Amazon Marketing Masterclass: Zero to $25m In 3 Years w/ Travis Killian

You slide that a little closer.

Thank you. Three, two, one.

Oh, boy. They just caught me. Red wine handed. That's how we started. New at 11. A man caught on camera stealing wine from a local grocery store. That was a heavy pour, to be honest with you. Travis Killian.

Nice to see you again.

Travis. Killing it. Killian. Good to see you, dude.

Nice to see you, man.

Thanks for hanging out with us on one.

Thanks for inviting me.

Of course.

I'm all jacked up on nyquil and coke.

I definitely can take down 8 ounces of pure coke. Coca cola.

I. I hope so. Don't pull Grant Cardone on me here.

You got to be liquid.

You got to be ready.

You got to have more.

Hey, hey, we're. What's the baby want? Hey, where's that milk at? Where's that milk, man? I need some food. Dog bumping it backstage. So Travis is a trooper. Just publicly, we should say, not only has he been on the COVID of the 1%, but Travis Killin it Killian is also a trooper. Cause he tried to call in sick today and he said, but no, I'm coming to wine with wine for the 1%. That's the kind of man Travis is.

A man of his word.

Travis. So the way I want to start actually is I think it'd be kind of hard to relate to somebody who's hit your level. But rather than talk about you at the top, I know you didn't start there. So would you share a little about where you came from before all of the success?

Well, how far back do you want me to go here?

What I'm going for is the deepest, darkest story.

Of you growing up in the car that was your home with rags. And I'm looking for the rags.

Oh, you want the rags original.

I want the rags story. So tell me about it.

So I actually grew up super poor. And when I was seven, I actually. Our family got split up. All the siblings went to go live with different people. I went to go live with my aunt and uncle for four years. It was just like a bad environment for the kids. I was very much just left to do whatever I wanted to as long as my grades were fine. No one really said anything to me, you know, oh, your grade's good. Okay, do whatever you want. That's fine. So I would just game obsessively play this game called Age of empires. And I was like a top 100 gamer. And.

From that I actually learned how to make websites because we would post like screenshot videos of like, you know, Beating some of the top ranked players. And then I started getting websites with traction, and I was like, oh, how do you make money from websites? You know, just out of curiosity, were.

You coding these websites by hand? Oh, yeah, just like HTML and like.

Dreamweaver, all the good stuff.

That's when you know your old. If you know what Dreamweaver is.

Front page.

I've fallen and I can't get up. Would it be fair to say that coding websites was actually kind of an escape and a solace for you?

For sure. I escaped, right? Like, you know, escape. There are lots of different forms of escape. Whether it's partying obsessively, video gaming, watching tv, or, like, whatever it is. And for me, like, I just was curious. I was just having fun. Like, none of this felt like work. This was just like, oh, well, they do this. So can I do this too? Oh, I can actually do that. And I actually find myself even today, like, trying to remember what it was like to be that. That kid and just be curious in the world. I think that as we get older, we start to lose that, like, curiosity of thinking outside the box and questioning the way things are and thinking that we're not fully capable. When I was 11, like, I never doubted anything that I did. I was just like, oh, I'm gonna try this. Oh, this looks cool. I'm gonna try this. Oh, girls don't like guys that game. I'm gonna learn how to work out. Oh, I'm gonna. You know, whatever. It was like, I was just having fun, just figuring out what it was to just, you know, to figure out who Travis is and what Travis wanted to do.

Travis, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I've had a similar experience lately where I realized that in my adult life, I had forgotten what it was like to dream. Like, when I was 11 and 12, when I was in elementary school, I never doubted that I was gonna be a millionaire. Like, I never doubted that I was gonna be successful. I never doubted that I was gonna be involved in baseball. It was just. All I had to do was dream. Cause all you had was potential.

Yeah.

And then somewhere along the way, other people's thoughts creep in and you. And it starts to become. At least for me, it's something. I stopped dreaming. And in the last six to 12 months, I have remembered how to dream again. And it has loosened up so much. Just creative energy for me. And that's kind of what I'm picking up from you, is that, like, you. You practice the art and the pleasure of just Allowing yourself to believe that you are capable of whatever you want to achieve.

Yeah, it's like, you know, believe in yourself, like, and believe. Believe in yourself. Believe in other people and just, you know, understand that, you know, life's better when you think you can do things than when you think you can't do things.

That's a. That's a quotable right there.

Anyway, so in college, you're. You're making passive income. And from what I know about your story, you got pretty darn good at search engine optimization.

Yes.

And a few of those sites did extremely well. Is that right?

