Ryan Daniel Moran: The Power Of Ads, Amazon, And A Good Offer #BrandBuilderPodcast

If you have an audience, if you have.

10,000, 100,000, a million people that you can send over to kickstart a launch, you win. Most of the people, even to this day on sites like Amazon, are throwing up a product and waiting and seeing what happens. Or they're grinding and clawing and begging and borrowing for every single review because it's a brand new business and they have absolutely no idea. And if you have this much influence, this much audience, this much direct response knowledge, and you take that over to a platform that has a trillion dollar valuation, you. You're in front of the largest marketplace in the world and you bully everybody else out of your way. Welcome to the Brand Builder podcast presented by capitalism.com I'm Max Kerwick and I advise physical product brands to find their story. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I invest in physical products brands. A physical products brand is arguably the most predictable path to a seven figure business. And we advise them, build them, buy them and sell them. The show goes behind them, tracks their success, and hands you the keys to what's working. Let's dive in.

Hey gang.

I'm interrupting you briefly to talk about cash flow and investing. My strategy for financial independence for the rest of my life is to build businesses and invest the profits. But the investing piece can be confusing sometimes. Where do you start if you're just starting out in your journey? I always suggest looking into dividend paying stock. It's an easy way to generate cash.

Flow, but if you're further along in.

Your journey, the foundation of my strategy is by setting up a wealth warehouse. A wealth warehouse is kind of like a second bank account except it's tied to the market. So it goes up in value, but it does not go down in value. It's a really cool strategy that a lot of my really wealthy friends use and Tony Robbins recommends this in his book Money Master the Game as well. And the team that I use to set this up is wealthwarehouse.com it's run by my buddy Sam Prentice. He is the sharpest person that I have met on this topic. He also has access to some really cool investment opportunities to buy cash flow as well. He shares them in some of the podcasts that we've done. But if you go over to wealthwarehouse.com or if you search for my name and Sam Prentice, you'll find any of the podcasts that we have done together as well as some of the opportunities.

That are available when you deploy this.

Strategy and it's who I use. He's one of our backroom partners. And it's the team that I go to for some insider investment recommendations, as well as setting up my wealth warehouse, which is the foundation of my strategy.

That's wealthwarehouse.com further ado. Please help me welcome Mr. Ryan Morin. Give a round of applause, guys.

Oh, hey, entrepreneurs and marketers.

Hey, Chris. What's up, man? Hey.

First things first. I know how hard doing these events is, and I know that all of us as entrepreneurs sometimes take for granted the fact that we show up in a room. And some of the best marketers and entrepreneurs are a handshake away from us. And I know how terribly difficult and grinding and hard putting on big events with hundreds of people. So could we give the team and Nate and the rest of the crew a round of applause for putting this on for us? Thank you.

It's always interesting. I feel very humbled to be in front of marketers because I think that marketers have the most powerful skill in the world, and it's being in front of millions of people at scale.

Think about this for a second. Take any of the 25 average people that you meet here and put them in a room, and if they know this much about buying traffic, about conversion, about email marketing, about customer value, take 25 of those people. Those 25 people have more influence than Dr. Oz.

Some of us owe a lot of thank yous to Dr. Oz because he made conversions bump for a really, really long time on sales pages. And 25 of the average people here have more influence than that. Now, somebody like Oz has brand which we're gonna talk a lot about.

But marketers, on average.

Have the ability to scale anything quickly. Now, at the same time, I noticed this problem in this community, specifically the community of media buying, driving a lot of traffic, blowing offers up overnight. And it's this idea that we can scale anything, but we're often scaling really, really bad offers. And I get it. Like, I totally get it, because most of us as entrepreneurs got into this world because we wanted a better life. Most of us got into this because we wanted money. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's not better or worse to be a benevolent entrepreneur versus being someone who is just a greedy capitalist. I own capitalism dot com. I am totally on board with being a greedy capitalist. But as a marketer specifically, you have a very unique set of skills. You have a very special set of resources, skills that, if applied well, make you way more money than you would ever have promoting shitty offers.

So I just like you Got into this game because I was wanting a better life. I remember the moment I was 16 years old, I worked at Dunkin Donuts. We called it the DD Cafe. To keep it a little bit more posh.

