w/ Nik Sharma, Sharma Brands
Nik Sharma, the brains behind Sharma Brands, has gone from freelance hotshot to the head honcho of a major digital agency that's a big deal in the CPG world. Nik walks us through how Sharma Brands evolved, bringing everything in-house. Think of it as a digital shopping mall, where each floor offers a new, top-notch service to boost your brand's online presence.
Highlights
(00:00) Sharma Brands and the DTC Evolution
(08:34) Cutting Through the Noise
(16:10) Brand Building and Content Creation
(30:18) Retail Sales and DTC Technology
(34:44) E-Commerce Strategies and Missed Opportunities
(44:10) Learn More About Nick Sharma
Nik dishes out his playbook on e-commerce success. He talks about the importance of testing your market, crafting content that clicks, and building a killer team. We explore tech tools that can give your business a leg up, like subscription optimization and creating landing pages that hit the mark.
Don't miss this opportunity to enrich your digital branding toolkit with insights from a top expert in the field.
00:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Heads up friends. The unofficial Shopify podcast is made by indie entrepreneurs or indie entrepreneurs and may contain material not suitable for all audiences, like swearing or economics. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome back, my friends. Today on the unofficial Shopify podcast, we are going to talk to none other than the DTC guy. We'll find out. Did he give himself that moniker or was a DTC council convened to bestow it upon him? We'll find this out. We're joined by Nick Sharma.
00:49
If you're familiar with Nick Sharma, you realize how exciting that is. This guy produces so much content. If you are involved in just looking for any information and you want good, detailed info about selling in e-commerce, direct to consumer, dtc it is inevitable you will run across Nick Sharma and, similar to Gary V, it's like there's so many Nick Sharmas. What flavor of Nick Sharma do you get? I prefer the Nick Sharma newsletter that's by Nick Sharma, is in my inbox, but I want to hear the story from him. When someone does so much and produces so much, what stands out to them? What do they prioritize? What is important to them? That's what we're going to find out today, and so Nick Sharma, ceo of Sharma Brands, joins us today to discuss it. I, of course, am Kurt Elster, jack Masty, your host, and Mr Sharma. Thank you so much for joining us.
01:44 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Excited to be here. I've also got one of these fancy buttons as well.
01:50 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I love that sound. It doesn't give me goosebumps anymore, but still still an exciting and pleasant, pleasant noise. So, Nick, well, where are you located, my man?
02:03 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
New York City, Big Apple.
02:05 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I love New York. I will go out there in April. I'll head back out to New York.
02:10 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah, it's beautiful here.
02:12 - Kurt Elster (Host)
You are. You're a lot of things operator, investor, advisor, the DTC guy. How do you see yourself?
02:19 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
I see myself as the CEO of Sharma Brands, and Sharma Brands is essentially a consulting firm consulting and execution firm for CPG companies, so our primary focus is brands that are generating $50 to $500 million a year. That's sort of our sweet spot, and our team does everything from strategy and research all the way through paid media, ad creative, cro, email, site design, site development. We're basically a full service digital shop. We sort of started this whole thing started because I was just freelancing and I'd go into a company and they'd say, hey, we want to go direct to consumer. Can you help us do that? Can you go find the web agency? Can you figure out the ads? Can you figure out what our acquisition offer is, figure out our retention strategy and manage it all on our behalf? That's what we want to pay you for, and so I started doing that, as you know, in 2019 and basically realized that, you know, the one thing I could do really well was build landing pages. I was really good at copywriting, designing landing page, and designing is like not the level of design we have now, but more so just using unbounces builder and being able to move things around in a way that I knew was intuitive to the user on the other end, and then I would manage all the other pieces. So, you know, super Coffee wanted to go direct to consumer. I would help them figure out, okay, who's buying our ads, who's editing our videos, who's doing this, who's doing that, and I would basically sit sort of as the you know, in front of the chariot holding all the reins on what we're doing. But then, you know, if they had something they wanted to do, it would flow through me and I would just make it happen.
