Amazon Sales & Reviews: $400k Per Month Case Study

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Ah. I suddenly feel coronavirus free. Hey, so let me. Before we bring on Travis and Jenna, I want to share something with you guys. I was having a great conversation this past week with somebody who was starting a new business. This is not a new entrepreneur, but it is a new. A new business. And this person has kind of wrapped up his old business, left that, left it in the hands of someone else to run it, and is starting something new. And.

We work together.

On the business and the thing that he should do. And he just read my book. He lives here in Austin. Just read the book, is super excited to follow the plan, but I gave him some advice that sort of surprised him a little bit. And this is what I said. I said his name is Ben. I said Ben, I wrote my book for a new entrepreneur. I wrote my book in a way that could help any new entrepreneur build a seven figure business. You are not a new entrepreneur. And so my advice for you is different than what it would be for someone else. And I said my advice for you is to go ensure you've got enough money to go hit this thing really hard. And for him that was maybe $100,000, maybe less, maybe $50,000 to do it really well, to have enough inventory for him to really smash the launch. And then I said, the next thing that I'm going to recommend you do is that he's fairly well connected and between the two of us we can get the attention of the people we'd like to get the attention of. I said the next thing I would recommend you do is that you go create a partnership with an influencer who is in front of your target market. And I would recommend that you give up 20 to 40% of the company to those two groups, financial financial backer and influencers. He's a little surprised by this advice. And I said, here's the thing, since you've done this before, you can handle a multi seven figure business within a few months. And if you go have enough capital to smash this thing to be able to sustain the inventory, to fund the growth, to keep things moving in the right direction and you have the right audience that takes this from 0 sales a day to 100 sales a day very quickly over the next six months, you can cut out like two years of time and just smash a seven figure business really quickly. And what most people do is they, they do what we kind of pioneered. You start in the grind, you get to 25 sales a day, you bootstrap your way to 100 sales a day, which is a million dollar business. And that's fine, it's what everyone should do when they're starting their first business. But if you can handle the scale of something bigger, you can go way faster with a few key relationships. Most entrepreneurs and a lot of you inside the 1% are learning about audience building, are learning about growing incrementally. And that's all great against what you should do at the beginning of a business, if it's your first business. But a faster way is to go create the partnership with the influencer, the partnership with the audience, the partnership with the person who has the money. And you stay in the owner's seat, you stay in that seat of control without you having to carry the whole thing on your back. So an example of this, an acquaintance of mine, Brian Lee, founded the Honest Company and LegalZoom and a bunch of other really successful companies. Brian sits in the owner's chair, raises the Money partners with the audience, hires the CEO and says, call me if you need me. Now, he only keeps like 30 or 40% of the company, but he is not operating the business. He is not risking his own capital. He's not learning about audience building. He just says one, two, skip a few. 99. A billion dollar company. And he has four billion dollar companies on his resume at like 45 years old. Why is he able to do that? Because he doesn't go into the weeds of the business. He comes up with the idea, gets the right people, and stands out of the way. This has inspired me a great deal, and it's something that I think e commerce entrepreneurs are particularly resistant to because most people are.

Trying to control the whole pie rather than trying to create as big a pie as possible. But would you rather have 30% of $100 million business or would you rather have 100% of a $3 million business? Either one's fine. And some people will say different things. But if you have entrepreneurial experience and you can handle a seven figure business, I'd recommend you take advantage of this unique time that we're in right now and you just smash it. Like you just go all in on this. And all in does not mean riskier. All in just means being committed to growing faster. And that means a few key relationships. Good morning, Drew. Good morning, Zoltan. Good morning.

Today we're going to be joined by Travis and Jenna. You might be familiar with them because I know at least Jenna has been on the podcast in the past and I reference the two of them all the time. I tell their story in my book 12 months to 1 million. And today we're going to be talking about sales and reviews. They have gotten really good at Amazon pay per click. They also manage Amazon pay per click for a handful of people. And they've been implementing the stuff that we've talked about from last week where we talked about getting 10,000 reviews. They've been implementing that into their existing business and they've seen really fast results and they've seen growth as a result of that. So we'll go into that as well. Doctors, give me a thumbs up if you are ready to come join me. All right, Three thumbs up. All right, let's do this.

Hey, team. What's going on?

How you doing, Ryan?

Doing great. Good to see you.

Yeah, you too.

Good seeing you. The three thumbs up was for Jude that's sitting watching frozen in the background.

Okay, got it. Hey, Jude. Good to see you, man. And Esther is watching. Esther, what Are you watching right now?

The what? The luppies. She's watching something. So she and Jude are on similar wavelengths.

Perfect.

And you know we're about to be neighbors because I just bought a house right by you guys. It's gonna take six months to fix up, but I will be out in your neck of the woods here in the next few months.

You should have looked in our community, you don't even have to fix them up because they're brand new.

That's true. So why don't you guys start by giving us a little bit of your background and the business and where it is now, and then we'll kind of backtrack of what you've been doing lately to get it to its current levels.

You wanna take the background?

Sure. Go for it. I mean, we started out as optometrists, and we were bored with two new optometry practices and ended up starting this business where we learned how to sell on Amazon, our company we named I Love. And we started out selling sunglasses because that's what we knew best. And it just made sense being optometrists. And then probably about, what, a year in or so.

