(podcast) How To Go From Zero to $10 Million on Amazon

We need to be very clear on who it is that we're serving, not what product we're selling. There is a very distinct difference between I sell beard oil and I sell to bearded men. I sell beard oil means every day I have to wake up and sell more beard oil. Wonder how I'm going to do that. What's working right now? I sell to bearded men means one thing. I need to find out where the bearded men are and I need to put my product in front of them. Which one feels easier?

You're listening to Freedom Fast lane, presented by capitalism.com this is the show about building businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms. And now your host, the future owner of the Cleveland Indians, Ryan Daniel Moran.

Fastlaners. Ryan here. Welcome to the show. Before we jump in, I wanted to personally invite you to join us at the capitalism conference this December 7th, 8th and 9th. This is made for physical product sellers, Amazon sellers, entrepreneurs with a big vision, people who are building something bigger than themselves. It's for entrepreneurial empire builders. If you are building something with at least a seven figure potential, probably have even bigger sites set than that. You understand the importance of dialing in your marketing and sales and you're investing in things that give you cash flow and things that produce wealth over the long term. Then you need to be at the Capitalism conference because you are going to be supported in each of those three areas. We brought in some of the best advisors in the world, including celebrity keynotes like Damon John Russell Brunson, Kimbal Musk, the founder of the Honest company, all those people that you want to hear from who can also come back and give you the playbook to getting the results that you want. Whether that is building a million dollar company, a billion dollar company, or just having an extra 10k a month in passive cash flow so that you can live the lifestyle that you want. They're all going to be there advising you at the Capitalism Conference. So I'm inviting you to join us this December 7th, 8th and 9th in Austin and you can grab your seat at the Capitalism conference dot com.

So who here is, who's here? Like big goal is to get to like a million dollars in sales on Amazon. Awesome. Now who here Maybe the same people, but who here is like they're kind of at that level or they're getting to that level and they're kind of looking further down and they're like, you know, my big goal is to get to like $10 million in sales.

Okay, awesome. So our Next speaker has done both. He's built a business and I've known him for a while, so he's built a business from zero to a million dollars and then built that business from there all the way up to $10 million. And he's actually produced over $20 million in sales on Amazon. So he might be a familiar face to a lot of you all. So he's got a lot of really cool experience. The other thing is too, is that he's taken this business beyond Amazon and has actually gotten his products, one of his brands that he recently sold into a. I think it's. I think. I don't think he's done with another one, but it was that one for sure. Into a thousand retail locations across the United States. And this part I have to read. According to this intro contributed by this speaker, he was recently nominated into the Handsome Sellers hall of Fame.

An exclusive and prestigious award, according to him. Please join us in giving a huge welcome to Ryan Moran.

Hey, buddy, how you doing? Thank you for having me.

Hi, guys. It's great to see you. Hey, where is the tribe?

Hey, guys. I'm so proud of you guys.

By show of hands, does anyone have no idea who I am? Ooh, that sucks.

Okay, well, it's great to be here. I consider it a privilege to be in front of you. Forgive me. Matt's a little ahead of schedule and I was in the VIP room when he started introing me and I sprinted over here. I'm a little breath. I. I'm used to chasing a two year old around, not sprinting from the VIP room. So I don't know about you, but I get frustrated when I turn on the news and everything that I see is about what the old guy or the old girl in Washington D.C. is going to decide for your life. This frustrates me.

This frustrates me because.

Growing up, I had things about my life I wanted to change. And it never occurred to me to wait for someone else to do something about. Occurred to me that maybe I should create the change that I wanted to see so that I could enjoy the fruits of that. Is anyone like me.

Good?

So I believe that it's entrepreneurs that solve the world's problems. I think it's kind of funny and entertaining when we turn on the news and we find out what 500 people in one area of the country think we're going to do about health care. Meanwhile, we have innovators and entrepreneurs who are expanding lifespans and are creating breakthroughs and inventing new things and not talking about it. So I consider it a privilege to speak to entrepreneurs. It's why I've committed my life to creating as many entrepreneurs as possible because I believe you are our best shot. And I think it is something very special that we can put the results that have happened in this community into one room and talk about how we're going to change our lives for the better. This community had a huge impact on me four years ago. I was sitting exactly where you were sitting, exactly wondering where am I going to take this business? There's some success. How are we going to grow this? And it was a result of really diving deep into that business that changed my life. And I think we all owe Matt and Jason a huge round of applause for what they.

