8-Figure Formula - How To Win In Competitive Markets

Next speaker is a guy from Austin, Texas.

As.

Mentioned last year, he thinks himself. And he's.

Okay.

Voted on a lot of charts as the best looking Amazon seller.

Yes, yes, yes.

He recently. And by recently, I mean last year, after coming to Romania and giving a speech, he sold a company, Amazon Business. But he doesn't like that term for a lot of money from.

For.

What's that called again? Eight figures. Yes, it's a lot of money. He sold that business. But he's still inspiring and inspiring people to go on the entrepreneurial path. He is the founder of capitalism.com.

He is the founder, I guess, of the Tribe. And a very cool podcast that I currently and very often listen to. It's called Freedom Fastlane. I think he's rebranding it to capitalism too, but soon, right?

Okay.

What more can I say? I don't want to take more of his time. So please welcome Ryan Daniel Moran.

Hey. But before he gets too far, could we give it up one more time for Alex?

I am so impressed with this man and what he is doing. Because.

What I am so fascinated by what is happening with entrepreneurs here.

The hustle and the hunger that is so palpable here. You just. You emanate this hunger and this excitement for entrepreneurship in a way that is so refreshing coming from even the US where we take it for granted. And I'm just so impressed with this group and with.

The entrepreneurs here who I think are completely changing this country. And when Alex and I met for the first time, he told me that he wanted to bring new opportunities to Romania. And you are doing that, my man. And as the founder of capitalism.com I just want to salute you and thank you and honor you. Give it up for Alex, everybody.

Salud. Chefacets.

I'm so thankful and humbled to be with all of you. And I'm so impressed with all of you.

You know, and before I. Before I get too far off, Alex, it's not only the opportunities that you've brought to Romania, it's also, you have inspired me.

To remember to enjoy life, that this is not just a grind to make more, but it's also a journey about enjoying more. And it's a lesson that I often have to remind myself of. And one time, Alex was. We had a mastermind meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, and we were on our way to the Cleveland Indians game, and Alex is doing his customary walk.

And he says, I do this to remind myself that it's all okay. And I do this. I catch myself doing this.

Anytime. I doubt myself Or I wonder if I'm on the right path, which I do all the time.

I do the Hootie.

I have learned just as much from Hoodie. Maybe one day, based on your Facebook and your Instagram post, maybe one day you'll teach me how to talk to girls.

Because you seem to have that nailed as well. I know a couple things about business. I know a few things about money. I can talk to a group of 500 people, no problem. Put me in front of a pretty girl and I'm a hot mess. I have no idea what to do. I wanna. You know.

So.

If you have a course about that or something, I'll fly to Romania for that conference.

Hey, thank you all for having me. Alex mentioned I sold a business last year, and I actually sold that business because my dream as an entrepreneur is to own a major league baseball team. When I was a kid, I actually. I battled with my dad because I wanted him to. You had to buy it. At the time, I wanted him to buy me a fantasy baseball team.

You had to sign up for a league, go to a friend's house and do your draft and track it. Now, obviously, everybody does it online, but at the time, I was fascinated with the business of baseball. And I. I decided I wanted to be the manager of a baseball team because I loved the business side of it and because of programming and religious guilt and all this stuff that we could go into if we have six margaritas. Like Jesse said, I went to school to be a pastor instead.

Spoiler alert. That didn't happen. And. And instead I said, well, if I want to go back into baseball, the odds of me getting the job I want are pretty low. So I have a better chance of just making so much money that I can buy a team and give myself the job.

And so I set the goal that I was going to own a major league baseball team, and I went headfirst into entrepreneurship. And I have built a few companies, sold a few companies, and the top line that I've taken a company is about $10 million a year. Didn't know how to take it to 100. So I sold a majority stake to somebody who had experience growing those types of businesses because I knew that I could apply that to another business or to a similar business because I'm playing the long game. I'm playing this. I'm thinking 25 years out. I'm just warming up. I'm just getting started. And so my goal today is to take where I've gone up to this point, knowing full well that I'm just at the beginning of the game, I am in the first inning, and I have learned a couple things in the first inning. And I am here to share with those of you.

The way to win today. Now, what's interesting about this is.

I tried to write a formal speech for you three times. Three times I opened up my laptop and sat down to try and put thoughts together, and I had all kinds of weird insecurities come up, which at first, you know, it comes up all the time for all of us, but for on the stage, happens to me very, very rarely. And what I realized is I started here.

I'm going here.

But right now I feel like I'm.

Here.

And some days it feels like I'm here, and some days feels like I'm here.

And in that moment, I realized that I was standing in the first inning comparing myself to the end game, wondering, what the hell do I have to share?

