Jordan West

E-Com Investor & Podcast Host | Multiple Exits| Avid Golfer, Biker + Hiker | Dad Of 3 | CEO + CMO | Mastermind Host

My Journey 
When I was 23 I decided to buy a Taco Del Mar restaurant... I knew I had made a huge mistake at 2pm the first day when only 3 customers had walked in... (and two of them were my parents haha) 
For 5 years I worked hard to grow sales every way I could think of and in the end, tripled our revenue which still didn't seem to matter on the profit side. (I lost a lot of money 💰)

The one thing that I seemed to be the best at in the restaurant endeavor was marketing and getting people in the door. 

Fast forward to 2014 when my wonderful wife Carmen (definitely my better half) started a modest baby clothing line and was selling at craft markets. 

I asked if I could test running a few ads on Facebook... and the rest is history. I learned every up-and-coming strategy and tactic and helped grow the small start-up to a multi-million dollar company and still growing!

Since then we have acquired multiple DTC brands and have built an agency (upGrowth Commerce) to service our brands as well as others who are in a similar situation to us!

In 2019 we started the podcast "secrets to scaling your e-commerce brand" which is now in the top 50 business/marketing podcasts in multiple countries including Canada and the United States.

I love connecting with people, so please connect. (I do have a no a**holes policy though, so don't connect if that's you.) 

I talk all about scaling businesses using paid ads on “Secrets To Scaling Your E-Commerce Brand”.

Chief Executive Officer

We just helped a brand pass $3,000,000/month on TikTok Shop LAST MONTH and it wasn’t luck!!

We’re now ranked as one of the Top 5 TikTok agencies in North America at Social Commerce Club!!

What I've seen is... 

Most brands have no clue what the investment into TikTok Shop ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE!

They guess when to spend, when to restock, or when they’ll hit break-even.

We don’t guess.

We plan every move using a forecasting system we built in-house. 

It shows exactly:

 📈 When to scale and how fast
 💸 When you’ll hit break-even
 📊 How much to invest in creators, inventory, and ad spend
 ⚙️ When to pull back or double down

That system is the same one we use daily to manage multi-million-dollar TikTok Shop brands.

And now, we’ve decided to make it available to other operators.

If you want the same forecasting tool we use to plan, invest, and measure scale... comment “Forecast” and I’ll DM it to you. 

(must be connected)

Let me know what you think!

Another random day 
Another random screenshot from TikTok Shop at Social Commerce Club 

This is ALL incremental as fas as we can measure!

PLUS HALO 

Once you nail this channel things het WILD 

But... 

You really have to invest in the beginning. 

It's not facebook ads 

The bar to breaking even is higher thann you think. 

I just built a forecasting tool that keeps EVERY SINGLE NUMBER in mind. 

Send me a DM and I'll connect you with my team to walk you through it for your brand to see where break-even happens on platform.

I want to be clear 🫠 
These daily random TikTok Shop GMV MAX screenshots that I share are from ADS driven results ONLY 🤩 

This doesn't include organic affiliate driven content 

I feel like the guy in 2015 trying to tell his friends that Facebook ads work (I was that guy lol) while the majoirty of people were waiting...

I realize that if you haven't gone HARD on TikTok shop you won't be able to to before BFCM 

But... 2026 will be the BIGGEST SHIFT into social commerce that we have seen. 

As AI content becomes more prevalent, HUMANS will crave human connection 

Which is why I believe that LIVE SHOPPING + Afilliate driven content will be the two biggest levers any brand can add to their arsensal. 

So what is my recomendation for bransnds in 2026? 

1. Talk to my team NOW to get in line at Social Commerce Club
2. If you can't afford us... I'll send you recommendations for cheaper agencies
3. If you're just trying to dip your toes in the water of TikTok shop join my skool group here https://lnkd.in/gMAu-gDZ

Me: “If you had one controversial take on what brands get wrong on TikTok Shop… what is it?”
Zohaib Rattu 🤳: “Over-subsidizing their products.”

Me: “Not could be cannibalizing your other channels… you ARE.”

That moment hit hard!!!

Because here’s what a lot of brands are doing right now:

They take their main hero SKU
Sell it full price everywhere else

Then make it stupid cheap on TikTok Shop “just to get sales” + get momentum

And then they’re shocked when

Amazon flatlines

TOTAL MER blows up

Retail partners start asking questions
TikTok didn’t break your unit economics.

