.2023.
1. Building a brand and building a direct response business are two different things. The way you’re accessing consumer demand is fundamentally different. A lot of tactics that work for brand building don’t work for direct response and v.v. Avoid frustration by deciding which type of business you intend to run.
2. Ralph Lauren started out selling ties directly to wholesale accounts–knocking on doors; a type of direct response. It became a capital-B Brand later. If you’re bootstrapping a business you need to start scrappy.
3. If you want to start a successful brand, you need to bring something to the table–skills or capital. “An idea” doesn’t count. You can’t outsource product development, marketing, finance and ops to third parties. What value are you adding? You don’t have to be “the best” at any of these things, but you need to know enough to run it yourself or lead an agency partner.
4. The best way to build a “status symbol” brand is still physical retail. You want aspirational people using your products publicly. You can either hire celebrities (expensive) or go to market in physical retail and get in the hands of “local celebrities”–the stereotypical “Jones’s”.
5. If you need to break even on your eCommerce business in year one, follow the direct response playbook. Design a product into an existing “burning need”. Speak clearly to your audience in a relatable way.
6. “Brand” is going to be a lot more open source in the age of AI. Expect more stunts that make the public wonder “is this real, or is this a joke?”. Loose brand codes make you antifragile. If you show up everywhere with consistency, it’s easier for bad actors to spoof you realistically. Of course, AI-generated brand stunts are their own form of PR–a sign that people care enough to clown.
7. There are a few hard and fast rules for running Meta ads–things that you must do to give yourself a fighting chance of success. The gist of these rules is that you can’t over-segment. In 2015 you could scale to $10k/day in spend with hundreds of micro campaigns. You can’t do that anymore.
8. That said, there is a ton of dogma in the DTC community about account structure and testing. Everyone has the “right” formula that MUST be followed, and they’ll dunk on anyone who does something different. But, inevitably, the only way to get the detailed formula is to sign up for a monthly membership.
9. SaaS is the ~magic weight loss pill~ of the eCommerce world. SaaS cannot fix your business (although it can help amplify something that is already working). Brands on DTC Twitter are not succeeding because of the SaaS they promote, and they’re probably receiving referral fees for those mentions.
10. The “client” of most enterprise SaaS is not the end user, it’s the VP+-level decision maker looking to build an empire so they become harder to lay off. That’s why most enterprise software is impossible to use and requires a team of 10 to maintain.
11. If your affiliate program sales are primarily coming from coupon/deal sites, you’re doing it wrong. Go rent a higher quality audience somewhere else.
12. Most email testing is a waste of time. Most of what wins boils down to (1) articulating your promotion in the most aggressive, straightforward terms possible and (2) pattern breaking. Put big numbers up front/above the fold and vary your SL/creative approach every 2-4 weeks. I just saved you weeks of your life.
13. If a vendor approaches you with promises of a big, vague return–Increase your conversion rate by 300%! 10x your ROI!–run. And take a moment to ask yourself how you arrived in a place where these pitches appealed to you.
14. 9 times out of 10, hiring a director or VP from a large brand is the most deadly decision a bootstrapped brand can make. I’m including venture-backed DTC in the “large brand” category here.
15. Your success is determined by a handful of decisions–product, price, and positioning. If you get these wrong you can still “grind it out”, but you’ll always be playing defense.
16. Jesse is absolutely right–most brands are half-assing many things instead of whole-assing one thing. Brands under $100M need to focus ruthlessly on profitable customer acquisition. If you can’t get Meta ads working, Pinterest ads are not going to be your secret unlock.
17. Customer acquisition does not have to mean Meta ads. Think outside the box. It might take longer to gain momentum and it might be harder to measure. But it could also be more sustainable.
18. Stop asking for the best brands to emulate. You don’t know their financial objectives, you don’t know their true audience and you don’t know if they’re profitable.
19. If you’re an entrepreneur with limited capital, go out and make 100 sales in person before you start testing Meta ads. Try to get insight on every rejection–was your product too expensive, not relevant, not special enough? If you can’t close 100 sales IRL, you probably can’t run acquisition profitably on Meta. I guess the caveat would be if you were really awkward IRL.
