Amazon Marketing Masterclass: Zero To $25m In 3 Years w/ Backroom Member Travis Killian #TheOnePercent

I seen this mistake happen over and over again. 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 spend a year trying to learn Shopify and they always, their Amazon sales are this or they're down 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. It takes one free person to create change. This is the show for them. We are the creators of the Free world. This is capitalism.com and we are the 1%. Hey, capitalists. Ryan here. This is a really fun edit from our recent Wine with Wyan episode that we record, inside the 1%. This one was with Backroom member Travis Killian, who has an awesome story of going from zero to over $25 million a year in three years. And he basically gives the playbook in this episode. Spoiler alert. It's a less exciting playbook than you might think. It looks a lot like doing the right things for a long time, which is what we've been preaching here@capitalism.com for more than three years. So he got it. Question for you. When are you going to get it? When are you going to get the idea that when you do the right things for a very long time, really cool things come out for you? I felt bad for C Money and for Nick, our lead editor, because there was so much good stuff in the live recording of this. I have no idea how they were able to pare this down. So this is just packed with good stuff on building a really profitable, exciting business. If you want to attend these live, if you want to have access to these types of people, you should come join us inside the 1%. You can try it for 30 days for a dollar. It's@capitalism.com join. And in our upcoming live sessions that we're doing, we're bringing on some members who have made their wealth by investing it really well, by investing what they make in business really well. So, for example, we have someone coming up on a live session that made all their money selling on Amazon, fba, and then they took that money and they invested it in real estate. And now they have a real estate business that I actually invest in or have invested in anyway. And we're gonna talk to them about that transition and about their story. So if you are craving more of this type of really in depth, high level, but also actionable content that's gonna change your financial future. Then you need to come join us inside the1percentapitalism.com 1. Enjoy this wine with Wine episode with Travis. It's so much fun and and I hope to see you on the next one live. Enjoy.

Travis Killian, nice to see you again.

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

Nice to see you, man.

Travis. So the way I wanna start actually is I think it'd be kind of hard to relate to somebody who's hit your level of somebody who has been as successful as you. And I've been very public about saying I think you're the best Amazon seller in the world. So I mean, that's a bold statement. I think we can back it up. 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?

Yeah. 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 with. With in the car that was your home with rags and. Oh, I'm looking for the rags.

You want the rags?

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

So I actually grew up super poor in a small town in South Carolina called Chester and a small town in North Carolina called Rockingham as well. 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.

And how old were you?

Seven.

Okay.

And then I ended up staying with my aunt and uncle for four years from 7 to 11. They did a fantastic job like setting me straight. My aunt was a high school teacher that taught business and computer. And then, and then I went back with my mom when I was 11 years old. And around 11, I started, you know, gaming a lot. I was very much just left to do whatever I wanted to as long as, as long as my grades were fine. Like I never, 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 played this game called Age of Empires. And I was like a top 100 gamer. And.

From that I actually learned how to make websites. Cause you know, 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. HTML and like, Dreamweaver, like, all. All the good stuff.

That's when you know you're old, if you know what Dreamweaver is.

Front page. Yeah, that's right. It's all front page. This is all fun. Like, even when I was, like, nine years old, like, my aunts would be, like, learning, like, computer, like, how to make websites. And then I would just sit next to her, and I rock. I've been doing this since I was like, as far as I can remember. And I would basically, like, just watch her do it. And then I'd go in my room on my computer and then make a website, and then she'd be like, how'd you do that? And I would, like, do all these cool things, and it was really fun. And so when I was, like, 11, 12, 13 years old, I was making websites online for things I just had fun with, whether it was games or anime I was into at the time or whatever. And then I started, like, you know, reading, and I was like, well, how do you make money on websites? And I learned, like, about affiliate marketing and passive income when I was, like, 15 years old.

So at, like, 13, when you're coding these websites, you're living with your aunt at the time, right?

