Asking E-commerce Millionaires How to DOMINATE in 2026! - Strategy, AI, & Trends

Key Takeaways

Hey guys. So, in today's video, I'm interviewing a bunch of successful founders running big ecom companies, asking questions about their tech stack, secret growth strategies, teams, AI, predictions for the future, and more. These people run some of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the world, meaning they're doing something right. All right, let's get started. So, what's your name, age, and what do you do? >> Hi everyone, my name is Jennifer Chung. I am the president at Forever Be More Cosmetics, and I am 32 years old. >> I'm Davey Fogerty. I'm 30 years old and I sell wearable blankets. >> My name is Jordan Smith. I am 27 years old and I'm the founder and CEO of Gleman. >> My name is Nick Shakleford. I am 35 years old and I am an e-commerce owner for Drink Breeze. >> Now, how did you actually get started in ecom? >> The company was founded by my mom and we were actually the first importer of the collagen beauty drink into the states and the first Vietnamese brand to introduce this product to Vietnamese women here in the States. Her ability to really understand what her customers want in regards to beauty products has really shaped Forever Be More into what it is today. >> Same way every entrepreneur gets started with a ton of failure, like launching just every single business trying to sell everything under the sun until something sticks. And I ended up going to work for a watch company that did influencer marketing. And they did, I think, $1 million in one day. And I was just like, e-commerce is for me. I got started in ecom when I realized how incredible meta ads was many many many years ago and then I fell in love with consumer products and so I just kind of stuck there for the last uh 11 years I would say 11 years 10 years really doing it at the highest level possible and I don't think I'll ever get out of this. >> I got started in ecom when I was 16 years old. I did a range of things drop shipping Amazon FBA. I built some SAS for the drop shipping community. I built some private label brands. I used to pay fan pages on Instagram. It gave me like a a really good head starter I think to life. I wanted to go into something longterm. Decided to try to build a brand and I'd also just gone through my own skin issues. So I thought of building this vitamin C, turmeric and aloe vera clay mask and yeah it just immediately took off. So that was how Gleman got started. >> How long did it take you to actually find traction? >> Uh pretty much immediately. 20 years ago when my mom first started the company, she was the first woman to do Vietnamese beauty talk show on the Vietnamese networks. So, as you can imagine, this was a family business that started out pretty much from my mom's tiny garage. And it would be her answering the calls once her live show airs and it would be me right after school going in to help her take down those orders. >> To get traction in e-commerce, you know, I tried to sell iPhone cases, I tried to sell headphones, tried to sell everything. That probably took me about six years until I got my first big winner. But then when I hit that big winner, you know, I did 10 million in its first year and then the next one did, you know, $200 million in its second, third year. So it all kind of just happened all at once. But yeah, you've got to pay your dues first. >> And then a question that everyone asks is, did you have to raise funding? Like how did you get the money to start your business? >> We did not raise funding for the business. We self-funded it. we are currently in the process of raising to continue to fund this. But in hindsight, I probably would have raised just a little bit more money so that it wasn't just all of mine. >> We have always been bootstraps. We are a family-owned business. We still own 100% of it. At one point, you know, I wanted to see if raising funds would be um an opportunity for my family's business. But, you know, we've been very fortunate to be able to say that we've pretty much bootstrapped the company to this day. >> Okay. Tell us the story of your biggest mistake and then what you learned from it. >> The biggest mistake that we had was actually in July of this year. We are still dealing with to this day. Our can, this is not it, but our beverage in like a normal 12 oz can was going for about $5 to $6 a can, which is super expensive. We lowered that to about $4 a can. And then we also green lit an offer where you can buy 16 cans from us or like a variety pack for a $45 amount when traditionally we sell it for $75 for this overall pack. So you can imagine people were going crazy for this. And so what this meant was we acquired a bunch of customers had an a margin profile that's not conducive for consistent compounding growth. And that really hurt and we spent just under a million dollars in 48 hours on this offer over the weekend. So it was just like oh my god what just happened? >> Financial management was definitely something that was kind of pushed to the side for the first two years. And you know we scaled quite quickly. The first year we did 3 million USD. The second year I did 7 million USD. And that's obviously quite cash flow intensive. However, I hadn't implemented the systems that were needed to manage that level of income. Then CO hit. We got into some cash flow concerns because all of our inventory became extremely expensive because we were still manufacturing in Australia and because I didn't have the right financial management. We weren't recognizing the increase in COGS on the P&L. Therefore, cash started to squeeze, but I didn't really know why. And at the same time, we and so many others were just getting thrown in unsecured financing offers. you know, 500K here, 700K here, 250K. I took on a few of those offers to support at the time and then realized, okay, actually, I need to implement a cash flow model, proper financial management, but it was a little bit too late at that time. So, we ended up having to go through a really, really large ballot street restructuring. Almost lost the company, thankfully. Didn't it was huge. Obviously, there was a lot of issues that went on around that time and people that got burnt and I got burnt in ways and that was just a huge lesson. just like financial management is like number one in the business. >> You know, one thing that comes up a lot when I talk to e-commerce founders is how messy finances get once you start selling internationally. Like when you manage different currencies, global payments, and different bank systems, it's a