How James Sells 7-Figures Of Sunglasses By Using Facebook Video Ads & Amazon - with James Swanwick

You'Re listening to freedom fast lane presented by capitalism dot com this is the show about building businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms and now your host the future owner of the cleveland indians ryan daniel moran.

Two years ago my.

Buddy james swanwick was running on the.

Beach and he was listening to this show today he runs a million dollar business by combining facebook with amazon today on freedom fast lane we're gonna unpack exactly how that works hey my name's ryan daniel moran i help people build businesses and invest the profits and james had never run a physical product business before he wanted to he didn't have the confidence and by listening to freedom fast lane he got the exact model.

Of how he was gonna make that.

Happen he had a little bit of a different skill set because he comes.

From a direct response background he actually.

Works very closely with tai lopez and we're going to talk about that as well and he took some of those lessons and he applied them to his physical products business that was based on amazon and it allowed him to scale much much faster and charge much higher prices we're going to cover all of that with james if you sell any type of physical product or you want to this is basically a roadmap for how james did it by using out outside traffic it is kind of an unveiling of his product his marketing messages what worked and what doesn't work how he approaches marketing how he hires it's.

Basically a great compliment to our twelve.

Months to one million plan in case study format so if you sell any type of physical product or you want to you are going to absolutely love this episode with james if you're listening to this and you haven't started a business yet and you're like what is this training that james went through and how do i build a business like this we train entrepreneurs to build physical products businesses inside of our brand builder bootcamp you can go through that at freedomfastlane dot com bootcamp or just go to freedomfastlane dot com and you'll see a link to it that will take you from just an idea or no idea at all to to having a product up live and selling within about ninety days if you're already selling products you're like i wanna hang out with more people like james you should be at tribe summit twenty seventeen it is may first through the fourth in austin texas and when you come to tribe summit it also gives you access to the tribe for a year we've opened up spots inside of the tribe specifically for tribe summit james is going to be there and you'll be meeting james and retail partners and a bunch of other heavy hitters who are already doing this so if you're already a successful seller or you're an investor looking for deal flow in these types of businesses join the tribe at freedomfastlane dot com tribe and come to the tribe summit may first through the fourth hope to see you there and i hope you enjoy this episode with james hey everybody welcome to freedom fast lane today i'm gonna be joined by my buddy james.

Swanik james thanks for hanging out with.

Us thanks for having me here ryan.

Dude i want to start with you telling the story that made me so.

Happy about you running on the beach and realizing that you were going to start a physical products business would you.

Start by telling that story yeah sure.

Of course i was down in sydney australia two years ago and i was running between bondi beach and bronte beach i'm australian obviously you can tell from my accent so i was back there visiting friends and family and i looked at your podcast rather freedom fast lane and i saw an episode there that said zero to a million dollars in twelve months the blueprint not sure exactly what the exact title was but it was something like that ryan and i stuck my earbuds in and i started running and i got up to bronte beach and then i turned around and by the time i'd got back to bondi beach which is about a forty five minute round trip i just made the decision you know what i'm just going to start a physical products business ryan has just laid it out for me he's given me the blueprint i love this and when i stopped at bondi beach and i was like sweating profusely the first thing i did was after i heard your episode was i pressed stop and then i phoned my youngest brother tristan who lives in brisbane australia and i said tristan i got this idea for a physical products business.

I'Ll do the marketing and the branding you do some of the logistics and the operations and let's just do it and after about a ten minute chat he was in and then we just began so thank you ryan for inspiring me to begin my physical products business.

Well tell us a little bit about that business because you took a little.

Bit of a different approach a lot of my students will sell what's already selling and i think that's fine and great you took a little bit of.

A different approach and you you basically.

Brought something new to the marketplace and it's done really well so tell us.