He was at a conference and saw someone on stage that was a doctor at the Tribe summit.

It was Stephen Cabral.

Yep. And saw Dr. Cabral up on stage. And he was kind of being drilled about why he wasn't selling his own products. Why is he selling other people's products in his office?

Because he was the expert.

Right. And so we decided that that's what we needed to do. So we looked at everything that we were selling on our shelf in our practice, and we said, okay, well, we're going to come out with every single one of those if we can. And so we just kind of started chipping away at that.

We were going to be a pediatric practice. We wanted to open up a practice for kids, but someone else had other plans, because when we opened up our practices in South Carolina, all we had were geriatrics. And so opposite of what we were going for. And with an older population, you get a lot of dry eye. And so we discovered that we wanted to treat more dry eye, and so we created a group on Facebook. But the big turning point came for us when a patient came in. We were prescribing a product that was prescription. It was called Avenova. And we were giving it to pretty much all our patients because it works so well. And they raised their price from $30 a month to $300 a month overnight. And that was kind of when Someone came to us and said, this is actually a patient or practice said, hey, this is now $300 a month. Can you make a more affordable version of it? Because I know you're an entrepreneur. And that's when I was just like, let me see what I can do. And so we went on a search for a manufacturer. It's a hard product to make because it creates bleach as a byproduct. And so we didn't want to have bleach in our formulation and so we found a manufacturer to do that. And that's how hydrate was born. And in the July box, our hydrate tea tree face wash was in there. That's kind of one of the follow up products because we learned from you quite a bit, Ryan, and we're just serving the person now. And so we know they wash their face and we don't want them to put chemicals and nasty stuff all over their face. And so that's why we came out with our face wash. But that's how we pretty much started. And that was three years ago. We're now three years and two months into our hydrate journey, which is our Dry Eye brand, and we're loving every minute of it.

That's great. Well, congratulations. I mean, I know that you've done a couple of pivots in your business and it seems like you guys have really hit exit velocity, if you will, in the last year or so since really going all in on, on this direction. Yeah.

And we about exited last year, but then listening to one of your lectures out in Vegas.

So why don't you tell that story? Why don't you tell that, why don't you tell that story? Because you did almost exit.

Yeah. So we, we were part of the back room for two years and we left the back room to join another mastermind. And the big difference between the two masterminds, not saying that other mastermind was wrong, but it was just wrong for us. And the reason it was wrong for us is because every time I went, and this is what I tell people when you're looking for a coach, is if you have a conversation with this coach and they make you feel overwhelmed when you're done, then that's not a good coach for you.

If you have a conversation with your.

Coach and they make you feel good and ready to go again, that's a good coach. And every time we talked to this coach, I felt overwhelmed. And every time we went to a mastermind, overwhelm just kicked in and I just, I didn't feel good. And so that gave me a scarcity mindset and that impacts the whole business because I'm the CEO. I'm the entrepreneur. So she's more of our CEO overall. And so we went to sell because we didn't know what else to do. And then we listened to your lecture last July. We entered the back room again last fall and we've almost doubled since we entered the back room again last fall. And so we were doing close to 3 to 3.2 million last year and the year before. And we should hit, I mean, we've hit a lot of logistical issues this year because of growth, but we should hit about 4 to 5 this year.

That's great. Congratulations. That's fantastic.

Thanks.

Yeah, you're on pace for an eight figure exit, my friends.

That's good.

That is good. Yes.

And I also know that the two of you have been testing some new pay per click strategies and also the review getting stuff that Jeremiah and Justin and those guys have kind of made popular in our little circle. So I was hoping you could share a little bit about what you've been focusing on and what has provided those results for you.

Yeah. So Jeremiah and I had a conversation. This is why I love the backroom. Because the backroom isn't necessarily one thing, it's the relationship building that you get. And when those relationships build, you share more. And Jeremiah and I were talking one day and something just clicked for me because he let me know the strategy that you guys learned last Sunday with Justin and Gabe. And it's pretty simple. Their strategy is price lower than what's out there with a higher quality product until you get more reviews and then you can double the price and that's when the profit comes. So they play the long term game. And he was telling me that one of their products, their best selling products, it took them like three and a half years to get to the reviews amount that they wanted before they actually increased their price. And so they're in it for the long term game. And that just clicked something for me. The difference between us and them is they sell one off products. I mean, you may get repeats every once in a while, but we sell consumables, we sell the face wash, we sell eyelid cleanser, we sell eyelid wipes, we sell lotion, we sell a lot of things. And so you have to kind of balance it with people don't want to buy cheap lotion to put on their skin. People don't want to buy cheap supplements to put in their body. And So I had to figure out a way to implement their strategy with the high end consumable market. And I wouldn't say even that we're extremely high end. We're kind of in the middle. We're not cheap, but we're not super expensive. And so what we've done is we price it where we want it to be priced in the end. And then what we do is on Amazon, we put a big coupon on it, like a 50% off coupon. So right now, the face wash that you guys got in your box, it's priced at $20. We're having logistical issues because the bottle that we use for that was used for hand sanitizers. So we don't have anything going on right now for that. But what we usually do for that product is we price it at 20 and we put a 50% off coupon on it. And we will run that 50% off coupon until we get to either 100 sales per day or a thousand subscribers.

