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

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

In this episode, Josh Coffin and Dylan Counts discuss three systems that helped three e-commerce businesses grow from $116,000 to nearly $700,000 in monthly revenue over a year. They stress focusing on compounding tasks—activities that grow week over week—rather than maintenance tasks. The first system is a weekly ad system using Meta ads, where you must launch new ads every week, kill underperformers, and follow "breadcrumbs" by adjusting product, message, or creative dials. They cite data showing the average ad shelf life is eight days, making weekly launches non-negotiable. The second system is a weekly email system: send an email to your list every week, no matter how small, and use a pop-up to capture 5–10% of visitors. The third system is a monthly promo system (not fully detailed). The hosts also share their excitement about AI tools: Dylan uses Claude code to build bots without coding experience, and Josh built a "Profit X-ray" app in Replit that analyzes ads, P&L, and email performance against benchmarks. They argue that organic social media is too slow for rapid scaling and that these three systems, consistently applied for 52 weeks, can transform a business. The episode includes practical advice, such as launching ads even when scaling budgets and always having a pop-up to collect emails.

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Last 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 want to do in this episode is I want to 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 want to walk through is if you feel stuck or you want to get $100,000 a month or even $700,000 a month, 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 have really changed. Now I think AI might change it a little bit. Maybe how we get the stuff that we need but 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. But before we kind of dive into that, and you don't know who we are, my name is Josh Coffin the founder of the E.Commerce Sally. This is Dylan Counts. He's also one of the guys that runs the entire E.Commerce Sally with me as well as co-founder of Breezeway, which is our MetAids Management Software E.Com Rans. That helps you optimize and make good decisions. Go check out Breezeway.co.d, check that out. But Dylan, question for you. - Okay. - What's something you're super excited about right now? - Well, I-- - It's got you jazzed. - Yeah, I just started using Claude code. And it was kind of scary at first because 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 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 iterate on things and what's really cool about it is a 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. There's a lot of learning curve to it, but 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. That was really fun. What about you? It's so funny. I know what yours is. Do you know what it is? I would guess I know what it is. What do you think it is? Replet? Freakin, you got me. But-- Did you been working on it like not? I know, okay, stop. So we're building-- So I'm using a tool called Replet. Replet 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 EmbronRoot. They blew that up pretty, pretty fast. To multi-seven, he'll be eight figures probably in the next year, which 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 of that is saying, 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 Replet. And pretty much how this works is you can literally-- you insert your gross profit margin on this thing and I could drag and drop my-- I could drag and drop 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 realizes, 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 PNL. And it will measure it across the core four metrics that we need. It will grade it and then it will tell you, here are the fixes because your gross profit margin is too low or your contribution margin or your variable marketing cost or your net profit. And here's how to lift it. And then we have an email scanner that literally did you plug in your Klavio API. And it will measure you against the benchmarks of the industry that you're in with Klavio. And it will pool all of your flows in. And it will grade them. It will pull every email. It will grade the email. And it'll tell you, here's what the 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. Anyway, we built that. And we built it largely. It's a tool that will probably sell for like 27 bucks or something. But we'll also maybe, maybe we'll start for a lot more than that. I don't know. It's something I wanted to just build. And I built it called the profit act. We had basically a fund profit in the main areas of your business. First of all, where are you profitable in your PNL? Where are you not? And then the ads and email because those are usually greatest levers. Yeah. But anyway, we built that out. 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 than that. I think it's been a little bit more than I found myself one night on the Sunday. It was like eight p.m. Like I have this idea for a, how do I do this? And I got on a rep lit. And then it was like, I hit the $20 membership and then it's like, add a credit to me. Okay, $100 membership. Okay, $250 membership. I'm like, all right, I'm just going to keep going. And then here we are now. I probably spent $500 building. Yeah. But it was worth it. We're going to give it to all our clients to make their lives light easier. But it's a great segue into the episode. What we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Where it's an ad grader and email grader. Not necessarily the PNL side of things, but the ads and email tie right into what we're talking about today. Yes, exactly. So 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. And the thing is, you're making things are things that will grow in aspect of your business. So what we're going to talk about now is how do you grow to six figure months? Well, you have to be really dialed in on acquisition. You ask the 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 could do that are compounding tasks. We look at these as if we look at acquisition as the greatest lever to getting you to the next level revenue wise, there you have to say, what's the greatest leverage use of my time in acquisition? And so we have three systems that we follow in these compound week over week. So these are compounding activities that we're going to 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 to do this exact three things. Now, how we do them is very nuanced, very specific inside our trainings, but I'm not, so I'm not going to go that deep, but I'm going to tell you the framework of what we do. And if we were, if we were starting at zero right now, like if we wouldn't started a business selling something, I was going to come with something, but I'm pretty bad at coming up with something. Were you going to use like a microphone? I was going to say something on my microphone. I was like looking on our desk to say like, what, what could I use? SSD hard drives. If we're, I'm man, that'd be a rough mark. Yeah, what? So if we're selling, if we were selling a 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 going to talk about. One of