Ecommerce Is Cool Again: How To Cross $1M In The Next 12 Months

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E Commerce is cool again. It has changed a ton over the last 12 to 24 months. And because of those changes, there are profitable opportunities that are available to even new entrepreneurs who are getting started for the first time. The opportunities are different than they were as recently as 12 or 18 months ago. But from the tests that we're running, both in our portfolio brands and in the brands that we mentor@capitalism.com, we're seeing faster results than I've ever seen before. For example, one brand in our community, Maple and Lark, did $300,000 in sales on a brand new product before they even had inventory ready to ship. Over a period of about eight weeks. One of our investments, Ancient Strength, did $25,000 in pre orders. They didn't have product yet with a tiny little audience. Over a period of two weeks, one of our brands added 50 sales a day, which is about $500,000 in top line revenue to their business. With one tweak that took no ad spend and it had no reviews. And one of our members in the 1% launched a business and got to a consistent hundred sales a day after just 10 days of having the product over. At Amazon, we're seeing results faster than I've ever seen in my career. And that is because there are new opportunities inside of E Commerce that haven't existed for years specifically for new entrepreneurs. To give you context, every market goes through cycles. When there is a brand new opportunity, there's kind of a wide open west. We call this the period when idiots get rich. There's more demand than there is supply, and everybody who participates wins. It's the new frontier. You saw this with Amazon in 2013, 14 and 15, you saw it with NFTs in 2020, and you're seeing it with AI right now. These wide open west periods are when there's all kinds of frothiness for buyers and first movers win. After about two to three years, you have a period called the consolidation. This is where the bad products or the bad companies get flushed out because they're beaten by the good ones. The best examples of this right now are crypto, where the bad projects went away and ironically food brands because a bunch came on the scene when there was keto and whatever the next diet craze was. And you have a few people who are winning in that space. After it consolidates, you have the frothy buyout period. This is when the really big companies like private equity come in and they start buying up the winners. And over the last couple years we Saw a whole lot of that because interest rates were 0% and there were all these aggregators coming in and buying up all these tiny brands. Once that slows down, you have the crash, which is exactly where we are right now. Interest rates are up, private equity has hurt and the aggregators, a lot of them have gone out of business. So you have this crash in E commerce where no one's buying businesses and there doesn't seem to be any obvious growth in the sector. But after a crash comes a new, wide open west. And we're seeing brand new opportunities open up that are making it possible for even new entrepreneurs to get a foothold in industries that they've wanted to be in for a long time. To win during times like this, you have to be old. You have to have seen a couple of these cycles. I've got a couple gray hairs now and I've seen a few of these cycles. And when you're going through a crash, the old school marketing tactics that everybody forgot about become really effective during the boom periods and the buyout periods. Everyone's chasing what's new. Let's go to TikTok, let's sponsor influencers, let's go on this new retail platform. But if you're old enough to remember what worked five or 10 years ago, that's the stuff that is going to start working again after the crash. Those are the profitable activities, the things that add money in your bank account, the things that make it predictable for you to launch really high margin products. And if you double down on those, because most people have to, since they don't have as much capital to throw around in all these other random opportunities, if you double down on those profitable activities, you will win in the next boom cycle. So here are a few of the opportunities that we're seeing work really well right now. First, Amazon has changed. The way to win on Amazon right now is getting really good at sending outside traffic to Amazon. Five years ago, the name of the game was to win on the Amazon platform. It was to rank for the keywords, it was to optimize your listing, it was to spend a lot of money on ads, and it was to ride the gravy train of the organic marketing machine. That still works, but it takes a lot more capital and a lot more time to try to beat everyone else, unless you send a lot of outside traffic to Amazon. And the best part is that traffic is cheaper than spending money on Amazon ads. For example, Google Ads are sometimes cheaper than Amazon ads and they convert almost as well. And it's outside traffic, which is a really good sign for Amazon. Amazon rewards outside traffic that converts into buyers. So if you invest in outside traffic and it becomes clicks and buys, Amazon will start to feed you in the rest of the marketing machine. But the thing that I can't understand why more people are not doing is running media or doing content to an email list and then building follow up sequences in your emails. This was how marketing was done in 2009, 10 and 11. You built email lists, you built follow up sequences and you sold products to them. And that crushes an e commerce right now if someone sees an ad for your brand or they follow your content on social media and they opt into a newsletter and they're getting emails from you, they will make the decision to buy from you before they even click the button. Then when they show up on Amazon, Amazon rewards that outside traffic and it's really high, converting traffic, which is a juice, to the Amazon algorithm. So the way that you win on Amazon is yes, optimize your listings, yes, run pay per click ads. All those things work. But if you're early in the game or if you want to win really fast, spend your time building hot lists and customer lists and sell your products to them. You don't need that many people either. You need like a few hundred people to have a great launch, to get consistent sales, to to get people ready to give you reviews. That is the start of a business that can have four products doing 25 sales a day at a $30 price point, which is a million dollars a year. The second opportunity is TikTok ads. Most people think about TikTok as the place where content goes viral or a great place to build an audience. I have a different opinion. I don't even post on TikTok. And the reason is because although content spreads very quickly, it's not an