A little bit about the business sure so i produce and sell blue light blocking glasses which i call swannies the company is called swanick sleep my last name is swanik so just call it swanic sleep and i got the idea a friend of mine in los angeles was wearing these really ugly blue light blocking glasses kind of like safety goggles that you might wear at a gun range or if you're mowing the lawn trying to protect your eyes from flying rocks and he was wearing these out in a hotel one night to dinner at the dinner table and i thought that looks really peculiar and i asked him so why are you wearing those ugly glasses and he said oh i'm trying to block the blue light i'm like what are you talking about blue light and he said well the blue light that's coming from your cell phone from your computer from these overhead lights it's basically hitting your brain keeping you alert and so it's disrupting your sleep so when you can't sleep well at night chances are it's because you're staring into your cell phone and into all that artificial light at night and i said yeah but you look ridiculous wearing them so anyway i went back to my place in los angeles and i went rummaging in my cupboard and i found an old pair of ski goggles that had like a kind of a yellow tint to it and i was watching mad men that tv show on amc and so i stuck these ski goggles on and i started watching reruns of mad men and what i found was that after a week of wearing these ski goggles at night my sleep actually did improve like i fell asleep quicker i woke up feeling more refreshed and obviously there's a placebo effect so i wanted to really give it a good test so after thirty days it was like oh man blocking the blue light really does work there was just one problem ryan i don't really want to go out and socialize wearing a pair of ski goggles on my face.

Bad for dating really bad for dating.

Bad for dating in fact on a friday night i got a text message from a friend who was at the laurel hardware bar on santa monica boulevard in los angeles where i live and he said hey come out and meet me we're hanging out with some girls here and it was friday night nine pm and i was wearing these ski goggles and i didn't want to go out.

To a hollywood bar and that's when the idea hit me it was like you know what i'm going to take the blue light blocking technology and stick it in a stylish frame kind of like ray bans that i would feel comfortable wearing out to a hollywood bar on a friday night and that's how i came up with the idea of a stylish pair of blue light blocking glasses that you can wear out and socialize and people don't think you look like a freak and you went.

About this in a little bit different.

Way because i know you take a lot of sales on amazon but it's not your only primary it's not your.

Only place that you take sales you've.

Really built a lot of the attention around this by doing interviews and running facebook ads would you talk a little bit about the marketing strategy behind that business.

Sure well we launched them on black friday twenty fifteen and we launched them on on amazon and we didn't really start selling them off amazon for about eight months and looking back that was actually a mistake we actually took too long to do that but our strategy initially was stick it up on amazon see if we can make some sales do some really good work with keywords on amazon's make sure that we're talking about the benefits of the product in our amazon page rather than the features of the product let's try and get as many reviews as we can to try and work the amazon algorithm so amazon promotes our product higher up when people search for sleep products and people search for blue light blocking glasses so we really went very hard on really optimizing our amazon page for the first time first eight months at about the eight month mark i said let's build a shopify site and it's now housed at swanicksleep dot com and from that point on i really it was just about me trying to like yell from the rafters you know tell anyone i can go to swanicksleep dot com i have a podcast the james swanick show so i tell people to go to swanicksleep dot com i tried to get interviewed by people talking about the benefits of sleep and push them to swannicksleep dot com you know i didn't run facebook ads i didn't do paid advertising until a few months after that so for the first three months of having the shopify account it was really just trying to tell as many people as possible try to get interviewed try to promote it as much as possible and drive traffic that way now starting about maybe four months ago we've started running paid facebook ads to our shopify site which has proven to be it's been really successful so far it seems.

I mean seeing your ads everywhere and i love them i actually took screenshots of them at one point because i was like oh these are really well done and we'll go into that in a second but i'm curious to hear a little bit about when you went out and you started working relationships and trying to get interviewed i don't know what like what hook or angle did you use to say hey put me on your show was it like we did you lead with the product and say talk about sleep hacking or did you already have those relationships when you went out to promote the brand how did you get it out there besides.

Just yelling it from the rooftops sure.