Girls will be like, I'm gonna come see you at the DD Cafe. Yeah, you are. I got free donuts. I actually won. I was the president of, like, my student council or whatever it was. And when I was running for president, I would just bring in all the leftover donuts and give them away. It was great.

That was my first experience with voter fraud.

Which thankfully doesn't happen anymore anyway. The bribing votes, that doesn't happen anymore. So I worked at Dunkin Donuts for less than. For just over minimum wage. And I remember coming home one night and I still had the smell of coffee.

On my skin. I'm in bed. I'm just about to fall asleep, and my door very quickly, almost violently opens, and it's my mom, and there's a quiver in her voice, and she says, ryan, you broke the washing machine. Now, I didn't know. Actually spoke to her about this last week because she saw one of my keynotes, and I spoke with her last week, and she's like, you know, ryan, you broke it twice. I did not know I broke it twice. Apparently, there was a screw you had to screw in. I didn't know that was a thing. And I broke the washing machine. $50 repair. She claims she pays for it. I paid for it out of my tip cup from Dunkin Donuts. But the thing that stuck with me about that experience was my mom was so upset over this $50 repair because it set her back yet another month. And that was the moment I decided, all right, I'm gonna live a different life. And the reason I tell you that is, is because we all, at some period in our lives, had this shift where we were gonna have a different life, a different experience, and so we acquired certain skills to be able to do that. For me, that was email marketing. That was search engine optimization. And I went on the journey of becoming an entrepreneur. But I don't know if you've had this moment yet. I hope you have it where you realize the people who never graduate from that moment of, I am just going to extract as much as possible. You really don't even like hanging out with them. And the people who put up shitty offers and drive a bunch of traffic to it and burn it and worry about the FTC coming after them and have sleepless nights because any of their traffic Sources could go away. You just realize that was never the better life that you wanted in the first place. And so what I'm here, if I can encourage you to make one shift, it is that if you apply the skill set that you've built up into this point to a brand that is sellable, you're infinitely powerful. Infinitely powerful. And sometimes it comes. It takes coming to an event like this. Sometimes it takes meeting a bunch of people who you don't want to be like. Sometimes it is one insight that sets you on a different path. Happened for me right after I graduated college, and I was at an event like this, and I met a man named Perry Belcher who's speaking tomorrow. You guys like Perry Belcher? Yeah, both of you. Whoo. Right? So Perry. Perry put on this event. It was this event called Traffic and Conversion Summit. And I went to the event, and I realized, oh, my goodness, the same skill set that I've been developing, the same skill set that I've been doing to promote offers to sell affiliate stuff.

If I really refine this and I apply it to something bigger, there's way more money to be made. And so I went up to Perry, and I was like, perry, I am.

I think I was 23 or 24 at the time. I'm 24 years old. I'm single. What would you do if you were me? And he said, as many girls as possible.

And then he said, you know what I would do?

I'd sell stuff.

Not hopes and dreams.

Not a bunch of scammy offers. Everybody's after that. People are always gonna buy stuff. And that was interesting to me. And I had built. I made all of my money. I had built all of my wealth at that point by looking at channels, looking at where the customer concentration was and showing up in front of them. In the info world, that was Clickbank. In the traffic world at the time, that was Google.

Selling stuff.

Where's the concentration on selling stuff? That was right around the time that Amazon was starting to really pop.

And what I discovered throughout the next couple of years was that the skill sets that you've been developing, the things that you know how to do, that most people in your world, in your community, most people that you hang out with, are wasting their efforts, are wasting their efforts on promoting offers that none of you really want to be promoting at, scaling offers that really aren't building any sort of customer loyalty if applied to a brand or applied to a place like Amazon. It was like bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight. Because it's so interesting. Like, please get this, if you're a marketer and you hang out with other marketers, your skill set and your view of that skill set starts to become very narrow. And what most people in this community don't realize is that skill set, when applied to a business that is actually scalable.

Is an acquirable, sellable, multimillion dollar empire that changes your entire financial future.

And we can make a list of examples where that has been the case. But most people in this world, in this community, are not willing to walk away from the addiction of short term results in exchange for building something that is going to create the type of lasting impact that every single one of us is got into the game to get in the first place. It's this very weird mental switch. But once you get it, you realize that what you've been developing is way more powerful than you've realized up until this point. So when I had that switch, I called a buddy of mine, his name is Matt. Matt was in this world. Matt was buying traffic to offers. Matt was putting up supplement things. And I think it was, I think it was Bing back then that was like the cheap traffic at the time, I don't even remember. And he burnt out on this world of buying a bunch of traffic to offers. They're gonna be gone tomorrow making two grand a day, and then the next day it's gone. Going to the CPA network and grabbing the different landing page for the exact same offer and throwing more traffic at it. Said, I don't want to do this anymore.

