Andrew Youderian 8:31
Ah yeah, a little bit of bleed over perhaps, but they’re definitely definitely separate. So yeah, and depends on the facet, too. Like we have some core values for our company we have and then kind of some different slightly different ones that guide our moderation and then kind of stuff in my own life that I think through so yeah, I think those are, those are different ones.
Joshua Chin 9:00
Gotcha. So shout out to Dr. Jeremy at Rise25 at Inspired Insiders for making this connection. And also you hear it on his podcast that inspired insider.com. And one of the things that you guys talked about was a little note card that you have with you all times throughout the day, or at least in the morning, where you read out certain affirmations that you’d like to live out in the way that you’d like to live your life. Is that still the case? Has anything changed since since then?
Andrew Youderian 9:34
Oh, man, I’m going to be this is kind of embarrassing because I think I did that podcast it’s been a while maybe a nine or 12 months.
Joshua Chin 9:40
I think it was in February. February. Okay,
Andrew Youderian 9:43
so yeah, once ago, I do not have that note card still anymore. So
Joshua Chin 9:48
it’s part of you know, it’s ingrained, right.
Andrew Youderian 9:50
Oh, man, essentially we’ll see here so definitely like to think so. But I have done a bad job of of keeping it around and reading through it. So so yeah. Little, little mud on my face for that one. I like Miami press workout impressive job on the homework here.
Joshua Chin 10:06
Thank you. But I you know what that’s that’s a, that’s a problem that I face too, I often come come to a really, really interesting idea that I really like. Most recently, it’s having no project management, to do lists, task lists at all, and having it all live on my calendar instead. So I have like, color coded events that represent different tasks that I’m supposed to do. And I’m supposed to optimize my tasks in a way where I’m spending 80% of my time on type A tasks where they are important, but not super urgent, and the rest kind of delegating to people would help such a hassle. Because what I had to do is to go through the Yeah, I did go through like a list and I had to migrate that list onto my calendar and then review the calendar a certain week and re review that every single day. And that did not stick for long. It was like a week oh, it is
Andrew Youderian 11:08
it is hard on a scheduling front like this last, I feel like I have taken place three or four stabs at like really trying to dial in a schedule. That works good. If you think about scheduling your time like to run any kind of meaningful business long term, you need to be able to deep work things strategically. You to work with your team, you need to be able to allocate time for like, making connections with people in the industry and talking marketing, like keeping your industry knowledge sharp. And there’s all you know, five or six different buckets, and you need to do all of them well or reasonably well over a long period of time. And it’s hard to manage them anyway. So I’ve taken them on my first set like a stab at doing that it’s worked a little bit better. But it’s it is hard to get getting a really dialed in schedule that you can, the covers all those bases that you can stick to, and you can stick to for the long term. It’s hard, it’s tough.
Joshua Chin 12:02
I feel that from from what I’m from what Anne said about you, it seems like you have a good balance between your family life, your personal life and your business. And it appears that every one of the facets of your life are flourishing at the moment. How do you how do you manage that? Because I believe that life comes in seasons, and sometimes you kind of let a ball drop here and there. And sometimes you get, like carried away of one thing more than the other.
Andrew Youderian 12:32
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone, I wouldn’t say that every single facet of my life is flourishing. There’s definitely stuff I think everyone has nobody can have. You can’t have everything all the time, right like and I’m no exception, or other people aren’t either. I think that’s probably part of the one of the travesties of like social media is it makes people think that’s the case. But I do try to I do try to like, right, yeah, you try to have balances something that’s important to me, I think apart from the first couple years, when you’re building something which is really hard to build a business and have a life in balance, I think that’s a good time to buckle down and really just go out of whack to get some momentum for something. Yeah, it’s been something I’ve tried to maintain my life and how to do that. I think. I think batching I probably talked about things people know a lot, but like trying to batch like phone calls like today, today is like the day where I connect and have like the whole day scheduled for team calls. I call it I’m super cheesy. But talking in team Tuesday, I’ve got like this little chart here, that kind of base of all my days, I try to put something on him. And so other podcasts, I’ll connect with my team, like if there’s kind of random calls, I’ll kind of put them in there. And so yeah, kinda like you were talking about trying to block out the day is like Monday I tried to allocate to marketing. So yesterday, I’d have any calls, no meetings, and it was an awesome day, because I spent six or seven straight hours just diving deep on marketing, getting some some new stuff off the ground, reading a bunch of stuff, which was fantastic. Um, having an office outside of the home helps tremendously, I think in terms of being productive, and I’m very binary either like to be on and working or like off and hanging out with my family or my friends and not try to have less of the in between. Yeah, so I think it’s, I think it’s, I don’t think there’s necessarily any, you know, a lot of stuff I would say would just be kind of maybe tropes that people have heard before. And but I think the big ones are just trying to batch I try to leave most days by 4pm so I can get home and hang out with family. Yes, kind of, I think it’s a combination of a lot of little things that that kind of hopefully come together over time and, and yeah, help you get more stuff done. So I think also, like understanding what you want to do and not I think focus is a huge one like I’ve over the years, tried to do a lot of things and still have a decent number of balls in the air but yet, being comfortable doing less and having more margin in life, I think is a big deal too.
