- Yesterday I posted on Reddit, ask me anything.
There's a ton of questions in here.
I'm gonna answer as many as I can.
And hopefully give you guys some insights.
Let's get into it.
Reddit.
We're in.
I gonna make an avatar
and it looks like me gym bro.
I wanna wearable blanket.
I need to buy premium to get that.
Okay, cool.
(laughing)
- [Friend] So the ones that are on top are the upvoted ones.
- Upvoted, understood.
I understand how internet works.
(laughing)
Hey David, how much profit did you make
from that 270 million in revenue?
Keep killing it, you're an inspiration to many.
Thank you so much.
I get this question so much.
People are so skeptical
of what we are doing and just eCommerce is a whole.
There's so many people screenshotting Shopify store.
And I think that you should be skeptical when you see them.
Our businesses range, our brands range from profitability.
So some of them are at 10% profitability.
Some of them are at 30% profitability.
This is fluctuating heavily month to month.
And especially
with the supply chain crisis that can come up and down.
The truth is
you don't want your net profit margin too high,
because that means you're probably not spending
enough on ads.
You want to make sure that your gross margin
of your product is as high as possible
but you're wanting to spend
lots on ads to grow your brand really quickly.
Especially if you know that there is some level
of word of mouth virality, customer retention,
those kind things.
So making sure that your default alive
which means that you are profitable
and your cashflow is profitable is the main thing
'cause then you don't need to rely on funding
if anything goes downwards, but then also making sure
that you are maximizing revenue as well.
It's a fine line
and it's definitely something that you should work
with your finance team and just keep asking people about
as you are doing, naturally I need it to be
somewhat sensitive about the,
our information for competitive reasons.
Max Simmons asks, hi Davie,
would you be able to do Facebook ads course
that is much more in-depth than your current two videos.
Yes, Max, I definitely can.
The truth is though
that Facebook ads does not need to be that complicated,
very, very basic strategies as well.
In the lemon scrub series, providing
that the product actually sells it will give us
an opportunity to go deeper into the ad account.
The reason why I haven't done this
is my YouTube is actually designed for beginners
at this stage
because we're just trying to hit as wider audience
and get everyone on the journey as quickly as possible.
That being said
there are so many things
that have really wanna get into with Facebook ads
talking about like Zapier integration
or attribution tools talking about bitcaps, CBO.
Main thing that you should be focusing on
is not these, you know, lots of hacky stuff.
Focus really on either your creative,
for creative testing and your landing page testing.
You know, do some CRO, do some advertorial,
those kind of thing.
Definitely taking the feedback on board and I'm,
I'm excited to do that more advanced video for you.
Hi Davie, Sherlock Bones ama when?
He doesn't have much to say,
he's a bit of a psycho at the moment actually.
They were trying to film that woods night,
the other night down the beach.
And he was just like running laps around me,
just sprinting around me.
And the guy was like, never work with children or animals.
The videographer.
I was like, I promise you, he's not usually this crazy.
Good day, Davie
how did you scale your order quantity so quickly
without using extra cash from outside the business?
I've ordered 300 units, my first order
and I'll have to sell most of them
to make the next order of 500 units,
but I'll be sold out for maybe six weeks
waiting for my next batch to arrive.
This is so common.
So first you might want to use pre-sale.
Okay? So that will give you that buffer time.
Let's say shipping home is four weeks.
You're selling it before it's left your supplier.
This is great to shorten those lead times down
but it does come with other risks.
You know, there's a shipment delay
and then you get lots of negative reviews
or something like that.
So make sure that you are communicating
very clearly to your customer.
And you're also giving yourself enough buffer time
in those things, because things do go wrong.
The second thing is supplier terms.
If you are, you know, get scaling up
you should be able to find a supplier that is
willing to give you some level of terms.
It is in their best interest for you
to be able to sell the product.
You can get a supplier contract involved that guarantees
that you'll pay maybe 10% upfront and then the remaining 90
or 80%, 60 days after it's delivered.
These are the terms that big brands can get,
but I have heard of some smaller brands
being able to convince their suppliers from this.
It's all about building those relationships
and trust, showing that you're a professional.
The other method
is there's lots of new ways to finance stock.
So Shopify has their own way of financing now
where providing you've got enough sales coming through,
they'll lend you the money.
Because there's so many of them,
you can actually start getting
some really competitive rates, just make sure
that you're literate in what fees they're charging.
What happens if you can't repay it
all of those kind of things
and then they should be auto financing you growth.
Final method is an investor.
