Partnerships and Suppliers - Tribe Hangout 7/4/2015

There we are. What's up, tribe? We got some new faces on the call today, and unfortunately, we're down a face as well. I know most of you come just to see Sean Coyne, but I'm traveling this week, so I'm on the road and visiting one of my other business partners who may be joining us at some point throughout the call. So you can all send your.

Holiday cards and your I miss you cards to. To Sean Coyne on Facebook or via email. Unfortunately, you're stuck with just me, but Matt may be joining us in a little bit. So today you guys didn't give me much to work with on the Q and A thread. And, you know, Madhavi wasn't there kicking off the charge saying where everybody lives in the tribe. So I didn't have much to go off of as far as Q and A stuff goes. So when my buddy joins us, we're probably going to talk a little bit about.

A little bit about partnerships and how we've structured ours because we've had a very, very good working relationship together and a really good split of tasks. And on top of that, I want to reserve some time to kind of pause and see where all of you are and see how we can clear out any roadblocks. So first, I want to tell you kind of a cool story. Last night, we did something really different. We came up and I visited my business partner, Matt, and we actually had dinner with our suppliers. So we have. We've just switched over to some new suppliers and we were. All the owners and the people who operate it were sitting around a table with us. We made dinner here at his house, and it was a really, really good time to talk business with those people, for them to understand goals for them, to make recommendations of what they can do. And unless you're Kathryn Chung and you're over hanging out with the suppliers, that's a pretty rare experience to be with people who are actually making your products, who have a hand in your product and have insight into how your product can be improved, how your line of products can be improved, other areas where you could sell them, other target markets that you could go after. And obviously that is a kind of a next step for. For a lot of people in terms of you don't have to worry about it right now, but it was very helpful to be around those people and to build that trust because all of you will burn through suppliers that you don't like. It's just part of the. It's just part of the game in all of My businesses, we have switched suppliers at some point. None of my businesses that sell on Amazon have the supplier that we originally stuck with. Of course, at the same time, we didn't have Katherine Chung sourcing it for us. So we cycled through several. And now we work with. In my primary business, we work with somebody that's actually fairly local, that we can have dinner with and has an incentive to grow with us. And it was a very unique but cool experience. And what's interesting is two things. One, how low their margins are, and two, how they experience the same kind of frustrations that we do. And third, a bonus one. A third one. This supplier actually makes product. And they were telling us that a lot of suppliers come to them as brokers. So a lot of suppliers aren't manufacturing. This is different if you're either working with Catherine or you're working with somebody, usually on Alibaba or not a warehouse, an actual manufacturer, overseas, if you're local. A lot of people are just brokers, which is very interesting. So we are working directly with a manufacturer, and they have a lot of the same frustrations with suppliers that we do. So it was just a very interesting conversation. And if you want details about that, I'd be happy to go into it. But let's kick this off by opening this up. I would love to hear where you're at. I know a few of you launched products this week or you did blasts this week. I know some of you started to get keyword rankings this week, which is really exciting. So I'd like to hear how many sales a day, if any, you're doing what your plan to get started, if you haven't yet, is, and we can tweak those processes from there. Open the floor to you now.

If you all don't go at once, I'll just start calling you out.

All right, go ahead, Emily. I want to hear from you because I know you had an exciting week. Preferably you will take yourself off mute first.

I see you trying to.

Am I there?

There you go. Now you're okay.

Sorry. Okay, so I did my zon, optimized for my listing, and the work that they did was pretty sick. And then I did my blast, and it was really successful. I got onto page one, and as I posted in the Tribe, I've only had one review, and I thought it was kind of interesting because that review came really fast, and it was a very negative review. And Clement and I were actually doing some research on it. It doesn't look like this person is a verified Purchaser and because there's only one review and I'm on page one, as soon as you hover over the view, what the person said, there's no way. So I've kind of been, I think, blocked from future purchases until I start getting more reviews coming in.

Also, it was interesting how you just brought up changing your suppliers, because I did some research with suppliers and I found that I can get much better margins with another supplier. So I was hoping to probably switch suppliers soon, too. And my labeling and making it look higher quality, etc.

Cool.

I know you didn't hear the first half of that. This is Matt, by the way, one of my other business partners.

You know what I should have said? I should have said, sean, you look different today. That would have been funny. I'm actually going to scoot back so it doesn't look like my head is huge and yours isn't. So Emily just launched her product this week and did a blast. Got to page one. She's got one review, but it's negative, and she's thinking about changing suppliers. So we've burned through a ton of suppliers. Sean and I have burned through a couple of suppliers. My other business partner, Paul, and I have burned through probably more suppliers than both other companies combined. So one of the things that I wish we had done when we started was have backup suppliers and then backups to backups and really got to know them. I was telling them we met our suppliers and we hung out with them. That's the first time we've ever done that. First time we ever had a really good relationship with a supplier. So it's kind of like dating you. You've got to have a first date. You've got to have a first order in order to see if you want to keep working with those people, but keep dating other suppliers, keep that process going with other suppliers, constantly get better prices, constantly work with those people to see what they can do, what they can't do. There's nothing wrong with completely.

Regularly getting new suppliers, getting new blood coming in, testing different people. And still to this day, we have some products made by other manufacturers. And Shawn and I are the same way. We have the mats made by one supplier, and then we have the towels made by a different supplier. So nothing wrong. It's kind of a mixed bag with each. Each has its own positive and negatives. However, your most important thing this week, you have no other assignment except to bug, borrow, and beg for every review possible from friends, family, tribe members, neighbors, the pizza delivery guy, anybody who has a computer in an Amazon account. You want to be bugging for review because if you're on page one, but you've got one review and it's negative, it's going to be terrible. But you've got natural sales staring you in the face as soon as you change that.

