Lessons From Running An E-Commerce Digital Ad Agency: Part 1

It started off as a side experiment. But time-wise it ended up being much more than that.

For the last couple of years, I ran an e-commerce digital ad agency.

Now I’m shutting it down.

I’ll cover why in this two-part post.

This is because as I reflect back, I thought it might be useful for someone out there to learn from my ups and downs, successes and failures I had along the way.

How we got here

2 job offers. I needed to choose one of them soon.

This is where I found myself a couple of years ago when I had decided to move on from my job at the time.

I was grateful to be in a position of choice thanks to past colleagues from my professional network.

Lesson #1: You cannot overstate the power of maintaining your professional network in opening new doors.

But they were both very different opportunities. One was at a competitor to my then employer, the other was as at a startup.

I asked for a little leeway to decide… and ended up going with neither.

After. I. Had. Already. Resigned…

Say whhaaaaaattt? (definitely not a lesson to take from this)

Well, a friend and I had been throwing around startup ideas in the HealthTech space for some time.

We had already brainstormed a tonne of ideas about building platforms that we believed could improve the quality of people’s health outcomes while making something sustainable.

And there were other ideas flowing through too in other areas.

So I decided to roll the dice and to try and bring some of these visions to reality.

So began my first foray into startup stealth mode.

In hindsight, we probably took it a little far in dodging responses on what we were doing, but you got to start learning somewhere, and on the bright side I did pick up the ability to give super vague high-level answers to protect trade secrets…

Lesson #2: Stealth mode can be super awkward or super normal, it comes down to you.

First steps in digital marketing

Up until that time, I had been working a lot in the digital space, and though I had a tonne of experience on the product side, I hadn’t done a lot of work on the marketing side.

Then I heard a VC share something interesting in an interview one day…

One of the biggest problems that startups face isn’t knowing how to build a product… it’s knowing how to market and attract customers. His words were something like “distribution is a real blindspot”.

He explained that this is because they often are founded by individuals who are very good at engineering or user experience or another product related skill but not at marketing.

“Hang on,” I thought… “that sounds like me?” <insert ephipany>

Now I made it a side mission to learn as much as I could in digital marketing to be more effective in going to market…

Lesson #3: Having a great offering is half the battle, the other half is getting your customers to come to it.

Freelancing… on the side

As I consumed everything I could on the topic, I eventually stumbled upon the world of people working out of their laptops as digital marketers for businesses of all sizes.

From freelancers to agencies, it was a fascinating place to see… because it had all types.

I had picked up a few skills by then and so it seemed like a great way to have revenue on the side while I worked on our platform ideas.

I would use what I had been learning to find customers for my products and services… to get customers to go to other people’s products and services.

It sounded poetic.

And then came the question…

How could I find paying clients though?

Now I really had to put those sales and marketing skills that I had set out to build to the test.

To make a long story short, I tried every channel I could… cold email, cold messaging, cold calling (a nerve-racking experience at first), and others… but it went poorly at first. Crickets.

Then I tried… paid advertising…

Running. Ads. Online. To. Find. Clients. To. Market. For. Online.

And then the equation changed and it seemed like the flood gates had opened.

I was no longer going out to find leads. They were coming to me.

I later learnt how to use those original channels in much more effective ways. But paid ads always remained a next level multiplier at scale.

Lesson #4: While all digital lead generation channels can work, paid advertising can really work when going for scale.

Start of an agency

Getting leads is one thing. I then had to iron out the actual qualification and sales process.

Once I did, I started signing up clients in local businesses, mainly managing their advertising campaigns in the same way I saw had worked for me.

I started noticing things I had to do that were repetitive in nature and could be easily outsourced to free up my time.

So in the spirit of the “4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferris, I brought on my first team member – a full-time virtual assistant living in the Philippines.

I created SOP (standard operating procedure) documents for her where I broke down steps to complete tasks and delegated them to her.

This helped me refocus my energy on what moved the needle the most.

But now, I wasn’t just freelancing on the side, I was also managing a full-time team member… on the side.

Lesson #5: Delegate tasks that can free you up to focus on those tasks that really move the needle most.

Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll share my journey to focus exclusively on e-commerce brands, and what led me to eventually decide to wind down the business…