From Minimum Wage To Multi-Millionaire In 12 Months w/ Joshua Crisp

So you were working minimum wage in 2015. You find an opportunity, you find some videos, a year later you have a seven figure business.

Yep. I had no money, no money to invest. I didn't know what a mentor was, I didn't know what success was. I was given an opportunity and I took action on it. And just relentless.

You basically followed the playbook exactly 12 months to 1 million. Nice work.

That was it. That was it. We're doing three and a half million on Amazon and like two to three million on Shopify at that time with this brand. And I start a brand new startup and office products and then I start buying real estate and flipping homes and all this other stuff.

So don't do that. You have to full ass one thing and then partner with people for your pet projects.

The one thing I haven't done is I haven't exited. So I'm excited more about going through the process so I can learn the process because it may be a seven figure, maybe low eight figure exit, but the next nine figure thing, I need to go through the entire process from start.

Call me before you sign any documents. Yeah, I got so many things I wish I had done differently.

A few years ago, Josh Crisp was making just over minimum wage. But fast forward a few years after that. He was making millions of dollars a year. What the heck happened in those couple years that made Josh go from minimum wage to millions of dollars? He learned to sell stuff online and he learned that four products at 25 sales a day at $30 is a million dollar business. Have you heard that one before? In this episode, Josh and I break down his strategies for selling over $10 million in sales and physical stuff online. But we also talk about where the best opportunities are right now for building a brand. Josh says in this episode that the biggest mistake that he made was he got distracted and he didn't build a brand that he could sell. And so today he's starting the whole thing over again with a different playbook. He has the same skillset, but he has a different playbook. And so if you listen to this, you're gonna hear the strategies that can help you grow faster, but you'll be able to marry it with the things that you know as a result of subscribing to my channel, where I talk about building a brand, building audience, and building a company to sell. When you do both of these things, you can predictably get to seven figures and position yourself for an eight figure exit. So Josh did a couple things really well. He sold a lot of stuff he was able to figure out the algorithms, he was able to partner with influencers, he was able to work really fast. But what he did wrong was that he didn't build a brand, he didn't have anything that he could sell. And now he's going back and doing all of that over again. And it's important for you to know that you can do the stuff that works in the short term. You can do all the sexy, fancy things that everybody talks about, but if you don't partner that with a strategy, the stuff that we teach, the stuff that we believe in, building a brand to sell, getting a brand to eight figures. If you don't do both of them, then it doesn't work. You don't have a brand that you can sell. But when you know the short term stuff and the strategies that are working right now and you partner with a long term view, you can make magic happen. And that's what we try to pound into the head of our members inside the 1%. And if you want to start your road to 1 million, that's a good place for you to begin. You can apply for a spot@capitalism.com 1 and we can help you start the road to 1 million. Josh did it. And once you hear this story, you're gonna realize that the only thing stopping you is the excuses standing in your way. All right, let's go hang out with Josh. Josh, we were just meeting, but you have told me that you have kind of a fun story about how my work got in here. And I don't want to spoil it. So I want to hear it. I want to hear it live. And I just want you to just go, let's start there.

All right, cool. So, man, this was 2015, around 2015, early 2015, lots going on. So I'm working minimum wage, third shift, 7pm to 3am at a trash recycling processing facility called Finitech, small town, LaPorte, Indiana. 22,000 people in population, right outside northwest Chicago. Dating my wife, now girlfriend at the time, and she worked for a gentleman and the gentleman she worked for, his name is Jeff, was an entrepreneur, was a small business owner. I never, no one in my family was an entrepreneur, business owner or anything like that. I thought that you had to be a descendant of the rockefellers or be McDonald's. That's what I thought business was. I didn't know you could be a person and own a business. So I got introduced to my wife. I'm dating my wife, I come to meet her at work one day and I meet this guy. And I become obsessed. I'm like, who is this normal guy wearing Levi's, jeans and a regular T shirt, driving this 99 Lincoln? Not crazy, no Rolex, no Rolls Royce, but he owns his time and he's sitting here and he owns this business. Like I didn't know that could be, that could be a thing. Became obsessed.

This is your wife's boss?

This is my wife's boss.

Okay.

So I became obsessed. I'm working for minimum wage, night shift, hand sorting through trash for my bare hands, and I became obsessed. I never wanted to be an entrepreneur or a business owner, but I wanted to own my time since an early age. I always knew that I didn't want to work for someone else. That was success to me. Not millions of dollars, cars or traveling or any of that stuff. So long story short, he was a manufacturer for bath and body products. And I became obsessed with learning everything about him. So on my days off, before work, on the weekends, I would go there and just sit and just watch, observe and ask questions. And I call this the breadcrumb effect. Right. When you're in proximity to success, they're not going to tell you everything. Hey, here's the checklist, go take this. And you're going to become successful. They're going to give you a small breadcrumb and see if you're hungry, see if you're going to implement it.

Yeah.

And I would take it and I would just run and I would implement it like, what's next, what's next? What's next? And I would hear him take these sales calls as he's selling, as he's selling the product to the clients. And he kept telling them, because it was business to consumer, he was a manufacturer, they would take it and they would resell it. And he was telling them, you know, stop doing the Tupperware parties where you invite people to the house and you try to sell them. Stop doing the farmers markets and stop trying to open stores where you're signing commercial leases, figure out how to sell stuff online. And he didn't know how to do that because all his business was generated through SEO. Majority of all of it was through SEO and some YouTube, organic. So I asked him one day, I'm like, why is nobody doing this? And they're, they're basically telling him, because, well, successful retail is in retail chains, Retail distribution, they're in stores.

This is like 2015.

This is 2015.

I mean, retail is dying. But it hasn't died.

It hasn't died yet. And everybody has the perception, just like I had a perception that you can't be a real business. Like you can't be a solopreneur and have something great. You have to be a Rockefeller descendant or a big household name. They had the same misunderstanding or misconception about retail. We have to be in physical brick and mortar, not online. Even though Amazon was crushing it, Walmart was starting to come on.

