Sean Coyne: Step By Step to Six Figures on Amazon

Foreign.

Hey, everybody.

Ryan Daniel Moran here with a very special episode of Freedom Fastlane. Today I am actually going to be sitting in the studio with my good buddy and business partner, Sean Coyne. Sean is my detail Guy on Zen ActiveSports, which is my yoga products company, which is based almost exclusively on Amazon.com and we're going to be going through a bit of our step by step process. You know, I am the high level guy, the high view person who thinks about marketing and sales and strategic vision. I'm really good at that. And sometimes I get questions from people who want to know some more of the details. How did you do xyz? And I go, I don't know, ask Sean. So finally I just decided, hey, Sean, why don't you come on the Freedom Fast Lane podcast and we'll address some of the details of what it actually looks like step by step to build a successful Amazon business. It's taken us a little bit longer than we wanted for this company to be successful, but we're just turning a corner and starting to get really profitable. And so this is a perfect time to have Sean on and talk about the things that we wish we had done differently, the things that we did really well. And if you really wanted a step by step plan on Amazon, this is going to be exactly what you were hoping for. Also, I should let you know that the tribe is opening up soon and it's gonna be opening up in October. That is my mastermind that Sean and I both run and we'll be doing it and helping people start Amazon businesses. So make sure you are tuned on freedomfastlane.com for announcements about that. So enjoy this chat with my buddy and partner, Sean Coyne.

Hey, everybody.

Ryan Daniel Moran here with Freedom Fastlane. And today we're doing something a little bit different. I am sitting next to my business partner, Sean. He's my partner on Zen ActiveSports, which is my. Which is our yoga products company where we sell mats and blocks and towels. You can find us@zenactivesports.com I actually keep tabs on the income from that on my regular income reports on freedomfastlane.com and what we're going to do today is just kind of go through our step by step process of, of why we partnered together, of how we built the Amazon business and just go through this step by step. Shawn, you're the details guy. You basically handle everything that I don't know how to do, which is most things I like to say. I am very good at just a few things. And you handle just about everything else. So I want to ask you a bunch of questions that I get from people about the actual detail side of things because I have no idea what happens most of the time. I just worry about marketing and selling stuff. But first, why don't we cover. I would like to hear your side of the story of how we met and why we decided to partner. And I'll fill in where I saw it a little bit differently, but why don't you go ahead?

Sure. So we grew up together, probably met in middle school or so, went to the same church, saw each other every week probably until the time we split off to go to different colleges and then kind of just fell out of touch for no reason other than we went to different colleges in different parts of the country. And it's hard to see someone lives 20 hours away. However, it wasn't that far, but still.

It was like four hours.

Yeah, 24. Whatever.

It was not that big a deal.

All right, I guess I could have.

But then we probably a couple years ago reconnected on Facebook and got to talking and I mentioned how I was selling inflatable movie screens on ebay and Amazon.

Would you share about that process? So he tells me, I'm selling inflatable movie screens. I was like, tell me about your process. And he said, so my process was.

I would go to target.com I would buy a movie screen.

I would use full price, right?

Full price. Sometimes I got a coupon. Those were good days. Use a 5% target debit card. So I got 5% discount. I would sell it on Amazon or ebay or both. Mark up the price a little bit to cover the cost of listing. And I probably made 20 to 30 to 40, depending if I had a coupon. Dollars per screen. Sometimes, you know, in the spring I was making, you know, enough to pay off a lot of my student loans, which was pretty cool. But it's also super manual process and required me to spend a lot oftime on target.com.

You'Re selling them every day, right?

Yeah, every day. Sometimes three or four a day.

So there are days you're making like a hundred bucks a day buying stuff on target.com with your 5% off debit card and then zipping them over to Amazon and ebay. Correct.

And I tried, I thought maybe it's inflatables. I tried to sell inflatable kayak, inflatable bounty houses. I never sold a single one. But the inflatable movie screens, that did work.

Alright. So for those of you who are like, I have no idea how to start a business. I roll my eyes at you because Sean was like, I'll just buy stuff on Target and sell it on Amazon and ebay. And I basically told you you were an idiot. I'm sorry about that because you were making good extra money from it. But I was like, hey, let's just. You're working this hard for this little money. I think we can take your ability and do something a lot better.

Yeah.

So we decided, I don't remember why we decided to partner, how we knew that we had complementary skills.

