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Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
Here's something I've been sitting with this week. We talk a lot about moving fast, shipping quick, getting the thing out the door. And most of the time that's good advice. But every now and then you meet a founder doing the slow, patient, unglamorous version of building a business, and it stops you a bit.
This week's guest has written a newsletter every single week for 100 weeks. That's roughly two years. In all that time he hasn't sold a single product. And honestly, I found that admirable rather than worrying. There's something in that kind of consistency worth talking about.
Swim shorts for Vikings
My guest is Gabriel Lindh, co-founder of Nordic Dudes, which he runs alongside a day job with his brother. Nordic Dudes makes anti-chafing swim shorts for "guys, or Vikings, with bigger legs". They come from an ice-hockey family, so the big legs are a genuine problem they've lived with.
The idea was born on a painful 40-minute walk from Coogee Beach to Bondi in Australia. Mesh-liner shorts, salt water in already-scratched skin, the lot. Gabriel sat on the idea for a couple of years, mentioned it to his brother, who had the same problem, and between them they found the nerve to start.
That was more than two years ago. They've just placed their very first production order. 200 pairs.
Build the audience first, the product second
Here's the bit I keep coming back to. While the product has been slowly taking shape through three or four manufacturers, a Fiverr tech-pack designer and endless sample rounds, Gabriel has been quietly building an audience the entire time.
The engine is a weekly newsletter called The Weekly Pillage (a name so good I signed up mid-recording). Every Thursday, for 100 weeks, he's shared the honest journey of building the business. The failed first samples that were, in his words, absolutely horrendous. The stuff that's gone wrong. The slow grind of it.
The thinking is simple and I love it. By the time they launch, there's a group of people who already know them, already trust them, and won't be sitting there going "who on earth are these guys?" when the product finally appears.
| | We haven't missed an email in, I think, 100 weeks at this point, which is pretty crazy.
— Gabriel Lindh |
Getting people to pay before anything exists
The other thing they did brilliantly was validate demand before spending real money. Before they had a name, a product, or anything at all, they wrote down 60 to 70 people they thought might want this. Friends, friends of friends, the brother's ice-hockey team.
Then they actually asked them to pay. In Sweden there's a payment app called Swish that makes transferring money easy, and 20 to 30 of those people pre-ordered and sent cash up front. No launch date promised, fully refundable, no pressure. Just a genuine test of whether anyone cared.
That's the whole game right there. Money in hand, before a penny goes on manufacturing, telling you there's something real here.
Why this one lands for me
I've tried to validate ideas properly more times than I can count. I'd set myself a threshold, some number of sign-ups or pre-orders that would prove the idea was worth pursuing. And here's my confession. I never once actually hit that threshold. Not on a single business. And I went ahead and built them anyway, probably out of blind entrepreneurial optimism, and I don't regret one of them, even the ones that failed.
So there's real wisdom in what Gabriel's done, testing cheaply before he spends. But the thing I most want you to take is the patience. He's playing a marathon, not a sprint. We talked about what I call the theory of eights, which is the idea that consistently hitting an 8 out of 10 beats exhausting yourself chasing a 10 you'll rarely reach. Launch at an 8, then let real customers help you improve the next run. A hundred imperfect newsletters shipped beats one perfect one you never send.
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