What that allows us to do is it just allows us to increase velocity. We got up to 75 sales a day before COVID hit. Covid hit, we ran out of bottles and so we had to stop all advertising. And now at full price with very minimal advertising, we're selling about 30 to 40 a day. But that's a result of having a great quality product and then giving that discount up front to allow people to try out that consumable. Now the big difference with this is that they will only see that coupon once in every three months. And the goal is to get them on subscribe and Save, because once they get on subscribe and Save, they're going to pay full price every time. And so the coupon, we reset it every three months, but each buyer will only see it once every three months. And so don't be afraid to discount your product really high, especially if you have a repeat purchase, because you'll gain that velocity. And what we see is only 33% of people that buy on a day to day basis use the coupon. And so it's attractive to see that and not that many people buy it. So that's kind of a basic rundown. I don't know if you want to dive into any of that anymore.

Well, I actually really appreciate how specific you're being. This is very helpful. So, but just just to summarize what's different about how you kind of approach, you do basically the same strategy as what we talked about last week on the kind of the giving 10,000 reviews strategy.

You.

Want to. And then you have that discount on the front end in order to get that surge of sales up front. And you'll run that until you're doing 100 sales a day or have a thousand monthly subscribers.

The part that I missed was you said that you were doing, I think 30 at full price as a result of. I think it sounded like you were trying to slow down because you're having some logistical issues. So do you temper the use of that coupon based on the velocity that you want to have? And does the coupon affect the user's ability to leave a review or the impact in the algorithm? That was the question that came up for me.

Yeah, great question. And we have not seen a problem with the coupon.

With leaving reviews. So we start the strategy when we have five reviews. And I think that product alone has. I think it's close to 100 now. I don't pay attention to the review count that much. I pay attention to the sales. And then.

So when sales were taking off, but we could not get the bottle anymore, and we knew how much we were going to have for the next six months, that is when we actually took the coupon off and. And it dropped down to like 20 to 30 sales a day. And we took advertising off.

Got it.

And so we do change the coupon based on velocity. We just ran out of stock on another product, and so we took the coupon off probably about two months ago on that one as well, and it still sold 50 a day. And so that velocity catches quick. And when you're up at the top of the organic rankings with just. I mean, we have that. That product we launched in May and it had like, we bought 3,000 units to start, and we sold it in like a month and a half. And that's all. And it's all because we followed what you recommend. When it comes to building your audience, our audience is close to over. It's over 100,000 now across all channels.

Hold on a second. When you start, I remember our conversations when it was like 800 people. So explain to me channels.

But our Facebook.

What does that mean across all channels?

So YouTube's about 42,000.

Okay.

Facebook group is about 12,000. Our email is about 42,000 and our ManyChat's about 2,000.

Okay, I've got 90,000. I've got a hundred thousand questions now. So the 42,000 email addresses. This is the part of your audience I didn't know that you had put focus on. So walk me through how that was built.

Yeah. So buyers, of course, Shopify buyers. We have close to 7,000 Shopify buyers now. That just came with time. We do not focus on Shopify. We spend $3,000 a month on our Shopify. But that builds as you build your audience, and that's pretty simple.

A big strategy that we use is blogging and content creation. And so we do one blog a week, and then we'll do Google Ads to get people onto the blog. The blog doesn't necessarily sell anything, but it educates them on a problem that our product solves. And then we offer a free dry ibook when they're on the blog. And that's email address capture. And I'd say we're at a pace right now. We get about 300 new emails a day.

Okay, folks, if you haven't gotten at least $100,000 worth of value in the first 10 minutes with Travis and Jenna, you're asleep. My child is right next to me. I should probably watch my mouth. But give the. Give. Give them some hashtags in the comments. Seriously, like they're getting 300 emails a day and they just gave you the how to. We just went through how they built their audience, which is a major struggle point for a lot of you. And we just talked about getting to 100 sales a day quickly. So if that ain't worth a hundred thousand dollars in the last 10 minutes, you have been, you have been freaking asleep. All right, so what I would like to ask you about is the, the beginning stage of how you launch. Because one of the things that I disagreed with with Gabe last week was he was talking about pricing things at a, you know, at a lower price point in order to, to get the reviews. And I was like, to me, that is like, that's not brand building. And I get it. Like it works for an Amazon based business and we talk this out, but I don't like it from a brand building perspective. And you just said that you don't do it. You just come out with the coupon code. I would like for you to tell me how you stoke the fire at the beginning in order to get those sales moving.

So this is our super secret, Ryan. And because we love, because we love the 1%, we'll let you in on it. You want to take it?

I don't want to take it.

You want me to take it? Okay, so cater to your audience.

Yeah, I mean, we have a big audience first of all, and that helps. So we use our email list and we use our Facebook group like Crazy. So for instance, we have a new face lotion that we actually launched in January. January, December, December. And then had mold issues. It was horrible. So we had to pull it all and we reformulated and we've been working on this new formulation for six months. So the first thing that we do is we use our audience to get them excited. You know, we let them know that it's coming back. We let them know, you know, what part of the process we're in. We might be wrong some of the time because it's taken a lot longer than we thought it would.

