Podcast 09: 6 Steps to Building a Million Dollar Ecommerce Business, Part 1

Nerd Marketing Ecommerce Podcast

The 6 key success factors and actionable insights that allowed us to grow a million dollar Ecommerce business in a single year. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the text transcribe from this episode. Click Here to download the PDF. How were we able to create a Million Dollar Ecommerce Business in about a year? Highlights The self-perpetuating cycles that drive growth in early companies How your retailer can find the untapped demand of your customers How to make integration with your suppliers work for everyone Why merchandising is your best marketing tool Reducing customer acquisition costs Links / Resources The Nerd Marketing newsletter (sign up to unlock freebies) The Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne Sina Djafari's company Duoplane -- order management for ecommerce stores Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later. ? Read the Transcript Drew: All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. My name is Drew Sanocki. I am the host and today I have a co-host. A special guest, a blast from the past, my former business partner Sina Djafari. Sina welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. You are the first guest. Sina: Thank you. I am extremely honored. I'm honored that you still talk to me. Want to save this transcribe to read later? CLICK HERE to download it as a PDF. Drew: Occasionally. This is like podcast episode 10 or 11. Sina: It’s the only way I could talk to Drew is if I agree to be on this podcast. Drew: Yeah. We are not going to catch up during this podcast. We are going to talk about something the audience might actually be interested in. That is how to build a retailer to $1 million in revenue. Actually historically how we built our own retailer design public to 1 million in revenue over the first 18 months. Sina that is one of the more popular articles on my blog. I think it's popular because everybody wants to be a millionaire overnight even though 1 million revenue doesn’t equal millionaire, it’s just a promise of ramping up a company pretty quickly, is something that attracts a lot of interest. As you know it's harder than you think and it doesn't often mean a whole lot. I thought that would elaborate on that article and drill down and get your two cents as the guy who went through with me. Sina: Absolutely and a fine article it is. Drew: Thank you Sina. In the article I have the five reasons. I think I wrote that now at this point to years ago. I look at that article again and I probably want to pull out a couple of those reasons may be add a couple more. We’ll start with those as a point of departure for discussion. The first reason was that we chose a blue ocean. I talked about this book called Blue Ocean Strategy. It basically argues that when you start a business, you try to find a category where there aren’t a lot of competitors. That is opposed to red ocean where the waters are bloodied with the blood of all your competitors, right? I think in 2003 if you go back to when we started Sina, there weren’t a whole lot of people selling furniture online. Design Public was there, I think they thought of themselves as a catalog first company because their website didn't really embrace any sort of best practices of SEO or anything like that at the time. We were fortunate to just choose a niche where there was a lot of search activity, a lot of people were looking to buy brands online and there weren’t a lot of sites optimized for those brands. I think that was a big contributor to our early success, Sina: Yeah absolutely. I know we talked about some of the, in the bullet points of what makes a blue ocean strategy in terms of competition and the fact that the products were essentially kind of marketing themselves.