Exactly. Can I ask you a question about when you were switching suppliers, did you also switch any of your labeling or your. I'm also considering improving the quality of my labels.

Did you just continue and send your new supplier what you already had as far as branding and labeling goes, or did you improve it as you went, or what did you do?

That's kind of funny because we're doing that right now.

Matt is kind of the improvement hound. He's always about improvement. So can you comment on that? Yeah.

So between switching suppliers, we always sent them the same label. So we are updating labels right now, but it has nothing to do with suppliers, so they don't really go together. So to answer your question, no. Unless you want to update your label, there's no need to. In between suppliers, you can use the same one, send the same files over to the new one.

She's also asking. She wants to improve her.

Yeah, I want to improve the quality. Like, I'm not happy with the quality. Like, I'm not happy. It looked good when I first saw the rendering and then now that I've seen it in person, I'm not happy with the quality.

Yeah, that could be a supplier. Like, that could be a printer thing.

Because the supplier is providing the printing as well as he provided the label. Like the design of the label.

Yeah, that could actually be just a cheapo printer, A cheapo supplier skimping out on their.

I think I'm going to have to outsource my label printing, too. Do you guys do that?

We've looked into it, but every manufacturer we've ever worked with has eventually.

Technically, we outsource them right now, but it's like the cousin of the owner of the company. It's outsourced, but they work next door to each other, so they work. So technically we do. But no, we've never gone, like, source from one completely stranger website and sent it over to a completely stranger manufacturer.

Or something like that. We've always had the manufacturer do the labels, but we have found that some suppliers have better labeling capabilities than others. And the recommendation I would make for you is change your labels slowly.

Our supplier has known we're changing labels for months. We just let them know there's going to Be a change and we get it perfect. And we don't roll out the new label until we're absolutely sure about it. I would keep doing what you're doing because sometimes when you change label or you change product, that can affect the lead time of the product that you're ordering. And the worst thing you can do is to run out of inventory. So you don't want to delay that process. Keep ordering what you've got until you have a consistent supply and then roll out the new stuff slowly and work with your manufacturer. There's a seamless transition into that. That new product.

Right.

Make sense?

Yeah. Thank you.

Cool. Who would like to go next?

All right, go ahead.

So currently we are still with one product.

Selling pretty well. But we like two or three weeks ago, we started to run out of inventory, so we needed to reduce our pay per click and to raise our price.

We still sold pretty well with the higher price, but now we are having our inventory back in stock and are planning to do a blast in a week and a half from now. Our first blast, by the way. So any recommendations about the blast.

Would be great. We are also working about on our two next products that will hopefully be on the next one month. In one month, we want already to have them.

In stock. So that's it for now.

So for your blast advice, go hard and fast. That's the advice. I mean, it's as many units as you can comfortably give away through as few keywords as possible in as short amount of time as possible.

That's a secret method.

This is an interesting point since in Sunblast you have the option to do like three or four keywords on the same blast. And if we are giving away a large amount, would it be a good idea?

We've done it. Yeah. I mean, we just did it, what, a week ago where we cycled through two or three keywords and we saw rankings, jumped on all of them. So you'll see a rankings jump on any keyword that you put in that list. Just a matter of how much do you want to allocate to.

Those specific keywords. So we did one in the yoga space about a week, week and a half ago.

Same thing. We actually went very, very concentrated on one keyword because we really needed a boost in that specific keyword. If we were just looking to get a slight increase, we could spread it out over several. But this, we needed one keyword to get ranked to put all the firepower on that keyword. The interesting thing is that we saw increase across all Keywords across the board rank higher. Even though we put all of it on one keyword, I recommend putting it on as few as possible unless you're just kind of tweaking things from that point.

Do you have a good launch plan for those second and third products?

We plan on contacting our existing customers.

We already have a Facebook page with.

About 5000 likes but we're not really using it yet properly to get real.

So solid customer base. So we're working on that now.

I would say the main plane may be related also to Emily's experience. We are planning to have a bunch of reviews before we are blasting for each of the products. But it's also because we have a very competitive, very competitive market and very competitive products. So I don't want to get to page one if I have few reviews because.

It won't help for the conversions anyway to be there in our case just because we have a very competitive niche.

Then do smaller, smaller promotions to your Facebook page and start thinking about how you can cross sell the existing products that you have.

Do you have ideas, Willie, of how to do this cross sales? Are you doing it through Amazon promos? Yeah.

You do it with banners in your listing. You do it by mentioning it in your product description. You do it through your product boxing, your product imaging. You do it through your blog posts, you do it through your Facebook posts. You show show how the two work together. That's how you do it. And that's a long term thing. That's not something that just happens overnight.

Anything else from your end?

I think we're good for now.

I will let other people talk as well.

So let's take one more and then I'm going to go over to the chat box. I want to hear from Madhavi because I know Madhavi had a big week as well.

We launched yesterday and we.

Are, despite having no reviews and just launching yesterday, we are getting some organic sales in. We are in a very competitive space though. We had a glitch, a technical glitch where yesterday I sent out the codes to friends and family and it was the dollar off amount, not the percentage off. And of course they were for free. None of the codes worked and we found out there is a four hour delay before quotes work. However, four hours came and went and the codes still weren't working. And at this time despite calls to seller central, we are not 100% sure why the codes aren't working. So we went to plan B which is where we just asked friends and family to buy it outright and we will pay them back.

So that was a little unfortunate. But again, plan B. And moving right along.

We launched the Facebook likes campaign again because he said if you can get 1,000 people that would be great. So we did and we were able to get our likes cost to about 21 cents per likes. And again, right now we're just going to pause it because we're going to need all, all gears in that action now for the launch itself and then we will of course revisit it and keep tweaking.

Matt have you ever had that happen where a coupon code just would not work no matter what?

