You launched your brand now WTF do you do

Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this email, I hope you’ve got feet up, beverage in hand, NBA playoffs on the screen behind you, and you’re ready to dive into the basics. This email ended up being about 9 pages long, so get cozy. But I promise I’ll keep it as entertaining as possible, you should be able to hear my voice just reading this to you in your head.

Before we get into it, did you hear that we launched a Slack group for Limited Supply? We’re at 1,300 people now, and the conversations are so good. Join it here: Limited Supply Slack. It’s just a bunch of us marketing/growth/DTC nerds, nerding out, as nerds do.

Lastly, we are hiring at Sharma Brands and HOOX. We need video editors, account managers, and copywriters. If you’re any of those roles, or you know someone who is, click the position and apply on the Google Form. Someone from my team will reach out about next steps. Thanks!

Ok, let’s get into today’s email

With all the content I put out, I try to target 3 types of readers:

1. The bootstrapped founder — first-time founder who’s looking to maximize output with limited resources, time and capital.
2. The CEO or CMO of a scaling retail or CPG brand.
3. Kirsten Green, or any investor who writes the first check into the next category-leading brand.

For today, I’m going to focus heavily on the first one. Today’s newsletter is a summary of about 75% of the MentorPass calls that I have. I’m not able to take as many as I used to, but I figured putting out today’s email will help a ton of people, and also just serve as a good live URL for me to share to others. If you’re wondering how to setup a call through MentorPass, just click here.

Picture this…

You just quit your cushy salaried job, where your car and mortgage payments are automatically paid once your paycheck clears into your personal checking account. You leave because you have “the next big idea” for a category defining CPG/DTC/Retail brand.

You do your R&D, speak to friends, order samples, find the one sample and turn it into the perfect V1 of your product, contract some freelancers or an agency to help you with your branding, website design, packaging design, and get your Shopify store and 3PL all setup.

You order some inventory, and now you feel like you are ready to launch.

You start small. You text and email everyone that you know, getting them all hyped! You start posting on social media, and you even try “boosting” a few of your posts to spread the word.

You launch and day 1 is a huge success! Your family, friends, former colleagues, etc. all buy from your store. You are feeling euphoric. This is it!

Everyone congratulates you on social media and your ex-BF/GF reaches out “just to say hello” but really they’re just incredibly proud of you for finally taking that leap.

You’re on top of the world. You know that you are going to be “the next big thing in DTC.”

Then... Day 2 rolls around and your sales drop off a cliff. Your site visits are down 50% and website conversion rate went from 7% to 2%. On day 3, your sales drop by another 50% from day 2, and now your conversion rate is at 1%.

The buzz dies down and your “launch” is officially over. People start to move on. Even though you had all this buzz on day 1, you come to realize that you are now just another brand on the market that needs to compete.

As the founder, you start to panic. Now what?

Frankly, I’ve seen this exact thing happen more times than I’d like to admit, which is why I wanted to eliminate those launch day scaries by writing the ultimate playbook for new DTC founders who are trying to go from zero to 1. I just also went through this myself. It’s one thing doing this with clients, but it’s another thing when doing it for yourself — your own savings in the bi-product of these Shopify dashboards showing days with no orders. It makes NO sense why people are coming to your website and not buying... Why the F can’t they see what I see in the brand?!

Remember, in business, hope is not a strategy and you need a plan if you want to succeed.

So with that in mind, here’s the exact playbook that I’ve used to help launch tons of brands going from 0-1.

Although it’s not guaranteed that every brand will succeed (did I mention that launching and building a business is really hard?...) I can say that if you follow these steps you won’t waste time or your hard-earned capital pursuing the wrong things. You will know that you gave it the good old fashioned Sharma try and you can rest easy knowing that you pulled the levers that were in your control to try to make things work. Of course, I must add the disclaimer that this MIGHT not work for your business... but I can say this has worked every single time I’ve done it.

Alright, let’s dive in...

The Optional Pre-Launch Test

This is something that Justin Mares and Nick Mares did beautifully for Kettle & Fire, a 9-figure bone-broth company. You can see Justin’s breakdown of the full process vhis website. But in essence, here’s what they did:

• Made a landing page with a fake brand, pushing the value props, benefits and outcomes a customer could expect from being a customer of this brand. 
• Spent some money behind ads (they did it with Bing, I recommend doing it with Meta) to get traffic on the page.
• Have a conversion event on the landing page — they used an Order Now button and processed paid orders. You could do this with email capture as well, as long as you up your expectations of what numbers to expect. 30% conversion on a landing page to checkout is a great metric for checkout, but for email collection, it should be at least double to feel validated.
• They refunded customers who ordered the product and told them it was coming soon.

