Marc Pitts is the founder and CEO of DiscountVapePen.com, a New Jersey online vape store that grew out of small eBay listings in 2014. When paid ads were shut off for his whole category, organic search became the only channel left, so he and his partner taught themselves SEO the hard way. The biggest lesson, in Marc's words: content written for SEO is "not written for people to actually read."
Read the full write-up on the Unscripted Small Business recap of this episode.
Marc's early posts read like a conversation in a smoke shop. That worked in 2014, when almost anything new about vaping ranked. Once the niche got crowded, his partner restructured the content with headers and pro tips, and rankings followed. Jeremy frames it as a human-to-bot-to-human chain: a person asks a search engine or an LLM, and that bot decides what the next person sees. Web copy for a Nevada dispensary reads nothing like how you would describe it to a friend, and that gap is where SEO lives.
With paid ads off the table, Marc's team tracks state-by-state and zip-code-level rules every day, keeps E-E-A-T signals clean. He watched other sellers profit from black hat tactics and passed. As he puts it, it's like "standing on your toes for everywhere that you walk," and "once you get jammed up, it could be it. That could be over."
Marc's soapbox: "The customer is always right was one of the biggest lies of our lifetime." Friendly fraud in e-commerce makes it hard to believe anyone, and a small store can't refund like Amazon. He's one of four founders in our roundup, Is the Customer Always Right? 4 Founders Push Back. For another founder building in a restricted category, hear Mark Gilliland of Kyoto Botanicals.
"How do you pivot in an industry under fire?" A domain like DiscountVapePen.com carries real authority, but it is tied to one product. Jeremy shares his Cheeseburger.space experiment on whether a domain name really matters, and Marc's question goes to future guests.
Connect with Marc at discountvapepen.com or on Facebook.
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