So has that changed? That has changed.

Yeah. It's the complete opposite.

So. So you're wondering how the heck, how the heck, why the heck aren't people doing this online? Like, why aren't? Exactly. And you start to research how you're going to close this gap.

So that's the next step. He's. I'm like, dude, I have no money and I don't know anything about your product, but I will figure this online thing out. So he gives me some products that were defects, that were wrong color, wrong fragrance, wrong size, like stuff that we're going to throw away or discount.

Yeah.

He would do these wholesale distribution liquidations on ebay and Etsy for stuff that was jacked up because he made everything in house. So he gave me that product that couldn't move in. Some of his least performing product, which were bath bombs. He was known for soap. Soap was his bread and butter lotion. Second, third, bath bombs. Nobody was buying bath bombs. He just had them. So when I went online and I'm trying to figure out how to sell stuff online, I started with Etsy because that's what I knew from him. Then I took it to ebay and I started to do okay. But I'm like, this isn't sustainable. There's not enough traction. So then I learned about Amazon and when I learned about Amazon that normal people could sell on Amazon without this crazy track record. Like, if you go to apply for Walmart, it's like, how many years have you been in business and how much sales have you done? And fly here and have this interview. Amazon's like, do you have an LLC and a bank account? So once I figured that out, it was Vendor Express. In 2015, when I got started, I came across your channel on YouTube and it was. I remember distinctively, it was the keynote, the 12 months to a million. And it was the home videos from the webcam where you're wearing the baseball cap, talking about buying a baseball team and just saying, do this, do this, do this, don't complicate it, do this. And I literally took those and I ran with it. So it was like that. And Some combination from some stuff I learned from my good friend Brian Burt changed the game. So I took that and I implemented it within one year of just trial and error. We took that business to a million dollar run rate per year. First year. So someone making minimum wage and my wife making $9 to that. It was a game changer.

So you were working minimum wage in 2015, you find an opportunity, you find some videos, you get a mentor. A year later you have a seven figure business.

Yep. I had no money, no money to invest. I didn't know what a mentor was, I didn't know what success was. I was given an opportunity and I took action on it. And just relentless.

Basically followed the playbook exactly 12 months to 1 million. Nice work.

That was it. That was it.

Tell me, tell me about the brand that you started building. Yeah. Reached a million.

So I feel like a lot of people feel that success is luck. I do feel that sometimes there are some components that can be lucky, but it's not luck. It's just hard work and relentless pursuit until you reach the end destination. That's what happened with me. But if you've heard Lush, Lush is primarily known for bath bombs. They had a patent on bath bombs that ended in 2015. So that was my little bit of luck.

I see.

But they were still not predominant on Amazon because so many people have a misconception that, well, I can't compete in this industry on Amazon because this brand and this brand's on Amazon. They didn't get brand notoriety on Amazon. They already built it off platform. They're in retail chains, their distribution's huge. Amazon's actually a small fraction of the revenue.

It's the spillover. It's that you have a brand. Exactly. And you have a presence somewhere else. And people are going to Amazon because they would prefer to buy from you. That's exactly. That's when you have a brand. And this is, this is what a lot of people don't understand is the brand building is built off of the primary buying engine. It's like just because you're in Walmart doesn't mean you have a brand.

Right? Right.

When people see you and go into Walmart to buy you, then you have a brand. Just because people see you on Amazon, does that mean you have a brand? It's when people voluntarily choose to buy your company on Amazon or Walmart or wherever. That's when you have a brand. When you control that customer's choice.

Yep.

Okay, so you got into bath bombs.

Yep. That was my primary skew. First skew, first few skus.

Okay, so was it. It was just a. A bath bomb business that you took to 12 months? Did you brand it out from there?

Yeah, so it. It was branded around. That started with the product. That was the product. I had no money. That was the product he gave me. And it's. I'm like, all right, I'm selling on Etsy. I'm selling on ebay. I'm starting some revenue. I'm coming back. He's giving me more product. And I'm like, okay, for this thing to make sense, I have to sell more, and it has to be sustainable. See, the thing with ebay and Etsy, it's not really sustainable. Like, people come for one times, they come for special events, they come for deals with Amazon. People come with buying intent to buy, and when they find a product that they like and a product that serves their needs. Where I made a lot of my money was through subscribe and Save. So it's like, okay, if I can win on the front end and get that customer acquisition and get them to subscribe, then I can crush it. So, I mean, that one skew, like, the whole thing that you said is get to 25 units. I remember. And my whole goal was like, I need to sell this one thing to 25 per day. And I'm like, okay, 10 units per day, $10 profit. 3,000amonth even to this day is what I tell people that I consult. So it's like, all right, I got 25 and then 50. And I'm like, okay, well, let me create some more. And then it's like, no, take the one thing up to 25, to 50, to 75, to 100. That one skew is doing 2, 300 units a day.

Yeah. Same story with me. I got. You think you cap out at 25, and then the market catches to you and you get more market share. And yeah, by the time we sold that company, we had. We thought we had maxed out the market at 25, but by the time we sold, we were at about 200 units a day. So. All right, so you started some other brands too. Right. So this was. This was an opportunity that was. You were at least invited into, but then you started starting brands that. Yeah, 100% of.

I started. Yeah. So I mean, I owned 100% of this brand. The way it worked is he was still a manufacturer. I built the brand up and I bought the. I bought the product from him.

I see.

Okay. I became his biggest client in terms of B to B. And then B2C. I was making so much money that I started an additional company. This is when the entrepreneur ADD kicked in. I made a ton of money, but it stopped me from making a buttload of money.

Yeah, we'll get there.