Throught this process, they validated demand, ensured there is “juice” to be squeezed with this angle and story, and it gave them the confidence to stand the brand up.

If you’re able to do this, you’re one-step ahead of making sure you don’t waste any money on the further steps, if the idea doesn’t convert. The paid media test should be somewhere between $5 to $10k in my opinion.

Launch day is irrelevant to long-term success.

I hate to break it to you, but launch days basically have no impact on your brand’s long-term success. Yes, launch days are always fun and you should try to maximize the buzz that you get from your launch but you need to have a plan in place for day 2, week 2, month 2, etc. that’s going to help you sustain growth, customer acquisition and sell-through of your products. As soon as you launch, there is now a ticking time bomb on the inventory, the fees that accrue with that just sitting and not moving, and the rest of the money being spent to “keep the lights on” for the business.

So with that said, here is the ingredient list, and then I’ll get into the recipe:

• A landing page that you can modify, edit, update, swap imagery/copy on.
• A static Meta ad template you can edit/modify based on learnings (I recommend doing this in Figma). $15k to $20k in advertising budget that you’re OK with losing.
• A video editor to help iterate on ideas (if you have no money, then look overseas!) 
• Content creators - you want a small group of 4-7 people you can rely on to create good content for you, at a price you can afford, that tells the story of your brand in the right way.

Now, the recipe.

Landing page and offer

As mentioned, the first thing to do is start with a landing page (you could do this with HOOX!) with a clear offer, some compelling copy, some product photos and a way to buy it.

Just your product, at full price, won’t convert unless you’re an anomaly like Jolie where your product-market fit is off the charts. Think about what kinds of offers you can run that work in your favor and in the prospective- customer’s favor, too. Here are some ideas:

• 10% off your order 
• Gift with purchase (free candle, free case, something that’s high-margin, high-perceived value, and contributes to the product experience) 
• Spend $X, Get $Y off your order 
• Buy X, Get 1 free

Those 4 are probably the easiest to start with and most applicable. If you have a subscription business, then you can incentivize a future subscription order to be discounted or free.

For landing pages, you want to build something functional, it doesn’t need to look like it came from Red Antler, but it needs to look like your mom can come to the page knowing nothing, and leave with the understanding of:

• What is the product
• Why does this brand exist
• Why is this product going to better my life
• Why is this company the best option on the market
• How fast do I get it if I order today
• Why should I trust this brand or product

I explicitly mention that because as founders, you’re drinking your own kool-aid... you have zero clue about the questions that people have. It’s always those 6. Just answer those, repeatedly. It’ll work.

As you start generating sales, make sure you go above and beyond with your customer experience. These are your first customers, of what could be a $100M/year business soon. They will remember being the first customer. You should remember them too. When someone buys, send them an email thanking them for their purchase, letting them know that you see them, they supported a new company getting off the ground, and that you’re there if you can be of any help.

If you don’t know how to write this email, just put this prompt into Chat GPT:

I need to write an email for an e-commerce business. We are a new startup with a mission to [insert mission here as you would say it to a 3rd grader]. Our first product is a [insert product here — not like “Hint Water” but rather “still, sugar-free, flavored water with light fruit essence flavorings]. I want to write a simple thank you note that will be sent as a plain text email to customers after buying. This email will come from Lauren, who is our head of customer experience. The company name is “[insert company name here]” and we just launched a couple months ago. This shouldn’t be too long, and should be written at a 5th grade reading level. Give me 10 options please.

You’ll get 10 options full of gold. Modify that to your liking, add a CTA to get some sort of reply, and set it up post-purchase. Why is this so important? It leads me to the next critical step: collecting reviews.

PS - replies are huge for you as a business. If the invisible email gods see that people reply to your inbox, it won’t be considered spam in the future. That’s why even for my newsletter, I encourage you to tell me your favorite cuisine (even though I do love going through the replies).

Review Collection

Now that influencers can be bought, media companies can be bought, and everyone is extra weary of what’s real and what’s not... one of your best levers for social proof is customer reviews. This means customers who bought your product, filling out the Okendo review submission form on your website.

Once you see someone’s product has been delivered, you should have a plain-text email that goes out a few days after delivery, asking them to leave a review. Emphesize the fact that you’re a new business, and their contribution would mean the world to you (it will, and it’s ok to be honest about that).

