Making $6M a year turning dropshipping products into real brands
About this episode
Liam is a 21-year-old founder from Cape Town who has been in ecommerce for about six years. After years of dropshipping random products he shut everything down, picked a product he wanted to build, ordered a sample to New York, filmed ads and hit a 6 ROAS on day one. That camera accessory brand did about $6 million in the past year.
He covers validating products on Google Trends, tracking angles, use cases and personas in Notion, a $30 per video creator program, coding custom landing pages with Claude, and the post-purchase experience that brings customers back.
Key takeaways
- The product is 90% of it. The brand makes the decision easier, but the product is what delivers the outcome the customer is paying for.
- Check the trend, then change the mechanism or persona. Skip anything declining on Google Trends, and in a crowded market bring a different mechanism or a new audience, like grip socks taken from trampoline parks to Pilates.
- Track angle, use case and persona. His team logs every ad in a Notion dashboard so a winning angle can be tested against every use case, and the other way around.
- Pay creators per video, retain the best. The creator program pays $30 per UGC video with no cap, and creators who make winning ads move onto a monthly retainer.
- Teach the customer before the box arrives. Post-purchase emails show how to use the product, and the box carries a QR code to a setup page with a bundle discount, plus an authenticity card.
Chapters
- 0:00 Meet the 21-year-old who made $10M+ in ecommerce
- 2:20 Getting started: from failing to first dropshipping success
- 5:15 The turning point: hitting a 6 ROAS on day one
- 7:30 Dropshipping vs. real ecommerce brands: why customer experience matters
- 10:10 The 90% rule: why the product itself is your biggest lever
- 12:45 How to find winning products using Google Trends
- 15:30 Meta ads strategy: tracking angles, use cases and personas in Notion
- 18:15 Building a UGC creator program to scale video ads
- 20:50 When to use AI creatives vs. real people for product ads
- 23:10 Using Claude to code custom Shopify landing pages
- 25:40 Increasing LTV and AOV through the post-purchase experience
- 28:15 Why shipping from China works for global fulfillment
- 31:00 Agencies vs. in-house teams: which should you hire?
- 33:30 Team management: using personality tests to motivate employees
- 36:15 Entrepreneur mindset: vision, core values and living in Cape Town
Recorded in person in New York. Every guest runs a 7 or 8 figure brand, across every category. Hosted by Sam Jacobs, co-founder of Commercive.
Or browse all episodes
Fulfillment from our own warehouses in China and the US.
Tell us what you sell and how much you ship. We reply with a quote within one business day.