So i always think about the person who's going to be interviewing me and i always think about what would benefit them and their listeners or them and their readers if it's a newspaper or a magazine i don't lead with the product so i don't go hey i've got this product swannie's blue light blocking glasses that help you sleep instead i lead with hey would your listeners be interested in me giving them seven proven sleep hacks so they can improve their sleep and then by the way one of those seven ways is wearing a pair of blue light blocking glasses which is my brand swanic sleep and so i led with giving benefit to the listeners like i'm going to teach your listeners how to sleep better and then through that interview obviously my blue light blocking glasses swannies comes up in conversation and that therefore that helps me promote the brand.

Relationships yes absolutely i was friendly with dave asprey who's the bulletproof coffee guy and i'd known him for a few years i'd had him on my podcast and i'd been on his podcast a few years ago i knew that he loved blue light blocking glasses and the fact that they help you sleep i sent him a video text message about a year ago saying hi dave james swanick here i hope you're doing well hey listen would you like me to teach your listeners on bulletproof radio some new sleep hacks that i've learned recently as you know i've got these you know my blue light blocking glasses and maybe we could talk about the dangers of blue light but i'll also talk about you know magnesium and circadian rhythm and all that stuff and he sent me back a video text saying james i love what you're doing i would love to do that and then about a month later i was interviewed on the show and then two months after i actually did the interview the bulletproof radio episode came out and our sales tripled in three days in three days so it was a combination of giving value and leading with giving value and then also leveraging existing relationships.

Yeah it makes total sense at what point point did you know that you had something that was going to be a million dollar plus brand was it the dave asprey interview or was there was there something popping even before then that you're like i have something that i can really build into something meaningful.

Yeah i think it was a few things i started to read the reviews that we had on our amazon page and when i started seeing people saying i'm sleeping better i'm falling asleep quicker these are really stylish and then i also saw people posting photos on their instagram page when they were out at nighttime at a restaurant and they're saying hey i'm rocking the swannies and now all of a sudden there was like a cool factor to it because our glasses are obviously stylish and i'm trying to promote the fact that they are stylish and they're hip and they're cool to wear as opposed to the very unsightly glasses that you can get on the market so i guess it was seeing those people talk about the benefits i'm like wow this is actually helping people and then also seeing people post and using the hashtag swannies like the name swannies kind of we just i didn't really think about i just started nicknaming it a mutual friend of ours ryan ben greenfield actually said oh i really like swannies but before that i was thinking about calling them like just swanic sleep glasses and because he liked it i went okay we'll just try and push this swannies thing and when people started using that hashtag without me even asking them to do so that's kind of when i knew i was.

Onto something yeah that's a special moment right there tell me a little bit about the promotion strategy off of amazon since you really started to dial in facebook ads and it's starting to get its own community how hard did you have to push that and what did.

The strategy look like well in terms of our paid facebook ads what our strategy is at the moment and what we're realizing is working is that we send traffic to the website to swanicksleep dot com and then we put on a facebook tracking pixel and then we send testimonial videos in retargeting so we actually haven't quite discovered yet how to convert cold traffic by that i mean someone who doesn't know about our product we send traffic to our website and then they you know after five or ten minutes of looking at our website they buy most people don't buy right away but we put that that facebook retargeting pixel on and then over the course of a week or two we'll strategically send them videos of customers who say hey i love my swannies these are great hey my sleep's improved hey i used to have eye strain and now i don't have eye strain and those have worked really really successfully for us to the point now where we don't just send one generic testimonial video in the retargeting campaign now we actually have a specific eyestrain benefits testimonial video and a specific sleep specifically entrepreneurs so then now we're getting very good at dialing in our marketing where we only target our entrepreneurs with video testimonials of people saying hey i'm john and i'm an entrepreneur and since i've been wearing the swanee's my clarity and focus has improved and i'm making more money in my thanks swanic sleep so the strategy really has been drive people to the site retarget them and then send them lots of video testimonial content thereafter so.

