hey everyone, I'm Davey. Over the past six months, I've been doing YouTube videos to try to explain how my Shopify stores have done over 230 million dollars. People are still buying courses. You don't need to do that to make sure there's no confusion. Over the next two and a half months, I'm going to be posting YouTube videos that show every step of the way. We're going to launch a product together. We're going to try to take it to a million dollars in sales. I'm going to hold nothing back and give you all the secrets that I would use to launch either a dropshipping store or a respectable brand. I'll also be bringing some of my colleagues and consultants that I use that specialize in certain subjects. While I understand how to speak their language, these people will be better than me at email marketing, Facebook marketing, SMS marketing. They are the experts, and I want to give you absolutely everything you need to succeed. We're going to cover a load of topics. First, we're going to find a

product. Then, we're going to launch a Shopify store. Third, we're going to talk about how you can create a brand out of that product. We're going to do product photography, videography, copywriting. I'm even going to show you how to set up the customer service for your brand. We'll then go into retention tactics using email and SMS. We'll launch the Facebook ads, TikTok ads, Pinterest ads, any platform where there's value. I'll also cover the importance of organic traffic, something that's often overlooked by ecommerce brands nowadays. We can cover how to get your products licensed, just as we've done at the URI with Warner Brothers and Disney. We're also going to cover one of the most important topics in hiring, how to get good people involved in your business so that it can grow to be bigger than yourself. Finally, although boring, we're going to talk about supply chain management and how important that actually is in building a brand. Before I go any further, please make sure you subscribe. A ton of people

are watching the videos, but we just need you to subscribe so we can stay in touch. For the first time ever in YouTube history, we're just posting a full course just on YouTube, free to consume so everyone can learn every tactic you need to get success. In today's episode, we're just going to go through a basic overview of everything you need to know. In future episodes, I'm going to share my screen and walk you through every step of the way. We're going to do it together. You need to treat this as an introduction episode. Get your pen and paper, write things down, write some ideas down. Let's get into it. So let's first get into our disclaimers for today. The first disclaimer is that e-commerce, you need to be patient. We're basically building a million-dollar brand. If I was to tell you there's a 10% chance that you could win a million dollars, how many times would you attempt to do that thing? This is basically what we're doing with dropshipping. We're working hard to try to find a million-dollar brand. When you

understand the risk reward of that. You'll put a lot more effort into your learning and won't be scared of failure. You need to invest small. You can't invest everything unless you're willing to lose it. Over time, you'll learn more about e-commerce, and then you can invest more, having the confidence that you're in control of the situation. If you have a family to feed, don't invest all your money into the business unless you know exactly what you're doing and have a large amount of control on the inputs and the outputs. This is the beauty of drop shipping. We only need 500 to a thousand dollars to get started. Basically, all you're paying for is a couple of subscriptions, and you're going to buy some ads. You can start very slow and scale up. This is why it's just a great introduction to get into business. Another disclaimer, I've never drop shipped before. All of my brands I've set up properly from the get-go using a 3PL and a well-branded experience. But that's

not to say that it's a bad method. I'm going to do my first ever drop shipping with you today, and I'm going to show you how that drop shipping store can be a quarter of a million dollar brand just like ours. One other disclaimer I'm gonna mention a lot of tools in these videos. I promise that there is not one tool that I will recommend that I do not use personally in my own businesses. These tools are designed to make your life easier and produce profit. So let's go into the things that you'll need to invest in. First is a domain name. These can be very very cheap, nine dollars to 29 a year. You're gonna need a Shopify store as well. The basic plan is just 29 a month. I recommend Shopify because it's the easiest to get set up. You don't want to spend ages setting up your website when you don't even know your product or your ads are going to work. Another upfront cost is inventory because we're going to be launching a drop shipping

brand, the inventory costs are going to be very minimal up front. But if you're looking to launch an actual brand using a 3PL, you're going to have to commit to a larger amount of inventory and import it to your country. Another expense that you're going to have if you don't outsource is going to be your website and your graphic design, such as your packaging design, unless you do it yourself with your iPhone. You're also going to have to invest in product imagery and videography, but I'm going to take you through how you can just do it with your iPhone. Another cost that a lot of people don't think about is business registration in your country. If you're in Australia, you're gonna have to register a business and get an ABN. Probably the main cost that people really need to understand how to control is their ad spend. Everything up until you launch your ads can basically be controlled to a high degree like a monthly subscription. Ad spends can be quite variable. You don't want to let it

blow out. You want to really control it at like ten dollars a day until you understand if your product is profitable. With all of these things combined, that's why I like to recommend that you have at least five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars of disposable income before you get started so you understand the investment. Now let's go over the skills that you'll need to learn to be a good digital marketer. The best thing about learning these skills is they open up a world of opportunity. Even if your business fails, if you learn how to be a good copywriter, you can go to any business and start doing copywriting for them. If you learn how to do Facebook ads, you're basically learning how to create so much value in these businesses, so you're always going to have these skills to move on. So even if your business fails, don't be afraid to just constantly keep learning. It will serve you really well going forward. All of these skills that I'm about to recommend you can learn on YouTube. I'm going to teach you.