What the hell does anybody want to learn from me? I'm not there. I'm here.

Now, to the person who's here, here looks pretty good.

And we are all walking around with this comparison game, with this game that we play in our heads of so and so is making 100k a month. This person's making a million.

This person sold a business for eight figures.

Hootie posts pictures of girls on Facebook.

And we are all playing this internal game of comparing ourselves to one another.

And the hell of it all is, regardless of where you are on the spectrum, you're all playing the game with someone else. I made the joke recently that I think someone could take a picture of themselves having a really bad day crying and take a selfie of it and put it on Facebook. And somebody else would say, I don't look that pretty when I cry.

What's wrong with me? Why do I have to look so ugly when I cry? And I'm only making a million dollars a month, but I don't look like that when I cry. I'm starting to cry. What if people judge me for crying?

We're all playing this ridiculous game of comparing ourselves to other people. And I just bring that up because I do it too. And so when I went to actually put something together for you.

I feel like I'm here looking here and full disclosure, I think some of you are probably better tacticians than me at a lot of what will be covered yesterday and today.

So all this to say, I feel like I'm one of you. And when you look at people who are on stage or you look at people in the room. They are running around with the exact same insecurities as you.

Worried that you're judging them and everybody else is judging them. And we are all human beings. So I know what it's like to sit in an audience at a conference like this and to look at somebody on stage and feel that comparison game and to feel like it's a mountain that you have to climb. And I hate being the guy who's on stage saying, I sold a company for a whack ton of money.

And knowing that somebody is going to have that same comparison. So before we begin, I got it, too. We all got it. So there's nothing magical about me. There's nothing magical about anybody on stage. There's nothing magical about anybody. Except some people double down on their strengths. Some people give more to the marketplace than others, and some people get the result. That's the only difference. I'm so bullish. I'm sorry. Encouraged by this room, because that hunger is there, and that's what it requires. So I'm excited to share this with you, knowing full well that even though I'm only in the first inning of my quest to own a major league baseball team, some of you will take some of this, run with it, and we'll come back in a year, and you'll still have all the same internal junk and insecurities. Unless you work with Guy and Elon.

You'll just have more money then.

Which, full disclosure, brings out even more insecurities.

I like to say money and alcohol don't change you, they just amplify you.

So, you know, if you give.

If you give a loud person alcohol, they don't go into the corner and get all introverted. If you give an attention seeker like me, alcohol, I don't become introverted. I'm gonna take my pants off and dance and say, everybody, look at me. And money is the same thing, but it amplifies more of, like, the internal stuff. Because most of us, look, entrepreneurs are weird. We're weird people. I mean, what does your family think? I know what my family thought.

In the US what do they think of you here?

I mean, you've been free.

Of.

Oppression, oppressive regimes for a couple decades. We take it for granted. So, like, we're all weird misfits for taking personal responsibility and for creating something new. So you have, like, there has to be something that changes or something that happens in us in order to even say, you know what? I'm gonna work my face off for a payoff later. That's what I'm gonna do. Like, we're different.

We're different. And so when money shows up, a lot of that gets amplified. And if you're cool with that, if you're cool with that piece of you, it makes you a fucking rock star.

And if there's a part of you that feels isolated or alone, that comes out too.

That's why I love this community and I love events like this because you realize you might be weird back home, but there's other weird people too. So can we just celebrate the fact that we've all got junk, we're all weird.

So let's be weird together.

So I will very humbly and with a lot of insecurity, share what I think is the eight figure formula that works today. We're talking about, you know, things are a little bit more competitive than they were a few years ago. Things have changed a little bit in the last few years. So we're going to talk about what it looks like now because it's different. And I took this picture, the picture that's, that's up on the screen A couple days ago, this was Tuesday night.

This past Tuesday, I was at dinner with Gary Vaynerchuk, Lewis Howes, my buddy Josh Bazzoni, Colin from Wild Foods and Jay Shetty. And I shared this photo with you because what's interesting about this is on the left is Lewis House, who has a huge social media following. Josh Pizzoni is the founder of BioTrust, which did $100 million in top line revenue in its first 12 months. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a couple books or something.

A guy in the middle doesn't know how to dress or talk to girls, but he knows how to sell physical products or something. Colin from Wild Foods is a multimillion dollar food company that I'm really fascinated with that does a really good job of blending social media and physical products. And then on the far right is Jay Shetty is a brilliant video marketer, built an audience of 13 million followers in two years. And if you put those, those that very multicultural white dudes in a blender, what you'd have is what I think is the perfect cocktail of what the strategy is that creates sellable eight figure businesses very quickly. Because I'm of the opinion that if you combine Amazon and social media and a couple other spices and heat it at the right temperature, you get amazing results. And so what was interesting to me in the context of this conversation was that.