You start with an ad that targets a group large enough for you to make a video specifically about the benefits for that group and then you're retargeting them with testimonial videos of people just saying i love my swanee's and you're retargeting them until they become buyers i.

Presume correct yes and initially we started out with people in the biohacking community so we targeted people who followed dave asprey and bulletproof coffee we follow people who follow the biohacking summit over in helsinki finland we targeted anyone who likes biohacking and is super into health like the really hardcore fanatics and all of our messaging was around biohacking like biohack your sleep or hack your clarity and your focus and that community the biohacking community they're super passionate they're super loud they're really into biohacking so my strategy really was if i can convince them and they're into it they'll do a lot of the heavy lifting and selling for us because they'll tell all of their community and all of their followers and then it'll start to just you know spread out from there and what.

Have the results been like this is something that most people struggle with immensely especially when they're making a pivot from something like amazon which does most of the heavy lifting for you to going out and getting your own community you seem to be doing it pretty successfully so what have the results look like and how'd you crack that nut yeah.

I mean i think it's i know you always talk about this and that's the importance of building a brand we're not just selling blue light blocking glasses we're selling a brand of swanick sleep and swannies and biohacking if you like and so it's not just throw up a product on amazon try and sell it in the amazon marketplace rather which has done really really well for us it's now trying to build a fun and cool factor around the brand of swanick sleep and by fun i mean like post photos of your swannies and hashtag swannies show us a post photos of you reading your book with your bedside lamp at night i'm encouraging people to send photos of them engaging with the product so too many people will just you know like they'll put the product up they'll sell it on amazon and then that's it but for us it's all about i want to see imagery of people using our product i want to see videos of people laughing and having a good time and using our product and i think that's really been a massive component in driving the sales because when you can see people using the product and you can see people having fun and you can see people getting benefits from it that really helps build the brand yeah amen to.

That and i know that you see this as more than just a.

Blue blocker company and i know you've got a bigger vision for that and we talked a lot about that in person about you know when you've got one good product what else what else do you build around that so how big do you see this brand or what do you think you need to do to go beyond just one product and having other successful follow ups yeah so.

My intention is to build one of the world's biggest sleep companies people often say oh you're a sunglasses company well actually we're not we're a sleep company and our main product so far happens to be a pair of glasses that you wear sixty to ninety minutes before you go to sleep to improve your sleep so while eighty five percent of our sales have been from that one product so far the blue light blocking glasses so we've started rolling out a one hundred percent pure silk sleeping mask we've just come out with a sleep aid a natural sleep supplement we're coming out with a magnesium spray which you rub on your muscles before you go to sleep which again helps you fall asleep quicker we're coming up with some bath salts some scented candles for relaxation at some point maybe twenty eighteen i want to get into the mattress business so i want to create an online mattress company where you can order a great amazing mattress online and it gets shipped to your door pillow slips pillows earplugs for travel travel pillows anything and everything you can think of in sleep we're building a sleep app at the moment which is in development so it's not just limiting ourselves to one product and patting ourselves on the back and going wow look at that we're so clever we built a million dollar business in eleven months selling one product it's now like right let's own sleep let's build a sleep company let's roll out dozens of sleep products and let's really help people sleep better that is beautiful.

You'Re speaking my language james.

When we.

Look at the total growth of the.

Company and what i love about what you've done by the way is the fact that you've got your lead product those customers are super fans and they're gonna go buy all this other stuff that you create as well so the next product is easier and the next product is easier so i love that you're following that model when you look at everything that has led you to this point though what do you think are those major levers that got you the awareness that got you the customers has it been dialing in facebook and doing podcast interviews or has it been more your amazon listings and where you rank for keywords i'm just curious as you look back on it because you've got more of a marketing background than most people who get into this business.

So as you look at it what.

Are those biggest levers that you think.