Joshua Chin 14:52
So then the big one being comfortable with being less and having so you had a zero call day It wasn’t yesterday. Yeah, it was zero cost. That’s incredible. I think that’s a luxury in, in what we do today.
Andrew Youderian 15:09
It’s It’s funny, I like I mentioned that on Twitter. And it was just like days like this, like the UN actually used that that that exact phrasing. I was like, hey, they’re the real luxury in 2021 has like, zero calls during meeting days when you can just dive deep on work and reading and learning and improving and building. Yeah, it was one of my I mean, people blew up like people, a lot of people were like, Yes, this is my life. So I think it’s, I think
Joshua Chin 15:34
it’s your living room every single day. Now. This is our life. And it I mean, in our field of work, it’s it’s been the case since day one, but now everyone’s shifting to online work only and leading with online conversations and not having a boundary between working and living and play and life. I mean, somebody disagree, I mean, to some work his life. I’m kind of like that, that way tech work and life is kind of intertwine. But with with with that, right? With the E the ecommerce SEO community. What are some of the the large scale trends that you’ve seen people shifting towards in the ecommerce space, as we move into kind of the cookieless world and for Apple is taking over privacy’s number one and all that stuff. Yeah.
Andrew Youderian 16:31
Do you so specifically focused on kind of marketing and cookie stuff? Or just everything in general over the last year?
Joshua Chin 16:38
I think so. Marketing, for sure. But anything related to growing ecommerce brand? I think a lot of people are saying that it’s, um, I think you might agree that the growing ecommerce brand in 2021 and beyond, it’s probably going to be a little bit harder than what it used to be. Even though it seems like everyone’s coming up with new businesses, and recently, yeah,
Andrew Youderian 17:05
I think it’s gonna be dramatically harder. I’m sorry, what? What that looks like, I mean, obviously, Apple took the hatchet to, to tracking. And so I mean, we looked at, at Facebook, and it’s just people anyone running a brand right now on Facebook knows, it’s just it’s a lot harder your, your results or you’re trying to expense way down, effectiveness is way down. And it’s just harder to to use that channel. So the big deal, I think, in general, that’s going to be a trend that we’re going to see going going forward quite a bit. So I think, what was it the we did a poll in the community about what the actual hip was? And I think the average was the average merchant, at least in our community, our community probably has the average person size, probably about 4 million in sales, four or 5 million. What was their return on adspend? Or I think we used more I think media effectiveness ratio potentially lose down on the ballpark of 40%. So like, 4040? Yeah, let’s go a couple people responded. Yeah, it was big. So it’s a big Yeah, big deal, I think going forward. Yeah, people just aren’t gonna be able to rely on paid ads, as as much you know, like, it’s Facebook now. But even even if that doesn’t happen, like, there’s so much more competition, you either have to arbitrage different platforms, new platforms that come out that have, you know, aren’t as crowded yet, like tick tock, potentially. And that works, but only last for a little while. But even still, like the number of new platforms coming out is much smaller, because they tend to be bought up by legacy players than the guys, Facebook and others. So I think, I think for marketing, people are going to have to do a few things, I think, I think we’re gonna start seeing more zero party data that tends to be the buzzword of the of the last couple of months, but I think I’ve seen more people start to install platforms that help with that. I think good old fashioned referrals is going to become even more important, which is just doing having a great product, great customer service, I think we’re gonna I think we’re gonna see business, the average size of a business be smaller, going forward, because you’re not you’re gonna have to earn business and reputation and credibility and word of mouth marketing the old way, not overnight. But I think unless something changes dramatically, if this trend continues, you know, it’s gonna be hard, a lot harder to build $100 million business, you know, you may have of raving fans that are five, you know, raving fans of a business that are five or 10 million or 15 million, but I think just in general, it’s gonna be harder to build. Scale, I think the defensibility of businesses will probably on average increase because the ones that stick around or are earning it with merit, versus paid scale and spending because you can totally blast your way into people’s minds and mental share if you have enough money. But if you can’t spend that money, quasi profitably, it’s harder to do. I see community being an aspect, the number of