This is supposed to relaunch back in March, but Covid.

And then.

So we, we do that first so we get everybody excited for this product to come out and then we do what you're going to talk about.

So the initial product launch to really get people excited, to really get people to engage with our emails, to get engaged with our videos is we actually give them a 100% mail in rebate. But we do it a little differently. And so I, I don't use rebatekey, I don't use any of those services. We actually do it in house. We literally do a paper mail in rebate like a company would do like a Sony or any mail and rebate that you've ever done. And so what they do is they come to our website, they put in their email address, they fill out a form, they print it, they mail it into our P.O. box.

Our team probably hates us because we are changing things like them.

We are changing things because it's gotten so, so big that our team showed us the last one and it was literally like 500 envelopes. And so what we do is we give them 100 mail and rebate but instead of giving them cash back, we actually give them a gift card to our Shopify store. And so it's, it's a win win for them, it's a win win for us. It's a win win relationship build because they get to try the product for free and then they get to use the money back on our store. And so but it's a full price sale on Amazon and that's the key thing. It's nothing against terms of service because we're not asking them for reviews, we're just asking them to try out our product and buy it on Amazon first. And once they try it out, we send them a customer satisfaction survey for that product and then that's when we start engaging with them and then we ask for the review if all is good. The key Thing is engagement. You just have to talk to your audience. And if you're afraid to talk to an audience, I'm sorry, you're not going to create a multi million dollar business.

Right.

I'm the CEO. She's the CEO of our multimillion dollar business. We talk to our audience every single day via text, via Facebook messenger, in the Facebook group, one to one. And we'll get on videos with them live, go live in the community, go live on YouTube, interact with them. I mean, that's what we're doing this for, right? It's just you want to serve somebody, so serve them. And that's all we focus on. And that's, that's what we do for the initial launches, just that, that rebate and then the secondary launch after we get five reviews is the, the 50% off coupon.

Yeah. Beautiful. What do you do from a pay per click standpoint? Because I know that's been a major focus of yours. What do you do at the very beginning when you're still getting those, you know, first 50 to 100 reviews in order to get the momentum going?

Yeah. So I fought keyword research. I hated keyword research.

Me too.

Oh man. With Amazon, I hate keyword research. But if you want to get really good at Amazon, you need to either hire somebody that's good at it, really good at it, or you need to learn it yourself. And I have a team member that's really good at it. And I got really good at it too. So before she learned how to do it, she's been doing it now for about a year and a half, two years. But before that it was me doing it and I got really good at it. And you just got to practice. You just have to do it. It's the same thing like blog writing, it's the same thing as copywriting. You just have to keep doing it daily or once a week or whatever to get better at it. And so once you figure out the keywords that you want to go after, I pick usually 5 to 10. And the biggest thing is that people go after those high volume keywords that everybody else is going after, but there are going to be long tail versions of those keywords in Amazon that have kind of medium search.

Without a lot of competition. And when you go after those, and we start out with exact match only, we just go after them with exact match only. And then if we have budget left over, we'll go after broad after that. I never start out with an auto campaign. Auto campaign is like step nine in my Amazon ppc sop. Because auto campaigns just like, I don't know what I'm doing here. Amazon, you do it just based on your computer algorithm and that's not the way to go. So we pick about.

You're just going after really tight focuses with tight budgets with the coupon strategy. So your conversion rate is high and you're just really dialing that in and then kind of widening it over time. Is that a fair summary?

That's a fair summary and I think you said it best. High conversion rates. Because high conversion rates means you're going to shoot up in the rankings. Because Amazon loves it. Yeah.

So even after you explain that to me, I still don't want to do it. So do you guys still have the agency?

Yeah, we do. So we work with a select few brands. We don't work with Amazon sellers. We work with brands that want to start selling on Amazon or to expand their Amazon sales. So we focus on scale. And that's not for everyone. Scale is a lot harder to manage as a business owner than just maintenance. People say they want to scale until they scale, right?

And then they're like, well, now what do I do?

Yeah, right.

It's the biggest problem we have.

Why don't you give a quick plug for your YouTube channel? Because I know people can find out about the agency, but I know you basically teach this stuff for free on your YouTube channel, so why don't you give a quick plug for that?

Yeah. So our YouTube channel is Amazon PPC Pros. And then we also have a Facebook group called Amazon PPC Pros. And all we do is pretty much share what we're doing in our agency and in our business. And so we do things in the business first in Ilove and then if it works, we take it to the agency and then in, in Amazon PPC Pros on the website, I teach you how exactly how we do it. And it's actually just a selfish way way for me to train employees when we bring them on. So when we bring a team member on, they go through my training and that's how they learn. And that's. We, we have a small team, like I said, we don't have a big agency. We just. You actually hop on a phone call with me and we talk to see if we want to serve you and you want to be with us. And so it's kind of a. It needs to be fit both ways before we actually engage in a conversation.

So one thing that is amazing to me about both of you is it seems like you are willing to do the long. Like you're willing to do what it takes to build things over the long term. I remember when the Facebook group was 800 people. I tell you, I tell the story in the book. You told me you're going to do a dry eye community. I was like, that's too small. And now it's 12,000 people, which is kind of amazing. So at those beginning stages when everything is a grind, how is it that you're able to maintain that focus and momentum? Because it seems like you do it in every area of the business.