Have led you to here i mean i really think it's two things one of them is using video in general to sell our products now that can mean me talking into a camera and explaining about the dangers of blue light and then sticking that video on the homepage of our shopify page so if you go to swanicksleep dot com right now when you click on the page it's not just like some some photos and images and buy now there's actually a five minute video that i have recorded of me introducing myself and talking about the product and interacting with the product and then if you go into the product page there are videos there are demo videos of me and some other members of my staff using the product and then when it comes to testimonials we don't just do screenshots of people's written testimonials which are nice we have video of people saying hi my name's chelsea from boulder and i love these glasses i really think like really paying very close attention to getting video testimonials from people has been a huge instigator in the growth of the company because people can see you using the product now we benefit a bit maybe more so than others because ours is a wearable product you wear it on your face so to look at someone in the eyes you have to go through our swannie's blue light blocking glasses so we benefit from that but all these other companies out there even if you have if you're selling something that you don't wear like maybe it's like a candle or a light or or whatever it is if you can get video of customers interacting with that product i'm confident that your sales will increase dramatically another big thing for us ryan and this is maybe less so the marketing and more so a little bit more or maybe not technical is we actually made a mistake of not testing our price point enough so for the first year we had this.

We advertised the product at eighty nine dollars and then suddenly about two months ago i had my business mentor say how have you done with testing price and i'm like oh i haven't really tested it we just found that eighty nine worked for us and he said test it so then i tested it eighty nine verse sixty nine and we did a split test and i measured the epc which is the earnings per click and what i found out and what i discovered was that if we had been advertising the glasses and selling the glasses for sixty nine dollars from day one we probably would have had about one hundred to one hundred fifty thousand dollars more sales in revenue in the bank account so that was a big mistake not testing the price quickly enough.

Did.

That affect your amazon strategy once you.

Figured that out well we changed the price on amazon once we did the split test on.

Shopify on our shopify page we then went and changed the price on our amazon and the same thing has happened like our epc our earnings per click has increased by almost a couple dollars so it's significant like when you look at it over the course of a year just making sure you get your price right is the difference maybe between saying the same and hundreds of thousands of dollars is facebook.

The primary means in which you're seeing.

Sending traffic to be able to test.

That or are there other ways that.

You'Re running things through split tests as.

Well yeah it is facebook at the moment.

We do google ads and we drive people to the website then we retarget them with the facebook pixel we haven't done youtube ads yet but i'm really excited about starting in the next couple of months because i think with the video component and video testimonials that's going to really work out well for us at least i hope it will but yeah at the moment our strategy in terms of paid advertising has very much been paid facebook ads and then we also buy some ads we also do paid advertising within amazon as well.

Very cool you work pretty closely with a mutual friend of ours tai lopez you know him better than i do you have kind of seen the ins and outs about how they grew their business what has working working close to or being close to somebody who is kind of infamous in our world what has that taught you about running businesses and what practices have you incorporated into how you run your business based on what you've seen they them do over.

There yeah i think ty i was mentored by ty for eighteen months starting a few years ago and then i went on to be his top sales guy for a year and i'm still involved in the business in some capacity ty really drilled into me he said he who tests most wins in other words test a lot of stuff test pages test headlines test pricing test facebook ads test youtube ads test test test test test and it's funny even though he drilled that into me i didn't test price as quickly as i should have tested so even despite the fact that he was telling me this thing and drilled it into me i didn't test the very thing been tested which was price i should have done that a lot quicker but what he does really well is he tests a lot of stuff like even now with his snapchats he'll put snapchats up and he can sorry not snapchats instagram posts rather and he can see based on the likes within an hour or two whether he should just delete the post or whether he leaves it up or not that's testing and so he says to me james you can delete do you know that you can delete your social media do you know that if you put up a post and it doesn't perform well you can just hit delete i'm like oh yeah you can so now he'll just put out a lot of stuff and he'll see how many likes or how many comments again and if it doesn't perform he'll just delete it and if it does perform he'll keep it and then maybe he'll do another version of it in another week or a couple weeks so his very famous lamborghini commercial which i think is now the most viewed youtube commercial of all time so that very famous ad where he's like hi just here in my garage just bought this brand new lamborghini fun to drive it up here in the hollywood hills that was one of about twenty videos that he tested so he did twenty versions of that not all of them in his garage but like you know driving around the hills and that was the one that that hit that just popped and then and that's where the benefit of testing a lot and testing quickly finding out what's a winner finding out what's a loser scrapping the losers doubling down on the winner if you can just implement that strategy and do it quickly and effectively man you can have monumental growth.

