Moving Forward In Your Business - Tribe Hangout - 8/8/15

Hey, what's up, tribesters or tribe team? Tribe members. Hey, guys. Good to see you. It's our last hangout for at least a while.

We have some old faces joining us. Brian finally made it on a hangout he's been trying for like 12 or 14 weeks. Elliot is back. Actually, why don't we. I have some things to cover, but since I'm excited and I'm curious, Brian, if you're cool with it, you always participate on the chats or on every call, but you never made it on. Your face has never made it on. And I'd love to hear an update on your business. Sure. I know you have that famous picture in the tribe of all of your boxes sitting there in your house while you were figuring everything out. So why don't you give everybody a quick update? Sure.

So after we did figure out the wonderful legal troubles that I had with my previous employer, everything finally went live June 20th. Since then, we've moved right under 300 units and about 150 of those went out via various blasts, things like that. Right now we're selling about five or six units a day. We're up to 88 reviews. All of them, virtually all of them are five star reviews, which is nice.

Maybe it looks a little unrealistic because we only have one three star review as our lowest thing, but that's okay.

I'll take it.

Things are going okay on that. The list building side is moving much more slowly than I would have liked. But I'm still trying to encourage some folks to actually get on my own mailing list so that I'll be able to take ownership of that channel at some point in the future. We're in the.

Late in the design process actually for our second product now, which had originally I had intended to be my first product. But custom designing a product takes a lot longer and costs a lot more money than even I had budgeted and planned for. But the good news is we should be getting the prototypes in for that here very soon and then we'll be able to hopefully launch those right around the beginning of the new year. I just last night put in my inventory order for the second round for my first product. So things are moving in the right direction. Maybe a touch slower than I would be happy with, but they're definitely going.

What can we do as a group to speed that up for you?

Everybody could buy some of my product.

I guess.

Put a link in the tribe and I'm sure you'll have some people take you up on that.

No Honestly, I think the main thing I need to do is I've got to. I've got to get my conversion rate up. It's still down around 5 to 7%.

But I have gotten the reviews over 88 now. There seems to be more organic traffic building up each day, which is good.

I think the main thing that I need to do is I need to get some better action shots in there. Right now I still just have a bunch of static product shots. I've been talking with Sean's photographer actually about trying to get that lined up.

So it's reviews, it's pictures and then it's copy, but reviews are most important and then images are second most important.

The other option I've got is a friend of mine actually is a photographer who lives in Austin. So I just told him to go down to UT and get a bunch of college kids wearing our product and put the pictures up.

Cool. Good work. Cool. It's good to have you. Brian. Congrats on getting things moving. Thanks. Let us know if we can help you.

Will do.

And Ralph, of course, just got back from the next level. Ralph, has your brain recovered?

How are you feeling?

The day I came back, I just did not even look at how many sales I made. I just relaxed. Now I feel charged up and ready to move.

Cool. Good man. What action steps have you started to take, if any?

Well, I've messaged my supplier to see if we can do some modifications to my products to start doing some of the things you talked about.

Anything else?

Not really. I mean, I'm waiting for my third product to be delivered as we speak. So.

No, not much.

I have the list of things I'm going to be doing the whole week, but as of now, I've only spoken to my supplier about the options and some things we're going to do.

Cool.

Public announcement and Shameless Plug new date for the next round of the Next level have been released. They're October 11th, 12th and 13th. It will be the last next level of the year. It's actually going to be the last next level for quite some time. So if you're a broadcaster, you watch this on YouTube and you're at all thinking about this, I would highly encourage you to apply for that one because it's going to be the last one for probably four or five months. So we've got a couple options here. We could dive right into the big reveal of who the keynote speaker is for Freedom Fast Lane Live. Or we could kick that down for a few more minutes and talk to all of you on the call, give me a thumbs up if you want to go through your businesses one on one or give me a thumbs down if you want to skip right to the announcements.

Announcement.

I think we had two and two. All right, cool. So we will kick. We will go right to the announcement then. So, as you know, Freedom Fast Line Live is in December.

