Growth strategy
You can build a million-dollar store with one product
The short answer
Pick one hero product, or a couple of hero bundles, and put almost all your effort behind it: a product page optimised within an inch of its life, a steady stream of founder ads and customer videos, and three emails a week. Nobody wants it to be that simple. It is.
This is the hill I’ll die on. You can build a million-dollar-a-year business with one product, so why make it harder than that?
Why does a big range slow small brands down?
Because when something isn’t working, you can’t tell what it is.
I see it all the time: a dozen products, a few email lists, several sign-up forms, more than one website. Every one of those is something to build, maintain and fix. When sales dip, there are fifty places it could be coming from, and you spend your week guessing.
One product means one page to improve, one customer to talk to, and one set of numbers to read. You can see what’s broken and fix it. Get the offer dialled in first, then build the tech backwards from it, not the other way round.
What does the playbook look like?
Four things, done properly.
What should the product page do?
One job: get the click. Strip it back to a strong baseline: clear photos, a price that’s easy to read, an add-to-cart button that stands out, and answers to the questions people ask before they buy. If you sell bundles, make the saving against buying separately obvious and pre-select the bigger option.
Why founder ads?
Because it’s you, on camera, talking about the product and the problems it solves. These are some of the hardest ads for a competitor to copy, and that advantage is shrinking every year as more founders catch on. Build the habit now.
Where do customer videos fit?
UGC clips of real people talking about the common problems your product fixes. Thirty seconds is plenty. Send them to a landing page built for that one type of customer.
How much email?
Three emails a week. Not one a fortnight. Three. Sending more email is the easiest win any business has, and most stores send far too few.
How do you make founder ads without a script?
Don’t write one. Founders stall for weeks trying to perfect a script, and it never comes. You won’t get it right first time, and it’ll take too long if you try.
Instead, sit down with your phone and read out your best reviews, your product description and your FAQs, reacting to them as you go. Film yourself against a green screen with your own website behind you. Add fifteen minutes of footage of you actually working: packing orders, making product, whatever your day looks like. The best ads don’t look like ads.
Don’t try to make a hundred. Try to make one. We’re not after Christopher Nolan here. Once you’ve made one, make it a system: one filming day a month, with customer videos filling the rest of the pipeline.
What about launches and new products?
Launches mostly reach people who already know you. If your ad account is all launch, launch, launch, nothing in it can run for six months and keep bringing in new customers.
Keep the hero product and its evergreen creative running underneath everything: founder story, reviews, customer videos. When you do tease something new, say what it isn’t (“it’s not a new version of the thing you love”), so people don’t hold off buying your best-seller while they wait.
Add the second product when the first one is humming. Not before.