If I Started an E-Commerce Brand Tomorrow, This Is the First Thing I'd Do

I get asked this a lot by brand owners who are just starting out: where do I put my first budget?

Most people expect me to say ads. I wouldn't touch ads for the first few weeks.

If I launched an online store tomorrow, my entire focus would be one thing: getting my product into the hands of as many relevant creators as possible, on a gifted basis, as fast as I could.

Not because it's cheap. Because it's the only thing that solves the two problems every new store has at the same time — nobody knows you exist, and you have nothing to show them.

The real problem with a new store isn't traffic

You can buy traffic on day one. That's the easy part.

What you can't buy is the reason for someone to trust you when they land. A new store with three studio product photos and zero reviews converts badly, no matter how good the ad was. You end up paying to send strangers to a page that gives them every reason to leave.

Gifted partnerships fix the page before you start paying to send people to it.

Every creator who receives your product and posts about it gives you two things: their audience, and an asset. The audience is the visibility. The asset is what makes your store credible for everyone who arrives afterwards, from any channel.

That's why I'd go wide early. Not five creators. As many as I could properly manage.

What "as many as possible" actually means

Volume matters here, but volume without selection is just giving away stock.

Here's how I'd approach it:

Fit over follower count, every time. I'd rather send twenty products to twenty people with 5,000–20,000 engaged followers who genuinely need the product than five to accounts with 100,000 followers who'll post once and forget. Smaller creators reply more, post more reliably, and their audiences actually trust them.

Outreach at scale, personal in tone. This is a numbers game with a human front end. Expect a chunk of people not to reply. That's normal — you plan for it by reaching out to far more people than you need, while still writing to each of them like a person.

Brief them, don't script them. Give an angle, a hook idea, a rough format. Then get out of the way. The content that performs is the content that sounds like the creator, not like your brand guidelines.

Ask for usage rights up front. This is the mistake I see most often. Agree in writing that you can reuse the content on your website, your ads, and your organic channels. That single clause turns a gifted campaign into a content engine.

Track who performs. Not everyone will. But the top 10–20% become your ambassadors — and those are the people you eventually pay, on affiliate or fixed terms, because you now have evidence they're worth it.

Why this beats paying creators on day one

When you pay a creator before you've tested them, you're guessing. You're paying for follower count and hoping it translates.

Gifted flips it. You find out who converts, whose content style suits your product, and which angle sells — before you commit a single fee. By the time you start paying, you're not guessing anymore.

That's the sequence I'd follow with my own money:

1. Seed widely on gifted. Build the content bank and the first wave of visibility.
2. Read the results honestly. Content volume, engagement quality, traffic, conversions. Not reach for its own sake.
3. Promote the winners onto affiliate or ambassador terms.
4. Then run ads — using the creator content that already proved it works, not a studio shot.

Starting at step four is how new brands burn budget.

This is exactly how Paropet got there

I'm not describing a theory. It's how we took Paropet to the number one selling harness in the UK within three months, through content strategy alone. No large paid budget behind it. We seeded the product to pet owners whose audiences genuinely matched, built the content around real everyday use, and let the volume of authentic content do the work.

The advantage a new brand has is that this doesn't require capital. It requires stock, a clear brief, and the willingness to do a lot of outreach.

The honest caveats

Gifted works best when you have a physical product people can use and talk about naturally, margins that can absorb giving units away, and enough patience to let content compound over weeks rather than days.

It works less well if your product needs heavy explanation, if your unit cost is high enough that seeding hurts, or if you need revenue this week.

And it takes work. Sourcing, outreach, follow-up, briefing, collecting content, chasing the ones who go quiet. That's the actual cost of "free" content — time, not money. It's also exactly why brands end up outsourcing it.

If you take one thing from this

Your first job as a new e-commerce brand isn't to sell. It's to become believable.

Gifted partnerships are the fastest, cheapest route I know to believable — and everything you spend afterwards works harder because of it.

That's what I'd focus on. It's what I'd tell any brand owner starting from zero.

Petra
Founder, PS Brandfluence