Five years ago, in ecommerce school, the number of people who were talking about building ecommerce brands with some kind of community, I don’t mean community like this authorial sense of like, we have customers, and occasionally they tweet about us. And so we have a community now, I don’t think that counts, what I’m talking about is like, you have a discrete group of people in some kind of gated or walled area, ie a Facebook group, maybe or a private forum, or, or something like that, that where they’re, they’re connecting, they’re talking, I know one company that uses Reddit, they have a Reddit sub thread just for their brand that they’ve used to drive sales, or feedback, some kind of discreet community that helps you build loyalty and and communicate with your customers but also bring in new converts into something greater than yourself. The number of people I’ve seen building using communities to build seven figure ecommerce businesses has exponentially gone up the last three or four years, I think that’s going to be something we’ll see more of. Anyway, I’m gonna stop talking because I’m rambling at this point, but a lot a little threads. But long term, the biggest thing is paid ads is harder, cookies make it harder, and I think the average size of stores will probably get smaller, and you’re gonna have to work harder, but the businesses that do survive and thrive will probably be more defensible as a result. And
Joshua Chin 21:15
I think the community bit is on point in our in our, in our space with what we do with clients with, with about approximately 80 clients and our retainer. So we get a lot of data and information as well, the insights are regardless that that acquisition is going to be really, really hard. Obviously, new platforms gonna come out and experiments are going to be run. But overall, acquiring a new customer is gonna be exponentially more difficult. So retention, then becomes much more important. But we think about retention and the stuff that we do on the back end, like email, especially all that stuff. There’s only so much that you can do before you bug someone out. But when you’re building a community of people, the network effect that you get from having multiple nodes. And you notice that the best, right? That of having multiple nodes of, of really passionate people about a certain topic is self sustaining, and most importantly, self growing. JIKI speak a little bit more to that and how economists feel came to be in the first place like the first 100 members, your first 100 fans, what was that like? And how did that change for
Andrew Youderian 22:33
you? Yeah. And to speak to that just for you to the kind of the Genesis story. People when they hear anytime you’re Hawking something, the threshold for how hard you have to work to convince somebody is much higher, because they know you’re a brand you have a vested interest, right? Like if you can have a community speak for you. It’s much more powerful. Just that’s why word of mouth is so powerful. For example, we had somebody who was thinking about coming to our annual summit ecommerce to go live. It’s from members of our community. And he was he had something else. Yeah, he was signed up for another conference, yet another ecommerce conference. And he was asking me like, hey, like, I’ve got these two conferences, I can’t decide like, which one should I? Why should I come to ECF live versus this one? Or should I? And I said, Hey, listen, I’m biased. Don’t ask me go post this in the community and see what people say. And so he posted it and like, people weighed in, and they were like, here’s why we think this would be a better fit for you, except it’s there. And it customer changes, his plans that come to our conference, they’re like, anytime you can get a group of people to do that, on your behalf. It’s so much more powerful than you just spending money and trying to convince them to do that. To your question about like, the early days of, of east of ecommerce fuel, like communities are kind of like, well, they’re classic chicken and egg problem, right? Like, yeah, you know, how do you build a community? You need people there? But if there’s no one there, like how do you get people to come? Yeah, so the tactic that I used was spent a year blogging about ecommerce because again, I was in the trenches, really had, at the time really deep sense of kind of day to day tactical stuff. It spent a year doing nothing but blog and connect with people about it trying to build up an audience and, and connections in the space. So probably three quarters of my time for a whole year was dedicated to that. And built up this list of 150 people I met along the journey that were really interesting that were smart, fun, respectful, like had some expertise in their their field and, and I use that to seed the community. So I, you know, over the last 30 or 60 days, dripped about five people per day in there and just slowly started like starting discussions, introducing people connecting people, tagging people in discussions. And then we kind of started to get some traction and some people talking and then I put up a small paywall really small, 25 bucks a month or something. And it kind of grew from there. And it took, you know, like took it 18 to 24 months before it was a really self sufficient community on its own without needing to have people you know, myself or my team really get in there and then moderate things and spur discussion, but that was kind of how the process went. It takes