Eric.

We've done so many and had every problem with coupon codes ever.

There's always customers that can't get codes to work, but it's maybe like a half a percent of the time.

It's often a user error.

Yeah. So I've never had like if you specifically tried them, you knew that they were being used correctly. I've never had that happen before.

Is that what's going on?

Monavie well, we were told by so far three people, friends got back to us and said code isn't working. And we called seller central, they told us that.

We can't give free codes, that you have to charge something. So I've never heard that before in any of the calls or on tribe they said that at the very least you have to charge $0.01. I myself have gotten codes and used them and the amount has been zero. So I don't know what's that percentage off? That was for dollar off.

Interesting. That's either a recent change at Amazon, an account restriction or just some funny business.

So without any straight answer and time being of the essence, we just went with plan B there.

Let's see what else.

Where's organic sales coming from? Let's go there.

Yeah, organic. I don't know where organic sales are coming from. We do have a custom formula. We are in a very competitive space. Our product is really very on point and a very good product. So if you're looking for something specific in that space, it will come up because there isn't anything else like it.

So you're getting a handful of organic sales and you don't have a lot of reviews yet. You're looking to give as many free stuff as possible out to friends and family. Right. If you could make it a $0.01, then if they make you charge a center and flick an Abraham Lincoln at your friends.

To make up for the charge, but get those out as fast as possible. Okay. Those reviews, like you are in the same boat as Emily in the fact that your only job for the next week or two weeks is to beg, borrow and bug. Beg, borrow and bug every review possible from friends, family, anybody you can. Somebody asked about getting tribe members to review your product. There's nothing wrong with getting people to review your product in the tribe. The problem comes in when everybody is reviewing everybody else's product and it's just a big wheel and it looks artificial. If you're getting a handful of people to review your products and they're all real reviews, go for it. It's just you can't have a group of people that are reviews. You can also run a Zomblast and get some reviews that way. But just whatever you have to do, get those 50 to 100 reviews as fast as possible because you're going to 10x those organic sales that you're getting right now.

Okay, great. And right now we have our Zomblast put out about three to four weeks from now for the same reasons that gal mentioned that we want reviews to be able to really do that conversions and make it stand.

Good.

Anything else that we can help clear out of your way?

No, I'm good.

Okay, cool.

Thanks.

Emily, would you madhavim.

Just one thing.

About these free coupon codes in Amazon. Sometimes it doesn't let you to do it the first time, but try it twice or three times and after a while it will enable you even it will enable you to do free codes if you are doing it dollar amounts and not percentages.

Okay.

It's kind of a bad try a few times and it will let you.

Okay, thanks so much.

Emily.

I want to give you a heads up. You have a bit of a fan club over at the broadcast page, so you might want to go say hey to your fan club.

And somebody asked about how many units I tend to give away in a blast. We've done 100, we've done 500. We've done everything in between. I'd say if you're doing less than 100, you're kind of wasting your time. If you're doing more than 500, you're being more aggressive than necessary.

Unless you have a ton of inventory and just I want to be number one, then it might take that many units or more. Would you disagree with that at all? You think 1 to 500 is.

Yeah, I mean, I think it is the depends on the space. So if you're coming in and you're going to Garcinia, plan on Giving away thousands. I mean, yeah, so it really depends on the space. But yeah, for markets that we've looked at and people we've talked to, I'd say one to five would be an accurate range.

Emily, are you willing to share what you gave away this week because you went to.

Yeah, absolutely.

I had given away, I lowered what I wanted to do much more, but I only ended up giving away 100. Amazon lost a bunch of my units and my blast was already scheduled so I had to. I wanted to be more aggressive but I did 100 and I still ended up on page one. I don't think my space is too, I think it's medium competitive. Like I think it's. Yeah, it's not a highly, highly competitive. I think 100 ended up being perfect because it landed me on page one and I was willing to do more than that.

So cool.

But yeah, Amazon lost a bunch of my inventory.

Amazon buys the. They pay you for the inventory that they lose. You're aware of that?

Yeah, they did, they did. I haven't had it or I haven't checked, but they said that they were going to deposit the money into my account to.

Refund me the money.

Yeah. And they pay you?

I was disappointed.

I was paying the cake.

Pardon?

They pay full retail price. So if your product's 30 bucks and they lost 1,000 units, they pay you $30,000.

Well, you know, it's interesting because I didn't do the math. I'd have to sit down and do the math and see if they did pay me full price. They must, if you say they do. But I had called them to say, would you be able to show these as actual sales considering you're basically buying them from me? Because I've now lost the algorithm of the actual sales. But they said no, but I tried.

Tried.

That's a valiant effort. Yeah, it's kind of a, it's a good news, bad news thing because all of a sudden you sell a bunch of inventory as far as cash goes at the same time you lose out on the momentum and the aggressiveness as you can do. I mean Krieger likes to tell the story that some of the easiest money he ever made was when. Was when Amazon lost his inventory and, and they had to buy it from him.

So it's a good news, bad news kind of thing.

Alright, let's move on. Steven, I want to hear from you.

Yeah, we got inventory in yesterday. I haven't checked seller central yet this morning, but we hadn't got an organic sale yet.

Yet.

I've got a Facebook following of about 1700 that I'm going to launch to in about a week. I wanted to go ahead and write press releases and get everything ready to go.

It's just a matter of also waiting on and begging for those reviews that you're talking about so that we can be ready for the traffic when it's time.

Matt, have we ever done a press release? I think one time, right?

Yeah, one time.

When we.

The first time we went through asm, we did one and yeah, we never did one again. I mean, that's.