Yeah. So I actually built an SEO agency in college when I was about a sophomore, and I was number one for SEO. Columbia, South Carolina, My SEO agency was. So I just had inbound leads every week, and I would just accept the lead requests and be like, what website are you trying to rank? What keyword? And then I would have clients paying a couple thousand dollars a month to rank for keywords like china sourcing or antique furniture or whatever. And sophomore, junior year is when I started making, like, six figures online. But I knew that, like, ultimately I wanted to do something that was more in my control. Like, I didn't like providing a service for other people. I knew that the value of the service I was providing was greater than what I was receiving, and I was helping someone else build their asset rather than building my own. I just didn't know what that looked like. So I continued to, like, you know, have these affiliate. Affiliate websites and stuff. Nothing really took off. And I was doing it as a service for people. And then all of a sudden, I had this. This lead came in. I actually ignored him for, like, two weeks. Like, I just didn't want to take him because he was like, he would leave voicemails. This guy called and he would leave voicemails. And he's like. He's very animated, you know, like, Like. And he's like, I got this big idea. Like, I want to talk to you. I got. I got to meet you in person, though. I got to meet you. Like, he didn't want to talk on the phone.

Those are the leads that usually freak you out.

And I was like, I've had people reach out and be like, I got the next MySpace. Like, I just need you to, like, invest all the money and do all the work. And I'm like, oh, great. And so I was like, okay, fine. He kept calling me, and I was like, all right, I'll meet the guy. And I didn't even have to go to Meet him. He came to my apartment, my college apartment. I'm over here with, like, three monitors, sitting in my chair, rocking. And he tells me that he has a dumpster rental company in Columbia, South Carolina. And for some reason, people were calling him to rent dumpsters in, like, Myrtle beach and Charleston. And. But he didn't have dumpsters in those locations. So instead of ignoring the calls, he would just tell them, hey, I'll rent your dumpster for, like, 500 bucks. And people, surprisingly, were like, okay, that's fine. And he would charge them 500 and then find somebody, do it for 350. And he just made 150 bucks over the phone in five minutes. And he was like, there's an opportunity here. And what he needed was more leads, more people calling. And so when he told me this model, I was like, this is kind of what I was looking to do, because I knew from a SEO perspective, like, if I built an authority site to rank in a couple of cities in South Carolina, I could just, you know, with a little bit more effort, rank it in a lot of different cities across the United States. So then I built. Then I told him, like, hey, you know, how about I built the websites and all the websites, and you just pay me when the phone rings? And he's like, done. And then here I am, like, want to drop out? Senior year in college. And I did that, too.

Senior college. I had a meeting with my guidance counselor and was like, I don't think I need to be here.

Yeah, I wanted to do that, but I realized quickly that the amount of work required to get a B is much less than the amount of work required to get an A. So I just got Bs. Senior year. I had a perfect 4. 0 up until that point.

That's funny.

And I ended up, you know, getting this guy, like, you know, a couple hundred calls a day at a couple dollars a call. And I was like, okay, I can scale this.

That's fascinating. And is this a person that ended up being who you refer to as your mentor?

He was. He's the mentor that got me into, like, business. And then I have another mentor that got us into, like, Amazon.

And this was like, 2017.

Right? 2015 is when we had the conversation. And then, like, we actually got into Amazon and made our first sale in, like, December 2015.

Okay, cool. So there was a. It was good timing, but there were people who are in it way earlier than you. And so there's. There's. I bring that up because a lot of people will talk like the good old days are over and you didn't really ramp up until 2016. So you go from zero to where you are now in really three years, which is kind of nuts. So what were those resources that allowed you to go full throttle?

Oh, gosh, multiple things. I mean, a capital. Everyone knows that, you know, when you start an e commerce business, you need capital for inventory.

And would you, would you comment on that? Like, did you, did you take money that was sitting on the sidelines from other projects? Did you raise money?

You know, my business partner and I, we did a mix of both. We self funded it and then we also just used the money that our lead generation and SEO company was making to funnel it into the e commerce company that we were building.

And what gave you the confidence to go so hard into it? Because you went hard fast.

