u/knock_his_block_off

My supplier is obviously sending my products to other customers who order samples even after a NNN was signed, I know this because I had one of my friends inquire about this specific product ordered samples and they dhled him samples, and in the bag was my product.

Me and my supplier have a good relationship, and I want to continue in it but I don't want to confront him and sour it, but I really want him to stop, but im willing to accept the mistakes he already made, what should I do?

I honestly think Marvel kind of lucked out with the whole Jonathan Majors situation.

Not because of what happened obviously, but because I really think they were already realizing the Kang plan was not working and had no clean way out of it.

Marvel spent years setting Kang up as the next Thanos. He was supposed to be everywhere, there were multiple versions of him, an entire Avengers movie was literally named after him, and they had already invested so much into that storyline that I think they would have kept trying to force it to work even if audiences were not really connecting with it.

By the end of Loki season 2 though, it almost felt like Marvel themselves had realized the character was not hitting the way they expected. Loki basically takes control of the timelines, the TVA starts monitoring Kang variants, and the season ends in a way where you could almost just leave Kang there and move on.

But without some major outside reason, I do not think Marvel ever would have actually abandoned him. They had announced Kang Dynasty, Majors was clearly supposed to be the centerpiece of the Multiverse Saga, and changing direction that late would have basically been admitting the entire plan was not working.

Then the Jonathan Majors legal situation happened and suddenly Marvel had a completely understandable reason to cut ties and reset everything without having to publicly admit that the Kang storyline itself was failing.

And now they get to pull the emergency button of bringing Robert Downey Jr back as Doctor Doom, which instantly creates way more interest than Kang was generating.

I usually test ads in a abo campaign ad set with cost caps. After I get 20-30 sales at that cost cap consistently Ill move it into a cbo lowest cost campaign, but for some reason the sales in the cbo lowest cost cap are almost nothing, and the price per purchase is 5x higher.

-Just to give you some background these are overnight lip masks attached to a cloth, so these are worn 8 hours overnight. Im worried I over preserved it and with consistent use its going to attach a irritation, here are both formulas:

Formula A:

• Water — 68.37%
• Glycerin — 8%
• Sodium Polyacrylate — 5.5%
• PVP — 4%
• Pentylene Glycol — 3%
• Trehalose — 2%
• Squalane — 2%
• Panthenol — 1.5%
• Sodium Hyaluronate — 1%
• Hydrolyzed Collagen — 1%
• Phenoxyethanol — 0.90%
• Polysorbate 80 — 0.60%
• Sodium Citrate — 0.55%
• Bisabolol — 0.30%
• Tocopherol — 0.30%
• Citric Acid — 0.25%
• Allantoin — 0.20%
• Tartaric Acid — 0.20%
• Disodium EDTA — 0.18%
• Aluminum Glycinate — 0.15%

Formula B:

• Water — 68.02%
• Glycerin — 8%
• Sodium Polyacrylate — 5.5%
• PVP — 4%
• Pentylene Glycol — 3%
• Trehalose — 2%
• Squalane — 2%
• Panthenol — 1.5%
• Sodium Hyaluronate — 1%
• Hydrolyzed Collagen — 1%
• Phenoxyethanol — 0.85%
• Polysorbate 80 — 0.70%
• Sodium Citrate — 0.55%
• Bisabolol — 0.30%
• Tocopherol — 0.30%
• Ethylhexylglycerin — 0.30%
• Citric Acid — 0.25%
• Allantoin — 0.20%
• Tartaric Acid — 0.20%
• Disodium EDTA — 0.18%
• Calcium Gluconate — 0.15%

These are individually packed, so theres no risk of contamination that way, so I feel like I can get away with less preservatives, what do you guys I recommend, and any other way to improve these formulas?

And what do you guys think about in Formula B, using Calcium Gluconate instead of Aluminum Gluconate? Everyone recommended aluminum glycinate but a lot of my friends say ''Remove aluminum or I won't use it''?

Just to give some background: I’m a solo founder. No employees, no co-founder. I’ve built and run basically every part of my ecom business myself, website, email, product development, ads, creative, operations, everything.

As the business has grown, I’ve gotten to the point where I genuinely need help. The problem is that almost every time I pay someone who is supposedly an “expert,” I end up wondering how they have the reputation they do.

A few months ago, I hired a pretty well-known CRO expert to create a listicle for my site. The goal was simple: explain my product, its benefits, and its USPs.

I paid $2,500 because I assumed I was getting something high-level that could actually improve conversion rate enough to justify the cost.

