Wow. The last Sunday of the year… Happy Sunday!!
2022 was a big year.
I hope you’re at home, sitting comfy, with a warm blanket draped over you, a Madhappy fleece hugging you, some hot chocolate in your hands, and Christmas tree lights glowing in the room. Today’s email will be slightly different — more of a personal recap and a letter to you.
Before we begin, I just have one thing to say…
And that’s… Thank you.
2022 was a wild ride. Sharma Brands did more than I could’ve imagined from a capabilities and revenue standpoint, and we doubled the headcount.
I launched Hoox and grew it to 24 full-time employees.
I launched a podcast called Limited Supply with my close friend Moiz which became a top 20 marketing podcast in the world; crazy!
I spoke at events in NYC, Bangkok, LA, Austin, etc., and met so many of you who read this newsletter in person.
I crossed 145,000 followers on the bird app that Elon now owns.
And I just signed 6K sqft of office space for the new Sharma Brands HQ in New York City, opening next year.
I think that it’s safe to say that 2022 was an unforgettable and productive year for my team and me.
Seriously, I can’t even begin to describe what this journey has meant to me, and I still feel like I’m just getting started.
To my parents, clients, employees, friends, collaborators, partners, and supporters, thank you!
None of this would be possible without my amazing community (aka you, the person reading this email right now), and I believe that we can all continue to accomplish incredible things together.
P.S. – As mentioned, I’m just getting started, and I have a feeling that 2023 is going to be bigger and better than ever before.
To stay up to date, please say hello on Twitter, and if you’re feeling generous, please tell a friend to tell a friend about my newsletters on DTC, e-commerce, growth, and business building, which I send out each week.
2023 is going to be a whole new adventure. I’d love more inspiring and ambitious founders, investors, operators, execs, and just genuinely kind and positive people to join me on this journey.
Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, here’s a recap of some of the things I’m most proud of achieving in 2022.
Sharma Brands built new capabilities for clients and 2X’d headcount.
To put it simply, when our clients win, we win… and I think that what I’m most proud of in terms of Sharma Brands’ growth is the fact that our clients had to succeed for us to succeed. If we weren’t providing value, and our clients weren’t growing due to our support and services, Sharma Brands as a company wouldn’t grow either. Like Jeff Bezos says, “you have to be customer-obsessed,” so when an SB client wins, we win, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
This year, we decided to invest more into the technology we build for clients — across reporting, landing pages, the creative process to review content, and more… as soon as we found routines, we brief it to be software-ified.
We did some amazing work launching new fully-custom Shopify websites that achieved a 4-6% CVR, got clients into beta programs with tech vendors that we could build on top of (cough cough Walmart and Feastables), and even drove a few million through landing pages on Black Friday, alone.
I’ve realized we play best with two types of clients (if you’re one of them, reach out):
- Brands that are looking to launch soon, test & learn, and get to $5M+ in their first year’s revenue.
- Brands that are doing $50-300M in annual revenue and looking to level up their commerce game across advertising, creative, merchandising, tapping new audiences, etc.
Through Sharma Brands, HOOX, and 1180 Media, we worked with over 100+ amazing clients in 2022.
This year was big! We worked with 100+ amazing clients across nearly every consumer category that you can imagine. From cookware to shower heads, to marketing automation software, to DTC chocolate, coffee, cocktails, serums, apparel, and even non-profits… we grew our client roster and partner ecosystem by a lot.
These 100+ clients, paired with literally tens of thousands of text messages, slack notifications, and emails that my team and I had to answer to make it all happen this year, were challenging and inspiring, to say the least. From the hundreds of client calls to dozens of late-night strategy sessions to countless campaign and brand launches to huge game-time decisions on ad-spend through the notorious “Q5” holiday season and a wholeee lot of A/B testing, we went to the moon and back for our clients this year. I couldn’t have been more proud of my team.
Again, thank you to my clients and the incredibly talented team of designers, engineers, growth hackers, paid media experts, strategists, ops leaders, and more!
I launched a new podcast called Limited Supply with Moiz Ali
As I mentioned above, one of the great joys of 2022 was launching my new podcast Limited Supply. P.S. Many of you listen to the podcast on Apple and Spotify, but more people should watch the show on YouTube! If you didn’t already know this, we record videos for every episode, and I personally think it takes the show to a whole new level. Reply to this email directly or tweet at me to tell me what you think :)
Anyway, beyond the podcast in general, I’m especially proud of our two-part episode with Harley Finkelstein, the President of Shopify. If you haven’t listened to these episodes, I strongly recommend you take a look.
In part 1, you’ll learn more about Harley’s origin story, the first business he started, how practicing law is the antithesis of entrepreneurship, and how he thinks about Shopify’s role in continuing to democratize entrepreneurship today.
In part 2, we dove deeper into Shopify’s business. We talked about their app ecosystem, their investments into brands through Shopify Ventures, how they think about competition, calculating sales tax, Shopify fulfillment, the $SHOP stock price, and more. If you didn’t listen to either of these episodes in 2022, I would love for you to revisit them when you have time.