This group kind of represented each piece of the pie. And if you combine them all together. I think you get what I call the eight figure formula. Now I'm gonna put this into sequence for you, but I want you to know that it falls. There's gonna be a temptation to want to take the whole thing at once. So each one of you is gonna be at a different stage in the process. Take what is applicable to you at each stage of the process. Save the rest for later. Because the temptation is to look at.

Someone else's results or someone else's formula and go, I gotta do all this now. Yeah, that hurts.

That's hard. So take what's applicable to your business now. Use it, take notes for the rest later. Because it'll take you three months to go through each piece first. You know, I mentioned that things are changing. We were talking about it last night. A lot of sellers who have been in this game for a few years are freaking out. And because of that, it opens up some really, really special opportunities right now. If you play this game well, right now, if you play your cards right.

There are, I think it is a.

It's a new golden age. Shit's changed in the last few years. And us old hats who have been doing this for a couple years, we're kind of spoiled in the old way of doing it. And now it's changed. And so if you're just getting into this game, you're in a really special sweet spot to take advantage of some wide open opportunities. Like some wide open opportunities, I'd say they're even bigger than they were a few years ago if you play your cards right. So a lot of people who are in this game doing it a different way are getting crushed or it can open up brand new opportunities. So for those of you who are brand new to this or you've got one or two products that are doing okay, if you go in what I think is the appropriate direction.

There'S massive things happening. Here's some of them, here's some signs of the times and some predictions for what's coming. Most of you know Amazon made an acquisition last year for $13.7 billion.

Company called Whole Foods. Humble brag. I was at lunch with.

John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, a week and a half ago, and he was talking about his boss at Amazon.

Like you're the founder of Whole Foods and you're saying words like boss. Okay? Amazon is Amazon's big. Okay?

So that's the first acquisition in what I think is going to be many acquisitions and you're going to see more of this just Wait until Amazon goes after Target or.

Facebook goes after Target. Because Facebook is going to be getting into this game. It's only a matter of time. If you look at what they're doing with messenger. If you look, look at what they're doing with E commerce, it's only a matter of time. Or if Shopify goes after Target. There's an integration between retail and the Internet happening and it's only a matter of time and technology. When you have a product that is on Amazon being fulfilled by FBA and you're killing it in.

Washington and there's a dude in the back who's looking at the data on his handy dashboard and he says, hey, this underwear is flying off the shelves. Put it on the shelf and they'll order it from Amazon's warehouse. You'll walk into the store and you'll see your product on the shelf. It's only a matter of time. And as more acquisitions happen, that is going to accelerate and include additional retail chains. So the integration of the Internet and retail is inevitable. It's happening, which is really cool if you're an Internet seller right now. Not so cool if you are a retail seller from 10 years ago. So you are at the beginning of one of the biggest changes in physical products history. There's also major changes going to be happening in advertising.

You might have heard about this thing called Amazon Prime Video. They're making a play. So imagine, for example, you could run ads on Netflix for your physical product. It's gonna happen on Amazon Prime. Only a matter of time when you can now not only run a pay per click ad for your listing, but you could also run a TV ad on Amazon Prime Video. It's gonna happen. People be watching TV and they're watching your ad. That video that you make to promote your product is no longer just a pre roll ad on YouTube. It's showing up in front of your favorite Amazon TV show. It's gonna happen. Alexa and millions of homes.

It's going to happen where Alexa hears that you're out of toothpaste and it orders it for you. Which is interesting and kind of scary because if you say, alexa, I need toothpaste, it's just going to order Amazon Choice toothpaste. But if you're a brand and a person says, I need more Tom's Toothpaste, it's going to order Tom's Toothpaste. So I believe to the core of me that your brand is everything. It's everything. Selling pencil sharpeners is a game from five years ago. Building A brand around specific people.

Is everything. Today.

You don't have a sellable or a scalable business if you are just looking for opportunities and trying to sell the next product. If you're not building a company that is targeted to a specific person.

You don't sell pencil sharpeners. You sell to teachers.

Teachers buy lots of things. What do people who buy pencil sharpeners buy more of?

More pencil sharpeners? No, you sell to people, you don't sell products.

And Amazon starting to show favoritism to brands. If you talk to anybody in some of the Amazon departments like Amazon exclusives.

They show favoritism to people who have strong brands. It's everything. And people who want to buy your company, like right now.

Old money is fascinated with Amazon in general. And it's going to happen to where money is just pouring into non US businesses.