them is not organic and 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 ones here. We'll get you there a lot faster. So if you're just a 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 not going to, it's going to 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 going to talk about are the weekly ad system, the weekly email system in 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 a 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. A number one is launching new ads. And number two is just optimizing the current ads. And we call this the weekly ad test and cadence and it's required. It is required. We actually did a study in Breezeway. I think you saw the study on call. Yeah. We have a $32 million in spend in about 69,000 ads in this 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 would be unicorns we want to 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, you 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 going to fall behind and you'll be like, well, maybe this ad is doing well. So I'm not going to launch this week. I mean, 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. 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. And all of a sudden, it was going really well, going really well, and then all of a sudden, she would just lost the row as that she had been continuing to get over and over. And I was like, what the heck happened? 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 caused her row as to start declining as she was growing her budget. Because she's like, oh, I didn't realize that was that important. I'm like, yeah, that's like the whole point of 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 descalate 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, it has to be non-negotiable. If you want to go to the next level, and as long as you're not constraining at, I mean, you should do it the other way. But as long as you, if you want to grow your revenue, that what's the number one to do that, get new customers. Get more customers, get people to buy again. And ads are the most predictable way to do that. Like 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, so I'm not gonna 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 breadcrumbing, Dylan, do you know the, you don't have your computer? It's gonna say, can you find the episode number? - Oh, I mean, I can find it if you stall for a little bit. - So the first thing is breadcrumbing. And breadcrumbing is basically where we're able to, you just wanna 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 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 when we look at this, we think of, there are three dials that you're choosing, what dial you're gonna 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. In 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 podcasts episodes on this. - Yeah, actually, so episode 227 is the five meta ad creative mistakes that 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. - 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 is every single week, no matter what, you pick when you're gonna do it. And 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. This is where you kill under performers, 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 on the organic. So you could literally, if you wanna 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 for 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 like three to four months. If you're really, really on it. - Yeah, and that's the thing. Like people underestimate what's possible at 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 breadcrumming. And the only way that you could fail is just to literally stop doing that. All right, that system number one, you have to have a place. Now this is gonna bring new people in 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. This 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. And 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 it's sending email 200 people or 20,000 or 200,000. This takes the same amount of time. You're just being lazy and you're creating excuses to why someone wouldn't buy. - Well, Josh, I actually just heard something worse in the alley. I was working with a brand. They had a great row as they were, 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. They didn't have a pop up. - Aw man. - 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 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 'cause 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 any of those emails. - And 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 then they're done that. Yeah, pop up definitely have a pop up. Like the way I look at it is this is 90, 95 to 98% of your traffic will bounce and they will never ever come back. And so if you wanna have the greatest impact, it'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 wanna 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-handger. 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 out. That's where we're like, we are their best shot at success and we have to trade it like that. So it is 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. And 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 to look at it, hey, I totally get it. I've been there before. We've made the mistake for before as well. But if you wanna 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 in resource. Resource of email for one email that's gonna be here and your impact at the beginning is gonna be really small. As your email list grows, the impact, meaning 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 the point of setting 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 setting multiple a day in that period of time. But all that said, getting the habit of it, no matter what. And then what happens is that weekly email first is like zero sales, zero sales, $50 in sales, $100 in sales, $300, $500, $500, $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 be like, oh, we got customers, we never ever talked to them in hope for the long game. Then it works out. It's like, no, you have to build that relationship. And at the beginning your email revenues can 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, then 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 talk to your people. Like have conversations with them through the email rather than just hear by this thing. That's a big thing. And the good thing is that, so like I kind of look at it as, imagine if you, like in any relationship, you're just, there's someone you always hung out with. And all the everyday was talking about themselves. You'd probably get a little annoyed. You know, the mispronounced has such a big ego. All they do is like try to sell me on something on how great they are. Or, 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 founder 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. Yeah. Email does require ad spend. And 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 and like actually it was at the smart market or 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? The difference is the small athletic store is going to do things that Nike is not going to do. Nike is not going to try and build a relationship with his customers. Nike is 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 do all these things and people like to buy from people. When you show who you actually are, you show yourself, you show your customers what the culture is like at your business, it's going to change the way that they look at you and want to buy from you versus the big box. It might actually be hard to compare your product one to one with Nike or Nike was an example of he used. That's why I'm using it. 