How To Succeed In The New eCommerce Economy w/ Mike Dillard

Hey capitalists man, have we got a great episode for you today. Ryan just talked with Mike Dillard from the Mike Dillard Podcast, a well known entrepreneur here in Austin, Texas and there are some real value bombs, braingasms, inspirational moments, practical takeaways here. This episode has got it all. So if you're still sitting on the fence with an idea for a product you'd love to create, if you're starting to think about making a pivot in your business, if you're looking for answers on where this whole E commerce thing is going in our new economy moving forward, this is the episode for you. Ryan talks about how the 0 to 1 million in 12 months formula was created when he started his own supplement company for less than $1,000, had an eight figure exit and in sharing that journey has helped hundreds and hundreds of people across the world build their own million dollar brands. Enjoy the episode and if you haven't already, head on over to capitalism.com book or search 12 months to 1 million by Ryan Moran on Amazon and this will be a business book unlike any other you've ever read before. Onto the show.

Hey gang. Welcome back to the Mike Dillard Podcast. We are joined with my good friend Mr. Ryan Moran today. And Ryan, we are going to talk about a subject that is near and dear to both of our hearts, which is providing new entrepreneurs with proven pathways to generate a successful business from scratch. Because that's the, I think, at least for me always been a point of pride having gone through that crucible myself and then being able to help other people do that as well. And then you've got the book right here that just launched on essentially your version of how to do the same thing 12 months to a million, how to pick a winning product, build a real business and become a seven figure entrepreneur. And I can't think of anyone else more qualified to teach this than you, man. So thanks for joining us today.

I appreciate it. I mean I appreciate the plug. I have a selfish plug that I want to ask Mike, am I the first person to be on the show three times?

You are, yes.

Now see that is making it man like 8 figure exits child's play right in a book for peasants. But I've been on Mike Miller's podcast three times. My, my like 25 year old self is, is flexing in the mirror right now. So thank you for having me. I, I told you the first time we ever did one of these that I was, I was only ever nervous to be interviewed by Mike Dillard because I so respect what he is doing in the world and I still feel that way. So thank you, man.

Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Yeah, I think the only, only other person that might be right behind you is Tucker. Tucker's been on twice, I believe, so I'll fight him.

Well, brother, tell us what's going on in the world today real quick before we dive into your methodology and the framework that you've created for folks, which is going to be super valuable. If you're thinking about starting a business right now or if you've been in the process of starting one and you're not getting the results that you're looking for, this is going to be a must read book for you.

Or even if you just don't know what you're, what to do right now, like, even if just like looking for some new opportunities because the world's in chaos and you're like, what the heck am I going to do with the next phase of my life?

Well, let's, let's start there, right? I mean, you started writing this book well before this whole event happened and it just happened to come out during quarantine. Couldn't have been better timing. What do you see out there when you look at the world? What do you see with your clients? You've got a lot of students who are in the e commerce space. They're either on Amazon or they have their own websites and they're selling on Shopify. But just kind of fill us in on what you're seeing right now.

Yeah, so in a broad landscape, I think what we're seeing is the final digitalization of brands. One of the opening chapters in the book is called the landscape of Opportunity. And if you read it now, it sounds like I had a crystal ball, but I was talking about how the big brands are giving way for all these small micro brands to collect market share. And because big brands, if you think of the Kellogg's of the world, the really large big box brands cannot innovate fast enough to keep up with customer demands and with customer buying behavior. We've all seen that over the last ten years or so. But with everything going on right now, we see that more than ever. And so we are not going to any retail stores. We are not leaving the house, by and large. And so what we're seeing now is that anything that can be digital is going to be digital. And if you have any sort of digital exposure, then you have the ability to get a piece of that. So the demand moving forward is going to be the consumption of things that we're used to going out and getting and bringing them into our home. So I think one of the industries that will really boom over the next few years will be in home personal training, whether that is getting an in home gym or workout equipment that is in your house or a trainer coming to your house. And I think that type of an industry is going to do very well over the next few years. But anything that can be done digitally or locally versus going out and getting it, this is the final nail in the coffin of that, of anything that we're used to buying conveniently, we are now going to have a micro brand around this. So my model has always been you pick an audience, you serve that audience. Even if it's 300 to a thousand people, you get those, give those people exactly what they want and you repeat the product launch process to that group of people. And that is going to be more relevant now than ever because there are going to be more people online with more specific needs than they had before or specific desires than they had before. So the options to create and release products, the lens is just widened and people are now going to be looking for community, meaning like online tribes more than ever. And we've both seen that when you have even a small audience that is really loyal and tribal, they buy over and over and over again. So we've just accelerated the pace that we were already on, which was small brands giving way to these very, very micro brands. And now there's more demand for custom products or custom desires met via products and more desire to be a part of some sort of small community. And if you marry those two things together, if you have a very small following, I mean literally 300 to a thousand people and you give them a few products that are exactly what that group wants, you can build a million dollar business even today.