HOOX
Surprisingly, my biggest win of 2022 might have been starting and scaling HOOX, even though people mispronounce it (good lesson for me in naming). In just under 7 months, we’ve grown into a 24-person team, building landing pages for brands like Roman, Crocs, UNICEF, Feals, Pela, and more.
My favorite part about HOOX is that we can help everyone from Fortune 500 brands to seed and Series A, B, and C startups, to folks that are completely outside of the DTC space. With Sharma Brands and 1180, we are limited to the brands we can work with… but everyone can benefit from a more optimized landing page that doesn’t come with a retainer.
In just over 6 months, we’ve seen how transformative a custom landing page can be for a CPG brand to continue scaling paid media efficiently.
If you’re a brand that needs a landing page for anything, you can sign up for a demo or reply to this email, and I’ll get back to you.
My Community
As I said at the top of my email, none of this would be possible without you.
When you share, comment, like, retweet, or repost our work, it helps me and the Sharma Brands family continue to grow, provide value, and find our tribe online.
To put it into perspective,
This year, I went from 22k to 40k email subscribers
102k to 145k Twitter followers
And 10k to 31K LinkedIn followers
And 0 to thousands of podcast listeners.
At this point, I get hundreds of comments, DMs, emails, texts, and slack notifications per day. I’m trying to keep up, but it’s hard.
My community means everything to me, and I will stop at nothing to ensure that I’m out there providing value and setting an example for other entrepreneurial leaders in our ecosystem.
I don’t just want to win. I want my community to win, learn, grow, and have fun alongside me. I take every comment, DM, question, reply, handshake, review, selfie, and invitation to speak, or go to your company happy hour or dinner, very seriously.
Sometimes I just can’t reply because I’m heads down working on client deliverables or in transit to my next meeting or event or taking the (necessary) time to work out every day, see my friends and family, and take care of others' personal things.
That said, your support means the world to me, so please keep those questions coming; I’m thrilled to do my best to respond and engage with you all next year.
So… with all that said, I wanted to say thank you again.
As an ambitious kid growing up in San Diego who decided college wasn’t the right path and took the leap on marketing, social media, and the internet in high school, to, almost ~10 years later, being an agency owner with 50+ full-time employees is truly surreal.
I know in my heart that my journey has just begun.
To 2023 and beyond.
Let’s all win together — there are enough seats at the table for everyone.
On to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
HOOX — The best-kept secret of growth marketers who need to increase conversion rates.
When your brand's site was built, it was likely defined and written by you, your team, and others who are effectively drinking the kool-aid of the brand. The copy and storytelling on your site are great for someone who knows the brand. Your return customers are probably happy coming to your site to place reorders, but what about making it easy for new customers, too?
With potential new customers, one of the biggest growth levers to increase ROAS is developing and launching landing pages that speak to new customers. This means content with proper brand and product education, demonstrating the product-solution-juxtaposition, and articulating it in a way that feels personable to the person who clicked through an ad.
Ever since I began working in eCommerce, I have always realized that spending the time to unlock efficiency with a landing page was a great investment. Even better was when I could get a landing page built out as a template, and then I could go in on my own, change the copy (depending on the audience I targeted or the creative it was being linked from), and continue running tests. With Sharma Brands’ clients, we have an entire team dedicated to building landing pages for our clients, and it always outperforms what our clients were doing before. To get those landing pages from a team that handles everything, the problem is that you usually need to be on retainer with an agency.
For all these reasons, last year we launched a company called HOOX (pronounced “Hooks”)... think testing hooks and angles. The goal was simple — we will do deep brand research, merchandising strategy, UX design, copywriting, UI design, and development. Then, we’ll give you the full page file so you can continue to iterate and launch additional variations of your landing page on your own. So far, brands of all sizes (Crocs, Caraway, Roman, Vahdam Teas, Feals, Blume, etc.) have gotten landing pages from HOOX.
The entire process is about 2-3 weeks from kickoff to a live link ready for traffic. Check out our HOOX landing page to purchase a page, or book a call with Dillon, and we can at least talk you through the process. The worst thing that will happen is you spend 15 minutes on Zoom and walk away with a new idea to test with your brand. Book a call here!
And if you’re an agency or a consultant who wants to use HOOX with your clients, you can book a call with Dillon and join our partner program. We’ve helped agencies increase their fees by making their paid media more efficient for their clients.
If you have any questions, just reply here, and I’ll answer!
That's all for this week ... well, Monday!
Yeah, today was a weird day for a send, but from seeing how many people had excruciating headaches yesterday, there was no point in sending this email yesterday. It’s a new year, and I hope that you’ve got some exciting results you’re working toward.
I hope you get your 9 hours of sleep tonight going into the new week and have an amazing upcoming (short) week! I’ll see you next Sunday. Thank you for reading all the way until the end!