TEA 246: The 3 Systems to $100K Months In Ecommerce (Only Using Meta Ads & Email)

Introduction to E-commerce Growth

0:00Last year, we partnered with three e-commerce businesses and we got in the trenches with them and we helped them grow from about $116,000 collectively per month with all three of them to just under $700,000 in revenue by the end of the year, $700,000 in a single month. It was like 680 something, I believe. And the thing is, that entire year, we did three things. We didn't do a million things. It was like, we just did these three things. And so what I wanna do in this episode is

0:30I wanna walk through the three systems that we teach our clients to do and that we just did in the trenches, showing them how to apply everything in live time. We actually did this stuff for a whole year. And so this we wanna walk through is, if you feel stuck or you wanna get to $100,000 months or even $700,000 months, just do these three things. I promise these things really work. We see it time and time again. We've been doing this for years and these haven't really changed. Now, I think AI might change it a little bit. Maybe how we get the stuff that we need,

1:01but the three systems haven't changed in a long time and they're wildly impactful. And if you're not doing these, you have to be doing these.

Host Introduction

1:08But before we kind of dive into that, and you don't know who we are, my name's Josh Coffey. I'm the founder of the eCommerce Alley. This is Dylan Counts. He's also one of the guys that runs the entire eCommerce Alley with me, as well as co-founder of Breezeway, which is our meta ads management software for e-com brands that helps you optimize and make good decisions. Go check out Breezeway.co to check that out. But Dylan, question for you. Okay. What's something you're super excited about right now? Well, I- What's got you jazzed? Yeah, I just started using Claude Code. And it was kind of scary at first

1:40because I've never written a line of code by myself ever. I'd played around like in the early days with ChatGPT trying to write an app in Xcode for an iPhone and played around with it for a little bit, but I couldn't really get the output that I wanted. So now with Claude Code, I was able to literally just say, here's what I want. And it just basically did it. And now I'm able to like iterate on things. And what's really cool about it is

2:10a lot of the time, if you want to do like a big project with AI, you run out of context window really fast. But with Claude Code, you can stitch together multiple AI prompts, bring them together with code into one big thing. So you're able to do a lot of different things with AI without running out of context window and keeping the outputs really high. So I've been building a few things with Claude Code, and it's just been really fun, really exciting. And I had to learn how to use GitHub. I had to learn how to use Railway, which is where it's getting hosted. Like there's a lot of learning curve to it,

2:42but AI taught me how to do it all. So that's been really cool. And then it's also helped me build bots, basically for the team to help speed up a lot of the stuff that they're doing.

Building the Profit X-Ray

2:52That was really fun. What about you? Heck yeah, it's so funny. I know what yours is. No, do you know what it is? I would guess I know what it is. What do you think it is? Replit. Freaking, you got me. Dude, you've been working on it like nonstop. So we're building something. So I'm using a tool called Replit. Replit is for software development. Of course, everything we're saying is AI right now. It's because it's so exciting. And the time to be alive. I was talking with Connor, who is he's an owner operator of Ember and Root. They he blew that up pretty, pretty fast to multi seven. He'll be eight figures probably in the next year,

3:23which is crazy. And so he's also a coach with us. So Connor and I meet and we're talking about it. We're just talking this week about how the time and opportunity right now that AI is presenting for businesses is just absurd. And if you actually dive in, it unlocks a whole lot. So anyway, all that to say, I built something called the Profit X-Ray. And this is actually an app that it has an ad scanner, a profit scanner and an email scanner. And I built it in Replit. And pretty much how this works is you can literally, you insert your gross profit margin on this thing

3:54and I could drag and drop my, I can drag and drop like a CSV of ad performance. And then it analyzes it through the lens of all of our benchmarks to say, here's where you're constraining in your current ads manager. And here are the recommended fixes. It grades it. It tells you what your break-even ROAS is, what the recommended target is based on your gross profit margin, where people are falling off in your funnel. And then we have a profit scanner that basically you upload your P&L and it will measure it across the core four metrics that we need. It will grade it. And then it'll tell you here are the fixes because your gross profit margin is too low,