Yeah, absolutely. Can you give us some examples of what that looks like from a physical product perspective? Obviously my audience I think is well versed on the digital ebook course kind of world, but E commerce examples I think would be unique.

Yeah, exactly. So I have a student right now, her name is Yasmine. I'm super proud of her. Yasmeen has a small blog that has been her side hustle for a couple years. And she's a mom and in her research as kind of a holistic minded person, she's become really fascinated with the relationship between the mother's gut biome and the child's gut biome, specifically where it relates to skin issues. So there's a very specific market. This is a Very specific blog of nursing moms who have kids with skin issues. It could be more specific than that. So most people would look at mommy blogs and have a kind of a wide range of products that that person might buy. Hers was really specific. She wanted to develop something that would help these nursing moms heal their kids skin issues. So she developed a probiotic that was really, really specific. She said there was one. I don't know anything about the markets, forgive me, but there's one specific strain that was really important to her. And most people will look at probiotics and say there's no money in probiotics because it's really competitive. They, those brands already have a foothold in the marketplace. They sell for like 9 to 20 bucks. But since hers was specific for this crowd, she was able to come out three times higher than all of her competitors. And her audience is buying it up. And it was so funny. We had, we had a coaching call maybe two weeks ago where it was like three weeks ago I wasn't in business. Now I am in business and I'm not a millionaire yet, but I just had a successful launch and I, I helped her kind of come up the next route forward to go from, you know, 100 sales to 500 sales. And we'll keep bankrolling that until it is $1 million business. So that's a really, really specific one. I have another, another group. This, forgive me, this is fresh in my mind. We had a, a coaching call two days ago. It was this husband and wife team. They have three kids. They love to go like outdoors camping. And they're sitting around the campfire and they are like, you know what would be fun? If we just had an outdoors camping brand. And they don't have an audience in this. They don't have funding behind them. They just decided to develop the product specifically for them. What do families need when they go around the campfire? They go RVing. And they developed a brand specific for that. They now have several million dollar brands that they have built, a couple of which they have sold just by following kind of this overall methodology. Or if we look at Mike Dillard, Mike Dillard has this really great responsive audience that I'm a part of that all of us who are listening to are a part of. Mike, if you came out with the, the line of products that was the survival line, like what are the things that you personally keep in your house in the event of catastrophe? We've all seen your emails about that or heard you talk about it on the podcast. And Since I have resonated with that. If Mike has a brand, I want Mike's brand. I don't want to go, first of all, I'm not leaving my house to go to retail. I'm going to my email to click on the link that Mike is promoting and I'm going to buy that. But the magic of this is when you realize that you don't need to have a Mike Dillard sized audience or list. You don't even need to have a blog that was your side hustle for a long time. You need a few hundred people which is as big as your personal Facebook friends list. And if you have and we can talk about ways to develop that audience and that responsive following. But if you have a group of people in mind and you develop the product that is exactly what they want you, you become successful and it happens really quickly.

Awesome. Awesome. I mean I've been noodling around with that question really since, you know, you and I have been hanging out the last couple of years in Austin. I've always wanted to make a physical product business. I have never been able to quite figure out what that would be for my audience. Yeah, the only obvious thing that comes to mind is an apparel line of some kind of.

So can I poke holes in that?

I would love that.