So my name's Ryan. I'm the founder of capitalism.com I'm 29 years old. I'll be 30 this year. I've built four multimillion dollar companies. I believe that a physical products brand is the most predictable route to a seven figure business. In my experience, it's also been a great way to build an eight figure business which is what we're going to dive into today. I've built and sold several different businesses. This is my fifth time on the amazing stage and I documented one of the sales of my business. So all of those videos are on YouTube. If you just look up Orion Moran, all the previous speeches that I've given from this stage are there. But I had a proud moment for me when I recently exited another business and that put me in the eight figure club in terms of cash received, meaning cash received for the businesses that I have sold on top of all the growth and the profits from those businesses. So I can now officially say I've sold businesses for eight figures in cash received. And our communities that grow physical products brands sell over $100 million a year. But like most of you, I got into this game because I wanted a better life. When I was 15, I heard my mom crying in the next room because I had broken the washing machine. And this confused me because I worked at Dunkin Donuts at the time I made minimum wage. I could take the tip jar that I got every night and pay a $50 repair for the washing machine. But I think my mom was just frustrated about another month where she had more month than she had money. So it was that moment for me that I said my family will live a different life and I don't know how I'm going to get there but I'm going to commit now to Doing whatever it took to being financially free. And a customer of mine gave me a copy of the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. How many have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I learned in that book that 10% of people created 90% of the wealth. And I said, okay, well then I guess I'm just going to have to do whatever it takes to get into that 10% club. And that was the day that I decided that I was going to be financially free. And one more thing had to happen for me to really get there though. And it was this. It was the day my daughter was born.

And I was an entrepreneur for years before my daughter was born. But it was really when I found out that I was going to be a dad that there was this.

Shift in me. And all of a sudden.

This was more than just about me. And I had to build something bigger than myself, both professionally and personally. And that was the day that I absolutely committed to going all in on the business that already had results. I was opportunity seeking. Up until this point, I had no more time for opportunity seeking. It was time to build something sustainable, something that would be lasting, something that would be life and world changing. And I tell you this because.

There are.

There'S probably about.

300 people in this room right now where the only thing standing between them and a seven or an eight figure business is just staking your claim in the ground and saying, I am absolutely all in on this. You are going to run into obstacles. People are going to say bad things about you publicly and privately. You will get negative reviews. You will have products not do as well as you think. But for the 20% of you or so who make this decision of, I am absolutely all in on committing to this. That stuff is like hitting an elephant with a fly swatter. Things just get out of your way and you keep going. So this was my day. I don't know if I can give that to you. But for some of you, it's as simple as walking out of those doors at the next break and saying, I am all in on this. And that is the only thing that is standing in your way. As a result of that, I've built businesses in the multi millions, hit the million dollar a month park. That was cool. I have been in over a thousand retail stores around the country.

And I've sold several businesses. This was the biggest check I ever received for just under $9 million for one of the payments on one of my businesses. But most importantly, my mom will never worry ever again about a broken washing machine.

And my Daughter will never have to worry about anything, which actually kind of concerns me.

So in a couple of days, I'll be participating in an eight figure panel talking about growing a business to this level. But what I thought would be fun if I just gave you the roadmap for getting there. Now, I know some of you aren't yet at the level where you can see an eight figure business, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you the entire roadmap of what it looks like. Because what I have found is that 80% of my job is telling people what not to do, not telling them what to do. We as human beings are so complex, we like to make everything so complicated.

So I could give you this roadmap and my job moving forward, if we ever meet again, is probably going to be me telling you why certain distractions will keep you off track. So I hope you'll find this to be refreshing in terms of its simplicity. I run a mastermind called the Backroom for people who are on the road to getting to the eight figure mark. And the whole goal is to get them to that point. And so we've seen what happens along the way and we've seen what levers can be pulled in order to get a business to that level. And I'm just going to share with you the roadmap to getting there. My fear, however, is that you'll overly complicate it or you'll think that it is not tactical enough. So I want you to use this as your strategy guide for building an eight figure brand. I also have a fear that as a result of you seeing my results or you seeing me on stage, it will trigger something in you that starts to compare. We're all playing this comparison game of what do other people think of us? What do we think of them? What are their results? Must be nice for them. I can't do this because. So this is the most embarrassing picture of me that I could find. This is me wearing jean shorts, eating Twizzlers out of a package.

My fashion sense hasn't changed much since this picture was taken.

