Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking

9-fig operator with nothing to sell. Frøya Organics, Norse Organics +++

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@_______pxoxo @Shopify Perfomance dropped too?

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

Is @Shopify down? Horrible performance and sometimes our page loads this

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@_abdullahsaleem We got dash fi, Revolut, Mercury, Ramp

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

We had some money with Parker. But luckily, we decided to spread out over many of these providers. Wonder who will be the next to fall...

[Drew Fallon @drewfallon12]

*PARKER CARD CEASES OPERATIONS

Parker, the YC19 fintech that served ecommerce merchants with credit cards, has officially ceased operations on May 4th '26

Patriot Bank, parkers banking operations partner, issued an official statement to clients confirming

Parker raised >$200m

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@markbuildsbrand We're starting right now

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@iamshackelford Nice!

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@_abdullahsaleem Mostly with influencers

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

Going bigger on partnerships. It's working.

While everyone blasts cold audiences with AI ads, we're borrowing trust from people who already have it.

One way to build a moat in 2026.

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

This is spot on. Get/keep going while the going is good!

[Camm @cjfeth]

Ecom is cracked right now

It feels like 2021/22 again

I think we’ll look back on this time in a few years to come and call it “the good days”

We’re living in a time right now where it’s never been easier to launch stores & hit huge scale FAST

If you’re in the game, you know some of the stores

0-8 figures/month & some of these brands launched less than a year ago

Then you do a deep dive into their funnels & it’s sheer creative volume driven by AI

LP’s are one shot manus prompts

They’re running 100k/days with a few editors & VA’s

It’s crazy what’s there for the taking & the the playbook is right in front of us all

Look at medvi, billion dollar company driven purely by huge creative output using AI authority figures with whitelisted pages

The barrier has never been easier to hit 1m+ months

Get a higgsfield account, build some solid workflows for high creative output, and dial in on one market with a huge tam & learn it like the back of your hand

Move like a fucking savage, go deep into your angles, avatars etc - push messaging across different formats

Have an obsessive love for the game, execute relentlessly & it’s hard not to lose

Don’t waste this opportunity

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@dtcpages @connor_m Or maybe you're just very good at running tests? We had a massive downswing after launching some tests last weekend. Saw the same kind of trends as mentioned in this post.

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@MattiSchroder I think maybe you can get away with it if you're able to only offer it to real first-time buyers. Feels very hard to make it work without some kind of perceived offer on Meta nowadays

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@RomanEcom @Duderichy Why? Because of the hassle or the outlook?

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

Number 1 hits home. Always validate that you've found a starving crowd...

Our first businesses never scaled past 7-figures, even though we were trying harder back then than now. Looking back, it's so obvious... solving a medium pain in a small market vs. a massive pain in a huge market.

[Davie Fogarty @daviefogarty]

If I lost everything and had to build a profitable ecom brand by summer, here's exactly what I'd do.

1. RUN THE UGLY WEBSITE TEST.

Find a competitor with a horrible site, no real ads, and photos that look like they were shot on an iPhone in a garage, but they’re still pulling sales. This tells you the demand within the category is so strong that even bad execution gets paid for.

2. SPEND A WEEK READING NEGATIVE REVIEWS ON AMAZON AND 1-STAR COMMENTS ON TIKTOK IN THAT CATEGORY.

The same complaints will keep showing up, and those repeated complaints are the actual product brief. People are telling you exactly what to build and how to position it for free.

3. USE WHITE-LABEL DROPSHIPPING TO GET YOUR FIRST 30 TO 50 ORDERS. THIS IS NOT A BUSINESS YET. IT'S JUST A TEST.

You’re spending money to learn what works and what doesn't. Your job is to detach all emotion from the result, so set your budget to what you're prepared to lose and treat every dollar as data.

4. SKIP HIRING UGC CREATORS FOR YOUR FIRST CREATIVES.

Use AI to generate them.

You can build 30 test ads in 4 hours. Spend 10 to 30% of your product price per day and don't kill any creative until you've spent 2x your product price. Anything less than that is statistical noise, and you'll throw away ads that would have actually worked.

5. TAKE THE NEGATIVE REVIEWS YOU PULLED IN STEP 2 AND TURN THEM INTO ADS.

Open every video by addressing the biggest objection in the first 3 seconds.

Record it on your phone yourself.

Founder ads perform every time, and addressing objections up front crushes them 80% of the time because you're answering the question that was already stopping the sale.

6. ONCE YOUR ADS ARE WORKING, MOVE OFF WHITE-LABEL AND INTO CUSTOM BRANDING.

Find a 3PL in your top region so customers aren't waiting 37 days for delivery. Get IP agreements signed with every supplier. Stay in dropshipping past this point, and you're racing to the bottom forever, because anyone with a Shopify account can list the exact same product for half the price.

7. ONE PRODUCT. ONE OBSESSION. DON'T LAUNCH A SECOND PRODUCT TO COVER YOURSELF.

Every founder I've watched try to launch product number two before mastering product number one ends up splitting their attention across two failing things instead of fixing the one with actual potential.

8. MAKE SURE YOUR PRODUCT IS SOMETHING PEOPLE ACTUALLY SEE BEING USED IN PUBLIC.

The Oodie showed up on Zoom calls, and people asked where you got it.

That visibility is a free distribution channel running 24/7 in the background. Products that get used privately have to pay for every single customer through ads, and that math gets brutal as you scale.

9. BY MONTH 3, YOUR REPEAT PURCHASE RATE IS THE ONLY NUMBER THAT MATTERS.

70% of Oodie customers came from personal recommendations. If your customers aren't coming back and aren't telling their friends, no amount of ad spend will save you. You're paying to fill a leaky bucket, and the unit economics will catch up to you within 6 months.

10. HIRE ONE SPECIALIST FOR THE THING THAT'S EATING MOST OF YOUR TIME. NOT A GENERALIST. NOT A COPY OF YOU.

If creative is the bottleneck, hire a creative strategist.

If ads are the bottleneck, hire someone who runs ads.

Max one hire per month, so you can actually onboard them properly and judge whether they're an A-player before bringing in the next one.

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@spencepawliw This is a masterclass in building brand and selling at the same time. Taking notes...

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@markoscales Best in class! I'm sure they're doing way more rev than that, though

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@swucco We've usually been able to teach them how to do it.

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

Media buyers are the most underrated hire in DTC right now.

Everyone's fighting over Creative Strategists. Bidding wars, tiny talent pool, impossible to find good ones.

Meanwhile, we post a media buyer role and get flooded with qualified candidates.

Every time we've added a strong media buyer and let them own a channel, they've found extra scale and profit we were leaving on the table.

Especially on supporting channels. There's so much juice left to squeeze. We're seeing great performance on Pinterest, Snapchat, and Applovin after we started putting dedicated people to grow these channels.

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@thedanielokon I'd add to that to try batched scaling campaigns with incremental attribution to drive more spend to more diverse creatives.

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

@lombardstr33t Yep. dm me

[Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking @2nervik]

I love running a remote org. You get the very best people/value + it forces you to plan, document, and communicate better.