In your business yeah is that partly why you started going so heavily on video so that you could throw a lot out there and scale what wins.

Yes absolutely so we test a lot of things i mean we've written blog posts and we send traffic directly to the blog post and within the blog post we have links through to our shopify page we we've tested sending facebook ads directly to our shopify page we've tested running facebook ads directly to our homepage and then tested again sending traffic directly to our products page we've tested sending i mean we test those things all the time and then once we've got results from that then we test headlines so if i go to my website now and i type in swanicksleep dot com we've got on the homepage the words at the moment are sleep better burn fat get focused feel energized look cool well that's probably about the fifth version of that we've tried other headlines before where we don't have the burn fat in there we don't have the look cool and we can tell from a split test as to which one works and which one doesn't so we're testing all the time and like ty told me a couple years ago when he was mentoring me he who tests most wins.

It does seem like.

That that mindset is is to just throw as much at the wall as possible and then to scale what sticks and scrap the ones that don't bring in any attention and i think so many people try to figure out what the strategy is or what's going to quote work before they just start experimenting and yet i think the people who do it really well just experiment with everything that comes into their head and then and then see what works and duplicate i also know that doing that well requires some sort of infrastructure and some sort of a team ty has like a billion people that are always scurrying around it seems working for him i know your operations is a little bit leaner so how big have you had to grow your team t to.

Get to this point yeah we have nine people who work for us now none of them are full time staff all of them are people who work either part time or close to full time and they're all kind of virtual my youngest brother tristan who's my business partner lives in brisbane australia and he has two people two staff who work with him there i have a project manager who lives in boulder colorado i have two web developer guys who are in bangladesh i have another guy who helps out with some web stuff who lives in missoula montana and then my facebook ads manager lives also in brisbane australia and then i live in los angeles we're very much a virtual company.

As we've grown and more revenue has come through the business i've been very strategic about who i bring on i only brought my project manager on four weeks ago.

Which is fifteen months after we launched the business and already that's starting to pay off like i'm seeing signs of how that's freeing up my time to do other things she's able to communicate with staff around the world so i don't have to or at least i'm more strategic about when i do do it and that's really helped us you know start to excuse me ryan to help us really scale the business now because it was getting to the point where i was being pulled in one hundred different directions so now i'm like appointing a testimonial manager whose only job is to get testimonials now i have a dedicated facebook ads manager now i have a dedicated customer support team of two people and so you know once you go to a certain certain size it becomes a necessity to do that otherwise you're just chasing your.

Tail all day you've done something interesting in the realm of for a while you were kind of the face of the brand because they're named after you right and you have all the connections it was your idea so it's you doing all the heavy lifting now you have this team that's in place that is at least taking a lot of those responsibilities off of you but as the founder of the company as the leader of the company now that you're established what do you see as your job how do you lead the company.

So i'm going to lead the company by using the power of my existing relationships to go and do bigger deals like getting suwannees into retail stores i want to do a sleep study with a university like harvard or usc or ucla where we take one hundred subjects and we monitor their sleep for a week and then we give them our swannies blue light blocking glasses for a week and we track their progress if we can get a great sleep study like that that will get us a lot of press it'll give us a lot of authority in the marketplace and ultimately that will help us grow sales i want to get on some more mainstream media to really help promote the business and at some point i might want to bring on some capital and so getting into the vc world and understanding how that works and really leveraging those kind of relationships i think is going to take us to the next level so part of me bringing on the project manager is really for her to be able to manage our facebook ads guy to be able to manage our customers customer service team to be able to manage our operations to deal with china with our inventory to be able to manage our warehouse and our drop shipping so i can then go on and do what i enjoy doing the most which is meet people meet other entrepreneurs.