You did!!

The way I think about TikTok Shop:

It’s the only channel that will pay you (even breakeven) to give you insane impressions.
If you even make $1 profit there

And you’re getting a $30 CPM worth of awareness for free
You’re winning.

The problem...

Most brands aren’t tracking the halo.
So they see “low-margin TikTok orders”

Instead of “cheap reach that lifts Amazon / Shopify / retail”.

If I were rebuilding your TikTok Shop strategy from scratch, I’d do 3 things:

1️⃣ Protect the hero
 
No more “fire sale” pricing on the SKU that drives your brand.
 Use:

 – Smaller bundles
 – Trial sizes
 – TikTok-only variants
 
And keep price architecture consistent across channels.

2️⃣ Define your blended model
 
Decide up front:
 – What MER are you happy with including TikTok
 – How you’ll measure halo (Amazon, Shopify, retail lift)
 – What CPM you’re effectively getting from organic + creator content

If TikTok is breakeven but blended MER is up and CPMs are down… keep going.

3️⃣ Make TikTok the awareness engine, not the profit center (at first) 
 
Creators get you reach.
 
Reach fills retargeting pools on Meta, Google, Amazon, retail.
 
Your job is to:

 – Seed a ton of creators
 – Let TikTok Shop break even
 – Harvest the profit off-platform

TikTok Shop doesn’t have to be “super profitable”. (at first)

It has to be super scalable.

Curious where you’re at...
 Are you still discounting your main hero SKU heavily on TikTok Shop? 

Or have you already pulled that back?

You’re talented?
Great! Let me tell you what matters more… 
And why talent is the thing that I look for last 👇👇 

Are you complainer? 
Are you a victim?
Do you not have a growth mindset?
Can you not take criticism?
Do you have a fragile Ego? 
Is it everything everybody else’s fault?


 if you answered, yes to any of the above, I don’t want you in any of my organizations.

If you are thinking to yourself, oh man, I have these people in my organization… do everything in your power to first coach and correct, but most likely you need to remove them. 

It’s incredible What will happen when you do! 

Anyone else with me?

Big ask LinkedIn 🙏
We’re looking for a head of live shopping at Social Commerce Club 

Will be insane growth over the next 5 years 

Maybe one of the biggest ops that I can think of TBH 

Will be sooooooo much work

But you will help us build something HUGE! 

NA based only 

Message me if you think it’s you. 

This role will report directly to the CEO btw

Yes yes yes 

We have been thinking more about what this role looks like from the agency perspective.

How we train fast

Who’s base knowledge makes them a good fit etc. 

And I will tell you what I know. 

99% of people don’t get it. 

They haven’t had the paradigm shift yet. 

It’s a new muscle 

It’s a new way of thinking. 

Working with creators is HARD! 

They don’t perform like ads do 😆

But this role is really big in terms of impact and responsibility 

Seems like more brands are catching on. 

But tbh I still feel like guy in 2014 telling their friends to invest as much as they can into Facebook ads and they laugh at me 🤷‍♂️🫤 when it comes to how big social commerce really is going to be!

Here’s how I look at this…

At Social Commerce Club we… 

1. take the highest performing tiktok shop content

2. Offer a percentage of ad spend (capped) to the creator to use their content on Meta 

3. Print brands cash with these ads omnichannel 

This is the 2025 playbook imo

Yesterday I was driving with my son who’s 6… 

We saw a bunch of billboards and he was asking about the messages on each

It reminded me of the classic Tim Ferris question… so I decided to ask him

“If you could put one message on a Billboard, what would it be?” 

He took about 3 seconds and said 

“My message would be “I love you””

This kid gets it ❤️

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SARAL - Influencer Relationship Management

SARAL is the simplest and fastest way for brands to get started with influencer marketing. Find creator contacts, email them, track and manage relationships, and more. 

Learn what's working *right now* with influencer marketing. Get on our "No BS" influence marketing letter:  https://www.getsaral.com/academy

Founder

Independent Consultant

I help product/tech-oriented founders who want to grow fast. 

I work with the founder or their marketing team to create a proper Growth Strategy, come up with customer-focused Positioning & Messaging, set up attribution analytics, and help executing on the right channels for Growth, such as performance marketing or direct sales. 