I just feel like.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but the thing that made me think of that was the fact that you put all this stuff on YouTube too. And I remember at the beginning it was like, no one's watching our videos either, but you still keep doing them. And now you have a following. So it just seems like you have a track record of doing things that people don't want to do for long enough until it seems like you came out of nowhere.

Yeah, I mean, I think we're just. We know what it takes to be.

Successful and to get things done. I guess. Like, even. Even when we first started selling on Amazon, I mean, we were seeing patients full time from 9am to 5pm and we would get up in the morning before work and we would work on our business, and then we would get home, you know, at the end of the day after seeing patients all day, and we would work on our business. And it's just wanting more, I guess. And you just have to be dedicated. I mean, that's what we've been doing the whole time. You know, we're going to run into roadblocks. We always do. You know, Covid could have been worse than it was for us. It ended up being okay. And we bought a business in between.

And, you know, it's just, I don't know, I guess the desire to just keep going and do more. And we've been through so much already. It's like, let's just keep going because why?

And falling in love with the process.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I'm reading Loser Think right now. Thank you for that. And one of the things he says, his goals are for losers and systems. Falling in love with the system is how you win. And that really struck a chord with me. Because once you fall in love with the system, then you're free. You have the freedom that you want. It's not money that's going to set you free. It's loving what you're doing every single day. And we've fallen in love with the process. And that's when we went to sell last year, before we signed. When we went to sign, I asked Jenna, I was like, what are we going to do when we sell? And it was like, we're going to do the exact same thing we're doing now. So why don't we just keep the business?

That's right. Corinne Woodmass likes to say that a lot of people are selling their business to someone else who, who's buying it for the freedom. And then they sit here and go, wait a minute, I'm in this for freedom. Why don't I just keep the business that I have? I know it better than anybody else. And so sometimes.

You want. I was really, really glad when, when the two of you decided to keep growing it rather than to exit it because you've done some amazing things with it. What are you giggling about, Travis?

What's that?

I said, what are you giggling about, Travis?

No, I'm just, I'm just. It's kind of one of those, like, we just dodged a bullet. I mean, if we would have sold, we would have been. I don't know what we would be doing. I don't know what you'd be doing. I don't know.

I get bored really easily, so I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I. But every so many good things have happened since then in our business, you know, and we bought this other company in May and that has been astronomically successful and it's been a wonderful thing for us. And it's something that, you know, we never would have done if we would have sold this business. So I don't know, I'm glad that we didn't. I'm glad that we're still growing it and.

Yeah, yeah. And it was a unique acquisition that came with also.

The reason we acquired it wasn't just to acquire a business, but it was also to get the team member on board. So the CEO of that company is now a part of our team as an investor number one, because he's, he owns 10% of the company, but his job now is to get us into retail. And so it's something that I didn't want to focus on. She didn't want to focus on it. We are not good at that, but he is. And we have a two person team now trying to get us into retail. And this guy has done it before with another company and he took this company from 500,000 to 100 million and so he's bored now. He's retired. And so we brought them on in the acquisition to then help us expand even more.

So I want to ask you about that here in a second. If you're. But if you're a member of the 1% and you want to come join us in the green room because you'd like to ask a question of myself or Jenna or Travis or you have a give for the community inside of the Facebook group. In the description of the video, there's a link to come join us in the green room. Just click on that. You'll be pulled here into the room and you can hang out with us. Ask your question or give your give to the community. While people are doing that, I want to ask you more about that acquisition because it was a strategic acquisition and there were some specific assets you were going for in that you're going for the people you were going. I think there was an audience that you were able to tap into. I was hoping you just walk through the, the, the assets that you decided to buy this business. It's not like they were doing X amount of dollars and you needed the cash flow. You were buying it for a strategic reason. So would you walk us through that?

Yeah. So they, they're an I company as well. They were in our agency actually. So we were actually managing their Amazon business and the scale was the problem. And so we would scale their sales, but then we'd run out of cash to buy more inventory, so then we'd have to scale down sales. And so we constantly were doing this roller coaster of sales of increasing, then decreasing, increasing, then decreasing. And so that was one of the problems with that business was that we saw that and we have the cash in our business to be able to support that. And so that was one of the reasons. And we'd been managing them for two and a half years and it wasn't that they weren't profitable. It was just the cash flow. Once you start to scale, cash flow becomes a bigger problem. And it becomes a bigger problem incredibly fast.

Yes.

And so acquiring them, we. The best month we ever had with them was 90,000amonth. And when we took them over, they were doing 20,000amonth because of this roller coaster. And right now we're sitting at 80,000amonth. But we stocked out of one product and we're just waiting for inventory. It wasn't a cash flow problem. It was a lead time problem. Yeah. So now we're working out those problems and they did not have an audience. And so we could take their products to our audience and instantly grow sales. And so that was a big part of it. And I just talked to somebody that's looking to buy a business. And the one thing I always say, if you're looking to buy a business, you have to think, how can I impact this business to the point that I can increase sales?

Right.

