Each and every year we hear about the increase in online sales, and as e-commerce continues to grow, talk of the death of brick-and-mortar continues to grow with it.
“The fun thing about doing e-commerce is that it’s growing phenomenally and there’s more and more need for it,” said Tim McDougall. “People are buying more stuff, they’re just buying it online.”
In 2016, McDougall teamed up with Jason Nelson and started 50-Pound Boson.
Based out of Cedar Rapids, 50-Pound Boson is an e-commerce marketing and growth hacking team that focuses on helping startup and emerging businesses establish a steady and growing stream of revenue from their physical products.
The company started just over two years ago and initially was focused on helping companies sell products on Amazon. Since then, the company has begun to expand into other e-commerce channels and has grown from two employees to a team of five.
“As we got recommended more and more, people wanted us to take on other things,” McDougall said. “So one of our challenges has been adopting new skill sets as we grow. We realized that we have to have the entire e-commerce toolbag before too long and with a small team that’s been our biggest challenge.”
McDougall is a firm believer that marketing is an investment, not an expense.
“We’re not just going to spend your money and give you a bunch of vanity metrics. We’re going to base it on whether or not we move product for you,” McDougall said. “Did we move more than you were moving without us. Are we creating profits for you? If you’re not you should drop us and if you are you should pay us more. And that turns out to be a proposition that a lot of young, emerging companies really like.”
McDougall says they would like to slowly increase the size of companies we’re working with and are considering the idea of putting out their own products as well.
“That gives us the opportunity to experiment in new ways that we might not do with a client’s product because if it blows up, it blows up in our face,” McDougall said. “That allows us to be out on the cutting edge of things without putting clients dollars at risk.”