Podcast 12: Sam Gastro and MyGiftCardSupply.com — A Million Dollar Retailer Case Study

How Sam Gastro, founder of MyGiftCardSupply.com about how he grew his $1 million dollar retailer. Tons of insights on how to use retention (not acquisition) to grow... EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Get my Million Dollar Cheat Sheet + the Episode 12 text transcribe. Click Here to download the PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher I've been fascinated by e-commerce retailers that are able to bootstrap to 7-figures within a short period of time. Highlights How Sam acquired his first 100 customers Using retention/word of mouth to grow to 7 figures How to treat your best customers differently Sam’s one actionable tip on how to grow your ecommerce business Links / Resources The Nerd Marketing newsletter (sign up to unlock freebies) Mygiftcardsupply.com Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later. → Read the Transcript Drew:  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki and we are talking about growing a company to seven figures, which is a really popular topic on my blog, and today I am joined by Sam Gastro. Sam, among many things he works on, one is Mygiftcardsupply.com, which is a business that he took from zero to over a million in revenue in a short amount of time. Sam, welcome. Sam: Hey, Drew. Thanks for having me. Want to save this transcribe to read later? CLICK HERE to download it as a PDF. Drew:  Sure. Thanks for being here. Sam is in Boulder, Colorado. Congratulations on the Super Bowl. Sam: Thank you, thank you. Drew:  Yeah, I was a little bit bummed because I was a New England Patriots fan. I'm from Boston, and I've got to say that was ... the Patriots gave them a better game both games than they had in the Super Bowl. Sam: Agreed, agreed. Yeah, I can't complain. It was a great ... it was a really fun year to watch football. Drew: Yeah, because everybody was sort of counting out, you know, the Broncos, because they weren't winning by ... they weren't dominating, you know, but they were winning by like a field goal, and Manning was like ... you know, he kind of was like me. He's like 40-something, like falling down, right, like slowly get up, injured all the time, right, like me trying to throw 50 yards. It was a good way to go out, right? Sam:  Incredible, absolutely insane. Yeah, during the middle of the season there, it was kind of wild with him like getting replaced, and it was like ... just a wild, wild year, but completely fun. Drew:  Congratulations. It would be great to talk about the Super Bowl for like 90 percent of this podcast and then we'll just touch on your retailer. Sam: Yeah, let's do that, essentially because I don't know a whole lot about football. I like it. I like to watch it. Usually I'm in it for the guacamole and the home team. Drew: Well, let's see. I don't know what the transition is from Super Bowl to Mygiftcardsupply.com, but did you see a spike in revenue during the Super Bowl? How about that? Sam: No, we did not. There isn't ... not a whole lot of football and gift card correlation, unfortunately. Drew:  For those who don't know Mygiftcardsupply.com, could you give a little bit of a background on the site, how you decided to start it, how long ago did you start it? Sam: Absolutely, yeah. I started it about four years ago, and I kind of stumbled upon the idea by selling a gift card on eBay. Basically when I sold it, it went to a guy in France, and I was a little intrigued because with the currency conversion, it went over what the actual value of the gift card was. I won't get into the numbers of it, but basically what I found after talking to him ... because I was first suspicious and I messaged him ... he explained that there's a large demand for United States gift cards, because people like to buy U.S. content and there's kind of a barrier. You have to use a U.S.