You can't do anything special. And you just say, I can manage their Amazon sales and they're an Amazon business, then it's going to sync eventually. And so we knew that we had the audience. They had five products, four of which we did not have yet. And so it was instantly. It pretty much added four new products to our line, five products total that we did not have to develop, launch, and come out with. And so we could just release them right away and launch them to our audience right away and increase sales right away. And so the fact that we had the audience to be able to build it, and we knew we could, and the cash flow problems that they were having was why we decided to acquire them. And it gets rid of, like, the double accounting, the double Amazon management, the double legal fees, all that double duplicate things that come with managing two businesses.

Yeah. Jenna, question specifically for you. I know that there's sometimes a temptation to do all of the great ideas that you learn from all of the different people that you meet along the way. And this is a challenge that you've navigated personally, which is like, where do you put your focus? Where do you put your attention as? How do you decide what matters enough to implement into the business? You've now crossed that hurdle. From the time I've known you, you've gone from just barely seven figures to mid seven figures. That requires focus and making a lot of mistakes. So how have you learned to navigate that over the last few years?

Well, mostly it's Travis has all these ideas, and then I have to be like, okay, wait a second.

Because just not going to happen. But basically, it's just, you know, you have to figure out what is making the biggest impact in your business. So we know that engaging with customers is a huge part of our business. That's one of the most important things in our business is our customer service, making sure that we serve our customer because we want people coming back to us. We know that we need to put time into the quality of our products. So our lotion took six months because we formulated it, we knew we wanted it to be healthy for the eyelids instead of detrimental to your eyelids. And we knew what we needed to do to be able to have a formula that was safe. And so we make sure that our products are good. We've just learned over time the things that we have to do and the things that we just have to set to the side until.

We can get to them. And if we don't get to those things, then that's fine. But I think you have to be okay with also just not doing everything. That's a big thing, because there are so many things that you can do out there that are going to grow your business. There are so many different ways that you can add revenue and all of that, but you just have to figure out what's best for you. So, so not be able to do everything.

And one thing that I think the two of you have really dialed in is who your person is, and so you're not doing a lot of things that don't target that ideal person. Travis, I know one of the things that kind of kept you stuck for a while was when you were in this other mastermind, they were doing a whole bunch of strategies that were great for those types of businesses, but they didn't target and serve your ideal customer. And so when you tried to do that, you ran into some roadblocks. And when you freed up those resources, you're able to funnel them back into the resources that were getting your ideal people. Is that. Am I remembering that correctly?

Yeah. So first, like, for example, there are, you know, everybody's talking about influencers, and influencers are huge, and they can be amazing for some businesses. We've tried it many different ways, and our, I mean, our demographic is just horrible as far as influencers go. It's hard to find good influencers. They're, you know, women in their 45 to 65, you know, age range that aren't necessarily always on Instagram or, you know, anything like that. And so we know that that's not going to work for us, so we had to figure out a different way to. To make that work for us, even if it's on a small scale. So it's just stuff like that. It's just knowing your company, it's knowing, you know, really knowing your audience.

And then you guys are your own influencer at this point.

Yeah, true. Yeah.

Yeah. So we've become micro influencers in our own space at, you know, YouTube 42,000. But still it comes from the Facebook group of 12,000. And so as what you say all the time, it doesn't matter how big they are, it just matters how engaged they are. In our Facebook group of 12,000. It brings so much more traffic to our website than our YouTube channel of 43,000.

So walk us through that because again, started at like 800 people. And I think you were just like doing Facebook lives and answering questions in there. How did that become such a source of business and traffic for you?

Engagement. And so being engaged and talking to the people one on one with comments. And we've written a blog post over every question that has come up in that community. And so with those blog posts we just say, hey, we've written a blog post, recorded a video all about this question. Here you go. And then that gets the traffic over there. And what we see is the traffic from that Facebook group comes at just a much higher rate than the YouTube. The YouTube channel gets more comments, but the Facebook group gets more traffic. And so that I think is an attestation to just our target demographic is on Facebook. And our, if you look at the stats, like our YouTube demographic that watches us is like 34 year old males, and then we're 61 year old females is our target demographic. So that's a big difference. And so that's kind of the difference between the two. And Facebook, I think, is just more personal. Like you, you just feel like you have more of a relationship on Facebook than you do YouTube.

Yeah.

So I think it, you know, it. I definitely helped that we are eye doctors and we have a thorough knowledge of the pain point that these people are having. So I think that definitely helped when we were growing our group because it was a place where people could come and ask whatever questions they forgot to ask their doctor or ask whatever questions they asked their doctor and got a horrible answer to. And then we would just write a blog post on it and you know, here you go. And so I think that was, you know, it became kind of a good place for people to come and just get answers that they weren't getting anywhere else.

I think a big part of it.

Too is just we simplify things. We're very good at simplifying the complicated. And we do that both in Amazon, ppc, and we do that both with dry eye. Because with dry eye, what happens a lot of times is they're just getting constant drops thrown at them, ointments, prescriptions thrown at them. And we tell them to dial it back, like just try replacing your breakfast with a green smoothie. And then they come back to us and say, that was amazing. I'm a week into this and I feel better than I've felt in years. And then we say, well, now just drink a little bit more water per day and stop eating this junk food. And we just make them do one simple step per week. And we do that for eight weeks with them. And it makes a huge difference in their lives. And it has nothing to do with drops, it has nothing to do with prescriptions. It's all just about taking care of your body. It's how to sleep better, how to stress less. And it just makes them rethink how they're going to treat their dry eye, which is what our book's called, Rethinking Dry Eye Treatment. And so it's just a different philosophy, and it's more of like a holistic health approach, and it's just taking care of yourself.

