The Andrew Faris Podcast

I tweeted a version of that episode title not long ago. It's nonsense: there is, of course, such a thing as revenue. But in DTC, revenue is also one of the metrics I reference the least often. Instead, I'm constantly breaking it down into two smaller metrics, both of which tell me a lot more: New Customer Revenue and Returning Customer Revenue. In fact, those are the first two things I loo...

If you aren't a baseball fan, you might not realize that we're living through a revolution. And Driveline Baseball is right at the center of it. The data-driven baseball training company has trained thousands of high school and college baseball players, well over a hundred MLB players (including MVPs, Cy Young winners, and All-Stars), and overhauled the way teams across pro sports think ab...

From his early ecommerce days of enterprise level Google Ads arbitrage to his just-ended run as President of Kuru Footwear (a mid 8-figure DTC shoe brand), Sean McGinnis has seen a lot. And his professional throughline is his ability to build and manage teams. In this wide-ranging conversation, Sean talks through the growth of DTC across his time in the industry, how he hires well and leads effect...

It's the most philosophical I've ever gotten on the podcast, and it's all around this question: why are you actually doing what you're doing in business? What's the point? And is it creating the kind of joy deep contentedness that you're longing for at the core of who you are? This is an easier question to ask than to answer, but as my own business has filled up its capacit...

There's no one I've met who knows Amazon like Bryan Porter, the Chief Ecommerce Operator at Simple Modern. Simple Modern will do over $100M on Amazon ALONE in 2023, and it's not an accident. It's the downstream affect of intelligent strategies that stretch all the way back to when Bryan and his two co-founders were testing which products to go to market on Amazon with in the first...

Your product didn't just appear out of thin air. It's the result of hundreds of hours of hard work, complete with crucial decisions you made so you could get it just right because you care about serving your customer well and being proud of the product you give them in exchange for their money. But your customer doesn't know any of that. At least they don't if you don't tell th...

Kelsey Lehrich is the co-founder and CEO of 365 Holdings, an aggregator that currently has nine brands in their portfolio. Which gives Andrew a chance to revisit one of his favorite questions: is the aggregator model broken, or was Andrew just a poor leader of it at 4x400? Kelcey’s business is very much not broken, and that means there’s lots to explore about what makes it work and what others can...

It's the most obvious thing about selling products on the Internet. It's also one of the easiest things to forget. And being conscience of it is the bedrock of great digital communication. What am I talking about? I'm talking about what I call the "digital gap" between your customers and your products. Put simply, it's the fact that your customers can't actually touch...

SPONSORED EPISODE. Gregg Carey is the CEO of Section 119 and co-founder of More Staffing. More Staffing helps e-commerce businesses locate, hire, recruit, train, maximize the value of incredible talent in the Philippines, and they're also my current sponsor. I don't usually offer sponsored episodes to my advertising partners, but I'm so compelled by how and why Gregg is working with ec...

Today's interview is with one of my very favorite people in ecommerce, Andrew Youderian. Andrew is the founder of E-commerce Fuel, an online community of 7-figure & higher ecommerce store owners. Ecommerce Fuel is the best-run online community I've ever personally seen, so I started by asking Andrew what makes great online community. From there, the conversation shifted to his unique p...

You should be buying your Meta Ads with Cost Controls. I've believed that for awhile now, but in the last six months my conviction on this point has solidified to where I now believe advertisers are costing themselves huge amounts of money in both efficiency AND scale when they refuse to implement this incredible tool. In today's episode I'm explaining that belief with 6 arguments aime...

So your business is growing? That's great. But it also comes with complications. Every team member you add means another line of communication, another position description to right, another onboarding process to nail, and another person to loop into the systems & processes that make your business work. Panagiota Hatzis has seen all of this, and she's helped multiple organizations navi...

In this solo episode, Andrew gets incredibly practical. Want to better harness the power of Meta Ads for your business? Great. Here are 4 truths that most accounts he's audited have gotten wrong. TIMESTAMPS [0:58]: CAC is not ROAS [05:38]: Lowest Cost is not Highest Value [08:56]: AOV is not LTV [11:52]: Spend is performance Follow Andrew on Twitter: @andrewjfaris Email Andrew: podcast@ajfgrowth.c...