And so what if all of this work that we've been cultivating was applied to something that we were proud of? They were applied to something that built up brand that was building up something that could be sold.

What if.

And so we decided to sell stuff on the channel that was Amazon.com and apply the direct response skill set that had been cultivated to be able to bring a flamethrower to a stick fight. And so ran a couple numbers. I remember our first product, it was so funny. Whenever you go into a new marketplace and you're starting over as a newbie, the that like first sale feeling still kicks in. It doesn't matter how successful you are. They're like, I got YouTube ads to work, I got a sale. And it was the same thing with something like Amazon, is it gonna work? And our first product, we got to 25 sales a day and in our brains we're like, wait a minute, okay, so we'll need four of these to have 100 sales a day and 100 sales is a million dollar business. Now here's the interesting thing. I ran the numbers once. My best friend in the world was really big in this world. Still my best friend to this day. He actually lives out here in Scottsdale. I was with him last night and we were kind of reminiscing about the days where we felt like we wasted our time applying our skill set to businesses that didn't matter. And the thing that, that he and I kind of talked about, a big realization was we ran the numbers on buying a lot of traffic to an offer, running it through an upsell sequence, paying or putting it on a network, having an affiliate.

Paying $70 for the customer for a $49 product, putting them through an upsell path, following up with them via email, or putting it on Amazon. And I was making as much per sale as he was.

I was making as much per sale as he was. While he was worried about scale and churning and burning offers, I was putting all my energy into ensuring that my customers were having a good experience and they wanted to come back and buy more.

And so a million dollar business was actually somewhat meaningful in terms of take home profit. And.

Because we're building up an asset that is going to churn out more products, it's now a sellable business. Because there was one other thing that Perry said to me actually when I decided to go this route. And he said, look, every entrepreneur wants to have the experience where you just sit on the beach and sip a margarita and you're quote, done. And I will tell you that exists, but it doesn't happen while you're operating the business. It happens when you sell.

And this was before I had ever sold a company. And I did not want to hear that. I wanted to hear. No, there's a magical point that you arrive at in your business where everything is systemized. Customers don't complain.

I wanted to hear that. Nope. Said it happens when you sell. And so when we decided to go this route, we said, all right, we're gonna build this thing to sell.

And so that meant building up customer loyalty rather than chasing churn and burn offers. Because you can't sell, sell an offer.

You can sell a brand and you can sell a business. You can't even really sell a temporary income stream. Man, I know so many people in this world who spend days, nights, weekends extracting as many dollars through an offer and then they sell it for like two months profit. I sold a business.

You sold your problems is what you did. So the valuable piece that you're building at the end of the day is the brand.

What is a brand fundamentally? A brand isn't sales, brand isn't profit. A brand is trust.

A brand is trust. The value of your company is in direct correlation with the amount of customer trust that they have in your business. The second, the half a second that you compromise that you have now compromised the valuation of your company.

And in this world, that is all about conversion. That is all about what is the immediate customer value, which is important, but not at the expense of customer trust. Assuming, of course, that you're building something that you want to sell. Assuming of course that you're in this because you want to maximize your value in the marketplace and the value of your life.

The second that is compromised, you become an offer hawker rather than building a legitimate business. And I can tell you you will make way more money if you operate on a business foundation that can be scaled and as a result be sold.

So we built up a couple different brands. We used Amazon. I'm often labeled as an Amazon guy. I am platform agnostic. I believe in going to where the customer is giving them the easiest checkout process possible. And if you're selling physical stuff, that place right now is Amazon.com and they're projected to double again over the next three years. So they're going to continue to be the powerhouse for a few more years and probably a few more decades still the greatest opportunity to launch a new brand, in my opinion. So we built that for four years. We ended up giving, getting an offer to be acquired that we actually earlier than we expected. About a year and a half ago.

We sold that business. And today my mom will never have to worry about a broken washing machine ever again.

Who said boom? Yeah, boom. Sauce.

So.

