The Bull Case For Ecommerce In 2025 & Beyond transcript

there has never been a better time than right now to be an e-commerce business operator and this will not be the best time to be an e-commerce business operator the best time is in front of us and that's what I want to talk about today I talk so much about how to build a great e-commerce business today I want to talk about why why I think it's a great idea to be in e-commerce to be running a business and what I think the future holds for our space basically I want to make the bull case fre Commerce and I want to make it in seven Arguments for you today and this is my survey of the e-commerce landscape in a way that I think will highlight for you what I believe is happening right now and in the future of what's coming next the phrase is something like uh and I'm certainly not the original one here but uh pessimists sound smart but optimists um you know win the future or something like that I forget but you get the idea right I'm an optimist about e-commerce right now and I think it's a relatively rational observation about what's going on so let me start making those those observations for you okay the number one reason you should be optimistic about starting a d Toc brand um and I'm going to use the terms D Toc and e-commerce Loosely I'm actually going to assume that uh some of these D Toc Brands e-commerce brands are actually going to be Omni Channel over time but I'm not really going to touch on the Omni Channel component of this today instead I want to talk about why e-commerce like starting a business that is e-commerce first at least on launch is a good idea and the first and most obvious reason for that is that the Tailwinds are massive and but what I mean by Tailwinds is that more and more e-commerce or more and more total retail volume happens online instead of in store every single year in the US a remarkable thing happened this year in 2024 which is that the total share of of retail that is online got back up above 16% of the US economy Okay the reason that's significant is because 16% was the number that Co spiked us to so when Co happened of course we had a big spike and I'm going to put a graph on screen right now so if you're watching this you can see it if you're just listening that's okay too I'll explain it fairly simply but in the first quarter of 2015 about 7% of all us uh retail business happened online that number has now more than doubled to 16% and if you go if you look at the graph what you see is of course what everybody knows which is that when covid happened there was a huge Spike that moved us all online and then some of those gains stayed but then it came back down some and now we've actually gotten back over that uh 16% number that we had originally reached at Co it never it never went all the way back down before covid the number was around like I think 12% if I'm looking at this right 12 or 13% had a big spike to 16% for the co year came back down to about 15% something like that continue to take down in 2022 and then now has moved back up okay um and and that graph is very clearly up to the right all the way around so it continues to be the case that more and more of our total shopping happens online this is a side from any broader economic growth right this is just a percentage of the growth so the the slices of the pie are getting bigger it's also possible the pie is getting bigger and I'm actually not going to bother to sort of weigh in on whether or not I think the future of the global economy is good though I think in the long run over over the last 100 years plus or whatever it looks really really good who knows what is going to happen in the very short term with all of that stuff but the economy keeps growing over over time and I have plenty of reason to think it will so I'm relatively optimistic about that too but that's really beside my case um what I'm saying is more and more uh business happens online and that's a really significant Tailwind for e-commerce operators because it means there's just less and less sort of barrier to entry do you might even remember the early days of shopping online I remember this like this is probably when I was like 14 or something like that but I'm 40 now in the early days of shopping online there was all of this concern that like if you bought something online it was going to be fraudulent that somebody was going to steal your credit card and of course those kinds of things still happen but it's just way lower of a concern than it once was and what what that mentality reflects in the early days of online business is that people had a habit of buying things in stores and that habit changed over time to where they bought things online and they got more and more comfortable buying things online and really what I'm saying is that didn't happen all at once and of course that's one very small microcosm of that sort of habit change just the idea that somebody would be stealing your credit card and that it would be fraud but there's all kinds of things like that that have changed over time and people more and more have gotten comfortable with it this is actually why there's a thing on meta ads called a conversions audience quote unquote the conversions audience is a subset of customers online who don't just use Facebook and Instagram but who actually buy things online right they're the people who buy things on on DTC businesses in a way that a conversion-based pixel could track so you're actually getting a subset of that audience but the the more that audience grows the more people who will do that who will click through an ad and buy the easier it is to reach more people with your business and so part of that of course is that the total number of people buying things online from D Toc businesses grows another part of that is that that's you know for meta specifically there has to be a certain number of people who are