🥗 What’s going on at Obvi HQ?

Hey there!

Welcome back to another bite to chew on.

Hope you had a great week thus far.

In today’s newsletter, we won’t be talking about anything specific.

BUT…

… instead, we’ll take you for a trip down the “What’s going on at Obvi HQ” aisle where we’ll talk about some of our recent learnings.

Before we do that though - We have two quick questions for you because we want to get to know you better:

Alright, now buckle up and let’s dive into it

The biggest event we’ve had in New York…

We still can’t get over the last event we had on Friday in New York. Over 100 founders - SaaS, DTC, and Amazon FBA brands - all in one room with the sole purpose of connecting and building relationships. (PS: Go here if you wanna join the next ones)

It was great to meet so many new and familiar faces.

With every interaction, you learn something new - so in this newsletter, we want to start out by sharing some of our learnings from the event

1). E-commerce is SO much bigger than just a Shopify website and some Meta ads.

There’s a whole other world outside of the Shopify eCommerce community that’s filled with brands that sell through Amazon, TV, and retail.

There were so many people who didn’t even have a website and still were doing $10-15M in revenue.

We spoke to one of the founders there who was doing more than $12M - ONLY on Amazon.

When we asked why wouldn’t he build a Shopify website, run some paid ads on it, and own that customer base…

He gave an answer that just changed our perspective on the DTC landscape.

He said, “Why would I buy myself an extra headache of dealing with Meta, Shopify website, and fulfillment of the orders when Amazon sells everything for me?”

The reason why this was interesting to us, is that it’s a very different thinking process from what we’re used to seeing and hearing (especially online)

There was also another founder who literally didn’t have a website or an Amazon presence but was doing $40M+ a year in retail and marketplaces.

These are the kind of people whom we (in the DTC space) typically don’t hear from.

Had we heard that strategy back when we were building Obvi we would have probably laughed and said that’s not how you build a brand.

These two conversations opened our eyes as to how small our Twitter community really is and how big the overall Commerce Community actually is.

2). We spoke to Christian Short from VitaHustle who gave us great insights into selling in Walmart and what he’s learned over the years.

One of the things he said is the buyer has a TON of power as to how your product will do in Walmart.

Sure, your price, and your packaging also matter but if the buyer is not bullish on the category - as a whole or your product in general - even with good numbers the odds are against you.

This just goes to show that to survive in retail great relationships with the buyers supercedes everything. This should be the cornerstone of your retail strategy since everything else will follow after that.

Make sure to prioritize that!

3). Being vulnerable is OKAY.

This actually wasn’t a takeaway we had but it's just a general thought (with just events overall).

Whichever founder we spoke to and asked how their October was going, we received standard answers like, “It’s going good.”

But after going deeper into the hood and asking more specific questions people started opening up and showing their vulnerability.

It has become kind of a societal norm and expectation in entrepreneurship that everything has to be OKAY (partly due to social media).

But, the interesting thing is…

The best conversations take place where everyone learns and tries to help each other.

And that only happens when you’re open and vulnerable

Yet, very few people get to have those open, honest conversations about how everything is ACTUALLY going.

The point of all of these events is to connect with each other and build real relationships where we (as a community) are open to each other and help each other.

Instead of pretending everything is okay and not having a chance to be HELPED, why not just open yourself up - get feedback from people better than you - and ultimately improve?

The takeaway is it’s okay to be vulnerable in these events and ask for help from your peers. That’s how you learn and grow

Building brands through personal brands

Over the past few months, the power of personal branding in “business-building” has become more and more evident to us.

To give an example; The acquisition of Coffee Over Cardio was fueled by our personal brands in particular

There’s a reason for this… when you build in public/ build a personal brand, it creates an in-built trust with your audience.

A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of sitting down with Maxx Chewning for 2 hours to record an episode of Chew On This…

… and one of the things we touched upon was how Maxx used his personal brand to “grow/build his businesses”.

In case you don’t know Maxx - he’s a media machine with over 385,000 subscribers on YouTube.

But not only that - he also knows how to build a brand and leverage his community.

He's built brands like Ever Forward (an apparel brand) and Sour Strips (a candy brand) and started working with a well-known supplement brand Ghost Nutrition.

So…

It’s safe to say that he understands the importance of leveraging community while building his brand.

But Maxx Chewning is just one example of many.

Celebrities like Dwyane The Rock Johnson, Kylie Jenner and Connor Mcgregor has done the exact same thing

Once they had built a deep connection with their audience - they built businesses to serve their audiences.

As you might know and must have heard - a lot of the initial traction of their businesses is driven by their organic presence.

The lesson we learnt from talking to Maxx Chewning was that in the initial phases building a personal brand may seem like a waste of time and resources - but it is STILL one of the biggest opportunities one has in the digital era.

Anyways, this is all we had from our “What’s going on at Obvi HQ” tour

This was a slightly different format than usual, so let us know how you like it

Tool of the week

Want to get 99% tracking accuracy and have trust in your data again?

In a world where Apple keeps making the lives of marketers harder and harder, you need to look for other solutions to get accurate tracking data.

In-platform stats just DOESN’T cut it.

That’s where a tool like Elevar comes in…

The easiest way to explain what Elevar does is;

They give you accurate tracking again through proprietary server-side tracking technology.

But wait…

“Isn’t there a free Shopify integration with Meta for that? “

… and yes, there is.

But it’s not equally as good in it’s accuracy of the data (we’ve tested this)

With Elevar, you get 99% conversion accuracy back, which is pretty insane.

So…

If you want to never miss another conversion reported - we definitely recommend you get Elevar set-up on your website to make sure you have 99% accurate tracking

#ProudPartner

Thanks for reading along

As always, we appreciate you taking the time to read this. We hope we were able to provide some value to you and look forward to serving you again on Sunday

All the best,

Ron and Ash