My guess is that you're probably trying to think of the product that will serve all million people who know who Mike Dillard is. I would encourage you to think what are if. Do you have 500 people on your list who would just frickin love it if you made an X for example? I'll tell you this. So my business is capitalism dot com. I mean you can guess my political beliefs, you can guess my like how I, how I vote, like where I invest my money just based on that alone. Right? So that's, that's my hundred thousand person following or so is around capitalism. Com. Well, my project that I'm working on right now is a company called Fit Flowers. Fit Flowers, it's a baking line and I'm going to launch it to my audience. Mike, do you know how many people on my list want flours that are mostly high in protein and low in carbs and that are banana bread mixes like 5%. And you know what? It's going to do great. Because those 500 people who have been following my podcast and on my list and be like flowers are. They're damn good, man. I made, I made the brownies and, and they're really good. And I'm like great, come on My podcast, let's talk about it, right? And I'm just going to have a freaking blast with it because it's something that I want, that I consume, that I'm excited to just document on my podcast or on my blog or on my Facebook page. I don't care about the 95% of people that are going to be like, what is he doing with this flower company? I don't really care. But it's going to be interesting for them to follow the journey of the development of that business. And that's such the important point. If all you do is document the development of the product, like, I'm here at the manufacturer, I was going to go with this product, but instead I'm going to go with this product like, that's really hot. And that gets people to really rally behind the brand. And so sometimes that could be as simple as if you send an email to your list that was like, would you rather this product or this product? And watch what people say. If nothing else, they're now psychologically going, what's Mike up to Now I'm paying attention to this. Like, that's where the snowball really gets rolling. So apparel lines are. Can be really great. Like I talk about in the book, there's two apparel lines that I really love. Mizzen and Maine and Public Rec. And both of those businesses, you know, at the time that I was writing the book, Diesel Jeans had just gone out of business and I bought Mizzen and Main Jeans, which is real, which was really interesting. So I talk about that in the book. But what's interesting about all of this is both Public Rec and Mizzen and Main were developed with one person in mind. And it was the either the work at home dude or the traveling young professional. Yeah, that very specific market. Developing a product that was exactly tailored to them is a reason why both of those businesses have been successful. So all this to say, my advice to you, Mike, if, if you want my help, call me anytime, unless I'm on daddy duty and we're watching Frozen. But if, if you've got, if you want to go in this direction, do something that's really exciting for you. Don't worry about what the audience says because you will document it on your podcast into your email list and you'll have several thousand people show interests, even if it's not tailored directly to them. And all you need is a few hundred people to be really excited to get to that magical million dollar level. And the million dollar level is simply four products at 25 sales a day is a hundred sales a day. And at a $30 price point, that's over a million dollars a year in revenue. So that's all we need to worry about. We don't need to worry about a hundred thousand, we need to worry about 25 people. 25 people. And we can start to snowball and in 12 months from now have a really successful seven figure business. Sorry for the rant, but this is obvious.

Love it. I mean, these are, these are the ideas that I'm talking about because it's just been a passion project of mine for years now of wanting to do something different and physical and creative and you know, all of that stuff. So absolutely love it. Well, let's dive in real quick to some of the formula. Right. The primary concept of the book is how to essentially start a business from scratch and hit seven figures within 12 months. Get Promise, definitely doable. So what, what's the primary framework and methodology behind that?

So, so just so you know, I don't consider it that big of a promise because like legally I'm pretty sure I'm getting into hot water if I try and come up with a number of people, but quite literally hundreds of people email me, write me on Facebook, have come up to me on the street. I was at LA airport once and somebody said, are you Ryan Moran? I built a million dollar business listening to your podcast. So like hundreds of people have come up to me cold with me just talking about this stuff and saying that they built a million dollar business doing this. So I don't think of it as that big of a promise. But the reason why it is fairly formulaic, if you will, is, is because the first section of the book, I call it the Grind, it's about getting like the hard decisions out of the way and it'll take about three to four months. And this is deciding what product you're going to sell, getting your first prototype, getting the manufacturer on your terms, building up a little bit of an audience of 300 to 500 people who want this before it's ready, figuring out how you're going to fund it, because you should have five to $10,000 ready to go unless you do something like a Kickstarter, which is another strategy that we can talk about, or get an investor, which is also a strategy we can talk about. So that's, that's kind of phase or stage one, the grind of getting ready for launch. And then the whole goal of that is to take one sale, we get one sale from a customer. So Basically launch phase two. I call it the growth. This is the next three to four months of the development. And our only goal here is to get that one product to 25 sales a day. Now, to a lot of people who are starting with no audience, who have no background, getting you 25 sales a day is a big, is monumental for someone like you, Mike. We might get there in seven days and we might, we might be able to do this a lot faster. So if you have any Instagram following, if you've got a thousand people who pay attention to your emails, if you have any blog, if you got any following at all, the, the second stage of this process is to get to 25 sales a day. That's it. Now, 25 sales a day. How do we get there? We do that by having a very specific person in mind that we can go after and make them raving fans. We screenshot every review, every email that we get, we post it on Instagram, we follow up with every customer and we show them love, and we watch that snowball start to build until it's at 25 consistent sales a day. So that takes about another three to four months, which is really just loving on the people who are following you, responding to every comment, responding to every email, and just going all in on the people who are paying attention to you until you're at 25 a day. At that point, we unlock stage three. And stage three is the last three to four months of your 12 month journey. And in those three to four months, our goal is to repeat that process over two to three more products. So we have a nice suite of products that have four, those four products doing 25 sales a day, which is a hundred sales a day. Now here's the really exciting thing for me anyway, I sound like a hype man. Here's the best part, Mike. Don Lapree here on the podcast, if you know that reference, you're old. So, so this is the fun thing for me. This was my mindset going in is like, I've got one product doing 25 a day. I'm going to do another one that does 25 a day. Well, when this, when my second product hit 25, sales per day, sales of my first product doubled. And then when that happened, sales of product two doubled. And so I went from 25 a day to 50 a day. And then the other product went from 25 to 50 a day. So it only took me two products, say a hundred a day. What the heck happened?