willing to click an ad and buy online and that of course that behavioral thing may may be more or less specific to to a certain audience but but basically you get the idea right the total share of retail happening online is growing and crucial I don't see any reason to think it's going to slow down anytime soon it seems to me that that audience is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger over time and if you do this at the level of customers not just like total volume of retail right that number is also growing so it's not just like some set subset of online customers are out buying the rest of other customers or whatever it's actually more customers as well uh when according to the best data I could find so that's a really big deal that's a really big tailwind and again if you got into e-commerce in 2015 in that respect the game is a lot easier now than it was before okay so that's number one number two there is and this is something I talk about a lot but it's something I believe in so strongly there is now more total intellectual capital on the DTC Collective balance sheet than there ever has been before and this point is crucial to me I I talk about all the time how dumb I was two years ago four years ago and when I think about that I think about how dumb I really was eight years ago nine years ago when I was first getting into this I just knew nothing and we were so unsophisticated phisticated about business and my journey in e-commerce in in over the last 10 years is actually a tiny little microcosm repeated over and over and over for people all across our industry I remember listening in the early days to Andrew yaran Ecommerce fuel podcast right that was like the first e-commerce podcast I found and just being hungry for knowledge about how to do it but the truth was 10 years ago not that many people knew how to do it because they had nobody had been doing it for that long like e-commerce hadn't been a big enough thing but over time the knowledge has continued to grow sometimes that's represented in knowledge storehouses like ctc's admission which is now an amazing resource there's a link for that in the show notes as well it's an amazing resource for you to jump start when you start your business to get knowledge you need to build from the ground up with knowledge that is accumulated over a whole bunch of years or a community like e-commerce fuel e-commerce fuel is a great example of this I mentioned UD darian's podcast e-commerce fuel started udarian used to do those reads and he would say his ad reads for the for his community for his online community he would say this is a community for six and seven figure store owners okay now the community is referenced as a community for seven and eight figure store owners and there's even some nine fig store owners if you're a six-figure store owner you're probably not far enough along to even join that Community anymore and now I know for a fact that there are like many eight fig operators in that Community many of them right I still remember the first time I looked at a like eight figure e-commerce business under Google analytics and being like wow this is an incredible business and that business still exists and it's probably now five times the size of that or something like that you know it's just remarkable to see and you go you think about the operators podcast right there's these eight the nine figure CEOs sharing knowledge for free every week that knowledge is on the DTC balance sheet it is there for you and you can go get it or the marketing operators where they you know their best growth guys are doing the same thing Taylor holiday talking about his content all the time I try and do that here bring that stuff to you I had Jordan West on and I'm gonna be on his podcast soon Jordan's got 600 episodes you know and I don't even I don't listen to all these actually don't listen to a ton of e-commerce podcasts what I know is there's people with deep experience who are bringing that knowledge to you for free to say nothing of D Toc Twitter and and that kind of thing right you just start the game at such an advantage if you know planning your LTV to CAC cohorts today is like table Stakes for e-commerce businesses and when I started it was like nobody had even thought of doing something like that nobody was thinking that way at all you know I can you I can give you episodes of mine on how to design your p&l from scratch that are like I'm so clear about now that when I was running 4x400 an aggregator I was so hazy about and and even then I think I was thinking financially more than some people were at the time and yet I was still a mess I was a mess of a CEO because I just didn't have those things clear and in my veins the same way so there's so much knowledge because the collective experience has grown over 10 years and people really underrate this uh because now so much help and knowledge in your business to save you from major mistakes is a text away a tweet away a community post away whatever it is right and that's a really big deal for helping e-commerce businesses so as businesses get going now and as they start now or as they're in the early eight figures now they can look and find real help for people who have made it to the next stage and that's a really big [Music] deal nearly every brand that I work with uses Billy to track its website activity back into meta it's what we use for our pixel for a bunch of Our Brands because it is the best most robust tracking that is in existence that I'm aware of in e-commerce and it's also at the best price so if you are still running your ad tracking for your business with the native Shopify integration you can do a lot better by getting upgraded tracking with Billy you get basically the point here is this you want to send all the website events from your website back to meta and you want to send as many of those events as possible so