It's going to spill over so that demand is going to rise. But in the US businesses are starting to see buying an Amazon business doesn't always work out so well. Has to be a brand. There has to be a brand behind the business, not just selling product. Oh, and Amazon's going to start buying the companies that are doing well. Yeah. So Amazon, I don't know if you heard, has some money and.

Sometimes they spend it.

On whole foods or ring.com.

Ring. A billion dollars. A company that every shark on Shark Tank rejected. Amazon buys for a billion dollars. A video doorbell that syncs to your phone.

They ain't done.

They're gonna be buying more.

So one of the buyers for your company might be called Amazon.com. what a world we live in. This is what's coming. It's a very, very exciting time or a scary time depending on how you play this. Oh, and by the way, only half the world currently has Internet access. So there's still 3 billion people waiting to get access to the Internet. So when, I don't know, India.

Starts seeing the same opportunities that this room is seeing.

I don't know if you heard, there's a few people in India.

And they are making more. Oh my goodness, are they making more in India? They just keep popping them out. Okay.

Now it's not just Amazon that's changing. We look at advertising channels like Facebook. Facebook is changing. Facebook owns every eyeball on the Internet between Instagram, WhatsApp and the Facebook platform. You have access to. Well, everyone.

See money. My right hand man and I were talking about how we forget sometimes when you're living in your own world that not everyone is exactly like you.

And then you fly to a different country. And you realize people have different cultures and they eat different foods and they have different tastes and they listen to different things.

And you don't need all of them in order to be insanely wealthy. You only need a few of them. You need this many of them in order to be insanely wealthy. And Facebook owns all of the eyeballs and makes it possible to advertise to just exactly the ones that you want. And that's only going to increase because.

Payments and orders are coming to Messenger. So you'll be ordering Uber from Messenger. You'll be using it as a. As a personal assistant service. You'll be sending a message saying, I need toothpaste, and I'll just order it for you. And with payments being integrated into Messenger, I think there's a chance that they could make a play for e commerce, which is why I think Facebook might start acquiring some retail chains or some online retailers, because that integration will be really interesting when you can target anybody on the Internet, anyone alive, and place an order instantaneously. And if you look at something like Facebook Watch, they're making a play for YouTube. So video ads on Facebook are probably going to be just as big as video ads on YouTube, which is one of the most overlooked and underpriced sources of advertising around, especially for physical product sellers like we are. We're obsessed with Amazon. We talk about Amazon pay per click optimization until we're blue in the face. One of the most overlooked places to advertise is YouTube advertising. It's just absurd, the scale that can happen with YouTube advertising. If you take one thing away, you should be advertising on YouTube.

And with Facebook Watch making a play, there's a new advertising source coming that's going to be pretty exciting. Oh, and there's still 3 billion people coming online. So that's only going to get bigger.

There's still more. Because if we look at. If we look at how the game used to be played, like a few decades ago.

You got celebrity endorsers and you got big TV deals, but today the TV stars are YouTube celebrities.

And it's really, really cheap right now to get them to talk about you or to target those channels directly to target the people who follow those celebrities. I also think one of the most overlooked places for traffic and sales is getting people who have email lists or readers to talk about you. We had just organically, just as just because they found us, we had a major Paleo blog mention one of our products recently and huge sales surge. Right. They just found us. And like it was our exact demographic, so our branding was perfect for this blog. Worked beautifully, like changed that product success.

Oh man. Imagine if we were intentional about this.

But these are things most Amazon businesses don't talk about, don't think about because they're worried about selling products, not selling to people. But the game's changed and if you want to make it, you think like a brand, not as a product seller. Let's look at a couple examples. How many of you are you familiar with four Sigmatic? The mushroom coffee, right? Was there any demand for mushroom coffee a few years ago?

If we even look at bulletproof coffee, Was there demand for putting butter in coffee five years ago? Was there demand for mold free coffee? What the hell is mold free coffee, by the way? I'm pretty sure that's a totally made up thing. Sorry Dave. I love you.

But no. You had influencers talk about these things. Four Sigmatic gave a boatload of money to Tim Ferriss. Talk about it. Put the company on the map. They sold a whole bunch of mushroom coffee. Now everybody, I walk into a retail store now and I see mushroom coffee sold. It's everywhere. That brand is huge. Now, Logan Paul, YouTube's celebrity, sells $30 million worth of physical products a year. $30 million. I can't stand his videos. Don't tell Logan. Logan, totally had me on your channel. But $30 million a year in physical products.

You know, I have.

A mentor that I'm courting.

That works with celebrities and really big names and has launched.

300 million dollar companies just by partnering with celebrities. And I'm of the opinion the next wave is not partnering with celebrities, it's partnering with social media stars because they have the traffic. You have the control of Amazon, which is the sales platform. Marry the two together. Magic happens. Eight figure companies just get birthed.