And I show you this because once again, four years ago I was sitting in this room. I've been an entrepreneur for 10 years. I've been an opportunity seeker for a long time and it was hard work getting to this point. There are certain levers that can be pulled that have made a massive difference and I'm going to share what those levers are. But at the end of the day, we are all Just people. And the only thing between you and the results that you want are the habits that you practice on a regular basis. So let's dive in.

Hey, guys, this is Ryan. We're going to take a quick break and we'll return to the show in a second.

Hey, fastlaners. You all know that I made the majority of my wealth by building, scaling and selling physical products companies, and now I run a fund and a firm that purchases them. And when we want to grow our businesses, we heavily rely on the services of Viral Launch. You've heard them on the show before. I'd highly recommend that you go and listen to the episodes with Casey Goss because they have more data about what's working on Amazon.comWhat products you should sell, how you should optimize your listings, what keywords you should go after. They have more data on that stuff than pretty much anybody else on the planet. So we rely on them to look at markets we should go into, what products we should release, and I would recommend that you at least check them out. And when you do, use the coupon code Capitalism to get a fat, hefty discount. We use them pretty heavily as a tool in our tool belt alongside just about everything else that we talk about here on the podcast. So head over to viral-launch.com to check them out and when you decide to test them, use the coupon code Capitalism at checkout to get a big hefty freedom fast lane discount.

First, let's look at the state of the market right now. Over 40% of online transactions.

Now start on Amazon.com. that's ridiculous. That's absurdly big.

We also know that Amazon made an acquisition in the last couple of months. Does anyone know what it is? Oh, oh, you guys heard.

And they're not done. They're going to continue to acquire. There was also news that came out in the last few weeks about them acquiring some freight forwarders to make actually our jobs a lot easier and be able to take products to market quicker. So they're accelerating in their acquisition model. They're expanding in the market share that they have. So the pie is actually getting bigger and rapidly. So I think someone, I forget who it was. One of my business partners said, Dude, BSRs are insane. Which is so like bro lingo for our little community. BSRs are insane right now. What they were saying was.

A product that would not be considered a winner three years ago is all of a sudden able to sell like 50 or 100 units a day because the market is actually getting bigger. Not smaller. That's exciting.

That's partly why our communities have been so successful, is because they're in front of this massive, massive trend and wave. This is also why buyers, meaning business buyers, are flooding into the market. Some of you have no idea the asset that you're sitting on. I've tried to communicate this in past talks and I try to talk about this publicly, but some of you don't realize that you're building a massive asset and everything that you do in your business on a daily basis is building that asset. And there are old school business people who want to buy those assets and they're pouring into the market right now. There are currently more buyers than there are sellers right now. So the cost of them is going up. It's a really sweet time to be in our little space. There's also more positive barriers to entry.

What I mean by that is.

All of the short term entrepreneurs who are just opportunity seekers, who aren't calculated in how they build their businesses are being removed from the marketplace because of these barriers to entry. But if you do what we're going to outline together, it's actually easier and faster to build a seven figure or an eight figure business now than it ever has been. So these barriers to entry are actually working in your favor right now.

So I believe that the days of selling on Amazon are over.

But it's easier now. And here's what I mean by that.

There is this story that happens in our community that we sometimes have to unlearn, which is I'm just going to take whatever's hot, throw it up there and try to get a piece of the pie. That's an okay place to start, but we've got to pivot and think bigger from there. So the days of I'm just going to find a bunch of products, they don't correlate to one another. There's no person at the end that we're serving over their customer journey. Those days are kind of over and we should be really glad because it's way easier now because it forces you to build an actual business which will make you way more money than just shopping for random opportunities. We're going to go into the exact tactics of how to do that. So I believe that building a physical product's brand is the fastest and most predictable route to a seven figure business.

In the real business world, there's this thing called the customer value. And the customer value is of course what a customer spends with you over their lifetime as a customer. So if you can serve that person over the life cycle of their experience or their goals and they're buying from you over and over and over again. That will allow you to scale your business much, much faster than selling another iPhone case and moving on.

So I am, I'm a super fan, for example, of Quest Nutrition. Tom Bilyeu spoke at our year end event last year. He's the founder of Quest. I love a lot of their products. I've probably spent thousands of dollars with Quest Nutrition and never once has it occurred to me to care about what their reviews are. Never once has it occurred to me to see what their keyword ranking is for certain products. Now I buy all of it on Amazon because my credit card is there. It's gonna show up in two days. I have actually waited for, I've been waiting for a product launch and it wasn't on Amazon yet. So I was like, I'll just wait till it's on Amazon. But I was a super fan waiting for that brand.