that meta has the most data to optimize with and in fact you could do that not only with meta with Google ads Google analytics G4 with like a one-click install Tik Tok ads uh X ads like everything is all right there all with one click really really super easy and very affordable um install with Billy it's what I use for my clients like I said um can be really a One-Stop shop replacement from Google tag manager it's an incredible piece of software so go check it out billy. a b y. a is what I use if you're still using using the native Shopify integration like I said ditch that uh I have tested Billy with my clients it outperforms the native Shopify integration especially and really obviously and I've also seen outform other third party tools like this at the level of actual Rass in the ad account and at the event match quality in events manager it's really great software b. a go check it out [Music] today number three related to that much of that intellectual Capital that is on the balance sheet has been reinvested into software products right so the the DDC Community has taken some of that intellectual capital and invested along with uh actual Financial Capital into developing software that is going to help make things easier every software business in the e-commerce space they're all doing the same they're all making the same promise which is that if you have and you use our software okay then we will make your business work better by work better what we mean is be more profitable at more scale like grow profitably essentially everybody's clear that profitable growth is what we're all trying to accomplish at this point the profitable growth is this goal and therefore if any of them are correct right like or or if even like many of them are correct they don't all have to be correct but if if lots of those pieces of software actually do the thing that they say they can do which is generate margin incremental to their cost right in addition to their cost there's probably I'm missing some word there but you get the idea right so if I'm paying $1,000 a month for a piece of software they generate that that piece of software generates for me at least $2,000 in additional margin in my business and certainly some of them do that I think it's easy to underrate that as well like these tools exist and some of them don't right some of them are just bloat on your on your Brand's balance sheet for your Brand's uh income statement for sure but many of them aren't many of them are run really really well they're really good tools they really help you and they create leverage and that's the whole point of a software Tool uh as opposed to hiring another human to do something or whatever is the software is cheaper than the human to do the same thing and it's leverage I think about you know Drew Fallon and Iris Financial like I haven't even used that tool a whole lot I've had Drew on the show a couple times great guy thinking really hard real Finance kind of thinker and you know a lot of the tools a lot of the way that uh somebody would have replicated his tool in the past would have been with a human who was you know keeping books in these really specific ways that human would be more expensive than the software costs and would probably be slower and less effective and therefore the software represents leverage for a thing that is needed in the business and if you take that story and expand it out there's just tons and tons of stuff like this I'm not going to give you my full DDC Tech stack it's going to be different than than everybody else's but it's like I mean here's an example like intellig is something that I've been using more and more where it's like if you know if I launch my brand uh as I'm talking about like there's a good chance I'm going to be able to price test from day one to find a sort of margin optimal price for my business like that is so crazy people pick price out of thin air and it has this massive impact on the business to say nothing of all the other simple split testing I can do Etc I've talked about firmat plenty on here fmat is an incredible piece of software it is an absolute Ferrari of a piece of of landing page software it just takes landing page you know I call it landing page software but it's more than that they're sponsor of mine but they're sponsor of mine for a reason like it really is so much more souped up as a post-click experience than anything else I've ever seen like it and it just that just didn't exist that long ago and of course at the center of all of this is Shopify itself Shopify becoming the Undisputed leader means that all of these software developers build on top of Shopify right so Shopify itself is better than it used to be but also its Central gravitational pole in the world of e-commerce also helps align all of these resources towards entrepreneurs and it sort of directs them right so instead of Drew building Iris for WordPress because that has 50% of e-commerce sales and the format guys is building format for Shopify but like you have to choose between those everybody Builds on Shopify which makes it that there's which means there's multiplying value to the software that's available to you I think it's a big deal I think it makes it a lot easier to run e-commerce businesses when you do it effectively again you have to work be careful about bloat but I think it really matters and uh and it really helps and that's how I think like I said the intellectual Capital that's on the DDC balance sheet actually gets redeployed into the actual brands in our space okay if you think of all of us working together as having uh in that respect number four this is something that I'm seeing more and more and believing more and more and is also a huge deal and that's increasing viable customer acquisition channels this is not too surprising it fits with number one the idea that there's total retail us that is growing but it's it's