All right, so some of you might be familiar with how we implement this. I've shared this very publicly over and over and over again. The million dollar formula is simple math. It's three to five products.

At 25 to 35 sales a day.

Times an average price point of 25 to 35 bucks is a million dollar business. Great. So it's our job to take a handful of products to 25 to 35 sales a day.

Have healthy profit margins. It's my opinion you should be charging more than your competitors, not less. And if you play the brand game, you'll be able to do that. If you are taking traffic off of Amazon and bringing it to Amazon, you can charge higher prices than your competitors. It's a conversation for another day. But this is the math behind a million dollar business. So.

I used to say the way you get to a million, take that first product, do everything it takes to have to get those first 50 to 100 reviews, rank it, move on to the next product. I think there's another step now. I think there's a more important step at the beginning. And even those of you who have been selling millions of dollars worth on Amazon already might have missed this step and now you're scrambling. So if you are just getting started, doing this, step ahead of time will make those three to five products.

Doing 25 to 35 sales a day almost automatic. And it's can you get a minimally viable buyers list that buys your product? Can you grind your way to having 100 buyers, meaning 100 buyers who love you, who buy from you over and over again, who believe in what you're doing. And so every time you launch a product, you have at least 100 people who want it and love what you're up to, because that gives you a minimally viable launch audience to where you know that you'll have people buying within the first few days, which will give you momentum, which will allow you to reach new audiences and make it easier for you to get reviews. So let's go into how to do that.

I think you should focus on these numbers, 110 and 1.

That's 100 buyers.

I love it when I make a point and all the phones go up. It makes me feel important, egoic, and also self conscious all at the same time. I immediately was like, all these pictures are being taken. This is my fly down. Good, I'm good. Take pictures all you want.

Tag me, tag me.

RyanDaniel Moran okay, 100 buyers who will leave reviews and we'll break down a little bit more of how to do this. I think that takes at least 1,000 followers, 1,000 social media followers, 1,000 email opens, 1,000 messenger subscribers. However you do it, however, is easiest and most natural for you. 1000 followers is usually what it takes to have 100 people predictably buy if you are engaging with those people.

So we don't have to go build a list of 100,000 people. We need 1,000 followers that are engaged, knowing that 100 of them are going to buy. And if 100 of them are engaged and will buy, a good majority of those will leave reviews if they're engaged as well. So 100 buyers is our minimally viable list.

A list of 10 personal superfans. What this Means is people in your network, people that you have their number, people that you call, friends.

That meet, the type of person that buy your product. So for example, I had a yoga company that I sold a few years ago. One of my personal superfans was one of my best friends in Austin. Her name is Carly. Carly does yoga. Carly was super excited that I was starting a yoga company. Now Carly doesn't have 50,000 Instagram followers. Carly might have 1,000 or 2,000 Facebook friends and like 800 Instagram followers just as a person. But guess who all of them are? People like her.

So if she's talking about it and all of her fellow yogis are also talking about it, that's good for me. So do you have 10 people in your personal contact list that are the type of person that buys the products that you're selling?

So we have 1,000 fans, 100 of them expected to be buyers. 10 personal contacts and one influencer with at least 10,000 followers. Not a million followers, not 100,000 followers, but a minimum of 10,000. Someone on YouTube with 10,000 followers, someone on Instagram with 10,000 followers, a blogger with 10,000 readers. These are reachable influencers. So if you want to come out of the gate guns a blazing. If you want to come out as hot as it is in this room right now, is anybody else hot as heck in here or is it just me?

If you want to come out of the gates of blazin.

The minimal viable launch process, hundred buyers, ten personal contacts, one semi public influencer. So here's an example. This is a company that I advise and a buddy of mine, Swaneeus. Is anybody familiar with Swaneeus? Swanee Sleep? Yeah, both of you. All right, so we got work to do in Eastern Europe. All right, so these are blue blocker sunglasses. You put them on before you go to bed, they filter out blue light, they increase melatonin, makes it easier to sleep. They have several studies backing that it increases sleep quality, sleep length, shorter time falling asleep. And this is earlier this week they did an Indiegogo campaign. They said, James sends me a text, he's like, hey, Ryan, I'm sending you a pair of our new frames called the Model X. Would you do me a favor and just post on social media for us? Sure, why not? Post it on Instagram, post it on Facebook, and if you look here first, 48 hours, $18,000 in sales on a brand new product right now. It's not like I was the only one that was posting about it. They went to their Other personal contacts, their own personal superfans. And now we have a little bit of organic movement happening on a brand new product. Another example here, this is somebody from our community. This is a company called Seed and Sprouts. They sell lunchboxes. Cool brand. They're about zero waste living, reducing waste. And they sell their first product was a metal reusable lunchbox. Okay, I know you can't see here, but they have a thousand.