In Austin, Texas, December 11th, 12th and 13th. And we have Gary Vaynerchuk. Keynoting day one Grant Cardone. Keynoting day two Pat Flynn is speaking. Travis Sago is speaking. Ryan Deiss is speaking. My best friend Mark Jenny is speaking. There's basically an all star everywhere that you turn. So we wanted to do something bigger for our end keynote. I just looked down and I saw Clement's photo and I thought it was actually Clement Live and I thought he was just staring and smiling at me. So we wanted to do. I'm actually nervous announcing this. So we wanted to do something a little bit bigger. Somebody who was worth over $100 million, somebody everybody would recognize. And after speaking with a lot of people back and forth, we said, okay, who would not just be a cool person to add to the end of the lineup, but who would be somebody who would actually create something that was actionable and something that was helpful for everyone in the audience. Somebody who had worked with dozens, hundreds of small businesses and had seen what had been successful, what had not worked and be able to advise and help a group of young entrepreneurs who were growing, who were budding, and somebody who was light years ahead of them and it could actually come back and impact them. So I'm proud to announce that our keynote speaker for Freedom Fast Lane Live is Shark Tanks Robert Herjavec. He will be keynoting the end of Freedom Fastlane Live and will be closing the event with Robert Herjavec, who has grown many small businesses as a shark and worked with them and been the catalyst for many of their successes. He will be hanging out there the third day and he'll be keynoting the event. So we already have over 1,000 people on the waiting list for tickets. Tickets go on sale this Tuesday and I imagine that they will go very, very quickly. Those of you who are in the tribe, you'll get a special announcement probably tomorrow or probably Monday with access for you guys. And for the rest of you, tickets go on sale Tuesday and they will go very, very quickly. That thousand opt ins comes before the announcement of a lot of the major speakers and they'll certainly go faster. With Robert added to the Lineup. So I hope to see all of your faces in person with that lineup, especially with Robert keynoting the event.

And everyone's on mute. So there's.

Dead fan. Cool. Thanks for your love in the chat box.

And your love over at the broadcast.

And I should also mention.

This is our last meeting for quite a while as we go back and we revamp what the tribe looks like moving forward. And I'll give you a little bit of a sneak peek of what we're working on. Our goal in the tribe is to create a shark tank like environment in the sense of, of we are bringing in investors, we're bringing in people who have access to retail, people who have connections at Walmart, cvs, people who have experience building audiences, people who have audiences and can promote products and then people with ideas and bringing them in and having a way for everyone to connect in that way so somebody can come to the table with an idea, pitch that idea, get an investor on the idea, get connected to retail, get connected to someone with an audience. And all of a sudden what took five years gets done very quickly because there's inventory, there's promotion channels, there's retail access, there's funding and all of that happens very quickly within the group. That is what we're seeking to build moving forward. And that's why A, Robert was a fit and B, why we need to go take a break and build it for a while.

Our deadline for that or our target for that is in November. So you'll obviously be hearing updates about that. We'll also be forming local chapters, so you'll be hearing updates about forming local groups and small meetups so that the tribe can meet regularly in person beyond these hangouts. And we'll have obviously announcement for that as soon as it is appropriate.

So with that, let's spin it back to you guys and.

Let'S go through your businesses. Steven, you gave me a thumbs up right out of the gate, so why don't we move over to you?

Yeah.

I ran into someone at the event that I spoke at last weekend who has a patent on a product that I might end up selling.

Obviously, I'm probably going to need to talk to an IP attorney or something like that to draft up a licensing agreement with them. I was wondering if there are any pitfalls that I need to look out for that or if anybody has any experience with that.

So you're licensing, potentially licensing somebody else's product and then selling it on Amazon.

So my only hesitation here is that you don't own the Business you just own. You might own the customers, but you don't own that channel. So if it. We were actually talking about this at the workshop this week. If you are treating that just as a cash flow business, go for it. But if you're hoping to.

Build something out of this, I don't think it's the best use of your time because you don't own it. So if it's just a means of cash flow, go for it. Just recognize that it is a piece of cash flow and it is not where you want to be long term.

What about your existing business?

Right now we are selling about three to five units a day.

Conversion rate is about 10%. I still need to get more reviews. I've only got 12, I think on my listing.

That's why you're only doing three to five a day.

I think I can get that up to 10 a day just from the amount of monthly searches that we have for our product.

If you remember Monavie's secret level of three digit reviews, once you're there, you. That's when you're kind of in the clear. If you're just sitting around on 12 reviews, you'll be flirting with three to five sales for a long time.

Your only assignment right now is to get as many of those reviews as humanly possible. That's all you should be thinking about right now.

Okay.

Anything else that we can do?

Think.

That's it.

Thank you.

