12. Launch vs. Grow, E-com vs. Other—Learn to Leverage Your Advantages with Dan Ben-Nun, CEO at ADSPACE

Dan Ben-Nun, founder and CEO at AdSpace and founder of the popular e-commerce brand Inkkas, joined E-Commerce with Coffee?! host Nate Svoboda for an unforgettable conversation about historic trends and new requirements of direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce.

Dan got into DTC when everything was new: Shopify, Facebook ads, influencer advertising, and even Kickstarter. He came in at the ground floor of the technologies that reshaped commerce forever. Dan started so early on Facebook ads, in fact, that the behemoth social network wrote a case study about his brand.

All this experience early on in the DTC revolution shaped Dan, too, and the way he thought about scaling an e-commerce business. He took all the lessons he learned and developed a methodology that, since then, has been applied to hundreds of successful e-commerce brands.

Dan’s methodology is based on five pillars:

1. Product-market fit
2. Customer acquisition
3. Lifecycle marketing
4. Reporting and analytics
5. Website experience

When this interview arrives at the topic of market saturation (and brands that are lightyears ahead in e-commerce), Dan insists that there’s never a start or end date to starting a new business model. Even brands just looking to e-commerce can be successful, he says, they’ll just have different strategies than those that existing brands used.

The interview wraps with talks about successful ad strategies, especially what video ads gained Inkkas in recent months. Listen to the full episode to hear what Dan has to say on the topic and everything else he covers in this episode of E-Commerce with Coffee?!

What to listen for:

• Dan has been around direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce for about 15 years, and for almost 10 of those he’s been building brands. The first was Inkkas, his e-commerce footwear brand inspired by native cultures of the world. And with its explosive success, Dan went to work for other brands as a strategic growth marketer. Listen to the full interview for the origin story of Inkkas, which is sure to captivate.
• Dan then gets into the five pillars of e-commerce, according to the model he built for brands after his own success with Inkkas. Listen in to learn what the pillars are and how to optimize each. “Whether you have a wholesale business, retail business, or e-commerce business,” Dan assures us, “there are some universal, foundational methods that position you for success.”
• Later in the interview, Dan dives deep into marketing channels. He talks about the gap between brands that are already established in e-commerce versus those just coming to market. There are ways to get your footing and Dan explains what some of them are.
• “Creative [content] is now the most important advertising asset,” Dan explains. Today’s video trends include things like the quirkiest videos getting greater engagement. The first two seconds of an ad video, Dan says, must break the zombie-like scroll action. Then, the rest of the video has to deliver real value to make the scroll-stop technique seem worth it to consumers.

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