Then it's like I started that brand. Then I started doing B2B with him as like an affiliate, making a ton of money through marketing. And then I started multiple brands before I created a new brand outside of that ecosystem. He called, he used to call it the Walgreens effect. I started to create sub like brands that were direct competitors. So I had one Bath Bomb brand that was killing it. Then I created another Bath Bomb brand, made it top 10. That was direct targeting the weakness to my main brand. One was quality and one was quality and then differentiation. Right. The biggest pain point in that marketplace was people loved your brand but went to new brands to try new fragrance color combinations. So the way I was able to crush it as every order was a new color to fragrance variation. So the only person on Amazon that had that and I charged the most for it because no one else had it then I knew the weakness was the price to quantity. So I created a competitor that was a great value brand, which I don't recommend doing. But it worked for me where it's like, okay, now I have more units than this brand at a lower price. So I was creating a monopoly. And then the third brand, once that was crushing it, ads all the way in. I went into office products. Yeah.

So it's like two brands that complement each other perfectly. And this is working. Yeah, I better start an office product business.

We're doing three and a half million on Amazon and like two to three million on Shopify at that time at this brand. And I start a brand new startup and office products and then I start buying real estate and flipping homes and all this other stuff.

So don't do that. I think, I think everyone can relate to that. They get a little bit of success and you're like, what if this goes away? I should start a completely different business that has nothing to do with this. So that my attention is diverted in two areas. No, please just double down on what is working for you. How did the office supply business end up?

What ended up happening at that point is I was juggling too much stuff. Like the easiest way to dissect this is if you have this cup is 100% of time, effort and energy. And you have four different brands for different businesses. I'm taking and I'm pouring it. So Now I have 25% into four things, right? And the killer was dropping and then the other ones were raising at the cannibalization of this one dropping. And then now it's like revenue amongst all of them is the same as what the one was killing it. And now I have more, less time. And for me the whole happiness factor was building this thing when I wanted, you know, being able to work on this thing and not being stressed out. And that's when the stress and yeah.

The thing that I've learned is you have to full ass one thing and then partner with people for your pet projects. Right. And I mean I still am learning this, Joshua. Even recently I had to sit down and be like, I got to pare back some projects. Like I, even now I'm, I know what I'm doing wrong here. I'm just stretched too, in too many different directions. So I need to pick my battles. And it's not that I have to delete them or get rid of them. It's what I have to choose is going to be I'm all in on and know that even if this thing is clunky or incomplete on the side, in a year from now we'll have so much more momentum on the thing I'm focused on. I can hire someone, I can partner with somebody, I will meet somebody that is inspired by my success and I can give them that opportunity. So it's not like I have to completely get rid of it, but I have to choose what gets all of my focus for a while. And we both learned this lesson of when you have too many things, it starts to crumble. But if you go all in on something, you can make anything work, you can make anything successful if you just pick it and tear it open. So you've done eight figures in sales now just in the physical product brands, correct? Mostly bath bombs then.

Yeah, primarily around bath and body. So once we kind of monopolize that, we branched into a few different things. Soaps, lotions, primarily. Bath bombs is the killer.

What was the best year and what was like, what was the top line of your best year?

Best year was probably man, 2017, right before I ventured off and started to get shiny object syndrome with not material things, but businesses being this mogul. We did, like I said, we did around three and a half million on Amazon, on platform, off platform, we did around three, three and a half million. And this was through Shopify. And what I was able to do.

A total of about 7 million.

Yeah, around 7 million. Profit margins were great. See I was good at, I was really good at a few things and what I was really good at doing is creating a monopoly. I was really good at finding exterior based marketing because once you hit the PPC cap, once you hit the search term search volume cap on Amazon, the way I was able to scale it so crazy is I went off platform into Shopify and started doing influencer marketing. And I also started doing Google shopping ads at the time. So that's what really crushed it. And when I was, when I reached the limit on PPC ad spend in terms of the visibility on Amazon, what really crushed it is I would create these groups, I call them like these little groups, these page. And I was getting like, it would be, I love bath bombs, I love bath time. And what I would do is I.

Would run ads very simple, based on my very old school, I love yoga pages in 14.

Dude, I'm telling you, it would be a Facebook ad and it would be a thing of a picture of a dog and it'd be like, like if you want a pet. Why? Because I knew the demographic who likes bath bombs, likes dogs.

Oh my goodness, that's like, that is throwing it way back in the day.

I'm telling you, I was grinding online.

I gotta be careful what I say on YouTube. People actually listen.

Yeah, dude, that stuff works. So I was farming and I was building these. You were building audiences, huge audience for cheap, man, fractions of a penny per, like. And then I would go in there and this was very simple. It's not, hey, go buy this thing on Amazon. I'm going to give you this thing on Amazon, right? And the way I did it is I'm like, hey, every single day I did a giveaway. My product at the time was 24:97. So 24:97 times 30, whatever that is, that was my cost, my advertising cost. And I'm getting like 10 to 20 followers for a penny off of these cheap ads. They're coming there and I'm saying, okay, giveaway time. So everybody had notifications on because they're getting free stuff every single day. And in order to enter it, you had to tag three people whom would love this product and also share this to your feed. So I'm using the simple guerrilla marketing tactic and I'm getting new people every single day. And it's just going through the snowball. And I built up tens of thousands of followers in this Facebook page and that's how I was able to get reviews, I was able to launch new stuff. So it's like I didn't have to do the traditional launch. I already had this ecosystem of people that like these products off platforms.

Yeah. And, and that was, that was like very old school audience building. Right. Whereas today you would probably do it a little bit different.

Right.

Like you build a much deeper relationship with that person in order to build that raving fan base. And you've said to me that your biggest mistake was that you didn't really go deep into those businesses and scale them and, and have an exit you didn't do. And I know you're thinking about doing it now, so tell me a little bit about what you wish you would have done differently there.

