Tobias Nervik | DTC Viking

Ecom is cracked right now It feels like 2021/22 again I think we’ll look back on this time in a few years to come and call it “the good days” We’re living in a time right now where it’s never been easier to launch stores & hit huge scale FAST If you’re in the game, you know some of the stores 0-8 figures/month & some of these brands launched less than a year ago Then you do a deep dive into their funnels & it’s sheer creative volume driven by AI LP’s are one shot manus prompts They’re running 100k/days with a few editors & VA’s It’s crazy what’s there for the taking & the the playbook is right in front of us all Look at medvi, billion dollar company driven purely by huge creative output using AI authority figures with whitelisted pages The barrier has never been easier to hit 1m+ months Get a higgsfield account, build some solid workflows for high creative output, and dial in on one market with a huge tam & learn it like the back of your hand Move like a fucking savage, go deep into your angles, avatars etc - push messaging across different formats Have an obsessive love for the game, execute relentlessly & it’s hard not to lose Don’t waste this opportunity

I’ve spent a decade telling people to do what I do: "Buy and Hold." Now I've decided to list my entire real estate portfolio for sale and walk away. It started slow. The bills, the maintenance, the tax increases... but the final straw was when I tried to develop an ADU to do exactly what the city of LA claims it wants investors like me to do: Create more housing. You'd think they'd make it easier, but after two delayed inspections, a sewer pipe replacement that needed 75 days advance notice, and a city-owned tree that became my responsibility, I'd had enough. The identity of being a real-estate guy is very hard to walk away from, trust me. For a long time, I stayed just because real estate was my "thing." It’s how I started. It’s what I’m known for. It led to every good thing in my life. But that blinded me to the fact that just because something served me in the past, it doesn't mean things haven't changed in the present. The reality of 2026 finally stripped the emotion away. My LA rentals are netting about 4-5% after the constant background noise of taxes, insurance spikes, and repairs. Meanwhile, a risk-free Treasury pays 5%. The trade-off just doesn't make sense any more. I’m reallocating to a liquid portfolio that actually lets me focus on the work I love. I published a deep dive on my Substack about the ADU nightmare that broke my patience, the exact numbers behind the exit, and where I’m moving the money next to buy back my sanity. I'll drop the link here in a bit.

If I lost everything and had to build a profitable ecom brand by summer, here's exactly what I'd do. 1. RUN THE UGLY WEBSITE TEST. Find a competitor with a horrible site, no real ads, and photos that look like they were shot on an iPhone in a garage, but they’re still pulling sales. This tells you the demand within the category is so strong that even bad execution gets paid for. 2. SPEND A WEEK READING NEGATIVE REVIEWS ON AMAZON AND 1-STAR COMMENTS ON TIKTOK IN THAT CATEGORY. The same complaints will keep showing up, and those repeated complaints are the actual product brief. People are telling you exactly what to build and how to position it for free. 3. USE WHITE-LABEL DROPSHIPPING TO GET YOUR FIRST 30 TO 50 ORDERS. THIS IS NOT A BUSINESS YET. IT'S JUST A TEST. You’re spending money to learn what works and what doesn't. Your job is to detach all emotion from the result, so set your budget to what you're prepared to lose and treat every dollar as data. 4. SKIP HIRING UGC CREATORS FOR YOUR FIRST CREATIVES. Use AI to generate them. You can build 30 test ads in 4 hours. Spend 10 to 30% of your product price per day and don't kill any creative until you've spent 2x your product price. Anything less than that is statistical noise, and you'll throw away ads that would have actually worked. 5. TAKE THE NEGATIVE REVIEWS YOU PULLED IN STEP 2 AND TURN THEM INTO ADS. Open every video by addressing the biggest objection in the first 3 seconds. Record it on your phone yourself. Founder ads perform every time, and addressing objections up front crushes them 80% of the time because you're answering the question that was already stopping the sale. 6. ONCE YOUR ADS ARE WORKING, MOVE OFF WHITE-LABEL AND INTO CUSTOM BRANDING. Find a 3PL in your top region so customers aren't waiting 37 days for delivery. Get IP agreements signed with every supplier. Stay in dropshipping past this point, and you're racing to the bottom forever, because anyone with a Shopify account can list the exact same product for half the price. 7. ONE PRODUCT. ONE OBSESSION. DON'T LAUNCH A SECOND PRODUCT TO COVER YOURSELF. Every founder I've watched try to launch product number two before mastering product number one ends up splitting their attention across two failing things instead of fixing the one with actual potential. 8. MAKE SURE YOUR PRODUCT IS SOMETHING PEOPLE ACTUALLY SEE BEING USED IN PUBLIC. The Oodie showed up on Zoom calls, and people asked where you got it. That visibility is a free distribution channel running 24/7 in the background. Products that get used privately have to pay for every single customer through ads, and that math gets brutal as you scale. 9. BY MONTH 3, YOUR REPEAT PURCHASE RATE IS THE ONLY NUMBER THAT MATTERS. 70% of Oodie customers came from personal recommendations. If your customers aren't coming back and aren't telling their friends, no amount of ad spend will save you. You're paying to fill a leaky bucket, and the unit economics will catch up to you within 6 months. 10. HIRE ONE SPECIALIST FOR THE THING THAT'S EATING MOST OF YOUR TIME. NOT A GENERALIST. NOT A COPY OF YOU. If creative is the bottleneck, hire a creative strategist. If ads are the bottleneck, hire someone who runs ads. Max one hire per month, so you can actually onboard them properly and judge whether they're an A-player before bringing in the next one.