actually um you know because the more customers there potentially are then that potentially there's more digital ways to reach them but uh meta has Ruled The Roost for 10 years and and probably longer than that honestly uh they they've been so overwhelmingly the next best place to spend your next dollar for so long that yeah it's been a frustration for a lot of people I'm going to talk more about meta in a second but the thing I want you to think about first is that there's not an a priori reason that meta should be the only player in the space like there's nothing magical about meta that makes it so they're the only ones who could figure out an ad ad Network that works right like at some point other players in the space can and will figure out ways or or at least should be able to figure out ways to make it so the digital ad served to a customer can result in a click and result in a purchase and that a conversion-based audience on that platform is a real thing where there's a positive Ro Ono again there's no a prior reason why met wouldn't be able to do that that there's maybe a little counterargument to what I'm saying here in the sense that like the news feed or or stories or reals like that method of engaging that that mode of interacting with ads online is so much better than say a banner ad which people have Banner BL blindness to whereas you know the a banner is an old you know Digital Image Banner right is so disruptive to a reader's experience on a on a website whereas a Newsfeed ad is actually right in line with their experience it takes up the whole screen it you know whatever so it's just way less you don't get blindness to it in quite the same way and uh and so in that respect maybe meta has a unique Advantage because the tool works for that but there's no reason to think that that's the only tool that can do that right and that's kind of the point and the most obvious of these well first of all actually before I say anything else meta itself has not actually declined meta is still amazing and one of the reasons for that again is if there's an expanding pool of customers who are buying things online then even as more and more ad dollars go to meta there's actually more and more inventory available of people who will convert just based on that and that's before you talk about what meta has consistently done which is opened up more inventory on top of that as Trends change Etc so the most obvious and biggest of those early on was buying Instagram but then of course they opened up stories on both Facebook and Instagram they opened up reels as well and I'm sure they will find more ways in the future to open up available inventory and volume I'm sure for example that meta at some point will have Instagram shops the same way there's Tik Tok shops and it can't be that far off or Facebook shops in similar way you know I'm not sure what their plans are but but there you go so right now you know people will say this thing which like you know meta's getting harder every year cpms are going up but I don't see a problem with cpms going up cpms going up is fine in my experience POS the the higher the CPM the higher the roas like at least at the level of the ad account cpms are positively correlated to Rass and that's because meta's really good at delivering a higher value thing when you pay a higher price for it cpms going up is only a problem if it's directly competing away margin but it's not necessarily the case because if it's actually more efficiently allocating your dollars to the best place then it doesn't really matter if cpms go up as long as the conversion rate goes up with it right and so far that's actually exactly what's happened on meta I was looking at an account today where I paying $3.50 per click and seven years ago that would have made it absolutely impossible for me to win on meta and I haven't seen a 20c click on meta in a really long time right but you know what these businesses are all bigger than they used to be people are spending more on meta not less like I just said there's more retail happening online like it there's just no indication to me that it's actually a problem So Meta itself is still the next best place to spend your next dollar and that hasn't actually slowed down people have sort of a doomsday mentality they've been worried about that for a long time they've had this feeling like oh we're too leveraged on meta and maybe I don't know maybe there's a day where that comes but right now I don't see like people have been prophesying that for a long time now and so far they have not looked um correct The Meta spend is is good or bigger than ever incrementality tests continue to show meta is the next best place to spend your dollar and that hasn't seemed to slow down as businesses just have only gotten bigger in that time if you're watching this episode and you are thinking about the future of e-commerce I'm going to be there with you when it comes as long as you subscribe to this show all kinds of great content coming don't miss it subscribe alongside that though back to the point that I was originally making there are now actually other AD networks that look like they're really coming along sided so apple is by far the a number one version of this that I see in my I've said this in a couple places in my 10 years in e-commerce I haven't seen something come on the scene with the potential of really being representing truly incremental spend really fast and really easy frankly like App 11 has App 11 if you don't know right is an ad Network for mobile games basically you can imagine that like there's just sort of endless potential volume here mobile games is a unique is a particular experience but people play a lot of mobile games and there's a bunch of other mobile apps out there where they can expand that to and people are getting 20 30 40% increases in their in their meta spend just by running their same meta