MAXIMIZING EFFICIENCY and INNOVATION: With Andrew Hamada | Think Big With Dan & Qasim

Welcome to Think Big with Dan and Qasim. Join hosts Dan Melnick and Qasim Massoud as they explore big ideas, limitless possibilities, and engage with visionaries, entrepreneurs and thought leaders who dare to dream big. Get inspired, motivated, and find practical tips for personal growth. Think big, dream bigger, and ignite your potential.

Welcome to Think Big with Dan and Konstantin and our guest today is Andrew. So, Andrew, if you want to go ahead and introduce yourself, tell us where you live and what you do.

Hey, I'm Andrew Hamada. I'm in Seattle, Washington here in the United States, and I lead a data and analytics company called Reason Automation. We help brands spend a lot less time managing their financial data from Amazon and more time actually taking action on it.

Awesome. So how did you get this idea? We like an Amazon seller. Like what kind of inspired you to like, start this and build this product?

Yeah. So we didn't think we would ever be entrepreneurs, but we were Amazonians, so we did work at the company. And you've probably heard a couple of things about what it's like to work there. Yes, they're all true, all the good and bad things, but two in particular stand out. One is that Amazon really, really loves you to use data for everything. And that means that as a, you know, undergrad business degree holder trying to get permission to do things, I was expected to go run my own analyses and I had basically to bring Big Bridge down to the basis point in order to get anything done. But the second thing you may have heard is that Amazon is really cheap. And so there was no team of analysts, no dashboards, no tooling or any kind to help me do this. It was learn how to write SQL, learn how to create ETL pipelines, learn how to schedule and manage jobs, learn how to validate your own data, and then munge it all together in Excel. And so at first, that is an absolutely scary and terrifying skill set to have to develop. But if you do it, and most people at Amazon do, you end up with kind of a superpower, where now, now you don't need to be beholden to anybody else to help you bring data and actually help you understand what your strategic opportunities are or prove them. You have all that capability yourself, and then Amazon does its thing, churns you out. And we expected to be able to use those same skills on the other side of the table on behalf of brands or agencies or what have you. And instead you get what brands are very, very sick of, which is the standard reporting interfaces in vendor central and seller central, which you know, Amazon is doing their best, but they're limited. And ultimately the world's best dashboard only really does 50 to 70% of what you need. And then you're looking around for that export to Excel button anyway, so we figured let's cut out the middleman, equip a lot of these brands with all the high quality data, ingredients and analytics ingredients they need in their kitchen and then let the cooks cook.

Awesome. So like, are a lot of the people that you know with you working in this company, formerly Amazon employees or just you and your co founder?

I guess. Like what does that look like? Yeah, it's about a half, half mix. So my co founders and I are all ex Amazon. We have a couple of other ex Amazon folks, but everybody else is comes from all over tech and various other places. The thing that we try to make consistent is that even if you never worked at Amazon, we try to sort of educate you in the best of their mental models and frameworks and how it works there. We tried to bring a lot of that with us while leaving behind the things that we didn't love. And so we've tried to train everybody to think the same way that Amazonians do.

Amazing. So if I'm like an Amazon seller and if I want to use your platform, can you just kind of guide me down the customer journey of like the exact benefits that it would help me, you know, on the platform?

Yeah, sure thing. So if you're a seller, you know, you're a business owner, you know, as opposed to, you know, being like Sony, where you're general manager of sales for Sony, that's your W2 job. So if you own your business, you have, you know, way more things to do than you have time to do. And you're always looking for opportunities to automate or put an entire track of work to bed, particularly in the early days. But you know, oftentimes what sellers find is that a year or two into the journey they've done all of the easy and the medium hard growth, right? And now they're looking for what are the extra hidden opportunities that I need to spend more time thinking about. And they haven't ever developed those skills necessarily because up until that point it's been about find the biggest burning fire and put it out or find the biggest pit of money and jump into it. And those things are usually pretty obvious in years 2, 3. And as context evolves, it can become a lot less obvious. So what we do is we help those brands take a really data driven approach to their business. Looking at things like the relationship between sales, traffic, advertising, supply chain, customer behavior, et cetera, and not only helping you understand your growth opportunities, but also your opportunities to do things like improve profit, which are becoming more and more important. Back when money was free, you know, three, four years ago, and for the decade before that, growth was king. But these days, a lot of sellers, as money is not free and as Amazon fees keep creeping up, they only really care about growth if it puts a dollar in their pocket at the end of the year. And a lot of them aren't used to thinking about the relationship between all of their operational expenses and advertising expenses and ebitda.