I think we were talking about if the actual movie screens would be good to sell on Amazon. Doing a white label process. We kind of looked into the demand and what we could get them for on Alibaba. And that probably would have been a huge flop. Which is good that we went into yoga and not inflatable movie screen business.

I think you're right. I think we looked at inflatable movie screens to see if they were a good market and they were not. So we just kind of kept the conversation going. And I think one of the things we did really smart from the get go was we just set, we just set up the rules for our partnership right away. I think exact words for you was let's treat this like it's your business since you're handling all the details of everything anyway. I'll provide some funding and ideas and connections and networking and stuff like that. And we were cool with that arrangement and we followed that ever since. And as a result, it's been fantastic working relationship where there's a lot of appreciation between at least as far as I. At least as far as I know there's a lot of appreciation between the two of us, which I see a lot of mistakes. That's a mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they just go into a partnership because they're like, hey, we're friends, let's do this thing. But before we did that, Sean and I were like, let's set up the ground rules. Here's how much money each of us is bringing into the partnership. Here is what the split is going to be. Here's gonna be what's expected of each person. And we've, we've never questioned that since. And it's been, it's been a great thing.

Yeah, I agree completely that the consulting buzzword would be synergy.

Yeah. And you said two plus two equals five once in that kind of arrangement. I thought that was a good way to put it. Alright, so I Actually, I'm a little fuzzy on why we even decided to go into yoga. I think maybe I had just been thinking about it, and I said, let's look into yoga. And you ran the numbers and things look good. And there wasn't a whole lot of analysis that went into it. And I think we just jumped in.

I think what we did was I scraped Amazon manually. I just kind of looked and made a list of some potential products, and we had a couple of them that were in yoga. And then we narrowed it down to start with the yoga mat because of the market.

Just. Just the size of the market.

Right, right.

So there wasn't like this analysis of a bunch of keywords. There wasn't a bunch of analysis into really anything except volume. Is there volume in this market and are there profit margins in this market? And that's how we made the decision. It wasn't a lot of. We weren't creative about it at all. I think the most creative thing that we did was when you said, okay, let's find out what this market wants. And you put up a poll to find out what the market actually wanted. So talk about that process a bit.

So when we were first, you know, kind of deciding where we wanted to go with the yoga mat, not being a yogi, or knowing too much about yoga to begin with, I thought, well, I'll just ask people who already know. So I created like, a surveymonkey survey and posted it on Reddit R Yoga, which is a subreddit, and basically just.

He's talking about Reddit.com yeah, Reddit.com it's.

R E D D I T. If you haven't been there, and just basically ask them, you know, what do you want in a yoga mat? And I had a couple different questions, a couple different answers, like, do you want it to be different colors? Do you want to have rounded corners? Basically any feature that I thought might.

Be cool based on what you saw in competition, right?

Yeah. I looked at the competition, and then I looked at what we could do to kind of combine the different features that some competitors had and some didn't to make like a super yoga mat. And it was good because a lot of it turned out to be things that I thought were important, weren't really important, and the things that the yogi community wanted or what we ultimately went with.

When I spoke at Amazing Selling Machine the first time, I was asked the question, when do you roll out different colors and different sizes of your product? And we asked that audience, when Sean put up that survey what color is most important to you on a yoga mat? And. And it was like 80% black.

Yeah. Which was not what I was expecting at all.

So we just decided to only do black. We wouldn't, we weren't going to roll out green if it was only 5% of the market when 80% wanted black. So let's not worry about other colors until maybe never because we'll just hit the majority of the market with one color. I think they also said they wanted it.

Well, how did you come up with the idea for the double sided mat?

I think I asked what kind of features did you want? Like, did you want it to be like soft? Did you want it to be firm, did you want it to be non slip? And that was how we got to the double sided texture. I don't think I ever showed pictures of textures or anything like that that we more inferred from the survey.

Okay. So somewhere along the way we picked up on the idea to do a double sided yoga mat, meaning a different pattern on each side. You flip it over, there's a different pattern and you could use either one. We also found that people liked it a little bit cushier. So there were some complaints about yoga mats being too thin and then there were some of them being too short, meaning they would do a pose and they be at the end of their mat and they'd have to reposition themselves. So we decided to make it a little bit longer than the average map. So those were the big. That was our big creative idea. We found out what the market wanted. We went to our supplier and said, can you do this? They said, yeah, no problem, this is easy. And then we were in business. You also handled the.

Supplier selection process and I think I told you about going to Alibaba.com and you kind of took it from there. So I get a lot of questions about how do you vet the supplier, how do you choose the supplier, how do you make sure they're legit? Talk about that for a bit.

