Just Launching / Getting Started

Shopify

In order to build the storefront, process orders, send orders to fulfillment, etc., you need Shopify. You can start with regular Shopify, but as you scale, it’ll become more cost effective to be on Shopify Plus, which also unlocks a new level of features on Shopify.

To launch your Shopify site, you can either use one of the themes Shopify offers or you can hire a Shopify partner like Sharma Brands to build you a custom  Shopify website and implement everything below.

Klaviyo

Use Klaviyo as your ESP (email service provider, or as I call it, “Email sending platform”) to setup everything from your order confirmation emails, automated flows and campaign emails.

They offer other services too, but I recommend them for email, and to host your email pop up when you launch. As you get to the next tier, you should use Amped, which I’ll talk about below.

Heatmap.com

When you’re sending hundreds, thousands or millions of people to your website, one of the most responsible things you can do is review heatmaps and dive into revenue per site element (buttons, modules, etc).

Heatmap is also starting to slowly roll out its AI product. They see millions of data points that informs the AI to give you recommendations on what to do.

Okendo

At the very least, you need to be setup to collect reviews, whether you’re launching or you’re doing $100M/year on Shopify. Reviews and social proof are one of the most important factors to driving conversion rate, understanding what customers want from you, and what you’re missing the ball on.

Okendo also offers a suite of products that you can continue to leverage as your business grows, including: quizzes, post-purchase surveys, and a loyalty program.

Stay.ai

Stay is a subscription company built by a founder/product lead whose entire career was in retention marketing. As a result, Stay feels like a dream subscription software for growth marketers too. 

Churn reduction, sampling, swapping products, analytics, are all done well inside Stay.

Triple Whale

If you’re not using TripleWhale for their attribution technology, then I recommend at least using it as a free dashboard. They have an iPhone app that makes it easy to view numbers at any time, and you can pin a widget to your iPhone home screens with real time numbers.

Malomo

Malomo is an easy-to-setup and beautifully-designed post-purchase site experience for your customers. Once they order, instead of just going to the Shopify Order Confirmation page, they will go to a nicely designed Malomo page where they see their latest shipping updates. 

The Malomo team is also great and gets very involved to make sure you’re happy with the page’s design and functionality, specific to your brand.

Accessibe

There is nothing that makes me more upset than ambulance-chasing attorneys who conspire to scam brands out of $10k for a false ADA claim. It makes my blood boil.

You should always ensure that your website is fully compliant, but one added layer of protection is the Accessibe on-site widget.

For those who actually need ADA features to navigate a website, Accessibe makes it easy for them to alter the site to a state that’s comfortable for them.

$5M/year or $500k/month

Marpipe

You’ve seen catalog or DPA ads on Instagram, Facebook, now even Snap, TikTok and others. Marpipe makes it easy to make good-looking catalog creative.

The best way to understand it, is see the example library. 

Think of a 8 lane California highway. 7 of those lanes are the Facebook ad auction for regular Facebook/IG ads. The Express Lane on the left is the Catalog Ads auction. Less competition, and everyone’s creative is boring. Using Marpipe, it’s easy to make catalog ads stand out and perform better than with just plain backgrounds.

Amped

Amped is an email pop-up software that converts around 7-10% for us, just by switching to Amped for email collection. It’s built by Matt, the founder, who used to run an agency entirely focused on email pop-ups. 

The pop-ups look beautiful and they are easy to setup in a Figma-style editor.

Black Crow

Black Crow has really good AI technology that you can leverage in different ways with their platform. The lowest-hanging fruit opportunity is to use Amped + Black Crow to trigger the email collection — we see about a 13-15% opt-in rate.

Motion Analytics

Motion is the best product to quickly understand what creative is working, and why. You connect your ad accounts and in real-time, you can see what creatives are working best, what their CTR is, their ROAS, individual CPA, the thumb-stop rate, etc. 

It’s helpful for creative teams (video editors, creative directors or graphic designers) to understand where to emphasize and where to try new things, creating a faster feedback loop between your media buying and creative operations. 

It’s also a great way to present an Executive Summary but showing ad creative.

Postscript

Postscript is often my #1 choice for SMS platforms for a few reasons:

  • Reasonable pricing and it gets better as you grow
  • Their product is constantly innovating
  • If you can’t afford an email team like Sharma Brands, they have an internal service to help you out
  • They are the only platform with on-site opt-in
  • If you have to download your own SMS list, you can do so at any time
  • Great customer service

Elevar

Elevar is the easiest way to ensure all your data is being sent back to your respective ad platforms. Your platforms can only be as good as the data that comes back into them. Using Elevar,  you can report back more data than the normal FB pixel or Klaviyo pixel would send back to the platforms.

Gorgias

Gorgias is a great SMB solution for customer service. Within the platform, you can setup agents with their own logins, create macros for faster responses.

Rebuy

Rebuy is the easiest way to setup on-site upsells, in-cart upsells, post-purchase upsells, and also build a conversion optimized slide-out cart.

Within Rebuy, you can also run A/B tests to see how you can maximize conversion rate. The last A/B test we ran inside Rebuy helped us make an additional $50k in revenue.

Similar to Okendo, they also have a suite of other products inside the Rebuy platform you can leverage: A/B tseting, bundling, reorder landing pages, smart links, merchandising widgets, smart search, etc.

Social Snowball

Whether you need an affiliate marketing platform or an easy way for your customers to share their own referral links, Socal Snowball makes both of them easy.

My favorite feature about Social Snowball is Safelinks, the dynamic coupon codes, which prevent leaks to coupon code sites. It’s also very easy to setup and manage.