engaged audience. It's a great way to build a following and to get exposure, but it's not going to be a full focus for you. I don't think it is the best place to build a list of buyers. However, advertising on TikTok is still super underpriced. Plus if you get any social proof or if you have a product that you can demonstrate, it works really well on the TikTok platform. TikTok is doing some very interesting things right now in order to create buying intent on the platform. This is the entire thesis of TikTok shop. People will be buying on the TikTok platform and this makes it possible for every influencer who has an audience to have affiliate revenue from anything that they talk about on their channel. This is super early, but it's a very interesting opportunity to watch. What I'm watching for, though, is how they're training their users to see TikTok as a discovery platform for brands and things that they will buy. That makes TikTok advertising very interesting and wide open right now. The third opportunity is whitelisting influencer audiences. In the olden days, influencers would do shout outs and they would do paid sponsorships on their feed. But two things have happened. One, the marketplace has said, we hate this. Anytime you see an influencer talk about a product or a brand, you're kind of annoyed. There's just no good way to do it. And the second thing that has happened is brands don't have as much money anymore. So the impact of these paid sponsorships has gone down, and the money that brands have to invest in it has gone. Has gone down, which means that influencers don't have a lot of money right now. There are these audiences all over the place that aren't making the revenue that they're used to making. And they're looking for other ways to make ends meet during a time when the economy has softened and their honey pit has kind of gone dry. One of the best opportunities to take advantage of this is instead of paying an influencer to talk about you, you whitelist their audience. Whitelisting an audience means that you have the rights to advertise only to that audience. And you can run ads that are specific to one person's audience. So you can pay somebody to do a demonstration of your video or talk about how much they like that product. And it doesn't go on their feed. Their audience never sees it in their regular posting. But as an advertiser, you can run that post specifically to that audience. This is a great way to build up an email launch list, and it is a great way to get awareness to the people who represent the person that you serve in your brand. The way that I would recommend doing this is having a discount specific to that influencer. Send them to a landing page that collects their email, and you build the email list of very targeted people that you can promote and market to for a very long time. And the fourth opportunity is to build really old school email newsletters. There's something I've been teaching inside of the 1% and to some of our students in the capitalism incubator who are struggling with the idea of marketing their product or their brand, especially if they've never built an email list before or they have never studied email copy. And what we've been telling people is the simplest way that you can build brand, get leads and promote your stuff is to start a weekly newsletter that is a roundup about whatever's going on in your industry. Over the last couple of years, some newsletter businesses have been bought for millions of dollars. One of our speakers at capcon, Sean Puri, sold Milk Road for millions of dollars. And. And it was just an email newsletter talking about what was happening in crypto. Now, the purpose of this is not to build an email newsletter business that you ultimately sell for millions of dollars, but you can do that. The purpose of this is just to build an email newsletter so you get the perfect people on your list that you can launch products to. For example, there's an influencer that we're working with in our space who has a huge social media following, but he doesn't have an email list. It's just not his primary strategy. So we've offered to build his email list for him. We said, hey, we'll do the Friday roundup email, kind of like Tim Ferriss 5 bullet Friday. We'll make the content, we'll write the copy, and all we'll talk about is your content, the things you like, and the brands that we both agree to promote. That includes brands he likes and brands that we own. This does a couple things for this influencer. One, it gives them another way to talk to their audience. Two, it gives them more exposure for their content. And three, it actually drives up their advertising rates because he can charge more for the brands that are sponsoring his current content. It makes him look really good. But for us, all we want is to promote our products in that newsletter. This is a free way to build a ton of leads who are super targeted for what we want to sell and do it in a way that adds value to someone that we want to be in business with for a really long time. So could you combine all of these strategies? I'm so glad you asked. If you do TikTok advertising to an email newsletter and send that outside traffic to Amazon, you're probably going to do pretty well. If you whitelist influencer audiences and you use that to build up your own audience and then send that traffic to Amazon, you're probably going to do just fine. If you build email lists and you promote new product launches and use that as the nucleus for getting reviews and sharing social proof and launching more products, you're going to do just fine. Some of these strategies may not sound new to you. At all. Because what works during the crashes is thinking like an old school marketer. It's thinking about the things that were profitable five and 10 years ago. It's the stuff that nobody pays attention to anymore because they've already moved on to the new opportunity and the shiny new thing. And the emerging trend when the profit is made with with the stuff that has existed and worked for a very long time. Strategies will come and go. Markets will boom and they will bust. But it will always be cool to build profitable businesses. And the foundation for that is to just have four products that do 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. The route to get there will adjust slightly, but the principles, they're mostly the same for decades. So if you want help on your road to 1 million, go to capitalism.com playbook. You can download our free resources. You can have them for free because I invest in brands who follow this methodology to build seven figure brands that we can exit together. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com thanks for watching. If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits you can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com Inc.