So the final question that I want to ask the two of you is, is what is it like working together as a married couple? And then the follow up, Jenna, how are you able to be both COO and an awesome mom? So I want to hear how you guys manage all of those relationships while still building a multimillion dollar business.

It doesn't come without challenges.

So first of all, it was not easy at first. We started out working at the same dining room table, like, here's me, here's him. Then he kicked me out.

Yeah.

Because I talk when I work, she talks.

So now we have a big enough place where we can, like, have different offices, which has been astronomically helpful.

So, yeah, Monday through Wednesdays, right now we work in our own separate spaces. When Jude is in daycare, he's out of the house. But when he's here. Yeah, getting help.

And then we work at our separate spaces during that time. And then Thursday we'll go to a coffee shop and work together because then that collaborates again and we can get, you know, different. Different mind space with each other and then in a different area. And then Friday we go on date day. And so Friday mornings are date day when Jude's at school. And then we have an awesome team. I think, you know, you have to hire a great team and it's going to take time to hire that great team. And, you know, we've had. Ashley's been with us for three and a half years. Her sister Amy's been with us for over two and a half years. Heather's been with us for three years. Treat them well and so give them what they want as far as, you know, they get the freedom because we have the laptop lifestyle with this business and so do they. But, you know, ask them what they want out of this business and Try to accommodate that for them. We had one of our employees, she did a beauty pageant and we sponsored her for that, and that meant a lot to her. And we just try to really encourage them to go after what they want in life. And we'll support them along the way by if it's financial, like, we'll pay for something for them to a certain extent. And then if it's freedom, we tell them we actually force our team to take days off because they won't because they love it so much. And I'm just like, guys, seriously, take the weekend off. And our customer service rep, like, check it an hour on Monday or check an hour on Saturday and Sunday, but take the rest of the time off. And she won't. She'll answer the phone all day Saturday and Sunday. And it's just like, you can take time off, but great team is key. And then I'll let you take the mom question.

Yeah, I mean, I think another big thing that's key for us as, As a couple and as. As just a mom is to have a schedule. So I'm going to show you this crazy schedule. This is every day of the week, every hour, every hour of the week. What we are doing and do we follow it? Have we followed it since we moved to Texas? Absolutely not. Because, you know, it's just been a weird year. We all know that. But at some someday soon in the future, we're going to be following this to a T. But for the most part, you know, every day we know exactly what we're doing. We know when we have meetings, we know when we're going to work out. We know when we're going to take Jude to school and when he comes back and we can hang out with him, you know, But I think just having this lifestyle is.

This is from one of your capitalism conferences from Craig.

Yeah. Yep. The perfect day formula.

Yeah.

Yep.

And it's. It's worked really well for us. I mean, we have it down to, like, what we do at night. Do we watch a documentary?

Yeah. It's where you watch entertainment. Well, you schedule your personal time first.

Yeah.

And then your couple time and then your work time. And so you work backwards. Because everybody goes into this life to have the freedom to do what they want, but then they never do what they want because they're too busy with their job.

Yeah.

And so you schedule it backwards. Work should be the last thing that should schedule in priority. So our personal time, meditation or being together, our date day, date time with Jude, anything like that. And Then what we do at nighttime. So if we're watching a documentary or we're watching a course or we're having entertainment like a movie and. And then we go back to work or the gym and then work.

Yeah. And I mean, I think as far as being a mom, Jude just always comes first, you know, your kids are going to have to always come first. And so, for example, he broke his leg our last day on vacation.

50 day vacation, he broke his leg. So he'll be in a cast for a couple weeks. And he also had to quarantine before going back to daycare. And so he's at home right now. So for the next couple of days, I know that my schedule just has to be a little lighter than it would normally be, and that's okay. And it's just. You just have to be okay with that poor guy.

Yeah.

You know what? I have, I have said this in the past of.

I never realized how chaotic I was until I made a schedule for myself. And then I did two things. One, I put everything into its proper place and followed it where it was like, Wednesday is my time to work on this project. And so when I would think about it, on Monday afternoon, I would just add it to a file on my computer, was like, I'll get to this on Wednesday. I'll put this thought. And then it was like, man, I've been just so chaotic with my time. And then what I did is I gave my schedule to a female and she went.

And carved out like way more time because she was like, why are you doing this twice a day when you could just do it for an extra? And I never thought of that before. And all of a sudden my schedule just freed up more than I ever realized. So that perfect day formula, if you want to go through it, I believe it's on the YouTube channel. And if not on the YouTube channel, it's definitely. We did a podcast of it with Craig Valentine. So you can just search the perfect day formula capitalism.com and I'm sure you will find that. Jenna. Travis, what have I not asked you that I should have at this point? And by the way, final call for anybody who would like to come hang out in the green room. We posted the link a couple times in the comments and on Facebook. So if you're a member of the 1% and if you want to jam with us for a couple minutes, you've got a few minutes to come do that. But this is a final call to do that. So, Jen and Travis, what have I not Asked you that I should have.