Right. So in terms of, like, improving profit, could one example be like, maybe even saying, hey, like, you know, which keywords to rank on? I guess, like, what does that look like? You know, just getting more specific.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a bunch of different levers that sellers have to pull in order to grow their business. We generally think of them as being sales growth, traffic growth, you know, pulling that leverage, content and operations. What we don't do is the traffic piece, because there's a lot of companies out there that are all trying to get a piece of the Amazon advertising pie. They've built a lot of really great solutions, and they've all kind of approached each other now, and they're becoming a little commoditized. And so rather than try to fight in that bloody ocean, we said, everybody's already got an ad solution. Instead, where people are struggling is how do they mechanize some of the custom analyses and other sorts of analyses that they know are important for their business, that these custom or even. Sorry, sorry, these standard dashboards aren't doing a good job of answering. So, for example, you can imagine that if you're a seller and you are shopping for a dashboard, the tool that you need if you sell 10 products, is completely different than if you sell 5,000 products with a bunch of size and color variations. But tools don't usually have the flexibility to go one way or the other. They're usually built for one use case, and they expect you to kind of adapt accordingly. What we do is we give you direct access to the underlying data so that you can build whatever custom tools and analyses that you want in addition to using our dashboards. And that way, a lot of our clients are basically moving from one of these stock tools and using us to build exactly what they need or to automate away a lot of the manual processes they're already doing. Right.

So they can go back and look and say, hey, listen, like this product or this SKU is not super profitable. I should kind of maybe like if they have, you know, especially if they have like 5,000 SKUs, they're probably constantly checking to see, like which SKU should they deactivate or which skews should they maybe even raise their prices or try and go and lower their costs, things like that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, if you're looking at the profitability at the product level, then those are the exact levers that you should be thinking about, do I delist this product? Like, is it actually right for me to sell it in Amazon? And the truth is that, you know, 20 to 40% of products are going to fail on Amazon. They're just not the market. And then to your exact point around, what are all the costs and investments that you're making and how does that contribute to the profitability? Like, would this product be profitable if we spent, you know, 1 10th on advertising and sold 110 as much? Like, maybe that's an okay outcome. You know, we'd rather make a dollar on 10 units every month than lose a dollar on 100 units every month. But really where we start to get deadly and special is, you know, to the point around that person, the 5,000 item catalog. You cannot do that item by item. There's just not enough hours in the week to do that or even every month. So you start to need to look at trends and collections of products. And so our, because we give you direct access to data, we make it really easy for sellers to analyze entire product collections as well as other attributes. Like, imagine that you're selling footwear. You probably are interested in understanding the performance of each individual style, but you also care about things like sizes and colors at scale across all of your product lines. Because if you notice at scale that, you know, sizes 12 and up suddenly are selling a lot more, that's something that can be really, really helpful for lowering costs and improving your supply chain efficiency for across your entire catalog in the next year. And you're never going to get to that insight by looking at individual pairs of shoes. You have to look at it by being able to tag products by size, by product line, by color, et cetera, and looking for those trends at scale.

So are most of your customers like within that category of having thousands of SKUs or do you have several customers that have like a lot less SKUs?

We are typically suited for customers that have complexity. And so that can mean huge catalog. It can also mean multiple Amazon accounts. So, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs don't sell everything through one seller account. They sell it through different accounts for each brand they own. Or maybe you've bought a bunch of brands over the years. FBA aggregation was a really big thing in the year, you know, three, four years ago, and it's still a little bit there. And so maybe your business is divided across 15Amazon accounts and you don't want to be dealing with your dashboard 15 times. You want to get the data out of 15 accounts, combine and consolidate it and then do your analysis. Those are the folks that tend to find the most value in what we do for sure.