4:25or your contribution margin or your ad variable marketing costs, your net profit, and here's how to lift it. And then we have an email scanner that literally you plug in your Klaviyo API and it'll measure you against the benchmarks of the industry that you're in with Klaviyo. And it will pull all of your flows in and it will grade them. It will pull every email. It'll grade the email and it'll tell you here's what to fix in the email and here's the revenue opportunity based on where you're below the benchmarks on these flows. Wild stuff. Pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. Anyway, we built that and we built it largely. It's a tool that we'll probably sell

4:56for like 27 bucks or something. But we'll also, maybe, maybe we'll sell it for a lot more than that. I don't know. It's something I wanted to just build and I built it called a profit x-ray. I basically got to find profit in the main areas of your business. First of all, where are you profitable in your P&L? Where are you not? And then the ads and email because those are usually the greatest levers. But anyway, built that out. Probably took three days. Probably took three days to build. Less than three full days. Like three days with a couple hours a day. Maybe a little bit more. Maybe a little bit more than that. I think it's been a little bit more. I found myself one night on a Sunday. It was like 8 p.m. I'm like, I have this idea for a,

5:27how do I do this? And I got on a replet. And then it was like, I hit the $20 membership and then it's like out of credits. I'm like, okay, $100 membership. Okay, $250 membership. I'm like, all right, I'm just gonna keep going. And then here we are now. I probably spent 500 bucks building the app. But it's worth it. And we're gonna give it to all our clients to make their lives a lot easier. But it's a great segue into the episode. What we're talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where it's an ad grader, an email grader, not necessarily the P&L side of things, but the ads and email tie right into what we're talking about today. Yes, exactly.

Weekly Ad System

5:55So let's kind of dive into that. And here's what I would say is, in your business, you have to decipher what's a maintenance task and what is a compounding task. And I look at maintenance tasks as things like you just do means to an end. If you're making product, right? If you're manufacturing your own stuff, you make a product and you ship it out. It doesn't compound anything. It's just maintenance. Bookkeeping is maintenance. It's compounding things are things that will grow an aspect of your business. So what we're gonna talk about now is how do you grow to six-figure months? Well, you have to be really dialed in on acquisition.

6:26Yes, fulfillment and make sure you have inventory and ops behind the scenes and stuff like that. But really, you don't have ops problems when you're sub $100,000. You really shouldn't have team or if anyone, you have maybe one person. Two is a stretch. And so you just need to stay lean. How you stay lean is you focus on the highest leverage things you can do that are compounding tasks. And so we look at these as, if we look at acquisition as the greatest lever to getting you to the next level revenue-wise, you have to say, what's the greatest leverage use of my time in acquisition?

6:56And so we have three systems that we follow in these compound week over week. So these are compounding activities that we're gonna talk through. And we proved this last year across all three brands. We teach our clients to do the exact same thing. If you were to work with us, which we have links in the description, you can go check it out. Just book a call and see kind of what it looks like and can we help you with where you're at? And what I would say is like, we teach our clients who do these exact three things. Now, how we do them is very nuanced, very specific inside our trainings, but I'm not, so I'm not gonna go that deep, but I'm gonna tell you the framework of what we do. And if we were, if we were starting at zero right now,

7:27like if we went and started a business selling something, I was gonna come up with something, but I'm pretty bad at coming up with something. Were you gonna use like a microphone? I was gonna say something. I'm like looking on our desk to say like, what, what could I use? SSD hard drives. If we're, oh man, that'd be a rough market. Yeah, I would. So if we're selling, if we were starting at zero, this is exactly what we would do. Once you of course have a product website, just the basics of it, and you have at least a welcome offer pop-up. And here's what I would also say, you'll notice the things I'm gonna talk about, one of them is not organic.