Our neighborhood friendly, Brian Krieger just joined the call. Brian, you are everywhere now.

I am in Tallinn, Estonia right now. Thank you very much.

Where is that? On a globe.

Have you heard of St. Petersburg, Russia?

Yes.

South from there.

Okay.

It's Eastern standard plus seven hours.

The only reference point I have for Estonia is Encino Man. Does anybody remember Encino man with Pauly Shore and Brendan Fraser? Where Brendan Fraser is a frozen caveman that Pauly Shore finds in his backyard. And to pass it off, he says that he's an exchange student from Estonia. That's the only reference point I have for that. What are you doing there?

I'm having a long weekend break and I happen to be meeting with a developer that's doing some work for me.

Cool. And I see you everywhere. All over the interwebs. How's business?

Business is great. Having some record sales day. It's great having an Amazon channel manager in place. My own personal Shawn Coyne. Thank you very much.

Who does all the stuff that. That Sean does or did for you. And no, things are going great. I'm actually spending three weeks on this side of the pond. And next week I'll go before a notary in Germany and swear and sign papers and open my European company.

Very cool. Very cool. Now, what are you doing differently that has grown beyond. I mean, you have people in place, you have a team. Great whoop dee doo. But what are you doing as a company that has been adding to the sales of the business?

I am.

Let me rephrase that. My Amazon channel manager is paying attention to a lot of long tail keywords. And there's a lot of magic to be had in long tail keywords to increase your units per day.

The notion is to go after those heavy hitters, those big ones, and if you got your main keyword, that's 800,000 or so, three quarters of a million impressions per month, you can bully your way to the top on that. And I've done that. But don't lose track of all of those long tail keywords. And that's doing some really nice stuff for me.

Yeah, we've had similar experiences where keywords that we didn't like. I've always preached Amazon is where you go for buyer keywords. You don't go for search like keywords. We've experimented with some that have really, really high volume, that surprisingly have less competition just because they're not buyer keywords and as a result of dominating and we've had significant sales.

So Ryan and Brian, for those long tail keywords, are you actually doing like mini blasts against those keywords or how are you actually going to get traffic ranked for those?

Yeah, we'll put them in our back office. We'll put them in our listing somewhere and then we might rotate them in with blast. At least we do. We'll rope them in with blast to rank for them and pay per click.

Absolutely.

Blast giveaway. That's when we do them.

Yeah, I've got them in pay per click as well. But I do do periodic blasts.

I'm blasting about 1,000 units a month right now. 250 units a week.

You can cover a lot of long tail keywords with that. You can.

All right, let's move on. I want to hear an update from. Oh, by the way, I didn't say it publicly. Freedomfastlanelive.com is where obviously you will get tickets. Somebody asked that in the chat box. And that'll be Tuesday probably at 10am.

Let'S bounce things over to your neighborhood friendly Madhavi.

Hey, Rhymes.

Hey.

All right, so from the gains that we've made for this week is that the blast did help us and we are now in the bottom third of the first page and our organic sales are a little over 30 a day.

Our conversion rate is really good and it's about 30% page. Looking forward, we have another blast coming up. My goal is to be on the upper third of the page and.

We'Ve got some new packaging coming in with our new inventory. Our second product is is in the works. We're working on increasing our Facebook following and our list building is going well with about right now about 6 or 7 opt ins a day.

Good. That's better than most good work especially on 30 sales a day. That's great. What do you attribute the jump in 30? You were at like 15 last I remember.

No, last week we were at around 26.

I think the jump is moving onto the first page now.

We talked about profit margins a lot last week and whether or not your profit margins were healthy or if they were too low. So have you made any changes there or are you still doing about $5 in profit a day?

We're doing about that and.

The plan is that once we've planted our flag as to the middle to upper part third of the first page then we'll start increasing our prices to where they really need to be.

Great. Well, good work. Congratulations. Thanks.

Alright, who would like to go next? I want to hear the accent of Mr. Elliot. We haven't heard from him in quite some time.

That's the only thing I can contribute is my British accent.

You're drinking out of a jar.

I am, yes.

It's a good vessel.

Yeah. I got my inventory in about two weeks ago and I've just been working on getting reviews. I'm up to 20 at the moment but have given away just over 50 on the basis of getting reviews in. So I'm hoping for another 30 this week. I've got a blast scheduled for this Thursday.

Yeah, Facebook just doing a campaign actually. Emily's helped me out with that.

