We have sold over 100 Ecom brands. Ask me anything on exits.

What is one trait that gives someone an unfair advantage when starting Ecom? Like something they did before Ecom where you immediately think: This guy is probably going to be good at this.

People always ask me what the best niche is to start an Ecom brand in. I think that's the wrong question. Does the product actually do what it says? Is it identifiable enough to build a real brand around? Is the pain point it resolves deep enough? Is the TAM big enough? Can you realistically see this business doing multiple 9 figures a year? That's the question I'd be asking before starting.

Gymshark and Comfrt were built more than a decade apart. The acquisition playbook is surprisingly similar. Social. Creators. Paid ads. Great product. The difference is the infrastructure around it. Better attribution. Better 3PLs. Better creative systems. Better software. AI. Faster feedback loops. What took years to scale before can now happen in months. There has never been a better time to build an Ecom brand.

Most Ecom founders have no idea what their business is actually worth. So we built a tool to show you: ecomswap.io/business-valuati… What are your thoughts?

The amount of $10m+ revenue Ecom brands with absolutely terrible financial reporting would surprise you. Some founders know exactly how much revenue they made yesterday. Ask them their actual net profit last month and they need to call their accountant.

Recently spoke to a brand owner claiming to do $2m a month in revenue. When looking at his P&L turns out he only did that 1 month 9 months ago and his yearly revenue is $5m. Just because you did $2m a month one month does not make you a $2m a month brand aha.

Here's how someone bought a brand and broke-even in less than 6 months. The founder spent years building a brand to $500k/month. The acquirer took it to $2m/month in 4 months, with significantly better margins. Same brand. Same products. The biggest optimization they made: The brand had heavy and expensive SKUs. They moved inventory to a 3PL and renegotiated COGS, improving the economics on the products by 35%. The business was already at 65% gross margins but only 10% net margins, so this completely changed the economics. They also did a lot of testing on the offers and increased AOV by 20% while maintaining essentially the same CVR. The crazy part is the founder already knew the SKUs were too expensive. He just kept delaying fixing it. Making the change meant tying up significantly more cash in inventory, buying much larger quantities to ship to the US, properly forecasting demand and restructuring part of the supply chain and the founder could not be bothered. It was a big operational and cash flow commitment, so it kept getting pushed back while the focus stayed on growth and ads. They had done $14m+ in lifetime sales before the acquisition. Had they fixed this earlier, it would have been a very different business. Every other effort they were making on growth would have worked at a much higher magnitude because the fundamentals underneath were stronger. I think founders need to regularly look at their brand from the perspective of someone buying it. If you were acquiring your business today, what is the first thing you would fix? You probably already know the answer.

A while back I sold a product in the cat niche. I tried many angles but I felt like the product was “saturated” and moved on. Months later I saw the exact same product being sold to dogs and it made a killing. Sometimes, the easiest unlocks are the ones right in front of you - you just need to think logically and stop trying to go for the most complicated solutions.

I speak with a lot of founders that don’t think their brand is even sellable. Or have no idea how to go about exit. Everything is sellable but at which price should be the real question you are asking yourself. The multiple a buyer is willing to pay on your EBITDA is simply a measure of how many years they are willing to risk on your brand. The more risk there is the lower the multiple and vice versa. For instance if your brand is dependent on a single channel and your whole business could collapse tomorrow because your CPM goes up or because there is a ban it will be very difficult for an acquirer to position themselves with a premium multiple because the reality is maybe in 6 months your business does not exist anymore. Truly understanding what these risks are and adapting your decisions towards lowering them to create a more sustainable brand is what will give you the highest long term ROI on your brand.

European brand owners: When you sell your brand, buyers will account for VAT when underwriting your P&L. There is no clever legal structure that magically makes VAT disappear. Unless your business falls within a specific VAT-exempt category, it needs to be accounted for.

Most Ecom founders are obsessed with scaling vertically. Spend more on the hero SKU. Find more creatives. Push more volume. But at a certain point, the biggest opportunity is scaling horizontally. Launching more SKUs. I see so many brands with a great hero product that refuse to launch new products because they’re scared of losing focus or because its at the bottom of their priority list. But if you already have thousands of customers who trust your brand, launching a product they’re naturally inclined to buy can be one of the easiest ways to grow. Higher AOV. Higher LTV. More reasons for existing customers to come back. And you’re not launching from zero. Meta already has data on your customers and audience. At launch, the new SKU can immediately be put in front of people who already have familiarity with the brand, helping you build momentum much faster. You don’t always need to find more customers. Sometimes you just need more things for your existing customers to buy. Everyone wants to scale vertically. The best Ecom operators learn how to scale both ways.