Followers on their Facebook page. Nothing crazy. Thousand people. So Sophie, the founder posted on her social media.

Her personal Facebook page, hey, I'm doing a Kickstarter, launching my first product. She then went to personal friends, said, hey, this is what I'm up to. Would you mind sharing this? She then went to Facebook groups that were about reducing waste. They're about eco friendly living. She got one of them to share it with the group. Just one, no big deal. She's new to the game. One Facebook group, a handful of personal contacts, her own Facebook page. And she did $25,000 in pre sales. Pre sales, presales.

For a lunchbox.

You can make a brand out of lunchboxes. You can make a brand on anything. And so Sophie raised $25,000.

For her business. Is that enough, like to have some momentum?

I think this is better than releasing a product on Amazon and hoping and praying, I think, although I would actually like to hire Jesse to pray on my behalf. And then I feel like maybe anything in the world could happen. I'm waiting for the Jesse cloud to be launched on Kickstarter where I can upload my prayers and thoughts to Jesse and he can connect to the universe for me. And I use the law of attraction to bring whatever so I don't have to do it. I can just upload it to the Jesse cloud. I know you can't read this, but this is just a mutual friend of mine on Facebook posting about.

Another friend of ours who was launching a new supplement line. And he asked some personal friends to post about his new supplement line. And he publicly said, I need X number of orders in order to fund.

The development of this business. He didn't do a Kickstarter. He wasn't on Amazon. He sent them straight to a shopping cart. No fancy magic, no sales page. Got his personal contacts to share about the brand that didn't yet exist. He hand delivered the product to people.

And he sold tens of thousands of dollars of pre orders from his own personal Facebook page and his personal contacts.

So we can come out of the gate with momentum. If we do this amount of Pre work before going live. So remember, 1,000 followers, 10 personal contacts, one public influencer. Even if you do, two of the three phones are up. Is my zipper down? No, we're good. Two of the three were doing better than 80% of our competitors, maybe more. This is how we start to build a brand that's bigger than an Amazon business. How we build a business that has full scale potential and to start putting the pieces in place for a business that can one day be acquired if that's something that we want to do. Which by the way, the payoff in this business is when you sell. The payoff is when you get a big check. The payoff like for if you are looking for the product opportunity with high profit margin, that's a temporary game. You can play that game for a while. But it comes when you've got a big audience and you can launch new products profitably, which we'll talk about. And it comes when you sell. That's when you're done. That's when you're totally free. So the second stage is now using that model that we just built, using that distribution system and releasing additional products through that pipeline and continuing to build that pipeline. So as we have now, this, this group of people that's buying from us, even if it's a minimally viable group of people, even if it's a hundred people that are now buying, our job is to release more products to them and get the most responsive to leave reviews. There's this big flurry right now in the space because getting reviews is a little bit different, harder than it used to be. There's no game, there's no service. We were joking last night at dinner. The best way to get reviews, just don't, don't do it. Don't get reviews. Leave reviews on other people's products. That's what you should do. Let them get banned, let them get slapped. But if you've got superfans who are buying from you over and over again.

I've never left a review because a company emailed me and asked me to. But I've left reviews for companies that I'm really excited about. I've left reviews for companies that didn't ask me to because I'm stoked about what they're doing or because I personally know the person. I've done that. I've never left a review for a company that just asked me to. Does anybody in here do that?

Then why are our company, why are we doing that to our customers before turning them into super fans? I think the dumbest thing in the world is when someone gives you money and they get their thing and then you're like, hey, do me a favor, now that you've given me your money and as our first time doing business, would you go leave a review for me and make sure it's 5 stars? If it's anything less than a 5 star experience, make sure you email us first so we can.

Prevent that from going public. Right.

Why are we doing that to our customers? Get the super fans first. Get them to be your seed reviews.

So what I like to do is when we've got this, when we have that group, we have that launch list, we have that group of people that has raised their hand to follow us or their personal contacts or they're coming from an influencer. What I like to do when I launch a new product is simply communicate what the new product is and its differentiating factor. What's different about this product in the marketplace? Ask the audience if they want it, sell it to them, and then ask them to leave a review.

I especially like to ask for feedback and then take the good ones and turn them into reviews. Let's go over how to do that.

First.

Conversion sources and traffic sources. You need both in this stage. By the way, if you're not in this stage, if you don't have your minimally viable launch list, your minimally viable buyers list, that's all you need to focus on. If you take nothing else away from these two days, do you have enough people to raise their hand and buy your first product, your next product, or the next release? In stage two, we need a conversion point and a traffic point. A conversion point is a way to communicate with our customers on demand, directly. That's email, it's manychat or I actually love Facebook groups. Facebook groups are great conversion points and the marketing's easy on them. It's super easy to put people into it, like target them. They've raised their hand and said, I want to join your yoga group or I want to join your.