7:58And that's because organic compounds, it is a compounding task, but the delay, the time delay of the compounding is just so great, and even so, it doesn't compound as much as these other. The other ones here will get you there a lot faster. So zero to 100K, you don't need the compounding that organic would take, or it would take a long, long, long, long time. So organic social media is not in the three systems. It might help a little bit, but it's gonna slow you down if you put a lot of focus on that. So this is if I decided to do nothing but these, these are the three things that I would do. The three systems we're gonna talk about

8:29are the weekly ad system, the weekly email system, and the monthly promo system. So let's talk about the first one. The first system is the weekly ad system. This is where you have one channel for ads for acquisition, and that should be meta ads. There are other platforms and channels out there for meta, for e-com, meta is unparalleled. You shouldn't go anywhere else. And so in this, there are two things that you should be doing pretty much every week. Number one is launching new ads, and number two is just optimizing the current ads. And we call this the weekly ad testing cadence,

9:00and it's required, it is required. We actually did a study in Breezeway. I think you saw the study on the call. Yeah. Okay. We did a study of $32 million in spend in about 69,000 ads in the software. And we found that the average shelf life, the median shelf life of an ad is eight days. Meta will give spend to ads on average eight days. Now there are outliers. Those are the unicorns we wanna get to that really crank, and we could scale really, really big into. But for the most part, meta has an eight day shelf life on ads. And so because of that,

9:30you need to be launching ads every single week, non-negotiable, no matter what. You have to do this as part of the business. If you don't do it, you're gonna fall behind, and you'll be like, well, maybe this ad is doing well, so I'm not gonna launch this week, or I'm gonna skip two weeks. And I kind of look at this as like, if you're making product and fulfilling, you would never just skip a week of shipping product to customer, or producing product if you're making it. Like, so this has to be the same. It's funny, I remember last year, we were working with a brand, and she was scaling her ad budget,

10:04and all of a sudden, like it was going really well, going really well, and then all of a sudden, she just lost the ROAS that she had been continuing to get over and over. And I was like, what the heck happened? Like, it shouldn't have just dropped. It shouldn't have just all of a sudden fell apart. Come to find out, for one month, she stopped launching ads. She was still scaling her budget, but she stopped launching ads. That's what stopped her, what caused her ROAS to start declining as she was growing her budget. Because she's like, oh, I didn't realize that was that important.

10:35Like, yeah, that's like the whole point of like scaling your budget. You have to scale your ads too. And that was, so she started relaunching ads, and she was able to get back to, she had to descale her budget, it was a whole thing. Now she's able to get back to where she was as she's been launching ads. Yeah, you have to like, it has to be non-negotiable. Like, if you want to go to the next level, and as long as you're not constraining at, and I mean, you should do it either way. But as long as you, if you want to grow your revenue, what's the number one way to do that? Get new customers, get more customers, get people to buy again. And ads are the most predictable way to do that.

11:05Like organic, you can't post 10 times a day and get 10 times a performance. But if you spend 10 times more on ads, done right, you'll get 10 times a performance or it's relatively close. And so you have to commit to it. Now, when we look at ads, we have a lot of training on it. So I'm not going to go deep in this because we have a lot of podcasts we've done on this. First of all, when you're testing ads, do a seven to 14 day look back and just find the next best thing. We call this bread crumbing. Dylan, do you know the, you don't have your computer. I was going to say, can you find the episode number? Oh, I mean, I can find it if you stall for a little bit.

11:37So the first thing is, the first thing is bread crumbing. And bread crumbing is basically where we're able to, you just want to look in the past and say, hey, what is the next best thing that I should do based on what's working in the last seven to 14 days. Maybe it's an ICP that's working and we need to build more ads for that ICP. Maybe it's a particular type of creative format and we need to do more of that. Maybe it's a particular message. We need to do more of that. Maybe it's a particular product. We need more of that. You're kind of determining what you need to focus on. And we, when we look at this, we think of,

12:07there are three dials that you're choosing what dial you're going to turn every week. The first is the product dial. Are we selling the right thing? The second is the message dial. This is the right ICP and the right angle. And the third is the creative dial where it's like, is it a format? Is it a modality like video or static? What's working from a creative? So those are the three dials and every week we're turning, at least we're choosing one dial and that's the breadcrumb. So product, message, or creative. And we have podcast episodes on those. Yeah, actually. So episode 227 is the five meta ad creative mistakes

12:37that are costing you money. I'd recommend that. And then Josh just mentioned the three dials that control your ad performance. We did an episode actually in Vegas, in the pool. In the pool, yeah. The three dials that control your ad performance is episode 228. So 227 and 228, February 2nd, February 9th of this year. I would recommend both of those. I think 227 is like one of our largest episodes at this point. It's like people love creatives or something. Yeah, so like go watch it. It'll talk further about the three dials. But the gist says every single week, no matter what, you pick when you're going to do it.

