Ecommerce Conversations, By Practical Ecommerce

Andrew Faris is a former pastor who migrated to digital marketing. From there he rose to CEO of 4x400, an ecommerce aggregator that once owned seven brands. Having recently resigned from that position, he's now assessing priorities and evaluating his next career move. It's a not uncommon position for many executives and entrepreneurs.

I first interviewed Sean McGinnis for this podcast in November 2020. He had recently arrived at Kuru Footwear, a direct-to-consumer shoe manufacturer, as chief marketing officer. One year later, he's president of the company, and sales are booming.

It's been a wild ride for Rick Wilson. He started in ecommerce in the 1990s as a salesman with Miva, the pioneering platform. In 2007 he joined an investor group that purchased the business. Fast forward to 2022 and Wilson is Miva's CEO. He recently completed the company's second capital raise and authored a second book.

Ryan Magin founded Viral Edits, a video agency, roughly two years ago. He creates original and repurposed videos for brands and influencers, focusing on TikTok and Instagram. The business has grown dramatically. The process is much more difficult than it appears, he says, requiring hours of video watching, editing, and nuance.

Having arrived from Estonia 14 years ago, Peep Laja has launched three companies: CXL for e-learning, Speero for conversion consulting, and Wynter for B2B customer intelligence. "I've always been entrepreneurial," he told me. "I like starting things."

Tracey Wallace is a longtime B2B exec and content marketer, having worked at BigCommerce and now, MarketerHire, a marketplace for freelancers. She addresses the post-Covid workforce, the benefits of hiring freelancers, and, yes, how to drive traffic with content marketing.

In 2012, Dean Pohlman was a collegiate lacrosse player who had taken up yoga. It so improved his on-field performance he began teaching the workouts to teammates. That led to DVD recordings, which led to a YouTube channel. He called it "Man Flow Yoga." Fast forward to 2021, and Pohlman is a global authority on yoga instruction for men.

Chris Williamson is a modern-day polymath with a fitting podcast. It's called "Modern Wisdom." Launched in 2018, it's experienced a whopping 30 million downloads across 400 episodes. He told me, "We talk about human nature, marketing, philosophy, life, life hacks, biohacking, fitness, health, pretty much everything."

The pandemic has upended the fitness industry. Having no access to public gyms, millions of folks turned to at-home workouts. According to Matt Reynolds, the founder of Barbell Logic, an online strength coaching company, the shift is permanent. "As the world has opened back up," he told me, "there's been a change of mindset, a paradigm shift in personal fitness training."

Clay Hebert once attended a conference in San Diego. He sat next to a fellow who inquired about his work. "What do you do?" the fellow asked. Describing the encounter, Hebert told me, "That question stumped me." He had fumbled his introduction to Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress.

This episode is different than most. I'm interviewing no one. Instead, I'm addressing a singular topic: bootstrapping, the concept of launching and growing a business without outside investors. My company, Beardbrand, is bootstrapped. It's a beautiful thing.

The year 2021 has been a doozy for Ben Smith. In March, he celebrated an investment round for Disco, his direct-to-consumer skincare company. In April, Disco's customer acquisition cost increased by a whopping 300% with the release of iOS 14.5. In May, he began selling on Amazon, only to see Amazon bid on the exact Google Ad keywords he relied on for traffic to Disco's website.

Andrew Youderian is the founder and CEO of eCommerceFuel, a leading online community of established store owners. He oversees a diverse team and manages a growing business with worldwide members. Surely, one would think, he works long hours with little downtime.

Where can you find a size 24 men's shoe? At 2BigFeet.com. Brandon Eley co-launched the business in 2000, before Google AdWords and long before Facebook and Shopify. "We've seen a lot of changes in 21 years," he said. "Keyword stuffing was legitimate search engine optimization back then."

Solving a personal hardship may be the most common motivator for starting a business. Clark Nowlin's hardship was acidity in coffee. It wrecked his stomach. Golden Ratio Coffee is Nowlin's solution. It's a producer of low-acid coffee. He founded the business last year in Austin, Texas, and it now sells direct-to-consumer in all 50 states.

Patrick Coddou is a direct-to-consumer pioneer, having launched Supply.co in 2015. The company designs, manufactures, and sells premium shaving products — all to great success. Until 2021. That's when Apple's iOS 14.5, which launched in April, upended Facebook's ability to hyper-target ads. Coddou's company relied on sales from those ads. He's retrenched the company and is soon to launch two new products.

Roman Zrazhevskiy's company, Mira Safety, sells protective gas masks. It launched in 2018, targeting consumers, medical providers, law enforcement, and others. The masks protect against tear gas, chemicals, and, yes, viruses. Still, reaching prospects was a challenge.

Josh Durham knows the downside of entrepreneurship. He founded an ecommerce company in 2015 and quickly grew revenue. Then it went out of business. Fast forward to 2021 and Durham has bounced back. He founded a successful marketing agency, Aligned Growth Management, that builds on his own early-day lessons.

Beardbrand's products are in all 2,000 Target stores. Lindsey Reinders, my business partner, drove that project in 2018. Selling goods to mass merchandisers is a goal of many direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands. Has it worked out for Beardbrand? I asked Lindsey that question and more.

Brian De Groodt launched Dispatch Custom Cycling Components in 2018 after a long career in enterprise software. The company sells bicycle headset caps, which sit atop the stem connecting handlebars to the frame. Customers can customize the caps, adding uniqueness to their bikes.