324 | Investing in Product Before Spending on Growth | with Robert Cardiff

Robert Cardiff is the co-founder and COO of Laundry Sauce, an 8-figure DTC brand reinventing the way consumers experience laundry. With a background in venture building and performance marketing, Robert helps Ecommerce brands unlock growth by identifying white space, building high-affinity products, and scaling through bold creative bets. Before launching Laundry Sauce, Robert founded multiple consumer businesses and now leads Give Ventures, a nonprofit teaching entrepreneurship to underserved youth in Central and South America. His work spans brand development, manufacturing operations, investor storytelling, and go-to-market execution—giving him rare end-to-end insight into what it takes to launch premium products in commoditized categories. In 2021, Robert and his co-founders made a $40,000 investment in a single anchor video—before making a single sale. That video helped legitimize their vision and raise millions in capital, setting the stage for their early DTC success. By skipping Amazon, obsessing over product-market fit, and treating customer feedback as gospel, Robert and his team built a brand people actually love in a category no one cared about. In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:39] Intro[01:22] Positioning beyond generic options[02:18] Differentiating in legacy categories[04:05] Asking why they’d buy your product[07:04] Iterating through multiple brands[08:45] Episode Sponsors: StoreTester and Intelligems[11:57] Partnering with top creatives[13:18] Launching with paid media first[15:33] Hiring experts for each channel[17:21] Growing with mostly organic traffic[18:10] Getting DTC focus right first[20:05] Surveying customers to guide R&D Want more insights from top Ecommerce leaders? Our episode guest was a featured speaker at eTail Palm Springs 2025, sharing insights with top Ecommerce minds. If you want to be part of the next big discussions, join eTail Boston in August 2025 and/or eTail Palm Springs in February 2026! Learn more at eTail’s official sites: etaileast.wbresearch.com/ etailwest.wbresearch.com/ Resources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/c/HonestEcommerce?sub_confirmation=1The World’s Best Smelling Detergent https://laundrysauce.com/Follow Robert Cardiff https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertcardiffBook a demo today at https://www.intelligems.io/Done-for-you conversion rate optimization service https://storetester.com/ If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews! Review Link: http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1447700156 Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast, community & educational resource providing online store owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business. Visit http://honestecommerce.co/ for more information. Or get all our content sent directly to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter:  https://honestecommerce.co/pages/subscribe