11. I was living from 7 to 11. I was living with my aunt and uncle. And then after 11, I went back with my mom in a small town in Colchester. She started getting the family back together.

Okay, so after you moved back in with your mom, that's when you started building websites. Is that right? Would it be fair to say that coding websites was actually kind of an escape and a solace for you, that it was, like, part of how you coped with that hard time. Is that fair to say?

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, since I was left to do what I wanted to do and I was already a good kid, like, I knew right from wrong. I knew I wanted to be somebody. I just didn't know what that looked like. 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 going to try this. Oh, this looks cool. I'm going to try this. Oh, girls don't like guys that game. I'm going to learn how to work out. Oh, I'm going to. 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. When I was in elementary school, I never doubted that I was going to be a millionaire. Like, I never doubted that I was going to be successful. I never doubted that I was going to be involved in baseball. And, like, it was just. All I had to do was dream. Because 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 you. 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. Life is better when you believe that you can do things.

I mean, so you.

So you start reading about affiliate marketing and making money on the Internet, essentially. And is that kind of how you found a different path than what had been shown you from your aunt and your mom? Yeah.

I mean, actually, the turning point. This is a deep, dark moment. Okay, I'm ready. All right. Two weeks before prom, I broke up with my girlfriend. Yeah, the end. And. Yeah, the end. And I didn't have a date. To prom. So. I never went to prom, actually.

And, Travis, I will go to prom with you.

Would you?

I will.

Dude, we would crush it.

We would bring all the dance moves.

We would. We would. And we would bring the boys to the yard, for sure.

Oh, damn right.

Better than this.

And I just remember this moment because I was like, you know, figuring out, like, I don't know, you just, like, we're feeling down. And my escape when I'm feeling down is to, like, read, and specifically not read, like, personal development and just, like, other. Learn from other people. And I remember this blog at the time, I think it was Steve Pavlina's blog, personal development blog, way back in the day. And I remember stumbling across this blog, and he had this post about, like, passive income. And I kind of knew that that's what I wanted, but I never heard the term passive income before. And to be honest, like, at the time, this is 2004, I don't really think passive income was a very big term in the Internet space to begin with. So the idea of making money without, like, trading your time for money was like a new concept to me. And I realized that, you know, with the advent of the Internet, like, I could do this and I could be. And he said, like, you know, his website makes money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. He makes more money. Like, you know, when he sleeps at night, he's woken up and he can cover the bills. And I was like, that'd be really cool.

And you're like. And you're still a teenager at this point?

Yeah, I was like. I guess I was 15, 16. Okay, something like that. And. And so I knew that's what I wanted. So then I started, like, you know, looking up affiliate marketing, making affiliate websites. I had, like, adsense websites. I had affiliate websites, like, all this different stuff. And by the time I was in college, like, freshman year in college, I was making a couple thousand a month online passively. And I'm over here like, oh, here I am, coming from, like, you know, poverty and food stamps to making a couple grand a month of freshman in college. I was like, living life. And then I finally drank for the first time when I was in college. And I was just like, see, up.

Until that statement right there, I was thinking about how remarkably similar our paths were. I mean, just, like, remarkably similar. And then you're like. And then I had my first. I did not drink in college. No, I never had a sip of alcohol. I did not have a sip of alcohol until I graduated college. Yes. And then I had my wild days where I drank, like, two glasses of wine and was a hit, you know? And Now I have two kids and.

I'm in bed by 9:30, and I'm trying to resurrect those wild days with Wyan again.

And here we are.

I'm just gonna start, actually. I'm gonna. I'm gonna get a CRM and an autoresponder, and I'm just gonna text you every Friday and Saturday. I'm gonna be like, hey, you want to come out tonight? Like, how are the kids doing?

Magic. You know what? Philip would clean up on the dance floor. He's six weeks old now, so he is popular with the ladies.

I need him.