04:07
Slowly, sharma Brand started evolving and growing and one of the things that we did was, you know, we just started building out these departments internally. So we would see, okay, you know, video, I think, was the first one. So we realized, you know, we're spending a lot on freelance video editors. Why don't we just go get the best one, bring them in-house and start producing our own video? Because it's cumbersome when somebody wants to, you know, do video with us, and then we have to. We have to, you know, first come up with the idea or the strategy and then we have to go manage other freelancers who, you know they all have their own schedules and whatnot. And so we built out the full video team in-house.
04:51
Then we did the same thing with design and then, you know, basically, one after the other, you know, almost on a every year basis, we added another new service, and you know, the most recent one being email, where, similarly, it was like we would basically outsource email to other agencies. And you know, our clients know all of this, they would see it all. But we would say, hey, we'll still manage the strategy and make sure it's, you know, bubbling up to whatever the top level result is that you guys are trying to hit. But the problem was, like you know, convincing an email team that their product, that they're producing, is not really just retention, but you know, we should think about using email for acquisition or whatever it may be.
05:33
Something else was not easy and so slowly I just started to realize we just got to build these teams in-house. We have to build them our way, we have to train them our way and you know it'll be a better customer experience for the client too, because they're going to come and it's going to be a one-stop shop for their. You know we call it like a full service digital escalator. At this point, whatever floor in the mall you want to go to. It's inside the mall. You just got to come inside the mall and you know we'll take care of you. So that's what I see myself as mostly in day-to-day as CEO of Sharma Brands. The other stuff is like. Those are all side hustles for me and today what you know?
06:12 - Kurt Elster (Host)
what are you working on now? What takes up your time? Is it Sharma Brands? It's the agency.
06:17 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
It's Sharma Brands, yeah, it's, you know it's. It's. It's a combination. Some of it's business development, some of it's you know internally. You know how are we becoming better, stronger, smarter, faster, more efficient? Some of it is figuring out okay, what is that next arbitrage or what is that next opportunity that we can jump on, before you know any of the other agencies or any of our clients will jump on for you know, another six to 12 months. But yeah, a lot of it too is just like you know, I don't even know like internal meetings. Basically, like you know, how do we get better, stronger, faster? And so I try to focus my time on the things wherever I have like the most leverage, and then the things that I don't. At this point, it's great I can. Just, you know somebody else can do it, you can pay someone else to worry about it or delegate it.
07:11
Yeah, exactly. In fact, last year I hired somebody whose entire job is basically to do the things that I need to do. That don't require my active thinking. So if it doesn't require my active creative thinking, but it's something that needs to come from me, hr, you know, contracts legal like I just don't have to deal with it. Somebody else is now entirely tasked with being mean but not thinking like me, if that makes sense.
07:37 - Kurt Elster (Host)
You started this in Sharma Brands 2019?. Looking back it's five years now. Looking at some exciting things happened in the last five years and, from your perspective, like what's the big thing that has changed, or are we just on the same trajectory we were?
07:55 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
I think to some extent we're on. You know, if you look at that one graph that you might be thinking of in your head, with the little bump in COVID and then the dip after COVID, you know, in that sense I think we're still in the same, we're on the same trajectory. But I do think from a standpoint of consumer habits, how consumers view things, how they look at ads, how they interact with brands, how they perceive things, I think a lot of that has evolved a lot, you know, and that was definitely accelerated by the pandemic. A lot of the things that, from a marketing standpoint, maybe used to work during the pandemic, like, just don't work now. Cutting through the noise has become a lot harder because the noise has filter. You know, bullshit filters in front of it from consumers. So I think in that sense it's changed a lot.
08:44
You know, one of my favorite examples is we launched this brand called Jolie, which is a showerhead company, and today there's probably, you know, six to 10 different competitors that have popped up that basically sell the same thing. One of them, I'm almost 100% confident, reads my newsletter, takes all the tips there and has built a landing page to perfection to compete with Jolie. I'm almost positive they read the newsletter because of the things that are on that landing page.
09:18 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Like this is just two on the nose.