It's never occurred to me to care about what their reviews or the things that we obsess about so much.

Because I bought into their brand story. So the first thing that I'm going to encourage you to do is to think about your business as a brand rather than a product or rather than a thing that you just throw on Amazon and try to acquire as much real estate as possible. We've had products do 150 to 200 sales a day with less than 75 reviews in less than 45 days. The reason for that is because it was the 15th product in a product line and we had built a customer base and we're able to launch products faster because people know who we are, because people are following us, because we have social media followings, because we have a list. So if you double down on building a brand rather than just selling things on Amazon, I promise you you will grow much faster and you will get to eight figures much faster and with less stress, with higher profit margins, you'll need fewer reviews in order to be able to get enough market share. And it'll actually be a lot more fun because you can graduate from this game of playing the black hat world. You can graduate from this world of worrying about what your competitors are doing because there are no competitors. You're building a brand. Now for those of you who are not at 1 million yet.

I'm going to give you.

One of my speeches here on the ASM stage has over a million views on YouTube and it was an hour long talk about the 0 to 1 million in 12 months.

Roadmap. So for those of you who are not yet at that point, I want you to listen to this the next two or three slides and then you can forget everything else. You can tune me out. You can close your laptops, go to your room and start to implement this stuff. It really is the only thing that you need to know in order to get to a million dollars. If we look at the numbers and the math on a million dollar business, it's three to five products, times selling, 25 to 35 sales a day at about a $25 price point. 25 to 30 bucks, that's all it takes. Getting to 25 units a day doesn't take that long. You run your Amazon pay per click well. You do a few launches, you build up a small audience that you release the product to. You get 50 to 100 reviews, manage mild keyword rankings. You can be at 25 sales a day pretty easily do that four times. You have 100 sales a day. It's actually probably going to be more because you'll have repeat buyers and crossover sales. You're over 100 sales a day. You're at a million dollar business. It really is that simple. Now it might require you to launch more than four or five products in order to get the full four or five winners. But at its basic essence, this is what it takes to build a million dollar business. Get each product to 100 reviews. Pick one source, one source of outside advertising, whether it be building up a Facebook group or it be advertising to a Facebook page, which is my preference. I do both on Facebook, but I have a process that I've shared here on the stage about how we build little Facebook audiences and launch our products to those to kind of kick start the process. Turn on your pay per click and repeat. This is all it takes. Devin is nodding his head aggressively. It really is that simple.

Do nothing else.

I could walk off stage right now for some of you. Do nothing else but that.

We've been able to duplicate this over and over and over again. That's what a million dollar business requires. Now let me tell you how to go a little bit faster. If you want to supercharge this and go faster, launch to an existing audience. It might be a Facebook page or a Facebook group. It could be an Instagram following. It could be an email list. It is simply a group of people where you control the experience in a contained area. So it's fun and sexy to talk about. What's the trick on Instagram or what's working now on Facebook. The only thing that matters is if you have one place where the person that you want to target is within your control. Could be an email list. I'm good at writing emails, so I focus a lot on driving Facebook traffic to email. Some people post on Instagram. You should go all in on that. Pick one and go in hard on that. Rather than trying to manage all of these different social media platforms. Pick one place where you can put your potential buyers into a contained area and you can release your products to them. You can retire from this world of who's going to give away more products, who's going to have more reviews than the next guy, because you actually have story time.

We had a little email list of about 4,000 people at one point, and we'll talk about building up those email lists. But at one point, right when we were at or near the million dollar point, we had this email list of people who had bought from us on Amazon. We hadn't done it really well, but we'd done okay. And we had about 4,000 people on there and they were fairly responsive. So we decided to experiment with a product launch to our email list. And, and the product launch just meant we wrote a couple emails telling our customers what was coming. And I think we might have run a survey to them to just get them engaged again. And we started writing about why this product would support them on their goals. And.

In the first five days of us launching that product on Amazon with no reviews, no keyword rankings, we sold 1,000 units of that product profitably. Not at a dollar, not at 299, but profitably. Yes, we discounted it to our list, but we launched profitably, which you can guess what that did to our keyword rankings. And we had 500 reviews on that product 30 days later. Why? Because we controlled the experience.