Yeah, I think that, you know, a lesson that I learned in the SEO world and in the Google SEO world is like, you know, if I knew, you know, I started Google SEO in the golden days of that, where it was so easy to rank, you know, 2007, 8, 9, 10. Right. If I could have dialed back in time what I knew in 2014, I wouldn't have waited so long to scale those SEO projects. Because you have something that works and you think it's going to work for a long time. And maybe it does, but maybe it doesn't. And so when we knew that we had different strategies that were working on Amazon, maybe that would work for a long time and maybe it wouldn't. So we just wanted to really go full throttle as soon as we could and quickly. And we knew that if things change, right? Because I mean, whether you like it or not, most all things online, any of you that get sales from, let's say social media, your sales are governed by an algorithm, Facebook algorithm, Instagram algorithm, whatever, YouTube algorithm. Any of you that get sales from organic traffic from Google, your sales are throttled by an algorithm. Any of you that sell on Amazon, that's another algorithm, walmart.com they're all algorithms, right? And so algorithms are always being tuned and changing and what they look for now may be different than what they look for in the future. And that's exciting to me because I just love like, you know, I'm not going to say I love gaming algorithms. I love just understanding them and feeding them what they want to, what they want to see in a very clean way. Because I don't want to do anything like black hat. I want to build sustainable businesses. And that's what We've been doing. All right.

I've got 17 questions right here. First things first, how much of this is fueled by your gaming background?

Oh gosh, so much. I treat everything in life like a game because it's just like, because I want life to be fun.

Listen, listen, gamer nerds. It gets better. You've got a skill that can make you multimillionaire. Hang on, hang on. 11 year olds on Twitch. It gets better.

Why do you go all in on Amazon? Why not diversify into other channels?

Well, I've seen this mistake happen over and over again and even in your back room, honestly, like I've seen people and you've seen it too. Like I've been in the back room, what, for two years now? I joined in the Costa Rica trip and I see people like all the time, like, oh, I don't like being reliant on Amazon and they'll literally. I've seen people in the group spend a year trying to learn Shopify and they always click their Amazon sales are this or they're down and their Shopify sales are like, compared to Amazon are still here. Right? And they spend like 80% of their effort on the thing that's producing less than 20% of the results. Right. And they end up like coming back and realizing that Shopify is incredibly difficult as well.

And Amazon's incredibly difficult.

Right?

Google SEO is incredibly difficult.

Exactly.

It's all hard. You can only do one really hard thing at a time. C Money. And I just did a video for Capitalism TV and I made the prediction of on Amazon is that smart marketers are going to stop trying to get off of Amazon. And I don't know about you, but I think that Amazon sellers try to get off of Amazon purely out of fear. Yes, they hit a million or $2 million and then they say, I'm afraid this is going to go away. So I'm going to diversify so that I feel secure in the income that I'm making. But you feel secure in the income that you're making by getting those existing customers to prefer you, to choose you, to review you and you going from 2 to 10. That's how you get secure in your income. Not by having all like a little bit here and a little bit here and a little bit here. Now there, there are cases like I have a brand right now where we have a big play to go off of Amazon and it's the side project but we don't reserve other resources away from the main thing in order to go blow up this Thing like it, you, you always protect and grow the main money maker. That, that, that's my take on it. I don't think you even have Shopify presences, do you?

We do, yeah. We have Shopify stores and I mean for some people they would be a good amount of income. But relative to the size of our company, it's still small and we're, we and I think it's more efficient now. Like this year we are exploring like more off site stuff, but only because we're going to like just and re. It's kind of like reinvesting some of the profits. Hire an agency, pay them 20 grand a month to do your SEO, don't build an SEO team. And then if it works really, really well and it's adding and they're paying for themselves and that's an investment that paid off. And then right now, personally in our company we're at a scaling issue, human capital. So we can't take the eye off the prize but we, but one of the ways that you grow when you're, when you have human capital constraints is you can always grow either via automation until you hire enough people internally or contractors. You can always hire more contractors temporarily until you build your staff where you can start taking some of the stuff that you're hiring contractors to do. So we'll hire contractors and say look, I'm just going to give you some money like keep me updated like you know, once a week on what you're doing. And we have KPIs that we monitor and we just kind of let that just take care of itself because we don't want to just have, you know, zero effort at all outside of Amazon because who knows what if it really does take off? Like as an example, Rappel Umbrella is like our flagship brand and I think on Google now we're getting about half as many searches as totes organically without messing, without even doing any amazing, any E commerce traditional Shopify work.

I love this game.

And when you sell over a million umbrellas a year, you're like, okay, we're probably touching. We're probably competing pretty well with them. And so we think that we have a real potential to get to do a lot of really cool things with that outside of Amazon as well.

That's so cool. All right, so how do you get an umbrella brand that big? I mean, did you reinvent the umbrella? What was so great about first? Actually my brain's going a thousand miles an hour. How do you even identify umbrellas? Good market to get into and Then how do you create the product that stands out enough to be able to sustain the amount of volume that you've done?

