10 Takeaways from a 15,500% Ecommerce ROI: We Sold Our First Brand & Reveal Everything

Pop the champagne and drop the beat … We just sold our first brand. And, yes, the math in that outlandish headline is right: a 15,500% increase from our initial investment. In early 2018, 4x400 — Common Thread Collective’s ecommerce holding company — acquired 80% of FC Goods. The price? $5,000. In Oct. of 2020, we sold it for $1.2M. Minus the founder’s 20% and less broker’s fees, that nets out to $780k. From $5k to $780k: 15,500% ROI. Of course, that clickbaity calculation is far from the whole story. That’s why this is a special episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast with guests Taylor Holiday and Aaron Orendoff … to reveal everything. All the numbers. The entire journey. Every struggle. Every loss. Every win. At the end of the episode, Taylor and I share 10 takeaways — the biggest and most-tactical lessons we learned. Best of all, I’ve summarized them all with examples and illustrations in this article to make the takeaways easier to take away: https://bit.ly/36HjDGf