ads in app Loven and this is one of the things that's really important to say about app Loven right now is that it works the clicks are like a fifth of the price a sixth of the price sometimes of what I see on meta and that suggests to me that the CPM dynamic just describe with meta hasn't actually kicked in with App 11 yet like they you can't even like there's so many things here's really the point it's really under optimized still it's obviously under optimized I spent a half an hour today for a client trying to load an ad into App 11 but it was such a clunky buggy experience that it was like a giant mess took me forever and I had to get the account manager involved because it was it was just trying to literally just build an ad okay now I'm sure I was doing something wrong and something stupid but also it's probably because it's still early stage and there's like limitations in the ad units you can use all of these things and when I look at that I take that as a really good sign because what it suggests to me is they have so much more room to get better and they're going to do it because there's so much money there for them to do it right so it's just worth too much money apple is a giant publicly traded company with a huge market cap all kinds of resources endless amounts of demand they have all of the ability in the world to pour resources into making it better at every possible level at the level of machine learning UI for media buyers algorithms ad units that they can open up expansion of inventory like it's so early and it works and that suggests to me that there's a if man if there's another meaningful Channel where people can spend money it could have a huge wind it could provide a huge wind at at Brand's backs right the other thing is I have had on this show recently both Jordan West and Paul howy talking about Tik Tok shops and social commerce in general and when you go from the Brand level and the uh with Paul and the agency level with Jordan like those guys make a really compelling case to me that especially for the right brand Tik Tok shops is a one representative of a much broader more viable thing which is a new way to leverage influencers and creators uh to generate value for your business and to have Partnerships with them that are really good for them and really good for you in social networks um and that social commerce you know to hear Jordan West tell it really is the future so look I'm a little more skeptical of Tik Tok shops than Apple because apple looks you know like an easier success and a faster success in a lot of ways but I will say I was convinced in those conversations that there an opportunity here for a lot of Brands and even if Tik Tok goes away which I don't think it will YouTube is opening up their version of it as well again there's going to be money there for Facebook and Instagram there's ways in which these are creating Halo effects into other parts of the business um I I think that's all a real thing and it looks to me like more and more I'm seeing brands have a again a viable opportunity to grow their businesses and that's before you talk about all the other realistic options for customer acquisition that are getting better and better and better over time YouTube I hear a little more about all the time and there's different measurement solutions that are maybe making it better I think it's not as easy as the other ones I think it's maybe the volume is tougher but I don't know it's really easy to imagine Google getting really serious about continuing to make YouTube a better and better eCommerce product I have at least one brand who's spending some good money on YouTube shorts and pretty fast and it was like oh that's interesting they didn't do much they just took their meta videos and put them into YouTube shorts and they seem to be getting somewhere with that like that could be a really big deal Direct Mail you know you see the guys at post-pilot talking about prospecting with really good targeting with direct mail is that a viable channel is it a lot of scale I don't know but uh they're working on that problem I had somebody reach out to me with an audio-based ad unit basically they said it's App 11 for podcast audio now again so early I have no idea if that's going to be viable or not but there's people working on solving this problem and specifically trying to get that into DDC so there's some there's there's sort of the more present options and the further away ones but people are looking around tech companies are looking around at the money that meta and Google are making from ads and they are trying to get in that game and they're going to keep doing it it's before you talk about if Tik Tok ads ever become more viable than they are right now if x ads become more viable than they are right now all of these things seem possible to me so number four increasing viable customer acquisition channels number five Global Talent access I think this is a huge deal again I think this is a really big deal there continues to be awareness of the p&l value of adding Global Talent to your business because you can get incredible Talent from all over the world to work on your business in a way where you can provide you can pay at the top of the market uh in other countries and you can pay below market rate in the US and the opportunity to access Global Talent and the essentially Brokers that are in the way that are helping make those connections for you is again really really really helpful I have at least one client who's working with amazing talent um and that Talent is in South America for him I've talked to matab bogal on this show multiple times about he hires people from Canada uh for his us-based businesses uh sometimes in Mexico as well sometimes in the Philippines for other things right so he's looking all over the place because the p&l value is just so strong and of course as you know more staffing has