I don't know that you do, because I follow you on Instagram, Travis. You don't look like you need any help. Anyway, so in college, 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, you know, accept the lead requests and be like, what website are you trying to rank? What keyword? And then I would have, you know, clients paying a couple thousand dollars a month to rank for keywords like china sourcing or antique furniture or whatever. And then I started. You know, that's when I sophomore, junior year is when I started making, like, six figures online. And this was all, like, pretty easy for me. And. 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. I want to talk to you. I gotta. I gotta meet you in person, though. I gotta 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 100, 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's the mentor that got me into business. And then I have another mentor that got us into Amazon.

Okay, got it. So that's where I want to go next. But first of all, have to give a shout out to Tiffany, who said she's from Bennettsville and Laurenberg, and she acts like you should know what that is.

Bennettsburg and Laurenberg, right by Chester, apparently. Oh, yes, yes, I know where that is.

Okay.

Oh, my gosh. Small town. Holy crap.

Hi. So, Tiffany.

Small town girl.

Tiffany wanted you to know that. Hey, if you're watching live, by the way, let us know in the comments. We'd love to say hello. First of all, hello, Brittany McKellen. Hey, Adrian Lazar.

Hey.

Who is an Ines.

Man. Zan, do you know how to say that? Mano.

Just so you know, Inez does not allow bad wine to be in my house. So this is a 2016 Argentinian Malbec.

Inez, I saved one bottle for you of something that looked really, really expensive. I don't know if it was really expensive, but it looks really expensive. And I was like, I feel wrong not drinking this with Inez. So just so you know, it's here. Let's see who else. Bram Sparrow is here. Bram is my man. Bram sent me the greatest, the best text today. I really appreciated it, dude. Herb, I actually need to figure out how to say your last name. Is it Detrement? I think that. I think that's how you say it. Who else is with us? J.B. mack is here. Valerie Rasenar, Josh Wilkinson. Doug Lawrence is with us. That Inez character keeps coming back.

A lot of emojis, too.

With a lot of emojis.

I don't know if she actually types. I think she just does emojis.

Oh, she types. And you can hear her from down the street when she types. She's the loudest typer in the world. Yes. At the next Capitalism conference. Details coming soon. Hint, hint. At the next Capitalism conference, you will hear the note taker, Inez Manziano in the back of the room pounding away. She's the loudest typer in the world. Okay, so, Travis, you have an SEO background. What got you into selling on Amazon?

Well, I kind of peaked in the lead, so I ended up building a lead generation business and scaled it across multiple verticals. And we're getting over a thousand leads a day across a lot of different industries and you know, it's very passive and kind of like running itself didn't require a lot of work. And it was at a time where Google was really cracking down on SEO. So like, if you were too good, you got like the wrong attention. And you know, we could always beat the algorithms, but beating like manual reviewers was quite difficult. So we just had to settle being okay and not too good. And so like, we were looking for other opportunities, so we were trying other things out. We had bought some online companies, didn't really pan out. And.

A mentor of mine who owned an SEO agency as well was also kind of in a similar scenario where we had these projects that were making money, but we had all this time and we were looking for something to do, something to diversify away from Google and just kind of get a new project going. So he started doing E commerce and Amazon and we had went another route and bought some Internet companies and tried to scale them. And then after about six months of him being selling on Amazon, he was like, so you should probably get into Amazon. And the reason why he reciprocated is because we actually joint ventured in a big, massive lead generation project together because he had a lot of SEO resources, we had a lot of SEO resources as well. And we had all the buyers for a bunch of leads. And so we did one final push and we made each other, you know, like a pretty decent amount of money, over 50k a month each. And we were like, okay, like, you know, he was really excited for that. Like, we were really excited about our mutually beneficial joint venture. And then he reciprocated by introducing us to Amazon. And it was at a time where we had the, we had the, you know, resources and time to be able to like dedicate to that project.

