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Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
I want to tell you about a bet I'm making with myself for the next 90 days, because the question behind it is one I think a lot of us are quietly wrestling with.
Two founders I genuinely respect have just given completely opposite advice about whether ecom operators like us should bother building a personal brand.
On one side of the ring is Davie Fogarty, the guy behind The Oodie — a $200 million-a-year ecom business. He's done the maths and reckons every founder-led video costs you roughly $3,200 in opportunity cost. His view is that if you're doing under $10 million a year, don't bother with personal brand. Spend the hours on paid-ads creative instead.
On the other side is Daniel Priestley, saying the exact opposite. AI is going to eat the businesses of founders who don't show up on camera, because lived experience is becoming the one moat AI can't replicate. And then there's Alex Hormozi, who posted 35,000 pieces of content this year. Thirty-five thousand. He treats content as the engine of the business, not a sideshow.
So who's right for us? The ecom operators under £5m, with small teams, twenty other priorities, and maybe two or three hours a week to spare.
I'm honestly not sure. So rather than pick a side from the cheap seats, I'm going to find out — running the experiment in public, with a real commercial outcome on the line, and writing up everything I find.
Why this isn't just curiosity
We've just launched SAM, our Slingshot AI mentor — a brand new AI-for-ecom membership that joins Claude with all the ecom frameworks we've been building on this podcast for years. Which puts me in a clean either/or position. The 2-3 hours a week I have for growth can go into Meta ads (Davie's recommendation) or into building personal brand on Instagram (Priestley's). Both cost roughly the same. And in 90 days, we'll know which one actually drove more signups. I'm publishing the numbers either way.
I should be honest — I've been here before. I once built a Twitter following of around 40,000 people, and it didn't do a damn thing for the business. Not one customer I could point to. So I'm not going into this naive.
The methodology I'm stealing from my 22-year-old son
My son Zak built his Instagram account, Zak The Nutritionist, from zero to over 70,000 followers in seven months. The methodology is almost embarrassingly simple.
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Find. Decode. Replicate. Iterate.
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He finds videos working well in his niche. He decodes why — the hook, the format, the micro-cues. He replicates them with his own point of view. Then he tests variables and trusts the data.
And it's in the iterating that he found things I never would have guessed in a million years. Same script, same person, same camera. Tea towel on his shoulder? Higher engagement. No tea towel? Lower. A few degrees of camera-angle difference? Engagement moved again.
That's the whole point. The audience tells you things your taste never could. And the only way to hear them is to test it.
What the playbook actually looks like
A few things I'm committing to:
- One tight niche, which is AI workflows for ecom operators under £5m. Not ecom. Not AI. The intersection.
- One platform for six months. Instagram, focused on Reels.
- A gradual cadence build. One reel a week to start, ramping to daily by day 90.
- A 2-3 hour weekly ceiling. If it's taking more, the system is broken.
- Every single Reel is me. AI does the operational work, but the face, the voice, and the actual story being told is mine. Because the whole point of this is that AI can't be you.
I'll publish the day-30 report on the next solo episode, with the actual numbers — Instagram-attributed signups versus what the same hours on paid ads would have done. If Davie was right, I'll say so. If Priestley was right, I'll say so. No retrofitted narrative either way.
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