How to win in ecom in 2025 (from a $200M/yr marketer)

**Sean Frank** (0:00)
I'm glad you guys invited me here because you're slumming it down with like the e-comm millionaires again.

**Sam Parr** (0:05)
This is like a make-a-wish type of episode for us.
There's really two things that I need to talk to you about. There's two reasons you're here. Number one, I cannot believe that you sell hundreds of millions of dollars of this stupid little wallet. This is unbelievable to me. It's been blowing my mind ever since I found that out. And now you're here finally to give us some answers. And two, I think you're very opinionated when it comes to e-comm. You don't hold back. You don't pull punches. And so we like that. We like spicy guests. And I think you're going to be able to have both of those things for us.

**Shaan Puri** (0:46)
I think you should smack Sean right now for calling it stupid little wallet.

**Sam Parr** (0:51)
Did you hear that? Yeah, stupid little wallet. I'm just trying to get him fired up. I told you he gets fired. He gets fiery. He gets feisty. So I wanted to stir the pot a little bit.

**Sean Frank** (0:58)
You better play nice. I'll dox your e-commerce brand.

**Sam Parr** (1:01)
That's true.

**Shaan Puri** (1:03)
He knows too much.

**Sam Parr** (1:04)
He's got some compromise on me.

**Shaan Puri** (1:06)
Dude, I've been a Ridge Wallet owner since 2016 or 2017 Ridge sponsored The Hustle.

**Sean Frank** (1:14)
Well, dude, thank you for the support and you guys were super early for newsletter sponsorships. We probably run a pretty big sponsorship ecosystem now. We sponsor a ton of newsletters, YouTubers, obviously. You guys were one of the first people selling that ad space.

**Shaan Puri** (1:31)
Yeah, and you know what I learned about your guys' industry? Well, just any marketer who's savvy is people like you and Sean, you guys know how to find early, interesting stuff, and you take all of the risks, and you understand the arbitrage, like the underpriced opportunity. And so we had a lot of smart people who would buy these ads with us. And I'm like, I can't believe they're doing this. It's so unproven. And then I realized that that's the theme of a smart marketer, which is throw dollars at a variety of things and then exhaust it once everyone else comes and finds it.

**Sean Frank** (2:00)
Yeah, it's ad arbitrage, right? Like everything's attention. So if I'm giving Facebook at this point, $15 per thousand views, and if I can get a better price off of newsletters or influencer or YouTube, it's all just an attention economy. And it's so funny to watch that pendulum swing back. Linear TV, the TV your parents probably watch, is so cheap to run ads on, because nobody's buying it. So like, you know, I'll probably spend...

**Sam Parr** (2:27)
What's like the CPM of linear TV?

**Sean Frank** (2:30)
A dollar. Like... Oh, wow. Because there's all these channels, right? There's been like, you know, thousands of channels that have come out that like have 800 people who watch them. So like you just buy like big blocks of random ad space that are just very male targeted. And like, yeah, literally like a dollar to reach a thousand people.

**Sam Parr** (2:49)
Do you know what our best performing ad channel is? Our marketing channel for my brand? Postcards. You would not believe it. Postcards. It's not super scalable. Like you can't just like spend to infinity on it. But, you know, you put a dollar in, you'll get eight or nine dollars out of revenue. It's amazing.

**Shaan Puri** (3:06)
That's great. You use PostPilot.

**Sam Parr** (3:07)
Postpilot. Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (3:08)
Nice.

**Sam Parr** (3:09)
So OK. So Sean, we should start at the start. So what's cool about y'all story is you sell a simple product. It wasn't like some some Mark Zuckerberg, you know, innovation or anything like that. And you've scaled it up. You've built it brick by brick. But you said you started in the service in like a sort of a sweaty services business. You didn't start the company and you didn't start off in the product game. So can we just do your story for a little bit? And then I want to brainstorm other DTC ideas with you afterwards. But first, let's do let's do your story.

**Sean Frank** (3:37)
Sure. Yeah, you got that right. The show's My First Million. So I made my first million dollars off of an ad agency. So, you know, Facebook ads came out in 2012 That was like when it was probably like an open beta. Anybody could join. And I learned how to do Facebook ads. I worked at an agency with my CMO, Connor, and the agency sucked. Like, you know, it was 200, 200 people working there, probably 500 clients.