Joshua Chin 24:56
time. It’s a Evolis thing. Man, I see, I see so many brands try to artificially kind of create a community. I guess in some cases out that would work, especially if you’re seeding it with kind of like paid effort. But the sustainability of a community, like what we see with ecommerce fuel is that comes organically through just the quality and curation of the community. What what’s the future of, of eCommerceFuel? I know that at some point, so I’m part of EO Entrepreneurs Organization, I’m in the Singapore chapter. And we are coming towards a kind of a decision point where we’re approaching the the 150 member Mark, where in above which we would most likely have to split into two chapters. And Singapore happens to be a really tiny country. It’s like, I think it’s 30 miles wide and 18 miles long, so very tiny country. So the reason why we’re choosing to split down into two, two chapters of keeping them as one huge chapter is that the there comes a point where a community will no longer be kind of you won’t be able to know everyone in the community anymore. And it’s really important for iOS to have that sense of belonging and all that stuff. Yeah. But when it comes to scaling communities, can you share loot or about your thoughts around how you’re scaling eCommerceFuel? And if you’re ever going to split the forum up into multiple chapters?
Andrew Youderian 26:43
Yeah, that’s a good question. So there’s a there’s something called Dunbar’s number. And it’s, I can’t remember who it was a scientist is done, I guess. Yeah, maybe a sociologist. And he or she, it’s embarrassing. I mean, no, no, you can see how much I know this person. They found the number at which a group dynamic starts to really lose intimacy is 150, or Stated differently that that? Yeah, the average person can probably keep about 150 relationships, reasonably going at any one time. So yeah, there’s there’s definitely merit to that for ecommerce fuel. Like I think that’s the debt communities are incredibly powerful, they’re incredibly defensible. Who’s gonna you know, especially if you have deep ties, or you can’t replace, you know, these unique relationships. The downside is like community takes a ton of time to build like Rutan true genuine commute takes a long time to build takes years. And you can’t scale it really quickly, right? Like if we, we have about 1100 members right now, we went in and over the course, next six months, we dumped another 1100 members in there, I would totally kill the dynamic of the community. Because, yeah, people post partially because they trust the people, they know them, they’ve seen them they’ve had they have rapport with them, or at least some level of people they see in the forums every day. So yeah, yeah, I mean, it takes time to build something like that we’ve built it over a long period of time. And in terms of scaling ecommerce, fuel, probably don’t, we don’t plan on like, dramatically scaling it up over time, in terms of like, trying to, you know, do that quickly, just takes time. And I think there is there is though, you do have to have and we thought a lot about this 1000 People, you can have connections with 1000 people, so any type of big group like that, that’s when the reasons we’re investing in these events, right, like, is trying to build out more, you know, it’s it, there’s a lot of value in having access to 1000 really experienced ecommerce entrepreneurs, because the breadth of experience, what they can weigh into the fringe things that they’ve seen, maybe your experience, something that only four or five other people have experienced, yeah, 1000 people in that crew, you can pull out those insights. But for the depth of relationship, that’s why we’re investing more in a lot of these regional events. So you know, the the Austin event or the Charlotte event or things like that, those will be smaller events where maybe 50 to 75 people from that area will come and gather and you can definitely manage those relationships. Well, we also just had an event with about 30 to 35 of our eight figure ecommerce sellers, and they can connect deeply there. So I think any good community, if you’re going to scale it, you got to think through how do i if it’s gonna get larger, meaningful, larger than that, then those you know, I kind of wonder 50 Or even, you know, 200 number, you got to think how am I going to think about providing an identity and value to the main group, but also give them the sense to go deep with a smaller group of people because you have to do both at once.