You know, I could give you a whole book called why I Chose an Umbrella and show you that it was all 100% by design, 100% in my control, but I'd be lying. You know, it's a little bit of luck, right? But it's like we knew that we like evergreen products. If you look at our portfolio, pretty much all of our products are going to sell products from the time we're born to the time we die. If you look at like the lead generation portfolio, Dumpsters. Dumpsters are gonna be around after I'm dead, right? So, like, they're not going anywhere. They're not sexy, but they're always gonna be around. I don't chase the fads. Typically we do have one fad product. Our toilet light is pretty cool.

Your toilet light?

Yeah. Best toilet light on Amazon. But in general, like, we like to do, like evergreen products that are always going to be around and, you know, we just focused on honestly, what is the function of an umbrella? And there were a lot of umbrellas that just didn't serve that function very well. So we built ours to really withstand the winds, really keep you, like protected, really, really grip in your hand, really just have a unique brand to it and just a lot of different things and just great customer service. And we just built it right from the beginning and it just happened to be like a market that's really taken off as far as online sales go.

So I want to highlight something here. There's. There is so much noise and attention around the marketing of the thing. One thing that I've learned from Travis is that Travis puts the most attention into ensuring that the thing is the right thing, that the thing is great, that it's phenomenal. He has just as much, if not more confidence in the product itself as he does in the marketing strategy. If you're picking up on the fact that Travis doesn't have his bag of tricks, that's like the new thing that's working on Amazon. His trick is having a great frickin product and then going in and going all in on getting as many people to see the product. And most of the time, he's so confident in the product quality that all the attention that he is spending money oftentimes at a loss to send to the product ends up panning out. Sometimes not, but most of the time it does because he's so confident in the product. Most Amazon sellers I think Amazon sellers are particularly guilty of this. Put the fewest amount of research and attention into product design and they put the most attention to just how do I sell more. That's because they're thinking about it in terms of what do I get out of this rather than how do I create something great for the customer. You can correct me if I'm misrepresenting anything.

Oh, everything you said is absolutely incorrect.

I'm just kidding. It's way easier to do well when you have tailwinds versus headwinds. I mean, you're just going to hit the ground running and you're going to stay running. And we know like from the, from the Google days and everything, like if we were to do things different, like how we would have made our business more long term and more sustainable and so we didn't make that mistake again. And that just comes from experience being an entrepreneur for, I don't know, 10, 11, 12 years. Who knows if he counts since I was 13.

Yeah, yeah. So I've got an interesting question that was posted in the comments. He says, I'm a rookie. He says, forgive me, I'm a rookie.

Oh, you're forgiven.

So he's here for the first time.

The idea, he's listening to you talk about just relentlessly going into these big markets and putting all your resources into blitzing these big markets. And he's sitting here like, I don't have these same types of resources, but I'm really liking what you're selling here. So I'm choosing my first product. What advice would you give James Reese?

Just like, you know, figure out where you can come in and do something that someone else isn't doing.

Boom.

I mean, you got to have an edge, man. If you don't go, if you go in and you're just doing the same things that everyone else is doing, why would you beat them? Like we, when we launched our, when we were, you know, I'm taking myself all the way back to when we were a rookie in the Amazon and E commerce world. Like, you know, we wanted to come in with some sort of edge, right? Like we wanted to do what people weren't doing. And we saw some weaknesses. We wrote them down. We ran tests, experiments. We gave ourselves every edge that we could possibly give ourselves so that we would be successful. And don't just rely on one little edge to get you ahead. Sometimes one little edge is all it takes. And maybe that works forever. But always try to find those little advantages.

Joe and I, we were talking a couple Months ago, and we were like, what is it that we really do amazingly well at? And I think that, you know, we came to the conclusion that we're really. We're like 1% better at a lot of things. And that just makes us, like, really, like, a powerhouse.

A hundred percent. James. This is what I would add to this. I know sometimes you can hear that type of advice, like, where do you have an edge? And it completely goes over your head. Because most of the time, we don't see our own strengths and we don't see our own uniqueness. We don't see our own unique flavor and our own unique approach to something. So one of the advantages that I had when I started my first business, or my first physical products business was my partner Matt and I just developed products that we wanted ourselves. And our unique advantage was if we liked it, it meant that the market would like it because we were the market. So you hear Travis saying he did all this split testing within the market to find the absolute best product. Matt and I did the same thing, except we were our own guinea pigs and we were in the supplement space. And so we're ingesting all these different combinations, seeing what worked the best. So it was fun for us to develop products for ourselves. A lot of people are looking for the right product to sell or the open market, and sometimes that can be helpful to be able to make decisions. But the way you win is by having some sort of unique or strategic advantage. And that doesn't come from just focus, finding a good market and selling to that market. You have to sell really well to that market in a way that is unique to them, that really serves the journey that they're on. So a hack for you to consider as you're going through this process is, what do you want? What do you wish existed? What do you buy on a regular basis that you wish was better? And those are the decisions, and those are the questions that you ask yourself that will lead you down a route of doing things better than all the other people who are trying to get out there and just trying to make money. You will make the most money when you focus on serving the people who are going to be giving you the money. And 80% of entrepreneurs aren't willing to do that basic work.

