DTC+: How It All Started

Hey everyone,

Merry Christmas and all my wishes to you are summed up below:

As this newsletter picks up steam, I want provide some context on how it all started.

How I decided to jump into CRO and start an agency, from being a freelance Shopify developer.

It began with a request from a friend, who is now my co-founder, for doing a one-off project for an ads client he had, running a simple A/B test on his client’s product page.

He needed my dev help, it was a 2 hour job for me.

My hourly rate then was $75, 2 hours, easy $150.

You can see the actual test here.

The kicker for the project was that if we hit a performance bonus (+10% increase with a 90%+ statistical significance) we’d split $8,000 between the two of us.

I had no idea what +10% increase would be and what “statistical significance” even meant.

At that time, I was a Shopify developer for 5+ years, mainly moving pixels around, based on someone’s opinion of what “better” would be.

No thoughts given to testing and/or optimization at all, in any of the businesses I worked for, and some of them were Amazon owned companies…

So, we spun up the test and I thought that would be the that, moving on to find more freelance work.

To kill the suspense, fast forward some days and the test was at 14% increase to revenue and 90%+ stat sig.

$42,000 estimated monthly gained revenue.

A lightbulb moment for me, if I ever had one.

We split the bonus, but the more important calculation was this:

I spent 2 hours… making $42,000 ($576,000 estimated yearly) for a business, for which I charged $150…

Mathematically, even if my rate was 100x for these 2 hours - $15 000 ($7 500 per hour would be a solid rate), ANY business would still accept that rate any day, as long as I was good enough to reproduce these results.

It was then I realized what leverage is and how people actually get wealthy in a scalable way without any revenue or time ceilings.

Hourly freelancing was never going to get me there.

Don’t get me wrong, you can’t step skip your way to a successful business.

I needed the experience, expertise and lesson, but moving forward my business goals lived in a different process - building a service around optimization and CRO for businesses that a few percentage increases are tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands.

It’s way more fun too!

That’s how it all started and I will be updating you on a weekly basis on how it’s going + continue sharing lessons and experience on e-commerce optimizaiton.

Have a great one and see you in 2025 📈

Julian

PS - Earn with your mind, not with your time.