Okay? If you are getting great roll outs,
there will be people that will
other than understand roll outs, that will invest in you.
Build a little bit of a pitch deck, go into LinkedIn,
go into communities,
reach out to people on Twitter, ask for investment,
give them good terms, get a good strategic investor in place
and they'll help finance your growth.
Miller lite delight.
Do you still like Ramen noodles?
Have we posted the like Ramen noodles somewhere?
I think this it's the startup diet.
You just gotta eat ramen until you,
until you're rich, I guess.
Hazhh, more of a personal question here.
I was fortunate enough to know pre-social media famous,
I don't think social media is famous,
but any male in his twenties with 10% of your success
feels like they must let world know something about it
but you stayed private about your success for so long.
Yeah, I did not go public about my figures or anything
until over,
I was doing over a hundred million dollars revenue.
The reason why, what I was telling myself is
that it was competitive reasons.
And that I knew that all the mass retailers
all of the drop shippers,
everything as soon as they saw my financials
they would come in and knock off my products
which since coming out it has just exploded.
It is crazy.
The other reason probably is
that I was just completely camera shy.
I didn't want to talk to anyone about it.
I think I grew past that and wanted to start giving back.
You should always be skeptical
of people that are selling you a course
or something like that.
Talking about their success
that they've previously had doing E-commerce
because, frankly if you are focusing that much at
in the early stages on talking about the thing, the brand,
then you are neglecting certain things.
You know, I had a big leadership team.
I have an amazing team of people
suddenly working on all of our brands.
So they're in really good hands
which allows me to step back a little bit
and do this kind of stuff.
Year 1, 2, 3.
You just need to be head down on, on the brand themselves.
Yeah, that's my advice there.
Thanks for the question and yeah, good luck.
All right, some rapid fires.
What can I do to find a winning product like yours?
I've talked about this a lot.
I'm gonna do a lot more videos on this.
I'm building a piece of software as well
that's gonna help you find all of this
the products as well.
So I'm gonna leave this question
head back to my other YouTube videos for now.
What is the biggest opportunity
for an E-commerce business to capitalize on
in the 0 to 1 million stage of growth?
Zero to, let's say a hundred thousand,
you're battling product market fit.
So you're trying to figure out if the products like,
if it is, now you're just battling this kind of
unit economics juggle
where you are trying to make Facebook
as profitable as possible.
To do that, focus on content, focus on customer service,
start building your metrics,
making sure your return rate's not too high,
lower your cost of goods,
lower your cost of service,
lower your cost of fulfilling the product as well,
like your courier rates.
The person that can spend more
on advertising is going to win.
So if you found this winning product
that you are early with and other people are flocking to it,
you need to be spending more than them on Facebook.
Lowering cost is the best way to do that.
Then getting your advertising just really efficient
making sure that you're getting good reviews as well
because that, those customers are gonna start coming back
repeat purchasing.
Hey Davie, how do you deal with seasonality for the Oodie?
Especially in Australia where most times of the year
it's too hot to rug up.
It's feeling a bit like that today.
Do you turn off ad campaigns
at the warmer months of regions when you're retargeting?
We have stores everywhere.
We have have UK, EU, US, Canada.
We're a global brand
which really helps with that seasonality hedge.
We do not turn off ads, but we do have to scale them back.
We're constantly measuring rollers on a daily basis.
So naturally the, the seasonality curve,
you will have a natural curve.
That curve is really interesting in the UK
because you are obviously going to hit Christmas
at peak winter period.
So it's kind of this really steep curve.
Whereas in Australia
you're going to have that black Friday period
which is a bit of a sales bump.
So it's kind of like, June, it's like peaks
and then it comes down
and then there's this little trough where it's like
kind of tries to come back up
but 'cause it's, 'cause it's summer it doesn't.
So you've gotta understand those seasonality curves.
They're pretty common across seasonal businesses.
Would you suggest to stay away
from the US market when starting out?
Asking because it looks way more competitive
and many Facebook ads get suspended
when they start targeting the US.
The EU has VAT implications
and it looks quite complicated for a beginner as well.
I'm in south America
and while there is potential
there are challenges related to economy and logistics.
This is a really, really good question.
I personally like Australia, I like Australia
and I like the UK when I first start the business.
And this is just because when I find trends
that's where they are in the trended lifes span.
You know typically you need to understand market positioning
and market timing is the most important thing
within starting a business.
Is the trend saturated?
If there, if the trend has been in south America
or let's say the United States for five years
but hasn't actually been launched in Australia
there is opportunity there, providing the market adoption
and there is some level of awareness.
