Introduction
In this interview, we sit down with Nick Breu, an 18-year-old entrepreneur who has managed to build a successful ecommerce store generating over $750,000 in revenue. Nick shares his journey from affiliate marketing to running a profitable Shopify brand, detailing the exact strategies he used to scale and the challenges he overcame along the way. If you are looking to build a successful ecommerce store, Nick’s insights on product testing, ad creatives, and outsourcing are invaluable.
Founder Success Story QnA
Could you give an introduction about yourself?
Yeah, my name is Nick Breu. I am 18 years old and thanks to The Real World, I’ve generated over $150,000 in profit in the past 90 days. Specifically from e-commerce. I’ve been in The Real World for about three years now. I started off doing affiliate marketing which taught me everything about marketing. The marketing campus taught me everything about marketing, sales, social media marketing, how to get views, and how to keep attention. Everyone’s chronically online now, so if you know how to capture their attention, you have the new money skill.
How long were you doing the marketing campus?
Probably around 2 years. I was in there just learning everything I could about marketing and sales. I even had a bunch of opportunities beforehand to start doing something else, but I just really wanted to learn more about sales and marketing and what makes people buy. I wanted to know how to get views and all this type of stuff. So yeah, I was in there for about two years.
What led to you switching after doing two years of sales and marketing?
I switched because I wasn’t making as much as I wanted to, but I knew I had a good skill. The main thing that pushed me was a friend that I met inside the marketing campus. We had an account together which he eventually quit, and then randomly one day he just texted me a screenshot of $330,000 revenue on Shopify. That was unheard of to me. He asked me to work with him, and at first, I wasn’t trying to because I wanted to keep learning my skills. But eventually, my account got banned, and I decided to take the opportunity.
How did you help him scale it and how did things progress from there?
We had a call and he ran me through the game. Originally, he was doing TikTok ads, but he wanted to go into a long-term brand because he knew I had the skills from the marketing campus and short-form editing. We decided that he would do the backend and I would do the frontend. A long-term store is usually a product that solves a problem. I started researching pain points for the product, just like I did in the marketing campus, and used my skills to sell it.
How many products did you try out before you got to your $150,000 profit product?
We tested about four products, which is quite crazy because most people test 20 and still don’t even make money.
What was the process going through the first three and at what point did you know it’s a good time to drop them?
Originally we started with TikTok ads. We were a bit too hasty; if the initial campaign was bad, we would cut it after spending $15. Then we switched to Meta ads. On Meta, you have to wait like three days to see if it’s a good product or not. But again, we were a little hasty. If it’s unprofitable for about three days, you just cut it. If it’s profitable or break even, you can try to optimize. However, after a week or two of break even, you should probably switch because it’s not worth trying to hold on for dear life.
Once you got onto your fourth product, at what point did you know this is worth going all in?
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