Yeah, it's just been a waiting game really.

Are you taking any sales yet?

No, I haven't taken any organic sales.

It's quite a competitive.

With 20 reviews. We don't even have pay per click turned on. There's not a whole lot.

No, no, I don't. I was going to wait until just.

Before I blasted.

So you know what you have to do. You just need more reviews so you can turn on pay per click and you're doing a blast which is exactly what you should be doing. And you'll be in good shape once that goes live. Anything that we can do to make your life easier?

The only thing.

Madhavi said she was getting about six sign ons per day to a list. Are you doing that through Facebook? Is that on the premise of getting a free product? How are you doing that?

We offer an ebook and a coupon in our first email follow up email that goes out and that's how, how we're getting our building our list.

Cool, thank you.

Are you having people reply to that email with their email address? Because you can't.

No, there's a PDF file that's attached and the PDF file's got the link in there.

Good call. Good work. Good call.

So I want to talk a little bit about moving forward from here. What you can be thinking about for the next couple months as we roll out the new platforms.

The strongest recommendation that I can make that you can do to set yourself apart from a lot of other people who are trying to compete with you is I use the term building deplorable assets. And what that usually means is controlling the audience in multiple places. So what that looks like in a practical sense is collecting emails. It's building the Facebook following, it's building the blog following, it's building any social media that you have that could be Instagram or Pinterest or whatever is relevant for your brand and being able to control the fact that when you send a message out, it gets seen by thousands and thousands of people. Where most people get stuck in this business is that they only build one leg of the stool. They only build the Amazon part of this. And that is a channel. But it's not one that you control. It's not one that you can directly impact. And then we worry about why there's this fear of what happens if there's the Amazon apocalypse. It's because you don't have that one channel that you control. What if you had multiple channels that you control? So that is the biggest difference that you can make in your business is controlling the opt ins, controlling the eyeballs really, so that you can hit a message out there and affect multiple people. And that is a leverage point for every other piece of your business as you move forward. Brian, did you just wave at me? I did.

I'm raising my hand in class.

I just did. Back in July, I did a YouTube product placement video. I spent five grand for it and I collected about 2,500 email addresses. It went to a squeeze page for a free sample. I just thought if you. Do you want to opine on that? I realize Most of the people that are in the grind, that's not really a focus for them. But for those that aren't. Do you want to share some thoughts on YouTube in particular and product placements in general?

I don't know much about product placement videos, so why don't you enlighten us?

So it's a bunch of guys that are fashionable and styling. So I sent them my product. Yeah, like you.

I sent them my product and paid them to use it in their video. They didn't endorse it per se, but they used it in the video.

I see. Okay, so you paid an individual then five grand to use your product in a video and then they plugged some page.

Yeah, I gave them a dedicated URL, went to a squeeze page, had a picture of them, a screen grab from the video and that's roughly two bucks a lead for email addresses. And I got some sales offers as well. Free sample, just pays shipping. I just thought I'd throw that out there as another source if you've got any thoughts on that.

Yeah, I'm always in encouragement of going to where the audience is and bringing them into your own umbrella and then selling to them. How long ago was that? And have you done any promotions or have you done any sales to that list that got built?

It was at the beginning of July and I built the list you were talking about and others were talking about building email lists and that's what popped into my brain about building another way to build an email list. I've not done any promotions to that list because my intention is to actually send them to my own store rather than my Amazon listing. I may do both. I'll give them the option of their purchase preference.

Yeah, and you obviously know my magic email sequence and I would probably implore you to deploy that as soon as possible because if they've used a sample and then they get hit with the magic sequence, that's a good time to hit them. But I think your strategy is sound. I like podcasts and YouTube for that type of of audience building because it's forever. So that YouTube video, you know you got 2,500 opt ins right off the bat, but you're going to get more as that video sticks around for a long time. I just found out one of my videos that it got like 4,000 views just because it got shared somewhere last week. And so as a result there was like this surge of traffic to one video and the opt in pages that that linked off to. So you'll have that type of experience what type of audience did this person have before you put the ad up? Like how many subscribers and such?

750, I think. Something like that.

750,000?

Yeah, it's a pretty big audience.

Yeah. That's a great five grand for 750,000 people. I'll take that all day long.

I did a cost per thousand and don't quote me on it, don't grade me on my math, but it was somewhere around seven bucks. One thousand, I think, something like that.

Those numbers are pretty good.

