Welcome to Dtcpod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you built. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. DTC Pod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok and Igorganic creative use the code DTC Pod. Ten for 10% off your next content purchase. What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Jonathan Solorzano, who is the founder of Solo Media Group. So, Jonathan, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in shopify development and a little bit about some of the brands and projects that you've worked on.

Yeah, okay. So I guess I'll give you the start of Solo Media Group and how we ended up here. We started Solo Media Group as sort of a way to do remote work. I moved to Columbia, hired my first developer over there, Richardson, and then from there we were white labeling for larger agencies here in the United States. So the idea was some of these larger agencies might have a contract with a company like Oatley, and then they'd outsource it to us, and we do the work behind the scenes and they'd pass it off as their own. Get the nice case study. After doing that for a little while, we got so good at shopify that we say we should just go directly to the customers. We have a good enough experience. So we're not like most agencies where we do a lot of things. We just do straight development and we do it just in the shopify ecosystem because it's where all the brands that we want to work with are.

No.

Absolutely.

And so one of the things that we're really excited to talk about on this show is just kind of what goes into building a shopify site, right? Like the core pillar of DTC is your ecommerce storefront. So that's going to be a really important component to get right. So what I'd love to do in this episode is first, let's talk a little bit about shopify, the platform, what you need to know if you're starting up a brand. So call it from once you've come up with an idea, you have a product you want to sell and you're going to create a shopify storefront, kind of what's that experience? What can you expect? How do you get started? And then after that, we'll get into where you come in for brands that are going north of $500,000 in revenue towards, like, ten mil and bringing on developers and looking for a bunch more customization. So why don't we start with what a brand needs to consider and how getting started on Shopify works?

Yeah, I think when you speak to other agency owners, people go around talking about design. We need to get a good design in. I think that there's a lot of overthinking. If you were to ask somebody that quote unquote, makes websites, but really, Shopify has everything it needs for you if you know no code to just start. So if I were to start a Shopify store tomorrow with my own brand, what would I do? I wouldn't even code, and that's that. I know how to do it. I'd buy a theme for $300. I'd throw that theme up. If you don't have a product design, get a product designed on fiverr, and then from there worry about marketing it. Because that's the one thing that I've seen so many people that start stores do, is they spend all this time with brand and design, and then they go down the hole and there's no sales. Right. They spend all this time idating, and they didn't worry about the first thing. It's sales. So, yeah, everything out of the box is in Shopify. How to fulfill orders. You can generate your labels there at tracking numbers, putting the tracking number in their order so that the customer gets it. It already has the email flow set up, setting up shopify payments that's already set up. Literally, you just plug and play. So if I was to start tomorrow, I would put a product up and start marketing.