I personally think press releases are a waste of time. I personally think anything outside of pay per click and a launch when you're getting started are a waste of time. Now, I mean, you could do a lot of things like YouTube videos and press releases and do that until you're making five, six organic sales a day. Or you could just cut out all that stuff and go straight to what creates the maximum effect, which is ranking for keywords. And that's where most tribe members are more successful than the average person doing this business. It just adds up your welcome. It's not going to hurt anything. It's just I prefer to go after the 80, 20 of what creates the fastest result.

Well, that's exactly the kind of information I'm looking for. I feel like I'm in school again writing a bunch of essays.

I wouldn't waste your time doing that, man.

It doesn't create. There are people who just swear by that and then there are people who have made that one YouTube video that got 100,000 views and that's what made. That's what did it for them. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. The rule is you blast your units either through internal services or outside services. You get strong reviews, you turn on Amazon pay per click and you repeat over and over and over and over again.

Good, good.

Anything else in that process that we can refine for you?

Well, there's a bit of a rabbit trail that I'd like to ask you about. How soon is too soon to be dating retail? And here's why I asked. I had an opportunity recently to go and speak as someone, speak as a spokesman for the industry that my product is involved in.

And I'm fine with trying to become an expert in my field within a month or so, but retailers are also going to be there. I just wanted to. I figured that at this point that would be more of a distraction since we're trying to do one thing at a time and rank first. And get sales. But I wanted to throw that out to you and ask you about it.

Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. How fast can you get inventory right now? How reliable is your stream of inventory?

Unless I air freight it all in?

I mean, I can get it in quickly, but.

The charges to get it in quickly would make it not very profitable.

I never say no to sales.

I never recommend saying no to people who want to buy from you. But if you can't get quick inventory, if you can't get a consistent supply, then it'd be better for you to wait until you have a consistent supply because you could burn a relationship with somebody who's like, who pays you money and then they wait two months to get product. So if you have a consistent supply of inventory, that's the time that you're welcome to date people who want to give you money outside of Amazon. That sounded out of context. That sounds really inappropriate. That's when you can date people who want to give you money.

So look, I think retail is great. There's people who make plenty of money just in retail and don't worry about Amazon. So never say no to sales. But if you can't get in the product, then obviously you need to wait until you have a consistent supply.

Okay, you can shore that up in six weeks. Go for it when you speak at this event.

All right, cool.

So in the chat box, Maury asks about last week's supplement call. It's posted, it's over on the YouTube channel. So just head there.

And how do I stop them getting the. I'm looking to do an insert and a promo code in product number two. Customers will reorder each month. How do I stop them getting the discount each month? Maura, I don't understand your question.

So they're saying if you put an insert in, they get an insert every single time. Just put on there. We've run into this sometimes, but just put on there that it's a one time offer. Or Ryan could make it sound better than that, but just put clear words on there saying that that insert is a one time promotion because yeah, they are going to get it every single time. And we have people that try to get a discount every single time. And yeah, that's kind of how.

If they used a single use code, would that fix it?

The code won't work again. But then the email is saying, hey, I got my. Why am I not getting my discount? This insert says I can get a discount.

Hey, you mean like they'll order again?

Yeah, and they'll want the discount again.

So you just have a customer service response. Be like, looks like you already used this code once. Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah.

You just have to tell them that. But it would be to back yourself up. Make sure it says in the fine print that it can only be used once, because then you can always reference that and say, hey, it's plain right there. You can only use it once.

All right, so just have them go to a webpage where they opt in. Don't put the coupon code on the insert. Just have it on the website through a single use coupon. And then when they come back to use it again, it won't. And make sure your customer service person knows how to handle that. Am I saying that right? Yes. Cool.

So that's your answer. Maury.

Emily, you're still getting a lot of love. People asking if you'll be their brand representative might have some equity position opportunities for you.

Brian, I would really love to hear from Brian. Brian, I know you're just watching the chat box, but I know you're live over at Amazon.

And I know you were doing some promos this week and I think you had your first sale, so I'd love to hear your status. And I know you said here that you've tried to get on the live call, but it was full. So if you can type in the chat box what's going on, we'd love to have it from there. We got some new faces on the call, Kevin and Jason. I'm not sure you've joined us before. Please forgive me if I.

If I screwed that pooch, but I'd like to hear from you guys. Jason.

Can you hear me? I can hear you, but you sound like you are quiet and in the woods.

Sorry about that. Let me see if I can turn it up here.

I can hear you now.

Okay.

I just got my product into Amazon warehouse yesterday, so it should go live hopefully today. I have my Zonblast run ready to go, but I'm waiting to get those first initial reviews. I'm going to leverage all my friends.

And family this weekend.

Their Independence Day is going to be full of begging for reviews. I was wondering, can you tell me again the difference between a verified and verified purchase review and regular review? Does it make a huge difference on.

What that does to the algorithm?

Well, reviews don't impact the algorithm at all. Okay, so neither one matters. As far as algorithm goes, it's just a conversion thing. If you've got reviews just matter for conversion, and conversion does impact the algorithm Verified reviews and unverified reviews tend not to impact very much a difference in conversion. Verified just means obviously they purchased from Amazon. Unverified means they purchased somewhere else or they didn't purchase. So there's. There's really not a big a big difference.

Okay, that's helpful.

And then as far as the blast, I have four Zon blasts coming up. I'm going to do 300 units.

Do you.

My thought was to go really big right off the top 150 units for the first one and then you know, go 50, 50, 50 or tweak it there. Is that a good structure? Is that a good structure? Yes, but 150 is not real big off the bat.

Okay.

Real big would be 3, 400 off the bat and then smaller blasts. So there's nothing wrong with that approach. But that's not. I don't think that's as aggressive as you think it is. That structure though of going like front loading some and then having drips after have heard has worked for a lot of people.

Awesome. Thank you.

