The 7-Figure E-Commerce Playbook

This phase kills 90% of stores—not because products are bad, but because founders skip the unglamorous work of proving demand before spending money. I watched a founder burn through €40,000 on Facebook ads for a product nobody wanted. He had beautiful photography, a slick website, compelling copy. What he didn't have was a single conversation with a real customer before launching. When I asked why people should buy from him instead of Amazon, he couldn't answer. The foundation phase is about one thing: proving that real people will pay real money for what you're selling. Not your mom. Not your friends. Strangers who have no reason to be nice to you. Before you order inventory, before you build a fancy website, before you touch paid advertising—validate demand. Put up a landing page. Run a tiny test campaign. Talk to 20 potential customers and actually listen to what they say. Once you've proven demand, obsess over your unit economics. What's your break-even ROAS? If you don't know this number by heart, you're flying blind. Most founders discover too late that their margins can't support the CAC required to scale.

You've proven people want what you're selling. Now the game changes completely. The instinct at this stage is to pour money into acquisition. Resist it. The brands that make it through this phase focus on something less exciting but far more powerful: making each customer more valuable. I worked with a skincare brand stuck at €200K for two years. Their CAC was €35, their AOV was €48, and their repeat purchase rate was 12%. The math simply didn't work—they were barely breaking even on first purchase and losing most customers forever. We spent six months ignoring acquisition entirely. We built email flows that actually converted. We created bundles that made sense. We implemented a post-purchase sequence that educated customers and brought them back. Their AOV went to €72. Repeat rate hit 34%. Same traffic, same products—but now the business was profitable. This is also when you need to start building systems. Document everything. The way you respond to customer service emails. The process for launching new products. How you brief creative. When you're doing €500K, you can keep it all in your head. At €1M, you can't. The founders who build systems during traction scale smoothly. The ones who don't hit a wall.

Here's where I see the most painful failures. Founders who built successful businesses destroy them by refusing to let go. Scaling isn't about working harder or spending more on ads. It's about building an organization that doesn't depend on you being the smartest person in every room. This is a complete identity shift for most founders. You went from doing everything to doing nothing—or rather, doing the one thing only you can do: setting direction. The brands that scale past seven figures share a common trait: their founders become orchestrators, not operators. They hire specialists who know more about performance marketing, supply chain, or customer experience than they ever will. They trust those specialists to make decisions. They accept that some of those decisions will be wrong. Retention becomes critical at this stage. If you're still generating 80% of revenue from first-time buyers, you're running on a treadmill that speeds up every month. Acquisition costs rise. Competition intensifies. The only sustainable path is building a customer base that buys again and again. Thirty percent of revenue from retention is the minimum. Forty percent is healthy. Fifty percent means you've built something defensible.