DTC ecom is war

Every day you’re fighting to survive as a business. 

You find out your supplier has been stealing your molds and selling them to your competitors at a discounted price.

Tariffs are introduced at a moment's notice by governments without allowing for any time to plan or prepare.

Your ads agency just assigned a new junior account manager and Meta performance is going to shit.

That new winning ad you launched a week ago was just taken down by Google’s auto-rejection robot, despite following terms of service to the tee.

Your website conversion rate is randomly tanking and you don’t know why. Your dev team is off on a week long holiday. 

These are all real life examples of problems we face as E-Commerce brand owners and operators.

As you start to scale, they only become more troublesome.

All you can do is put your head down, get to work, and find a solution each time.

This is the mindset of a winner.

But mindset is usually not enough to find long-term success.

There’s a missing ingredient nobody is talking about.

It’s not your ad creative, TikTok shops, or giving up a crazy amount of equity to a massive influencer.

It’s much more simple than that…

Knawledge.

Yep.

(bonus points if you mentally read that in the Tai Lopez “in my garage with my Lamborghini” voice)

And I wish it wasn’t the case. Because knowledge unlevels the playing field to some degree. You can be better skilled than your competition and still lose in the end because they got lucky with something or someone they knew and you didn’t.

A few months ago I was consulting with a DTC Grounding company. They sold bed sheets designed to ‘reconnect your body to the earth’ and increase your sense of well-being.

Turns out they had a direct competitor that was not only copying their funnels and ads, but actively paying blackhat Meta reps for several illegal and unethical purposes:

• Applying AI exempt tags to their own ad accounts, allowing them to upload controversial ads without immediate rejection from the algorithm robots

• Screensharing their competitors ad account structure and ads, sent via a video recording in Whatsapp

• Manually shutting down competitor ad accounts without true cause or reason

All of these services cost thousands of dollars, each. I know because I have personal contacts with some of them. The Meta reps offering these services would lose their job and potentially face legal consequences if their boss or company ever found out. So it makes sense from an economics point of view why they charge so much.

Do I think this is morally right? No. But a lot of things in business are unfair. It’s on us as owners and operators to adapt to our environment and make the best move possible on the chess board.

If you don’t have the capital, resources, and network to keep your business alive, you’re going to lose. Plain and simple.

Wanna know what I told that Grounding company?

I told them to fuck their competitor right back as hard as they can. Do all the same stuff they were doing to them, but kick it up a notch. Add in lawyer notices, takedowns, etc.

That’s my personal worldview at least. If you mess with me, you’re going to feel it double coming back your way.

Reply back to this email with what you would have told that Grounding company. I’m curious to hear your responses.

Alright, nuff said.

Till next week,