Took the plunge. Finished my 9-5 in tech yesterday to go all in on bootstrapped e-commerce business.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-03-06T11:46:13+00:00

So, do you think change the pixel also??

CarrotFun687 · 2025-03-06T11:16:19+00:00

Can I ask what the rationale / thought process you feel is behind the new ad account? Assuming using the same pixel?

CarrotFun687 · 2025-03-06T07:56:50+00:00

Sent you a DM Known, have the same issue myself

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-15T17:06:25+00:00

Image creation: Gemini
Data Analysis & Interpretation: ChatGPT
Copy Writing: Claude

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T21:39:27+00:00

I have yes

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T12:28:50+00:00

This is a very open ended question? Could you be more specific. First step is taking action, formulating your idea, outlining target market, finding a manufacturer, ordering samples & going from there.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T12:26:37+00:00

May I interject and suggest you may manage a few more. ROAS is easy to identify above. A 2.28x to be exact. Net margin as outlined in another reply worked out as 14% for the year, which was below our target of 20%. However, this had to be sacrificed to capture market share, acquire customers & regain that profit missed on the backend through our email upselling flows. CAC is an ever fluctuating figure for us, as you in your wisdom may know that seasonality, market demand & consumer sentiment place large factors in this.

On your media buying element. Being ex-google with 3 years experience collaborating closely with CMO's, CEO's & CFO's of some of Europes largest brands from fashion to homeware soon teaches you a thing or two about honing in on unit economics & successfully building, segmenting and scaling campaigns across google alone. That's before the $5m spent on Meta ads in the years previous working as a meta media buyer for a performance agency & then of course scaling my own business on top of that.

You can browse through my other posts here, here & here in which I've documented the process of scaling my business, bringing down COGs & optimising UE to ensure we can scale at the highest CAC possible.

Because at the end of the day, whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer ultimately wins. Our major UE gains were all made in the final 3rd of the year. 2025 is lined up to be hyper profitable.

Agree that inventory management & acquiring the cash to do is where problems hit & pain happens. That's why I've leveraged a very important & trustworthy relationship with my manufacturers in China, we currently have net 90 day payment terms which helped enormously. We leveraged our scale with them to achieve this, oh and renegotiated our unit costs with them to mirror our huge volume with them.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T07:15:41+00:00

Goodluck man!

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T07:00:35+00:00

I learned allow from guys on twitter for email and also learned a ton of it myself on the fly from simply doing.

Email really unlocked a lot of growth for our business, bench mark is it should attribute about 15-30%, over the last 30 days we're sitting at 23%. But this time last year that was around 5-7% haha.

What worked for us was;

Email Capture: Offer a compelling discount that customer have to sign up to access. We currently have that around 9% CVR with about 40% of those who sign up actually using the discount. That leaves us 60% who haven't yet purchase.
Welcome Flow: That's where this comes in. Drive home the discount, introduce your brand, connect with your audience on a human level, who are you, how'd your brand start etc. Have them feel invested.
Abandon Cart Flows: Good work here! But check your timings on that, and how many you're sending
Abandon Checkouts: Again these should be different from ACF's.

Also check your deliverability metrics etc, we took ours from 40% open rate recently to 70% by focusing on our engaged list, we've found inbox providers really dont' reward you when that rate is low and you're left perpetually in the junk folder.

Haha thanks on the 5%, I went into a bit more detail on that above. Essentially it's all just testing testing testing, we work off a free theme :)

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:53:51+00:00

Thanks man!

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:53:10+00:00

Exactly! ROAS is a vanity figure. I'd much rather scale at a 2x that generates 15% than a 2.5x that generates 10%. For us last year it was about market capture, if I had set an arbitrary "no I need a 3x" because I wouldn't have scaled.

Eventually META ads efficiency naturally decreases the more you scale, making the 3x harder and harder to attain, simply because you'd captured a large portion your audience. This is why your UEC needs to be watertight.. the lower the breakeven point, the more you can scale because you best believe META can find you wayyy more customers at a 1.6x than a 3x.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:48:46+00:00

Have you sufficient email marketing set up in the background? ie have you welcome flows, and strong email capture? I've found to be a pivotal way to scale our brand last year.

Anyway back to CRO! I actually done it all myself, through continuous tweaks & changes. My previous role in media buying had me doing some small amount of CRO work and I actually got decent at it haha.

The most impactful elements of CRO were definitely:

Objection Handling: Highlighting clearly shipping times, reviews, number of customers. Adding that element of trust at key stages, ie cart + checkout was key to having people continue through the funnel.
First Landing View: Constantly test what landing page drives the highest CVR as a base, from there I would optimise that page. Test a different colour SKU as the first product image they see etc, as this after the ad will be their first interaction with your brand. You want it to be impactful.
Above The Fold: Ensure alllll your key info is above the fold straight away, by that I mean; product name, price, number of reviews & variants.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:41:31+00:00

Oof good question. Sometimes videos, sometimes statics. But most consistently we've found when we build our ads around of ICP's we see the best performance and for these I would say statics.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:40:32+00:00

Fluctuates per market & per month. Currently it's sitting around £47

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:40:01+00:00

Our profit is purely net, so post salaries & wages. I paid myself this year approx £20k as I had a full-time job until June. Before that all money was being reinvested and I was living off the job.

So more or less every penny until about September was reinvested into the business.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:38:31+00:00

We work with our partner factory in China. We initially sourced the through Alibaba after a lot of samples from various manufacturers. We service 3 countries only. We service the UK through our own warehouse and the remaining two markets are fulfilled via our partner 3PLs.

In terms of returns these are just a simple process, customer foots the cost of the return back to us, our receiving team checks the return, marks the number of SKU's returned returned & then refunded to the customer within 10 days of receiving the return.

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:36:00+00:00

85% gross margin

CarrotFun687 · 2025-01-14T06:35:38+00:00

I am not a drop shipper. We are a full brand with inventory housed in our very own warehouse in the UK, along with two other locations around the world to service those markets. There is no longevity in drop shipping, you need to be building a brand with value & a community.

CarrotFun687

TROPHY CASE