Did you add it as a meta, as an upsell to each other?

No, because it was all on Amazon.

Ah.

So here's, but here's what happened. You had somebody who had bought in the past come by Safe now. Correct. So you were not doing new customer acquisition as much. Cause they're coming back and reordering. So you have, you don't just need 25 new people a day, you need 25 rating fans who are to come by and buy over and over again. So they were buying the first product when they ran out, then they would see that we launched a second product and they would buy that one. And then Amazon has this kind of marketing machine that when they start to see consistent sales, they start to do retargeting and they start to show you up in the search engines and they start to show you on the listings of other people's products with like frequently bought togethers and stuff like that. And so as you have multiple products, you start showing up in more places. You have subscribe and save start to kick in. And so the machine starts to build momentum. So once you have that 25 sales a day within your first six months or so, the rest becomes a faster snowball that builds. And that's why you can build a million dollar business so quickly.

Awesome. Love it. Love it. When it comes to creating a physical product, I mean, even I, I go a little blank here. Like, how do I even start? Let's pick one of your products or let's pick the one you're working on right now. The protein powders. Yeah, yeah. By the way, I would love that because you got me on the, the cauliflower pizza crust train. I've seen the stuff that you've been talking about that you've been making on your Instagram.

Oh, dude, dude, dude. Best diet ever. I call it the two rules diet. Two rules. Eat 25 grams of protein at every meal and eat your carbs and fats at separate meals. That's how I eat. I've never had a better diet ever. But that'll be podcast number four, Mike.

Well, I'm telling you right now, every single morning I eat almond butter pancakes from Snap Kitchen. And I take the two pancakes and I get RX bar brand almond butter, put it in between it, pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds to heat it up. And it's like a protein slash egg creamy, savory breakfast dessert. I don't know, but it's, but it's all protein and fat. There's no sugar in it.

That's right.

Literally what I eat for breakfast. So if you're putting out a product like that in the future? Like, I'm definitely going to be buying it.

Well, I just want you to know that your former podcast guest, Michael Greger, he will not approve. Yeah, he will not approve of this. He and I have a. Have a funny history together. But, Dr. Gregory.

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

We won't even go down a ketone body. Was I him on stage?

I was like, anyway, yeah, I tried to ask him too. He still didn't understand.

But anyway, okay, you've got this idea for protein powders. Where do you even go to start sourcing that?

Great question. So. So, first. First of all, before you even have an idea, because. Because a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in this idea of, like, what's a good product to sell? Or. Or this loop of, I want to have a physical product, but I'm not sure what to do or what to start. It's so much easier if you start with a person. So. And the way that I've been able to find that rock solid person is someone who is starting a new journey. So we're all going through usually multiple journeys in our life. We have journeys of an entre becoming an entrepreneur, the journey of losing weight, the journey of becoming a parent, the journey of graduating college, the journey of finding a job, the journey of, like, these are all parts of our life. If you can get somebody at the beginning of their journey, then you have them for the whole life cycle as a customer. So one of my first brands was a yoga business, and so we targeted new yogis who are starting a new journey. What does someone buy when they're starting a yoga journey? First thing they buy is a yoga mat, then they buy a yoga towel, then they buy a yoga block, then they buy yoga pants. Thank goodness for yoga pants. So that is a new journey. And when you think about it in that context, it becomes very clear what they're going to buy and what those first purchases are going to be. And if you get them early, then as you develop as a company, then you have this group that has followed you for their whole journey. They're going to prefer you over the other competitors. So that's how we decide or narrow in on what type of products that we're going to sell in terms of getting it made. There are more resources now to having prototypes made than ever before. But my favorite thing to do is to just go to manufacturers and ask for. Ask for, like, the simplest prototype that you could possibly send me, and quickly, because something really magical happens when you get A physical product in to your house and you're holding in your hand and you're like, I made this. Even though you didn't make it, you're like, I could sell these with my label on them. So when, when I had a supplement business, one of the things we did was we're like, send me whatever you got on your shelf, send it to my house. We'll test it and we'll see if we like it. And so they, you know, they send you the pre workout. You're like, this tastes like garbage. Let's go back and fix the flavor. But the effectiveness was great. I had a great workout. So you go back to the manufacturer and you said, we want to buy this from you. Taste was terrible. What can we do about that? And you go back and you, and you are now working with the person on making that right. There are more complicated ways to do that. Like there are contract manufacturers who can take your idea and make it real, and then you take it to a manufacturer and get it made. But I like to start as simply as possible because I do not like delaying sales day. I do not like delaying money getting date for any reason. Peter d' Amandis says that if you're not embarrassed of your first iteration of the product, then you waited too long. Yeah.