been sponsored of mine for a long time I love to talk about them anytime I can because they've been revolutionary in my business and I really mean that my business simply could not exist the way that it does right now without them my coming e-commerce brand could not I actually think I would not have been able to start it without them I really mean that like the way that I'm doing it without sacrificing basically all of my client work and all those kinds of things but right now I'm doing that business with so far very low time investment on my time because I have incredible people in the Philippines working on my supply chain and looping me into the process and some of those things with some of my Direction I'm going to go to the Philippines in not very long because I'm going to meet those people in person and it's going to be a party man because there's all kinds of ways in which we're interacting it's a big deal because it opens up the talent pool for a lot of people and look I think there's really good reasons to have an in-office culture for some Brands and yes that's more expensive but there's also some values to it but if you're not that there's good reasons to have a remote culture as well there's no Solutions only trade-offs right and so if that kind of talent is available to Brands it creates this p&l opportunity that again like the software thing creates a bunch of Leverage and once again I only see getting better not worse more and more the same Dynamic of my 10 years in e-commerce and the intellectual capital on the DDC balance sheet is going to also keep happening in other parts of the world and you're going to really continue to be able to find manager director executive level Talent all over the world who can make your business a lot better who you will love to work with who would be great and there's not really any reason to keep it in the US so that's going to be a win for people on on every level and I I think that's only also going to get better and more interesting again as the as the sort of intellectual Capital spreads as the opportunities and the Brokers and the agencies who can make those connections fre you spread as well the number five Global Talent access that's a big deal on e-commerce Brands p&l number six what about the m&a market so this has been one of the reasons why it's been harder in e-commerce for the last few years is that valuations have decreased and this is directly a result of course of the postco um inflationary environment in the US the reality of the end of zero interest financing that's available right and basically a lot of different things on the interest rate side that have depressed the values of Ecommerce business and slowed the demand side on the m&a market so if you're going to sell your e-commerce business it's harder it's been harder to sell it over the last few years there's a lot of capital that has been dried up and as brand you I watched it happen with 4400 and some of those things where as as they went to go take different brands to Market they had multiple deals where when the capital call went out for investors to go and and put capital in to go buy businesses that Capital wasn't there and the deal would fall through at the last minute that's again a really major factor in the way this whole Marketplace works because if you want to have an exit at some point then you need people who are willing to buy your business but my guess is that as we exit a this I'm I'm gonna say a little more tentatively because it's basically a macroeconomic prediction that's extremely hard to get there's too many factors in a prediction like this here's the way I'll frame it for the last few years that since covid basically and since the sort of postco um swell of e-commerce valuations which was very short-lived it's been a depression of those things and that more recent depression of those valuations and decreasing of those valuations that I think is still really present on people's minds even though it may well not be predictable of the future and that's really all I'm saying it's very easy to see a world where there is a more more of an appetite for the acquirers to come and buy e-commerce businesses it won't be on the same kind of uh you know the old Revenue based deals that were in the early early stage of e-commerce but those deals haven't happened for a while anyway and so yeah there's been correction in that market but it looks to me like now there's all kinds of reasons to think there's going to be more Capital going to be more investment and I think that's going to get better and again it's going to be a a fertile soil for you to go and sell your e-commerce business when it's time and number seven this is going to sound maybe like a silly thing but I think it's important what about positive unknown unknowns it even unknown unknown I think was coined by Donald Rumsfeld uh I think but the idea is like there's different kinds of scenarios about what's going to happen in the future there's no knowns for example things that not only you know are going to happen but you know you know they're going to happen right so you're aware that they are going to happen um there there's certain there there's certain things that are going to happen and you know about it and I'm not going to go through all four of these but there's also different things like that right where there's unknown knowns there's a certain thing that's going to happen but you're not aware of it okay um so an unknown unknown would be something that is contingent in the future nobody knows it's going to happen it's totally uncertain that it's going to happen and also you don't know that you don't know it a really clear example of this would be Co Not only was Co something that nobody saw coming nobody thought about how it was going to possibly happen right it wasn't in people's consideration at all it wasn't in their consideration window