This YouTube interview (Capitalism.com, Oct 25, 2017) features Ryan Daniel Moran interviewing Casey Goss (Viral Launch) about finding and exploiting untapped niches on Amazon. Key takeaways: hunt ancillary/accessory products instead of the headline item; use a sales-to-review "ROI" metric (reviews are the barrier to entry) and target markets where the sales-to-review ratio is low (examples given: ~2–3 or 5–10) to find "gold mines"; watch for emerging retail/online trends that precede Amazon saturation; and move on to new products once a listing reaches roughly 80% of its maximum sales potential rather than spending excessive time on the last 20%.
Questions this video answers
Approximately 2–3 or 5–10 (sales-to-review ratio).
When a product reaches roughly 80% of its maximum sales potential.
Chapters
Amazon.com is becoming more and more competitive. So a question often comes up of how do you compete when things are being saturated by well funded companies who are moving into the space. I asked Casey Goss of Viral Launch this question and he had a surprising answer about how much money there is still left to be made by going after overlooked niches that that most of the big players ignore. Here's what he had to say. I'm always surprised that even for as long as we've been talking about Amazon, there are still people who are finding small niches that are untapped. So I've asked you this publicly in the past. I just want you to reiterate, are those markets still available?
Oh yeah.
How do you find them?
Yeah, so we actually wanna do a study to quantify how many available niches there are because there are so many. Like you said, we still have so many people saying, oh, Amazon's dead or it's so saturated there's no opportunity, but there's still so much opportunity. So how do you find them? Really it comes down to just putting in the work, putting in the time. Again, if you're cutting corners, it comes to bite you. And we see so many people that don't want to put in the work and they go source the vitamin C serum or the grill brush because everybody else did. Right. And then they don't have. But yeah, really one tip is looking for those ancillary products. Right? So if I want to sell a drone, like looking at drones, don't look at selling the drone, but think about the accessories that go along with it. Walking through any retail store and having those ideas and then just going and looking at the market. In Amazon, what is the opportunity? The biggest thing that we coach on looking at is looking at the sales to review ratio. We call it the ROI metric because reviews are generally the barrier to entry in a particular market. So if Everybody on page one has 1000 reviews, well then you need relatively close to 1000 reviews to hit market potential for sales. And so anyways, if you can find markets where that sales to review ratio is 2 to 3 or 5 to 10, you found yourself a gold mine. And in those smaller markets, typically there aren't very many reviews because sellers aren't going after those sexy unsexy markets. And that's where your opportunity is to come in and, you know, really kill it.
Yeah. The other thing that people don't talk about is that there are always new trends. Like there are always new markets.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There are always cycles. There are always new products that come out. And my first product ever was one that was I saw everywhere in retail stores and advertised all over the Internet. And there was very little competition on Amazon. It was exactly what you're outlining. Built a multi million dollar business that I then sold for many, many millions of dollars. So that was an emerging trend that I was ahead of. And if I was just looking at the Amazon data, I'd be like, ah, there's no money here. But because you could see the trend by doing some basic market research, you could see that there was a market there. And those are always happening, there's always something else coming. So it's if you use the tools that are at viral launch or you're looking at.
The overall strategy, you can take advantage of those opportunities as they become available.
Yeah, completely agree.
Yeah. So one of the questions that comes up is I think you think more product driven, I think more brand driven. And I kind of think it's both. And so rather than debate should you focus on products or brands because they both work, I'm curious as to your perspective of when should someone move from one product to adding additional products to the line. When does it make sense to do that? Then I'll give my perspective as well.
Yeah, so I'm huge. The Amazon opportunity is still so big.
Right.
And so I'm huge on moving fast and really kind of adhering to the 8020 rule when it comes to making these kinds of decisions. Because going into that 80% that is only driving 20% of the results just isn't worth the opportunity cost for you. And so really I think that you should have a really good expectation or understanding of what maximum sales potential is for your particular market. For some people's markets it may be five sales a day. For some people's markets it may be a thousand sales a day. And you really need to understand that because once you are, once you have the system in place or your product is through the process and it's near maximum sales potential or 80% of maximum sales potential, that's when you need to shift your focus on to sourcing other products or getting into these other markets. And if you have a team, ideally you have people going through all stages all simultaneously so you can launch as many products as possible. So we see so many people dwell on maximum sales potential is 100 sales a day and they're at 80 and they're just like spending months and months trying to get that last mile, that last 20, and it's just not worth it because you, you could launch another product in that same amount of time and get that 80% again.