In my opinion, until you’re doing about 100 orders per day, you should focus on sending these out 1 by 1, from an actual email account, not through an automated email. You want the highest-potential deliverability rate, and you want this to show up in the Important tab of their inbox.

Get a review, ideally with imagery attached, and thank them somehow. It can be a $10 gift card back to your store, it can be something more personal like buying them a slice of pizza (a $5 Venmo). Up to you, and how you want to do it coming from your brand.

Organic Content Marketing Strategy

Emailing and texting all of your friends about your new product and your launch date is definitely the right strategy but you can’t stop there! You’re going to need some compelling ads if you want to scale.

That said, organic social is a great way to test and learn before you start running ads. Especially with the ways that social platform feeds are setup today — you can put anything out in the world, and all of a sudden get discovered by 2 million people overnight.

One of the reasons for having content creators in arms reach is so you can test what does well on places like TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and Twitter. As soon as you find a video that works, you double down. Until you do find something that works, keep posting. My friend JT made a course for short-form content, but even the free 50- page PDF is full of gold. Highly recommend downloading it here (just wait for the pop-up to show up).

Paid Ads Strategy

Separately on the ads side, you can get rolling with some tests. Before you do this, make sure that your landing page is good to go. You can “test” the LP by even directing your organic social traffic and attention to the landing page. Here is how to get ads setup:

1. Put together a list of angles that you think make sense. The best way to do this, is to ask yourself “Why should someone buy my product” and answer it in as many ways as possible. They can be short and brief. Just list them.
2. Take those ideas and try to combine those that are very similar. If you’re unable to generate any ideas, then go to Chat GPT and ask it what angles it recommends. Remember to be very specific about who your customer is, what your brand is, and why you exist. Otherwise you’ll get a very generic answer that won’t work.
3. Turn those angles into briefs for video editors and content creators. You can also take those angles and develop static ad creative (images in Figma) that you can run on Meta. Why statics? The CPM is about 1⁄3 of the CPM it takes to show a video ad.
4. Set a budget of $500 per day and start testing the ads in Meta. Make sure that you focus on specific customer audiences as you build out the campaign. Don’t just go broad, despite what you see on Twitter or in publications. We are talking about $0 in historical spend... going broad works when you have enough ad spend history for Meta to know who to go after. You have to think of the Meta ads engine as a human... if it has no learnings, how will it know what to do?
5. Use Microsoft Clarity on your landing page and website to understand what is working, what’s interesting, and what is just fluff to prospective customers. If you have no changes to make, you’re lying to yourself. It’s okay to have a horrible V1 of your site, as long as you’re willing to improve it and know that your first attempt doesn’t need to be perfect.

Keep repeating steps 3 and 4 until you find something that starts to work. You want to look at these metrics improving:

• CPM: Cost per 1k impressions. This tells you how much Meta likes your content and ad setup. If this is high, its not favorable. If it’s low, you’re doing exactly what aligns with their goals: keeping users engaged. 
• CPA: Cost per acquisition. This is the cost is takes to acquire 1 new customer to your brand.
• CTR: Click-through rate. This tells you how good your ad creative is, and it’s helpful to learn where your funnel is broken. High CTR, but low conversion rate? Means your site/landing page needs work. Low CTR? Means your ads need work.
• CPC: Cost per click. This is just a good number to monitor. It’s a function of CTR & CPM, so if you see this going down, it means you’re doing what the platform wants, and whats good for your business. 
• CVR: conversion rate. This can be looked at from the ads (i.e. how many people who saw our ads bought) or the website (i.e. how many of the site visitors became customers).

Why is all this helpful outside of just driving sales? Well, this creates the fastest feedback loop for you to be able to understand and respond to the market. You can test new messaging angles, new styles of creative, new product opportunities, etc. You’re building the worlds most efficient focus group with a customer acquisition funnel.

Double Down

As you start to find things that work (angles, styles of creative, hooks, messaging, etc) do NOT lose sight of constantly testing and learning. Most people fail with paid ads because they don’t take the time to go through all the steps above. They run ads once, can’t make it work, lose $4k and then never try again.

Once you start getting customers in the door, don’t forget to focus and invest in the other low-hanging fruit

• Using the social proof you get in the ads themselves 
• Duplicating landing pages and testing new angles
• Optimizing subject lines in your email to test for higher open rates 
• Setting up SMS collection and flows, especially abandon cart or abandon checkout flows 
• Iterating on the email collection pop up to get from 4% to 12% 
• Sending surveys to customers about what they love from your brand, what they hate, and what else they’d like to see.