And we weren't grinding from the very get go. Now, for those of you who are just starting what that looks like is putting in the work now to build up the eyeballs where you can crank that lever once again. That could be a Facebook group, a Facebook page, it could be an email list. But where are you going to build up those eyeballs now so that when your products get released, you can crank that lever. So in order to do that, we need to be very clear on who it is that we're serving, not what product we're selling. There is a very distinct difference between I sell beard oil and I sell to bearded men. I sell beard oil means every day I have to Wake up and sell more beard oil. Wonder how I'm going to do that. What's working right now? I sell to bearded men. Means one thing. I need to find out where the bearded men are and I need to put my product in front of them. Which one feels easier? Because Facebook tells us all that data. Instagram tells us all that data. Pinterest tells us all that data. Google tells us all that data. If we want to get our message or our product in front of a person, we have all the tools in the world to be able to do that. But if the question is, how do I sell more product? You can spend a lifetime answering that question and never take any action. So the first step to make this much faster and much easier is for you to put in the work now to identify who the customer is behind the purchase that we want to have happen and go get in front of those people and put them into a confined space where we can target them. I would encourage you, once we know who the person is, to simply list out what 10 products do they already buy?

Not what would they buy, but what are they already buying, what do they think about on a daily basis, or who do they purchase from on a daily basis. If we know those 10 products that that person buys, it becomes very easy for us to know what our next product launch is going to be. We don't need to look at what's ranking for what or what competitor is doing what. We just need to look at what our customer wants and then we put it into the brand, release it through the process of putting it out to our audience, getting it to 100 sales, and we're on the next step to getting to a million dollars. I like to ask the question, how does your brand help your customer along their journey? Your customer is buying your products because they have some goal in mind. Your job is for your products to help them take one step closer along that journey. And you will have them for life. And they will buy all 10 or 50 products from you, and you'll have a $10 million business. I know this sounds overly simple, but this is how businesses are built.

Most people who exit this game or who quit do so because they're focused on product and not people. They forget that there is a person behind the purchase. All we need to do is get more of those people, go get more of the people, and you can launch whatever products you want to them. You can tell whatever story about the product that will serve them. You can show up however you'd like in front of them. And we'll look at some examples. So your job is to look at the person and the needs of that person and allow your products to be the solution to the problems that that person has. So if you're not yet at a million dollars, you can tune out for the rest of the time. You can make your list of 10 products that you're going to serve to your person. You can start to identify who that person might be, go away, talk to no one for six to 12 months, and you can come back and show everybody your million dollar business. And then we can have a conversation where we can say, okay, what does it look like to get to 10 million? We can help you with that. But if you're not yet at that million dollar point, all you need to be thinking about is, is releasing products to groups of people over and over again and getting them to leave reviews. All you need to do to get to a million dollars. Now, what we're going to talk about next is going from 1 to 10. And I'll give you the levers to pull to get from 1 to 10. If there are things that help you or that you can start to implement now or you have my blessing to do so, so long as it does not distract you from building the million dollar plan. We have to have the million dollar plan before we can get to 10. So if there are lessons here for you to take and implement, please do so. It will make the process faster. But if it distracts you, just wait. Wait until you're at a million and then you can start to work them in. So from going from a million to 10 million requires three things.

Hey guys, this is Ryan and I wanted to take a quick second to talk to you because I know that you listen to the show because you're a different type of entrepreneur. You are building something, you probably run multiple projects. You are beyond the point of trying to make a little bit of side money. You are thinking about the long term and you are thinking about which of your projects is gonna be your empire. You're starting to think like a real business. And you're also looking for investment opportunities that are going to grow your wealth, are going to increase your cash flow and make you free for life so that you can live life on your own terms. I know that's you because it's also me. And that's why we hang out. And if I'm describing you, then I'm encouraging you, inviting you to grab your ticket to the Capitalism Conference. We've already announced a bunch of our celebrity Keynotes who have built hundred million dollar and even billion dollar empires. We're bringing in a panel of investment experts that are going to talk about cryptocurrency and what's going on in the economy, as well as some marketing and sales experts which specialize in physical products and online brands so that you can grow your business beyond seven figures, scale to eight figures and even plant the seeds for the nine figure hundred million dollar empire. I know that you've got your sights set on something big and all of my big breakthroughs have come from events, but I was always frustrated with the types of events that I went to because I thought it was mostly small minded people and there wasn't the ability to pick the brains of the individuals who have really built something great. So if you want the Playbook to building an eight or a nine figure business as well as the Playbook to building building a team that builds your business for you and grows your marketing and sales channels bigger than Amazon, and you want passive income and to pay less taxes and long term wealth from your investments, then this is a can't miss, must not miss event. These tickets will sell out. So go to TheCapitalismConference.com to grab your ticket and reserve your seat. This is the only place where you're going to be around big level entrepreneurs who are who have built something and are coming back to give you the Playbook. And if you get one of our elite access passes, you'll actually get out of your seat and go with the speakers backstage and meet with them one on one. This level of access does not happen often. We do it once a year and this year it's December 7th, 8th and 9th in Austin, Texas at the Capitalism Conference.