lot. So, that's why I wanted to talk about Airwalk, which is an all-in-one financial platform that allows you to open multicurrency accounts, receive payments globally, and even integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce, so your international customers can check out easier. Air Rolex also has a bunch of other cool money tools for scaling your business, like lowcost foreign exchange, global payments to suppliers, expense management, and more. So, the link is below if you want to check it out and get your first $50,000 of foreign exchange free. And now let's get back to the video. What does your current team look like? And do you have any overseas talent? >> I think we have around 70 full-time employees. And then we have typical, you know, COO, uh, and then the operational structure under that which manage fulfillment. Every single pillar you within e-commerce such as customer service, marketing, email, every single channel, all of those people needs someone that's responsible for that. >> We have an operations manager. We then have a growth manager that oversees everything that happens within growth. We also have an email marketing agency that support. We have a paid media team that based in Latvia. We have a static ad designer, a UX UI designer, a video editor that comes in and out as they're needed. Then we have our customer success team also agency support that supports and is able to flex up and down. >> We are a very small team here in the states. I would say we have about a team of five. We outsource a lot of our marketing to agencies as well. Our biggest amount of staff is overseas in Vietnam where we have a 247 call center. So I think in total we have a team of about 20. >> What's your current strategy for acquiring customers? >> Our main strategy is around creating userenerated content and then developing really unique patterns and innovative designs whether that be licensing with Warner Brothers, Disney and then using Facebook advertising and user generated content to convert those customers. We have internal content creators that are creating 20 to 30 pieces of content for us every single month. They're posted on some of their own channels. They're also posting on the Gleman channel. We then graduate a lot of those pieces of content through to paid media. We also just have a generally like strong paid media content engine that every week is producing x number of videos and if we have a specific video that we want to produce, we then pass that through to the creator team and script it for them to film and create. So right now the majority of customers are acquired via paid media. And it typically happens as well when we launch our like Black Friday Cyber Monday sale. That then acquires a lot of the customers that have kind of been on the fence over the last year or so and have considered buying Gleman. What is your current tech stack? Shopify, Netswuite, Stored, Clavio, ChargeFlow, Triple Whale, Afterell, Revo, Day for subscription, Alia for Popup, and maybe 20 other apps that we use. But those are the big ones that we have. >> We use all the classics to be honest. Just Shopify, Figma, Slack, Gorgeous, Replo, Meta Ads, Google Ads. Yeah, we just use the standards >> and our tech stack is Shopify primarily. Uh we do do some creative stuff, but yeah, mainly Shopify and we are incorporating a fair bit of AI as well. Now, >> what are the most important social media platforms for building an e-commerce business? We have the hugest following and most active following on our Facebook as well as my mom's personal YouTube. I would say that about 60% of our traffic comes from Facebook because remember again our demographic of middle-aged Vietnamese women, their preferred social platform is Facebook. >> Now, what's an underrated growth hack that not that many people are doing? go in, grab all of your old creatives, anything that has scaled in the past, duplicate the ad, put it into one CBO, so one campaign, put some um cost caps on that, and then just activate them all. You'll be very, very surprised that some of these random old creatives that you thought were just completely done, will suddenly start spending, and then you can just get a ton more creative running, which is kind of like one of the main reasons why people aren't growing, just cuz they aren't introducing enough creatives. What e-commerce trends are you super bullish on? e-commerce trends that I'm super bullish on is making sure that the product you launch has continuity or has the ability to be subscribed to and a built-in mechanism for repeat purchases. I spend as much as I possibly can and I buy into an LTV of 3 months, meaning I'm willing to spend what a customer would spend with me for 3 months. That's very difficult for a lot of people to think about. They want to be profitable on the very first purchase. And I think we're coming to a time where if you can't afford or don't have the margin baked into your product for you to acquire customers and new customers at scale, it's going to be very very difficult. So thinking about buying into the LTV or having more LTV from your product is going to be a huge huge differentiator moving forward. >> Look, it is just AI like it's absolutely changing everything. AI, you know, can create parallel content 10 times, 100 times, thousand times faster than we ever could before. So, you need to be able to use AI to still create creatives as good, if not better, than the previous ones. Um, and then hopefully you can uh do that at scale. And that's how you're just going to overtake everybody. How do you use AI? >> AI writes the majority of our scripts before we actually apply the human touch. So, like let's say it's a winning creative from another brand. We'll descript it, then we'll make our own version, and then we'll go through and kind of humanize it. We use that to accelerate the creative process. We're using AI to build out briefs and landing page briefs as well. A lot of our tickets are now handled by AI. It does a lot of cross-checking for me personally and sometimes I'll like compile a lot of information and summarize it with AI. >> We do use AI for usually deep research and creative iterations. We use a tool to analyze our all of our most recent email campaigns and recommend what we do next with those campaigns or what ones we should not do. We are going to start using AI to give us recommendations on what we should be changing on the website. >> Tell me about the most successful campaign that you had and then why it worked so well. >> So just before Black Friday, your CPMs will start to really increase. It gets really