And do kind of like bigger things that will take our company to the next level yeah just an.

Observation i think for me the greatest contributions i make to my companies are i build my audience through creating content and i develop strategic relationships and i have found for me that i don't know if it's out of guilt or just addiction to the grind i probably spend the least amount of my time doing that and i find myself doing things that i'm good at doing like writing copy or leading a team but aren't the sweet sauce that i bring to my business it's only been recently that i've really had that discovery so just an observation how that i find it interesting that you recognize that your greatest contribution is developing those relationships and you spend your time going out and building them because you know that's how the company will grow so yeah did you have to work at becoming aware of that i guess i asked kind of selfishly because i feel a little bit guilty doing what i'm best at even though i know that's what grow.

The company the most i'm always looking at ways i can fire myself from parts of the business so i always i wake up each morning and i think to myself how can i fire myself from the customer service of the business today how can i fire myself from getting testimonials and reaching out to customers and getting the testimonials how can i fire myself from having any type of conversation about our relationship with our chinese manufacturers and getting the inventory over to the us because that's not my strongest gift that kind of stuff i'm not good at it's scattered it doesn't play into what my core strengths are so i'm not saying i've mastered it yet ryan and it sounds like maybe you're going through that process even just thirty minutes before i jumped on this interview with you i was literally scouring through instagram looking at hashtags of swanee's trying to find more customers who love our product that i can then pass on to our testimonials manager to then go out and try and say hey can we get a video testimonial with you that's not a good use of thirty minutes of my day it's not because someone else can do that it doesn't require me to do it what's a better use of my time is having a conversation with you a fellow entrepreneur it's talking to harvard it's talking to walmart or to retail stores it's going out there and getting.

Highly listened to podcasts and growing the brand so i'm always thinking to myself how can i fire myself today.

That'S beautiful and.

That frees you up to go do either what you enjoy or what will lead the company the most a question i don't know the answer to james.

Is this your primary project do you.

Have other businesses that you run and.

If this is the primary thing at.

What point was it you know at what point was it viable enough for you to go all in on this.

Yeah so i have a second major business called thirty day no alcohol challenge and the thirty day no alcohol challenge essentially teaches social drinkers how to quit booze for thirty days i have a membership site i've put a couple thousand people through there it's a recurring membership site there's a facebook group we do live calls and that business has been running exactly two years and it's a modest business it's a modest business it serves a lot of people it helps a lot of people it gives me immense satisfaction and i would say now i look at that as a business that just pays the bills so to speak i intend to five times that business but i intend to spend five times less five times less on that business than i do on swanic sleep because swanic sleep has has grown so exponentially and i've realized that we're onto something here and like people like helping people sleep is powerful and and seeing people like sharing the photos on social media and just looking at the numbers in terms of revenue and sales coming in it's like okay what's working well swanic sleep's working okay i'm going to double down on that i'm going to put more attention on that business and grow that than i am on the other business which even though i've had that longer is only doing modestly well compared to the swanic sleep so one of the things ty always taught me was double down on what works and so that's what i'm doing i'm doubling down on the swanig company there's something.

I just want to ask you because you've been in this game you've seen a lot of successes and failures from being well networked you come from a very different background than most people who get into into this world and there's a fear that most entrepreneurs have and just based on your background i want your answer to this do you ever fear that it's all going to go away.

I do i mean i feel fear every day but what i think i'm very good at is just saying effort i'm just going to keep moving forward anyway.

