Episode #20 - Mark Builds Brands

#15MinuteFounder

In this episode of The 15-Minute Founder, we sat down with Mark Builds Brands, a YouTube creator and entrepreneur focused on e-commerce, AI automation, and direct response marketing.

He has built a reputation for launching highly profitable online brands while sharing unfiltered insights on content creation, funnels, and growing businesses digitally.

Here’s the full conversation.

Highlights

Q: It’s 2025, you have zero dollars, zero followers, and need to make your first dollar online. What do you do?

Mark: I’d probably build AI tools and sell them to businesses that are basically still stuck running systems from five years ago.

Think brick-and-mortar businesses that are still adapting to social media in general. Imagine coming in there with AI systems to help them be more efficient.

You have to be a little technical with some of the AI tools, but if I wasn’t comfortable with that side, e-commerce is still a fantastic way to make money. It’s getting more competitive, but there’s still plenty of room to eat.

Q: Is e-commerce dead in 2025, or would you still advise someone to start an e-commerce business?

Mark: If you’re being completely objective, you’ll have an easier time starting your first business somewhere else. But e-commerce is still a phenomenal business to start.

You can do other things that are probably easier to make your first dollar online, but will they give you the freedom and flexibility that you really want?

With e-commerce, you have to learn a lot of skills – a little bit of copy, ads, organic content, CRO, web design – and bring them all together. You don’t have to be a savage at all of them, but you have to be kind of good at all of them if you’re a one-man band.

But when you build that up, e-commerce is one of those businesses where you can put $1 in and get $3-4 out and only work a few hours a day.

You can have an e-commerce business making $10K-30K a month in profit while working a few hours a day, spending time with family, doing whatever you want.

But you can also build it to be one of those brands that exits for $100 million, $500 million, or even a billion dollars plus.

Q: What’s your issue with people who preach focusing on just one skill like copywriting or high-ticket closing?

Mark: You’re still somebody’s employee. If you’re a high-ticket closer, you are an employee to the offer owner. They could fire you at any point, sometimes purely for political reasons. Same thing with copywriting, especially with AI. If you’re not empowered by AI as a copywriter, you’re just not going to make it.

There was a point recently where we were going to hire a copywriter, and I was like, “You know what? No, I’m just going to build an AI agent to write all the copy for me.” And we did. Those days are already here – it’s not coming, we’re already here.

Q: What is a direct response savage, and why are you one?

Mark: A direct response savage is somebody who can convince just about anybody on the internet, without ever seeing them in person, to buy one of your products the first time they ever see it.

That’s what direct response really is – directly getting a response from a random stranger on the internet.

If you run an ad that’s so good that a customer sees it, knows you, likes you, trusts you enough to pull out their credit card and pay you money on the very first time they’ve ever seen you – that’s a hard thing to do. Especially right now with skepticism at an all-time high and trust at an all-time low.

Q: How would you explain direct response to a 5-year-old?

Mark: Direct response is trying to get something from somebody on basically the very first impression.

If I was meeting you for the first time and I really needed to get $20 from you, but you had no idea who I was, and by the time I walked away I had your $20 in my pocket – that’s direct response.

Q: If there’s one skill an e-commerce business owner needs to know in 2025, what is it?

Mark: I think it’s AI right now. The really most savage skill is combining AI with direct response.

Direct response pays your bills tomorrow, branding pays your bills in 6-12 months from now. You should do both, but for early entrepreneurs, you have to know direct response.

If you apply AI to that, that’s why I spend so much time every day working on not just prompt engineering – because I think that’s relatively basic – but building workflows and agents to basically act as employees in your business that work 24/7, don’t complain, and don’t require much of a salary at all.

Q: How did you become known as someone who builds brands?

Mark: It started when I was 18 with my first e-commerce brand. What I’m really interested in is creating not just a following, but people that would completely change aspects of themselves after following you.

They adopt all your philosophies, your vision, your mission, and turn into like a little army of mini-mes. That’s ultimately why I’m “Mark Builds Brands” – that’s what I try to create.