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. That email is a really easy way to do that. There's such a rise right now in founder-led brands. Even the head of PayPal is hiring 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 same all of it. Like, literally. Even the McDonald's CEO just didn't go very well. Just going to show the founder-led brands. I think of Bloom with Greg LaVecchia. LaVecchia. Which by the way, we had a podcast with him years ago when they were way smaller and now they're like billion dollar company on if you know that. It's crazy. We actually just bought some of their pop. So it was like, oh, this looks really good. I was like, wait, it's kind of crazy. We had the founder of this. All of them is everywhere. I see it everywhere. Yeah. Like, I have Greg's number and we DM on Instagram and stuff like that. But anyway, all of that is a 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, and then they expanded into doing community-based events. And so 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. There we go. Over 100 episodes. Back in 2024, it's called building a $150 million brand in four years, bribing target, product heists, and unconventional marketing. He had product heists. That's an interesting episode, guys. Go listen to that. And his wife is Mari. Mari, 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 tell some, 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 would be 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 as 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 really community over the long term. In 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 where 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 sight-wide, collection, it could be product-specific, but you could do a discount, it could be different. And I recommend you rotate these and it's not the same every time. This is where you could do a sight-wide discount or a collection discount. Yes, like percentage or dollar. You could do a tiered discount. You could do a buy one, get one free. You 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 promotion 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 a lot that you just came up with. Black Friday's Cyber Monday, fall, Halloween, Christmas, New Year's, January, New Year's starts. Like, they're infinite. All year long, there's 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, 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. Do you watch TV? I don't watch a lot of TV. But when I do watch TV, I feel like it's always Toyota Thon. It's all, every commercial is always Toyota Thon. I'm like, they should actually make commercials when it's not Toyota Thon because that would actually probably be less frequent. But they're literally always running Toyota Thon. And it's like, it's June, so it's Toyota Thon. I'm like, I thought it, I thought it made was just Toyota Thon. You could do it for a like, uh, we've done things for us. So it's like Josh just turned 32. So it's 32% off any of our programs or the company just turned 10 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 over two weeks, you're going to make the same amount in two weeks as you would over three days. I promise the only difference is now you have so much more resource invested for two weeks of promo. I promise by the end of the first two days, people are just going to stall out. It's going to flat line for the next 10 days until those last two days. And so two types of promos number one is a discount number two is a product launch. And this is really, really good because there's no discount on this. This is full retail, maximum profit play. And this usually leans into urgency, a little bit scarcity. Sometimes the exclusivity of the fact that this is just a new thing. And so I love alternating these where the first month, we do a promo the next month, we do a product release, the next month, we do a promo, the next month, we do a product release because this will train, this will help not train your people that you do a discount every single month. And because you're also going to alternate the style of discount, the people aren't going to get comfortable. They're going to take advantage of it every time. And so this is the three, this is the three systems. We have the weekly ads test and the weekly email system and then the monthly promo system that's going to create cash injection from the list growth that you've had over that period of time. And I'll tell you this, when you run this system properly, all three of these 50 to 60% of your revenue will come from ads 20 to 30% of your revenue will come from email and SMS in 10 to 20% will come from organic repeat and everything else combined. So the most important thing are that if you do ads and email and SMS and you follow this system, the weekly ads, weekly email and monthly promo, you're going to create cash injection, you're going to grow your list, you're going to consistently grow your database and it will get you there, whether you're spending $50 a day, $1,000 a day, you're sending 100 people, 100,000 people. This is highly leveraged, highly compounding tasks and you have to treat these as non-negotiables in your business. You know, let the fire of social media posting and getting behind on there, let that burn. Who cares? It doesn't matter if you don't post on social media. If you're skipping on on these, this is the thing that's going to hold you back from going to the next level. This is zero, I say zero to 100K. This goes well beyond 100K. We work with clients and like, I just was talking upstairs with Isaac about a client that came in and they were like, barely, they had retail stores and they came and started work with us. They were doing barely any online and they now they're cranking $300,000 a month in growing in less than a year. So it's like, they just do these three things. Of course there's other things. Like, these three systems, guys, I'm telling you, these will change your whole life, your whole business if you commit to it. Cool. Well, hey, if you found this valuable, please do us a favor, leave this podcast a rating on whatever app you're listening on. And if you're watching on YouTube, make sure that you hit subscribe. And drop a comment. Are you doing all three of these or which of these three are you doing right now? Drop a comment in YouTube. But other than that, we appreciate you. We'll see you in the next episode.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The hosts grew three e-commerce businesses from $116,000 to nearly $700,000 in monthly revenue by focusing on only three systems.
  2. System 1
  3. System 2
  4. System 3
  5. The hosts emphasize focusing on compounding tasks (like ads and email) over maintenance tasks (like bookkeeping) and avoid organic social media for rapid scaling from zero to $100k.

