Episode 291: Building an Ecom Brand From Scratch: Inside Our First 60 Days

Episode 291: Building an Ecom Brand From Scratch: Inside Our First 60 Days Episode Description What does building a new ecommerce brand actually look like before you know whether it's going to work?

In this episode, Smart Marketer Agency CEO Pep Hufen takes us inside the first 60 days of Longer Together, the pet supplement brand Smart Marketer launched with partners Michelle and Tyler from Living Well with Dr. Michelle. Pep explains why the partnership made sense, the competitive advantages they had going in, and the three phases the team is using to build the business: validation, infrastructure, and scale.

From a one-page website and a handful of Meta ads to $75,000 in early revenue, subscriptions, Amazon, reviews, and returning customers, Pep shares the real numbers and decisions behind the launch. He also gets into what surprised him, including an unscripted video outperforming their polished creative and the tradeoff they discovered when sending cold traffic directly into a subscription offer.

And one of the biggest lessons from the validation phase is an important distinction for ecommerce founders:

"You can have an amazing business, real product-market fit, people love it, and not be able to profitably sell with Meta ads."

– Pep Hufen

This isn't a case study with a perfectly packaged ending. Pep is documenting Longer Together while the team is still building it, testing assumptions, and waiting for the data that will determine what comes next.

You Will Learn Why Smart Marketer decided to build a new ecommerce brand from scratch

How the Longer Together partnership came together

The competitive advantages the team wanted before launching

Pep's three phases for building the business: validation, infrastructure, and scale

The two questions the team needed to answer during validation