expensive to advertise on Facebook. It's actually cheaper to advertise to these people in October. So in October, we did this lead generation giveaway where you could go in to the draw to win a $1ie. We had, you know, 10,000 plus people trying to add to cart at one given time. We had a profitable return on ad spend on that. Then just before Black Friday, just before we launched our sale, we emailed everyone and said, "Go try to check out now. You can be the first one to get it." And then, yeah, a bunch of people joined. And obviously, we had a limited amount of goodies that we could give away for a dollar. And then a lot of people end up shopping with you. Anyways, >> how do you stand out in a super crowded market? >> What has really helped stand out is how much we care about our community. Um, our customers are primarily middle-aged Vietnamese women who have been with my mom since day one. and really resonate with her story and they really feel like they are a part of our growth and a part of our family. As a consumer, I love the idea of convenience and buying things through a brand's website, but I also want that kind of in-person exclusive experience of knowing like this product is curated for me, if that makes sense. >> You need to get extremely clear on what your product actually does for the consumer and potentially what problems it solves and how is it going to best serve the consumer. The other piece as well is you want to think about all of the different barriers to purchase and motivators to purchase as well and build content around that. It is important to think about not just your overarching like key message, the key reason why people really want to buy, all of these other supportive reasons that you can use that will further support your overarching story and therefore hopefully create a really strong multi- kind of touch marketing funnel. >> What do you think the e-commerce landscape is going to look like in 5 to 10 years? They think that the main thing will be agentic AI. A lot of people think that AI is just going to help the regular business owner. It's not. It's similar to how when e-commerce launched, everyone was like, "Oh, this is going to make every single business more valuable." But it didn't because a lot of people got stuck in their own ways. And then all e-commerce did for them was they had to add another cost center. They had to learn how to do websites when all they really knew how to do is run storefronts. It's going to be a similar shift within AI. a lot of the smaller businesses or even ecom businesses that fail to adapt with it. It'll be an added cost center. They'll have to pay another agency and it won't actually support them when the people that do will just completely uh overtake them. So, I think it's just going to be like a bit of this power shift and a lot of businesses are going to become obsolete which is technically you know your opportunity if you actually are willing to learn the tool. I believe that there is just no way that the traditional shopping from our phone from an ad on a website is going to be the the only way in which people are going to find you and discover you. And I think that as more integrated pieces where back in the day used to think that you could speak to Alexa and tell it to buy and it'll just auto ship from you from Amazon, that could be an experience. And it also could be a full robot that analyzes what's in your fridge and not in your fridge and gives you two buttons to click and then all of a sudden it's it's ordered to your door. And I think it used to be more like sci-fi, but in the next decade and seeing the initial advancements of just the most recent updates of of shopping through GPT, I think it's going to be there. And I can't wait to find ways of getting and convincing robots to buy my product. >> I think we're moving from a skill-based economy to a management/allocation type economy. >> A lot of items are going to really become much much cheaper. the majority of items are going to become kind of commodities and you really are going to need to build brand or build extreme innovation in what you're doing to be able to break through the noise. So brand is going to be important. I think human connection is going to be important. Short form content is not really going to um hold any weight. It's going to be done by AI and brands will still do it. the content that's going to break through and really therefore create a connection with a customer because no one's going to remember your 3se secondond video anymore because the amount of 3 to 15 second videos are just going to be ridiculous on a day-to-day basis. Majority of them are going to be AI. That's my like high level prediction if honestly in 5 years I think. So >> what absolutely crucial skills do entrepreneurs need to learn to win in the next decade? I think if entrepreneurs really want to stay successful, especially when first starting out a business, is they have to stay scrappy. And being scrappy means being creative and really using what is at your disposable to be able to grow your company. And so I think if entrepreneurs lose sight of being creative on their own or being scrappy, it's going to make it much more challenging and much more costly for them to grow their business. just because skills are going to become less useful and less valuable because it's going to be easy to do those skills with the use of of AI. It's going to be the ones that know how to use AI and know how to allocate work and build workflows and manage teams are going to be the ones that are really going to be able to achieve some pretty incredible results. So, I think that's like extremely high level. >> The thing about e-commerce is so multifaceted. You cannot just be a really good marketer. You cannot just be really good at spreadsheets and operations. You need to understand at least the base level of every single one of those skills so that you can actually scale the business and you just keep developing and upping those skills every single day. Okay, so I hope you guys got a ton of value from the interviews. I really want to thank the guests for sharing their insights, advice, and stories. And I also do want to say thank you to Airwalks for making this video possible. I'll have their link in the description down below. If you guys enjoyed the video, make sure to hit that like button, subscribe, because on this channel, I make a ton of videos about finance, entrepreneurship, business, and it's all to help you guys live a financially successful life. Thank you so much for your time, and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.