Now I don't know if it's any better than just doing big blast. Big blast, big blast. But I have heard people say that doing big blast and then a drift blast after has had really good results. I don't know why or why that would, but some people have reported that's the case. Tell me your review getting plan. Once you've got organic sales coming in.

Just use the feedback loop.

I'm going to use that for following up the email and then try the telephone call technique. And then I have a couple.

Co op shout outs.

I'm near the coffee industry so I have some small batch coffee brewers that I'm going to work with and we're going to kind of shout each other out and try to drive sales that way. Good. I think that's a good plan at least for starting out. That will at least get you through the grind.

Awesome.

Good. Good work, Jason.

Alright, I want to hear from Kevin.

I cannot hear you. Sadly though.

I cannot hear you. I see your lips moving. Can anybody hear Kevin? Give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Okay. We can't. We sadly, sad face. We cannot hear you.

Exactly. Our thoughts exactly. All right, tell you what, we're gonna skip you and come back to you. Give us a wave. Like heck. Have you ever seen Team America, World Police Matt?

So Kevin's got to give us the signal. Do you remember the signal?

So give us the signal when you're ready to. When you think you got your audio figured out I'm going to skip over to Clement.

Hey.

We had a pretty good week. Sales increased, organic sales increased significantly. We don't actually know why our BSR jumps. And so right now I guess we're trying to figure out our second product arrived but we had issues with it because it was initially categorized as oversized. And.

It'S actually 18.1 inches because the box expanded during transport.

It's a high dollar value enough product that we are thinking we don't care that enough to ship it back and have it redone. That will replenish it with better sized boxes in the future.

And just to preface this, we think this is a brand that won't necessarily do.

Supplements big.

It's not a huge moving set of items, but the margins are pretty good. And we're pretty happy with the margins and we think that we can get it to a reasonable size and turning out a pretty good business. And so we're actually also working at other brands and businesses. But I guess for this particular brand, my question would be and our hurdle is it's within a niche of a niche. And so I can't imagine anyone ever being passionate about this brand, particular product. And it's within home improvement. And so the question is, is it worth spending the time and effort to really trying to build massive audience when they might only be interested in seeing.

Seeing.

Anything related to us once every couple years?

It depends.

On.

What the rest of your products are. Can you guys still hear me? I've got a lag on over here.

Yep, I can hear you. You're kind of frozen. Oh, yes.

Okay. Oh, it just came in all at once. Signals try out here.

Earn what who you're targeting into a market.

Then yes, you should continue.

You should.

Wow. Stronger already. Then you should go ahead and target those like that as a group. If you're just sending a product, then no. If it's just one product and that's all you're going to target and that's all you're ever going to do with this brand, then it's not worth it. But that's probably not what you're doing because that's not what we teach and that's not what we do. So if you can go after the home improvement space, if that's who you're going after, by all means you should have. Oh, thanks, Matt. I didn't know you brought that in.

If you can go after the home improvement space and that's who you're targeting, by all means you should be turning that into a market.

I Don't mean to repeat myself, but if that first product just hits something that a very small amount of people would buy, but they'll buy other things as well that you plan on releasing in that line, by all means, you should be working to capture that customer. If not, don't worry about it. So where do you fall in that spectrum?

So everybody who bought our first product would be interested in this product that we're launching. And it's actually a much larger market in terms of the ability of people to use it. So our first product launch was a subset of a subset of a subset of a market. And then so we're kind of moving up in the. In the size of the market or that we can access.

But I guess even combined.

It'S not. They're both more expensive products. And I guess, yes, you could market the whole series to everyone, but although I guess it's difficult to explain with.

It, actually.

Our good buddy and mentor Travis would probably tell you that it's even more important for you to have relationships with those people in the small market, because in the type of market you're describing, you're probably going to have higher priced buyers who will buy much more expensive products than the average person buying on Amazon. And in order to sell that effectively.

You'Ve got to keep relationships with those customers. So I'd suggest it may even be more important for you to maintain that as a market. You'll have a more passionate group who will buy everything of yours.

Okay.

Thanks.

Cool. All right, let's. Brian.

Kathryn, give me one second. I want to hear from Brian here.

So Brian says, here's where I'm at. Product went live June 20th. Got to 15 reviews pretty quick, but been sitting at 16 for a few days now. I just yesterday used our neighborhood chat site to give away another 50 units to my neighbors. Cool. So far it looks like 12, 15 of them have purchased. I hopefully get another 25 reviews or so next week. I'm paying the price to be number one on pay per click, but my ACOS is terrible. My average conversion rate. Is that what that means, Matt?

Average cost.

Oh, cost of sale. Okay, Right. Is terrible as my conversion rate sucks at the moment. Assuming this is due to a low number of reviews. You are correct, Brian. I did this on blast last week but screwed up the setup and only 24 units were sold. Ouch. Did move me in the rankings though. Plan is to get reviews in and over 50 and then do another blast. Goal is to get to number three in my subcategory. There are two keywords that I'm aiming for number two and number one on the other person ranking number one is selling more per month than I have the inventory for. So I'll beat them in a few months when I can stock up. Alright, so your plan is solid and your analysis is correct that the reason your conversion rate sucks is because of your reviews. I had somebody comment contact me just this week. He's like, hey, I launched product number two. Product number one is doing great, but product number two is doing crappy. Can you look at my listing and tell me what magic words are missing from my listing to improve my conversion rate? I clicked on the link. The only magic words would be like don't buy this, this product sucks, We're a scam. But when you've got 14 reviews or however many they had, that's pretty much the exact same thing. So that was the reason why his conversion rate stung because he only had like 14 reviews. That's why your analysis is spot on, Brian. Good work. If you need any help clearing out the next inventory or the next inventory, the next roadblock so we can get you to selling more inventory, let me know in the chat box.