Sure. So I had used Alibaba in the past, not for wholesale, but just personal things, mostly computer related. So I was relatively comfortable with the process. It can kind of be scary and overwhelming if you've never been on there before.

But in order to find the supplier, basically I reached out to probably 10 or so yoga mat suppliers who had decent pictures and looked like they had the quality of mat we were looking for. And some of them never responded. So I wiped them off the list. Some of them responded, but communicating with them was very difficult. So I removed them from the list. And then I think I got samples from three suppliers that I thought I would be happy to work with and we could build a long term relationship.

Would you base that on responsiveness and responsiveness? English?

Yeah, English was definitely a big factor.

Yeah, I think probably those two. I also made sure when I made that original list of 10, there's like some options you can filter on Alibaba, like certified or. I'm trying to. I can't remember off the top of my head.

I don't even know. Are there reviews on Alibaba? Do people peer review one another?

I think so. I think so. But I.

Neither one of us remember, so it.

Couldn'T have been that important. But there are some ways to filter out, like, certified factories. And I did only look at those certified factories.

Okay.

And then I got samples from three suppliers.

And I specifically asked for, like, scrap samples. Like, send me different scraps of different size mats, you know, different width, different colors, things like that, so I could get a good feel for their abilities. And then one of them was clearly superior to the others. And that's the supplier we ended up going with. And it's been working out great. They've been very easy to work with and very accommodating of our. Our quickly growing scale. Starting off relatively small and now kind of shifting that. And so that process worked very well for us.

Yeah, the supplier selection process can be kind of daunting because you don't know them in person. You're worried that some dude in their underwear with bad English just taking your money if that scares you. There's actually a girl in the tribe now. The tribe being my Amazon mastermind, and she'll actually go and vet suppliers now for people in the tribe. We're gonna be opening up the tribe again in October, and it's likely gonna be the last time that we run it before the tribe goes through some. Some facelifts and some changes. So if that's something that you want to be a part of, the tribe will open up again to the public probably for the last time. October. Good group in there. So just to recap, so far, Sean and I partnered because we had complimentary skills. We were very clear about our different roles. We did some market research just to find volume. And we decided that yoga was the area that we were going to go into. And we vetted a whole bunch of suppliers, a whole bunch meaning three. And we asked them for samples and they just shipped us the samples of scrap material, found the best one, chose the one that had the best material and who also had good communication with us. We placed an order and all of a sudden we were in business. There's a couple details I want to ask you about because I never touch anything like barcodes. I don't even know that process at all. I just worry about selling stuff. So barcodes and labels, how did you go about setting those up? Because I know Amazon needs something. I feel like such an idiot asking this question because we've been in this business almost a year and I have no idea how barcodes work.

Sure. So there's a couple different ways you can go, but I'll just go over our way, which I think is the easiest and there's the least amount to go wrong. So especially at first is probably the way to go. So what we did is we purchased a 10 pack of UPC codes. I don't remember the name. It might be cheap UPC codes dot com. That might not even be a real site. I'm not sure. But either way, we purchased 10 and they were $20 for 10. So that kind of gives you a guesstimate of what pricing might be. And we did that before we had our label designed. Now the label design, we didn't. You know, there's. I don't have a great resource to share with you because I designed the labels. Basically what I did is I went to a site with like stock graphics and kind of pulled together some elements to design a label that fit the Yogi community.

We put like a Photoshop file together and zipped it over to our suppliers.

Right, right, right. Yeah. So I designed. Yeah, I designed it in Photoshop. And then our suppliers specifically wanted a PDF and I, before I even started designing, I worked with them to find out what size it was and what size of a buffer they wanted. So, like, they need some extra room to wrap it on top of itself.

So you could get somebody on Fiverr to do that. You get somebody on odesk to make that 99 designs. Yeah. And just. You just zip that over on a PDF file to our supplier and she. She printed it and put it on.

Right, right. Correct. Yeah.

So the UPC codes, you. I know you got them from cheap UPCs, which we're not even sure if that is a real site.

But.

But you purchase them. But what. What the heck do you do with them? I. I don't. I don't know how that works.

Sure. So on the UPC code, there's a barcode and there's a number and the barcode is Just the number in a different format. So you need the number to create your listing on Amazon in order to.

Create the barcode number.

The barcode number. The UPC number. So in order to.

Sorry, do you use one barcode per order? Do you use one barcode per unit?