So is your analysis mostly like, is it only like Amazon? Because like, many sellers obviously have different channels, right? Many sellers are like omnichannel D2C, which is kind of what we focus on, right? Amazon retail. So if they kind of want to look at all those channels, can your dashboard do that or is it really only Amazon?

Ooh, you get, this is the question that every single person on a sales demo and every single one of my customers asks me all the time is, you know, you're full Amazon today. When are you going to do Walmart, Shopify, Home Depot, TikTok, shop, et cetera, et cetera. And my answer to them is, is always the same, which is, it's not that we don't see the value, but the reason that you chose us and didn't choose one of the, you know, 500 channel tools is because you recognize that there is something about Amazon that makes it more difficult to operate. And that if you are one of Those, you know, 500 connection point API tools that can connect to, you know, Facebook, Google, all these shopping marketplaces, every advertising channel, et cetera, and Amazon makes an update that requires a bunch of dev work. How does that get prioritized in your list of stuff? It has to. 499 other channels. So we tell our customers, you actually really want a pure play partner for something as complicated as Amazon is something as critical as Amazon because even if you are selling in other channels, Amazon is probably the biggest. It's certainly the most complicated and it's probably the most strategically important. So invest there. We also think that it has the most data, you know, Shopify is probably a close second and they're getting better all the time. But the Amazon ecosystem is just so enormous and they have a full retail media stack now that it's essentially one of the only channels where you can go all the way from initial impression through conversion, through repurchase, and get that entire data in one ecosystem. And that makes it super valuable to focus on even if you have other channels for sure.

And so obviously now we're like in a new year and every year Amazon is always announcing different changes. So what are you kind of seeing in terms of like some of like the, the trends on Amazon or things that might even like affect your customers and clients, businesses?

Really great question. I could talk about this for, you know, an hour and a half on its own, but I'll focus on a couple things that are the most recent. So first is Amazon on the seller side has been raising fees every single year for a very long time and raising advertising costs and et cetera. And seller margins as a result have gotten much more compressed. And going into 2025 a lot of sellers were terrified that fees would go up again. Amazon came out with this announcement that said we will not raise any fees for sellers in 2025 at all and will not introduce any new ones. And that felt like a big win. Then Amazon showed the other side of the coin and basically revealed a new reimbursements program. And what that means is that sometimes Amazon makes mistakes and loses your product or damages your products or what have you before they ever get to ship to customers. And there is a very large cottage industry around service agencies or SaaS, companies that help sellers recover some of that money from Amazon by filing claims, identifying trends, et cetera. And essentially Amazon has said, no, no, no, you don't need to do that anymore, that's not necessary. From now on we're not going to honor that process. Instead we will proactively reimburse you when we lose things. All you need to do is upload your cost of goods sold, which if you are a business owner selling products, the absolute last thing you want to do is tell Amazon where you're getting your products and how much. Because all of that data is absolutely going to be an input into how much they charge you, how they source their own private label products, etc. Etc. And of course, you know, they say that doesn't happen and I'm sure that there are some guardrails in place to keep it from happening and I'm sure it happens anyway.

Yeah, yeah, that's definitely tricky, but it's interesting, I mean at least that they raise fees. But I guess on the flip side, yeah, there's always nuances. It's like, it's never like a one sided sort of thing.