And so, 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, I mean, that 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 was it that allowed you to hit the, you hit the accelerator hard when you came out of the gate. You said that you had the resources and the time to be able to dedicate. Dedicate to it. 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 out an E commerce position, you need capital for inventory.

And would you, would you comment on that? Like, did you take money that was sitting on the sidelines from other projects? Did you raise money? Did you have, did you go get funding somewhere? Like, what was your approach?

We did a mix of, 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. And if I could have dialed, 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 a strat, 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, like, if things change, right? Because, I mean, whether you like it or not, like 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, not. 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 blackout. 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. There's money on the other side of it.

Oh, for sure.

So, so it's, it's a big video game to you and so you took that approach that made you a top 100 gamer and you said, okay, this is working. If I could go back to my Google days, I wish I had gone all in on what was working at the time. I'm not going to miss that opportunity on Amazon.

Exactly.

And so you go full throttle into this and you said that there were certain strategies that were working really well for you. And my understanding is those strategies haven't changed much over the years.

Not really.

Would you get a high level view on what that is?

Yeah. So like, you know, if you know the good old days of Amazon, let's say that you had to like, you know, everyone knows you used to do like giveaways to rank and now giveaways tend to be less effective. But the premise is kind of the same. You want to basically make Amazon look at your listing. So what can you do to blitz your listing early on? And you just test a lot of different methods. We don't rely on one single thing to rank a listing. We blitz it from a lot of different directions because we know that all those signals are going to make our listing rank better.

And that would be Google, ppc, everything, Facebook ads. It would be Amazon pay per click. It would be. Is there anything else you would throw in there?

Email list. We have, we've accumulated a massive email list over the years and so basically.

Any resource you have to drive traffic to the listing, you're willing, and my understanding is you're willing to lose money in that process in order to gain the algorithm. Is that correct?

You definitely should be willing to lose money and obviously get better and better to where ideally long term, you don't even lose money on it. So within each of the, let's say there's all those different strategies you just mentioned within, we would get really good at all those strategies to where the losses are minimalized over time so that we have ability to scale more with less loss and a faster roi, because that's what's going to Allow us to continue this perpetual system.

And is that whole process to continue to feed Amazon and get them looking at all these different signals? Is that correct?

Yeah, for sure.

So none of that is black hat? No, none of that is, like, hard to understand.

It's not.

It's. It's just you being. It's really you just having the balls to go as aggressive as you've gone.

Yeah, you got to have the balls to do it. You also got to be very, like, conscientious of, like, what you're doing and really tracking it, split testing, running different experiments. I would say a huge core competency of our. Of. Of our team, our employees, our team internationally. Everyone is always like, test, test, test, test everything. Because you know, what we think might work might not actually work. And so unless you're monitoring, tracking, testing, tweaking, tracking, optimizing, tweaking, testing, tracking, unless you're continuing to do that over and over again, you're going to get stale and you're going to get left behind. And that just happens to be one of the things that I personally really enjoy doing.

So micro question here. What are you using for your tracking and your split testing?

Oh, gosh, we'll use, like, Google surveys, Facebook surveys, like, test within our own audience. We'll use, like, their survey providers.

Oh, so you don't. You don't mean test like ad strategies. You mean test the product.

We'll test the product before we develop the product. We'll test the product after it's already developed. We run AB tests on the listings to always try to increase the conversion rates. Yeah, we're just like, we test different strategies, like, you know, advertising strategies. Like we say, okay, we know what this does. You know, we're probably about 95% perfect or close to perfect in this. But what happens if we do this other thing in ads, you know, with, let's say, Amazon PPC as an example? Could we do better if we just, like, scratch our initial belief and do something completely different and just like always trying to do that and learn.

Have you ever had a dud?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Like, have you ever sunk money into something that just never turned.

Yeah.

Would you tell me about that? It would make me feel better about this.

Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. Let's see. We launched a sleep mask that, like, literally put, like, marks on people's eyes because they were using moisturizers with alcohol, and alcohol pulls dye out of material. So, like, when you put a sleep mask on at night and you put a moisturizer on your Eyes and you fault. You wake up, you might have like black marks on your eye and you're like, what the heck? So we scrapped that product.

That was, that was a funny, you know, an interesting loss. We've had like other products that like, you know, the margins just weren't as high as what we thought it would be or it took way longer to launch. We have a mattress protector that just hasn't taken off and that's fine. The pillow protector did just, you know, it's just part of the game. As long as your hit rates are better than your loss rates, just keep going and know when to cut it. And we've also had products like our oil diffuser that literally the first year it didn't. It was. We thought it was a loss. And then we, you know, improved our strategies and we ended up like kind of redoing the whole thing and we ended up restoring it. Now it's a really good success and one of the Amazon's most competitive categories. So, yeah, like, we're always. I'm not scared of losses. Losses tell you something. And it also humbles you. But I think that the scary thing is that for me about what losses does is to your mindset. Like, I've definitely let losses affect me as far as like second guessing what's working and just accepting that maybe it's not going to work on everything and maybe I should continue to double down on what was working. 60, 70, 80, 90% of the time. You know, when you have a loss, you tend to focus more on that than you do on your. The fact, on your winners.

Yes.

And it makes you like, well, should we do this? Like, are we spending too much money on this? Like, is this going to work? Is every. Is the sky falling? Like, and you got to really, like have a mental toughness to understand, like, what to, to extract what's true and factual versus what's in your head and the belief.

I 100 agree. And I have found that it is a skill, a learned skill to be able to identify what is the voice in your head versus what is true.

Oh my gosh.

And you have to get kicked around a bit to be able to have that mental toughness. It is required. I think it is why adversity, which both of us had growing up, is a precursor to success. Because it's one of the things where you learn to ignore what is going on right now and think about something else. Think about a future, think about a dream, think about what could be and you create that rather than stay stuck in what is going on right now, there's a question that came up from one of our 1 percenters and, and you mentioned how you have these big email lists as a result of all these sales, are you doing anything to get those buyers to follow you in other places or are you just getting them on an email list to follow.

Me in other places?

Like social media, Are you building any social media? Are you getting them to come back and buy again or are you just trying to get them onto an email list and if so how?

Yeah, yeah. So you know, we like to really like focus not on too many things at first, right? So like first want to interact. Like if we have a product insert, like we don't want to have them like join, follow us on social media and opt into our email list and go to our website and you know, register your warranty here. Like we don't want to have them do like five different things. We wanted to have them do one thing and that is like visit a website, opt into our email list and incentivize them. And we're always split testing what's the best way to incentivize them to do that. And it's not the same for every product. One product you may be able to incentivize them with like you know, let's say like an extended warranty. And another product you may incentivize them with like a cheap little add on. But whatever you do for that specific product and always be testing, get them, we like to get them to our list because we know emails are cheap, right? Like we're not paying to retarget them. We're not, we're not like sending them to a website and then losing a lot of them. We're literally sending to an email list and sending emails to them is super cheap and effective long term. And so we use them for product upsells, for helping get product reviews on products that may have a rating that started going down or something like that.

You do a blast to the list.

Exactly.

Able to turn that on. By the way, there is a bonus in your members area called get 500 reviews in a weekend. And I included some copy that I use for that exact strategy. So my strategies on Amazon are similar where you get the one thing that I want is those buyers on an email list. Now I do it personally because I'm an email marketer so I will sell more if I have a big email list. But I had this one strategy I've deployed. I always coined it get 500 reviews in a Weekend and I wrote sample copy that you can swipe and seal. It is in your members area inside the 1%. All right, Travis. Question that was submitted by one of our members.