It's one barcode per specific product. So we have black yoga mats with the barcode, let's say 729. If we have blue yoga mats, it has to be 7 to 8. They have to be different UPC codes for different products because that's how Amazon can say send out the blue mat as compared to send out the black mat.

Okay, so you bought the UPC code and you did what with them?

Right. So then I, I took the UPC code and the file came with, you know, some different size images. I took the one that fit our label and just pasted it into Photoshop. But if you're using.

Onto our label.

Onto our label.

Okay, so the UPC code, you bought 20, we needed one. Right. Went on to our label.

Correct.

And then you gave the same barcode to Amazon.

The number.

Correct the number to Amazon so that when it came in, they could take out all the units, scan it, say, oh, this is the black yoga mat with Ryan and Sean. Let's charge them a lot of money because it's so.

Yes. So the UPC was their key. You don't have to do it that way, but that's the way I would recommend because you need the UPC code anyway, so you might as well use it now. When, when you're first starting, you can allow Amazon to do their FBA labeling. So they're going to put their own barcode on top of it, but they still need that UPC to figure out what it is they're getting.

Okay.

We actually don't have to pay for those stickers anymore. I don't want to get too far off topic, but if you register your brand, you can request a sticker list exception. Sticker list exception. And you won't have to pay that 20 cents anymore.

Okay, so we save 20 cents a unit.

Right. Which can add up pretty fast.

Okay, so that makes sense to me now. I get a lot of questions about shipping.

Sure.

And we, this was a pain for us and we made a whole bunch of mistakes with this. And this is, this is probably, we probably do a lot of things differently in retrospect on this. But talk about the shipping process, how it gets to the states and then how it gets from the states to Amazon's warehouse. Sure.

So this was for me was definitely the most nerve wracking process. The first time we decided for our first shipment to use the suppliers, shipper and freight forwarder and let them handle it.

Meaning they had contacts with somebody who could ship it to a port in I think Seattle. Right. Or Vancouver.

The first time it went through New York, it went backwards around the world. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So our supplier book the first time, booked our cargo on a ship that was gonna take a very long time to get here, but it was cheaper. It just took an extremely long time. But they handled everything. Basically they sent us the bill for the mats and they included the cost of shipping, they included the cost of the customs clearance. And it was just like a one payment and you're done. It was slow and it was more expensive.

So it was like two months, right? Yeah, it took two months of shipping. It was awful.

Right. And it was very nerve wracking because there was no like single point of communication. So I ended up being on the phone with the truck driver, making sure he had a appointment set up for Amazon. All kinds of stuff that you really don't need to be doing, especially when you're paying someone else to do it. So for our second time, we use a US based freight forwarding company out of, they are in Seattle, I believe, called Derringer. But I think their website's a n derringer.com and it went much smoother. Basically talked to them, kind of gave them the heads up of what we were doing, size of our packages, of our cartons, how many we were ordering, where they needed to go, and they gave us a quote and they said, all right, we'll take care of it. Put us in touch with your supplier. So it was pretty hands off.

So our supplier communicated with the freight forwarder.

Correct.

I never knew that happen.

Yeah. And there's actually, not to complicate it more, but our supplier communicated with the shipping company in China that communicated with our freight forwarder that communicated with me.

I'm confused.

Right.

All right, so. So the freight forwarder, the company that takes it from the port in the States to Amazon, right?

Correct.

And they handle that whole process. You're like, hey, talk to these people and they figure it out. Right? Correct. And then there's the shipping company that your support our supplier uses that puts it on a boat somewhere and ships it off into the middle of Pacific Ocean.

Right. But Derringer arranges that. They organize everything from supplier warehouse to Amazon warehouse.

Okay. And there's a bunch of freight forwarders out there. Right. This is the one.

That's just the one we went with. They're great. But, you know, I'm sure there's plenty of other, you know, valuable freight forwarders available.

Okay, so. So the freight forwarder is a company that brings everything to Amazon warehouse, but they do all the communication with the suppliers to make sure it's on a boat somewhere and on time and delivered. Right.

And they handle the customs clearance, which is very nerve wracking as well.

And then they send us a bill.

Right. So they're kind of the middleman that does all the stressful organizing.

Okay. So at this point on the detail side of things and the inventory side of things, what work are you doing? When we want to place another order, what does your process look like? You go to the supplier, you say, hey, we want more mats. And then do they know to contact shipping company and freight forwarder or what does that process look like?