09:20 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah, yeah, it hit every, like, you know, in one of the newsletters. I definitely talk about every single section in the landing page. It had every section in the same order and so. So anyways, you know the point there is with that filter that consumers have, you know, nobody knows what the other showerhead companies are. It's not easy to cut through the noise anymore as it was before.
09:43
You have today, you know, multi-hundred million dollar fashion companies launching new brands. Nobody's ever heard of them, nobody's probably going to hear of them, because it's not as easy as it used to be. And I think the cutting through the noise that's the hardest part you know, unless you're spending. I know of one brand that spends, you know, probably eight to 10 million dollars a month on advertising, just strictly lower funnel advertising, but they have no brand. They're the only ones that I know who have gotten through it or gotten away with not building that sort of brand or that top of funnel. But I think for 99.9% of people you have to figure out how to first cut through that noise and become interesting before you can even have the audacity to go sell product.
10:30 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Okay, I want to talk about brand building with you. I want to talk about storytelling, but one quick follow-up. I mean you mentioned Jolie, the showerhead brand. You've got quite a few brands of the portfolio. If I pick a favorite, it's Judy. Judy, the emergency kit brand. I just I love the branding, I love the idea and I believe it was an Oprah's favorite thing an OFT, yeah, I think twice, oh, twice, that's impressive. So, with that big portfolio, are any of those brands your baby, which is your favorite?
11:05 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
A company that I would drop everything and go work for is called Cadence. They make these incredibly beautiful travel capsules mainly for women who are traveling. Or maybe you go to sleepover at a friend's house. You need to take your skincare routine with you. You take your moisturizer, your cleanser, your shampoo, whatever. Basically it allows you to take your routine anywhere, and they're really they're pretty, they're hexagon, they bagged it together, right. Yeah.
11:31 - Kurt Elster (Host)
It's a fully-coded design.
11:32 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
They made them themselves. Steph, who's the founder, invented this and this is why I joined the company early on. But she literally came to me for coffee. She brought 3D samples that she made herself because she figured out how to use a 3D printer and build this in CAD and then print it and then brought it and said this is what I want to build.
11:54
I love those people and then she passed it to the thing I love people who can do that and then she actually made it work and she was a one-person team up until probably I think definitely at least the first 10 million in revenue was just her, and she's another just incredible story of somebody who has built a brand that I'm very proud to be associated with.
12:14 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Do you? I've heard there's already some recurring themes here. You seem to have a preference for small teams, people who bootstrap, people who could DIY it. Do you think that's where brands often go wrong, like hiring too early?
12:31 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah, yeah, I think companies I've built, the ones that are sort of like intentionally slow and steady and really making sure, hey, before we do that, let's just make sure that this thing works here before we get to stage two. And then, once you get to stage two, okay, let's just make sure everything here is working so that when we get to stage three we're not trying to go back and fix stage two. The companies that sort of take that slower approach, I think have a much higher chance of success than hey, guys, we just raised $3 million, let's go hire a team of 30 people, get a recruiter in here. We need to start screening and hiring people and here's the end product that we need to build in the next six months. Those are a lot harder to actually make sure that they work because you're not really intentional, you're missing all the things that make a company special in the early days, whether it's that shared grit or that shared culture or whatever it may be. If you just start adding a bunch of things into the pot, you got to let your onions cook first and then you got to add your garlic, and then you got to let that smell get nice and then you got to add your tomatoes here. It's like if you put everything in at once, you'll still get a pasta, but it's not going to taste good at the end of the day, and so that's how I think of it.
13:50
I also just think that, the way that consumer brands are, in 95% of cases, they should not be venture funded, and, honestly, the same goes for technology companies. In this space, too, I was looking at a company I invested in last year and they were pretty much flat year over year. The only difference is they took on VC money and now they're not profitable anymore, and so that is the downside of raising money too early or too quickly, or maybe just like not knowing how to spend it, how to use it or not doing it before. But yeah, generally speaking and of course there's outliers there I'm invested in a bunch, but generally speaking, I'm a much bigger fan of let's really think this through from the get, go and be slow and intentional about it. Fundraising should be a vehicle to expand what is already working.