My goal is to create a repeatable process for growth and create loops that compound into predictable revenue 📈

I have helped multiple founders scale to $1M+ in ARR and continue to crush it for my clients. They call me the Rainmaker 💰

Growth Consultant

Sunsama

Head of Growth

Prisma

Fractional Head of Growth

Cledara

Growth Marketing Manager

Nium

Content Marketing, SEO, and Paid Search Growth.

Context Page

Product Marketing Consultant

Bubbles

Wise

I was the first marketing hire @ Wise. Created and executed an outbound ABM plan for Wise's B2B2B strategy. Owned the affiliate program which was prime driver of end-user accounts.  9x-ed WoW application rate. Worked with the CMO, CS, and Engineering teams to promote engagement and retention.

Startup Intern

Startup Intern helps the best startups hire the best Interns.

Chief Firefighter

Founder - SARAL | The Influencer Operating System for Ecommerce

Make no mistake about it.

Influencer marketing is the next big thing. In fact, it's already here. Most of the DTC world just needs to catch up to the right ways of executing 😉

If you don’t have big names talking about you, loving you, and recommending you, you’re missing out on millions of dollars of revenue that could be yours 💸
Imagine letting that much money go down the drain because there isn't a simple enough way for you to capture it. 

When you consider that just one tag, one mention, or one recommendation could result in tens of thousands in sales, you owe it to yourself to try SARAL: The Best Influencer Marketing Tool on the Planet right now 🔥
 
🤔 What makes it the best?

Because it makes influencer marketing as simple as 1-2-3.

With a few clicks of a mouse, you’ll be able to:

1️⃣ Identify top influencers in your niche
2️⃣ Connect with them and build a relationship
3️⃣ Monetize you relationships 

And not just with one or two influencers but hundreds. Imagine 100 influencers promoting your brand on socials week on week. It brings in crazy $$$. 

That’s why you’re going to absolutely love Saral and the money it will make you 💰

Here's the best part: 

It brings in eyeballs and sales without you spending a dime on Facebook ads.

Don’t take my word for it, here’s what our users say:

💬 "This is insane. you are literally replacing a whole team of people with these features"

💬 "Holy shit just watched your demo – your product is absolutely revolutionary."

💬 "Love how organized the app is. It looks SO clean. I think the Drip part is key, glad you have that in there. Especially with the templates"

As my thanks for giving us a try, you’ll receive a FREE copy of my Quick Start Guide to Influencer Marketing, that will take your brand from nobody to superstar in no time 🌟 

Remember, it's as simple as 1-2-3 after you read the guide and you're all set  🚀

Get them talking about you NOW! 

Try here: https://www.getsaral.com

Yash Chavan

Your tech startup is only as strong as the person building the tech department.

Exactly one year ago today, I met Yash Kalwani. After several painful mis-hires and tough lessons, I finally knew what I wasn't looking for in a Head of Engineering.

What I didn’t expect: finding exactly what I was looking for... a Yash in engineering 😂

Since he joined SARAL, the product has seen a massive level-up:

👉 SARAL Inbox - like Superhuman, but for influencer managers
👉 SIA - our AI assistant powering smarter workflows
👉 Campaigns - a better way to structure and manage creator collabs

...and many more.

What most don’t realize: being a great startup CTO is hard:

- Build a lean, high-output team
- Prioritize under pressure
- Clear tech debt while still shipping fast
- Translate the why into product reality
- Survive bugs, outages, and the founder's insane timeline expectations! (guilty)

Kalwani’s done all of the above, and more, with grit, humility, and speed.

So grateful to have him building the world's simplest and complete influencer marketing platform with us at SARAL - The Influencer OS.  

If you’re a non-technical founder, don’t wait too long to find your Kalwani 🪄

🔥 We’re hiring our first Founding GTM Architect.

Yeah, I don't think that title exists in SaaS sales — so I just made one up.

This role doesn’t fit the usual mold. If you don’t see yourself as an SDR, AE, or “closer”… keep reading 👇

At SARAL, we’re building the Influencer OS for eCommerce brands, helping them build Predictable Influence instead of renting attention through ads.

We’ve scaled profitably so far while being mostly India-based.

Now, we’re ready to take it to the next level, and we’re looking for someone who wants to architect our entire US GTM - building on top of what we've achieved so far. 

You’ll design and run the full play:
🤝 Relationships + ABM + Events → not spray-and-pray cold emails or transactional selling.

You’ll work directly with me, operate like a founder, and have massive freedom to build what works.