Sure. So right now we have our contact with our supplier and I email her and say we want to order X amount of mats. She'll let me know when they're about to be ready. And then she knows a week before they're ready to send me an email and she'll just check in with me, making sure that, you know, we're good to go. And then she'll email the contact in China. I'll let Derringer know that they should be expecting X amount of mats and know a month or so whenever it gets over here from China. And then I just wait and then I get a bill.

Okay. And the first time we ran this process from start to finish, meaning we placed our order and got it could sell, it was like two months long.

Right.

I think we've got it down about three weeks now. Is that maybe a little bit extra for production time?

Yeah, shipping, definitely three weeks. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, actually, I think it, I think it was closer to. This shipment is very fast. I think as the supplier and Derringer are kind of, you know, getting to know each other's rhythm, they know what lead times the other one needs. Things have been speeding up a lot, but yeah, three weeks is probably a reasonable shipment time.

Now. We talk a lot about shipping and with people who are going through the tribe and people who are new to Amazon businesses. And one thing we wish we could have done, and I'd say at the beginning we should have done this, is just paid the extra money to have things aired, airlifted over to us, especially like samples that took forever to get to us. Yeah, there was A process of getting samples and prototypes and stuff like that that I wish we just spent the extra money to have them put on a plane somewhere and, and airlifted over to us. And rather than have those that month dead period when we first started of waiting for samples and prototypes, I wish we had just paid the extra money. And now when we're talking to new business owners, we say, if you can, if it's at all economical to put things on a plane, even if you're paying a few extra bucks per unit, by all means, please do it. Because you save yourself a month of not making sales.

Compared to having it on a boat somewhere, which can take a really long time. You're gonna end up paying customs fees and ground transport anyway. So if your product is light and small, please put it on a plane. For us, we have oversized yoga mats. Not a whole lot we can do. They have to be on a. On a, on a boat somewhere in a cargo crate. Have to. Otherwise we're paying like 8 million bucks for our supplies, so we don't have a choice. But. And that's why I'm very comfortable talking openly about our yoga business. Because I. If somebody wants to try and go through the headaches of all the shipping, like headaches that we have having an oversized item, I'm like, all right, fine, try and compete with us. We've gone through all these headaches. No one is going to last as long as we have.

And the barrier to entry, capital wise, is large.

It's higher. So let's talk about that for a minute.

If we could.

If we could start over again, there's a few things we would do differently. I don't know that I. I don't. Had I known all the headaches going into having an oversized item, I wouldn't have gone into it. I'm glad we did in retrospect, because we've defeated a bunch of competition. But I. For a new entrepreneur, I would never recommend anybody have an oversized item because you pay extra fees, it's more expensive to ship. You have inventory limits. That was a pain in the rear.

That was really, really a problem.

So Amazon has this limit on products that are seen as oversized, that are bigger than their standard storage size. And since we had a longer and heavier yoga mat, it was oversized, which means, first of all, we had to pay more for their fulfillment. And second of all, we could only keep 500 in stock. And not only that, we couldn't even have any being delivered to Amazon until we were completely out of stock. So we had These huge gaps in between orders that set us back months. And that was, I think, the biggest challenge that we faced, which is why for new entrepreneurs, I would never recommend going into an oversized product. It's been. We're not quite a year into this business. It'll be a year for us in November 2014. But as of, as of this recording, we're just shy of a year. And we're just now getting past all of kind of the headaches and the inventory problems. We just now have all of our systems in place where we can really start growing. And for somebody like myself, who is a stable, secure entrepreneur and somebody like Sean, who's not replying on this business for his primary income, we could weather that storm. Most people who are, who really want a big win in entrepreneurship, that would be, that would be enough for them to quit. So that's, that's something I wouldn't recommend most entrepreneurs do. Is there anything else you do differently?

I would, I would probably spend more.

For the convenience of things. Like I would have the samples overnight. And even if it's was $100 instead of $50, you know, that $50 might seem like a lot on that day, but if you can get your product to market a week early, you're going to make that $50 in a couple hours. So I would definitely, you know, things like that, things like product photos. I would definitely have gone with a professional photographer off the bat.

Interesting. Why would you have gone with a professional photographer right off the bat?

I just, I think.

The loss in conversion rate, even if it's small over the last seven months, would have covered the cost of a professional photographer.

Interesting. So we agree that we would have spent more money up front to get some time back, right?

Yeah, I think that time is worth well more than you'll be spending.