Summary:

In this episode, Josh Coffin and Dylan Counts discuss three systems that helped three e-commerce businesses grow from $116,000 to nearly $700,000 in monthly revenue over a year. They stress focusing on compounding tasks—activities that grow week over week—rather than maintenance tasks. The first system is a weekly ad system using Meta ads, where you must launch new ads every week, kill underperformers, and follow "breadcrumbs" by adjusting product, message, or creative dials.

They cite data showing the average ad shelf life is eight days, making weekly launches non-negotiable. The second system is a weekly email system: send an email to your list every week, no matter how small, and use a pop-up to capture 5–10% of visitors. The third system is a monthly promo system (not fully detailed).

The hosts also share their excitement about AI tools: Dylan uses Claude code to build bots without coding experience, and Josh built a "Profit X-ray" app in Replit that analyzes ads, P&L, and email performance against benchmarks. They argue that organic social media is too slow for rapid scaling and that these three systems, consistently applied for 52 weeks, can transform a business. The episode includes practical advice, such as launching ads even when scaling budgets and always having a pop-up to collect emails.

FAQs

The three systems are a weekly ad system, a weekly email system, and a monthly promo system. These are compounding tasks that focus on acquisition and customer retention.

Meta ads have an average shelf life of eight days, so launching new ads weekly is non-negotiable. It prevents performance drops and supports scaling by continuously testing and optimizing.

Breadcrumbing means looking at the last 7-14 days to find the next best thing to test, such as a specific ICP, creative format, or message. You choose one of three dials—product, message, or creative—to turn each week.

Organic social media has a long time delay for compounding results. For growing from zero to $100,000 per month, paid ads are more predictable and faster, so focusing on ads is more efficient.

You should send an email every week regardless of list size. This builds a habit and maximizes revenue from both buyers and non-buyers, as it takes the same effort whether you have 200 or 200,000 subscribers.

A pop-up captures 5-10% of your traffic that would otherwise bounce forever. It collects emails so you can follow up and convert visitors into customers later.

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