Well, I think I'll just comment something that you did for us last November when we rejoined the back room and we sat down for a coaching call with you. And simplification is just so key to making this business grow because we were doing so many different things that were just taking our attention away from what was actually making the money and causing the freedom. And so what you made us do is you made us look at everything we were doing and you literally told us to just stop doing them, stop doing it.

I remember that conversation very well.

And we did. And so it was a challenge. And I said, if I could do one thing for this business, what would it be and why? And so we actually started out by making like 10 things and then we narrowed it down to one and we each did that. And that's essentially what we have to make sure we do every single week. And if we get that done, it's a successful week. By Wednesday, I am so bored. I'm just like, I don't know what else to do. Do you have anything to do? And she's like, no, I don't have anything to do.

And so I get all my stuff done if I can, like before Thursday.

So, like Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, we're just kind of like, let's go do this or this. And it's all because we just got rid of all the stuff that was, you know, causing us to just be busy. And that's allowed us to just kind of free our mind up to free us up to go to the pool or read a book or just meditate.

And relax or this new city we.

Live in, the close off city.

So I think that just really simplifying. And a lot of your listeners are at the point now where they're trying to get off Amazon and get on Shopify and don't do it. Don't do it.

Or do it simply.

Yeah, I mean, we spend $3,000 a month on Shopify and that's it. And that's. It's retargeting. It's people that have been on our website, we just retarget them. And I would recommend doing whatever made you successful over and over and over. If it's launching products on Amazon, keep doing what you're doing to make you, to get you to that success. And like I said, we're going to do probably close to 5 million this year. And we still do not focus on Shopify. It's there, yes, but we do not try to get cold prospects. Amazon is where we do everything, we focus, we send our audience to Amazon and we'll do that until it stops working.

Beautiful, beautiful. Jenna, tell me what you cut. When we had that conversation and you and Travis had to narrow in on what was working, what did you stop doing?

So the biggest thing we actually had like income producing websites that we were managing ourselves. And so I was doing all the articles for that. I was proofreading articles for those websites and it was like, how many websites? Three, four? I don't know. It was a lot of websites and it was just like, get all of that out of here. So I cut all of that out. We literally do. We do maybe one a month and I hire it out for every site. And some of them we even quit doing any content for at all because it wasn't doing anything. And so I cut all of that out. We do one a month on some of the sites. All I do is proofread it. I hire the article out and then I have a team member post them.

And we were doing three articles a week on our website and we went down to one.

Yeah.

And that's been great.

And it's increased our traffic, of course.

That's great. Well, you know, the lesson that I have learned, but still takes practice for me, is that you have to, you have to cut out enough room for inspirational or meaningful work to come out. And most of us drown that out with what keeps us busy rather than what is meaningful. But if you leave space for what is meaningful, then really good work comes out. And that's when you write the. The good article versus the busy article. It's when you, when you write the. The, you create the good product rather than the one that you think is going to sell. And that's when you can create a multimillion dollar business and still have the perfect day formula at work for you. Yeah, yeah.

Thinking it's the hardest thing to do.

What's that? Thinking is the hardest thing to do. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's true. Well, my friends, it is this. This. First of all, I so appreciate how specific you were about your numbers and what you did and what the strategy was. I just want to recap the strategy just to make sure that I didn't miss anything. So when it comes to launching products, you come out of the gate at the price that you want, but you do a big coupon and then you do a proper launch to your audience, which is on Facebook and on YouTube and then you run Amazon pay per click to continue to stoke the flames of that. And then you're doing the review getting campaign and the audience building campaign through. You do it with a mail in rebate, which is then credited over to the Shopify account and puts them into the overall customer system. And then the rest of your time is spent developing meaningful products and going all in on your audience, which is mostly through a Facebook group, and on YouTube, which creates that kind of reciprocal.

Virtuous cycle of building more eyeballs, getting more engaged, and allowing you to sell more products. Did I miss anything major in the overall strategy?

Not at all. I mean, that's perfect.

Perfect. Well, if you are watching and you got value out of this, please give Travis and Jenna some love in the comments. With some hashtags and some thank yous.

Travis and Jenna have.

All right.

We had. We had a hiccup there for a second. You've been in this for five years. Is your time. Is that timeline right?

Five years that we've been doing it?

Yeah.

Yeah. So Travis and Jenna have navigated the ups and downs at this point, and of course they're always coming, but have gotten through that grind process, made enough mistakes to be able to know what to do. And they just laid it out for you in the last hour. So please give them some love in the comments.

Guys, it's such a pleasure to be a part of your journey and I know that y' all are just getting started, so an eight figure exit is on the horizon for you and I'm really glad to be a part of your journey. Thanks for hanging out with us today. I appreciate you guys.

Thanks for having us, Ryan.

Thanks, Ryan.

All right, guys, we'll give the YouTube channel one more time. Amazon PPC pros.

That's it. Amazon PPC pros on Facebook and on YouTube.

All right, look them up, guys. Subscribe to their stuff, follow their work, hire them if you're a brand, and give them love in the comments. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time. Take care. Bye.