14:45 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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15:58 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
I think it is the attention economy. Like vibrant, it's hard to do it right. This is why Venture is such a bad idea for most of these brands. Building a brand is something that like building a brand right Brand building, cutting through the noise it is something you have to do consistently, so it just right out of the gate. It requires a decent amount of time ahead in order for this to be accomplished. You just have to keep doing the right thing consistently. Or even, like Jolie, come up with great campaigns, but it's got to be consistent. If they just did it once and it didn't follow it up with something else, then it's not going to work, and so I think there's different ways to do it right.
16:45
If you're a company like Eritzia, there's a different way to cut through the noise and you have a lot more resources at your disposal that you can leverage If you're a brand new company out of the gate. One of my favorite examples is there's a TikTok account by the name of Strawberry Milk Mob. I don't know if you've ever heard of this name, but this girl has. She's got to have at least a couple million followers on TikTok and she basically just builds her business on TikTok. And I have to say she's probably doing. I'd expect at least 10, maybe 20 million in revenue, not a single ad spent completely off the back. And how did she do it? She just created content that cut through the noise. So it's like every brand is going to create content anyways. She just figured out her way of cutting through the noise was just talking to the camera and explaining things or talking about the bloopers that happen in her business or what it's like working with her sisters.
17:48
And there's no doubt you have to create content. It's just a matter of what is the content you're going to create and how true are you looking to make it? How true are you trying to make it look? I think the other thing is, like a lot of these brands that came out of these branding agencies. They look at a slide deck and they say, okay, based on the branding agency's slide deck, this is the type of content we got to create, these are our templates and this is what we should talk.
18:13
These are our four pillars, and every sixth post on Instagram has got to be this, and it just doesn't work anymore. You can't have this picture perfect approach, even if you're building a luxury fashion brand or whatever it may be. There's variations of it that still work for that type of brand, but in general, I think the brands that are a lot more true and real. And you're talking to the founder through the content. Not necessarily the founder has to be in the content, but that's the style of content or the way that the content is put through is, I think, the way to cut through, and so you think the place where brands go wrong with storytelling is they're being too formulaic, too reserved, and it just comes across as inauthentic.
19:03
Yeah, it's like you know. We believe that everyone should live pit free and be proud of their body odor. Who's we and who is everyone? You know I don't want to be a part of that whack ass group. Just give me deodorant that smells good and tell me why it smells good and tell me why you started it. Maybe there's a connection there. Yeah, just a lot more authentic. What do you think is?
19:29 - Kurt Elster (Host)
the For an early brand where you're bootstrapping. Where do you think the gains are? In content creation, the opportunity, or how much should they be producing? Because I think the issue with social media content is you got to crank it out. The content hole must be filled and it is forever emptying itself. But how much is enough and at what point am I hitting diminished returns where now I'm just screwing around on social media as opposed to actually working? Even I today I struggle with like well, what's the balance?
20:03 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
I think honestly, I think a lot more people need to be honest about is this working, and they should define what those metrics are. I would probably define it as is it driving traffic and is it driving sales? Is it getting people talking about us? You know, those might be the only three metrics you should really look at.
20:24
I think there's too many people, there's a lot of founders in the SaaS space that do this, where they say I'm creating content, I'm building a brand, I'm getting leads, I'm putting content out there. It's like, bro, but no one watches your content, your content sucks and no one cares about the content you're putting out. But sure, you are creating content. And the same thing happens on the brand side too. You see these fancy photo shoots that happen, or overspending on with content creators to put things out, and it's like, yeah, but that's just not hitting, it's not hitting the mark. And you guys are repeating the same thing that you think is going to work, but it's not going to work.
21:08
I just think you should basically look at metrics and just see if it's working. If it's on the B2C side, I think traffic sales, and are people talking about it and on the B2B side, basically same thing. Signups leads new prospects new prospects becoming customers and does it get us into anything? Does it enable us to walk into a room differently? Anything else? I think people are just lying to themselves.
