Mostafa | Building From Zero

🛠️ Building a retention marketing agency (and more) from my dorm room.

✒️ Documenting the journey

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

I’m building an ecommerce retention agency from my dorm room.

🧵 Here’s what I’m learning in public:

[Siddharth @siddharthwv]

To grow your audience on X:

~ Create impactful content
~ Build a like-minded community
~ Establish yourself as a category leader

Keep it simple.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

@markproduct Negotiation. This book helped me a ton with it

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

@The_Money_Buddy Chipotle burritos

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

I don’t necessarily believe that comparison is the “thief of joy”.

Comparing yourself with others can help you calibrate yourself in terms of how well you’re doing in any endeavor.

Example:

You’ve been going to the gym for a year.

No visible results.

Comparing yourself with others who’ve been working out for a similar time will tell you that you’re doing something wrong.

No need to tie it to self worth.

Just calibration.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

If what I said was intriguing enough to make you get this far, I think you’ll benefit from what I’ll be posting about.

Welcome aboard 🫱🏻‍🫲🏼

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

Like I said, I’m still in the early stage.

Uni, outreach, mockups, delivery, learning, mistakes, rebuilding the personal brand, trying to become sharper every month.

I’m not documenting the finish line.

I’m documenting the part where the standards are getting built.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

If you’re building a service business, I want this account to be useful for the parts people usually skip:

Positioning, outreach, trust, delivery, client thinking, and becoming harder to replace.

Not just “get more leads.”

Build something people can actually trust.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

I’m building an ecommerce retention agency from my dorm room.

🧵 Here’s what I’m learning in public:

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

If you have an ecom brand, I want my content to make you think:

“Wow, this guy knows what happens after the click”

Because acquisition is expensive, and most brands leak money after the first visit, first purchase, or first email signup.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

I’ll be posting about ecom retention, outreach, sales, and the process of building an agency from my dorm room.

If you:

-Have an ecom business

-Are building a service based business

-Interested in retention, offers, positioning, and customer psychology

-Are early, but not casual about what you’re building

-Or are building anything else from scratch

You’ll probably relate to what I’ll be posting on here.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

I plan on teaching that approach to the sales reps I’ll eventually hire, but as of right now, it’s just me doing everything.

Prospecting.

Outreach.

Sales.

Fulfillment.

But it’ll stop being like that very soon, and this account will document that.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

They way I usually do it when reaching out to someone I want to work with is this:

I find something a potential customer of that brand is likely to ask about one of the products.

“Would you recommend taking this supplement every day, or is taking breaks better”?

“What skincare product would you recommend to someone in their 20s (obviously no concerns with aging), and is just looking to maintain that longevity going into old age”

“How long does the 500ml bottle of shampoo last”

“Which of your toothpastes would you recommend for coffee stains?”

You get the picture.

I ask that question to the CEO.

When they reply, I send them an email mockup that’s built around answering that one concern, with the answer they gave me as the foundation.

I also find other areas they could improve on.

Could be their pop-up, their offer, or anything else that is of real value and fits the whole “tell them something they weren’t aware of” frame I described earlier.

I then send all that to them and invite them on a call for a free audit.

Much better than “nice brand, here’s what I sell”, wouldn’t you say?

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

Another thing I’ve learned:

The average person you want to sign as a client has probably already been reached out to hundreds of times.

They know every opening line in the book.

The second you open with something that ever so slightly reeks of “I have something to sell you”, you’ll be ignored.

Open with something that applies to them specifically.

Something that would be impossible to have as a copy/paste template.

Structure it in a way that naturally leads to whatever it is you’re offering them.

It could be an observation.

It could be a question.

Not “hey bro ur brand logo is really cool, now buy my service”

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

An example:

I noticed you lead with an email pop-up offer of 10% off.

Looks like most of your products are around $150, though, which would come out to $15 off on average.

Wouldn’t you say having that as the offer would he more incentivizing than a generic 10% discount?

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

I’ve gotten my first couple of clients through cold outreach.

What I’ve learned from that is this:

If you tell a business owner something about their business they weren’t aware of, chances are, they’ll want to work with you.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

It’s a lot deeper than just “designing emails”.

Mapping out customer journeys.

Finding emotional hooks.

Intuitive segmentation.

Coming up with offers that don’t kill margins.

Studying cohorts.

Finding unorthodox angles.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

The goal:

Help ecom brands take full of advantage of the traffic and audience they already possess.

The main vehicle used to achieve that would be email, but by no means so I want to position myself as “hEy wE dEsIgN pReTtY eMaIlS, pAy mE $5K”

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

Probably the best example I’ve seen of “sell emotions, not benefits”

You think it would hit the same if they just rattled on the ingredients/vitamins/quality/etc?

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

Probably the best example I’ve seen of “sell emotions, not benefits”

You think it would hit the same if they just rattled on the ingredients/vitamins/quality/etc?

[Mostafa | Building From Zero @caffeinemo]

Cold outreach isn’t dead.

Laziness is dead.

A prospect should feel like you actually looked before reaching out.

“i lOvE yOuR BrAnD”

“qUicK qUestIon”

Cringe.

They can smell it from a mile away.

Your first message should instantly tell them you noticed something they didn’t