That's good work. Good work.

I fully endorse that as a strategy.

The emails mean nothing if you don't do anything with them. So I'm more interested in what you do moving forward.

I like the notion you just threw out there also of podcasts and product placements. Not sponsored products per se maybe, but product placements. I found that.

I think that there's a more genuine response from an audience if it's not a blatant endorsement of the product. An advertisement per se.

Right. Well, if it's this podcast is brought to you by or this YouTube channel is brought to by, I mean we still do okay with that actually, but it's not as responsive. If somebody says I've been using such and such or this is.

What we like, that's a little different.

I'm just trying to copy Coca Cola. They got a big marketing research budget than I do.

Well, I think that's a great strategy. I'll probably follow you up and find out. Did you just contact that person out of the Blue? Yep.

Most YouTube channels they have for business proposals email so and so and it went to their agent. So, you know, it took six weeks of back and forth to put it all together.

Cool. Well, good work, Brian.

And actually the mechanics of it, the squeeze page just went to Click funnels and I collected the payments right on Click Funnels and then uploaded the orders to Amazon.

Nice work. Now go deploy the magic sequence.

Yes, sir.

That'll pay for your advertising right there.

Who would like to go next? Who has a problem that we can solve?

I have a question.

Go ahead, Ralph.

It's actually for modav. I heard you were getting opt ins. Then you mentioned the fact that you had an ebook in a PDF. How does that contribute to you collecting emails? How did you have it set up?

Okay, so the PDF has a link in there of which you have to go and you go to the squeeze page and.

Once you enter the squeeze page then you are given the the links so that you can download the ebook and Then you're also told that you'll get an email with your coupon code in it. And so that's how we set it up.

So the PDF is not the ebook itself?

No, no. The ebook is pretty. Is hefty. It was an info product that we had prior to having our physical product, and it was what influenced us in getting into the space to begin with. So we just repurposed it for this particular thing. It worked out good as a pair. And it's just a link that takes you to squeeze page captures, your email, and then you get what you wanted.

Okay, thank you.

You're welcome.

That's a great strategy. Thanks for sharing that.

Anybody have an issue that we can solve here on.

I just have a quick question on the. You know, the building presence on social media. Obviously I've been doing that on Facebook, but it's becoming, growing much more apparent to me that my audience really likes and enjoys and hangs out on Instagram. And I know zero about Instagram. So I was just seeing if anyone had some recommendations on either where I could go educate myself or a wonderful VA who would just do it all for me.

We're actually having the same realization ourselves. And I don't have Instagram. I've never logged in. And I know that puts me behind the times, but I'm actually in the same boat with you where we're just hiring that out. So if anybody does have insight on that, I'd love to hear it. But we're hiring it out.

I don't have any insight, particularly on Instagram, but I want to share a little nugget that I learned within the past two months. When it comes to social media, I found that it's better to find somebody who's an expert in a specific platform. So if you find somebody who's good on Facebook, they're likely not good on YouTube or Twitter, for example, vice versa. You find somebody good on Twitter, etc. So you're looking at different people and different resources for different platforms. Six months ago, I thought you could get one person to do it all. You can't. You need different people. That's obvious to you, Ryan? Probably, but it wasn't obvious to me up until two months ago. And I thought I'd share with the group.

And that is specifically if you expect this person to build an audience on that platform. We could have a social media person who is in charge of contacting potential sponsors on each of those channels. But to go in and actually build the audience of each of those, you're Right. They tend to have certain sets of expertise in specific platforms.

Anybody else have any specific issues we can hit?

Hey, Brian. I don't necessarily have any.

Ryan.

I'm sorry, not Brian. Don't have any issue per se. But I'm actually back selling on Amazon again after I emailed Jeff Bezos. The only problem I'm having right now is I did lose some ranking. So what I'm doing right now, when I came back on, I started selling about 30 units a day. But now that all. But I was still at probably around 7 or 7 or 8 on the page. So right now what I did is I dropped my. What do you call it? I dropped my price and now I'm selling about 70 units a day. I'm. I'm losing a dollar per unit. But yeah, just what I'm doing is basically trying to just blast my way back up to the top.

So.

So I've gotten under the 300 ranking in my category, in the main category. So I'm hoping to hang out there a few days. I can afford to lose the money for now just to get my rankings back and then I will.

Raise the price and get back in profit. So that's where I am right now then. The other thing is that I think I mentioned this before is I redesign all my product inserts so I can promote all my other products.