21:34 - Kurt Elster (Host)
That's my sense too. Even, yeah, if you don't have the KPIs, you really have no idea. But with organic social media content, no one cares. But then when it's Facebook ads and it costs me real money, then suddenly it's like, well, what's the ROAs, what's my ROI here? But when it's just me wasting time on social media, no one's looking at themselves and going well, what's the ROI? And we screw it around all morning on Facebook, right?
22:01 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah, 100%. And that's a great point too, which is the best ads paid media is like fundraising when you fundraise, you're just putting more dollars on something that's already working. Paid media should be treated the exact same way. You should just sprinkle enough dollars on top of the content that is already doing well, with or without a paid boost, because all it's doing is. I have this analogy, which is like if you put a photo in Microsoft Word and you stretch it out from the corner, if it's a low quality photo, as soon as you stretch it, it gets blurry, but if it's a high quality photo, you can stretch that thing forever, and so the input of that content if it's bad quality content from the get-go paid media is only going to make it worse for you, because you're going to be spending money on something that's not going to be blurry, versus if you put something in that's already done, it's proven to do, well, it's something you know resonates, and then you add dollars to it. Now you're stretching something that has a lot more potential.
22:59 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I want to talk on the topic of budgets. I want to talk to you about brand building from the perspective of bootstrapping. You seem to have a preference for bootstrappers Mm-hmm. Often, when starting out, do you suggest we test launch brands or just go all in and I'm guessing it's test launch the brand. How? How do you?
23:27 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
do it. Yeah, test launch. I think in most cases, test launch is very few cases where, first of all, there's just very there's not a lot of innovation in this space. So most things that come out are oh well, we use a different contract manufacturer, we use a contract manufacturer that makes everybody else's skincare products and we put our label on it. But the innovation part is has a much higher success, I think, of hitting, depending on what it is. Of course, Cadence and Jolie, I think, are good examples of that. Or innovation in the process, like Brightland. It was innovation in how they extracted the olive oil and brought it to market.
24:08
But if you're launching a brand, I do think the best thing you could do is test it, and this is like pre-commitment. If you were to go and get to a brand launch without testing it, you'd probably spend tens of thousands of dollars, maybe 100,000, maybe over, Whereas here you could say all right, I'm going to put $5,000 to the side and I'm going to create a landing page, Maybe two versions of it, I'm going to make 10 pieces of creative, I'm going to come up with a fake brand name, get some designs made and then I'm going to run some ads and I'm going to see if people come to this site and they read about what I'm about to sell. If they put their email in, that's signal number one. If they put their card number in and do a pre-order, that's signal number two. And you just look at the conversion rate and understand, okay, where is the potential? And that'll tell you how interesting is the idea.
25:06
If people are 25% of people are putting their email in, that's a decent idea. 50% of people are putting in their email, that's a really good idea, Something that people definitely want. If 70% of people are putting in their email, you should get started on that right away. If it's 80%, I'm like take all my money, I'm investing in this thing and you can very quickly understand is something going to be huge or it's not going to be huge? I just think it's a much easier path to go down than you work really hard for a year, year and a half, you launch this thing and then you're like wait a second, where are all the sales? I thought I'm supposed to get sales right now.
25:47 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So, on the topic of bootstrapping any other essential lessons in there, once I've hit that point of all right, there's definite interest here. We can manufacture the product. We think this can work. We're going to start any other essential lessons for someone who's ready to go. They're looking to launch, they're early, but they have a limited budget.
26:10 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah, create a bunch of content. Figure out how to create content. I think, like an influencer A lot of my influencer friends are really good at just DMing other people hey, want to do something together. Hey, want to make a video together, want to create something together. I think you got to have the same mindset. You got to create a bunch of content. You either raise a bunch of money and you pay other people to create content, or you don't and you create the content and then you slowly work toward a point where you pay other people. I think content is one. I think the other is as much as you can.
26:48
Try to manage your cash flow. Try to use credit cards that are smart. Try to extend your payment terms. There's this one that we use, called Flex. It gives us cash back and it allows us to extend our payment terms. Negotiate everything. The price you see on a SaaS company's website is the price that they want you to see. It's not the price that can be on your contract. You can always negotiate down.