Yeah, the other big one is generative AI and I'm sure that you know, every person that comes on this, on the show with you talks about this to some degree or another, and I'm not going to be any different. Amazon is neck deep with Claude and Anthropic, so they have a very vested interest in making this work. And my friends internally there tell me that AI has been fully rolled out to every employee and is being used on a regular basis, especially in tech, for, you know, all the coding use cases you hear about. But that that same mental model has been hitting a lot of teams, roadmaps and goals. And you can see that in the types of products that are getting released. This is going to impact brands in two ways. First, you're going to see a lot more AI tooling become available for you as a seller. Some of it's going to be awesome, some of it is going to be absolutely terrible, and some of it is going to be awesome one day and terrible the next day. But Amazon has shown that they are serious about investing here and I would expect really rapid iteration in that space. That's actually kind of rough news for providers like me because it means Amazon is coming for our lunch and trying to make it so that brands need us less and less and less and can rely on the ecosystem more and more. So, hey, it's a win for brands. Just take everything with a grain of salt, as always. The second is that Amazon is hyper aware that LLM success is driven by the input data quality and accordingly they are trying to lock down as much of their public data as possible. And the biggest one is customer ratings and reviews. It used to be that you could go to any product detail page for any product on Amazon and read every single review ever written with star rating, with who wrote it, with all the keywords, et cetera. And I think Amazon assumes that nobody is ever going to bother scraping all of this and like create anything of value from it. Well, and then OpenAI showed us that actually everybody can make a product that makes that pretty trivial and turns it into highly valuable graph information. And since then, Amazon's been locking it down. Makes sense from their perspective, but really sucks for brands because that was your one source of getting that data. Yeah, until this year you could still go to a detail page and scroll backwards, click through to see up to 100 ratings and reviews. But if you're a brand with 10,000 reviews on a product, how useful is that? Now they're actually updating it again so that you will have to log in as a customer in order to see ratings and reviews, which means all scraping is dead, right? Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, as you said, right, like, these, like, large platforms like Amazon or even Shopify are always trying to make their own versions of their SaaS products, you know, but, like, it's never going to be as good. And like, you know, obviously you got a head start, so it's always important to stay one step ahead. So I guess, like, on that note, right, if you could go back in time to before you got started, like, what is the one biggest piece of advice that you wish you knew?

Okay, there are two. I'm going to cheat and give you two.

Sure.

One is something for me personally in my career, which is leaders need to lead. I'd heard that as kind of an idiom many times before and thought, well, duh, like, what does that mean? Of course a leader needs to lead. What the heck else do you need to do? But it wasn't until spending time as a leader, managing managers at scale, like in this company, that I started to understand exactly what that means. And you probably understand this too, Dan, that when you're a W2 employee or working for somebody else, there is always somebody else leading. There's always somebody else's priorities that you are inheriting, whether you know it or not. And on one hand, that can get annoying sometimes as you get told to do things that you don't want to do. But it also is a huge security blanket. It means that ultimately decisions that you make aren't the critical ones and that you don't need to make them on behalf of everybody else. You're all kind of following what somebody else is saying. Even if you have some independence in your area of influence, compare that to being, you know, at the top of your own company. Even though I have co founders, everybody is looking to me to set direction. Anytime there's any ambiguity about strategic direction, what's important, values, priorities, they're looking to me. And if I am not very visibly leading, then there's ambiguity. I didn't recognize how much ambiguity that was and how easy it was for me to kind of resolve it just by being really clear, really opinionated in public while still giving people the opportunity to disagree with me in a safe way. So if I could go back in time and wave a magic wand, I would be that leader from day one. I would be a lot less humble about it. I think my personality is just generally to try to say, you know, what do I know? I'm trying to learn with everybody else, etc. And that's true. But at the same time, I think a lot of my teammates wanted me to be that person saying, this is how it works. Here is where we're swimming at all times. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah.