Okay, Catherine, now we can go over to you.

Yeah.

My second product was really, it's brilliant. So I will be running out of stock in two days. I sell double more double the sales volume than I expected. So I was slow to replenish my stock. So it's a mistake. I learned I need to be bold more to order more inventory. So that's why. And already on the top of my keyword listing I have two keyword and I ran number one for the primary keyword and I ran the second for my second keyword. So I already.

Doing really well for my second product. But my coming question would be when I got my inventory back after three weeks I would consider whether I stay the number one question is how am I going to make sure I get back this listing? The high ranking.

What is the strategy? I mean I have a plan and feeling is that I wanted to aim more aggressive. I wanted to go.

Another double of what I am doing right now. So I relaunch. But having said that, I need to maybe aim for someone outside Amazon instead of within Amazon. Is it proper to do things like that? Or I concentrate my energy on my third and my fourth product which I already also planning. It's a trade off whether I still promoting my second product which is already doing very well or I spend more time on my third or fourth product which I believe Will also bring me a very quick sales volume.

So what's the question exactly? Is the question how to maximize your keyword ranking or is the question what the next step is to grow your business?

Something like that. Okay, if I already went at the top of my keyword, is there anything that I can.

Grow more within Amazon.

Or go outside Amazon? So when I read already the top one, I'm already tapped 100. I already outbeat my competitor without any questions. So on again.

Am I going to do a lot better within Amazon? The question number one or I should aim for outside Amazon for this specific second product because it just too well doing. Within three weeks I already ranked the top, so it's going too quickly. But for me I wanted to still go further. I believe that product can not just the top two, but it can draw some sales from other competitor within the same niche.

Oh, you're growing too quickly. It must be so horrible for Catherine. She's selling out of its stock regularly and be driven competitors. Must be terrible for you, Kathryn. Step one is bully your way to the top. That's what you've done. Step two, if you want to start taking market share away from other people so you get a bigger piece of a more condensed buy is to increase your conversion rate by getting a faster pace of reviews than everybody else. Because then everybody chooses you. You get number one tags so your conversion rate skyrockets, you improve your images, you get video testimonials. Those are all things that will impact your conversion rate so that you can continue to own that market. Then you can do things like turning on outside traffic channels like Google AdWords or Pinterest ads, or growing an audience on your blog or Facebook. These are all things that you and I will go into extreme detail on in a couple weeks when you come to Austin for the next level. So with a real clear plan on that. But the next step for you, if the question is how do I steal market share on Amazon, it's you improve your conversion rate so people choose you over everybody else. That's the answer there. If it's how do I grow my company the fastest? Duplicate exactly what you've done on as many products as possible and then worry about tweaking so you get that extra 20 or 25 sales a day when you've got a new product that you can release and there's an extra hundred sales per day that you could hit that will grow your company faster than tweaking to get that extra conversion rate. So I would release more products and then worry about capturing more market share over the long term by having rabid customers and really strong conversion rates.

So you mean launching new products more important? All right. Yes, I think. Yeah, I already got top. It's 200 units a day, so I don't know what to do.

Okay. So fast. Poor Katherine is selling 200 a day. Good work. Yes.

We'll scale that pretty quickly when you come into town in a couple weeks. Selfish plug. By the way, there's one spot remaining for August, the August workshop. And we have a deadline for applications of next week. So if you're at all thinking about joining us in a month. The deadline is next week and there are no current plans for future workshops, so we'll probably have one in the fall. But there's no date set or anything. So if you're at all thinking about taking your business to the next level, this would be the time to get your application in because they close in a couple of days. Hey, Ryan. Yes, go ahead, Ralph. I was just.

The last day on Wednesday, around what time is it going to be over?

What? The application process. The next level. Yeah. So you have to be booked, paid, and have your trip lined up by. So that's eight days from now. So next Sunday is the time that everything would have to be signed, sealed and delivered. So the last time to get your application in would probably be Wednesday or Thursday.

No, I mean the event itself.

Yeah, on the last day on the 5th of August.

Oh, we'll finish up about 1pm on Wednesday. Okay. You'll be having a very, very full day on Monday, a full day on Tuesday, and a half day on Wednesday and Sunday.

That's when everybody's arriving. So arriving around 1 2pm is probably ideal.

Or. Yeah, we have one event on Sunday and it's at night, so you could arrive anytime, preferably before 6 o', clock, but our one event is at 8. Okay.

I actually wanted to turn it over to either you or. I didn't see Kevin freaking out, but. Oh, he is freaking out, all right. I did see flashes of light going. I thought maybe that was his attempt to try and get his.

Hi, can you hear me now?

I can.

Yay.

Maybe it's too hot today in Germany because all the things stopped working now.

Maybe.

All right. My brother and I, we joined with ASM4 back at the end of last year. We launched our first product 9th of January, and right now we have our third shipment at Amazon. The problem was right in the past days that we ran out of inventory with our second shipment and it took Us two and a half months before the next shipment to arrive. So we got our products last week. We did a blast right away, and the plus really helped us. We are now on spot number three of our main keyword. This morning we reached first time below BSR 2000. And now we are at a process of thinking about whether to concentrate on that first product we have, like adding new colors, for example, or adding a second product. Because the problem is right now that our cash flow is not. Not that high. And now we're thinking about, well, we have some thousands in the back. Get it into concentration on the first product, adding several colors, maybe getting some ads outside of Amazon, or adding a second product and then putting the money in that.

I think your first inkling was correct. I would focus on putting it into the first product that you know is selling until you're in the clear on cash. Normally, I recommend rolling out as many products as possible, but if you don't have the cash to maintain a significant amount of inventory for both, then don't put it into that second product. Remember, the rule is roll out as many products as you can comfortably handle without detracting from what you already have built. But for you right now, rolling into a second product would detract from the cash that you need to have a significant amount of support for product number one, which is selling. So ultimately, that could hurt your sales. So instead, put all that cash into shoring up your inventory reserves for product number one when you're in the clear on cash, which will probably only be a couple of paydays a month or so, then roll off product number two.