This was asked by both Devin and Rich. Okay, 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 backroom, honestly, 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 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. Yeah. Not by having all like a little bit here and a little bit here and a little bit now. 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 always protect and grow the main moneymaker. 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 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 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, you know, 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 like doing any amazing, any E commerce like 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 do a lot of really cool things with that outside of Amazon as well.

That's so cool. So I've got an interesting question that was posted in the comments by James Reese. 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 gotta 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, you know, 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, you know, always try to find those little advantages. Like I, you know, Joe and I, we were, we, we were talking a couple of months ago and we were like, you know, what is it that we really do amazingly well at? And I think that, you know, we came to the conclusion that we're, we're like 1% better at a lot of things. And that just makes us like really like a powerhouse.

100% 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 were 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 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, 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 at 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. And like, you know, just get. Don't do it for greed or selflessness. Just do it because you just. You genuinely just want to, like, you know, help others. Like, my probably one of my most passionate products is our cushion, because it actually, like, relieves chronic pain from people that are sitting. And I feel a disservice, like, in the world, if we don't do the best we can at selling our seat cushion, because there are a lot of people that have hours and hours of pain all day in their back that could have relief from our product that don't know about it. And that fuels me beyond just, like, the sales that we get. And that's why our seat cushion is up 60% year over year. And so, like, and that motivation is going to get us even further, and we have ideas to continue scaling that because I'm less motivated about the money and more motivated about actually helping people. And so if you can get to a point where you're motivated less from your ego and more from a point of serving other people and doing the world a better service, then you'll find that motivation is just effortless.

That is fucking beautiful. I'm 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 dot 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. Some of you think this game is about pursuing money so that you can have a better life. But you get the money and you get the better life when you go out and you solve problems, when you create change. That's why it's so beautiful that Travis is saying he's so passionate about his seat cushions because they solve one problem, and it's the relief of pain in his customers. And that gives him the fuel to make it better and better and get out to more and more people. 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, then it's 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.

Did you take this headshot just for this. This newsletter, or is this a modeling?

I actually did it for the newsletter. Man, that's amazing. You told me that makes me sad. I told you I try to do 1% better at everything I do. And for the 1%, I'm going to do 1% better for this 1%.

That's fantastic.

Actually, this wasn't a pose. It was between poses.

That was between poses.

It was between poses. It was actually like, he caught me, like, moving, and he was snapping photos, and then we tried to beat it, and we couldn't do it. It's that good.

That's fantastic. That is good. Okay, so just a lightning round for people who are commenting on the live Doug Lawrence. So what would be your advice for finding the problem and the people for whom I want to serve and the problem that I want to solve? You seem to go product first and then just make it awesome for those people. I go more for the people first and what are they struggling with and develop it for that. So how would you answer that question?

Oh, man. There's lots of different ways. Like, personally, like, I'm just looking at what people are searching to buy. And then once I find something that looks interesting from that perspective, then I look at what the complaints are for that product and then say, is this something that we believe we could fix? And then I look at competitors. Has any competitor done, in our opinion, a really good job at fixing that problem? And if all three of those things line up, then we'll say, this is a pretty good opportunity. There's a market, there's a demand for it, there's some clear complaints and room for improvement that we feel we could solve, and there's a clear lack of resolution in the market for it. So we start the search at the product level and then qualify it that way. If I were to do it another way, I would probably start by looking at. I mean, you could just type in, like, all. A bunch of people are always searching for questions, right. Like, of problems, like, how do I fix this? How can I do this? How can I.

Do this one thing? Or how can I improve this or help alleviate this? Right. Like, people are always searching and looking for answers. And so you could go from that search intent and build a product for that audience that way, or you can go from the buyer intent and then build a product for that audience in the way that we do. Just depends. Those are two different ways to accomplish a similar goal.

Yeah, and I just take.