Upsells, Cross-Sells, Product, and Channel Expansion

Remember earlier how I mentioned the gift with purchase (GWP)? Think about how to expand your product lineup with that in mind. What will be your tier-1 products that you want people to buy, what will be your tier-2 products, and what are your add-ons that can become GWPs or upsells.

If you’re a skincare brand and you’re just selling one product for $29, you’ll never make money on the first purchase. But if you sell the one for $29, then there’s a pop up asking if you want a second one or to subscribe, then in the cart it’s pushing an add-on product, and post-purchase it pushes you a tier-2 product at a discount... you’ve now 4x’d your AOV, and can make money on the first order.  

As you increase ad spend on Meta, you can turn on Google, and maybe TikTok. Although, I personally think you can get to a decent size with just Meta alone. Jumping on TV, OOH, or podcast ads can all wait. The highest leverage thing yuo could do as you’re slowly growing between the 5 and 6-figure monthly revenue mark, is getting earned media (influecners, creators, and editors to post) about your product.

Again, and as you probably know, there are so many tools of the trade that can help you drive new growth and reach new scale but this 5 step process is exactly where I would start.

It’s wild because I still haven’t even talked about retail, wholesale, influencers, partnerships, SMS, mobile apps, OOH, CTV, events, link placements in newsletters, sponsoring podcasts, the literal dozens of other things that you can do to grow to 8 and 9 figures as a DTC brand.

This email is really for that 0-1 founder who is trying to get their first million “cha-ching” notifications from the Shopify app. These tactics are the foundation but they are still just the tip of the iceberg for multi-8 figure annual growth.

Anyway, I hope that this helps and gives you a blueprint to follow as you get started on your entrepreneurial journey. Starting and growing DTC brands has been one of the most fun and rewarding things that I have done and it’s been an incredible journey to say the least.

If you found this helpful, please tweet about it! The more entrepreneurs who get to this newsletter to read this content, the better the overall ecosystem does.

Ok, now onto some fun stuff...

Vendor of the Week:

Highbeam — The banking partner that helps you optimize your banking to make you more money as an eCommerce brand.

When the SVB collapse happened, I was sort of surprised to know that banks had investors. Similar to airports, I never really thought about how banks start or if they’re funded... turns out they are. So then I thought, “Ok, but how do they make money?”. Well, they just take your money that you put there, and they farm it out and try to earn more than what they owe you.

Now, with Highbeam, you can also farm your money out and earn 4% APY on it. In addition, here’s what else Highbeam does well:

• Instant payouts from Amazon and Shopify (2 business days faster = 10% faster, with 20 business days per month).
• There are no fees. It’s literally called “No-fee banking”.
• 2% cash back on ad spend when you use their credit card.

Outside of just capital resources, their dashboard and interface is setup for DTC brands. You can see when fulfillment costs have suddenly gone up and you need to quickly figure out why, or if sales have gone down compared to the ad spend.

Highbeam is aiming to be the go-to bank for all DTC brands, and I see why so many brands have made the move over — it’s just built to make your life easier as an operator of a DTC brand.

If you want to setup a time to learn more about Highbeam, click this link and choose a time convenient for you. You can also go to their website and browse around the product features. I recommend checking out their credit/lending guide.

LP of the Week:

This LP is for one of my favorite brands (which is always so awesome to see when a brand I love wants a page), Magic Mind.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PAGE!

The page is hyper focused on driving trial, which, as a beverage company, your entire goal is “Cans in Hands” as you scale. Not only does the LP explain everything carefully, but as soon as you make your selection of the variant you want to buy, you go to a beautifully optimized Shopify checkout page, as well.

If you’re unsure how we would build a LP for you, book a demo with HOOX and let’s talk through what we can do for you at HOOX. When you buy a HOOX page, we take care of research, strategy, wireframing, copywriting, designing, and developing the page. It’s a low-lift process for you! Book a demo here! 

That's all for this week

Hopefully today’s email was valuable for you, even if you’re not a first-time founder! Sometimes the basics are all you need. Also, have you seen any cool use cases for Chat GPT yet? I’m just really getting into it. All In Podcast has gotten me hooked on trying ideas.

I hope that you have an amazing upcoming week. Get a workout in, exhaust yourself completely, get 9 hours of sleep, and stay hydrated. When should I just launch a Sunday Newsletter collab with a hydration company? Maybe soon.

Ok I’m done. Have the best week ever!