All right.

Because what we did to get our product running now is that we dropped our price. I listened to your podcast at the Freedom Fast Lane about your supplement company, and we dropped our price, which made our margin drop from 48% to 35%. But our sales increased twice.

Yeah, perfect. So you end up taking home more money at the end of the day. We did an experiment with that company this week where we raised the price on that same product. And we did it because we had lower inventory. So we wanted to maximize our profit per unit and not run out of inventory. So we play that game a lot of.

Managing the price and the number of sales coming in because that company is kind of in the situation you're mentioning. We could roll out subsequent products, but the profit and the money in the bank doesn't really justify taking away from what the first product is because there's so much growth that is still available there. And because we can double the sales just by tweaking the price pretty quickly. So that company still is very slow to roll out new products for the exact place that you're in. So I think you're doing the right thing by putting all of your emphasis into that first product.

And do you think it makes sense that, like, for example, I order now 5000 units, my first product, and to say, okay, because.

All in that market, we have the same color of product, let's say that I stick with that color, or, for example, I go 2000 with the old color and get 1000 of another color, 1000 of another color to get a little bit of outstand to the other competitors.

I would put as much emphasis in your first product as possible and tweak slowly.

From the way you're describing it, it sounds like you've still got room to grow with your product exactly as it is. If that's the case, I would do that and then worry about tweaking. Do you disagree with me on that?

No, no, actually not. You told the story of how we thought we tapped out at 25.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

And that's what.

Anytime I see a situation like this, that's what I think of where we thought we tapped out at 25 sales, and now we're, what, five times that on one product? And if we had known that, we would have put more effort in that product to get to that point faster, because that would have freed up so much cash to go to the other.

Products.

Because we've spent some time where we had other products out that we didn't have the cash to support and push. So they're just kind of sitting there doing nothing or not nothing, but not much. Not what they could be doing. So, yeah, I'm completely on board with Ryan on this.

Okay.

Do you maybe have a recommendation for Tag Gripper with action shots? Because we asked one professional photographer, and he wanted to charge us $2,000 for four or five action shots, and that's a little bit high, I think.

Yeah, No, I don't have any recommendations for them, but I know that they exist. Sean had it with a personal friend. He just sent them to a personal friend and had him do it for a few hundred bucks.

There's some good people in the tribe that have used some good people before. We've talked to a couple, but, yeah, if you ask on the Facebook page in the tribe, I know you'll get some good, much more affordable recommendations than that.

Product photography is the one that's just a white background, right?

Monavie says yes. Okay. Or Emily says yes. ProductPhotography.com is just a white background.

Oh, we did use them.

We didn't like them for our stuff, right? Yeah, but they did a good job for some other stuff. And then.

We'Ve never used action shots. Sean and I did it for yoga and it was just a personal friend.

Okay, great, thanks.

Oh.

Look at the chat box.

Sean's hanging out on the chat box. That always makes me smile. So Sean put his email address again at the in the chat box.

Sure, bro. Sean, with you on the trip.

That would have been a pretty awesome. That would have been too much awesomeness from Missouri to handle.

Somebody. Okay. I love how there's like these inner. These inter conversations that happen in the chat box and then I come in and I read one out of context and I get so confused. But I'm glad you guys help each other out on the chat box.

From J. Paul.

Is it common for Amazon to require listing more than one product in a category? Is it common for Amazon to require listing more than one product? We are in the travel accessory space but we have one product which can be classified as luggage, which is where the problem occurred. Does anyone have those kit? I don't quite follow your problem, John.

I don't know why you'd have to be required a listing in more than Amazon makes you pick one category. But.

If you're required to be listed in more than one category, that's a good problem to have because it gets you more exposure.

If you fit more than one category, you'll likely have to pick one. But required listing more than one product in a category. That does not compute.

Ralph, we talked about next level but we didn't hit. If you've got anything in your business that we can clear, anything we can do to help you move forward.

And Ralph is just sitting there invisible, walking around in his very minimalist pajamas.

Yes, hello.

There he is.

Well, at the moment I'm second product. I'm waiting for my third product to be released sometime this week and I have my second product in selling. I just finished a Pulse from Zonblast and it went pretty well. I'm selling about 25 a day on average. Only in the last seven days it started selling that much. So that's where I am right now.

What do you attribute that? Growth?

Ranking.

Ranking basically because it is very similar to my first product. So the keywords are very similar and.

I knew what keywords worked.

I basically had all the information I needed to.

Basically add to my second product, which I did. And so I knew exactly what keywords were going to be easier for me to rank.

So.

So that's what I targeted.

Okay, because Clement brought up the question earlier about capturing market share without knowing where it came from. And sometimes that happens with the product you mentioned where we thought we capped out at 25. And just so both of you are aware, sometimes that happens because of rankings increases. It happens because of number one tags. It happens because of cross sells from other products. It happens because you have repeat buyers. It happens because somebody you started to rank on Google. It happens because somebody put your product out on a forum. It happened because you got one really, really awesome review. It's because somebody reviewed you on their blog or on YouTube. There's all these different factors that can play a role. Most of the time it's what Ralph described. You have a rankings increase and sometimes it's these other factors as well. And Clement, with as small a group as you're targeting, there's probably a lot of word of mouth in that market. That's why I recommend again to you that you do build that customer relationship with that market because there's probably really strong word of mouth. And if you service.

That small crowd, chances are you'll be the go to person for that crowd and you'll make up for the lack of volume.