Part of a review club, quote unquote. Once I'm done, once all my sales go through or they follow through that sequence.

Well, good work and congratulations on being back in stock. I know that was driving me absolutely crazy.

Making per unit.

What are you used to making per unit?

Used to making about five or six bucks per unit profit. But I went real aggressive and just dropped the price just to prefer sales.

I think that's a smart move. We've done that in the past and it's not fun for that week or so, but I think that's a good move. You're usually number one for the keyword, correct, Right.

You're in the top three. Usually I'm in the top three for that keyword.

Yeah. You should bounce back quick, especially if your reviews are competitive as far as quantity compared to everybody else, you'll bounce back pretty quickly.

Yeah, that's the plan.

Good work, James.

Thanks.

I have one another question. So I heard James talk about redesigning his inserts. And that's one thing that's been.

Blurry in my mind is what a good insert should look like. And who or what products could I potentially order in order to analyze What a good insert could look like. Because we talk about inserts, I know what they are, but I don't have a vision of what a good one would look like or what it would say. I know we can see, drive them through to a landing page and what call to actions to put in there, but just wanted to see one physically.

You want to comment on that?

So basically how my insert is set up, the original insert that I had basically was that told them.

They leave me a review, I'll send them a free product. But that was kind of aggressive and how I had it set up. So the new, the new setup and the new rewording of the insert is still along the same lines as basically have them.

Well, I'm capturing the list of people first and then I'm telling them to be a part of my review club. And then periodically I'm going to send them.

Send them emails for new products that I am. I can't even worry about that I'm actually selling. So the list. So the review is actually not necessarily for the product that I'm selling, but for the launching of new products. And so I'm basically trying to train that list. And I've had some success in the past, even with the original email where I'm training that list to expect new products to come out and to get those products so I can start getting reviews on a product when it initially comes out the gate.

And what about the design of those inserts? Did you have somebody to design them? Obviously you probably wrote the copy for them. I think that would be helpful for Ralph to hear.

James.

James one more time. Yeah, I think it would be helpful for Ralph to hear did you have. How did you have them design and how you came up with the copy for it? I assume you just wrote the copy for it and the angle for it and then you had a designer design.

That I had my wife do it. They're really simple what I could do. Ralph, I can send you what I have. I can send you the original design and I can send you the new updated design. Once I get off, once we get off the call, you can see exactly what I did.

Please.

Thank you, gentlemen.

No problem.

Hey, Ryan. On the subject of unit profitability, I've got just a little tip to throw out for the tribe. If you look at your FBA fee and your referral fee as a percent of your selling price, my standard and most people's standard for not oversized units, but standard units is probably around 32, 33%. I have a two pack variant for one of my products and you get some economies of scale in that. I have my two pack priced at 80% of two times the single pack and my FBA fees as a percent of selling price is 27%. So I'm putting five points of revenue in my pocket on a two pack variant. It's more profitable to sell two packs. The cool thing with that is all I'm doing is getting my already existing skew together and I do that myself before I send it in to Amazon.

I see a lot of people do that with three packs or combos of their different products. We talked about doing it with a yoga kit at one point of having all of our products.

Right.

I've seen that using promo codes with buy these things together. What I'm talking about is actually kitting it together as a separate asin as a child and you save your fees as a percent of selling price are.

Lower now the only difference there is that it has to arrive at Amazon in a kit. It has to be actually it is a different product.

You can poly bag it together, you can shrink wrap it together, you can box it together, whatever. But it's a separate product. Yes.

Thanks for that.

And do you outsource the bundling of those things?

Yes, I outsource it to my 13 year old son.

Perfect. Seriously?

Yeah. I mean those of you that are lucky enough to have children or neighbors who have children, don't lose sight of that teenage desire for cash.

I have tried to get Esther to help me with my business.

And then poos herself.

She's not a good. I'm still working on her on same here.

Model Emily. Last week we had some things we were working through. Would you give us a quick update?

Sure. So I'm still hanging out on page one in the grind. Been working towards getting more reviews. I'm about I think 17 away from 100 reviews. In my reaching out to people to get reviews I've actually had a couple interesting opportunities come my way of people who are pretty significant within my niche offering. One asked me if I sponsor.

Their experience with my product goes.

My product. I've got an actual personal email thanking me for the effectiveness of my product and what a great experience they've been having. So I know it's a good product. I'm still.