If you don't, if you don't draw a line in the sand, you'll find a reason every single time to push it out.

That's right. Yeah, that, that's, that's exactly right.

Yeah.

And so this is why the targeting piece at the beginning is more important than what, what product do I sell? Because the person that you target will narrow in the types of products that you sell and what differentiating factors are really important. And apart from that, you're kind of just guessing. So if you nail like the big three things that they want. For example, if we're talking about food again in the flowers, we want it to be low calorie, we want it to be macro balanced, and it has to be delicious. That's it. Those are the three important things. Now, to some, they would say it's less important that it's delicious. It matters more that it's organic and it has no artificial sweeteners. That's not my market. So if we can make the other three more possible by using sucralose or a different artificial sweetener, we might be willing to make that sacrifice. Now, I have my preferences of what something might be, but I'm usually focusing on three things that are important to the Exact person that I am targeting. So a Quest did this really well. You know, our buddy Tom Bilyeu, when he started Quest, had almost the exact same thing. He said, he said, my business exists to end metabolic syndrome. And I know that it's going to be high in protein, it's going to match our values, and it's going to be delicious. And they reformulated the product several times to match that, to match those values. And if you go buy Quest products, they have some artificial sweeteners in there, they have some products that are more expensive than their competitors. That's not what they're competing on. They're competing on the things that are most important to their core customer. And oftentimes we kind of get lost in comparing what other businesses are doing and we look at data of how much of something is selling and we try to make our decisions from that. And I don't think that's helpful. I think it's much more helpful to look at what does our exact customer want and make the big changes that are going to serve that person specifically. And then we have a raving fan for a very, very long time. And we don't need that many raving fans in order to do damage.

Awesome, awesome. So what are some of the questions that someone can ask themselves to help them identify a niche and a need?

Yeah, good question. What do I spend more than a hundred dollars a month on? That's question number one. So do you order takeout? Do you buy jiu jitsu stuff? Do you play video games, do you garden, do you podcast? And do you spend at least a hundred dollars a month on those things? And think nothing of it because it's the thing that you're really excited about. So look at your buying behavior. That's a really good one. Number two, what journey am I on or what journey is someone close to me on? So right now I have a 4 month old. I'm a father for the second time, and this is my first boy. So I'm on a new journey to become the father of a son. Right? And if you look at something, someone like our, our friend Ryan Mickler, who's been on the podcast talks, he's like, his specific message is for his real core market is fathers of boys, how to be a man that leads another man. Right. So his message really resonates with me in a way that it didn't resonate even six months ago. So what journey are you on and what journey is someone close to you on? And I mean, you've experienced this Mike, when you become apparent, you start saying things like, what kind of a stroller is that? That's a, that's a fancy ass stroller. Or that you got over there like, like what does this sound machine do? You start seeing products in a way that you didn't see before. If you are on that journey and you know that other people are going to be on that journey at some point too, you don't need to be the expert. You need to be the buyer. You need to be the person who is curious enough about all these products that you can iterate and make changes and, and market in a way that is authentic to the people who will be following in your footsteps on the exact same journey. So where do you spend money and what journey are you or someone close to you on? And number three, what would you have fun doing? Even if it wasn't a $10 million business or a million dollar business, what are you naturally excited and motivated to talk about? So I mentioned my student Yasmeen earlier. We were on a coaching call maybe a couple weeks ago, and she grabbed the bottle of her probiotic and she was like, she was talking about why she was excited about it. And I told my video guy, I was like, grab that clip and send it to Yasmeen. Because that was the best ad she could have made. It didn't matter what her copy was, it didn't matter what her strategy was. It didn't matter that she didn't have scarcity in it. All she did was she was just one on one telling me how pumped she was that she developed this solution that was specific to her audience and to her people. And so she was naturally motivated to talk about this. And doesn't matter what the conversion rate is at that point, but the fact that she spoke from that place means the conversion rate is going to be really high.

Yeah.

So those are the things that I suggest people look at when they're considering going on this journey.

Awesome. Love it, brother. Love it. Once you hit, let's just say momentum, Right. Let's say you're up to a spot where you're making 50 to 100 sales a day. We've seen some big, obviously changes take place specifically on Amazon in the last couple of months. Delays in shipping, delays in getting inventory, things like that.

Sure.

What are some of the risks that you need to look out for at that point? So you've got some momentum, you're making some money, you're making some sales. A lot of people, I'm assuming, and I would love your Insight on this. Were really caught off guard by this kind of world event. And what do you need to be thinking about at that stage? Is it hiring? Is it opening an office? Is it legal? What's the next phase of development?