I think that is a big area for new entrepreneurs, is the more you invest up front, the more money you will make moving forward because you'll have higher conversion rates, which puts you up higher in Amazon's rankings, which brings you more customers that will come back and buy from you again sooner. So I know that people who are bootstrapping a business are very protective of their money. But I say the more that you can invest up front and if you can do it wisely and things that directly impact your bottom line, I'm 100% for that. So let's talk about. All right, so we finally got the product. We know how we chose it, we know how we chose the features, we know how we got it shipped we know how we got it to Amazon.

We went through a process. I think it was my idea. This is my one contribution to the business.

Just as one.

Well, actually I should clarify something. People ask me why, why did we start this business? Because this, this is not my primary business. But I was actually, there's actually an interesting story behind why we just, we started this. Some, a lot of you know that a year and a half, two years ago, I shut down what was my business of information publishing. At least about making money online. I shut that down, I went in a new direction. I started the Amazon thing, I started to get comfortable. And now I now what I do mostly besides run my primary business is I invest. And if you listen to the podcast that I have about investing, one of my primary strategies for investing is being the money person, the money and ideas person behind starting new businesses. And I find people like Sean who are really sharp and really hard working and we create a perfect partnership together where this is his first full time business, your first like real business. And that's not, you know, drop shipping, movie screens. Yeah. And, and so he's learning a bunch, meeting a whole bunch of really interesting people that I've networked with over the years. We're using for the most part my money and mostly Sean's time. And that's a perfect partnership for us. So that's, that's why I go into partnerships like this. But let's talk, let's talk about this, this process of how we got it off the ground and launched. Because we did that, we did this well. And this was my, I think my one contribution besides money and ideas of. We decided to build up an audience that we would launch to. We had that first shipment, we had that pretty much two months of dead time. And we said what do we do with this dead time? To make sure that by day one we can take an order. What can we do now in this interim so that when that hits Amazon we can fire off and start taking orders from the get go. And you set up most of it. So let's talk about that.

Sure. So I mean even though I set it up, it definitely was your idea. So what we did was we started to build a Facebook community. And I think that's important to differentiate from a Facebook community page. I don't know what the technical aspect of it on Facebook. You know, you have Facebook pages or whatnot. But we thought about it as a community. So we wanted people to come to our Facebook fan page or following or whatever the heck we say it's a Facebook.

It's considered a page. Yeah, is a technical term.

So we wanted to grow a yoga community within our Facebook page. So we provided, you know, great content. We tried to start conversations. We ran a lot of ads to bring people into our page to increase our likes.

Like 10 bucks a day, right? Yeah, we spent like 5 or 10 bucks a day with an ad that said, do you like yoga? Right. Like us here. That's all it said.

We split test different pictures. And yeah, the copy say the same. If you like yoga, click like with.

An explanation part and that's it.

And it worked. It worked really well. So as we built up that page, we didn't just let the page sit. We made sure we had content. We posted great photos. We asked our fans to submit their own photos, which has been really cool.

The community really likes to add back into it. So people on our page are generating content for us, and all we have to do is click, copy and paste and then give them a shout out and they're happy, we're happy, and the community's happy. So we built that page up to 5,000. Did we launch it 5,000?

The first time, I think it actually was less.

Less than 5,000?

Yeah.

All right, so somewhere less than 5,000. And we. Do we. Well, I don't remember what we did from there. Is that when we ran.

Well, we're about two weeks before we knew it was gonna be at Amazon, we started releasing the pictures that we had taken of the prototype. And so mixed in with all of these fan photos were pictures of our prototype of, hey, we're launching a yoga mat. And all of a sudden this community of 4,000 active members is like, sweet, a new type of yoga mat. And then we just started talking about it once in a while in between all the content. And then we had a contest for free yoga mats. And so the day they hit Amazon, we had people sharing our content about our yoga mat, entering to win our yoga mat, and we were giving away, I think 10 a day for five days.

Yeah, sounds about right.

So we gave away 50 yoga mats, which was fairly expensive. I mean, it costs us 17 bucks or so to make to produce and ship the yoga mat. Is that right?

Plus, we have to pay the Amazon fees on it. So we were losing money every single time.