Aaron Orendorff is the best B2B marketer I know, and it's not just because he's an elite writer (with a byline in the New York Times to show for it). It's also because he has a clear framework for what he's trying to accomplish in his messaging. That framework? Keeping customers from hell and taking them to heaven. He's thought about it in his posts as a marketing lead at Shopify Plus, Common Thre...

Your brand has great LTV, so everything is easy. Right? Not so fast. While growing a high-LTV brand is easier than growing a low-LTV brand, having a clear roadmap of how and when to generate growth AND profit can make all the difference between success and wasted opportunity. In this episode, Andrew talks about how to operate a high LTV brand, from planning where profit comes in your P&L to th...

There's just no one else quite like Isaac Medeiros that I know of in ecommerce. With a team of a ~dozen creators, 16 freelance scriptwriters, multiple YouTube & TikTok accounts, and now a Discord channel, Isaac has taken the content-driven approach to DTC to a whole different level. The result: a fast-growing, profitable DTC brand with a PNL that doesn't look like any others I know of in the s...

Are you SURE you need that attribution tool you're paying for? I'm not. The closer I've looked at the performance of the brands that I work with, the more convinced I have become that third party attribution tools don't provide incremental insights at best and are overtly misleading at worst. Today on the show I make the case that you should carefully evaluate whether or not your attribution tool...

Matt Bertulli has seen a lot: he's run a successful agency, raised venture money, and now runs two large and fast-growing ecom brands in Lomi and Pela Case. Which means he's thought a lot about how important it is to do at least one really important thing right: nail your customer experience. Matt joined me for a wide-ranging discussion on how to make sure you do that, how that creates value in yo...

Let's talk retention, but instead of pure methods and tactics, we're analyzing the "genetic" elements of high-retention brands and products. I've got 6 of them, and I put them in order of most important to least important. The good news? If these factors don't describe your brand or products particularly well, you're the one with the power to change them. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS [2:17] The category of...

Bill D'Alessandro is back! A couple months ago, Bill wrote a post that blew up in the Ecommerce Fuel forums titled " This Is An Intervention: Stop Taking Fixed Fee Loans " where he explained why the quick & easy revenue-based loans from folks like Wayflyer, ClearCo, and Shopify Capital are so much worse than they look. I'll be honest: I myself realized how poorly I had been thinking about this...

You didn't become an entrepreneur because you think, "Nothing will work out and I won't even try." Quite the opposite. But if you're the CEO of your company now, it's your job to flip that instinct around and start asking, "How will this go wrong?" For optimists like many of us, that's not intuitive. But it's necessary. In this episode I'll explain why. TIMESTAMPS [00:34]: Andrew’s "CEO's should b...

If you gave me a list of 100 businesses and asked me to rank which ones were most likely to die in the next 5 years, I'd be shocked if you found me 5 I'd rank higher than the national retailer I'm talking about in this episode. But here's the thing: I'd be wrong. Not only is this business still around; it's growing . And the story is full of great lessons even for those of us running very differen...

Bear Handlon isn't on Twitter, and if you aren't a CrossFitter you might not have heard much about Born Primitive. But I've seen them up close for years now and I can tell you for certain: it's one of the best ecommerce businesses you don't know. BP is a mid-8-figure brand, punctuated by putting up $1.2M in two hours to kickoff BFCM. Bear is a remarkable guy who started BP with his then-wife, Mall...

It's the "very special episode" time of year and I'm doing my part. To round out 2022, I joined up with The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast for a colab episode where Taylor Holiday (CEO of Common Thread Collective ), Richard Gaffin (Senior Copywriter & Podcast Cohost at CTC) and I reflected on the unique ability of failure to form us and teach us for the long term. Whether it's been a great or terr...

There's one really simple way to make certain that your DTC business simply cannot be successful at scale: lacking any organic revenue. In this episode, I'll walk through the foudnational design of a scalable ecommerce business, including the two main ways to generate organic revenue on the back of your paid acquisition. TIMESTAMPS [01:10]: Importance of growing organic revenue [06:26]: Ways of gr...