You can use an analogy like this if any single guys are out here listening and you've ever seen an attractive woman walk down the street and you have this fear that if you walk up to her and introduce yourself she'll knock you down or not be interested in talking to you but at some point you have to just say you know what i feel the fear but i'm just going to go and approach the woman anyway because if you don't then you'll never have any type of relationship with her and the moment that you say the word hello or hi or smile your chances of success increase exponentially so when it comes to business i feel the fear all the time like oh is a competitor going to come and smash me and like is apple going to come out with their own glasses and then destroy our business sure i fear that but i just say i'm just going to move ahead anyway do i fear that sales might dry up or have hit a critical point sure i fear that but i just take action as if it's not going to happen anyway so i just keep moving forward i know that's a little bit cliche it's like you know feel the fear do it anyway but you know you can either feel the fear and just be paralyzed by it and kind of be like deer in the headlights you're crossing the road and like you see that what happens to the deer it sees the headlights and it freezes right and what happens to the deer it ends up as roadkill right it gets killed so when you're in that spot you've either got to like move forward or you got to move back but you got to move or you're going to die so for me it's like feel the fear and just move anyway james talk.

A little bit about swanick sleep where do people find that where do people follow the brand i think you are just such a brilliant case study of how to do this well and i would encourage the freedom fast lane community to follow along as a case study so where could people find swanick sleep.

Yeah if you just go to swanicksleep dot com i will spell it for you because we i have a silent second w so it's actually spelled swanwick sleep that's s w a n w i c k sleep dot com even though it's pronounced swanicksleep dot com if you just type in if you want to look at our amazon page and see how we build our amazon listing you could just type in swannies blue light blocking glasses and they should come up and if you just google as well we've been doing quite a lot of work with seo as well ryan and so if you type in blue light blocking glasses into google i would love it if you told me that hourglasses come up first or at least on the first page very cool and.

One of the best books i ever.

Read i recommend this to literally every entrepreneur i know is the primal connection by mark sisson and it's basically about the way i interpreted it was how the modern world messes with our genes and ruins our hormones and crushes our genetic expression expression and basically how to recapture that especially for entrepreneurs who are working at computers all day and one of the things that he recommended most highly was grabbing a pair of blue blocker glasses so i have my swannies next to my bed use them every day so i love what you're doing both as an entrepreneur and just how you are showing up in the world so thanks for what you're doing and i wish you all the success in.

The world james well thank you ryan and just before we leave here i want to thank you as well because you were really a catalyst for me taking action and starting the business in the first place i mean i'd like to think that i would have started the business anyway even if i hadn't heard your podcast episode but who knows maybe maybe i wouldn't have but listening to that as i was running between bondi and bronte i was thinking you know what if ryan can do it and he's just laid out the blueprint i'm just going to take action i'm going to do it and too many of us i think listen to a lot of content and maybe people listen to your show or they listen to my show and then they don't take action but you really inspired me to take action in that moment and i'm so grateful that you did inspire me so thank you ryan well i appreciate.

It the compliment well hot diggity how'd.

You like that fastlaners if you sell anything online that was pretty much your playbook for combining facebook with amazon so that you have multiple sources of sales without cannibalizing one from the other hey james is going to be at our tribe summit may first through the fourth if you sell physical products or you want to invest in physical products or you have an audience and you want to launch physical products to them i would highly suggest that you come to tribe summit and you join the tribe we've opened up spots in the tribe just in time for tribe summit so head over to freedomfastlane dot com tribe to get inside and also to attend tribe summit this may it's going to be our best clients in one spot people who run seven figure businesses people who invest in these businesses people who buy these businesses are all going to be in one spot we have our retail partners coming in we have people with audiences we're doing an investment panel it is going to be a more intimate experience than freedom fast lane and everyone there is going to be a rock star but it is going to be also a luxury camping trip where we're going to do kickball and we're going to do color wars king of the mountain all kinds of amazing stuff so you will leave with new partners with new mastermind buddies with new lifelong friends and with your paradigms blown of what the next step is for you in business so head over to freedomfastlane dot com tribe to join us at the tribe summit and we will see you this may i hope you enjoyed today's episode make sure you're subscribed on itunes and if there's anyone you think would find value in this episode please share it with them thanks for listening.

We'Ll see you on the next episode.