13:08And there's a lot of nuance to that. And of course, those two episodes are very deep and they go into like the product, the message of the creative dial, how to start thinking about creative. But either way, the most important thing is this. You need a weekly ad system. And this is where you kill underperformers, you inject new ads, and you follow breadcrumbs. That's it. Every week, build new ads. Guess what? If you're really smart, make those ads, copy paste onto organic. So you could literally, if you want to keep organic going, that's totally fine. Build ads that you can post on organic, take those and throw them in ads as well. And if you were to do this

13:38for 52 weeks, it would be unreasonable that you wouldn't have winning ads, winning offer, and a clear ideal customer profile. Usually you can find that in like three to four months if you're really, really on it. Yeah, and that's the thing. Like people underestimate what's possible in 52 weeks. If you just commit, you just need to commit and say, for 52 weeks, I will launch new ads no matter what. If you do this for a whole year, it sounds crazy, you'll change your whole business. You'll change your whole life because in a year, you could find out a lot of stuff by breadcrumbing.

14:09And the only way that you could fail is just to literally stop doing that. All right, that's system number one you have to have in place. Now, this is gonna bring new people into your ecosystem. If you drive traffic, you're gonna get purchases. As you drive traffic, you're also gonna get your list growing because of the welcome pop-up that should be capturing between five and 10% of people. So as the list grows, you're gonna get buyers and you're also gonna get those non-buyers that have not yet purchased. This is where system number two comes in.

Weekly Email System

14:33And this is the weekly email system. This is where every week you send an email to your list no matter what. And the list size doesn't matter. This is a habit that you need to build. I've heard this. I don't know if you hear this at all in the alley, but like, I'll hear like, well, my email list is only like 200 people. So it's just not worth sending an email. It's like, it doesn't matter if you're sending email 200 people or 20,000 or 200,000. It takes the same amount of time. You're just being lazy and you're creating excuses as to why someone wouldn't buy. Well, Josh, I actually just heard something worse in the alley. I was working with a brand.

15:03They had a great ROAS. They were far above their break-even into Target. They were only spending about $85 a day. I'm like, guys, it looks like you're ready to scale. You've got good ads. You've got everything. Now, unfortunately, they started scaling into a meta issue where things were, or meta was having some issues. So the performance as they scaled wasn't super great. So we pulled it back. We're recalibrating and everything. And I was like, well, guys, here's the good news. At least you have your pop-up that collected some emails and you're able to send, oh, you don't have a pop-up.

15:35They didn't have a pop-up. And they're like, we just don't like the look of a pop-up. And it kind of messes with the brand. And I'm like, so you just drove like two to three times more people to your website than you ever have before. And you weren't able to collect any of their information because you don't have a pop-up. So they now have a pop-up and that is fixed. But that was really sad because the performance didn't work. But I was like, hey, you'll be able to send emails out to these people and get some money back. And they weren't able to collect

16:05any of those emails. Been there. Actually, we just launched a new funnel and we forgot to bring over the pop-up for our own funnel. So we literally just did that exact same thing. And we're like, what the heck happened? Well, two weeks ago, we moved to this new funnel test that we had been running. We forgot that. So been there, done that. Yeah, pop-up, definitely have a pop-up. Like the way I look at it is this, is 95 to 98% of your traffic will bounce and they will never, ever come back. And so if you want to have the greatest impact,

16:35it's like your pop-up is the way that you can now capture an extra five to 10% of people and you might impact their lives. And so it's like, if you want to serve the most people, you need as many shots as possible because you have the best stuff out there. And I think that's a side tangent. You have to believe in your stuff, like believe that you are the best, you are the best option for somebody who's looking for the thing. That's how we look at it. When someone works with us, we're like, we are their best shot at success and we have to treat it like that. So it is our, our like, I don't know what kind of duty you call it. I mean, it's conviction. It's conviction, right? It's our conviction. It's our duty to literally try to serve as many people as humanly possible.