20. If you’re asking yourself “But where am I going to find 100 qualified people to pitch?” then you need to learn more about marketing before you launch that brand.
21. Marketing SaaS is a lot like marketing fashion. The product can be knocked off easily, so you have to create a reputation/hype cycle around it and pass the hot potato when hype is at its peak. Most SaaS will not be a fit for the venture model in a few years, in the same way that most DTC brands are not. This is especially true for Shopify apps.
22. The exception is SaaS that becomes more valuable the more information you feed it. Facebook and Google fall into this category. It’s hard to pull off, because you need a good algorithm and a use case that people will pay for.
23. Experienced retail leaders who “came up” circa 1995 – 2014 know how to put merchandise in front of qualified traffic. They don’t know how to generate qualified traffic. It doesn’t mean that experience is invalid. But it does often mean that they don’t understand what to do when sales are down.
24. My last full time job before going solo was at a globally recognized brand. I went into their NYC office once during my two years of employment. I remember texting my husband from the office:
Me: “I feel like I’m in an episode of Succession.”
Him: “Which character are you?”
Me: “An extra.”
Kind of sums up why I am no longer there. The Season 4 plot point where Kendal was urging his lackeys to “make the numbers bigger, but still realistic” at 1am was triggering.
25. A publicly traded company cannot operate a luxury brand. Luxury strategy and “let’s make those numbers pop next quarter” are oil and water. The exception is a public company where more than 50% of the shares/voting rights are owned by one person.
26. The modern corporation is in the business of externalizing as many costs as possible. That’s a cheap way to find Alpha. No need to invent a better mousetrap when you can simply pass the hot potato better than the next guy. Scale becomes a self-perpetuating moat.
27. The fashion industry takes itself way too seriously. Most of the big brands to emerge out of the past decade have been streetwear/athletic wear: Lululemon, Alo Yoga, On Running, Aviator Nation, Golden Goose, Supreme…I could go on and on. The era of ~dressing fancy~ as a status symbol is dead.
28. When you take a job offer you’re placing a bet on management. If you’re joining a small company, try to meet with the owner for at least 30 minutes before you take the job. Make sure they’re mentally stable and have good ideas. If you’re joining a large company, read everything you can find about their financial results, strategy, etc.
29. DTC is great for building lifestyle businesses, less great for building a nine or ten figure exit. “Brand heat” still counts for a lot when it comes to valuation. You don’t really build brand heat online, although online channels can contribute to it.
30. The exception is celebrity-backed brands. SKIMS and Jones Road Beauty are both DTC-first and growing exponentially. But the founders of both those brands won their fans and awareness in the physical world first.
31. The hourly rate for a therapist (without insurance) is $150-300. If an employees’ effective hourly rate is lower than that, it is not their job to manage your emotions. Yelling at people, using your authority to belittle or intimidate them, or (god forbid) throwing things at them–all abusive behavior. Get yourself to a real therapist and work your shit out before you manage people.
32. Negotiate every job offer, even if they say “this is the best we can do” upon presenting the offer. Their reaction to negotiation tells you everything you need to know about how they’ll treat you as an employee. If they rescind the offer, good riddance.
33. “Digital marketing” provided marketers with a wealth of information. But that information gives us an inflated sense of our own power. Most of digital marketing (yes, even Meta ads) is demand capture. That’s not powerful or sustainable unless you’re creating demand somewhere else.
34. The bell curve meme is accurate. The need to hyper-analyze every campaign and landing page is an average strategy with a local maximum. You can only break out of that local maximum with good instincts and new ideas.
35. In marketing, you get what you pay for*. I added the asterisk because there are a lot of grifters in the industry who are only good at marketing themselves. Cheap is almost never good, but sometimes expensive isn’t good either. Challenging! That’s why it pays to learn a little bit about your tactics before you try to outsource them.
& One For Good Luck: It’s healthy to assume the best intentions from people. It’s also a luxury. Realistically, you will encounter many immoral users. The trick is learning to identify these people early and avoid them.