So from going from a million to 10 million requires three things.

Growing your audience.

Doing paid advertising and innovating on your product, that's what will take you to 10 million.

How many people can you now get in front of? How many eyeballs can you influence my recommendation? On paid media, you can use whatever you want as long as you're comfortable with it and you put in the work. My favorite is YouTube ads and Facebook ads. You can use whatever you'd like. Product innovation just simply means what you do differently. What are you bringing new to the marketplace? And we start to think about these things once we are at 1 million. Let's go into how when I say audience and audience building, I am talking about the ability to get in front of your potential customers, customers on demand. If you don't have that, that is why you're scared of Amazon making a change. That is why you're afraid to tell people what your product is, which I think is hilarious.

It's because you are at the mercy of what another competitor could do or what Amazon could do. But if you control the customers by being in front of them, you have them on a Facebook page, you have them on an email list, you have an Instagram following. We had one of our students, this jazzes me up. We had one of our students report that they put up a basic ad just like we'll talk about, and that ad got them 12,000 followers in seven days. Maybe it was 14 days for 200.

It was less than $200.

Like, yep, go do that more. How much should I keep spending at those numbers? However much you can borrow from all of your friends. Keep, keep doing that. So an audience is simply your ability to get in front of your potential customers on demand when you're starting your business. We all kind of know that you must be willing to go into the red to get customers reviews and get your rankings. Once you're at a million, it requires you to be willing to lose money to build your audience, to be able to lose money to get those eyeballs that are going to become your customers down the road. This is why in my model, I save it for the million dollar point. Because now we have the capital to be able to do that. If you're comfortable doing it now, please do. But absolutely do it when you're at a million. Here's what the process is for building the audience. Number one, we call it customer extraction. Customer extraction is looking at the buyers who are showing up on Amazon or wherever you take sales and getting them into our fold. So many people say, I sold my beard oil. Woo, let's go sell more beard oil. And I say, why don't you go get in front of that person who just bought beard oil and get them into your ecosystem so they'll buy 10 other products, products over the next year. We can scale a lot faster if we do that. The ways that you get those people into your ecosystem, product inserts and Facebook retargeting. I won't belabor the point here, but the way to do that is you export your customer data from Amazon, upload it into Facebook and you can be in front of all of your customers. Get them into your ecosystem. Once they have made a purchase they've already voted for for you, get them to join your party.

Number two.

