How DTC Brands Boom and Bust with Jesse Pujji, Founder and CEO of Gateway X

To state the obvious, starting and growing a DTC brand is hard… even if you’ve been in the industry for years. Jese Pujji is the founder and CEO of Gateway X, a bootstrap venture studio that helps build businesses in the DTC space. Jesse has been working with and growing brands for years from the outside looking in. But even for him, when he tried to build a brand from the inside out, there were some real challenges and lessons learned. 

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Jesse told me all about that first DTC venture, Poophoria, and the mistakes he made getting it off the ground. But he also talked about all the successes he’s had and the advice he’s been giving to the brands that come to him looking to take their companies to the next level. He talked about which channels to focus on, and why founders should really only hone in on one when they’re starting out. And he also gave us a peek into the future of mobile and why you should be looking at TikTok’s strategy as a benchmark for your own. Enjoy this episode. 

Main Takeaways:

• You Can’t Please Everyone: One of the mistakes brands make is not having a clear enough picture of who their target consumer is. It does not pay to be broad. Just because everybody drinks water doesn’t mean starting a water company and selling to the whole world will work. You need to hone in on a persona or two and speak to those people very specifically, otherwise your message will get lost in the shuffle. Research, talk to potential customers and build products and marketing that address them specifically.
• Stop Channel Surfing: When putting content out early on, founders should pick one channel and find people who know how to run the campaigns. But, as the founder, you need to be involved in what you’re saying and who you’re talking to. By doing that you can make the economics work on a specific channel and then move on. Trying to focus on multiple channels concurrently is a recipe for disaster because they are each incredibly complex and nuanced. Plus, when you work on one at a time, you are able to learn and master new skills and then transfer them.
• Tik Tok Talk: If you think about how revolutionary Facebook was 10 years ago, many believe that TikTok is in the same position to change the way we experience web and mobile content. The immersive experience, lack of a traditional feed, and the addictive nature of the platform is becoming a roadmap for brands that want to engage customers long-term, especially on mobile.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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For a full transcript of this interview, click here.