Golly. So you hit on already the two biggest mistakes. Eight figure mistakes, zero exaggeration. Two mistakes that were eight figures. Number one, you talked about delegation. I didn't know how to hire the appropriate roles, I didn't know what the appropriate roles were and I didn't know how to hire them appropriately. We started, me and my wife were the only people that worked on this company and we took it to seven million, like our best year. Three and a half million on Amazon alone. And then we started to hire and hiring was friends and family. So that's where we screwed up. Yeah. Then I didn't exit at the best year and at the trajectory. If I would have just sat down and focused on that one thing and not did anything else, I probably would have got it around 10 million at A1 EBITDA's eight figures, you know. But the EBITDA multiples back then on Amazon businesses were crazy. They're not what they are today, so God knows how much money. But the good thing is I owned 100% of them. They're trademarked, thousands of reviews. I have all the original work, everything. I still own the ip, so something I'm doing now years later, because that flat, round, flat line around 20, 19, 20 ish. When I started to buy real estate and sell.

You started getting distracted.

Exactly. So I'm going to relaunch them all and hopefully pick off where I left off.

So let's talk about that now that you understand, you know, the playbook. You've run the Playbook multiple times, but you didn't build a brand as well as you would like to. So now that you get a second chance, I feel like I'm talking to myself because I get a second chance at the brand that I sold. I bought it back a few months ago. So since, since you're getting a second chance at it, what do you plan to do? Differently this time in order to build that depth of and have something that you can exit.

That's huge. So one of the key components is hiring the right players. Like right off the bat, I'm going to hire the right players to be working.

But in this case, like right off the bat is once you have the business that is producing enough cat like you wouldn't do that from the very beginning.

Not using resources I already have.

But I just mean like you, you can keep going that direction. I just want to say I know that this is a brand that already has some momentum. So of course you might start to build that infrastructure. But from a strategy perspective, what would you do to revive that audience, revive those listings or to get back to 200 sales a day? Like, what levers would you pull differently this time?

This time it's going to be mainly around community. So we're going to do a lot. And what I'm going to follow is something similar to what boxycharm did. What boxycharm did really good before they exited is they had community down packed. I had a good community. I had the Facebook groups, you know, but they weren't a part of the brand. Right. Like BoxyCharm, they called their audience charmers. They had a mission. They were a part of this vision. So now the brand is called Amor. Amor is love in Spanish. So now when I rebranded it and I'm making the altercations to the brand, it's love yourself. So instead of just having fun during bath time and we're the best because we solve the problems, it's all around this love yourself movement, this health, this health and love yourself movement, this tranquil movement movement. So when we do the messaging and the marketing, it's going to be different. Yeah, Right. So it's going to be lovers, like, hey, what's up lovers? So I'm going to have like, we're going to create this real, like audience and this real warmth around the brand and we're going to launch it together. And it's going to be a lot of UGC on the relaunch versus just UGC paid through influencers.

Yeah.

So I did really well with UGC through paying influencers to promote it. But the best form of marketing is organic marketing. So now it's like when we do the launches, we're building this ecosystem where we're getting people to create the content for us and promote it and distribute it for us. And that's the whole strategy I'm working on right now.

Yeah, I'd be interested to Hear your thoughts. Because there's, there's two different directions you can go with influencer marketing because back in 2017 you didn't have TikTok.

Right? Right.

Your best years, you didn't have Instagram reels, you didn't have YouTube shorts. And so now you have this opportunity for viral organic reach that did not exist. Yep. That was a pipe dream for us in 2017and18. And now you can kind of make it happen. Absolutely. So with influencer marketing, you can either partner with the people who have the reach and that you know are going to hit the right demographic, or you can just play a volume game where you get as many people as possible to show them using the product, talking about the product and you put that into TikTok and Instagram Reels and you pray and hope for the best that something is going to hit you build an audience. So you've done influencer marketing, the first way of partnering with people who had reached. Now that you're relaunching this brand, are you going to go in the same direction or are you going to play more of the volume game?

I'm going to do a combination of both. I think a combination of both. Because the thing with the volume game is the volume game will get you the traffic. But I believe that the organic UGC will keep the user. So the user retention for me, the game and this doesn't work for all products but like for your products. For my products, I'm really, really prioritizing the subscribe and save the continuity and predictable income. So for me, the way I was able to crush it is I identified what my cost per acquisition on these trials were not trials, but these commitments were and I was willing to lose money. So I think that the way that we can do this and make it sticky is through the referrals through the ugc. So I'm going to have the volume bringing in order to rank and increase the rank on these search terms I want. But the organic being out there and the overwhelming social proof of real users using this and getting their friends and family and people whom know like and trust them to come, I believe it's going to be more sticky for the long term. So it'll be this pendulum that'll be able to balance.

Just curious, what are you doing to increase the take rate of subscribe and save you? Just maximizing the discount.

So mine's very guerrilla and it works. And here's the thing, I can't remember exactly whom said this, but a few people who I'VE watched closely have said the same thing. So to whoever was first, shout out to you. But amateurs monetize the front end and experts monetize the back end.

Oh, yeah, that was Abraham Lincoln who said that.

Okay, so I've heard hundreds of people. Are you being serious? It was Abraham.

Yes, it was Abraham Lincoln who said that? Marketing term. Yes. Yes, Josh. Abraham Lincoln was a master marketer. Yeah, yeah, he was a funnel hacker. I met him at Funnel Hacking Live last year.

Yeah.

You didn't know that?

Dude, I've heard a bunch of people say that. I didn't know who it was. But.

Anyway, so you heard this Abraham Lincoln quote. You decided to apply this to Amazon.

