Ryan Daniel Moran (creator of the book "12 Months to 1 Million") revisits his million-dollar brand-building blueprint and explains how the plan still works but needs tactical updates for 2023. He reiterates the core three-phase approach (Grind: get first sales; Growth: scale to ~25 sales/day; Gold: replicate across four products to reach ~100 sales/day and ~$1M/year) and highlights three market changes: (1) Amazon’s algorithm now rewards outside traffic more than discount-driven promotions, increasing the importance of audience-building and email lists; (2) post‑2020 market compression and lower valuations (now ~3–5x EBITDA) make rapid large exits less common but easier mid-level success more attainable; (3) influencer/TikTok-driven virality has become a major growth channel, enabling small influencers to drive large sales spikes. He advises maintaining healthy margins, building owned traffic (email/funnels/Shopify), and using influencers creatively while keeping the original repeatable product-launch process intact.
Chapters
I wrote a book about building a million dollar business three years ago. But some things have changed and I'm going to share it with you right now. I've helped over 500 people build seven figure businesses. That was before I published 12 months to 1 million in May of 2020. I'm really proud of that. But it's been three years now since I published 12 months to 1 million and the market has changed a lot. So today I want to share with you a few things that have changed in the market or in the strategy in regards to the 12 months to 1 million plan. First of all, if you found this and you have no idea who I am, my name is Ryan Daniel Moran. I help entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses by building brands that get to 100 sales a day. And in my book 12 months to 1 million, I break down the million dollar strategy into getting four products at 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. The entire process takes a year to do. And I break this into three phases. The first phase is the grind. The purpose of the grind is just getting a darn sale. It's making all the hard decisions like what am I going to sell and how am I going to sell it and what's my product going to be and how's it going to be different from everybody else and what am I going to charge? It's doing all of those hard decisions that everybody gives up on over about 90 to 120 days. And then you take your first sale. If you do what I share inside of 12 months to 1 million and in my mentoring program, the 1%, you will come out of the gates with many sales because you'll stack the deck and have people ready and waiting to buy from you as soon as your product is ready. The second phase is called the growth. And the growth is about getting a consistent 25 sales a day. And we do this by building the audience, by being really good to our customers, by doing some very basic advertising, by turning our customers into reviews and building rating fans. That process takes a about another three to four months and that will take us from one sale to 25 sales a day, which is where we cross a consistent $10,000 per month in top line revenue. The third stage is the gold. And this is where we will finally cross 80 to $100,000 a month and give us a million dollar business. And the secret here is just repeating the process that took us six months to build, but repeating it much faster over three additional products. So we have three more products doing 25 sales a day. And since we've built the customer base and the processes of getting 25 sales a day, once, we can do it much faster over three more products at the end of the year, you have a million dollar business. You have a business that's doing 100 sales a day. The process to getting there adjusts based on where the market opportunities are. So for the rest of our time together, I'm going to go through a few things that have changed in the marketplace. Some that will help you get there faster and some pitfalls to avoid along the way. The first thing that's changed since the release of 12 months to 1 million is that Amazon's algorithm has shifted. It used to be that you could just discount your products and then you could blast it out to high heaven, or you could leak the code on on a forum and you would get a bunch of sales and Amazon would reward that. In a lot of cases, that is not the case anymore. Amazon reduces the amount of impact that discounted sales have in terms of how you rank for keywords. But there is another little loophole, if you will, that allows you to rank for keywords very aggressively. And that's because Amazon now prioritizes ad outside traffic like they used to prioritize cheap orders. So if you can control traffic outside of Amazon and bring it to the platform, Amazon will reward that more aggressively, just like they used to do in the olden days if you would do cheap discounts and giveaways for products. What this means is that you need more focus on building an audience and an email list outside of the Amazon platform. We teach our members to do is follow something called the traffic triangle. This is where you're getting exposure, followers and people on a list, an email list ready to buy from you as soon as you have a product ready. This gives you enough control of an audience to be able to rank for keywords and release any product that you want. In fact, one of our members just last week posted a screenshot of having just 100 people on an email list and having his first $500 day on Amazon. So the snowball was really starting to build and he was only a month post launch. So it doesn't take a lot of people in order to have enough of an audience to be able to control how aggressively you rank for keywords on Amazon. The big takeaway here is that audience building matters more today than it did five or even three years ago. The second thing that has changed in the last few years is that the market has compressed in 2020 and 21. E commerce was the hot girl at the dance. Everyone wanted to buy the companies, everybody wanted to start the companies. The valuations were huge and capital was easy to get. And this happened after the