So What's This All About?

Why Even Do This?

You probably know some marketing. And I know some marketing. So we both know that I'm supposed to lay out the "what's in it for me" value proposition ASAP. (And I'd better do it sharpish as I wasted the above-the-fold text being polite).

So here goes nothing.

This is gonna be (one of) the most interesting DTC resources out there.

And it'll be that because I'll post the reality of what's happening, as it's happening. That means the downs as well as the ups.
This is a bit of a risk on my part. For one, I haven't 'made it' yet at all. Meaning I don't have the convenience of writing my own hindsight history from the comfort of the winner's podium. Instead, I could utterly balls it up and my failures will be irritatingly public.

There is also the risk of publishing useful numbers and others using them against me. But overall I believe this will be worth it, as the content's gonna be that much more useful for it.

There are plenty of people posting top-level Shopify dashboards and Facebook Ads screenshots (often suspicious).
I'll provide deeper analysis, insights and updates on how things are really going as I grow these bootstrapped brands. The challenges, setbacks, tests, mini-wins - everything.
Speaking of, what are the brands? 

Today's Brands

The first one is a health and wellness brand called Healthy Yeti.
It's done...let me switch tabs to Shopify...7,363 orders so far.

Feel free to check it out.
If you do, try and do it on mobile please because on desktop there are a bunch of little CSS bugs that I haven't fixed 😅.
But therein is the classic bootstrapper's conundrum - too many todos (and not enough resource to do the todos).
You'll notice a lack of an 'About Us' page and probably a million other things that would be nice, but ultimately aren't needed right now.

This is because I'm currently getting my arse kicked by the New Product Development (NPD) and Supply Chain side of things - more posts coming on this.
This was one pillar of the business I hadn't had prior experience with as my background covers marketing, ecommerce, data, a bit of coding and finance. Suffice to say it was a learning curve, which I'm further along with but probably still on.
So until those are good, fonts and GIFs on the homepage can wait.

The second one is a pet brand called All The Sniffs.
Yes, yes... I completely copy/paste'd the theme. (If you 'Inspect Element' you'll see I didn't even change the class names).
This one has had a lot less resource but has nevertheless put 1,407 orders on the board.

The Journey So Far

Both brands have gone through a push of New Product Development. The rough plan was to test several products as cost-effectively as possible (remember, bootstrapping here). And then double down on the winner/s.
This meant a lot of scrimping. Coding the website myself, doing all the customer service and plenty of Upwork. Then constantly hawk-eyeing cash and dying a bit inside with every failed ad test (my God it's different when you're self-funding the ads).

The world was still reeling from COVID and supply chain issues so there were some pretty hefty lead times. One was 6 months..!
In fact, the pet brand was spun up in part because the wait time was so long for the health products. I was happier to do several product/brand tests in parallel than suffer the long lead times in series.

My main challenge is finding good ol' product market fit.
I'm more comfortable scaling up a product that's already working as that's where my career experience has been.
Doing the 'zero to one' is a more elusive art form that I'm having to learn on the spot. And while I have more data about what's working, in truth I'm still not fully there.

There are still tweaks and improvements needed to the product and packaging before they're ready to have more marketing resource put behind them. That's being worked on now, so I'd post some deeper articles on those soon.

Once those bumps are ironed out then it should be time to invest more in the marketing, website etc and scale them up.
I.e. the fun stuff! 

So this should be an interesting point in the journey to join. The 'zero to one' build is only part done and there's plenty still to play for.

What Is My Motivation?

This is a fair question. After all, most people running DTCs don't spend time writing detailed articles - they have a brand to run!

Here's why I think this will be good for me too:

1. Solo bootstrapping is a lot of head-down mode
   It's a lot of hours hitting the keyboard and looking at a screen. Publishing articles and updates should help with finding and chatting with others on a similar path.
2. There's a more open community now
   I don't know if it's just me, but now there are a tonne of interesting people posting online compared to 4 or 5 years ago. You can't be certain of specifics, but I do believe if you put out good things consistently, then doors will open and good things will follow.
3. Public accountability
   ‍Self-motivation is a challenge. It can be draining when my internal willpower is the only driver. So these public updates give me an external motivator to keep me productive because I'll always need something new to write about.

Come Along For The Ride

C'mon, you didn't think this article would finish without a nice call-to-action, did you?
‍

⬇️ Submit your email in the signup form below!  

(I didn't say it'd be subtle)

But how's this - I'll make the following pledges:

• I'll post the inconvenient fails even though I won't really want to
• I'll put extra elbow grease in to include content you can use directly in your DTC company, e.g. templates, ad copy, ready-made Google Sheets etc.
• I won't blur out stuff on my screenshots
  (excluding things like IDs or personal info...🧐)
• I'll try and make it a bit of a laugh along the way

Maybe these brands will blow up and become huge.
Or maybe they'll just blow up (the bad kind).
Either way, it should be informative and maybe even entertaining.

Drop your email into the form below and catch you on the next one :)

Cheers!

- Greg