So, dude, I just lost money on the front end, basically. I lost money on the front end. I knew the stick rate was high on it. I knew how to make the stick rate high. I think the two things that you need to look at with user retention and stickiness on the subscribe and Save is, number one, how much does it cost? Like, how much does it cost to acquire one or a customer through subscribe and Save? And number two, what is their retention? What's the churn look like? And if you identify what the retention is? If the retention is three months, why? Like, I think too many people look at, like, okay, well, my, my churn is three months. After three months, they're going to bounce. Why are they going to bounce? And for me, I knew exactly why they would bounce because they want to try something new. No one wants to try the same thing for 12 months straight. So once I crack that code, what did I do? 12 different variables. And I let you know when you bought it inside the box. Hey, you're probably going to want to try other brands or have tried other brands for this one reason. And we've become obsessed with focusing on solving that one thing. Yes, Mark, we're the only brand on Amazon and in the world that offers 12 different variations throughout the year and a new prize in every single box. So now I had the gamification because people are addicted to, like, prizes and not knowing what it is. So every single box, every single month, we had a new prize that we gave away and every single month we had a new variation. So I went from 3 months to 12 months stick rate. So now, now on the front end, it's very simple. I lose money. No one else. Like, everybody's discounting 20% to make it enticing for subscribe and Save. I was going subscribe and Save as low as I could. If I Could put free, I would, but I couldn't.

Right, Free for the first acquisition.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Because I know we are being willing to aggressively get people onto some sort of a continuity order. Yeah, no, you're going to keep them for 12 months and the ability to advertise that broadly is going to spill over to Amazon which is going to drive up your rankings there, it's going to drive your review rate there. And so just the willingness to punt for a few months, the break even or the profitability gives you the meat on the bone to be able to create this halo effect for the brand.

Absolutely. So it's very elementary but very, very effective. And the other thing is like I was able to charge more. A lot of the competition was at a 1999 price point. So I follow the what I call WWAD or what would Apple do? Apple's the most purchased trillion dollar company, most purchased electronic consumer good and they're 10x5x10x plus what their competitors are. Well why do they do that through value? So my competitors were at 1999 and I was at 2495. So that addition of margin gave me that 50%. So if I'm losing money, but I know like even at the three month user retention at 50% margin, I know in two months I've recouped my money back. So I was already crushing it right there at the three months. But then the only thing I obsessed on is how do I get more predictable income through continuity and, and how do I increase the stick rate? And the easiest way to increase the stick rate, it's not because I'm the greatest marketer of all time. I became obsessed with putting the clients reviews in spreadsheets. I looked at four and five stars and I looked at one and two stars and I started to pull out. This is before I when you could just upload and say pull all the similarities between these, these review groups and these review groups, I did it manually in an Excel and I would pull all the 1 and 2 stars and all the 1 and 2 stars which wish there was variety. So this is what the competition did. They created child asins of variety which their overhead was ridiculous. So instead of me having to have 10 products of the same product to culture to meet their need, I then just changed my shipments and I planned them ahead of time. So every single month we had a new variation. And you can do this with anything. You can do this with colors, you can do this with fragrances, you can do this with bundles, sizes.

Gifts, anything and a Lot of people still aren't doing that. I don't see it.

What's interesting about this approach now is obviously the Amazon algorithm has changed quite a bit since 2017, when you and I were really active in the game. But now Amazon rewards outside traffic.

Oh yeah.

More than it rewards pretty much any other metric. So if you're able to aggressively acquire customers or even email subscribers or tech subscribers, and you're able to aggressively do that because you're willing to lose money on the front end, you build this giant list of people that at the click of a button, you can send them to Amazon, send a rush of traffic and attention there, which Amazon rewards. And now you control your own destiny. You can control how aggressively you rank for keywords, you control your conversion rate, because that is a highly convertible source of traffic when you own it. And so by focusing on the brand building, you also are able to control your Amazon presence. Most people try to go Amazon heavy and then convert them into brand.

Yeah.

It's so hard to do that.

Yeah.

But the opposite direction is, is very predictable.

Yeah.

You build the brand and you get customers in a channel that you control and then you bring them over to Amazon. Man, Man. Can you build a brand that you can sell?

Yeah.

So the plan moving forward is to aggressively do that and build an asset that you can have an exit for. Is that fair to a fair summary?

Absolutely. And then the other big, big component is too many people go direct to Amazon. Like the off platform building, I'm going to add an additional step. So instead of using all the influencer traffic from TikTok and all the other influencers from different platforms and sending them directly to Amazon through some type of UTM or cookie or whatever it is or discount or whatever traditional strategy. What I'm doing is I'm selling, sending them to an opt in or a lead magnet.

Yeah.

And I'm building the intellectual properties. So now what it looks like right now is I'm building a community. Right. I just wrote an e book and not an E book like buy my product, you'll get this ebook, a real ebook of context that will help the quality of the user. So all these different ways to help them sleep better. Why sleep is important. About energy, about in the mornings, about routines. And I built this e book. So that's going to be the lead magnet. So when we're off platform and we're talking about the product, hey, this is amazing product and this amazing brand, you should follow our mission. Get this free thing of value in exchange for your Phone number, your name and your email. Then from there I'm pushing them to Amazon with a coupon. That's the whole strategy. And that's the strategy so I can build that. The biggest, other, biggest mistake, other than not selling the brand and not hiring, was not building the intellectual property outside of Amazon. It's so easy, like you said, to build the brand off Amazon, collect the phone number in the email and then send them to Amazon versus get them on Amazon. Try to say, hey, go to this website for this extended warranty and give me everything, every information that you have. I need your social, I need your credit card, I need where you live at. It doesn't work that well.

That's a much harder game to play. We're almost, we're doing almost the exact same playbook at Sheer Strength where we're writing a short book about biohacking and hormone optimization with a hook of five biohacks that you never heard about on Bulletproof Radio or from Dave Asprey or too controversial for Dave Asprey or something like that, writing that we've partnered with a couple medical doctors writing that. And then we'll sprinkle in our supplements throughout that and the biohacks throughout that and also recommend some other brands. We'll also send traffic to other people who sell to our market because that opens up a relationship that we can, then we can collaborate over, over the years. So it's almost the exact same strategy of getting the person to know, like and trust you and then sending them to Amazon rather than trying to do the opposite.

