Do’s & Donts of Scaling to 100k/m

I talk to a lot of people who are starting their own brands. I would say I generally get to look under the hood at around 40-50 a year. I also talk to a lot of brands that are in different stages of growth.

If they’re at 10k a month, or 100k a month, or 3M a month, they’ve got different focuses. But this email will be for those who are earlier on in the journey (less than 200k/mo).

I want to share the mistakes a lot of these early-stage founders make and what I would avoid to get to 100k/mo.

Removing the Noise

Here’s a list of the things that matter very little when you launch a brand:

1. Fancy boxes

2. Excellent website (aka expensive)

3. Influencer

4. High production content

5. High production photography

6. Expensive shit

This list doesn’t apply to VC-backed companies because they always tend to need to do this stuff to get early traction quickly. Because they’re VC-backed and need to grow quickly.

The problem with growing quickly early on before you get an understanding of your customers is that there are SO many things you simply don’t know and you won’t know until you try different things.

I want to clarify some of these items I shared above. First off, fancy boxes are expensive. They usually add an additional $3-$5 per order. You can’t afford that. You’re an ecommerce brand. Remove that useless cost. Your top priority is acquiring customers to get a strong enough feedback loop to acquire more customers.

You know what people do when they receive your fancy box? They throw it in the trash.

Save the money, invest in less expensive things like inserts or educating your customer about the use of the product and why it’s so amazing. Don’t invest in a fancy box, please.

I’ve talked to people who have spent 40k on their fancy website. Our brand we launched this year cost us 5k in total to build. Know when we will pay for a new website rebuild? When we’re closer to 350-400k/mo in revenue. Not worth the capital.

Where will I put that extra 35k we saved? Acquiring customers.

The influencer one could go either way. My problem with activating influencers right off the bat is that you may not know exactly who your ideal customer base is. I want to provide an interesting example.

When we launched our brand, we thought we would be targeting gym-goers. We had a ton of creative and language around that. Turns out, our ideal audience is actually not that group at all. If we would have spent a ton of money on influencers in that category from the launch, it may have given us a false signal that we should invest more into that group of customers while not realizing we were wrong all along.

The best platform to find out more about your customers is Meta. And then you can affirm that data through using a tool like Kno Commerce in a post purchase survey. I’m not getting paid for that link, but I think it’s an excellent (and inexpensive tool).

I do believe influencers and whitelisting with them is massive and I’ll probably do a newsletter about that at some point but I don’t believe that it is the best strategy to do early unless you’re a beauty brand or fashion brand and you know your audience really well already.

When it comes to high production content, I find it difficult to believe that there is a solid enough ROI on 10-20k in costs to initially get footage for high production. I would wait for that. And again I would put that 10-20k into…wait for it..customer acquisition.

You can scale and then you can afford to do all the high production shoots you want. I do think that a lot of brands doing 8 and 9 figures are crushing it with high production content, but they can afford it and it’s a very good ROI as you scale.

Biggest risk is if you do shoot the content and it doesn’t work, you will never be able to recoup that investment. It’s a sunk cost.

With how things are progressing with AI, there are plenty of tools to use that can get you pretty far after getting some basic white background photography with your products. I would start there and then once you feel so inclined, you can get more high production content as you scale.

I remember when Flewd launched most of the content that was on the site was taken in the bathroom of the founder. No high cost photo shoots, just super scrappy photography.

It’s not the end of the world if you get some solid photography, just don’t spend an arm and a leg on it. Most of the stuff that will work on paid ad platforms will be native-looking anyway. Some static creative will work well with high production creative, but the copy is what carries it over the actual photos.

So yes, most of that stuff above is expensive shit. It is really cool and exciting to show off to other people who think it’s cool and exciting. But your prospective customer cares about one thing and one thing only: what can this product do for me?

You need to crack that first and foremost. Find out how to communicate to your customer through creative, spending on ads, angles, offers, etc — once you crack this then you will have plenty of money to put into expensive shit. Some of it will have an incredible ROI. Some of it won’t. But believe me, you do not want to just overspend on stuff early on. Unless you’re VC-backed. Then spend away.

No offense, VC-backed brands. You’ve just got a lot of money to burn and need to grow quickly. I get it.

For the other brands out there and marketers advising those brands, these are good insights to follow.

I will be sharing in my next week’s newsletter our portfolio update and it is going to be goooood. Finally some good news across the portfolio and stuff is working really well.

I’ll be diving into our creative process and media buying process and results we’ve seen that I think would be good for you to test out in your account/s if you’re running them or send to your team to follow.

I’ll also be sharing in a couple weeks about my plan to grow our in house brand from 100k to 500k/mo. I spent quite a bit of time planning out the launch to 100k/mo plan which we got to, and then spent a lot more time on the 100k to 500k plan.

I think it’s going to be fun to execute and you can follow along as I share our wins, losses, and either good or bad decisions with you.

If this was helpful, feel free to send this to a friend who is an early stage founder who needs to be reminded to stop wasting money on expensive shit 😂 

Ways to work with me or support me:

Agency partnership: We have officially opened our doors for Q1 of 2025 for 2 brands in total to join us (one spot has already been filled). We prefer to work with health & wellness brands that are solving a real problem. If you’d like to learn more about our work and how we can support you (through creative strategy/production + media buying) you can do so here.

Consulting Call: If you want advice on scaling your agency or your brand, I am happy to help. I usually keep this to no more than 3 calls a month (already have 1 spot taken for November). You can find a time to meet with me here.

Resources for Q4: I highly recommend checking out LiveRecover for Q4/BFCM - they have live agents that recover abandoned carts and we have rolled this out for many of our brands and it has been epic. They’ve recovered 100’s of thousands of revenue for us in the last few months. They’re waiving the platform fee for 3 months if you let them know I sent you. Check them out here.