Sure. So a couple points here. Number one, if we look at the last few months in buying behaviors, if you ask most of my students, a lot of them will say that they're up, that their sales are up because there's more demand for products to be bought online than in stores. So you have more, you have more transactions happening online, you have more demand for e commerce companies, and I think you have less consumption of the big brands. So, yes, a lot of people were caught off guard by this, but it just sped up the inevitable, which is that online brands are doing even better than they were doing previously. And some people are, are down 20%, some 30%, some are, some had a big, like a stock market crash and now are kind of moving their way back up. But I don't have any students that are like, well, we were in business and now we're not in business. But if you go to Barnes and Noble, they're pretty much out of business at this point. So number one, there's, there's, there's sunlight in this industry right now. The, the next thing that I want to mention is when you're at that type of a level, the biggest mistake that I've seen people make is they start to compromise their audience. So I tell the, I tell the story in the book that after I sold my business, I started it with about $600. I built that up. I sold it for eight figures. And when I sold it, the company that I sold it to ran it to the ground. And what happened was they got really caught up in the numbers and the professionalization of the business, and they no longer paid attention to the connection to the audience. So the thing that really built what we were trying to do, they got away from. And that's always a compromise. When I've experienced in my own life that when I do things for money, when I cash in my chips, I end up making less money because I've compromised. The thing that got me to that point, which is that intimate connection with the audience, the honesty, the transparency with the, with the audience. And I think that's what, what people make a mistake doing when they're at around a million dollars is they say, well, I'm at a million, I want to go to 10. And now I'm going to go harder. And they forget about the Things that got them to that point, which was that transparency and connection with the audience. It does not take that many people who really love what you are doing in order to get to seven figures. And then number three, you asked about hiring. I have a section in the book about partnerships and if you're going to take on a partner or if you're going to hire someone. The mistake that I have seen once you are at that level, once you're doing a million dollars or so, is they start hiring people or partnering with people who are just like them. If you are going to come together with someone else, please, oh please, oh please. If, remember this line, if the two of you are exactly the same, then one of you is unnecessary.

Yeah, I, I recorded a video on this exact same topic which hasn't been released yet, but it's the same thing. You can't have two captains on one ship.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so you need to hire somebody who is different than you and complimentary to you and do it when you're ready. Like do it when it feels good to do it. We don't need to get office space or plan ahead. The only thing that we might be cognizant of during this whole ramp up period when you're doing 50 or 100 sales a day, is that you do not take profits off the table until you've hit the million. You will be running a million dollar business and making nothing because it will all be being rolled into more inventory, more advertising and more scale. And it's, it's a grind of a year. You are working hard for a year and on the other side of it then you get to pay yourself and then you have a seven figure business and then you're a real entrepreneur and everybody looks at and says what the heck did you do this year? You say I read this really good book, but, but a lot of people think that Once you're doing 50 or 100 sales a day now you're paying yourself. And that's not the case. You're paying once you're at 100. Yes. But until that point, your payday comes when you see your first month. That is $100,000 a month. And that's when you're a full time entrepreneur.

Awesome. What do you do if you get an email from a company that's like, hey, I'm interested in buying your business?

You take the phone call. That's, that's, that's what you do. So I mean I have experienced this where somebody really early in the process gets a phone call from a brand that wants to acquire them. And I mean, this all comes down to, is this a business that you want to run for a long time or are you in this for the money? And either one is totally fine. If you're in it, the money, you take the million and run. You know, take, take the million, invest it well and go find your next thing. I, I was mentioning the, the couple that goes RVing and does, does camping and that kind of stuff, they had something kind of similar happen to them where they've had several exits in the businesses that they built according to this formula. And somebody came in with a big enough check and they said, no, it's a good enough check for us to walk away from this. And now they have enough, you know, enough in the bank and enough security for them to go, what's the business that we really want to do next? And, and those are hard questions to ask too, like, what do I really want? So if you're in it just for the money, take the call, take the million and run. But the businesses that are really sellable are the businesses that you never want to sell. Those are the ones that end up scaling to 10, 100, a billion dollars. But we don't really need to worry about that right now. We need to worry about getting to the first million. And that takes about 12 months.

So a question within that question is who do you call once that email comes in? Meaning is there a specific type of attorney that you want to talk to so that you are confident that you're not being taken advantage of, that your evaluation is fair? Because you know you're probably going to get lowballed, right? Your business could be worth twice what they were offered.