but I'm not the only one on YouTube. There are experts out there giving amazing information based on their real-world experience. Don't go buy a course, just go watch these free YouTube videos. It's all you need. First, a definition: digital marketing is often used in lots of different areas. It's a very broad category. When I talk about digital marketing, I generally mean social media marketing, such as paid platforms or organic traffic. A great way to just learn the basics around digital marketing is the Google Fundamentals course. Yes, it is free. One of the most underrated skills in e-commerce is copywriting. It's a little bit boring compared to graphic design and ads, in my opinion. Good copywriting, like imagery, can make or break your website. You're basically using words to craft emotion in your customer. People buy based on their emotion. You also need to educate people on your product so they understand that it is the right product for them. So, a couple of books that I recommend for copywriting: Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz is a

great one the psychology of persuasion by robert cialdini is also amazing. You can also join facebook copywriting groups that are all around e-commerce. People share ideas and their recent case studies that work so well for them. Another great way to learn about ad copy is just going into an ads library of a competing brand, studying what they're writing. A lot if you're feeling really lazy, you can also use a copy service that uses ai. I'll put a link in the description. The other skill you need to learn is actually really confronting. It's videography. People look at videography and they see so much complexity and think, I could never do that. That is far from the truth. When I first started doing videography, I'd film video ads for free for random companies just trying to understand the skill. My first videos were terrible, but that's okay because you just keep learning. You start seeing things differently. You can start expressing creativity in different ways even if you're not a creative person. E-commerce videography is very formulaic. It's basically you're just

showing the product's features, and you're doing the same format every single time. It's really simple. The best thing about it now is that you don't even need a video camera. You can just use your iPhone. The reason why I do recommend learning videography is it's so expensive to get a proper videographer. In that 500 to a thousand dollar budget could be eaten up for just one Facebook ad, which just isn't sustainable. If you can learn content, you can de-risk the process that we're about to embark on. One of the best videographers on YouTube is Peter McKinnon. I learned so much from him. I also learned so much just watching Sam Kolder's travel videos. They inspired me to get into videography, and it's still one of my favorite passions. The first step if you're using an iPhone is just studying a lot of other ads that are out there, understanding how long each clip goes for, how quick is the transition, what copy overlays do they use, making sure that you have the right lighting, all of these kinds of small tips.

will make you into a professional videographer really quickly for e-commerce. If you're serious about getting into videography and you want to use a proper camera, it is great fun, but it will take a little bit of an investment to get that camera and a lot more learning to understand the settings. Once you have this though, it's a skill you have for the rest of your life that is very valuable. The other skill that obviously plays into videography as well is photography. You can't have a good e-commerce store without beautiful pictures of your product. It creates trust, it makes people understand what the product's going to look like in their own home. Think about how often you've turned down a product online because you're just not quite sure how it looks like, the website just doesn't do it justice. If you've got a small product, your iPhone is going to be more than good enough. We're just going to buy a lightbox, we're going to put it in there, we're going to take a photo and do a really simple editing and get it on.

the website. These light boxes are small investments, they're not 100% necessary. We can also just get a white sheet and put it next to a window to make sure that we have diffused lighting. So after you've done all of those skills, the next step is website development. This will require basic graphic design skills. When I started learning graphic design, I just downloaded Photoshop and I just started watching YouTube videos. I first learned how to design a logo, then I learned how to design a label. It was just slow progressions. It also went really hand in glove. What's that, the expression hand in glove? I always said a handy glove before. I was like, that's not it. And then I just committed to it. I think it is hand in glove. Use it if it's in it. The reason why I say it's great to learn just basic graphic design is because then you can start doing web design. Shopify is just a drag and drop editor. If you understand how to edit photos, take the photos, you can drag them.

onto your website and make it look great. Then once you've got your site, you need to learn how to do paid traffic. I know this is sounding like a lot of work, but let's remember we're trying to build a million-dollar store that will change your life. So you need to learn all of these skills, or at least understand how to manage them. Paid traffic is the best form of advertising at the moment because you're working alongside these platforms. If you're just doing organic social, such as posting every day, using hashtags, looking at their followers, it's just not gonna grow your business as quick as actually paying these platforms for impressions. The main platform that people start on, especially with drop shipping or building brands, is Facebook advertising. In my opinion, it is the most powerful. It's got the most data, and it's probably the easiest to use. If you're really struggling with Facebook advertising, maybe it's just your personality. You're more of a creative person rather than a technical person. Maybe you can do influencer marketing, but again, it's not very scalable.

