John

9figs ecom, always hiring top talent

[John @ecomaurelius]

@iamshackelford i love cadence but this flavor tastes like im drinking a battery

[John @ecomaurelius]

@jordanhaswings have you found that your natural cac raises over time?

especially as more competition enters the market?

or has your natural cac remained stable for a while (6+ months)

[John @ecomaurelius]

@AlexFinn was this a result of a prompt/cronjob or did your clawbot do this proactively without direction?

[John @ecomaurelius]

@chuckiegregory are you seeing an impact on ncac/roas?

we're seeing the same but ncac is stable so we're just ignoring it

[John @ecomaurelius]

@Br3ntGbs the monthly visitor number gets lower and lower every time i see these posts, next up 1.5k monthly visitors

[John @ecomaurelius]

first we noticed the redirect happening -> isolated which pages had redirects -> reviewed the HTML on the pages with redirect

found the repeating code that wasn't present on the pages w/o the redirect

never would have spotted this without first noticing the redirect

and we had to refresh the same page 8 times to get it to trigger

[John @ecomaurelius]

i got scammed by a pakistani... AGAIN

this time it was a fiverr developer that we hired over TWO YEARS ago to do some speed optimizations on our funnels

first off, the speed optimizations didn't even work, so that was just his warmup scam

now here comes the real scam...

we realized that our highest traffic funnel was suddenly redirecting to a 1:1 clone website on a different domain for every 8th user to hit the page

he had injected a small malicious line of javascript into the HTML of our landing page to redirect a percentage of traffic to his clone page

we looked through the logs and identified who did it - removed him and removed the code

100% our fuck up - we haven't been vigilant enough about permissions

let my mistake be your learning lesson and keep your permissions and access tight, especially when working w freelancers

[John @ecomaurelius]

@lucawashenko last week those fuckers locked my account and told me that my identity was stolen and that i needed to file a identity theft report

i subsequently shit my britches

in reality someone just tried to (unsuccessfully) reset my password

[John @ecomaurelius]

@AbyssusErigo high ticket on the phones is a common strat and it objectively works

just need a product offering that actually makes sense at those price points which is theoretically a heavier lift (assuming you want to actually provide legit value + have happy customers)

[John @ecomaurelius]

phone sales is an incredibly under-leveraged strategy in ecommerce that 99% of brand owners will never implement

when i talk about our phone sales team, other brand owners usually ask: "is it really worth the lift?"

absolutely yes - and i'll tell you exactly how to do it

simply put, it will:

- improve your customer's experience
- increase profit and existing customer LTV

setup a flow pushing your customers to schedule a call with your team of experts post-purchase (calendly is the easiest)

on that call, have your experts:

- educate the customer on how they should use the product properly (this is important and should be the primary reason for the call)
- next, ask the customer what problems they're dealing with (get specific, your goal here is to learn as many of their pain points as you can)
- after learning about their pain points, upsell them with additional products that solve those pain points

people LOVE to talk about their problems, so simply give them the stage and you'll be surprised by how much they tell you

and to a skilled sales rep, this information is like pure gold...

they can build a detailed profile of the customer live on the call which will enable them to personalize the perfect offer

and the end result is an all around win-win:

- the customer knows how to correctly use your primary product for the best results (increasing retention and likelihood of customer success)
- the customer has more of their pain points solved by your other products
- you've increased that customers revenue and subsequently your brand's avg. LTV

if executed properly, your AOV on phones will be 4-5x your funnel AOV, making it a significant and worthwhile driver of incremental revenue

invest in the touch points with your existing customers and you won't regret it

[John @ecomaurelius]

@lukemcilwee good point, however it can require more effort (management) to ensure the affiliates are following the rules and don’t damage the brand

still a worthwhile initiative nonetheless

[John @ecomaurelius]

going from 8 to 9 figures isn't just about working harder - it’s about adding force multipliers to your brands ecosystem

a force multiplier is anything that increases output without increased input or effort

the most straightforward example of a force multiplier for ecom brands running paid media is having an amazon presence

we are on amazon with a product that customers love, making our reviews strong

our meta spend drives demand → people search for our product on amazon → we capture that demand passively with the highest reviewed product in the category

for every 1 sale we make through meta, we get ~1.6 on amazon

same team. same ads. same spend. way more revenue.

the next intuitive force multiplier is retail expansion, by the same mechanism

this is on the roadmap for 2026

if you’re not engineering force multipliers into your ecosystem, you’re capping your scale and leaving money on the table

[John @ecomaurelius]

speed of iteration is the single greatest predictor of success in ecom

offers, creatives, media buying strategies, cro treatments, sales scripts - it doesnt matter

the fastest iterators win

we can test more in 1 week than what most teams can in 2 months

this allows us to move literally ~8-10x faster than our competitors

we’re able to do this because we have intentionally built a team and culture that thrives under pressure - where urgency is ever-present

when someone new joins our team and tells me something will take 2 weeks, they often laugh when i ask them what needs to happen for it to be done in 72 hours

“no, seriously - what needs to happen for it to be done in 72 hours”

…and then they find a way to get it done in 72 hours (9/10 times)

if someone is given a deadline far in the future, they will start working on it 48-72 hours before its due

so, set short deadlines and enforce fast turnarounds… make it the default

productivity will increase drastically, and your business will take off like a rocket ship

[John @ecomaurelius]

@cvshmvker yes

[John @ecomaurelius]

@jakubecom campaigns/adsets that are significantly below target CPA + going into strong performance days of the week (fri/sat/sun for us right now)

[John @ecomaurelius]

@FedotOff90 🤔

[John @ecomaurelius]

@jakobcounts123 yes, dm me your top 3 spending ads

[John @ecomaurelius]

@FamousAlan is what real

[John @ecomaurelius]

my meta reps flew out to mykonos for a dinner and i learned two things:

1) the largest spenders ($20m+/mo) within direct response are doing no manual media buying and it is all automated based on first party performance data

when performance is good on any given asset, the automations are hyper scaling and making budget increases 3-5 times a day

and they still have strict performance targets that they’re hitting

they believe that the media buying position within companies will be obsolete within 1 year

2) if u spend over $50m on meta u get a bday cake

[John @ecomaurelius]

sounds like custom internally built tools, which doesn’t surprise me

i previously tried an enterprise level ad management tool like this and

1) it was ridiculously expensive (5% of spend or something close)

2) when the tech breaks/goes down, the automations completely destroy the ad acc

so considering how critical the maintenance of the tech is, i wouldn’t be comfortable relying on an outside team to ensure everything was running smoothly