How My E-Commerce Startup Reached 1,000,000 Facebook Fans Without Spending a Dime on Paid Ads
The organic Facebook playbook behind Diamond Candles — photo-first content, the ring-reveal loop, and why the audience compounded without paid spend.
Archive
From the archive
Posts from the earlier WordPress version of this blog, written between 2013 and 2016 while building Diamond Candles. They were lost in a platform migration and have been restored from the Internet Archive at their original URLs, with the content unchanged. Treat them as a snapshot of that era — the tactics reference platforms and ad products that have since changed or disappeared.
2016
2015
The Growth Hacking Podcast Interview
A podcast conversation on growth hacking a physical product: building virality into the product experience rather than bolting it on afterwards.
2014
Successful Entrepreneurs Are Fundamentally The Best Person In The World To Solve a Problem
Why founder-market fit beats market timing — the case that durable companies come from the person best positioned to solve a specific problem.
How to compete against Amazon in the e-commerce industry
Do what Amazon can't: meet customer needs in ways a logistics giant structurally will not. From the Clarity Live interview series.
How to manage a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultant
Freelancer, agency, or in-house — the pros and cons of each, from direct experience running all three models.
How To Validate Your Ecommerce Idea Before You Throw Away Thousands
How to tell whether a physical-product idea will actually sell, and whether it can stand out, before spending real money on it.
Facebooks New Content Ads: RIP Outbrain, Taboola, Gravity, Disqus
Facebook got publishers hooked on free referral traffic, then launched a sponsored-content format aimed squarely at the native ad networks.
2013
I’m looking to get off the Yahoo platform. Shopify seems to be nice, and BigCommerce just looks like a slightly better Yahoo. Thoughts?
Answering a store owner weighing Shopify against BigCommerce after outgrowing Yahoo — what actually matters when choosing a platform.
7 Shortcuts for Building an E-Commerce Startup to $1M in 12 Months
The guest post that started it all — seven shortcuts from taking Diamond Candles to $1M in its first year, originally written for Clarity.fm.
Why these still exist. These URLs collected inbound links over the
years and were returning 404s after the site moved off WordPress. Restoring them at
their original addresses preserves those links and the record. Content is reproduced
as published — some outbound links and embedded media no longer resolve.
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