Facebook is an auction it's gonna be competitive.
So binding those little pockets in Facebook
those untapped markets is amazing.
That is literally what I'm building my software for,
to try to find that competitive edge.
What is your process for building a team
of good freelancers to help you in the start-up process
until you can afford to hire a full-time team?
Okay there's four questions in this first question.
How do you ensure
that your freelancers communicate the brand's image
and voice the way you have intended EG copywriting,
content creation, customer service?
Okay, let's start there.
We're talking about two things there.
We're talking, I guess
about accountability and we're also talking
about brand consistency and maybe quality control.
So in terms of accountability, using Upwork
we obviously have tracking for those VAs.
We also can use external tools like Hubstaff
to track the user behavior.
One accountability measure
and alignment measure that I love to use
in those early stages
when you're just starting out with Vas
is the daily stand up.
So you're gonna start with a
15 minute huddle in the morning.
What are you working on?
What did you work on yesterday?
What are your main challenges?
In terms of hiring VAs,
I think that's the most challenging time
and the truth is that it's very hit and miss
even for the people that are the best at it.
You can use processes like video interviews
to really weed out the large amount of applicants
that to you're gonna get.
You can use things like type tests.
If it's, let's say a customer service to check the speed
of their, their typing and their English quality
it's all those kind of things that can really help
go through a large amount of applicants
and find the one that's right for your business.
Biggest misconceptions around virtual assistance
and hiring remotely is that they are just robots.
They are people too, on the other side of the computer.
They, if anything, they need more love
and attention than any other employee
because they're not sitting next to you.
They don't know you.
So therefore you need to actually
really try to communicate extra to them,
get them enthusiastic and involved.
In terms of the copywriting
and maintaining the brand quality,
resources like your brand book is gonna become
really, really important.
You could even try like questioning them
that after they've read the brand book,
how would you answer this to maintain your brand?
We've started implementing
the "lean start-up" innovation principles,
which are brilliant.
How do you strive for innovation
and testing in your new business in all aspects?
Let's say we're trying to increase the referral rate
of our product by adding an element
of branding to the packaging.
Maybe it's a QR code for virality or something like that.
First need to set up a team.
We need to set up a structure.
So who is leading the project?
You need certain capabilities within that product team.
So you need the person
that is going to design the product,
you need, the person that is going to test the product
when it comes in,
the marketing person, reading the data
like a data analytics person, these people can be anyone
in your organization that has the skills
and capabilities to figure this stuff out.
Then you just wanna have like a monthly meeting, okay?
Where everyone updates and creates action items for that.
Create the hypothesis of what you're trying to achieve.
In this case, it's like referral rates,
our amount of people that purchase
after scanning this QR code in the product
and then just meet frequently to get that happening.
You can use project tools like monday.com to track that
and keep notes and keep everyone accountable.
The other system that I will recommend is just
an OKR system.
Most of the time we are just constantly trying to do
iterative growth.
Whether that growth is through content
or landing pages or any product, we're just
constantly trying to improve things above the baseline.
It really is a very consistent process
and that's why I do recommend
OKRs just general if your organization.
which YouTube video was your favorite to film and why?
It's a good one,
meet your team video was pretty fun.
We had mimosas.
It was, it was a good laugh
but I think my favorite video to watch was actually
the throwback one where we went through
the footage from school and just kind of
walked through my life.
I think that that was really interesting to watch
like retrospectively and understand, you know,
what I'm doing. I guess the other one is, you know,
this how to build a brand series,
we where just getting so much positive feedback,
people changing their lives.
So cool three, that's 90% of my videos, but that's okay.
Would you drop me a thousand for my dumb ass cat?
Oh no, I'm a dog, man.
If you can go back in time and change one thing,
what would you change?
I think the main thing that I would change is probably
just my approach and just my general mindset about life.
I think that, you know, I was so hell bent
on just becoming successful
and making as much money as possible
and not only missed a lot of opportunities
but also I probably wasn't as happy and enjoyed life
as much as I actually could have.
Young males especially putting so much pressure
on themselves to look good, to be successful,
to be alpha is just like, it just causes a lot of problems.
If I could change a one thing would be my mentality
around that and just trying to find peace rather than,
you know,
just trying to be something that I didn't need to be.
If you want me to answer any more questions
head to Reddit and ask them if this video does well,
like and subscribe and you know, we'll do it again.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
I like answering the challenging ones for people.
Sometimes I do feel like maybe we don't go
into enough detail without YouTube for the advanced viewers.
So please make sure you leave,
leave a question and like and subscribe.
Thanks.