A similar but slightly tweaked approach where I just start with the crowd, start with a group of people, ask them what they buy and what they don't like about it, and then go develop that. So it's. It's the same process, I guess, the same end goal with different processes to get there. So, Doug, the way to answer your question is ask people. I don't think it up. Just ask them. You can serve those people. You are ask. Ask yourself of what you want, and then go develop that.

You know, when. When Yeti first came out, I was like, why are you going to call yourself a tumbler? Because if I tumble you on the ground, you're going to leak. I always thought that was silly.

So are you coming after Yeti?

We have thought about it.

So I want to invest in that company.

Yeah. I always thought that that was silly to call something a tumbler that didn't. That couldn't tumble.

I don't know.

All right, Travis, I'm gonna ask this to wrap things up. I want to ask this question that I get. I get slammed with on a weekly basis. And you've done it, and your approach to it flies in the face of Everything. And is influencer marketing. You've had the Kardashians talk about some of your brands. Travis, what's the secret to influencer marketing?

Actually, this is what you got to do. You have to hire a private investigator. Okay. Then that private investigator has to figure out where they live. All right? And then you have to make sure that the climate is very cold, and then you end very dry. And then you send her a humidifier every day until she uses it. And then she. I'm just kidding. None of that's what actually what happened. What actually happened is we woke up one day and we had a surge in humidifier sales and couldn't figure out what was going on. And then my marketing manager, Camilla was like, we just got a news mention in Allure magazine and it looks like Kendall Jenner just tweeted about our. Just tweeted about this interview. And in this interview, like, halfway through, she mentioned that one of her secrets or one of her beauty secrets is using our humidifier at night with essential oils. And that was pretty cool. And we've had, like, we've been on Good Morning America wire cutter featured in probably every major, like, online public syndication, as mentioned, at least one of our products before. And it's all because when you sell million, you know, millions of units of stuff in a year and they're really good quality and they have really good reviews, and you're doubling down on every. Every step of the way of improving them and getting your name out there, then people are going to find out about it and they're going to talk about it. And we didn't pay for it.

Not a single one. And not none of the outreach either. Right. Like, you, you weren't going out and. No, you made a great product that was selling a lot. Enough that other people found out about it.

Exactly.

That's influencer marketing, Everybody. All of you are trying to hack the system by paying people for shout outs and all that. You're missing the real opportunity. It all starts with, do you have something great for a very specific group of people? That's the starting point. Then you can turn on tips and tricks and tactics to make it go faster. But if you really do your job, people start talking about it automatically. I had a really cool shift. My buddy Jeff woods mentioned a conversation that he had with his boss and his mentor, Gary Keller, and they were selling all of this product. And Gary said, there's one problem. The product sucks. And Jeff was like, what are you talking about? We're selling this like, we're Selling this much. This much. He says, yeah, but none of the sales are coming from referrals. No one's talking about the product. A really great product comes because people are talking about how great it is. And I was like, huh? How guilty have I been of just relying on my own marketing rather than seeing marketing as the.

The. The fire or the gasoline on the fire to make it roar even brighter so that I get more referrals? And that was a real shift for me. And it seems like you've built your brands to be able to do that.

You know, remember when I first talked to you, we had this conversation about, like, what is a brand?

Yeah, I do.

And I was like, well, I don't really understand what a brand is. I know what, like, sales are. I know what making good products are. I know what, you know, like, making, you know, pleasing your customers is. I know what nurturing your customers is, but I don't know what a brand is. Like, I couldn't wrap my mind around it. And now I would say that we actually have brands, because if you get people that will literally, like, remit. Actually, this is funny. I was having a meeting with someone that last week that been working with for over a year. He didn't even know that we sold umbrellas. He actually works for another one of my brands, Bossman, and.

He didn't know anything about, like, you know, my major company. We always focused about bossman and stuff. And. And he was like, so you sell umbrellas? I was like, yeah. And he, like, you know, looked at our website or whatever, and he was like, I have one of your umbrellas. He knew right away. He knew right away. I just said, before even I just told him the name. And he knew that he had our umbrella. And that's branding.