of possible outcomes and this is like one of the really hard things about predicting the future is that there's unknown unknowns there's things that you just have no idea you're really removed from any possibility that could happen okay and covid for e-commerce business at least initially there's an argument that this was actually hurt that hurt in the long run because of some of the interest rate uh ramifications but at least initially generated a whole bunch of value for Ecommerce businesses so for all of the negatives of Co and there are many okay I'm not trying to frame it another way for this really specific group of people called e-commerce brand operators Co actually provided a ton of value to their businesses they were the in a weird way they're winners in the co outcome right again there's some downsides too but for for at least some time they're winners and nobody could have seen that coming and this is the thing that I think people do and the reason I bring it up is people have a pessimistic mentality and they probably should you should save because there are negative unknown unknowns this is the reason to have a savings account you know if you're an agency owner and somebody fires you that is a good client and you didn't see it coming right well that's suddenly money that you don't have anymore that you were going to have in the future okay that can happen and and so you have to have some savings account right there could be all kinds of reasons why something goes right or wrong in your e-commerce business uh and it hurts and so you have some savings and having some cash built up is a good thing but there are also positive unknown unknowns and this is what everybody underrates that you know app Loven I would say is another example of this nobody like you could make it a prediction like I just did that more of these will come online but nobody saw a mobile game ad inventory coming and yet suddenly there's this new player in the space that maybe meaningfully impacts a whole bunch of businesses it's still early I'm not ready to go all the way that App 11 is for sure the future right there could really early but it seems to me that it has a lot of potential and nobody saw that coming and nobody was you know whatever they're all sitting there and trying to crack YouTube you know and at some stage in the business and that's fine but what happens if something else like that happens what happens if someday we all wake up and um gosh I don't I don't know it's not no no known I can't predict it that's the whole point um right but Mo but a lot of times we think about this in negative terms uh and we think okay some everything could break and again that's a good consideration for a CEO a CEO needs to look around the corner and think about how it could go wrong that's part of their job but CEO Also may be running a business where a positive unknown unknown happens that really helps their business and that's all I'm saying and so that's part of the bull case is that there can be positive outcomes in all kinds of different ways that we don't see coming that's a little vague I know but uh but still important so I'm going to run back through them really fast just so you have them recapped number one total retail in the US continues to grow as a percentage of total online retail excuse me as a percentage of total retail continues to grow number two the intellectual capital on the D Toc balance sheet really awesome and is also again continuing to grow I think that's another important point there I didn't really make very well but in five years what will we know that we didn't that we don't know now number three better software has been made and again will continue to keep being made number four increasing viable customer acquisition channels like app and potentially Tik Tok shops and some of these things number five Global Talent access number six the m&a market getting better for Brands and number seven positive unknown unknowns that's my bull case for the market it's not really I wouldn't say EXA actly why I'm starting an e-commerce business but it's part of it at least some part of the consideration is that I'm a Believer in what's coming next hopefully those things are good for you and for your business as well and I would love to hear any feedback you have do you disagree with me about any of these is there any that I missed is there anything that's the bease for e-commerce in the future that you can see coming I'm a bit of an optimist so please let me know you can reach out to me at podcast a jf.com I would love to hear from you about this or again tweet it publicly put it on LinkedIn publicly somewhere where people can argue about it I would love to hear get a conversation going about what people see in future of our space I'm at Andrew J Ferris on X I'm a little less active on LinkedIn but you can find me there as well and of course anything I'm doing is at AJF growth.com do don't forget uh to go support my sponsor Billy for this episode Billy is great software for measuring your ads I hope your Black Friday has gone awesome and I've got all kinds of great episodes coming in front of me still just like always including matab who I believe I just referenced here um in in this episode mat tab's coming up this week or maybe he will be out by now by the time this gets released who knows anyway matab definitely check that episode out if it's not if it's not the last episode before this one it's the next one you're not going to want to miss that uh matab Bogle is great I've got also an episode coming with laa gavara from more Staffing about how she's building her supply chain from the ground up which I think is really fascinating because she's a real supply chain expert for a brand that she's working on so uh all kinds of great stuff coming subscribe wherever you are watching or listening thanks so much for doing that talk to you next time [Music] oh