A week later, I got what looked like an AI-generated listicle that barely even mentioned the product I hired him to write about. Somehow the ai picked up one of my older products and wrote about that instead.

It was complete slop.

I called him out on it, and he ended up refunding me in full. He’s extremely well-known in the ecom Twitter/influencer space, which made the whole thing even crazier to me.

A few weeks later, I decided maybe the answer was hiring an all-in-one agency.

They charged $10,000/month, with the potential to scale up to around $20,000/month depending on sales.

That is an insane amount of money to me, but I thought: if they can actually take a meaningful amount of work off my plate and help grow the business, it’s worth it.

At first, they helped with some email optimization and website optimization.

Then things started slowing down.

By months 3 and 4, it felt like almost nothing was getting done. I’d send them new ads to launch or ask for help with something, and sometimes it would genuinely take over a month for anyone to act on it.

Eventually, I dropped them.

Then, about two weeks ago, I hired a media buyer specifically for Meta and Google.

$5,000 upfront, with the possibility of going up to $15,000/month if ad spend exceeded $150,000/month.

Again, these numbers are insane to me.

I’m literally the type of person who will think twice about ordering DoorDash because I don’t want to pay an extra $5 in fees.

But I’m so overloaded with work that I’m willing to spend thousands of dollars if it means getting competent people who can actually take things off my plate.

The onboarding sounded great.

I was introduced to the team. They sent questionnaires about the business. They talked about scaling the account. Everything sounded professional. I gave them 100 new ads that need to be launched, that can be winners.

Two weeks go by.

I look at my Meta account and basically nothing has changed.

So I message Slack asking, essentially, “Hey… are you guys doing anything?”

The next day, someone on the team pauses a bunch of my winning ads.

These were ads that had been running successfully for a long time, had accumulated a ton of social proof, and were producing solid ROI.

They then relaunched them inside a new campaign.

Except they didn’t use the existing Post IDs with social proof.

They didn’t properly use the Partnership Ads setup.

Some of the captions and primary text didn’t even match the products being advertised.

And some of the ads were literally sending people to product pages that didn’t match the ad.

I didn’t catch it immediately.

By the time I did, about $1,400 in ad spend had been burned at roughly a 0.2 ROAS.

My normal ROAS is 1.9+.

Then I start realizing that the person I thought I was hiring to manage my account has a team underneath him doing most of the actual work, and I’m effectively paying a premium for access to outsourced labor.

At that point I’m like: what the hell is going on?

I DM him and tell him I want out. From my perspective, this has become a complete clown show.

He asks me to give them another chance.

I tell him no. You’ve already wasted almost three weeks of my time, caused unnecessary ad spend losses, and made changes to an account that was performing better before you touched it. I just want a refund and to move on.

What makes this especially confusing is that this guy has one of the biggest followings in the ecom Twitter space. Based on his reputation and content, I assumed I was hiring someone elite. If I told you who he was and your in ecom twitter you would know what im talking about.

The actual experience was completely different.

So here’s my real question for other founders or even agencies:

Is this just how agencies eventually work?

Do most of them get good enough at marketing themselves that they can charge premium prices, then hand your business off to cheaper junior employees or contractors while the person you thought you hired barely touches the account?

Because after three experiences like this, I’m starting to wonder whether the only realistic options are:

1. Keep doing everything myself.
2. Hire people directly in-house.
3. Build my own small team of specialists instead of hiring agencies.

I genuinely don’t mind paying good people a lot of money.

What drives me insane is paying premium prices because I’m trying to buy back my time, only to end up spending even more time auditing and fixing the work I paid someone else to do.

TL;DR: Solo founder desperately trying to delegate. Paid multiple highly regarded ecom experts/agencies thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Each time, the actual execution was dramatically worse than expected, and I ended up having to take the work back over myself.

Do I just stop looking for agencies to hire?

I run an online business, and my mom and brother help me pack orders. Every day, they have a routine where they pack all the orders that came in the day before.

The problem is that we can never really take a full day off or go on a trip because the platforms I sell on require orders to be shipped within 24 hours or I get penalized. Because of that, I started looking into other options.

My plan was to find a 3PL that could occasionally take over when my family and I wanted to travel, take a day off, or go somewhere. I wanted something where I could easily turn their shipping services on and off whenever I needed them.

Recently, I found a 3PL that can pack and ship the orders for me. Because of their shipping volume and relationships with shipping companies, their labels are about $3 cheaper per order. On top of that, they only charge $1.25 per order for labor.