Or I mean, that might be the case. It also might be the case that a competitor reaches out to you and says, we raised money and we need to deploy this somehow and we're going to give you twice what you're worth. And that happens too. So yes, some people will try to strong arm you and some people want your business because you're doing things the right way. And they come a call in and they, they offer you a big check. I mean, we could talk about working with a broker or we could talk about using an M and A firm, but I just was helping a client who's working with an M and A firm and it was a really good move for him. He's going to have a really, really big exit on the other side of all this. But he didn't worry about any of that until he was doing over $10 million a year. So they had a specific goal they were going for. They got there and they went and got a professional M and A firm. And we felt all, you know, official for doing that because we didn't really even know what that was when we started the process. And you don't have to when you're getting into it. You worry about that when you go, wow, we're doing really well here. I wonder if it's time to cash in our chips and do something else. But at this point in the process, the things that are really important are deciding who that core customer is, what those first four products are going to be, and what our launch plan is so that we have such a great first 12 months that we have to think about who is our M and A attorney earlier than we expected. Those are good problems to have.

Cool. What's the most important skill a person needs when it comes to building a business like this? Initial skill like copywriting for Digital products?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm actually going to go with the ability to create connection with customers. And I think copy is an extension of that. Sure, we've experienced the times where copy wasn't all that great, but the connection with your customers was so high. The conversion rates were really great. Or if you could have the best copy in the world, but if the offer doesn't match the audience, it doesn't matter. But if you really understand who the who is, if you really understand who is on the other side of that purchase on the other side of that transaction, then you could screw up 80% of this and still do really well. And you could have the tiniest audience or the tiniest following or no following at all and still create a product that connects with the right crowd. I have a student who created a really low calorie dessert and was selling it to their audience. And what they didn't expect was that one person in their audience was going to be well connected at Weight Watchers. And they got really big in the Weight Watchers community. Not somebody that they were targeting at all, but they were able to adjust their messaging to match that audience. And it's still really big in that specific community. So if you understand who the who is. So like self awareness and empathy, I guess, are the. The two skills to that. If you understand the person that is involved in the transaction, that's the superpower to making a business like this successful.

Awesome. Yeah, couldn't agree more. Couldn't Agree more. And I, again, like you said, I think copywriting is a big piece of that. It's just effective communication. That's all copywriting is. How do you. That's right.

Speaking to a very specific person, to the challenges that they're facing in creating a product that sounds like it was made just for them, because it is.

Yeah. Awesome, brother. Shoot. I think we've covered a lot. What else, what else do you think is super important that we haven't had?

I want to give, I want to give one kind of tip that I think makes things move a lot faster because I think it's easy for us to get really in our heads about this process. And I like, just, you know, like, I have this phrase I use my team when I don't know what to do. I go, well, let's make some mistakes. And I will learn from there. And one of the things that I've discovered, especially at the beginning of a physical product brand, is if you highlight everything that you want more of, then you get more of it. For example, there's a lot of debate in the Amazon marketing world about how, like, what's the best way to get reviews? Which I think is the most unhelpful question. What's a good way to get. What's the best way for me to trick my customer in order to get them to leave a review? And what I say is, every time you get a good review, screenshot it, post it to your Instagram and email it out to your list and just say, thanks, Pat, and you just highlight all the things that you want more of. So, and so does a video review on their, on their blog or their YouTube channel, promote it for them, Celebrate the wins that other people are doing for you. The process is not, how do I sit here and think up how do I get reviews? We'll look at the reviews that we're getting and we celebrate, we promote them, we, we broadcast them, we put them on social media, we thank them, we encourage other people to see that there's positive association with the thing that we want to do. And so the content process, the building up, the audience process is nothing that we have to think of. We just have to share everything that is going on. So I was telling somebody yesterday, one of the things you can do is respond to your negative reviews publicly, get a piece of hater, email, respond to it publicly. I used to take the negative reviews we would get, respond to them, then email it to all my customers. And so they would just say, like, man, like, these people are really on it. These people are really paying attention. And so if you just do that, like, that's real and transparent. You do videos like, hey, we noticed that this product had this problem, so we're going to do something about it. And I've seen your reviews, like, I'm listening. And so I just want you to know that we're doing what it takes. It's going to be a pretty expensive thing. Thing for us to. For us to fix this, but we're addressing it and so we'll keep you posted. Somebody. Somebody asked a question about, well, how do I get an investor? And I said this exact process. Can you imagine the power of somebody firing up their phone and saying, hey, guys, this is so and so from such and such a brand. You know, we've had a really great first eight months where we've, you know, we're selling a good $40,000 a month. We've gone from nothing. We had no investors, no background of this, no audience. And we just went all in on our customers doing this stuff. And we've been really encouraged and really excited by all the growth. But the truth is we're running into some challenges now because we want to roll out products number two and three and four, and there's just not been enough meat on the bone for us to be able to make that investment. So we're going to be looking to bring on some investors or maybe some bank debt. We're not sure. This is kind of the new part of the journey. And I just wanted to share with you that we're committed to doing the exact same quality in our next product we did with the first one. And it just means so much to me that we have your support. So thanks so much for supporting the company. Watch how many customers reach out and are like, I'll invest. I want to be your investor. Yeah, I'm a super fan of your business. You hit $40,000 a month in sales with no backing. Like, I want in. And so the more that you just share the entire process, the more that next opportunity opens up. I've said this like four times, but it's shocking how few people you need in order to make the needle move. So we just need a few hundred or a few thousand of them to build a really successful company.