Joshua Chin 29:29
Right, that makes sense. So you’re effectively creating many communities and many groups within a larger community of larger identity, essentially, definitely, in in what cases would you recommend putting money behind the growth of the community, especially when it comes to an ecommerce business where it’s b2c kind of a where, where the relationship isn’t as tight knit as what we would expect from eCommerceFuel where It’s business and brand, and maybe 10s of 1000s of customers.
Andrew Youderian 30:06
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think one of the, the other struggles too, if you’re trying to, like grow a community is, a lot of it is you’re building fans, word of mouth marketing, things like that. And sometimes those are harder to gauge and track than just direct, like, you know, top funnel, bottom funnel clicks, and you’re investing more for the long run. So if you’re thinking like, how much would I afford to spend? How much do I afford to spend to try to get someone into my Facebook group that is driving a lot of this traffic? That’s a hard thing to answer. And I don’t think I’ve answered that. I do think the more you know, if you’re trying to think through what’s what’s an easier sell for someone like is it easier to if you’re running two ads, and one is like, Hey, we’ve got this amazing group of skateboard enthusiasts. They’re all in the 30s. And that’s the niche, right? Like, people in the 30s, who are picking up skateboarding later in life, come join this forum and talk about it and share that. The barrier to sign up for that, especially if it’s a free community is much, much, much lower than Hey, come buy, you know, this brand new skateboard that we have this design for people approaching, you know, getting back to skateboarding later in life. So I think it’s, if you’re willing to invest the money there, very few people are building communities and also building communities kind of with some of that paid stuff. So I think it’s an interesting avenue, but I don’t I from a from a attribution standpoint, and how much should you spend standpoint? That’s a harder question to answer, not
Joshua Chin 31:35
not. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I suppose there would be a way to quantify what one community member is worth to a brand. In some maybe in some proxy manner? That might make sense.
Andrew Youderian 31:54
Yeah, it’s trying to think about that kind of initially thought through, like, for example, let’s say you had a, you could, you could see, on a post purchase survey, 40% of people have sales come from a community, right. So, so So I heard about this to the community. So maybe if your sales are million per year, you say, Okay, well, we generate 400,000 through the community. Let’s say we have, you know, 1000 members, so maybe we know that each community member is worth $400 in revenue per year. Our margins are 50%. So there were $200. And on average, so I mean, maybe you could totally back into some math like that. So hey, maybe we will spend to add new committee members that, you know, if we’re getting them for, if we’re getting signups for $15, pretty safe margin of error. Yeah, I haven’t never thought about that. Like that. But you could probably do it.
Joshua Chin 32:44
And one of the things that we talked about is that, you know, that that network effect the nodes of of people, and maybe that that contributes somewhat to the fact that every new community member is a little bit more valuable than the last one. Maybe? What do you think about that?
Andrew Youderian 33:08
Okay, I think it really depends on the quality of the members. One thing that we have been kind of unapologetic about is, is trying to, if you’re gonna have a community community is defined by you don’t have to be exclusionary, to be exclusionary, but you do have to have walls that go up. So I think, you know, we’ve overtime raised the threshold for revenue, and in general, unless people have a strong recommendation, or we know them, well, we really don’t like agency owners. And because there’s some great ones like yourself, but there’s also people that will come in and just pitch the community and they’re not a good fit. For Yeah, so I think to the extent that to the extent that you are keeping those boundaries and those guidelines, you really have a lot of follow through with those isn’t isn’t generally Yeah, a second community member is going to be more valuable as long as you’re not growing too quickly. And as long as there’s time for the community to kind of digest as a terrible world. I’ll use it anywhere to find my people but to digest who they are and get to know them and like without dropping a ton of people in at once. But yeah, in general. And so you get those network effects. That’s what I mean. That’s why Facebook blew up so much. Probably a bad proxy for the type of companies we’re talking about building but in general, yes. There’s some some cool network effects for sure.