17:07And a pop-up is a way that you get more people in your system that you can serve them better. And so if you've ever not had the pop-up, you don't like the look of it, hey, I totally get it. I've been there before. We've made the mistake from before as well. But if you want to impact more people, have that in place. Okay, so one email per week starting out. Now you could lift email as your revenue, as your list grows, because you always have to measure, you always have to measure impact and resource. Resource of email for one email is going to be here and your impact at the beginning is going to be really small. As your email list grows, the impact,

17:37meaning the output of your revenue is going to go up. And so there's a point in which now one email per week is worth going to two emails per week because it has a compound effect on the impact. And then three emails per week and then four and then five and then you get to the point of sending at least an email a day. And that's usually like one of the more max thresholds that people get to aside from promo cycles like you might be sending multiple a day in that period of time. But all that said, get in the habit of it no matter what. And what happens is that weekly email at first it's like zero sales, zero sales, $50 in sales,

18:07$100 in sales, $300, $500,000, $5,000. So your email becomes more important over time. And if you're looking to really build community and relationship with people, that's how you do it. You have to communicate to build a community. You can't just like be like, oh, we got customers, we never ever talk to them and hope for the long game that it works out. It's like, no, you have to build that relationship. And in the beginning, your email revenue is going to be such a small percentage, but it will grow over time. And that's key too. Like you don't want your emails to only ever be sales emails too. Because if you're only ever asking for people to give you money,

18:38then that's not actually building that relationship. People are going to unsubscribe. And you're going to just train a list of like they're only going to be looking for deals or whatever. So you should also use these emails as a way to build community and actually like talk to your people. Like have conversations with them through the email rather than just, here, buy this thing. That's a big thing. And the good thing is, so like I kind of look at it as imagine if you, like in any relationship, if you're just, if there's someone you always hung out with and all they ever did was talk about themselves, you'd probably get

19:08a little annoyed. You know, I mean this person has such a big ego. All they do is like try to sell me on something on how great they are. So instead, this is where you tell stories, you highlight customers, you highlight certain products. Yes, you talk about behind the scenes, you humanize yourself, you tell founders stories, why you started stuff and then people begin to buy you and when they're bought into you, when you launch new products, they will buy those products. But if not, the other thing is you're just living off of ad acquisition which is super duper expensive. Email doesn't require ad spend

19:39and whether I'm saying email to 100 people or 10,000 or 100,000 people, same amount of time but the output goes up really, really high. Something that was really interesting that I heard actually it was at the Smart Marketer event in Nashville we were at. I was talking, funny enough, I was sitting at the organic table talking about that and they were kind of talking about how they look at organic and all of that but it kind of applies to this in that he made a really good point that was, well, what's the difference between Nike and small e-commerce athletic store?

20:10The difference is the small athletic store is going to do things that Nike's not going to do. Nike's not going to try and build a relationship with his customers. Nike's not going to pull the curtain back and show, here's how we make the products. It's just not going to happen. That's the benefit that you have as a small business. You can be fun. You can be yourself. You can be relational. You can do all these things and people like to buy from people. Yeah. So when you show who you actually are, you show yourself, you show your customers what the culture is like

20:40at your business, it's going to change the way that they look at you and want to buy from you versus the big box because it might actually be hard to compare your product one-to-one with Nike or Nike was the example he used. That's why I'm using it. But it might be hard to compare your product with the big guys, but it will be very difficult to compare yourself with the big guys. And that email is a really easy way to do that. And there's such a rise right now in founder-led brands. Yeah. Like so many, like even the head of PayPal

21:11is hiring a direct, or the CEO of PayPal is hiring like a director of personal content for him to build a personal brand. That's crazy. Burger King, same way. That's true. I remember the- Sam Altman, like literally- Even the McDonald's CEO just didn't go very well, but that's going to show the founder-led brands. I think of Bloom with Greg Levecchia,

21:36which by the way, we had a podcast with him years ago when they were way smaller and now they're like billion-dollar company. I don't know if you know that. It's crazy. We actually just bought some of their pop soda. Oh, yeah, yeah. Their soda, yeah. It was, I was like, oh, this looks really good. And I was like, wait, it's kind of crazy. We had the founder of this on our podcast. Moon is everywhere. I see it everywhere. I'm like, yeah. I like, I have Greg's number, like, and how like we DM on like Instagram and stuff like that. But anyway, all that to say like Greg and his wife, I'm blanking on his wife's name, but either way, they tell their story throughout the whole thing. It was built on,

