653: (Solo) Why Community Is the Most Undervalued Asset in E-Commerce Right Now

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0:39Just head to OmniSend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. hey founder fam welcome back to another founder to founder solo episode today i want to talk about a really big shift i'm seeing in how e-commerce brands are approaching their marketing right now for a long time the playbook was pretty straightforward find creators that match your customer run influencer campaigns drive sales do product for post or pay them and that worked and it it still works like that's how I grew my brand healthish massively like at peak we were sending out like 500 to 600 packages a month and it blew up the brand but brands that are really pulling ahead of doing something more sophisticated and I want to give you an example of a brand out of Australia that really brought this to a sharp focus for me that I want to talk to you about and I think it's it's really interesting and I hope it gives you some inspiration.

1:40Nathan Chan:Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. If you haven't heard of Fate, the label, it's an Australian women's fashion brand by Brit Saunders and I interviewed her late last year. So she started as a content creator, YouTuber, built like a massive, massive following. Before like even, you know, the word influencer existed, before even content, being a content creator was cool. She built a massive audience and then she used that as her launch pad for Fate. And you got to check out the interview.

2:19She come into the studio. It was an incredible interview. She talked about her childhood, growing up, how she's built three or four or five multi-million dollar brands, a couple of them in the e-com space. But incredible story. You got to check that out. Anyways, eight years in business. She has multiple retail stores all around Australia, like a really engaged community, especially in the Australian e-commerce space. And they recently announced their very first creator event and they called it Fate Estate. So it was like a festival style brand experience in Byron Bay. And for those of you that are listening around the world, Byron Bay is like this kind of hipster, cool kind of hippie capital of Australia, beach vibes, you know, Chris Hemsworth.

3:03border place in Byron Bay. It was a pretty big haven post-COVID. Anyway, the lineup was serious. They had some well-known brands, Bondi Sands, Funday, Havianas, Las Minerals, and like a lot of other brands came on board as partners, like big brands. And what really caught my attention was how Brit framed it, because this is a brand that spent eight years really kind of proving they mean it when they say community comes first. So when they opened new stores, they didn't just throw a creator event. They asked the Instagram community why they deserve to be first through the door. They picked winners.

3:39They gave them a private shopping experience the night before opening for their brand birthdays. They took real customers on trips, not influencers, not creators, customers. So when Britt said this was their first ever creator event, that hit differently because it was not just a brand that never thought about it. It was a brand that deliberately chose their community over industry moments for eight years straight. And then she said something I think every single e-com founder needs to hear. And it was, we are blending creators and community, inviting both into the same space because for us, they have never been separate.

4:15Eight years in, first creator event, and that is not a slow start. That is a deliberate strategy. So here's what most brands get wrong. They treat influencer marketing as a strategy. They treat community as a strategy. and two separate budgets, two separate strategies. But this is where it gets interesting because influencers sit in the marketing column and community sits somewhere vague. Maybe it's product, maybe it's not, maybe it's customer service. Because here's the thing, community is hard to attribute directly to revenue and it usually gets underinvested. But fate, what they figured out was something early that a lot of founders that are absolutely crushing it do.

4:56And this is a through line I see among successful founders in the e-com space. is when you build genuine community first, everything else just gets way more powerful. So at Founder, we are doing big, big pushes to double down on community with AI and attention and just so much slop going out. Like relationships is everything. And like, you know, we're looking to highlight our community more than ever. We're looking to have more in-person, more connection events. Now let's talk about the economics because this is where it really clicks. Like influencer marketing is a reach play. It's a content creation play, but you're borrowing somebody else's audience.

5:36And every time you want that reach, you have to pay for it again. But community works differently. When customers feel genuinely connected to your brand, they come back without you paying to reach them. They refer friends, they create content, their customer acquisition cost is basically zero. And the lifetime value of a customer embedded in your community is significantly higher than one who just bought once from an influencer post and never came back. So community, while it's this like, you know, fluffy thing that, you know, everybody wants a great community, everyone wants community, but it's not so much always a focus for brands because we look at the immediate return, the CAC-DLTV ratio and all this kind of stuff.

6:15So community is not something that just feels good. It's an asset that compounds. And this is what the Fate Estate story makes really clear. It's an asset that other brands want access to too. So Bondi Sands, massive, massive company. Funday, massive company. I've got an interview coming out with the founder soon. Javianas, right? Massive. They didn't show up because Fate had a big Instagram following. They showed up because they have a genuinely engaged community that trusts the brand. That community has real commercial value, not just to Fate, but every brand that they partner with in the room.

6:45So eight years of community building turned into a festival-style PR event co-funded by major brand partners. This is what community as a business asset looks like, guys. So what does this mean for your brand? What's the action item here? Keep doing your content creator influencer campaigns. Keep using it to get UGC and content. But ask yourself, what are you building between those campaigns? How do you build a deeper relationship at scale? Are you turning new customers into a community? Are you giving them a reason to stay? And start thinking about what a strong community makes possible beyond retention.

7:22So the Trini Tribe, Trini Woodall, incredible community. What's the name of your community? Her Facebook group with the Trini Tribe, insane. You don't need a Facebook group, but you need to have an intentional space where people are connecting around a common cause, which you are linking them through, through your brand. Because when creators and community work together properly, your marketing gets more effective, your acquisition costs go down, and you build something with real value beyond your next campaign. and this is a strategy worth building towards. So if this episode got you thinking, share it with another founder who needs to hear it.

7:57We are working so hard to grow this pod. If you have a friend that's a founder, share this pod with them. That's all I ask. Share it with two people. We're here to help support you however we can. As always, thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next one.