27:14
If you're a brand and you've got some sort of leverage, either you've just raised a bunch of money, you're about to go market like crazy. You've got some sort of a celebrity or influencer name attached to you. You're well-known in the community, whatever it may be. Leverage that. Go and say hey, hey, okendo, give me 25% off because I'll do a case study with you. Se Australians hope to get to know you quicker than your English in a week or two and produce a video profile. If you're just checking them out, yeah, I just think anything that's a number is up to interpretation. Basically, go, negotiate everything consistently. Negotiate too.
27:48
Moise says a great thing, which is when he was at native. Every half a million dollars, every million dollars of revenue, he'd go back to Stripe and ask him for a discount. A lot of times they'd say no, but then, of course, sometimes they say yes, and that ended up saving him a ton of money, I imagine. Yeah, but yeah, I think those are probably my top lessons. And then the other one is you know if you've got and this is if you're raising or you're not but your people, your team, that's your number one priority outside of your customers is making sure that your team is really happy. If your team is happy, everything else works out perfectly. It's like if you can create the perfect environment that creates the perfect system, which creates the perfect processes, which creates happy people, and so that's great advice.
28:36
Yeah, investing in the team and making sure that there's a good culture is very underrated.
28:42 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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30:37 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah. So one is if you're not ready to go into retail meaning if you're not incredibly confident that your product will sell out in retail it's not even worth going in because you get one shot at retail. And if you can't drive sell through in retail first, they're going to move you down on the shelf. So if you started around eye level or chest level, you're going to get to the bottom of the shelf in height and then if you can't move there, then they're just going to take you off. The other thing is if you have multiple SKUs and you can't move multiple SKUs like, let's say you have a cleanser, a serum and a moisturizer you can only move the moisturizer, but you can't move the cleanser and the serum Target's going to look at that and say your brand is not moving. You're going to get penalized in the same way as if you're not selling any of your units. So one is I think you got to make sure that you have that. And then two is I think different brands have done it different ways. Obviously, if you're a celebrity brand, it's much easier to drive traffic in store. If you're a non celebrity brand, I've seen brands do it a couple of different ways. One is just using social media. So I think Poppy is probably the best example there, where they just created a bunch of awareness organically on TikTok, just saying, hey, we're in retail and you should go check it out, and that did really well for them. Imi did a really good job leveraging a Facebook group they built of ramen lovers and ramen customers who could.
32:06
As soon as they launched in Whole Foods, the stores, the shelves were basically sold out. I've seen other companies where they use some online software to basically collect people's phone numbers and they'll say, hey, we're going to text you a coupon, you go to the store, you use the coupon, you got a discount on your product, or vice versa. I've heard about this Go to the store, buy it. This one I've heard works. Yeah, this one does work. Well, texas, the receipt and we'll give you a rebate for that amount.
32:36
I've seen a friend of mine who worked at a huge supplement brand used to do something where he would even get a Shopify order and it would go through a rules. So it would say okay, if Shopify order is based in San Diego, well, we know that Costco carries our product in San Diego. So mark, the order is fulfilled, go to Instacart. Go to build the order in Instacart. That way somebody's actually going to Costco picking up the order, scanning it at checkout and leaving. That person's still getting their order and Costco is now seeing sell through on the shelves.
33:08 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And that person got their order same day.
33:11 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Same day, yeah, and so there's tons of different ways. I think it really just depends on you know. Like, obviously, if when you first sit down you're like, okay, how are we going to drive retail sales, it's like, well, I don't know, you know, should we run ads somewhere? But you just got to get somewhat creative. Again it comes back to like cutting through the noise. Like how do you get creative to the point where you know you have this like top 1% idea that might work. It may not work, but at least you can, you have something to go test.
33:40 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I love that. All right, so you started. We started talking about tools a little bit there and some interesting outside the box, thinking that I loved what's your DTC tech stack? What tools are you using consistently?