So we probably lost about a thousand dollars doing that giveaway. But as a result, we now had a community talking about our yoga mats. We had organic sales coming in. We're starting to rank in Amazon because all of a sudden we have People buying our yoga mat right away and getting it from Amazon, even if they had a coupon for free or half off or whatever it was, it didn't matter. Amazon sees there's a lot of activity around this yoga mat. We got reviews really fast because our community bought and reviewed and we basically had this launch go. And as a result, I think we built that up a lot faster than most businesses who just sit around and wait for sales to come in. And that made a tremendous difference in our process. We continue to do stuff like this now. For example, we're now looking at rolling out a blog for our brand and we're having our community create that content and submit photos and blog posts and video posts. We're using our community to do that for free so we don't have to pay anybody for content. We will do launches to that community for new products, for random giveaways. If we want a spike in sales, we'll do coupon codes. So that was a good move for us was building that audience. You could do this with an email list, you can do this with a Facebook page, you can do this with a forum.

The communication vehicle is not as important as do you have a responsive audience that wants what you have. So no matter what you're selling, ask yourself the question, can I build a community or a responsive list around.

This topic, around this idea? Alright, so Sean, now we've moved, now that we've done this business, we've been at almost a year, we have basically our systems down.

We'Re finally profitable, we're finally, our bank account is starting to grow and we've seen a lot of people come in through the tribe and through a lot of different channels, building their own Amazon businesses. And you and I both have worked with people, me from a higher level, you work the detail stuff. Where have you seen people have struggles on the side of details and what solutions do you offer to them?

Sure. So I think the time span where the most issues occur is between day zero, when you decide this is what you want to do and when you send the check to your supplier. So once that, once your checks to the supplier and your car goes on its way to Amazon, a lot of the back end work is done, but in between that time there's so much to do. I think people get overwhelmed and they confused and they lose track of what they need to do now and they start worrying about like the launch. But if you don't have your product chosen, how do you. You shouldn't be worrying about the launch. So the Thing that I would say, I am a very organized person. So I would say make a list of what you need to get done and then just do one thing at a time. Humans are not very good at multitasking. You know, we like to think we are, but we're really not. So you need to focus your time and energy on that single thing. And for a lot of people, that single thing is finding the right product.

For us. We looked at what market did we see the greatest volume in where we could compete, and then we went with one. I think if you spend too much time overanalyzing it, I mean, you're losing money every day that you don't have a product. So if you're losing money, you're already losing money. So you can't lose more money than the money you're losing.

So I would say to people not to overanalyze the product selection. Find one that they see a strong market and then just go with it.

You also, you have this kind of philosophy that I think has freed you up a lot. And I think we're talking about it last weekend where.

I've been frustrated. I'm the driver, right? So my vision of this is, Sean, we're gonna build this into a 5 million dollar company, sell for a bunch of money. I'm going to buy the Cleveland Indians. I'm exaggerating slightly, but no, he's not. Well, I am going to buy the Cleveland Indians. We are going to sell this company for $5 million. But I'm the driver behind this. Your goal was you're like, in one year, wouldn't it be nice if we sold like 10 mats a day? Right? Which is still my goal, which we started doing like day one.

I think it took like six days and we were selling ten mats a day. So my goal is pretty much met. So.

Well, you have this very laid back approach to the where you said to me last week, you said everything, that I'm gonna invest financially. I've already invested, so it's not like I'm gonna lose any additional money. So I have no stress about the business. I just run it. And I know that it's gonna grow into something special and I don't have to worry about how much is in the bank right now. And I don't have to worry about as long as we can afford to buy more inventory and continue to roll it over and own more product, because Sean and I don't. We haven't gotten paid from this business yet. There's about an 8 to 12 month curve and we were set back a few months because of shipping and inventory issues. So we still have a few months before we're in the clear on paying ourselves. But you still seem so laid back about it. And I see so many entrepreneurs get tense and stressed and I think that has allowed you to get a lot of things done. So how do you handle your emotions when it comes to this business?

So I would say there's a very big difference between being calm and being relaxed. I think I'm very calm. Quite often I'm not relaxed. So although I might not have stress about, you know, losing that money because that is how I think about it, it's gone. As long as I'm not losing more, I'm happy. And I don't really know how I would lose more without putting in more. So you know, on that aspect, I'm not stressed about the, the financial impact of this business. You know, I don't, I don't rely on it, which is really cool thing to have. But as far as the, the day to day details, I often get stressed out about what I'm doing that day. But I try and organize everything into massive lists with sub lists and lists that link to other lists and give me a head. I'd probably make a giant diagram. But once I have everything written down then I only have to be stressed out about what is important right now. So think your perception of no stress is managed stress.

Okay.

Manage stress and, but you use it.

In a positive way. You channel your stress into productivity. Right?

I have very.

