Looking back to when I started running my own ecommerce business I think this the approach that I wanted to take. And I did, but somewhere along the way I became sidetracked by the need for speed. To grow my business at a faster rate. On reflection, I made a series of bad decisions that took business growth out of my own hands. Today, I work with founders in a role that I wish I’d had building my own ecommerce brand. Let’s talk about DIY Ecommerce Growth.
There’s a version of ecommerce success that feels inevitable when you’re scrolling LinkedIn or listening to another podcast.
You launch. You find product-market fit. You hire an agency. They scale you with Meta ads. Revenue grows. You raise funding or reinvest aggressively. You add more channels, more tools, more specialists. The machine gets bigger.
And somewhere in that progression, you stop recognising the business you built.
I’ve watched this play out dozens of times and I felt this too whilst working on/in my own brand. Founders who started with clarity, conviction and a vision for what they wanted to create, end up running companies that feel like they belong to someone else. The strategy is outsourced. The creative is templated. The growth playbook came from a case study about a brand in a completely different category.
It works. Until it doesn’t feel like yours anymore.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: what if the path to sustainable growth isn’t about hiring faster or spending smarter, but about staying closer to the work itself?
The Seduction of Outsourced Growth
Let’s be honest about why founders outsource growth in the first place.
It’s not laziness. It’s logic.
You’re told that specialists know more than you do. That agencies have proprietary systems. That you can’t possibly stay on top of algorithm changes, creative testing, attribution models and funnel optimisation while also running a business.
So you delegate. And in the short term, it feels like relief.
Someone else is writing the ads. Managing the spend. Interpreting the dashboards. You get to focus on “higher-level” work … whatever that means.
What gets lost in that handoff?
Context. The agency doesn’t know your customers the way you do. They don’t feel the subtle shift in tone that lands differently. They don’t recognise the question that keeps coming up in support tickets that should inform your positioning.
Continuity. You’re building a brand, not just a campaign. But when growth is outsourced, the creative gets disjointed. One person writes your emails. Another does your ads. A third handles social. Nothing feels like it came from the same place, because it didn’t.
Control. When performance dips, you’re dependent on someone else to diagnose it, fix it, explain it. You’re reporting to your own business through a third party.
And perhaps most critically: learning stops.
When you outsource the doing, you stop learning how it actually works. Which means when something breaks (or when the agency relationship breaks down and ends) you’re back at square one, except now you’re further along and the stakes are higher.
What DIY Ecommerce Growth Actually Means
DIY doesn’t mean doing everything yourself.
It means staying close enough to the mechanisms of growth that you understand them, shape them and retain control over them.
It means you might hire specialists, but you’re literate enough in what they do that you can collaborate, interrogate and course-correct when needed.
It means your growth strategy isn’t something handed to you in a deck. It’s something you designed, because you understand your business better than anyone else possibly could.
What does this look like in practice?
You Own the Creative
You’re writing the emails. Or at least the first drafts. You’re briefing the ads based on real customer language you’ve collected. You’re building the landing pages with an opinion about what matters and why.
You know you’re not a world-class copywriter. But because creative is strategy, and strategy shouldn’t be delegated before you’ve earned the right to delegate it.
You Understand the Channels
You’ve run enough ad campaigns to know what good performance looks like in your category. You’ve analysed enough retention data to spot patterns. You’ve built enough content to know what resonates.
You’re not trying to become a technical expert in everything. But you’re fluent enough that when someone pitches you a strategy, you can tell whether it’s grounded in reality or recycled from a framework that worked for someone else.
You Build Systems, Not Campaigns
The goal isn’t to get really good at running Facebook ads for six months until the next algorithm change makes you start over.
The goal is to build growth systems that compound: content that attracts long-term, organic traffic; retention mechanisms that turn customers into repeat buyers; brand equity that makes acquisition easier over time.
These systems take longer to build. But they’re yours. And they don’t disappear when you stop feeding the machine.
The Underrated Advantage of Staying Close
There’s an economic argument for DIY ecommerce growth: it’s cheaper, at least initially.
But the real advantage isn’t financial. It’s strategic.
You learn faster. When you’re doing the work, you’re getting direct feedback. You see what converts and what doesn’t. You hear how customers talk. You notice the patterns that no one else would flag because they’re not immersed the way you are.
You stay nimble. When your growth strategy lives in your head (or at least within your team) you can pivot quickly. You’re not waiting for an agency to update the deck or reschedule the strategy call. You just move.
You maintain voice. Brand consistency isn’t about templates and tone guides. It’s about one coherent intelligence behind everything you put out. When you’re close to the work, everything sounds like it came from the same place, because it did.
You retain value. The knowledge you build by staying close to growth doesn’t just help you now. It’s an asset. When you eventually do hire specialists or scale a team, you’re hiring from a position of competence, not desperation.
When DIY Breaks Down (And What to Do About It)
Let’s not romanticise this. DIY ecommerce growth does have limits. At some point, you will need help. The question is: when, and in what form?
The founders struggle? They wait until they’re drowning, then outsource everything at once.
The better approach is to add support incrementally, in areas where you’ve already built competence.
You’ve been writing all your own email campaigns for a year. You know what works. You’ve developed a voice. Now you can bring in a contractor to help with execution, not strategy.
You’ve been running ads long enough to know your CAC benchmarks, your retention path, your unit economics. Now you can hire a specialist to optimise, because you’ll know whether what they’re doing makes sense.
You’ve built a content engine that’s generating organic traffic and brand authority. Now you can bring in a writer to help scale it, because you’ve already established what “good” looks like.
The principle is simple: never outsource what you don’t yet understand.
Because if you do, you’re not delegating. You’re just hoping someone else knows better than you do. And they probably don’t, at least not about your specific business.
Building for the Long Haul
This strategy… it’s slower at first.
It takes longer to learn the channels. Longer to build systems. Longer to develop the competence that makes everything else easier.
But compounding takes time.
The founder who spends six months learning how to build effective content will still be benefiting from that skill five years later. The founder who outsourced it on day one is still dependent on someone else to make it happen.
The founder who understands retention economics can make smarter product decisions, pricing decisions, acquisition decisions. The founder who’s only ever looked at a dashboard built by someone else is flying blind.
The founder who owns their growth strategy can weather algorithm changes, market shifts and agency churn. The founder who doesn’t is perpetually vulnerable.
DIY isn’t about rejecting help. It’s about building from a position of strength rather than dependency.
You Don’t Have to Choose Between Growth and Ownership
The conventional wisdom suggests a trade-off: either you grow fast by outsourcing to specialists, or you grow slowly by doing everything yourself.
That’s a false choice. The real trade-off is between fragile growth (let’s say fast, expensive, dependent on things outside your control) and resilient growth (this iscompounding, efficient, rooted in systems you understand and own).
DIY growth is resilient growth.
It’s not about doing everything yourself forever. It’s about staying close enough to the work that you can shape it, learn from it and retain control over the direction of your business.
It’s about recognising that growth isn’t something you buy. It’s something you build.
The founders who build it themselves (even if it takes longer) are the ones who end up with businesses they still recognise ten years later. Businesses that feel like theirs.
If you’re tired of growth strategies that sound impressive but don’t feel like you… or if you’re ready to take back control of how your business grows… let’s talk.
I work with founders who want to build growth systems that are sustainable resilient and unmistakably theirs.
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