33:54 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Oh man, I'm going to get a lot of hate for this one. Let's see, I mean Shopify, go to for the, for the CMS, exactly Cha-ching. Let's see for subscriptions, you know, depending on the brand, if they want something that's sort of set it and forget it, you know, set me up with a subscription and I don't want to have to worry about it. We use smarter If it's set us up for a subscription and also we have somebody, one or two people, whose full time job is subscription optimization, because that's a big part of the business. We use stay for SMS. We use PostScript email, we use clave, although I have been very intrigued to check out send lane and I think we have a client we're helping migrate to send lane, so I'm excited for that.
34:44
Then, what else is there? Yeah, like Okendo, we use for a lot of reviews and they have a whole suite of tools now that we've been using, you know, triple. Well, north beam, depending on the brand, it's usually just preference which one they like. Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. Those are kind of the main ones.
35:04 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Any preference on, say, like reviews apps? Okendo, I'm also an investor.
35:08 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
But I prefer Okendo because I'm the one Indian who can't code and Okendo makes it very easy to implement and go live.
35:17 - Kurt Elster (Host)
We migrated. We had a client who's like oh yeah, I need help migrating to Okendo. We didn't have to do anything because they did the entire migration for us. I was really impressed by the customer support.
35:28 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
No, their team is great. The other thing, actually one thing I learned early on that maybe somebody should steal and do is we made Slack channels with every possible vendor that we work with and so you know if a client has a question, if we have a question, something goes wrong. It's like it's one Slack ping and we get the answer within you know, less than 10 minutes, which has been huge. Helps us again cut through the noise.
35:54 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I used to resist doing the shared Slack channels. And now I've realized, because I was at like peak Slack, you know like 2021 year and like 30 Slack, and I realize now what a missed opportunity that was. And now I'm like those shared Slack channels just fabulous for that quick, like hey, we could do some. Really we could move just quickly between synchronous, asynchronous communication without it being annoying. It doesn't have to be. You know the big notification nightmare.
36:21 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah, exactly.
36:22 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I know one thing you're big on is landing pages. I am too. I think it's. I think it's just it's a missed opportunity for a lot of merchants, especially early on, because they don't necessarily understand it or it feels like you know extra work. Help me make the case to them. Please convince these people that they should. They should try out landing pages.
36:42 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
You know landing pages is one way to do it, but I think it's really any sort of site experience you're driving people to. If you're selling coffee, for example, let's say you're selling this new fancy coffee. When people go to your homepage and let's say this customer, they're told about the coffee brand. They click a link on social media, they end up at the homepage. The coffee brand talks to the internet as if it's sitting in a conference room surrounded by maybe like people in their 30s, maybe from Brooklyn, or whatever branding agency they used or whoever helped them build the site. The point is, regardless of who it's speaking to or how it sounds, it's set to speak one way. You can't have a homepage speak to 12 different customer personas in one page. It just doesn't work. It's speaking to one person, whoever that person is in mind.
37:40
When it's the time of site creation With landing pages, that coffee landing page might actually introduce the fact that their coffee doesn't have acid reflux. When you drink two cups a day, it's hard to talk about something like that on the homepage. But if that's what your ad talked about as a reason of why it's a better coffee brand, and then you click through and you get to the homepage. There's somewhat of a disconnect there in the messaging Because if you see that in the ad, you click through and now this landing page is immediately talking about that and all of the talking points throughout the page sort of ladder back up to that point.
38:21
You're guaranteed to have a much better conversion rate. Even on clients. The average conversion rate for a landing page is anywhere from 8% to 11% on the Sharma brand side. That's usually because we're making the landing page, we're also making the ads and we're running the media. In that case it's usually really good. But even if you have your ads and your landers and they're speaking consistently, you should definitely. If your site's converting it 2%, 3% and you've got a good landing page, you've got good education on there, you've got somewhat of an offer and of course you're selling something that's of interest or of need, then you can almost guarantee that that landing page will probably double or triple that conversion rate.