When I told my mom about it, she started crying and said, “What else am I going to do? I’ve been doing this for the past three years. I love helping you grow your business, and it gives me a purpose.”

Now I feel stuck because I want to keep my family involved in the business, but financially, it would cost me more to continue having her pack orders. It would honestly be cheaper to pay her a salary without having her work and let the 3PL handle everything.

I thought about giving her a customer service role or finding something else for her to do, but there really isn’t anything else she would enjoy doing.

What would you guys do in my shoes? She seemed genuinly depressed when I told her I wanted to switch it.

I bought a product in bulk from a manufacturer and the product is defective, but they claim it is not, and the defectiveness can be demonstrated on video, but they say it is wrong and send a video of it not being defective, but that can easily be another version or something else.

I need to hire someone in China I can talk to to explain the situation so they fully understand, so they can talk to the chinese manufacturer on the phone. I can pay up to 160,000 yen

I remember having to do this in middle school where we were given a map and had to memorize where each state is, and had a test with a map of the states and had to input what state where, I just tried it now and failed miserably, what about yall?

- Miami Heat just signed Giannis, Lebron is out of the question

- Lebron said hell go to Golden State if they sign AD, but Wizards have already said they have no desire to Trade AD and plan to have him start

- He IS NOT signing to the Cavs, imagine if he decides to choose the Cavs and doesn't win the championship, and not only does he not win the championship he gets swept in the playoffs, he does not want to go out like that

Lebron loves Lamelo, Lebron Loves Edwards, and Edwards single handedly nearly got us to the finals with 0 help, imagine with Lamelo... and now Lebron? The shoe fits.

Wolves clear the Spurs with Lebron and Lamelo easy.

And Wolves in 6 vs Knicks.

I have one of the biggest brands in my ecom niche, I sell my product wholesale.

When you Google my product, my Google merchant listings don't come up anywhere, but the person I wholesaled my product to, a extremely small boutique shows up first on search results.

Wtf is going on...

I found out one of my suppliers was basically feeding my products to bigger sellers.

Every time I spent time and money developing a new product, testing it, improving the formula, and finally launching it, another seller would release almost the exact same thing a 1-2 months later. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but after it kept happening, I knew something was off. Since a product like mine can take 4-6 months to develop, then 1-2 months to produce then another month to actually be delivered to the usa, where I sell. It made no sense that they can launch my exact new products (just branded slightly differently) in 1 -2 months.

So I made a new Alibaba account and messaged the factory like I was a random seller looking for new products. I asked if they had anything new I could sell.

They literally sent me pictures of my product they produced for me in the past.

That confirmed it.

So for my next launch, I found a completely new supplier and placed my real production order with them. But I also placed a small order with the supplier that had been leaking my products.

The difference was, I gave the old supplier a decoy formula. It looked like the new product, but it was intentionally a bad watered down version that didn’t work well at all. It was for example a cosmetic serum, so you couldn't tell the effects of it, until you had weeks of testing/use of it. So if they were to sample it they wouldn't think it was different then any other product.

When I launched the real product, it started getting momentum and sales. As expected, the old factory started advertising it to other companies like it was the same product I was selling. Other sellers already knew I had launched something new and it was selling online, so when the factory showed them the decoy version, they assumed it was the real formula.

And while this is happening, im talking to my old supplier how Im ready to place a new 50,000 unit order any day now and hyping it up how everyone's loving it. 😂😂😂

Meanwhile, all of my actual orders were being made by my new supplier with the real formula.

The funniest part is now when you look at some of the competitors’ reviews on TikTok Shop and Amazon, you can see 1- and 2-star reviews all over the place. People are complaining because their releases don't work at all.

Worth the $6k I spent on the decoy product I had to destroy

Ingredient | CAS # | %
Water 72.57%
Glycerin 8.00%
Sodium Polyacrylate 5.50%
Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) 4.00%
Squalane 3.00%
Panthenol 2.00%
Trehalose 2.00%
Sodium Hyaluronate 1.50%
Ethylhexylglycerin 0.25%
Phenoxyethanol 0.20%
Tartaric Acid 0.20%
Disodium EDTA 0.18%
Allantoin 0.10%
Aluminum Glycine 0.15%
Bisabolol |0.15%
Magnesium Glycinate 0.05%
L-Theanine 0.05%
Centella Asiatica Extract 0.05%
Passionflower Extract 0.05%

Made this overnight lip mask, love the effects and how it stays on all night, but I don't love how its bitter, also I showed my friend and said if I make it without the aluminum it would be way better, but I dont know how. I have tried, but its the only thing that stablizes the gel. Without it it tears.