Yep. And what I focused on before with retention and stickiness and subscribe and save, I'm doing in turn in terms of actually getting the clients to stick. So something that you could do or you could explore that I'm going to do, which I've done in the past, is I'm going to create a membership. Like the easiest way to add value and out value your competition is to really think about the pain points. What do they need? What are they using your product for? What does it look like after they use your product? Right. And for example, give you a very elementary example, if you're in that space around fitness and health and cognitive energy and so on and so forth, you can hire trainers for very, very cheap, on an hourly rate and have them do weekly live trainings inside of a group. Right. And inside of this group, as a part of purchasing your program, you get access to a weekly live call with these trainers that break down four different components of whatever it is that your pain points are right. So, for example, it could be. One could be strength, one could be mental health, one could be like energy, and the other one could be sleep. You can go higher. Four different coaches that are experts in this off of LinkedIn or wherever you find them Upwork, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube influencers, and you can pay them $200 an hour. $200 an hour times four is 800, times four is 3200amonth. How much value do you think it is for me to include on a 2999 product a program that you get access to for free with $0 out of pocket with four different coaches every single week coming?

Beautiful.

No one is doing that in the industry. And in a lot of the clients that I consult, it is the easiest way to increase stick rate. It's the easiest rate to outvalue. Because outvaluing on Amazon is not 2015 where it's a free gift or a free ebook or get a second product free. It's how do I build a community? How do I over deliver? How do I create a real community? And a perfect example, Peloton is nothing special. It's the community. So it's exactly what peloton did. They took a physical product, they took a problem, which is during COVID How do I exercise at home? Right. They took that problem and they solved it through community. So you can build that same community very, very inexpensive through hiring coaches.

I'm really glad you said that because I was just thinking today I'm trying to solve this thing at your strength where my whole goal is to get people on $200 a month continuity. These are your far five products. You should take. You should take them forever. Here are your labs and look at the difference between when you before you took them and after. And the labs are different. And I was trying to think how to make that really sexy. And the idea of bringing in a personal trainer, a health coach, a nutrition coach.

Exactly.

And doing things like we'll do your workouts for you.

Exactly.

We'll interpret your labs for you. We'll come up with your. Your macro breakdown for you, and we'll do them on these calls and putting them in the group. That is a huge advantage. And no one would ever cancel. If they're getting the supplements, they're getting the coaching. That's a total life transformation. So you actually just close that loop.

For me all in one. Because think about it. I buy I've seen one was creatine. You take creatine pre workout or post workout however you take it, right? But you have to work out to take the creatine. If I buy the supplement and stop working out, then the continuity is stopped. The other one could be post workout, some type of post workout supplement. Basically, if the workout stops or I'm not getting results from the thing that I'm doing, I'm going to stop taking the supplement. So the easiest way to do it is somebody who buys supplements and I'll use myself. Because I've got into fitness in the last year and a half, it's been a huge game changer for my life. And I know consistency is key. If I miss one day, I go six days a week, half for the last year and a half. If I miss one day, it ruins everything. So. But I also need to know the macronutrients, right? I also need to know what supplements to take, how much of them to take. I also need to know what workouts to do. These are all different areas where your customer has to go outside of your world. It is very inexpensive to bring a personal trainer in and to do an in home workout. If you don't have time to go out or to record them at a gym doing different body movement workouts and have that inside of an application or inside of a training. Almost like, almost like a mastery.com or mastermind.com so mastermind.com interviews all these different entrepreneurs and these different people in these different areas. And they create these miniseries almost like Netflix. We've done something similar with what we call the cheat code and it's very effective. You go hire these different, these different professionals, you pay them, they come in and they teach on these different areas. Why are we doing this? Culture, community and user retention. If I know why, they're going to leave my atmosphere and I can inject that in without being getting shiny object syndrome. And I can do this effectively and efficiently. It makes sense. So that's very, very effective and inexpensive.

Yeah, I appreciate you closing that loop. That gives me, that gives me a little something to chew on because I've been wanting to think, how do I, how do I make that continuity irresistible? How do I make it so nobody would ever want to cancel? And that, that, that's actually really helpful. I wanted to ask you, in addition to all the other things that take up your entrepreneurial add, you also built a personal brand along the entire journey and you have a huge Instagram following and I think people follow you other other places too. How did you build the personal brand, especially while you were doing all these other things?

Got it. So I primarily. Majority of my brand started when I was building these brands and I was documenting. We talked about my mentor and him loving Gary Vaynerchuk, and he always talked about document the process and document the process. So I started to just show myself online. If you go on YouTube, it's embarrassing, but it's still there. You scroll all the way down to 2016, 17, you're going to see these videos where I am just dead and the tonality is weak. And I'm, hey, guys, we're in my, my warehouse right now. You see 50 employees over here boxing up this shipment. You know, UPS just told us we have the largest account in Laporte, which is pretty great. And I'm just documenting it. I'm not selling anything, anything like that. And it started. And that real transparency and just value that was coming from that channel, it just sparked. People went crazy and they said, we want more. And then when I started consulting, I started to actually get on social media. I implemented all the strategies that I learned building my business in social media. And it's basically around utilizing influencers. In 2019, 2020, we spent four or five million dollars on influencers alone. It's basically understanding, like, where are your clients? Like, where are your dream clients? Where do they hang out, what do they like to do, what type of content do they like to consume? And then just producing that. So, like now we have a studio and now I shoot two times a week. But I didn't have any of that. It was literally just brute force of that volume game you talked about. Now Instagram isn't what it was in 18 to 20. The algorithm has shifted because they wanted to compete with TikTok. So it went to video before it was memes, and I did memes and I killed it with memes before and afters, motivational quotes. Right now it's shifting back from video a little bit more to images because of all the, like, the, the negative energy and the suits and everything that was going on with like, hey, you keep saying screwing content creators and people that have been loyal to your platform because you want to be the next greatest thing. Like right now they're getting ready to compete with Twitter and roll out something at meta. It's just crazy. So right now it's a combination of video, but it is going back. We are seeing pictures work, but it's just consistency and outvaluing everybody. Like in any brand that you're trying to create, the biggest mistake or the biggest fear, which I had, is if I give My greatest stuff away. No one's going to like, no one's going to buy my stuff. Like if I give you everything, no one's going to buy my stuff. Right. And I generally believe that if you over deliver, you'll be overcompensated. Right. And that's something. Gary really cracked the code. Reason why people love him is he gives you everything.