Joshua Chin 34:22
Andrew, what’s what’s coming up in 2022 for you that you’re excited about? Yeah,
Andrew Youderian 34:28
probably the biggest thing is just we’re getting ready to roll out a ton more events. This last year, we’ve done a couple and every year we’ve done ECF live for six or seven years now but really investing heavily in events like I mentioned events and we’ve got a a Los Angeles Regional meetup for our members. Coming in January. We have three other meetups that I mentioned ECF live in Norfolk and March. We have an adventure trip coming up this this spring yet to be determined but a very good chance to be there a mountain biking trip or a surfing trip or a skiing trip. Lots of local meetups in Toronto in New York and, and in San Diego all over the place. So thing I’m most excited about is, you know, as the world’s kind of coming back a little bit more to a state of normality, getting people together again and getting store owners together in a place where they can share some share meal and talk about what’s going on their lives in their business.
Joshua Chin 35:19
It’s so it’s so meaningful, I think that we often underestimate the, the, the power of face to face in person meetings, the ability to, to connect, it’s so much more powerful. I was at La a couple weeks back for for the geek out event run by Nick Shackleford. And James Van Elswick, it’s, it was incredible. It was a it was a relatively small group of people with about, I believe, 5060 people, it was a great crowd, highly curated as well. And everyone’s there to, to share in a different Kuta for so long as well. And it’s coming out to an event like that. It was just incredible. Unfortunately, there weren’t much movement, because in California, they’re much a lot more restrictions around events and such. So we had to stay confined within the same location truck the whole two, three days. But uh, four days, actually. But it was it was great. It was actually really great.
Andrew Youderian 36:22
Really brain geek to geek out about it sounds really fun. What did they talk about? Like, what were the topics?
Joshua Chin 36:27
Oh, we geek out about all kinds of growth stuff. So we talked about growing ecommerce brands and every every facet of growing ecommerce brand. So we have with people coming in from filming companies SMS, we talked a little bit about adapting to Facebook, and changes, it comes with Facebook, all kinds of all kinds of stuff. And when you have like 60 people at varying state varying specialties, all at a very high level, I believe the average, I think the average revenue in that room, annual revenue of businesses in that room was over eight figures, I think something along the lines of like 12 million, you have no wrong. So it was a really high level of, of people those and that makes it such that everyone have the mindset of I want to give as much as I can. Because I know that I’ve been given so much in my journey, that the more I give the Morrell eventually see. And that that makes all the difference. So one of the things that we talked about was was actually the iOS 14.5 update. And I spoke a little bit about iOS 15. And it’s an impact on email. But it seems like the control is coming back to the consumer a lot more with when it comes to data and all that stuff. And you mentioned third party data. That was actually one of the topics that we kind of dive into and how to kind of structure a conversation with a prospect turning that conversation into something that’s actionable in the backend with segmentations and, and automations. But what do you think? Is the future going into 2022? How do we adapt? Are there? Are there specific channels you recommend we look into? He talked about tick tock and Twitter’s coming up with your econ stuff as well.
Andrew Youderian 38:38
Yeah, I think the channels I think that make the most sense are and I really wish I’d coined this term. I feel like I’m just just hijacking it. The owned marketing like clay vo but think anything you have, you don’t have to have a gatekeeper to get through. I like I like SMS. I think that’s interesting. I don’t use it personally. But the number of store owners I’ve seen they use it to there’s one of our our ecommerce fuel. Capital portfolio companies uses SMS incredibly effectively for launches and promoting products like they’ll send an email send an SMS text and just watch their analytics just explode in terms of people and sales. It’s really cool. SMS I think still is has a lot of reach. Like email if you’re still doing it. Well. There’s some complications that you probably know better than I do with with with Apple and iOS 15. I like I like Twitter, have a Twitter I don’t think it’s a great b2c tool. I think it’s really interesting for b2b, I think it’s really interesting for making connections in your industry. But I like that I think direct mail is something that is is interesting, too. We’re starting to do some of that with eCommerceFuel. Like we have a really engaged membership base. I think like 75% of our members visit at least once a month and I think it’s something like you know, maybe 30 or 40% visit at least once a week and events like people are just busy, like the amount of stuff that is just thrown at all of us every single day that we have to go through is, is digitally especially, it’s just yawning. But when I get a piece of mail, when I walk to the mailbox, usually I’m coming back. It’s something tactile I can read at night, it’s on the on the table. Ironically, there’s less competition for that. So we’re starting to do some mailers for ecommerce school just to try to add more value and help people keep up on like the top discussions in our community. And I’ve heard good reports. I mean, I know I know, brands that generate 56% of their their sales through through some form of direct mail or catalog. So it’s really Yeah, it’s by no means dead. So I think yeah, those are some of the channels I think are interesting. Tik Tok is a lot of talk about that it’s fairly new and like a new platform is probably chances to build an audience in arbitrage. Anyway, all that I think it can you still do? You know, Google, definitely Facebook less. So yes. But I like the platforms that have a little bit more direct ownership, podcasting. It’s one that I’ve dealt with, I think that’s harder on the DDC front or just direct to consumer front for person. Yeah, but those are those are some ones that come to mind for me.