39:04 - Kurt Elster (Host)
That's the case for it. Being able to segment in that way, being able to get all of your messaging aligned, gives you such an opportunity to boost the conversion rate and then maximize the ROI of whatever, whether it was your time on an organic campaign or the return on ad spend.
39:23 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
The other thing, too is on the retention side. As those people come in, you can tag those users as hey, they came in on this offer or they came in on a landing page, and then six months down the road, you can actually analyze okay, our new customers that came in and hit the homepage versus our new customers that hit a problem-focused page, which one has the bigger LTV. It's almost always going to be the latter.
39:49 - Kurt Elster (Host)
As we come to the end of our time together, what do you think the biggest missed opportunity is in e-commerce and digital branding?
39:59 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
I would say the biggest missed opportunity right now brands who are refusing to get on TikTok shop. That is going to be, I think, the next Amazon, at least for the younger generation. If you're refusing to get on there because either A you think your customers are not on there, you're wrong. B you're not good at creating content that's a you problem. Or C the platform's not mature enough, you're also wrong.
40:34
Everybody should be on TikTok shop trying to get their products sold, number up, trying to get their reviews up, just trying to build that social proof, because in a year from now, when it is what everybody's using and then you get on and start, it's going to be insanely hard to cut through that noise and to get your social proof numbers up and to really even just understand the intricacies of the platform and how it works and how does that route orders in and how does it tag orders and what do these users do after they buy once on your shop. I think if you're not on that now, you're sort of setting yourself up for failure in a year.
41:12 - Kurt Elster (Host)
The brands we do have on TikTok shop have all been. They're like well, we'll try it, let's just see what happens. They didn't have high expectations of it but they also the successful brands are just willing to experiment, to devote 10%, 15% of time to just try something new. The ones that did try TikTok shop were all consistently surprised at how well it did. Yet the integration itself on fulfilling yours that it had its teething issues. We learned the hard way, like oh, the shipping rate names all need to really match was a recent one. We just figured out what was making us crazy about it. But outside of that stuff, I think it worked better than a lot of people expected and it doesn't seem to be slowing down, whereas in the past we're like social shopping, not as hot as you would think. You make it work. But it wasn't amazing. Tiktok shop now people are a headline I saw today was like we finally figured out social shopping in the US and I don't think they're wrong.
42:18 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Yeah, I fully agree. I think even if you look at the most successful brand on TikTok shop, it's a great example of what we were talking about earlier with how do you cut through the noise and just have authentic content. Yeah, I mean, tiktok figured that out in a way that I think Facebook has been trying to figure out and has unable to succeed, and I'm excited to see how they evolve it. I know that their team over there is run internally sort of like a startup, not like a big corporate company, which is why I'm even more excited because I think the rate of innovation is going to be really high.
43:02 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And yeah, so I wouldn't sleep on that. So, outside of TikTok shop, what's one piece of advice you'd give to upcoming e-commerce entrepreneurs?
43:13 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Focus on all of the unsexy things, especially if this is your first brand or first time being an e-commerce founder. Focus on the dimensions of your packaging to make sure you're maximizing what you can send for a flat shipping rate. Or focus on the packaging looking good, feeling good in customers' hands or when they take a photo. Focus on the ingredients of the product you put out, really making sure it's differentiated or innovative. And then focus on the customer. The customer is. A lot of people start a brand and they think, oh, this is awesome, People are going to start tagging me or people are going to be using my product. But in reality, if every customer is not satisfied, then it's impossible to build a brand, and so the website, the landing page, the ads they don't matter if your customers aren't excited and really thrilled about it. So I think that's where I'd focus the most.
44:10 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Our final question is the CTA, the call to action. Where can we learn more about Nick Sharma?
44:18 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
This one's easy. You go to nickcocom slash email. Very good, nick, with no C. So nickcocom slash email.
44:24 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So I will go through all the stuff into the show notes, tap or swipe up on the art to get to it. Definitely sign up for Nick's email. It is one of my favorites. And, nick Sharma, thank you so much for being here.
44:37 - Nik Sharma (Interviewee)
Thank you, thank you.