Right? Yeah. Then, so. And then you want whatever he does.

Yeah. It's like, oh, you have something. Give it to me. It's an FT. I don't care about NFTs. Give it to me. Like I don't care.

Like yeah. And the interesting thing about documenting the journey is you meet so many people that you wouldn't have met who can open doors for you. We tell people in the 1% that almost no one documents their journey, but everyone who does has success.

Wow.

There's like no, almost nobody's willing to do it. But if for 90 days to six months you just sat down and documented where you're at in the process, what you're thinking, how you're feeling, what the product design looks like, what your sales look like, if you just did that for three to six months, you'd have enough of an audience that they're going to start buying your stuff.

Absolutely.

And they're going to choose you over everybody else. It's enough to build a little bit of a fan base, to have a $10,000 launch, to get to 25 sales a day, to get your initial reviews, to get things going and moving off the ground. But almost nobody does it. But if you do it, you'll probably be successful. And it sounds like you did that and you had outsized returns because you have hundreds of thousands of followers now.

Yeah. And dude, you don't need to have like it didn't start out like that, like I, it was small growth like you said. So you don't need hundreds of thousands, you don't need to be verified. The thing you need to do is be very consistent. Consistency is the killer to growth on any social media platform in terms of the algorithm showing your stuff to other people, but also in terms of the user and user retention.

Right.

Because the algorithm is designed to keep users on platform. So if you're not constantly putting out contact and content and they're not constantly watching it, they push you to the back and they push whoever they're more engaged with to the front. So it's a two edged sword. So. Well, I'm not growing fast enough. I'm going to take it from every day to two times a week or I'm busy right now. I'll do it when I feel like it. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for growth. So it's like even though you have a small audience or the growth is small, like in Alex Hormozi, my good friend, talks about this all the time. Like, he blew up overnight. But his podcast is six years old and he's been podcasting for years. He's been creating content for years. And when he exited gym launch and transition from all the strategies that built and sold gym launch into, hey, let's do this in marketing another era, it blew up. So it's like an almost like Gary like document, don't scoreboard, watch. Continue to document. Continue to document. That consistency, I believe, is generally what led to my growth. A majority of it.

Now that you're relaunching the brand, you've become a little bit of a Swiss army knife, knowing the old school strategies, knowing the new school stuff. So where will you put your focus to build the audience and to build this community as you relaunch the brand for the second in time right now.

It'S going to be three things. Three things. TikTok, which didn't exist, and TikTok, like, if you look, I've been viewed over a billion times. I have collectively around 7, 800,000 followers. TikTok is my lowest. Like, we're maybe 20, 30,000 followers. That's a new beast. I'm going to focus on conquering TikTok, TikTok JVs, TikTok influencers because that is huge and viral and untapped. It's an unrestricted platform. But the other two is going to be one, the community. Like I explained to you, because no one is doing that subconsciously. Apple has a community that no one knows about, right? Apple has a community. They just didn't say, hey, when you buy Apple, you're a part of a community. But we've all had that customer service call. When we get on there, it's like, they know your name, they know your problem. Hey, what type of music would you like to listen to while you sit here? And by the way, you don't want to do anything, hit control, alt, delete, and I'm going to take over your computer, do everything for you while you listen to your greatest tunes. That's a community, right? On top of that, they also have the App Store and all of these different things which are community. So I'm going to do TikTok. I'm going to focus on that community where I get these people in just like boxycharmer did, we do the subscriptions, we do the giveaways, we do the events, we do the movie nights, all this stuff, which is a real fun community. And then number three, which I still think people are sleeping on, which we crushed it with, which is a combination of blogs and, well, I don't know what you classify it, but blogs, Pinterest and YouTube, primarily around reviewing and what happened. And I learned this from my mentor because he was really, really good with SEO. That's his main business was built off SEO. I learned about domain authority and backlinks and all of that. Well, Amazon has so much domain authority. And when you start crushing it, you get on the first page, when people start typing in your money keyword, which is not like, not profitable in ppc, you'll rank on Google, people will come to Google to search and they'll buy on Amazon. Well, you can take it a step further. If you know prime day is coming up and you know these mommy blogs that have high domain authority, you know a little bit about SEO, you can go and you can start to create these top 10 lists and guess who's on the list. Yes, you're giving credit to your competition, but it looks organic and you're on there, right? So now I'm getting all these, these mommy blogs, all of these review sites. I'm creating all of this SEO from YouTube. Pinterest is a sleeper for physical products. YouTube review sites are a sleeper for physical products. And then these top 10 lists, these top 10 for Christmas, top 10 for dad, top 10 for a better life, top 10 to become, get in better shape. All these top tens, top fives, they're easy to rank and they're highly searched. So you can go to SEM Rush, you can use any tool to really look at these search terms and see what sentences are getting the most visibility. And I would focus on going to hire somebody on Upwork.com to write these blogs and start pushing backlinks to these blogs, which you can literally go and type in, build or create backlinks on upwork. You don't have to know SEO to this blog. Get it on the blog. Start pushing the links to the blog, it'll start to rank and focus on ranking that once you rank to the first page for top five gifts to buy from mom and your bath bombs are on there, that thing lives forever. You just have to do maintenance every other month in terms of buying some more links to shoot to that listing.

