Reimagining Creator Commerce with Fourthwall

This week on DTC Pod, we’re joined by Will Baumann, the co-founder and CEO of Fourthwall.

Fourthwall empowers creators to sell products online without needing to be e-commerce experts. They handle sales tax, supply chain, customer support, and more so creators can focus on making content and growing their community.

In this episode of DTC Pod, Will shares his insights on the complexities of building a business out of one’s personal brand and how Fourthwall has been aiding this process for over 50,000 creators.

Will also touches on the power of creators today, the trends they’re seeing at Fourthwall in terms of product popularity and paid ad usage, and Fourthwall’s differentiation strategy, growth channels, and future plans.

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Fav Quotes from Episode #331

“We think of ourselves as, like, the Canva to Shopify's Photoshop, right? Like, you want to launch a professional branded experience, but like, Photoshop's a power user tool. Shopify is a power user tool."

— Will Baumann, 00:04:21 to 00:04:32

“Usually our theory and how we guide people to start is, in the beginning of your community monetization journey, you should try to sell five hats on demand or five t-shirts or something. That's just a sign that you can sell and you have a community who wants to build around that."

— Will Baumann, 00:19:29 to 00:19:45

“I'm incredibly bullish on creators as a whole. I just think it's such a superpower that if you own an audience and you have distribution, you solve, like, the hardest part of business building in my experience, which is like going from zero to one in terms of customers, you start with that audience day one."

— Will Baumann, 00:22:04 to 00:23:07

3 Best DTC Practices from Will Baumann

1. Identify your customer persona and make them your North Star

Setting up an account on Fourthwall nowadays takes 3 steps and around 5 minutes. But it didn’t start that way. It took 2 years of technical investment and no customers. How come? Because it was the right call to make to win their market.

All of Fourthwall’s efforts, from product development to pricing, are designed for their core customer group. Their customer persona guided their decisions, and now it’s guiding their growth and their success.

2. Cultivate and leverage the power of community

Communities are indispensable marketing and sales tools both for creators and the businesses that serve them, like Fourthwall. 

Will notes that their target customers are in a pretty niche and tight-knit industry, so it definitely helps their company when users share positive feedback.

In fact, Fourthwall relies more on word-of-mouth rather than paid ads. And they’re seeing the same trend in their users.

3. Diversify your efforts across multiple growth channels

As we see with Fourthwall, you can invest in multiple growth channels simultaneously to:

(a) Tap into different demographic groups that might find your business of interest

(b) Spread out the risk so that even if one route encounters a hiccup, others can bear the brunt

(c) Increase brand visibility; the more channels you are present on, the more familiar potential customers become with your brand