22:08and then they expanded into doing community-based events. And so like community is so important in a simple way. The easiest way to get started without a high amount of resource is literally just send a weekly email. By the way, if you're interested in the Bloom episode, it's episode 136. Oh, there we go. Over 100 episodes ago. Back in 2024, it's called Building a $150 million brand in Four Years, Bribing Target, Product Heists, and Unconventional Marketing with Bloom Supplements. Oh yeah, he had Product Heisted. Yeah, that's an interesting episode, guys. Go listen to that. And his wife is Mari.

22:40Mari, that's it. There you go. Yeah, and they just had a baby, actually, in the last year. Okay, so email is a great way to build relationship with your audience. Now, that's system number two, weekly email. Here's the thing. Even in that email, you can sell. Now, this doesn't mean you're doing a hard sell. You could tell story in it. You could have image at the top. You could have some longer text, tell story, and then the very bottom just have product blocks that it's like you just have different collections of products, your best sellers, so that way people could read the story and if they want to buy, they could buy and they will buy. So it's not going to be

23:10as much as a dedicated sales email, but you will make sales. You will build a relationship. It's like a win-win right there and you build a community over the long term.

Monthly Promo Sprint System

23:18And the third system is the monthly promo sprint. So this is now where ads are running, we're getting new customers and we're growing our email list from the pop-up. The weekly email is building relationship with people and getting a little bit of sales. Now we're going to crank the heat and make a lot of sales. This is going to maximize your cash injection every single month, which will then grow your revenue and inject enough cash to allow you to keep investing more in ads, which will then get your next month to be bigger than that. And it's going to be this compound effect. And so the monthly promo sprint system is a 72-hour window

23:49where once a month you are going to blast your email and your SMS list for some kind of a promotion. And there are two types of promotion. My recommendation is that you alternate these every other month. Number one is a discount promotion. So when I say promotion, everybody thinks discount, right? Money off. And so a discount promotion can be site-wide, collection, it could be product-specific, but you could do, a discount could be different. And I recommend you rotate these and it's not the same every time. This is where you could do a site-wide discount or a collection discount. Yes, like percentage or dollar. You could do a tier discount. You could do a buy one, get one free.

24:20You could do a free gift or a buy X, get Y. Buy two, get this for free. Buy two, get one for 35% off. You could try a lot of different buy X, get Y combinations. And you can often tie these to holidays. The easiest way, in my opinion, to do a discount promo is tie it to a holiday because everybody wants a reason to buy. And then the discount is just the layer on top of that. So for example, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, back to school, spring. I mean, there's just-

24:51That was a lot that you just came up with. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday, fall, Halloween, Christmas, New Year's, January, you know, New Year's starts. Like they're infinite. All year long, there are so many holidays. Winter sale. There are months. Yeah, people want to like to buy when there's a reason, even if the reason is silly. It could be like, oh, it's X, Y, Z month, so this weekend only, insert whatever. You could go find a national any day, right? I make the joke all the time. You know, the, do you watch TV?

25:21I don't watch a lot of TV. But when I do watch TV, I feel like it's always Toyotathon. You know, it's all, every commercial is always Toyotathon. I'm like, you know, they should actually make commercials when it's not Toyotathon because that would actually probably be less frequent. But they're literally always running Toyotathon. And it's like, it's June, so it's Toyotathon. I'm like, I thought it, I thought May was just Toyotathon. You could do it for like, we've done things for us where it's like, Josh just turned 32, so it's 32% off any of our programs. Yeah. Or the company just turned

25:5210 years old or 13 years old and so we're giving whatever. Like there's so many things you could do. Anyway, promo type number one is a discount and do it for three days. We've learned that it doesn't matter if you go five days, seven days, 14 days, everybody buys on day one and then the last 48 hours. And so might as well make it three days. You're going to have huge spike and then urgency, urgency and it's done. If you spread it out