controllable. It's hard to measure, so that's why I always recommend starting with Facebook with your product. Another thing that we really need to touch on is logistics. With luck, your business is going to be a huge success. You're going to scale into international markets. You're going to be serving thousands of customers on a weekly basis. With that growing complexity means that you need to understand operations. Otherwise, what's going to happen is you're going to let your customers down. That's going to give you negative reviews. That's going to bring your platform feedback scores down, which is going to make your advertising more expensive, and your brand is going to go to zero. One of the main things with supply chain management is how you communicate with your suppliers. Being very clear with product specifications, the lead time that they're going to produce for your customer, the shipping lines they use, all of those kind of things. Getting very clear, getting it in writing to make sure that your customer doesn't suffer. Then to measure your success around your operations supply chain, you need to

start measuring things like delivery time your customer reviews on your platform. The best thing about e-commerce is you will be starting slow you'll just have a couple of orders here and there which isn't very complex. You can sort them out as they come but as things grow you really need to be learning from your mistake. You need to be systemizing processes to make sure that when you're at scale there's solutions for all of those problems. One of the best books which is quite challenging to read especially if you're new is high output management by Andy Grove that is one of the best management and operations book I've ever read. When it comes to operations the main thing is really understanding your costs understanding your 3PL costs or your delivery cost and then holding your providers accountable for those costs doing monthly checks with your finance team to make sure that you're not getting overcharged on a weekly basis a good knowledge of finance is your best friend in this journey. There's multiple things that you need to know the first one is obviously profit.

you need to know if your brand is profitable, but the other thing you need to also know is if you are importing stock, is cash flow. This is one of the most important elements because basically, even if your brand is profitable and making money, you may run out of money, and you'll need to take on funding, or you'll have to declare bankruptcy. The two pieces of documents that your accountant should be creating is a balance sheet and a profit and loss statement. You can then just monitor cash flow closely. Your account should be able to create a cash flow statement. However, in the early stages, you should be able to just really understand based on your orders and the cash coming in. To learn accounting, you can just do a daily accounting management course. There's plenty available, or you can just watch YouTube videos for free. A common mistake that I see with entrepreneurs is that they don't set up their accounting software quick enough. There's plenty out there. There's Xero, there's MYOB. I'll chuck a link in the description once you

find out your product is profitable. Then you want to subscribe to these very quickly. Link your bank feeds because your accountant is going to be asking for one thing. That I often see as well is people getting bookkeepers and not understanding how to manage them. If you're getting an outsourced bookkeeper and your business scales lots and you have no accountability checking if they're doing tax properly. That can cause a huge problem for you. It's probably worth getting an accountant in the early stages in your own country. But again all of these things can be done after you really understand your business is going to work. We're starting with a really small budget. We need to make sure that we're onto something. And then we'll put all those systems in place. One thing that I'm also going to do is I'm going to put a little bit of a glossary in the description. This is going to include a lot of acronyms and terms that you're going to hear on this e-commerce journey. I really just want to

make sure that you're following along. People use acronyms all the time, and it's really important to understand them. So, a couple of final notes before we get started on this journey. We're not going to launch multiple products at once. We're just going to go on this learning journey and focus on one product. When I launch a product and find one, do not copy me. That is just one of the main things that I want everyone to understand. And the reason is so many people are going to copy me. What's going to happen after I find this product and then I launch it is, by the time I do my next episode, there are going to be hundreds of copies. What that's going to do is make the auction on Facebook advertising make this product basically unprofitable. I don't mind, but I just don't want you to invest in a product that is not going to work. I'm just going to show you all the skills that you need to do, and when you launch your drop shipping product, you need to keep it top secret. Don't share.

your confidential data, like your Facebook dashboard, to anyone else. Launch this product, keep it to yourself, enjoy the journey until that you're so successful that you can shout it from the rooftops, and then help other people in business. You need to be ready to fail. I failed so many startups before I got started in e-commerce. The truth is, it only needs to work once and your life will be changed. So just keep learning through that failure, don't get discouraged, and eventually you will make it. For those people coming along this journey, I'm going to create a Facebook group. Sign up and we're going to post all of our tips there. As well, I'm going to let you guys share and answer each other's questions. We're going to build a free community so that nobody gets left behind. I'm so pumped to get started. I hope we can create a really fun brand and teach you a ton along the way. So make sure you're tuning in every Sunday when I drop these videos. Put that notification bell on and

Watch Me Build A Million Dollar Brand | Beginner Episode

Watch Me Build A Million Dollar Brand | Beginner Episode