Whatever group, your gardening group.

They invite their friends. It's super easy to create engagement. They're great launch lists, they're great conversion points. So a way to get in front of our customers directly. Email, manychat, meaning messenger and Facebook groups. That's how we convert the eyeballs. We get the eyeballs through Facebook ads, YouTube ads, or Instagram ads. Specifically swipe up ads.

But your goal is not a huge audience, it's the responsiveness of the audience.

I know plenty of people with Groups or email lists of 500. More than enough to do damage. If you can have a list of 500, create a buyer's list of 500, it's enough to launch very, very profitably and beat most of your competitors from day one.

So.

What I like to do, kind of my strategy for building up these audiences is to run a video ad.

That highlights your differentiating factor on your product. And my favorite place to do this are on Instagram stories. Just as a Facebook ad or an in Instagram ad.

Send that traffic to an email list or to Facebook messenger so that we have their data, we have the ability to communicate with them, and then make them an offer. This is our job in stage 2. Drive the traffic from social media to a place where we have their contact. There's a lot of conversation about how do we drive traffic to Amazon or how do we drive traffic to a funnel to be able to make sales. I would highly recommend that you send them to a conversion point, meaning a place where you get their data, you get them into Facebook messenger, you get them into an email list, you get them into a Facebook group, you have a place to communicate with them rather than lose them. That's my recommendation. And then we make them an offer. So this might be hard to read and I'll wait for the phones to go up and for me to check if my zipper's down. But I'll read this to you like I just made up this copy on two hours of sleep.

Minimal viable copy in an email. It might be. Hey, we've been working on a new blue Teff Head Blue Teth, which is like a Bluetooth, a new Bluetooth headphone that doesn't fall out when you're running. We've got 100 on pre order right now and we need some feedback. Do you want to be first in line? Simple enough. They reply, yeah, I want one. Great. Just to confirm, we've got 100 of these, so I want to make sure that we get them to the right people. Would you be willing to send us feedback within 30 days of use?

They reply, yeah, sure, I'll do that for you. Awesome. Here's the link where you can get it before anyone else. I'll hold one for you until Friday. Let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise I'll follow up in a few weeks to get your feedback. Simple enough. The idea here is to go to the people who are in our contact list, get them to raise their hand and say, yeah, I'll take one. And then we make them an Offer notice. We're not saying we're giving a bunch away for free. We're gonna do it 75% off to get because we need reviews. It's going to our minimally viable buyers list.

Making them an offer and asking them for feedback. And this is how we start the process of taking a brand new product, releasing it to our audience and repeating that until we've got three to five products selling 25 to 35 sales a day. You have a million dollar business that we can scale from here. And the scale will happen in two parts. We're gonna scale it by building the audience and we're gonna continue to optimize Amazon. This is how multi million dollar businesses are built.

This is how it might be done on Facebook. Similar process. Big news for men. The world's most comfortable underwear hits the shelves on October 2nd. Comment below and we'll put you first in line. Video of. How would you do a video of men's underwear that wasn't super creepy? I don't know. I don't want to see that ad. But.

If you had an ad that wasn't super creepy about your men's underwear line, this might be sample copy for you to use. And then you'd follow up with them via manychat, which is how we get people onto our messenger list. Hey, saw your request to get our new style of underwear that come out on October 2nd. Do you want me to add you to the notification list? Get them to raise their hand. We're building up now a launch list. We're building up a group of people who are saying, I want to be first in line for your product. You could do this for five bucks a day and have your ideal people raising their hand. Being ready before your product is live to buy your product. These are people who are sitting, waiting and ready. This is how we build up that launch list. It's how we build up that distribution channel for new products.

Your goal in this stage is to build a responsive enough audience to be able to churn out new products consistently and profitably. Which makes it way easier to rank for keywords and to get reviews predictably. Does this make sense?

Oh, that made me feel good about myself. Thank you. All right, and then the final stage. Again, if you do not have those things in place.