That's.

That is branding what you were alluding to. Actually, MJ mentions in his. One of his books is called legacy Marketing. Legacy marketing is like, something you do one time, whether it's a podcast, an interview, like, a piece of content, whether it's a product that's like, sitting in someone's as small as, like, sitting in someone. You know, you're sitting in a chair, and then someone else comes over and is like, what are you sitting on? Oh, that's a seat cushion. Oh, where'd you get it from? Buying it. Like, all this is forms of legacy marketing. In other words, that it continues every day to get you new sales that you don't pay for. And so you want to build as many nodes of legacy marketing out there.

As Many things that you do once that matter forever.

Forever without having to pay incrementally. You pay one time and then it's there.

All right, Travis, I'm going to leave with this. This is the 1%. So what is the one thing that if you could go back in time and tell the 13 year old who is building websites.

What would you tell that person if you could go back in time?

Okay, assuming that like I don't tell them to buy Bitcoin or Apple or some stock. Right? Just assuming that I'm talking to a 13 year that looks like they were in, you know, the situation that I was in and I want to like encourage them to, you know, get out of their situation. Right? Is that what you're asking? Like, if I was talking to them present day, like, they're just like certain. Similar to me.

Maybe or maybe not. I mean, you and I have had a lot of deep conversations about happiness too.

Yeah.

So like what, like what would you just tell that kid?

I would just say, like, dude, just keep. Don't let adults tell you like, that you can't have, you shouldn't be having fun what you do. Don't let adults tell you that this is the way and there's no other way to do this. Always, you know, question. Always believe in yourself. Realize that we are not like extraordinarily like, like hyper intelligent individuals that you don't have the ability to ever compete with, that we're just normal people like you that just, just had fun and believe that we could just like do whatever we wanted and we just tried. You know, you're a kid, like, you know, continue to live in the moment, but also, you know, try to like, challenge yourself in lots of different ways. Like, and yeah, just like believe you can get out of where you are and do something. And at least if you. Whether you can or whether you can't doesn't really matter. What matters is that you're not going to let yourself not try.

And I would say that that advice is universal regardless of the age, because I would. Look, somebody who is starting a new business at the age of 45 say the exact same thing. Don't let the belief patterns, don't let the opinions of the people around you, don't let your peers, decisions about what's best for them influence how you see the second half of your life. Because how you see it and how you create it will determine whether or not you actually go for and achieve the freedom that you want. 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 to, to, to know you and to bring what you've done to entrepreneurs around the world. So thank you very much.

I appreciate it, man. Thank you, thank you for those of.

You who watched on the Live and are hanging out here inside of the 1% and this is going to be our approach moving forward with Wine with Wyan bringing on the guests that I know will serve the community for where you're at. So I thank you for your participation here in the Facebook group and for hanging out with us on the live. It is a pleasure to be in front of you and to serve you. Thanks for hanging out with us.

And I just want to say one thing to you and that is 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, 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, they were out living their life. They didn't care about, you know, answering everyone's questions. They just did it to, 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, 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. Means a lot to me.

Yeah. Thank you.

All right, 1 percenters, it's great to see you. As a capitalist, I believe that you create the change that drives the world. So I salute you, I honor you and would love to cheers you sometime when you're here in Austin, Texas. Great to see you. Thanks for watching. Good night, everybody. We're doing some trainings inside the 1% for this month for our members. You can get your spot over@capitalism.com join and there you can test it out for 30 days for a dollar and come hang out with a bunch of people who are actively doing this stuff, including everything that you're going to hear on the podcast you can attend live. So the trainings that we're doing on what's working right now with Amazon, you can join that live and we'll leak some of it here on the podcast. But if you want to be here and involved in the community, go over to capitalism.com join and you'll be with a bunch of your peers who are doing this stuff together.

Sa.