The other one is something that I learned a while ago and that I constantly am reteaching myself. It's the only piece of advice that I give out more generally to other people. And when I periodically do lectures or guest speaking or teach at a class or what have you, I always give this piece of advice of advice. So we're wind to 2011 and I just started at Amazon as a fresh out of college hire and I asked my boss kind of a lame question, my skip manager, I was like, you know, what's the one piece of advice you'd give me to succeed here at Amazon? And he gave me a much better answer than I deserved. He immediately had one. He said, andrew, here's how it works. At any given time at Amazon, you have a hundred things to do. 20 of those things is going to be really important and valuable. Move the needle for the business, move the needle for the team, move the needle for your career. Personally, you're going to have time for five. And what that means is the other 95, including the other 15 that are valuable, will go away. You can't put them up, pick them up tomorrow, tomorrow you have another hundred things. You can't give them to anybody else without considering that they already have 100 things and everything you give them becomes 100, 100, 203, etc. And that problem never, ever, ever goes away. So to succeed in Amazon, and now my advice is to succeed at anything, including leading a startup, you have to get really good at two skills. First is you have to get good at picking and justifying your five things. Just stop angsting about it. Just go, you know, identify the 20 that are valuable. Don't, you know, spend a time creating a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive decision making model. Just pick and go. That's part one. Part two is you have to practice letting go of the other 95, because otherwise you end up in this constant cycle of angst, wearing these weights of missed opportunity around your neck that constantly make you move slower and make decisions slower and eventually add up and burn you out. And I think that this lesson was super, super valuable for me to hear at Amazon. It took me two years there to internalize it and I still burned myself out. I watched tons of other people not hear it and not internalize it and flame out as well. And I see I imagine this is happening in corporate America, all over the place, and with entrepreneurs all over the place. So if I had to go back in time to when I started reason, I probably would have taken a week to just remind myself of that paradigm over and over again before I entered the, you know, the busiest, most stressful period of my life where that lesson was going to be deployed 100,000 times a day.

Yeah, that's some great advice. So obviously now we're in 2025 and I'm always curious, right like this this year just started. So if we're going to have this conversation again in one year from now, where do you see things going for your business?

I think that everybody in the Amazon data space is focused on getting better and better and more unique outcomes for their clients. Three, Amazon data was hard to pipe, and just getting it out of Amazon systems, cleaning it up and storing it, was enough to have a business, and we did. But Amazon's made a lot of improvements to their APIs and other tooling. And now just getting the data is a commodity and the price cratered accordingly. And so everybody is trying to figure out, how do you make that data more and more usable? I see this in three ways. The first is the most technical, creating more useful data schemas. What do I mean by that? If data normally lives in 15 different reports and you need to like, you know, combine and transform them in pivot tables and vlookups in Excel and blah, blah, blah, blah, how do you create that unified data set that eliminates all that prep work and make it easy? Still a little technical, still not visualization. But, you know, for the data savvy folks like me, that's really what they want. They want the data assembled, all the hard work done, and then for you to get out of the way for them to get creative. The second is in visualization. So analytics, tooling, et cetera, whether that's a dashboard, whether that's a report or a jupyter notebook or something else, how do you make the data easier to consume for a wider and wider audience, meeting them where they're at? And I think as part of that, we are exploring how do you get beyond what exists today and what we think is going to exist in the next couple of years and leapfrog that to the next five, ten years down the road? And so again, we're coming back to AI. Everybody's, I think, pie in the sky dream is to have a tool or an assistant that you, you and anybody else at your company can talk to in human language, using your own voice and get really business accurate answers because it's doing all the translation for you. We are so far from that. So many people in our space have promised products that do this. I've tried them all. They all have the exact same problems. We've tried to build it internally. We have the exact same problems, but is there. And of course everybody's iterating on it as fast as possible. So expect a lot from us in that space. My goal is that you talk to your database and get answers, not just SQL queries. The last is how do we create predictions, you know, predictive analytics and net new data that you didn't have insights into before. As we get better and better with big Data and as LLMs and machine learning get better and better about interpreting it at scale, our company is really well positioned to help you with that because our entire core in bread and butter was getting really high quality structured data out of these tools in the first place. So we're already set up to equip you for that kind of predictive analytics and we see a lot of our biggest customers doing that already with AI, ML, forecasting, price optimization, etc. Amazing.

So if somebody watching this wanted to reach out to you, wanted to work with you guys, what's the best way to get in contact? If you can share like your website, email or a contact form?

Yeah, absolutely. It's reason automation.com is our website. If you want to talk to me, it's andrewasonautomation.com I check all my email. We're not such a big company that you won't get a response. Please check out the website. Also, I am perpetually on LinkedIn, so if you look up Andrew Hamada on LinkedIn, you'll see me in this great blue suit that has become something of my trade show trademark. Come say hi.

Awesome. Well, Andrew, thanks so much for your time today.

Thank you, Dan. It was great being on the show. Appreciate your time. Of course, Sam.