Between one to five sales a day.

Still. Still not really right now.

Cool. So you were cutting in and out there but I think.

Oh, sorry, sorry.

We heard the crux of it that some opportunities came out as a result of you reaching out to people and gotten some really good feedback on your product. What about kind of that barrier of you hit this like 1 to 5, dead stop what to do. Are you clear on maybe what that blockage is and what we can do to solve it?

I think so. So like I was saying in the last meeting that it seems that my niche has become super saturated super fast. Like every time I'm jumping on there, there's somebody else entering the same product as me, pretty much with a different label. So I need to. I need to basically change my branding. I need to change my image, I need to change my presentation. I need to have an edge that nobody else has. So I guess that this would be a question.

So I'm sourcing a new supplier which would be significantly cheaper than the one I have now, sourcing, designing new labels, etc. I do not want to get rid of my inventory that I have now until I'm set up with my new inventory. I do not want to order from the supplier that I've been using. So I'm kind of okay with letting it sit there until I'm completely set up with my new inventory and then I'll just blast this out and deplete it. Or should I just still try to get rid of what I have? Regardless of the fact that I'm not.

Ready yet, I recommend making these changes slowly. Keep in mind that a new label.

Is not going to get you from five sales a day to 50 sales a day.

That's not what's going to do it. What's going to do it is a, what's your big differentiating factor? And two, it's conversion rate, which is just reviews, images and copy, which you already know. I think we talked last week about the fact that your review count was. Was a great start, but it was still low comparatively to your niche. And we talked about dropping the price for you just to see what would happen if you were lower than everybody. Just to see is it a buying market. So did you experiment with any of that?

I didn't experiment with the price for the reason that I hesitated on it possibly moving too fast because I do know how many impressions it's getting and it's extremely high.

And I didn't want to be stuck in an opportunity where I really, really want to break free from the way that my product is listed right now. I hate my labels. I do think that there's a difference because my images are poor, because my labels are poor. And so I'm looking at my competitors and I can't even compete with their images because my product doesn't look quality.

That's definitely something that needs to be addressed. For sure. I believe that it's better to make sales with less profit than no sales and no profit. That's your call. I'm interested to see how much your market buys. But if your images are poor, that certainly does need to be addressed.

Yeah, like I said, I mean, they've been professionally done, but you can't get away from the cheap looking label. And even though they were professionally done, I did those sources, I just can't get away from what you're looking at in the image.

Got it.

Well, is there anything that we can do to help you clear this roadblock?

I've teamed up with one of the tribe members and we're going to help each other out, hopefully starting this Monday. So I think I'm all set.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

And Gareth, we heard from you for the first time last week. Yeah, I'd love to hear an update. Actually, before that. Ralph, someone posted in the chat box over at the broadcast that they use a service called Canva to design inserts. I've never heard of this, but C A N V A, they say it's a free service to design insert.

All right, Gareth, let's zip over to you. What's going on?

All right, so yeah, much of you were on last week and heard my dilemma.

So an update with that. So I actually talked to the individual who filed the claim against my product so that I could get some specifics. And ironically enough, he's from the town that I grew up in.

But anyway, his main concern with my product was that I was using a phrase that he had actually trademarked. And I guess again, during my research, I guess I never came across that, but he was able to validate and confirm that he trademarked the phrase that I was using.

Periodically in my copy and on my inserts and product labeling.

Basically what he said was.

I need you to stop using it. Number one, you have to change your inserts.

Send me a copy.

Of it, confirming that I.

Ceased and desist from using the phrase no longer on any of my packaging or designs, and that I removed all of the inventory that I have on Amazon and any other marketplace with that original packaging.

So.

I basically told him, okay, yeah, that's not a problem. We'll handle that. And I hope we can get this resolved in an expeditious manner.

So a couple things, Gareth. First of all, was it a legitimate trademark? And what I mean is, was his trademark on the word blue or was it a trademark on.

A phrase that was truly unique?

It was a phrase that was truly unique.

Okay.

But if you didn't know, it would seem pretty common, you know.

Okay, so you can push back on this. There is. So I'm not an attorney, don't take my advice over the advice of an attorney. But.

There'S something called reasonable patents and reasonable trademarks, where if you have a.

I'll give you an example.

Some of you are familiar with my Amazon video.