📈 $150K OTE / 1-2% Equity
📍 Remote, US-based
 🎯 Goal: Scale and own SARAL’s US GTM motion

If you’re the kind of person who loves creating demand, showing up at events, posting, building relationships, and turning all that into revenue — this might be your dream role.

👉 DM me if this resonates, or if you know someone who would be a fit!

We just shipped one of my favorite features in SARAL: Campaign Mode ⚡️

️We advocate the “Predictable Pyramid” of influence. Seed → Ambassador → Custom Partnerships.

We finally enable the last step of that process through campaigns.

Select your top creators, set campaign stages, track progress, send emails, and measure campaign-specific results — all in one place.

No more spreadsheet or ClickUp chaos 😵‍💫

Perfect for this time of year when you want to go deeper, not wider. 

Shoutout to my man Omkar Patil for shipping this in a week, and Sneha Naik + Praful Jain for taking all the user feedback and turning it into a functioning product!

🎥 Watch the walkthrough, or log in and try it if you’re on SARAL already.

I am in the middle of reading the new “State of Ecommerce” report by KnoCommerce team, and one stat stands out glaringly:

➡️ 6,600+ word-of-mouth customers were tagged as “Google” or “Direct” in Shopify.

That explains why so many founders keep saying “ads aren’t working anymore.”

It’s not that Meta died.

It’s that your real demand drivers: influencer mentions, organic content, community buzz, never get the credit 🤷‍♂️

You're stuck optimizing for tracked clicks and ad performance, not true influence that creates enough belief in the market for your ads to work. 

And so you end up cutting the very channels that quietly make everything else perform better.

This line from the report hit home:
💬 “Without customer-declared data, brands over-invest in what looks good on paper and under-value what’s actually driving demand.”

That’s literally why we built SARAL's new measurement engine, to fix that blind spot.

To help brands see and measure the ROI of influence that pixels and affiliate links alone cannot.

If you work in Ecommerce or DTC, this report is worth spending your next coffee break reading.

I'll leave a link in the comments for whoever is interested. So glad Bar and Tina put this together! We had fun contributing, the overall report is such fire 🔥

⚡️ You gotta know the rules to know when to break them.

A brand using SARAL is getting ~46% positive response rates on their influencer outreach emails! That's a very very high amount for a seeding campaign.

But if you look at their email, it violates every "best practice" in the book:
➡️ Too many links
➡️ Long paragraphs
➡️ Asks for shipping address in the very first message

Most marketers would say: “You can’t do that!”

But here’s the thing... It works for them.

Because they know the rules, and that gives them the power to bend them.

This is why copy-paste influencer scripts don’t work. Context matters. The market's familiarity with you matters. Testing matters.

I think it works for them as they've already done some huge collabs with mega-influencers, so there's massive awareness in the space for the brand... so all the nano-influencers want to work with them.

If this brand followed "best practices" they'd be stuck in longer cycle times shipping products to influencers.

👉 Know the rules, and then bend them to your context.

This is a good lesson I wanted to share with you all today.

If you’re running outreach campaigns and seeing inconsistent results, start here:

✅ Audit your response rate (25% is a solid benchmark)
✅ Test copy variations by niche
✅ Break a rule or two intentionally and see how it does

Are you running experiments in your outreach yet?

~~~
#influencermarketing #growthmarketing #dtcbrands

⚡ Most brands miss this lever in influencer marketing.

They think of affiliate marketing and paid influencer campaigns as two separate channels. But what if you could link them?

One of our SARAL brands had a brilliant play:

They used affiliate revenue from their influencer program to fund paid collabs with top creators. All within SARAL.

Here’s how it worked:

➡️ Started by seeding 200+ creators with product over 2.5 months
➡️ Activated affiliate links to track sales
➡️ Identified 15 creators who crushed it organically
➡️ Took affiliate earnings and turned them into paid partnerships with those creators

No upfront risk. All performance-driven 🔥

This is what we call graduating creators inside the Predictable Pyramid Method.

From Seeding → Ambassador → to Paid deals…

All tracked in one dashboard. All compounding.

This is how you build an owned influencer community that pays for itself.

👉 Using your affiliate revenue to *create budget* for your paid influencers is a brilliant way to get the engine running without advocating for extra $$ internally. 

COPY THIS!

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The Battle

Jordan West

Yash Chavan

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The Battle

Jordan West

Yash Chavan

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Engagements

Likes

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