Joshua Chin 41:12
Just saying you mentioned eCommerceFuel capital. Yeah. Tell us more about that. I think that’s, that’s intriguing to a lot of people. And you’re involved in a number of m&a is true, true to the ecommerce, fuel capital, but also you’ve seen a number of m&a is true. Your community as well. What’s the what’s the overall goal of both capital and what have you built?
Andrew Youderian 41:39
Yeah, so ECF capital is the idea was, it was a bunch of, I got to know a lot of really interesting and smart and savvy folks in the ecommerce space, from marketing, to Shopify, the m&a to all sorts of different things. And there’s all these companies kind of that are fledgling companies are coming up that would love to have capital to grow, because ecommerce just sucks cash like nobody’s business, generally. In terms of eats it up, as you grow, just need to find inventory, but also want some some guidance along the way. And so the goal was to put those people together as smart money investors, and partner with some of those brands. So we look for brands that have decent margins have good lifetime value that primarily are off Amazon that have really high repurchase rates, and that make a proprietary product. And yeah, try to invest in those. And so um, yeah, that’s kind of the thesis and done two or three deals over the last year and learned a ton. And, yeah, it’s been a fun, fun, fun process.
Joshua Chin 42:42
What’s the Do you have a you have an investment thesis or some error criteria?
Andrew Youderian 42:49
Yeah. Interesting. Yep. So I think in terms of brands, generally look at brands that are need to be doing at least, you know, bare minimum would be probably a couple $100,000 in revenue, ideally, more like maybe high six, low seven figures, is kind of the sweet spot there. Hi, rip your repurchase rates in terms of repurchase rates from customers of at least 25 30% decent margins, gross margins of at least you know, 50, ideally 60%, ideally, off Amazon. And the reason of those is kind of looks into the future of a lot of what we’ve been talking about today, like I want, it’s getting harder to advertise, you need to have customers love the stuff that you’re doing. And if you have customers who love what you’re doing, and the which is indicated by a higher repurchase rate, you’re you’re not gonna have to spend as much to acquire them profitably over the long term, you have to do less marketing, you’re gonna have more word of mouth marketing that’s built in Amazon’s kind of a two edged sword but that’s getting harder and so trying to find brands aren’t dependent on Amazon and build something unique and it stands alone on their own calm and just good margins are always a good thing, right? Like you know, good margins, solve a lot of problems. Oh, yeah, that’s kinda so that’s kind of how those criteria kind of fell into the into the you know, made it into the the list that we’re looking for.
Joshua Chin 44:05
I love it, Andrew, and where’s the best place to find out more about eCommerceFuel the capital and all the good stuff and all the events that’s coming up?
Andrew Youderian 44:16
Yeah, eCommerceFuel.com is the best place to just as a springboard for everything so if you’re interested in joining the community in your seven or eight for your store owner a merchant or brand owner would love to have you ecommerce go podcast you can find anywhere you get podcasts, ecommerce capital ecommerce.com and then I’m on Twitter at @Youderian you’ll never be able to spell it but that’s where I’m at.
Joshua Chin 44:40
So perfect. And as usual guys, all the links are gonna be in the description below and if you’re listening in from Spotify or any of the podcasting platforms, it is y-o-u-d-e-r-i-a-n their ad either on most social channels, right Facebook,
Andrew Youderian 44:56
mostly Twitter grants pretty much where I spend my time this is awesome.
Joshua Chin 45:00
Yeah, and lots of good content out there. Definitely if Andrew, Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was fun.
Andrew Youderian 45:08
Yeah. Thanks so much for the invite. It was really great chatting.
Outro 45:13
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