With really high profit margins, really high customer loyalty.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And Emily, you've got this mysterious person that sometimes walks behind you and they look like.

A very fit creepy silhouette.

Yeah, that's my very fit husband.

That's his.

Any follow or last words? Let me check the chat box one more time.

Ryan, maybe I can ask two more questions. Short ones. It's about the blast. I wondered if, for your experience, does it matter algorithm wise if you are giving away for $1 or 1 95?

I wish there was.

But no, I don't. No, I don't.

You don't think it, madam?

I don't think. I don't think, no. So if you know for sure that we're gonna, that we give away like.

Say.

No, we're gonna give away 200 units, no problem. Then we'll charge as much as we'll charge five bucks because we'll capture three bucks of extra profit. But if we're just blasting, we don't know, we got to get as much volume as possible. We'll go for a lower price.

Okay. And about the sale price during the blast, does it matter if it's higher or lower algorithm wise?

Again.

We didn't think it did.

And we're starting to think it might. This is a little bit of a new development.

How would you answer this question, Matt?

I mean, I guess you just tell our situation.

Okay, our theory is higher is better meaning but the listing retail price is better.

And then adjusting it later to be lower. Else. We are speculating here. We are completely speculating why I'm there's not science. We are speculating because of a situation that we found ourselves in where we launched at a lower price.

Raised it later.

And it really hurt conversions, really hurt rankings. There was such a little move in rankings. And our theory is because.

Amazon takes average price into buy box display and if we raised the price on our account.

Then we would lose the buy box even though we're the only seller. It's a really odd thing. So if that's the case, then the reverse must be true. That if you launch at a higher price and then you lower your price later, it may increase.

Conversion rate sales and ranking velocity. We are speculating, but we're testing it right now. So this is a brand new development in the last two weeks or so that we've run into this issue. So we're speculating what the fix might be. So when you're doing a blast, we think a higher price is better, meaning a higher listing price, not the price that the coupon makes it an actual higher price. And then so there's a bigger dollar off percentage that the customer is getting, but it's the same price that it normally would be. That's our theory and we will probably be testing this pretty thoroughly over the coming months. But that's the. We have very limited data on that.

Thank you. And one last question.

Sure, sure.

Did you notice any difference between doing the launch with one time promo codes or regular codes?

Yes, yes we do. When you launch with regular promo codes, they have a tendency to leak and for all your inventory to disappear very quickly. When you do single use, you have much, much more control over it. We figured that one out the hard way about a dozen times and that's a painful process. If you're doing a Zonblast or one of the public services or you're doing a public coupon code, you don't want it to be a dollar, you don't want it to be 99 cents or 3 because those leak and you run out of inventory and it's pretty much the worst day of your life. Unless you have ever had your head chopped off, that would be a worse day. But nothing Much comes close than having your coupon code leak and a thousand units of evaporating into thin air in 20 minutes. But if it's something like a half off coupon, if it's a $10 off coupon, where if somebody wants to buy, if somebody wants to leak your half off coupon code and spike your sales, God bless them, go for it. Make that a public coupon. Make that a. Not a single use. But if it's some ridiculous offer that you have to do for Zomblast, please use a. Please use a single use coupon code and please lock your inventory. But if it's just a sale price and you'll take all the customers, you can make it public. Blast it out there.

Did that distinction make sense?

Yes, absolutely. So it doesn't matter to the algorithm if I use this code or.

A regular one?

It does not matter.

It's just for inventory protection.

Any final questions?

Okay, maybe I can just add a tip that we had once.

In order to protect inventory. As you know, it takes, which is crazy, it takes like four hours to cancel a coupon if you need to do it urgently. So what we did when it happened to us was just to raise our price and that happened immediately. And it helps you to protect our inventory in case.

You got it.

Yeah, that's a great plan. It's good. A question about somebody saying thoughts on Thomason? Thomason.com I've actually never used Thomason. I think we experimented with it a bit in the yoga space. I mean, it's been done a hundred times.

It's good for getting some press. I think there's better ways to get press. But Thomasin's a good kind of starting point. I have nothing against it, I just don't see it. I think it's a better use of your time than press releases. But I still it as a really good use of someone's time. And there are people who might disagree with me. There's probably people who have done really well working just with Thomason. But I think it's like an okay use of your time. That's just my opinion. J. Paul John responded that his issue with Luggage is that Amazon says we cannot list a single. I think it means product. A single product in Luggage, as in just. They can't have just one. That would be news to me.

Try talking to a different rep.

Try just asking the same question on a new thread. As soon as you get a different rep. That lets you in.

A bunch of conversations here. How do you lock your inventory? What is that called a fulfillment. A merchant.

A merchant fulfillment order. Yeah.

Yeah.

Is that what it's called?

Do a fulfill mcf Multi channel fulfillment.

Yeah.

There we go.

I got one right. I got a detail right, tribe.

And then just instead of ship this inventory, you hit hold this inventory, and simple as that.

And that just means that that inventory can't be sold. And so you delete the payment coupon code, release the inventory back into the pool, and then you can sell again.

And to release, you just look up the.

You have to give it an order id. So you just search for that order ID just like you would any other order and click cancel. Super simple.

Yeah, it is really simple.

First time it was described to me, I was like, oh, details, this is awful. And then I actually did it and it was really not. My guess is that things like shipping labels and stuff are the same way. Don't ask me to print a shipping label. I will not figure out this detail. This is why Matt and I work together. All right, tribe, thanks for hanging out with me on your holiday weekend. Remember, if you want to go to the next level, this is the last week to apply for August. Otherwise you'll be waiting until the fall or maybe even early next year. So nextlevelvideoseries.com is the page for that and I will see all of you next weekend. Thanks, guys. Special thanks to Matt davis.

Thank you.

See you guys.

By.