Thread: How to build 6 figure e-commerce products with less than $1000 through PMF

1) Deciding what to sell:

- If you don't have customers, think about something you and your friends would buy

- If you have customers learn everything about them (where they eat, fav music, etc)

- host a design jam with your customers, ie. we just got 30 moms together on a series of video calls to design our upcoming mom bag

- don't use multiple choice surveys because you can't get answers you haven't written. Instead ask open ended questions like...

"what is your favourite bag" on channels like your email welcome flow and IG. Make it feel like direct communication (plain text, not overly designed)

2) Get your product made:

- If you want to be aggressive on testing first, you can dropship, but I personally wouldn't

- Find suppliers, don't limit yourself to one country. At first I found people by going down rabbit holes on LinkedIn and have found great factories in India, Italy, China, etc

- As you grow, more suppliers will come from warm intros because they'll want to work w you

- MOQs will be the hardest part, you need to find suppliers that believe in your potential and will let you move forward with small order runs.

This takes convincing and selling on the vision. In the worst case just do a small sample run and pay a little more.

3) Start selling before making huge capital commitments

- Get your samples and take 10/10 photos, videos, etc. Don't go short on this, you want no excuses if it doesn't sell well

- Put up your @Shopify store, make fb ads, tik tok ads, etc. and take pre orders

- This is great because the pre orders are upfront capital to help make your larger order, cash flow for more ads, and it very quickly tells you if you have a winner or not

- If things go well, you're in business and you can make a bigger order and keep selling!

- If things don't go well, you've saved yourself tons of time and capital and you can start the process again. Make a small order to fulfill the pre orders, or cancel them and return the funds

4) Keep winning

- Finding a winner is RARE, once you've found it double down

- You can do this by creating add ons (ie. inserts for a Tote, belts on a Mini) or launch new colours.

- New colours are great because they take almost 0 "inception" time and because the product is already a winner, it's very unlikely a new colour won't be.

5) Grow profitably

- Be cognizant of your unit economics and don't let your advertising spend get out of hand. Take those profits and re invest them into finding more winners so you can grow exponentially.

The only thing better than one great product, is 2.

6) Through this process try to improve the world in some way

- As you grow your product, you gain more control because you choose who you buy from. Choose better materials, better factories, demand transparency, and hold your supply chain accountable

- A great example is our Ocean Backpack. As it grows and gets more sales, we can remove more trash from the ocean, improving the world, and growing our business all at the same time.

All made possible by talking to your users and finding product market fit