E-commerce Advertising Journey

Shaan shares his personal experience of learning e-commerce and paid advertising from scratch.

"What helped me when I went into e-commerce - five years ago I had never done an e-commerce physical brand before and I had never done paid ads before. Fast forward to now, I probably run $40-50 million dollars of paid ads and gotten pretty good at it.

What was the learning curve? One thing that really helped me was instead of just going straight to a course, I started doing it myself so I had my bearings and I knew what I didn't know on a very low scale budget. Then what I did was I found somebody who already was winning with that method. I found either a friend or somebody nearby and said, 'Hey, I really think what you're doing is great. I'm young, I want to learn.' I basically went and said, 'Can I come by for the day? I just want to ask you a couple questions about paid ads.'

They'd say, 'Sure, come over.' Then you come over and end up opening up their Facebook ad account with them. You start asking them questions, and if you do it right and if you're an earnest genuine person who's likable, you'll find somebody who will give you that real world, real-time type of mentorship. They'll tell you the ins and outs, like 'Oh, your ad account got shut down? Email this guy' or 'Hey, that's normal, here's what happens.' They'll tell you stuff that you can't find just generically on the internet.

It's a war on all fronts when it comes to learning. You should be doing all approaches and then the ones that are giving you a more rapid rate of learning, do more of those and less of the others as you go."