Getting an LOI is not the same as selling your brand. I've seen founders mentally spend the money the day an LOI gets signed. Big mistake. The LOI is where the real work starts. Once you sign, the buyer gets exclusivity and starts trying to prove that everything you told them is true. Every inconsistency becomes either: A reason to reduce the price A reason to change the deal structure A reason to walk away And here's the part founders underestimate: Before the LOI, you have leverage. You can talk to multiple buyers. You can create competition. You can walk away. After signing exclusivity, a lot of that leverage disappears. The buyer knows this. A $5M LOI means very little if it turns into a $3M purchase price after 60 days of diligence. Make sure you are speaking to multiple parties and don't just choose the party with the highest offer but the one in which you have the highest certainty of close. This generally comes down to ensuring the buyer: -Has the necessary committed capital to close -Has an understanding of how Ecom and your operations work -Has a coherant track record and plan for the brand

4+ years since we started Ecomswap. Before Ecomswap, we had sold many of our own brands through Exchange Marketplace and our personal network. I loved the process. Talking to acquirers, negotiating deals, understanding what made a business valuable. Back then, the market was completely different. On some of our first deals, we didn’t even have a purchase agreement. We literally agreed on a price, went through escrow and transferred the business. We then started helping friends sell their brands. That’s when I realized there was a real opportunity here. We had already launched 30+ Ecom brands (some worked some didn't), but I felt like I needed to position myself differently and build something that could truly compound with time. What made me love M&A was the value and the in-depth connections you build both with founders and acquirers. You’re helping a founder at one of the most important moments in the entire lifecycle of their business. For many of them, it represents years of work. We traveled almost every month to meet with buyers and sellers, go to conferences and meet with amazing people in the space. And Ecom M&A was nowhere near as developed or consolidated as other markets. It still isn’t. Meaning that the wrong positioning on a business and the wrong buyer pool could make a big difference to the multiple independently to the IP and quality of the brand. But Ecom keeps growing. More consumers keep buying online. Brands keep getting bigger. And the buyer universe keeps getting more sophisticated. Every deal we did, we learned. Every deal we did, our network expanded. Then the deals got bigger. Our processes got better. Our team got stronger. Today, we have investment bankers and M&A professionals working alongside us from our office in Dubai, and we’re building something that looks completely different from what we started 4 years ago. And it still feels like we’re at the beginning. We are building towards doing 9-figure exits and much more. Crazy to look back at where this started. It’s been a bumpy road, but when you genuinely enjoy the journey, the outcomes tend to come by themselves. Proud of what we’re building. A lot more to come.

I think starting a brand from scratch is one of the worst uses of time for an experienced Ecom operator. Once you have capital, a team and years of experience, the opportunity cost is just too high. Scaling from 0 → 1 takes the same energy if not more than from 1 → 10 But the ROI on that energy can be significantly higher. You build momentum on already existing momentum and not from scratch. There’s also something people underestimate: business age. If you start a brand today, scale it for a year and decide to sell, you're trying to exit a 1-year-old business. Buy a 4-year-old brand, scale it for a year and you're now selling a 5-year-old business with a much longer track record and hence much bigger buyer pool. That alone can have a major impact on the multiple buyers are willing to pay. So you’re not only buying existing revenue and EBITDA. You’re buying time. And once you already have the experience, team and capital to scale brands, I think buying becomes increasingly more logical than starting from zero. You can deploy the same skillset into a larger existing base and compound enterprise value much faster. At a certain level in Ecom, the game should shift from: “What brand can I start?” to: “What brand can I acquire and make significantly bigger?”

Here’s the easiest way I explain M&A multiples to Ecom founders: A buyer paying 5x EBITDA is essentially handing you 5 years of today’s profit upfront. What an acquirer will measure to come up with the multiple are the KPIs you should optimize for, for example: high Meta dependence (or single channel) → -risk SKU concentration → -risk Founder dependency → -risk Declining revenue → -risk Recurring revenue → +certainty Strong IP & Defensability → +certainty Solid team → +certainty Creating the right systems that give confidence and predictability around your revenue is what will create a competitive process at exit and push buyers to pay a premium multiple for your brand.

The best time to sell your ecom brand is usually when you have absolutely no desire to sell it.