Yeah, chase the money, man. Just chase. Like, just have fun solving problems. You have to just solve problems, look what people are complaining about, and figure out how to help them. Honestly, like some people say, like, you know, entrepreneurs are, you know, greedy or whatever, selfish. Like, we literally greedy Entrepreneurs, I know we literally, like, only get paid when we help other people. Like, we are solving problems in the world, we are creating better products than existed, and we are serving other people. So if you can get to a point where you're, you're, you're motivated less from your ego and more from like, you know, a point of serving other people and like, doing some, doing the world a better service, then you'll find that motivation is just effortless.

That is fucking beautiful. I am cheersing to that. Travis, I love what you said so much. I would like for you to read what is on the inside of the 1%.

Box. Would you read that out loud?

All right. Capitalism.com, create the change. A capitalist is a visionary kind of entrepreneur. We build things, we change things. We embrace being part of the 1% and we outwork the other 99%. They can judge us, debate us, even blame us, but they cannot ignore us. Because without us, there would be no progress. There would be no jobs, there would be no change.

There would be no change, ladies and gentlemen, without entrepreneurs. Travis.

Yeah.

You were recently Featured in the 1%.

Yeah. Quick question. If entrepreneurship doesn't work out, would I be a good model? Well, I think this is my backup.

I'm a little bit confused by the hand gesture, but I do like the outfit and the hairstyle that you've got going on.

And the Zoolander face.

Right.

That's Blue Steel.

That is Blue Steel.

I believe that's a Blue Steel face.

That's Zoolander Blue Steel.

Dear God, it's beautiful. Well, Travis, I'd love to cheers you with wine in my glass, but I actually am the one who finished tonight, so.

He finished early. I'm gonna.

Cheers.

Thank you for hanging out with us at Wine with Wine. It's always a pleasure, my friend. Super, super.

Thanks for having me, man.

To call you a friend and to bring what you've done to entrepreneurs around the world.

Thank you for, you know, a lot of, what I see a lot of people doing is they'll interview like the greats, like the Elon Musk's or whatever. Like, I really appreciate that you interview like the everyday people that have done something great with themselves, because that really did. When I was a teenager, like, I didn't really get inspired by like the people you saw on tv. I got inspired by the people you never hear about on the forums that would just post a couple of posts and then, you know, they didn't. They were out living their life. They didn't care about, you know, Answering everyone's questions. They just did it to help out that 13 year old kid looking for direction and belief in themselves. So, like, I really appreciate that you bring the real people on your show.

And well, I appreciate that because a shift I've had recently is I think in the entrepreneurial circuit there's a temptation for the host to be the hero. Like there's a temptation for someone in my seat to position myself as the hero. But the truth is the hero is the entrepreneur, of which I am one of many. And the hero is the person who is sitting in their home right now thinking, how do I do things differently to leave a legacy different than the one that I am trying to build right now? That's heroic. It's heroic to be the person who wants something different than what you have right now. It's heroic to be the 13 year old coding website saying, I'm going to live my life differently. It's heroic to say, I'm 40 years old, I have 20 years of work history and I don't want to spend the next 20 years of my life doing the same thing that I did. And it's time for something different. That's heroic. And so part of what I want to do is just inspire and call out the hero that is the entrepreneur. So thank you for that. It means a lot to me.

Yeah, thank you.

Hey YouTube, thanks for watching. This was Wine with Wyan and this is a segment that we do inside of our membership called the what. If you want to hang out with us, live and interact with us and meet other entrepreneurs who are doing cool things in the world, you can join us over@capitalism.com, the number one. That's the number one for the 1%. Also, if you enjoyed this, subscribe to the channel because we leak stuff like this with entrepreneurs who are creating change in the world, who are doing cool things, who are featured on the front of the 1% newsletter. So come subscribe, join the fun. And we do this just to share the insight and the knowledge that comes from our community. And when you're ready to join the community, you can join us@capitalism.com 1. So thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.