Please, for the love of everything, once you're at a million Put attention into building your email list. Very simple way to do this. Run an ad and we'll look at some examples to your potential customers who you know who they are at this point because you know who the brand is attracting. Put an ad talking about what your product is and offering a coupon code. They'll come to a website, enter their email address, look at what the numbers are, what it costs to get that email address, and then allow them to purchase on Amazon. This is a very overly simplistic way for you to start doing that. Once you have the mental bandwidth to be able to focus on that, that's one easy way for you to start getting in front of those people. And for many brands, that's enough. If you're targeting the right people and you know what their pain point is and you just put your message up in front of them, they already know why they're buying. So give them a coupon code so you can get your email address and let them move on and then you're going to follow up with them over the long term. There's also this thing. I'm shocked that no one in our world talks about them, but there's this thing called Solo Apprentice. Did you know that the data exists? If you have a beauty company, you can actually go find out who bought a beauty product within the last 60 days and spent at least $50, and you can rent that data and run your own offers to. That baffles me that we can do that in today's world. And it baffles me even more that there are entrepreneurs who don't utilize that. Now it's a little bit more capital intensive because there's always a minimum spend of at least a few thousand dollars. And there are brokers out there. A decent one is Macro Mark. And there are brokers all over the place who will broker these lists. And you can put your message in front of them and get those email addresses and then market your products to them over the long term. So those are two ways that you could start building your email list. One, by extracting the customers who have already bought from you. And second, going out and putting your message in front of the people who would become buyers. And the third is focusing on social media, which is really just another glorified way of building your audience. But one of my favorite ways to do it at this point is to double down on getting our customers to show publicly that they're raving fans of ours. So this might look like putting together a Facebook group for your brand or the people in your brand and encouraging them to. To post selfies of the product that they bought on Amazon from you. We've been able to do this and have all of the wonderful Amazon images we could possibly handle. We get people showing them holding the product, them using the product, them giving the product as a gift, and it's just gold. We grab that off Facebook, we put it in our ads, we put it on Amazon, we put it on our social media page. And guess what? The people in the group love it because we're giving them attention and we're sharing their social media profiles. There's a lot of talk about, like, hiring ambassadors. I say customers are the best ambassadors because your customers are already your ideal demographic and have friends who are also your demographic. So if we can play with that data, if we can play with that, their influence and work within their influence, that can go a long way. So we'll use that to solicit testimonials to get them to leave reviews to get their product selfies or images. And we'll use that as part of our ads, which will then run to get more email addresses. And the snowball keeps on building. Now, once again, this is going from 1 to 10. So this fertile ground that we have to launch new products to retarget our customers starts to build and build and build. Product launches become easier, they become faster. We have now this pool of buyers that want to leave reviews for us. We no longer have to worry about, can we still give away product and ask for a review. We just sell to the thousands of people who have been following us and ask them to leave reviews. We don't incentivize them. We don't do anything against tos. We just ask. And if we built up customer goodwill up to this point, we can add hundreds of reviews, sometimes within a matter of days. Number two, paid advertising. I'm going to tell you the secret to paid advertising. The secret to paid advertising is being willing to suck till you don't suck no more.

Give me the ad that's gonna convert. Give me the thing that's gonna do well. Just go suck until you don't suck no more.

And that is the secret to paid advertising, by the way. You'll be shocked at what works. Every time I put up an ad or a video, I'm like, this is gonna. This is going to win. This is going to be the thing. Nothing. Oh, I guess I'm a failure as an entrepreneur.

And then the one random thing that we do is, wait a minute, that one dang It I'm wrong again. My suggestion is to focus on video as your paid advertising. Video is the first medium ever where customers actually share your ad for free. That has never happened, ever. It's also the cheapest opportunity in history to test a message quickly and be in front of millions of people. It's also the only form of advertising ever that can put a business on the map overnight. So I would encourage you, when you're at the level to test paid media that you test video. How many of you know this product?

Right. So this product is beautiful because it was built basically on one video that we all know. It has 31 million views at the time that I took this screenshot. Free advertising. That is amazing. This is a buddy of mine who runs a company called Paleo Valley. One of their primary products is Beefsteaks. This is a video that promoted their beef sticks. How do you differentiate a beefsteak? You talk about the pain point that it solves, which is that the founder of the company did not have a healthy snack that they could travel with. They talk about that pain point, put it in front of Paleo customers and individuals who would be ideal for that brand, and this has absolutely blown up their company. Here are a couple tips for good videos. Focus on the pain point and don't give content. Content kills conversions.

Speak to your ideal audience and let them preach your message for you. Just speak to their beliefs. Speak to their desires. Do not give content. If in doubt, just lead with what you believe. Lead with who you are, who you represent, and what you believe. And I'd like to show you my favorite example.

Oh, that's good.

Oh, hey. Didn't see you there. Here at Black Rifle Coffee Company, a lot of people ask what our policy is on the Internet trolls. We've adopted the you approach.

You see, at Black Rifle Coffee Company, we don't make our living making coffee. We make our living off of personal putting bad men in their graves. Therefore, we don't care if you buy it. It's merely a passion. So if you come into our house talking trash, expect to get it tenfold right back at you. Because at Black Rifle Coffee Company, we cater to men. Men don't even know how to use Facebook. They're too busy cleaning carburetors or cutting down trees, slaying eggs.

So buy our coffee or dumb. We don't care.

Love it. Love it. This is coffee for conservative men.

Now, a member of our team, Marusha, runs a coffee company from moms called Perky Perky. And she just does selfie videos where she documents the journey, she talks about her business, she gives inspiring messages to the women that follow her. They're both coffee.

Can you imagine if these two met at a conference.

And the dude with the rifle was like, so what's your business? And she's like, oh, I don't talk about my brand.

I don't share my product.

What?

I don't want someone copying me.