Q: Is there a playbook for building a brand?

Mark: On the branding side, especially in e-commerce, it’s differentiation. The question is: how do you actually differentiate yourself?

I was looking at the e-commerce content scene, and I strongly dislike the majority of content creators because they all say the same thing.

You can tell they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I was like, “I’m building a brand around myself. How do I differentiate?”

I decided to take it to the extreme. Not only am I going to say screw the SEO titles – I don’t really have keywords in my YouTube videos – I’m also going to say screw custom thumbnails.

I don’t do any custom thumbnails or put thought behind them. I’m even going to say screw production quality.

I film my videos on a MacBook with earbuds and a mic I got from Walmart for eight bucks. And the final piece: I film every single video with my shirt off in the dark, which is literally how I work all day.

Q: Was this differentiation strategy intentional?

Mark: A lot of it just kind of stumbled together, but that’s also just who I am. The non-polish, just giving raw value, screw what anybody else thinks – that’s just who I am and my way of communicating.

It wasn’t like I was planning all this out step by step. It just fell into place because that’s my personality naturally.

Q: Were you always planning to get into e-commerce?

Mark: No. Up until I was 17, I wanted to be an anesthesiologist. I love health and would read health encyclopedias for fun. I found the biology and physiology of the human body fascinating.

Then I turned 17, started looking at universities, and did the math on how much time it would actually take to become an anesthesiologist.

Four years undergrad, four years medical school, one to two years residency, one to two years fellowship, and then you’re still starting at the bottom. I’m 24 years old now – I would still be in medical school.

Once I discovered that wasn’t what I wanted, I went down the business rabbit hole. I read every single biography about Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Mark Cuban, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk.

I was feeding my brain this information about how to be a good entrepreneur every second of the day.

Q: What was driving you at 17 to consume all that information?

Mark: I’ve always wanted to be the best at everything. In high school, I wanted to be the best player on the basketball team and also be really good at academics.

I studied like crazy. Not being the best really bothered me – it would take up space in my mind and drive me into action.

When you have a little voice in your head saying you’re never good enough, you will never stop working. I’ve since changed my mindset into something slightly more healthy, but the high-performance mindset is a double-edged sword.

The same thing that makes you a savage high performer is also your biggest Achilles heel in your personal life.

Q: You mentioned changing to a healthier mindset. What’s the new approach?

Mark: The voice is still there a little bit, but instead of “you’re never going to be good enough,” it’s shifted to “there’s always more you can do.”

My mindset now is not as much focused on accomplishing goals as it is on building joy and having fun in the process.

One of my favorite quotes is: “The man who loves walking will always walk farther than the man who’s in love with the destination.”

You can try to fall in love with the destination so much – making all this money, becoming a billionaire – and you’re going to watch your motivation slowly go down because it’s not fulfilling.

Recently I started shifting toward doing everything I can to enjoy the process, because that’s what 99% of your life is made up of.

Q: How do you tactically enjoy the process?

Mark: For me, it’s this childlike curiosity I have about marketing. Most people lose that natural curiosity as they grow up, but I try to keep that same curiosity frame at all times.

I’m genuinely curious about new tools popping up, new ways to convert people, new strategies I can use in my videos and ads. That stuff makes me so excited to learn about.

Most people see it as a chore, but I want to dive deeper and go down these rabbit holes. It’s like a whole new world opening up in front of me. That’s how I feel about AI right now.

Q: What’s your current AI tooling stack?

Mark: My stack is so extensive right now. I have every single subscription you could possibly imagine. I don’t even want to look at my bill for Gemini because it’s going to be crazy.

ChatGPT is obviously still the go-to, especially their new O3 model as a reasoning model – very intelligent. For image generation, ChatGPT-4o is very good. We use that plus a software called Kling for image-to-video for e-commerce.

I use Gemini very frequently – it’s ranking either number one or two in terms of intelligence standards because it has so much data. I’m usually bouncing between Gemini and ChatGPT all day.

But this is level one. The mind-blowing stuff is taking these super powerful large language models and putting workflows, automations, and agents in place for them to run 24/7 according to your processes.