Let'S look at the landscape, like the state of the marketplace here. There have been a few very interesting developments over the last 12 to 18 months. First, Amazon made an acquisition a little over a year ago. Does anybody remember what it was? Oh, you heard about it? Yeah. They bought Whole Foods and they ain't done. There will be more acquisitions and the day will come when a company like Facebook acquires Target.

What happened in the news this week, a retailer.

What's that?

Amazon did increase minimum wage, but Sears declared bankruptcy.

I would not be surprised if you see an Internet company acquire them.

It's distribution. It would actually be a smart play for Walmart because Walmart is trying real hard to get their E commerce game.

They're trying real hard. I've had a few Conversations with some influence people at Walmart. They can't get out of their own way. Walmart. If you watch this recording, call me again.

They're trying real hard. Might be it might be a good play for them to acquire Sears and go Sears like. Like do a hybrid E Comm Retail. Anyway. All this to say that you're starting to see the integration of E Comic and traditional retail. And it is only a matter of time. And we have our first example. It is only a matter of time when somebody is killing it on Amazon and you just start showing up in Whole Foods and other retailers across the country and across the world. Happened with Bulletproof. Probably the best example in our world. Started as a blog.

Wasn't a particularly good marketer, good promoter, not necessarily a good marketer. Had a podcast, sold some coffee, started to scale it and now if you walk into and then sold a ton on E Commerce and Amazon, what happens? Walk into any Whole Foods and you will see dedicated space for Bulletproof. They'll probably end up being a billion dollar company.

This much application of good marketing to a well done physical products brand versus a crappy offer changes everything.

You show up with one of Elon's, not flamethrowers to a stick fight. That's what happens. Now a couple other things have happened in the last 18 months or so. Anybody familiar with Rxbar?

About half of you. And yet they were still acquired for half a billion dollars.

The revenues were only. They were under $100 million.

It's kind of absurd. That's absolutely absurd. Now why is that happening? Because big money cannot innovate. And as fast as entrepreneurs can. Company was only four years old. When you realize that big established businesses, their model.

Is to buy other businesses. Who bought RXBar? Does anyone know? Kellogg's. Now Kellogg's has the infrastructure to build their own bar. They have their own bar. But they can't innovate as fast as entrepreneurs can. Especially entrepreneurs who know half of what you do.

A couple other acquisitions that have happened in the last year, I don't know if you've heard of any of them. One of them was called Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club, they sell razors.

And they sold for a billion dollars. Why? They dialed in one piece of direct response advertising, YouTube.

And what did they do? They built up a whole hell of a lot of customer trust and they built up a real brand and it sold for a Billy.

And people in this world walk around like comparing whose dick is bigger than the other person's dick? Who's Buying more traffic than the other person, who's making bigger offers, whose upsells are more aggressive than the next person. And meanwhile, Michael dubin.

Dials in YouTube advertising and six years later sells for a billion dollars.

So what I want to walk you through is if, if and how we were starting a brand from scratch, how we would dial this in using the skill sets that most of you have. And full disclosure, my entire focus, my entire thesis right now is going out and partnering with people who have influence, partnering with people who, who have audiences and building physical products brands around that influence. I'm raising a fund to be able to fund that infrastructure to invest in physical products brands. I am all in on this. All in. My goal is to buy the Cleveland Indians. I decided that when I was between 9 and 12 because I wanted to be the general manager of the Cleveland Indians because I'm fascinated with the business side of baseball. I went to school to be a pastor. That didn't happen, by the way. Realized I was never going to be the general manager because that would be one job that somebody else had to give me. So I guess the better route here is I'm just going to have to buy the team.

And we're looking at billion dollar valuations on companies that are a few years old. I am all in on this space. All in.

So if we were doing this from scratch, it would look like this. The flamethrower to a stick fight analogy that I keep bringing up is that if you have an audience, if you have.

10,000, 100,000, a million people that you can send over to kickstart a launch, you win. Most of the people even to this day on sites like Amazon are throwing up a product and waiting and seeing what happens, or.