Nice. Awesome, brother. Love it. Sage advice coming from experience. Straight up, can we.

Can we start a Mike Diller brand now?

I'd love to.

Haven't figured out quite. What's that?

I said you heard it here first on the Mike Dillard podcast.

Yeah, well, you know, I don't know if I would, I would do it under my name. I would, I would want to do something under a different name that I, that I would have the potential to sell down the road. But. Yeah. So two, I have two favorite examples by the same couple, John Olson and his wife Yanni, who are YouTubers. Right. That I followed for years. So John's a big race car driver guy and so I found his stuff via that old Red Bull professional skier. And we love the same stuff. So I'm like, all right, cool. So he starts a blog probably three or four years now ago now on YouTube. And it was just a lifestyle vlog, no real point or audience or whatever. It's just, hey, here's what's going on in our life. And they live interesting lives. So kind of like a Casey Neistat type deal. And about a year, year and a half in, he's got right around a million subscribers on YouTube. He launches a luggage bag line called Douchebags.

So talk about a name that stops people in their tracks.

Sure.

But he's a fanatic when it comes to design and detail and art and look and feel and all of that stuff. And so he created this very unique luggage bag line. They launch the first one or two pieces to their audience and this is high end stuff. It's fairly expensive and they sell out in an hour. Right. That is now its own massive product line with probably a hundred SKUs that's sold in Aspen ski shops and all over the world. Right. So he doesn't even run that company anymore. He has an entire team with a design studio, probably 30 staff, and that is its own company now that was launched off of his YouTube as basically a Kickstarter campaign. He did it again last year with an apparel company called say, Normal. I think it's French, I don't know what it means, but. But it's the same type of stuff. So they took T shirts and it's all custom threading. They took hoodies and they add all of these little unique attention detail pieces that you're not going to find anywhere else. Where they take, you know, the, the strains off of a hoodie and they dip the little plastic tips in their own color of brand and things like that. They, I think they launched with 10,000 pieces. They're like, this is as much as we are willing to go in on this. We haven't sold this before. They sold out all 10,000 pieces in less than 10 minutes.

Amazing.

And have an entire apparel brand that I Track down the guy who. Who manages on LinkedIn. And I'm like, do you do consulting?

So, yeah, I mean, that's amazing. And then let's dial that. You also don't need a million YouTube subscribers to hit $1 million in sales in 12 months. Like, you need a few hundred people that you build over time by documenting the experience of building the business.

Yeah.

And so I wanted to call that out because I think some people would say, like, I need to go build the audience first. No, if you got the audience first, it means you can go faster, but it doesn't mean that you have to have that in order to hit a million dollars in 12 months. In fact, it's way easier to build the audience as you're documenting the development of the brand and that. And. And that creates your biggest raving superfans. They'll say, I was with you in the beginning.

Yeah, 100% agreed. 100% agreed.

That comes to me is our buddy Aubrey. Like, Aubrey had a superpower named Joe Rogan. It's not really fair to make this comparison, but. But Aubrey didn't know how to make a physical product. He's like, joe, what do you buy? He's like, I'm really into nootropics. So Aubrey goes. Develops a nootropic. Joe likes it. He had one influencer, and he did. He's obviously done really, really well. So this. The nut can be cracked in multiple ways. The important thing is that you're developing a product for a specific person, and then you repeat that process over the next year, and your chances of success are very high.

Awesome. Awesome, brother. Absolutely.

Love it.

Thank you so much, dude.

Thank you. This is so much fun.

Absolutely. Guys, 12 months to a million. Go pick it up now. It is out. Ryan. Where else can folks connect with you? Obviously, capitalism.com but about your social.

My podcast is called capitalism.com they can find me there. We do a ton of case studies and teaching on this stuff. And then my social. Is my full name, Ryan Daniel Moran. So I'm Instagram at Ryan Daniel Moran. And I'm on Twitter and other places too, but mostly Instagram.

Awesome. Awesome, brother. Thank you so much for the time.

Thanks so much for having me, everybody.

You bet. Take care, guys. We'll see you next week.

I was angry before But I circle the drying in my mind.

I can't find.

Don'T let the sun go down.

Sam.

Let's go.

Sam.