Q: Can you share an example of an end-to-end agent or workflow you’ve built?

Mark: Perfect example: when creating video ads, you want the top performing hooks and scroll stoppers. A lot of the best ones aren’t created on paid media – they’re created organically, especially on TikTok.

If you can spot one of those scroll stoppers or hooks early on before anybody else, that could be a new winning ad that prints a million dollars for your business.

We built an AI agent that runs through all of TikTok according to a set of keywords, picks out the highest performing videos, specifically extracts the hook section (the first 3-5 seconds), and sends it directly to our editor so we can run that as an ad variation within 20 minutes.

What used to take us five people in a week, we can now do in two or three days with half the people and have the quality be even higher with these automation tools.

Q: Why should businesses run more ads? Aren’t ads bad because you’re paying money? Can’t you just do organic content?

Mark: At any point in time, your business is one winning ad away from doubling, tripling, or 10x-ing its growth. Look at Classic Tees – they ran one ad that brought them to eight figures within record time. One ad, eight figures.

You can look historically at companies, even big ones like Chevy and Ford, where they created one ad that just exploded their business to the point where it was unrecognizable. That’s all you need.

For me, it gets very personal because I can think of specific ad creatives made by myself or my team that took my life to the next level.

One ad took me from being a broke college kid to making my first $10K month. Same thing to go from seven figures to eight figures – there are a few ads that really take you there.

It’s the biggest needle mover you can have in your business, period. If you’re that good at writing and creating ads, you’ll never worry about getting customers ever again.

Q: Why do some people succeed with ads while others fail?

Mark: It’s important to look at the history of direct response. Most of it stems from direct response copy. If you look at old copywriters like Claude Hopkins, Eugene Schwartz, Gary Halbert – they were mostly running direct mail campaigns, which is really hard.

Copywriting is literally like learning a new language. It’s very unnatural, especially if you go through traditional educational systems where they tell you to write in the most complex way possible, use the biggest words you can.

You literally have to unlearn things to become successful.

If I went to Gary Halbert and said, “I just graduated with a marketing degree, I want to work for you,” he’d say no. That would be the biggest red flag to him, and he’d tell you your first step is to unlearn everything you were fed.

The second thing is that organic content has blown up over the past decade, and so many people are good at creating content but bad at creating conversions.

You can be really good at getting attention and suck at monetizing it. Just because you have a good hook on TikTok doesn’t mean that’s going to be a good hook for direct response.

Q: What’s usually the lowest hanging fruit for improving monetization?

Mark: Probably better copy. I put up a post on Instagram asking people to send me their stores to review.

The biggest mistake I see is people click on the link, it looks aesthetically pleasing, but then I start reading the copy and it’s terrible. Not even features and benefits – basic stuff is so bad.

People fall into the trap of “I need to build a brand, so I’ll fall in love with store design and UI” but they don’t write high-converting copy to go along with it.

That’s the 80/20 because I can tell you from experience – I’ve run funnels that are ugly as hell but still destroy because you’re getting the 80% right, which is the copy and maybe secondarily the funnel architecture.

Q: You’ve said “if you put in 80% you get 80% results, but if you put in 120% you get 1,000% results.” Can you explain this?

Mark: I’ve seen this when hiring employees. There are people who give you 80%, 90%, or 99%. But going from 99% to 100% or 100% to 120% is what separates B players from real A players.

The bar is set so incredibly low for most people. It’s easy to put in 120% – you just have to work a little bit harder than most of the lazy people you’re competing against.

If you’re not willing to sacrifice something as little as sleep to get something done, you’re going to lose to people like me. I usually sleep pretty well, but if I have a project that I said I’m getting 100% done by tomorrow, it will get done.

If it starts getting late and I don’t think I’ll hit my eight hours, then screw that. I’m going to do everything I can to stay up and get it done.

The biggest value in my life is if I say I’m going to do something, I do it at the highest level possible. Your say-do ratio.

There are so many people who just talk and have nothing to back it up. If you want to be the 120% guy, just be a man of your word.