Loop Returns

In order to make returns easy, and less of a CX headache, I recommend using Loop Returns. The portal makes it seamless for customers to make returns, and Loop helps encourage customers to receive store credit, do an exchange, or find a new product before getting their money back.

It’s a returns portal with built in retention levers.

Superfiliate

At this stage, you’re likely running influencer campaigns. Don’t send people to Meta landing pages or your homepage, instead create a curated experience for an influencer’s audience with Superfiliate. 

It’s easy to setup, their team is hands on to help, and works better with influencer campaigns, versus just everyday customers.

$10M/year or $1m/month in revenue

Nostra

The fastest way to increase conversion rate by 10% to 20% is using Nostra to optimize your site for faster speed. Forever 21, Brunt Workwear, Jolie, Lolavie, Glamnetic, Everyday Dose and others all have Nostra installed to drive faster load time on their websites.

This means lower bounce rate, higher conversion rate, and because of better site engagement, lower CPMs on Meta too.

It takes 5 minutes to install, and you can even run an A/B test to understand the impact. Or just go to Jolie’s website on your phone and see how fast it is.

Northbeam

Unless you’ve built your own attribution modeling, you should be using Northbeam at this stage to understand each channel’s true impact to your revenue. Is Google actually over performing, or is that because of a heavy push from YouTube and  TikTok? Northbeam will be able to answer that for you and show you where to raise budgets.

Tracksuit

Those massive brand awareness surveys and studies done by legacy companies are now available at a fraction of the cost with Tracksuit. 

With Tracksuit, you can easily see how your brand has gained awareness or lost it over periods of time, during large campaign flights or really whenever you want. Our clients who sell in retail find a lot of value in it and everyone who sees the platform, says “This is a no brainer.” 

Prescient AI

If you’re moving budgets around frequently and need a tool for MMM, Prescient is the tool for you. Mike, the founder, spent years building this for the entertainment industry and is the reason why some hit songs have become hit songs. He now brings that technology to eCommerce and makes it easy to see how much more you can push each channel, and what the outcome of that will likely be.

$50M+ per year or $5m/month in revenue

Kustomer

Once you get toward the enterprise stage, I’ve seen most of our clients shift to Kustomer. The feature-set is more applicable, the pricing works out better, and they are more of an enterprise solution.

They just recently were bought out from Facebook and are now a standalone company. Since that happened, they have been shipping updated product features much faster and have built a better platform.

Tydo

Tydo makes custom reports, analytics and business intelligence easy. They help you onboard and integrate all your data sources (whether they’re standard like Shopify and Meta, or they’re custom data sources), and then they build you dashboards based on what your needs are.

It’s fully white glove BI setup and done within a week. We have so many custom reports we setup for clients through Tydo, creating the ultimate cockpit for executives.

Level Access

Level Access is legal protection from ambulance-chasing attorneys and they take care of any inbound demand letters or lawsuits for the site. It costs much more than Acessibe, probably north of $50k/year, but that’s a lot cheaper than settling multiple cases.

Ok, that wraps my list of what I’m working with today. I’m curious what I’m missing that you’d recommend. Please reply and let me know — I’ll share a fully updated list.

On to some fun stuff... 

Happy Sunday! 

If you’re reading this, I hope you’ve enjoyed your weekend and you’re sitting on a comfortable couch, with your feet up, a beverage in your hand, and you’re ready for a quick read on my DTC tech stack. 

This past month, I received a lot of emails asking what software or SaaS companies should they be using at different stages of their business. So for today’s email, I’m going to break it down and try to make it as easy to digest. If anyone needs a specific intro to any of these places or has a specific question about how I use it, please reply and I’ll do my best to answer everyone.

Before we get into today’s email, Sharma Brands is hiring for a few more roles! If you are a good fit, or you know someone who is, please share it with them:

This past week, there were two incredible events in NYC — Commerce Summit and DTC Experts. Both are very tactical and, therefore, extremely valuable; not to mention the crowd of people that come and trade notes, share ideas, and create conversation. Here are some more coming up:

The Modern Day DTC Tech Stack

Here are the stages I think it’s worth talking through

  • Just launching your DTC brand
  • Getting to about $5m/year or $500k/month
  • Crossing into 8-figures: $1m/month or $10m/year

Vendor of the Week:

Superside — Your creative partner to get designs done faster, more reliably, and at scale.

Imagine all the creative services you need, under one roof, and leveraging the power of AI. With Superside you get the best of both worlds: top design talent enhanced by AI efficiency.

When you work with Superside, they can help across:

  • Ad design
  • Motion design
  • Video production
  • Web design
  • AI consulting
  • AI-enhanced creative

Superside uses a flexible subscription model depending on what all services you need, and can turnaround creative in as little as 12 hours. At the very least, having a subscription to catch last minute needs sounds like a no-brained.


If you’re ready to check out AI-enhanced creative for your company, book a demo with Superside!

That's all for this week

I hope today’s email was valuable to you in some way, depending on how big your brand is. If you have any specific questions or want my 2 cents on a specific vendor/SaaS company, reach out!

After the Knicks dropped out of the playoffs, I just haven’t cared to watch any other games, but this week the NBA Finals starts up! Who do you think is going to win? My first thought — Mark Cuban is the real winner. After selling his equity in the team, they made it to finals. The man can’t lose!!

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight, and get a fresh start to your week. As we get into summer, I encourage you to go for at least a 30 minute walk outside — the weather is so beautiful!

I’ll see you next Sunday, same time, same place. If you have a topic for me to write about, send it to me and I’ll buy you lunch as a thank you!