That is all you need to focus on to have a multimillion dollar business. It'll get you there. If you combine an audience of buyers with the internal power of Amazon, you scale way faster. This is the final step. The final step is to Turn on other sources of cold traffic to continue to build up that audience and to build up that distribution list my favorites for scale, meaning once we've proven that we have a model that's profitable, we turn on YouTube and Facebook ads. Now there's lots and lots of Amazon sellers right now who are attempting to run Facebook ads straight to a physical product purchase or they're trying to get influencers to talk about their thing. It makes no sense until you have built out the rest of the distribution model, like just paying people to talk about you without the ability to capture them or without other products in your line so that it's profitable for you to spend that advertising dollar doesn't make much sense, especially for people who are bootstrapping, which is most Amazon sellers. So this is why I save it for later in the process when we know that we can take people from email and send them over to Amazon. So this is the part where you can go actively recruit influencers and bloggers, meaning we want to have our personal contacts and one small sized influencer to give us that internal firepower from the get go. But this is the point where it might make sense for us to personally or have someone on our team reaching out to influencers to talk about the other products in our line. This might be also where we look at featuring our product in places. So as an Amazon seller, we get hit up all the time for people who will feature our products in magazines or feature it on a TV show or do a paid video for it. Don't do any of that, please.

At least until you're at this stage of the process. Because at this point you're a brand that can capture your customers and get them to buy other products. So at this point it might make sense, but not until this part of the process. But it's here that we focus on spending the money on YouTube or experimenting with those dollars, experimenting with cold traffic on Facebook to bring them into our distribution process for the rest of our products.

And it's here where we might start to be a company that can be acquired. And there's a lot of money moving into this space. A lot.

I left this in here. I know this is a few years out for most of you, but I wanted to give you some context for why this matters.

Businesses.

The big conglomerates, the big companies.

That are in retail that have been around for 50 or 100 years, they grow through acquisition. That's their model. Their model is that they need you to sell products so that they can buy you. They're Counting on you.

That's how they grow.

So at the top of the chain we have these conglomerates who buy companies in order to raise their stock price. At the middle level we have private equity groups who serve as the incubator for small businesses to get to that point. And they have investors who need to get a return on their money. And they do that by buying businesses at the bottom of the chain. And that's you and me, that's people like us. In order for investors to get their return, in order for conglomerates to raise their shareholder value, they need you and me.

They need to buy businesses now as entrepreneurs who got into this game for a better life.

Sometimes that's a mental tweak because there's us. We want the freedom and the money's in between. We need the money to get the freedom and we forget that the money needs us.

To go up the chain.

I like to say money can't do shit without you.

We spend so much energy thinking about how to generate money, what's going to make money. Money needs you. Can't do shit without you. It needs you to be going out and providing value, building systems and developing products. And when you do that, money pours in from the investors, from the conglomerates who are counting on you to develop something that they want to buy that will give them return.

That's the role you and I have.

In the eight figure model. I mean, if we look at recent acquisitions, Vital Proteins was a two year old company has sold a minority stake in their business for over $100 million. A minority stake?

I'm sorry, that's actually wrong. It's Ancient Proteins. Ancient proteins did that. Not that any of you care.

Hundred million dollars. I don't care what it's called. RXBar. Four year old company started from I believe a 19 year old's basement selling protein handmade protein bars to CrossFit gyms. Four years later sells for $600 million.

Seventh generation selling paper towels and eco friendly products. $700 million dollar shave club. A billion dollars. I picked these examples strategically because none of them were Amazon businesses.

All of them were brands that did all of their marketing off of Amazon. But all of them killed it on Amazon. Why? Because they didn't focus on maximizing the channel as much as they went out and got people, they advertised to people. And people will buy wherever they're comfortable buying in retail. They'll buy on Amazon, they'll buy on Facebook messenger, if that's the next platform. If you get the people you can sell A lot of product. And that's when your company is scalable and sellable. So I tell you. Oh, a native deodorant. I added that as a separate slide just for fun. Two year old company deodorant, who knew there was money in deodorant sold for $120 million two years in.

So I give this all to you for context because I want you to know that what you're building is way bigger than you realize. Way bigger for your local economy, way bigger for your life, way bigger for the people who want to acquire you. Like what you are sitting on and what you are building is way more impactful than just something that you do so that you don't have to work a typical job or that you outpace your peers. It's something so much bigger. It's something that has such bigger ripple effects than you realize. If you play this game right, if you play your cards well.

There'S money that wants to chase you and it's waiting for entrepreneurs.

It's waiting for people like you and me to go create those opportunities. And you're sitting in this sweet spot in this emerging technology, in these emerging opportunities, in this emerging time when opportunities are opening up here for the rest of the world and in this space, specifically in physical products, for you to go all in and to chase this new opportunity. Because this wave is coming and it's getting bigger and it continues to compound and it's waiting for you to take advantage of it. It's why I'm so optimistic by the young, hungry, aggressive, excited entrepreneurs in this room, why I'm so like, why I would bet on every single one of you being one of the weird ones and being one of the misfits. And I'm so honored to share this with you. Thank you all for having me.

It.