Yeah, very channeled stress. So it's specific stress per day. Instead of this overwhelming out of control what do I do? Stress. It's stress. Because I know this needs to be done right now.

Well, I think, I think what I see is that you don't have financial stress, right?

Yeah, no, definitely.

You're not worried about the money in the business, which most new entrepreneurs worry about. They worry, they worry about how hell, I worried about money for years into my business. It's only been in the last. It's since I retired from doing stuff I didn't want to do. Businesses that I wasn't passionate about. That's when I stopped worrying about money, which is really bass ackwards. But I think what I'm hearing you say is that you recognize there was a risk. You were, you took a risk that you were comfortable with. Didn't mean that it wouldn't hurt or that it, you wouldn't. You want. It's not that you didn't want it to work out or anything. It was just a comfortable risk.

Right.

You were, you knew that you were okay with that. You set it aside, said, okay, that money is gone, I've planted that seed and that will sprout someday, I hope.

Right.

And you were, you didn't eat into your life in order to plant that seed. Right?

Correct. Yeah. I only used money that I could afford to lose. So going in the worst case scenario after I put that money in was I just don't get that money back. You know, if I don't, it's fine, you know, my life's not really going to change for the worse.

Well, I think you having that approach because I won't name names, but I have one good friend who has, who does not have that approach. He has the approach of I'm in this business and I need the money now. And it very much impacts the way that he builds that business.

Right.

Because now all of a sudden the long term is blocked by this immediate need for cash. Which, which, which means that the decision making process is not as healthy is what, that's what I would use. Is it thinking longer term, planting longer term seeds is a much healthier way when you don't have that stress. And I think that has allowed us to make really good decisions for the long term.

Yeah, definitely. And not to get too far off track, but we've seen this with publicly traded companies, CEOs that are compensated, the majority of the compensation is, you know, based upon their stock performance. They'll make bad decisions for the long term to make money now. So I think it's kind of the same, you know, mindset.

Instead of trying to make money this month or this week or even this year, it's more of a long term goal which allows the stress of the strategy to be eliminated so I can focus solely on the stress of today.

Amen. Alright, so I got one more question for you. I am the idea person, I am the.

The majority investor. I drive things forward. But how the heck do you get so much done? You manage so many details, it makes me want to throw up because I could never do that. So how the heck do you do that?

I think the lists really are a big part of it. I mean, I use my phone for a list, but you can always use like a notepad or something. Although a phone's probably better. But I'll make lists of anything and everything that I think may or may not need to be done. So on my list right now is to get a haircut. I Mean, obviously I'm not going to forget to get a haircut, but now I don't have to think about it. So I can like on the app I have, you can star items from any list and it goes to a star list. And that's the list that I work off of week to week. And as it dwindles down, I add more things. I just look at what's the most important thing that needs to be done and I star it and then I do it and then I say, what's the most important thing that needs to be done? And I star it. And just like a cyclical process. So instead of having to worry about the 400 things on my list, I only see the 7 or 8 that are in the star list and those are the ones that I work on.

Sean, you are a freaking rock star. My man. So proud to call you my business partner. Thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fast Lane.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Our business is called Zen Activesports. If you want to check us out, it's@zenactivesports.com I also report on the income, the monthly income reports on freedomfastlane.com you'll also find us on Amazon. Obviously. We have a yoga towel, a yoga mat, a yoga block, and some other products in the pipeline as of right now. And if you liked this podcast, we tried to make this as step by step as possible for you new Amazon entrepreneurs. Do me a favor and share this with somebody who has been thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, who has been thinking about Amazon as a potential channel or business model. Share this with them. We'd love to help somebody overcome some of the challenges at the beginning. And also, it always means a lot to me when you leave a nice review for us on itunes. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane and we'll see you on the next ship.

Well, there you have it. There's the step by step plan for how Sean and I built a six figure business on Amazon. Even with a ton of setbacks, way more setbacks than I expected. Without them, we'd be way ahead. But we have finally turned a corner and are getting really profitable at this point. And really, in the long run, we're just getting started. Hey, if this is a business model that you're thinking about, I am opening up spots in the tribe in October, likely the last time that I will be doing the tribe, at least in its current format. So if this is something that you're looking at pursuing and you want my help, my personal help, basically for free, it's a bonus for using my affiliate link to buy some stuff. This is going to be your opportunity to do that, so make sure you are signed up to the newsletter@freedomfastlane.com thanks so much for listening to Freedom Fast Lane and I'll see you on the next show.