Q: What’s another conventional marketing rule you’d throw out the door?

Mark: I would just have this as a rule: question everything. All these rules we have as marketers were just invented by some guy no smarter than me or you, and then everybody followed him.

Marketers are copycats who never look back to see why this guy actually started this in the first place.

One of the best skills you can have as a marketer is having super weird, outlandish, creative ideas that you test but don’t see anybody else doing.

If you play the game of copycatting people, you’re always going to be second. You’ll never be first.

If you want to be in first place, you have to be the guy who comes up with crazy ideas, breaks all the patterns, breaks all the rules, and still makes it work.

Q: Can you explain the three levels of speaking to people – mind, body, and soul?

Mark: There’s this famous quote: “You have to enter the conversation that people are having in their own minds.” That sounds like level one, but how can we take it further?

95% of our thoughts aren’t even conscious – they’re subconscious. You really can’t enter the conversations in someone’s mind; you’d have to enter the emotion, and emotions are felt in the body.

If level one is entering the conversation in their mind, level two is entering the emotion in their body.

The third layer is entering their level of energy in their soul, their consciousness. This is where most people never go because it’s a little woo-woo, spiritual. But I’ve noticed that the higher level of mentor you get, the more interested they are in the metaphysical spiritual side.

What’s deeper than our biology? Energy – that’s what makes up the physical matter that we are. We use the word energy – “he has good energy,” “she has bad energy” – but we don’t apply this to marketing.

There are specific states of energy. People operating at low levels of consciousness typically feel shame, guilt, apathy, fear. We have systems to measure the level of calibration somebody’s at.

If this is true, how can I write copy that speaks to people at these lower levels of consciousness, helps them raise their level to a higher one, then brings them back down so they feel that loss? That’s the perfect time to sell them a product.

Q: How can someone raise their own internal vibrations?

Mark: I’d recommend reading everything by Dr. David Hawkins, especially “Power Versus Force” and “Letting Go.”

A lot of times when you feel you’re operating at lower levels, it’s because you have this view of “life happens to me” versus “life happens for me” or “I’m in control of my life.”

The bottom levels are “life happens to me” – there’s nothing I can do, it’s all external. The next level is “life happens for me” – I’m in charge, I’m capable, I can make changes.

The final section where you get to levels like peace, love, or enlightenment is “I am life” – the complete embodiment of the highest level of energy.

Q: How do you manage consuming versus creating content in today’s attention economy?

Mark: The more you can cut out consumption that doesn’t add value to your life, the better you’ll be. That doesn’t mean scrolling social media is bad – for us it can be really good.

I find one new hook scrolling social media, feed that to my ad team, cool, we got a new winner. But that’s intentional scrolling versus non-intentional.

The more time you can spend in creation, the better you’re going to feel. You just have to be ruthless with your time. A lot of times that means not responding to people, leaving people in your life behind.

If you look at where you want to go, there are things you have to drop off on the way if you really want to get there.

Q: What’s the most underrated marketing channel for e-commerce in 2025?

Mark: TikTok Shop is the obvious one. It’s nothing new – if you caught it two years ago, you’d be chilling. But it’s still very good. The way they’ve been developing the platform is very advantageous to e-commerce businesses.

Outside of that, SMS is always super undervalued. The return on ad spend for SMS is always 10x plus for us every month.

If you have a right-wing product, you can run on Rumble. All these newer social media platforms – their ads managers, pixels, and algorithms are so weak and underdeveloped.

You have to accept there will be bugs everywhere and you won’t get good treatment like running Facebook.

Q: If you had one billboard in Times Square with one message for entrepreneurs, what would it say?

Mark: “Run more ads.”

Q: 100 years from now, when people study Mark Builds Brands, what do you want them to say about you?

Mark: I would want them to say he just experimented like crazy. I think experimentation is one of those ways you can express childlike curiosity, always enjoy the process, and constantly be learning.

You’re going to get left in the dust if you think you know everything and your ego gets in the way. Always be learning. There’s always more to learn. There’s always a bigger fish.