They'Re grinding and clawing and begging and borrowing for every single review because it's a brand new business and they have absolutely no idea how you do what you do in terms of traffic, audience, direct response, no idea. I consult with some very well established brands that think what we do is magic and so. And they're all trying to pivot over to Amazon. I was reading an article last night that there's some very large companies abandoning Google AdWords for Amazon ads, which by the way, you are a better marketer than Amazon and your data is probably better than theirs. And if you have this, this much influence, this much audience, this much direct response knowledge and you take that over to a platform that has a trillion dollar valuation, you're in front of the largest marketplace in the world and you bully Everybody else out of your way. So the way that I would start from scratch and the way that we're playing it is to build a direct response funnel that the entire goal is audience and customer retention. Meaning you have a self liquidating offer that's a physical product, you buy traffic to it just to build up customers and email addresses. That's your job. Part one, part two, you're gonna do an intentional launch of your Amazon presence. So this was one thing that we did really well.

We were in competition with brands and businesses who at the time it was really popular to just give away a bunch of product to try and spike you in Amazon's algorithm. That was the play. So what we did was we just started doing traditional email marketing launches of our products.

Seems kind of obvious, nobody else is doing it.

Still to this day the greatest opportunity that I see like the entire Internet e commerce world is people who do really good marketing to channels like Amazon. And when you combine the two, magic happens. So we started doing these intentional launches just via email with tiny customer lists and basically pre selling 1000 units of product which drives up reviews really quickly, makes Amazon freak out, drives up your ranking. And we just won with me and my partner, no team, no big ad budget, working half as hard as most of you do in the CPA offer world and dialing in the customer experience, ensuring that they're ridiculously happy, ensuring that our products, we'd actually be proud to show them to our mothers.

And that. And by the way, if you don't do that, Amazon will crush you because we're now all exposed. I mean reviews are like the first taste of exposure to a brand.

So when your customers trust you and they buy from you and they recommend you, now we have a scalable business.

And so in this way we launch the Amazon channel, we have our direct response funnel and then it's a process of continually rolling out new products and building out our distribution which I predict over the next year to three years will become increasingly integrated with retail.

And those who play that well will win.

A good example of this, probably the best example from our community our space would be organifi. It did a perfect execution of this. 8 out of 10.

Drew the founder had an audience, they were loyal to him. He sold info products, wasn't happy, came out with a physical product that they were really proud of.

They launched it via an e commerce checkout process. We're able to buy traffic to that built the audience even bigger. Launched on Amazon, they're four times the price of all of Their competitors, which is often a big question that comes up is like, well, how am I gonna sell at. I'm used to selling $67 offers. How am I gonna make my margins work on a $19 product? You don't. Because brands don't cheapen their product by racing to the bottom. Brands have audience and they have trust, which justifies a price point, four times the price of your competitors.

And so that's what they did. Four times the price of everybody else, which gives them the margin to play this really well. And they outsell most of their competitors.

Not just in terms of profit but in terms of quantity. And they continue running their direct response funnels and Amazon plays a role and they can take all that data to a retailer and say put us in your shop. And that's very persuasive. One of Walmart's higher ups said to me once, I just got out of a meeting and the conversation that was had was go find the best selling products on Amazon and, and put them in Walmarts. It's gonna, I mean the integration of these two worlds is going to get very interesting over the next few years. Very interesting.

I'm fascinated by a specific entrepreneur who some of you may or may not know. His name is Brian Lee. He the founder of the Honest Company.

And was also the founder of LegalZoom. And he was, I do events once a year called the Capitalism Conference. And he and I just did a Q and A, like a fireside chat and just listening to him talk about how he thinks about his businesses where he says, well first I find out where the distribution is and it's usually an audience and then I go make products that are different enough in the marketplace to stand out.

And I combine them.

That's. And then he builds billion dollar companies.

And if you're a marketer.

Who has half the skill set that I know you do, you're selling yourself short. If you are not playing this long game of building something to be acquired.

Of building something that actually builds customer trust and loyalty and builds a brand because that's where all the valuation and all of the money is to be had. That's why being in a room like this is kind of humbling because your skill sets, when correctly applied, change your life and a lot of other people's as well. So I consider it a privilege to share some of this with you and to be among you. I think you, not just entrepreneurs, not just capitalists, but marketers specifically have the greatest potential to impact whatever you want to do. So please scale what matters to you, not just what brings in a temporary result. You can scale whatever you want. We've now marketers can now say they've elected a president.

You can scale whatever you want.

You can scale whatever message, you can scale whatever offer. You can scale whatever profit center, product, business you want. You have a very, very powerful skill. Please use it well. I love you. Thank you for having me.

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