Khue Tran — Ecom operator from Hanoi

Khue Tran

📍 Hanoi, Vietnam · operating US time zone

ABOUT

I am Khue Tran. Ecom operator from Hanoi.

15 years in performance marketing. Half affiliate veteran, half wholesale ecom operator, full-time AI/automation builder. I run two wholesale brands (DTK, ND) and one private label brand (LAVIS) from Hanoi, while advising B2B wholesale ecom founders on the boring infrastructure work that actually compounds — and using AI to solve store operations and marketing problems faster than I could without it.

15+

years in performance marketing

3

US wholesale brands I operate

3

countries lived & worked

14h

time zone gap to LA daily

THE JOURNEY

From a Russian dorm to running 3 US brands from Hanoi

2011

Russia · the first $1

Vietnamese student in Russia chasing affiliate marketing. Reading Pat Flynn at midnight, copying landing page patterns, testing Google AdWords with whatever rubles I could spare from a student stipend. Most things failed. A few things worked.

2014

Vietnamese affiliate blog · top 10

Built a Vietnamese affiliate blog that ranked top 10 in its niche. Not big money by US standards, but enough to learn what most marketers never do: how to make $1 turn into $1.50 reliably, at scale, while nobody is watching.

20142016

Niche site flips · Escrow deals

Built and sold niche affiliate sites across Amazon Associates, Clickbank, and Vietnamese networks. Individual deal sizes ran $50k–$500k, transacted through Escrow.com. Buyers were US/EU portfolio investors building affiliate rollups during that brief window when PBNs were still profitable to acquire.

Late 2016

The nail pivot · real inventory

Amazon kept cutting commission rates and Google’s quality-update shadow was already visible. Started a US wholesale nail supply ecommerce brand. Real inventory, real customers, real warehouses. Went through several rebrand cycles between 2016 and 2020 because brand-name fit matters more than founders admit.

Today

Three brands · ~$500k MRR · Hanoi to US

DTK, ND, and LAVIS Nail Supply serve the US salon and wholesale market. Combined ~$500k MRR. Shopify multi-store, shared GMC catalog, cross-brand ad accounts. Day starts at 4am to overlap with US Pacific hours. Warehouse ops happen while I sleep.

BRANDS I OPERATE

Three US wholesale brands. One shared infrastructure.

DTK

DTK Nail Supply

B2B wholesale, salon-pricing-for-everyone model. Anchor brand of the portfolio.

WHOLESALE · EST. 2016 · SAN JOSE + OHIO

ND

ND Nail Supply

Sister wholesale brand. Complementary product lines, strongest blog and content engine of the portfolio.

WHOLESALE · SHOPIFY ADVANCED · 309 POSTS

LV

LAVIS Nails

Private label brand. Direct-to-consumer positioning, different audience from the DTK/ND wholesale side.

PRIVATE LABEL · DTC · META + GOOGLE ADS

WHAT I DO

The boring infrastructure work that compounds

🛍️

Shopify

Multi-store infrastructure, app stack optimization, checkout flow, performance, theme dev.

📣

Paid Ads

Google Search, Performance Max, Meta. Branded, prospecting, retargeting. Cross-brand portfolio thinking.

🔍

SEO

Technical SEO, content decay, cannibalization audits, schema, internal linking, E-E-A-T.

📦

GMC & Feeds

Google Merchant Center catalog health, product feed quality, OOS sync, disapproval triage.

✍️

Content Systems

Editorial workflow, content audits at scale, AI-assisted production with operator review.

🤖

AI & Automation

Vibe coding internal tools, custom MCPs, AI-assisted ad creative, automation for store ops + marketing workflows. AI is my second brain.

TOOLS I BUILT

Internal operator tools for running 3 ecom brands

Running three stores with a small team across a 14-hour time zone gap means I build every internal tool I cannot buy off the shelf, or that does not fit our workflow. None of these are productized SaaS. They are operator tools, the kind you write on a Saturday because tomorrow’s campaign needs them.

🔌

CUSTOM MCPs

Google Ads · GMC · Shopify write

Programmatic write access to ad platforms, merchant feeds, and stores. Safety rails for budget changes and learning-phase guards built in.

📦

INVENTORY HUB

Multi-staff Shopify webapp

Internal inventory app for 3 stores. Replaces the CLI tool warehouse staff could not use. Cross-store sync, rule engine, audit trail.

🚨

STOCK ALERTS

Daily 7:30 AM low-stock + OOS

Auto-monitor 366 must-stock SKU watchlist across 3 stores. Telegram alert before reorder hits Google Shopping disapproval.

🔬

BLOG AUDIT PIPELINE

Decay · cannibal · schema at scale

Audited 309 ND blog posts end-to-end. GSC pull, decay scoring, SERP cannibalization, schema validation, fix plan generation.

📰

MORNING BRIEF

6:30 AM macro briefing

Pulls 8 sources (yfinance, FRED, vnstock, SBV, Polymarket, GDELT). Rule-based regime classifier. Telegram delivery in 9s.

💓

HEARTBEAT AGENT

Proactive ops assistant

AI that checks email, calendar, ad-account anomalies on a rotation throughout the day. Reaches out only when it actually finds something.

Running a wholesale ecom brand and stuck?

If your ad/SEO/content stack got too complex to hold in one head, that is exactly what I help with. Book a free 30-minute call.