publication of 12 months to 1 million. I was already saying in 12 months to 1 million that you could have an 8 figure exit if you did this well and then the market goes crazy. And I had members who were getting six, seven and eight times their EBITDA and getting huge valuations when they exit their company. This was a special circumstance. Money was cheap. Aggregators were flooding into the marketplace and everybody was trying to buy up E Commerce companies. That bubble has at least deflated. Some of the aggregators that were buying up these brands tanked the brands. Some of them even went out of business. And as a result, you've had a culling, you've had a removal of a lot of brands from the marketplace that originally were taking up a lot of market share. And so what you have is a few big players that are standing at the top of the most competitive industries. But at the same time there are fewer new brands jumping into the space because it's not as sexy as it was two or three years ago. What this means is that you actually have an easier or faster time getting into the mid level range of success. You can have 100 sale a day business, $1 million business, easier now, faster now because there's fewer people who are competing for the secondary market, if you will. But it's going to take longer to be one of the big brands. It's not a two year process anymore, it's a five or a six year process. If you want to have a 10 or 20 million dollars business, specifically on Amazon.com you can still absolutely do it by driving traffic to an email list or a Shopify site, or building a funnel. But on Amazon specifically, the market has compressed. The other thing to note here is that valuations have come down about what they were before the big run up. So you could sell a business for 3, 4, 5 times EBITDA in 20, 19 and 20, and then it went way up to 6, 7, 8, sometimes 10 times. Now they've come back to between 3 and 5. So it's not like the market has completely imploded, it's just back to where it was at pre Covid levels. And the focus for those of you who are active in the space should be on maintaining really healthy profit margins and having high cash businesses and waiting for the next bull run, the next boom. And that would be the time to take chips off the table and maybe think about selling your business. The third big change in E commerce since I released the book is that influencer marketing has really become a thing. When I wrote 12 ones to 1 million, TikTok was not really a thing. I mean, it existed, but you didn't have the crazy virality that you have today. And influencer marketing was still kind of a niche thing that not a lot of brands were doing. Now it is almost essential to the blueprint. It's almost essential to experience the fast growth that most people want. A product can go from 0 to 50 sales a day in like a week. So there is lightning in a bottle available for a lot of brands. For example, I have a brand that we invested in inside of the Capitalism Fund that partnered with an influencer with just 2,000 followers, 2,000 followers. And when this account did a video demonstrating how much they liked the product, the product went from 10 sales a day to 50 to 100 sales a day. Overnight, boom, completely changed the product and added about $500,000 a year in top line revenue to that brand. That's crazy. That just did not exist three years ago. So if you have a good product and it's unique in the marketplace and you know who your person is, then there are more advertising opportunities for small brands than has ever existed before. But you need to be a little bit more creative than just where you show up for keywords on a site like Amazon.com you've got to be able to connect your product to the followers of the influencers that you're partnered with. Now how do these changes impact the 12 months to 1 million plan? Honestly, very little. We're still building small audiences and launching a couple of products to them. It's still about getting a few people to buy our product and leave reviews and letting the machine start to build up momentum. It's still about having four products that serve one core person, knowing that we're going to serve them for a very long time. And if we do a few things well and we build an audience and launch a few products and we're good to them and we get reviews, we run the chance of having serendipity favor us with a video that goes viral or an influencer that picks us up, or we have a crazy run up in the economy where our valuation is crazy, those things do happen. But the process to getting there and seeing stacking the deck to have a million dollar business is almost exactly the same as it was when I released 12 months to 1 million. We're in a new window of opportunity where less people are starting brands but the brands who are starting have more access to resources to be able to grow faster than ever. And so the people who get into the game are planting seeds for the next three to four year cycle where they're going to have really strong profit margins and they're going to be in position for a very healthy exit a few years down the road. So I am still very bullish on the space. I'm still investing in e commerce brands, I'm still starting e commerce brands. I still believe in this stuff and I think that the opportunities just continue to expand. Whenever you're ready to start your road to 1 million, we help entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses by getting four products at 25 sales a day, which is 100 sales sales a day. And when you're ready to start that adventure, come join us over@capitalism.com 1. That is our mentoring community called the 1%. Why is it called the 1%? Because only 1% of people ever become millionaires and we have a predictable plan to getting there. And so once you follow the plan over a long period of time, you'll have a million dollar business and you can start your road over inside the1percentapitalism.com I'm Ryan. Daniel Moran. I help entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses. And what do you know, the process still works. I'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for being here.