They're the exact same product but to two different demographics. Do they compete with one another? Not a chance. This is why I laugh when people won't talk about their businesses. I won't talk about my. I don't talk about my product. That's adorable. That's so cute. You're so afraid of. You have no idea who your customer is. That's what that means. Both of these examples know exactly who their customer is. They're completely different customers, even though it's the exact same product.

Number three. The third area that will take you from 1 to 10 is by innovating on your product. This doesn't have to be super complicated and this doesn't need to be at the beginning of your business, but once you have a million dollar run rate, innovate for your customer, do something new. You have the capital to be able to try something and explore and make some mistakes. The other cool thing is since you have the customers, you can ask them what they want and you can invest that capital into developing something custom. You can spend the 10 grand on getting a brand new product made and your customers will probably support it even if it just breaks even. So what's the new thing that you can release to your brand that's a little bit different in the marketplace? Not hugely different, but just a little bit different. So that you can say we're the only product that blank or we're the blank for this group of people. And if you can do that, you win. One of my favorite examples of this is like, we'll stick with coffee Camara Coffee. Camara Coffee is a coffee brand that adds a couple nootropics into their coffee. And so they know that biohackers and people into longevity are gonna be their ideal market. So that's who they show up in front of, where the nootropic coffee just a little bit different. And as a result, that won and they own that marketplace because they were the first to market there. Now I know some of you are going to look at this and my fear is that you're going to be overwhelmed by this process. So I want to leave you with the one hiring tip. I wish someone had told me when I started my business, yes, you will have to outsource a few things like design or a little bit of writing. But when it comes to actually going from 1 million to 10 million, the thing is going to be people, people who are dedicated to your business. And I wish someone had told me that there are three things that you look for in a person that you bring on. You look for someone who's done what you want them to do already. They come to you with the system and they know it better than you. They come with a Rolodex of people who can support them and that can support the brand. And they love what you're up to. That's the criteria. I've done it before. I love what you're up to, and I know these people who can support us. I wish someone had told me that when I started my business. And I felt weird not giving that to you. When we're talking about building a $10 million business, I'll echo the words of Gary Vaynerchuk, who spoke at our stage a couple of years ago when he talked about going from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100. And he said, this here's the dirty.

Secret that no fucker that's gonna talk to you over next weekend is gonna tell you. You wanna go from a million to 100 million. It's about people.

There's no algorithm, there's no platform, there's no fucking math arbitrage. To build something from a million to 100 million, you will have to tap into your EQ skills, not your IQ skills. And you'll have to realize if you're even capable of it, because if you're not, you're gonna have to bring in a partner or somebody you trust for life to build out that. Because you have to scale humans. And to scale humans, you have to know how to deal with humans. And that's the truth, and that's the way it is. And listen.

And that's it. I wish somebody had told me that when I started my business. So let me give this to you in a nice packaged formula that you can implement.

The first thing you have got to know is who you serve, not what you sell, but who you sell to. That makes deciding what to sell and how to sell it way easier. Go get those people into an area that you control. Facebook, email, however you're comfortable. Go get in front of those people and put your message in front of them. You will launch faster. You'll rank Faster, you'll have reviews much easier. Next. Over the next few months or the next year, release three to five products to those followers. Get them to at least 100 reviews. Turn on Amazon pay per click. Repeat until you're at 1 million. Number three, you will go bigger than Amazon. You'll go bigger than the 1 million point when you consistently can invest in building the number of eyeballs that you have, running some video traffic to continue building that audience.

And continuing to release new products. Hopefully some of them have some new twist on the market that allows your customer to experience and achieve their goals a little bit differently than someone else. Repeat until you are at 10 million. That's what it looks like to grow a business from zero to $10 million.

Some of you will do this. Some of you will change lives. You will invest in employees, you will invest in customers and you will turn around and people will tell you the impact that they had on their that you had on their lives.

It's very unique to be an entrepreneur and to have that type of impact. It's why what you do matters. What you do as a greedy capitalist is the greatest gift that you could give to your kids, to the community and to the world at large. The world needs you to be successful. The world needs more free people who are building something that matters, who are defining their own lives and doing something about it. It is you that makes a difference in the world. Not governments, not the guy next door, not someone, somebody else, but you actually doing something about what you want to create in this world. And that's what I believe to be the purpose of an entrepreneur. And all of you are doing it. My name is Ryan Daniel moran. My website's capitalism.com thank you for having me.