A YouTube video about the Amazon product launch port formula. Jeff Walker reached out to me and was like, hey, I have a trademark on the phrase product launch formula. Could you do me a favor and change out that title? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for letting me know. Thanks for being cool about it. Simple change that's easy to make. If it's something like that, where it's the name of a product, then that's a reasonable trademark. If it's a common phrase that you wouldn't know, you can push back on that.

The other thing is that you can negotiate the terms of how you work around this. So we had trademark.

Infringement once. Where we made it was a stupid one, but we made the change, the requested change, in order to avoid any issues. But we were able to sell through the inventory that we had and just correct it moving forward. You can negotiate on this. You don't have to just say, what do I have to do in order to make you happy? You can say, look, let's be real about this. We're happy to make the change. Obviously, we didn't know you existed, nor was there a way for us to know that you existed. So I'm sure you understand the mistake. Rather than.

Throw out all this waste, we'll make the change moving forward. But of course, we're going to sell for the existing inventory, inventory we have. But you can negotiate on this if you think it's reasonable, make the change. But I would stay on Amazon to allow you to sell through that. Are you back approved on Amazon or are you dead in the water right now?

I am dead in the water. I've literally been, which is why I'm trying to go through this individual in a cordial manner because I don't want him to block me any more than he has because.

Amazon, you know, slow in their response. So it's kind of like, you know, it's like, you know, you stab me in the foot and then. And then you're punching me while I'm down still. So it's kind of like, I Rather have.

I totally understand. I mean, we've had it. We've had it before. Right. So my only recommendation is you can still keep being cordial, but you can push back on the destroying inventory because it has a phrase is silly.

And he can have that infringement lifted. So if you're cordial with him, by all means you can continue being cordial, but I'd push back on the existing inventory. So you could sell through that.

Yeah. And so initially I was going through.

Seller support, but at the end of the day, they told me that there's nothing that they can do and I'd have to be going with seller performance, which is I. Apparently a whole different group. And they don't even have like a contact number. You have to go through email is what I'm told. And, you know, apparently seller support doesn't even have a telephone number for them.

Correct.

The whole eats again, it's annoying because it's just, you know, I need faster communication so that I'm able to.

Well, Amazon, my man, I think we have all experienced that one.

Yeah.

But I'll tell you this, this has definitely got me thinking to push my second product, you know, sooner than later. Initially, I was trying to, you know, wait until I got some good momentum going or additional momentum going on my first product and then bring up the second product. With this happening, it's kind of like, well, maybe I need to go ahead and start to find and get up the second product so that I'm having some sort of cash flow coming in.

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot we can do as a community to help you. The only way through this is through it. Right. Please post in the Facebook group how and when you get this result.

All right, Ryan, if it's okay, I'm going to echo what you just said. In my corporate job, I've dealt with over 20 different trademark infringement matters.

What you said having a negotiated settlement, if the person is accusing you actually has a bona fide trademark. And you do agree that. Yeah, I'm going to change this.

Not reworking inventory is a pretty standard negotiated settlement. The only thing I'm going to add to that is normally it has some date not to exceed January 1, 2016 or something out into the future, where. Yeah, I'm going to change this. I'm going to do a rolling change. You know, I'm being cooperative here. That is standard settlement with trademark matters.

Thanks for adding that.

Yeah, thank you.

I got Tor in there, too, so that's good to hear so that I can try to work that out.

It is pretty standard.

We're going to wrap up, but let's talk a little bit about moving forward. So first of all, thank you for being such an attentive group for the last 14 weeks. It's been really exciting watching your businesses start and then start to grow. Nothing changes here moving forward. We still will have the Facebook group. We just need to take a break as we roll out the new platform and figure out what all those details and nuances are. So I will still be active on the Facebook group and we might have some touchpoint meetings here and there. We'll see what the group wants.

The tickets for Freedom Fast Lane Live go on sale on Tuesday. Would you all do me a favor? Would you go to freedomfastlane.com and as of probably in the next 30 seconds, might even be up now. The post announcing Robert Herjavec as the keynote speaker is live. Would you please do me a favor and leave a comment on that post? Just go there and say you'll be there. Share your favorite Robert Herjavec moment. Just say something about that so we can get some activity on that page. I would appreciate it. So I believe it is live now. So just head over there as soon as we hop off. Thanks, guys. So I will see you on the Facebook group and I'll keep you posted on the new Tribe platform and I will be speaking to you then. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Bye, everyone.

Bye, guys.

See you.

Bye, guys.