To maintain You've admitted that your entrepreneurial ADD has gotten you in trouble.

Yep.

But you have. Your brain fires a thousand miles an hour. Like, you know all these things.

Right.

Like, and like learning TikTok is a very different skill set than building a community, which is a different skill set from doing SEO. So how do you plan to do all of this? Do you have an order operations? Are you going like that point? There's like, there's an interesting dichotomy here.

Yeah.

You want to control your entrepreneurial add, but you have really big ideas and plans that go in different directions. So how are you going to bridge that gap?

So you said it again, and I'll hit on it again, is delegation. So now I focus on this strategy which I call the acronym is asap. Asap. It's Autonomous sustainable action and Perpetuity. That's a system or a framework that I follow. I'm very good now at knowing what needs to be done. That's the add, but that's also like the experience. So I know all these things need to be done, but I'm not going to do them all. The mistake that I got myself into is knowing them all and doing them all. Because we know we can do everything better than everybody else. When you do everything, you can't do everything at all. You can't do.

You can't do any one thing better than any one person.

Exactly. So now it's delegation. Like, I'm not going to learn TikTok ads, I'm not going to learn TikTok distribution or any of that. I'm going to hire someone immediately to do that. And if you're listening and you don't have the money, of course I have the resources from this and I have resources that, to hire people to accelerate this brand off the get go. But if you didn't have money to start and you had maybe less than 20 grand and you're getting started, like where I got started, you got to really identify what is that money moving needle. Like what is the biggest thing for me it was, I got really good at ppc. I got really good at guerrilla marketing. We talked about the groups and everything like that. And I shouldn't have done all the other tasks. Like the minute, like when do I hire someone? The minute your tasks are being like your time from the task that produces the revenue is being mitigated or it's being removed. So hire the va. The VA can do the customer support. The VA can do this. Like, you don't need to be writing emails Sending emails, handling customer support, doing review requests. You shouldn't do that. Focus on the one thing that'll make you that big return. Right?

And that's get, get good at one thing and then use that momentum to partner with other people. You can run everything else in the business. Dude, I can't wait to see this turnaround.

Yeah, no, I mean I'm excited for this. I'm excited about it. You know, I'm a bit nervous about it because it is a very competitive industry, but I know the industry. I've got all the IP and I'm excited for where we're going to go. And most importantly, I'm excited. The one thing I haven't done is I haven't exited. So I'm excited more about going through the process so I can learn the process because it may be a seven figure, maybe low eight figure exit. But the next nine figure thing, I need to go through the entire process.

From start to call me before you sign any documents. Yeah, I got you so many things I wish I had done differently. So I'm excited for you and I'll look forward to that call when you go to sell.

Yeah, I'm excited, man. I can't wait.

Congrats Josh. Thanks for, it's great to hear your story and I'm really excited to watch where you go with this.

Likewise, man. Thanks for having me on, brother.

If you are working a minimum wage job, if you hate your life right now, if you've had failures in your past, it's important for you to know that you might be just a couple years away from more financial success than you know is possible right now. The stuff that we talk about here works this, the strategies that we talk about, they work. During this interview, my brain didn't move as fast as Josh's did. I can only implement like 25% of all the cool hacks and tricks and stuff. And guess what? I've still had an eight figure exit. I still have multimillion dollar businesses. I am still an investor and mentor to brands that are going to have an eight figure exit. You don't need to do it all, you don't need to do everything. You need to do a couple of things really well. And in order to do that, you need to be in the game. If you're ready to get into the game, you can apply for mentorship inside the 1%@Capitalism.com 1 and if you are already over a hundred thousand dollars a month and you need a little bit more advice, if you need some capital you can apply to work with me and our team directly inside the capitalism fund@capitalism.com fund. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Ryan. Daniel Moran. I'll see you guys next time. Take care.

And now a quick word from Jared.

One of our members in the 1%.

I was bankrupt and crippled to making a million dollars in a year. And then I grew that business and kept growing it. So like my whole world changed financially very quickly. Like it was amazing how fast it was able to transition and like turn once things got rolling. Ryan in capitalism.com Pretty much like taught me everything I knew about like E commerce and a specific specifically branding was the biggest thing that I think capitalism really does well and they focus on teaching their students about building a brand and just teaching business to people. Like everything he teaches is stuff that he's done. You know, it's not like from theory that you're going to learn. So it's like all stuff that he's done. So I think the biggest thing that capitalism.com helps you with is that you're getting to learn from somebody who's done the exact thing that you want to do, which is the most important thing in the world. Like I'm in the like coaching business now. I like to help out other business owners. The biggest thing is going to someone who's done what you want to do and then learning from them. That's how you fast track your results. So if you want like the fast lane and to get your results really quickly, you go to capitalism.com and you have them show you what to do so you don't make all the mistakes and you get there really quickly. And it was the best money I ever spent because I went from bankrupt and crippled and all this other stuff to a million dollar a year business in one year, which is exactly what he teaches. And I was like, holy crap, this stuff works. Starting a business, it's scary. And so you have so many questions that go through your head about different things you need to do. When you have somebody who can just lay out, you know, a simple plan for that you can follow, that's like the biggest thing ever because you don't get stuck in your head thinking, well maybe I should do this over here, maybe I need to worry about that over there. But to have like somebody who's done what you want to do, lay out a plan that's like the fast track, fast lane, 200 mile an hour, like euro train going across the country to just get what you want, that was like the most beneficial part of the whole thing was just being in charge of my own life instead of having to stay somewhere I didn't want to and do a job I didn't want to do. I mean, it was really important to have, have that freedom, which is what I think everyone is kind of searching for. So I was a, it was a very healthy exit and was able to let me focus on many other things in my life and not have to worry about that stuff anymore.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. 1. 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 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@capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com income.