The State Of Ecommerce & The Landscape Of Opportunity

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S welcome to capitalism.com I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Today we're going to talk about the state of E commerce and the current landscape of opportunity. Chapter one of my book 12 months to 1 million talks about my overall thought process of why I focus so much on physical product brands. But things have changed and amplified in the light of COVID and quarantine and in my opinion the pace of change has accelerated and the landscape of opportunity has collapsed time. What that means is a lot of the things that we said were going to happen are happening now. A lot of what we already saw happening is happening faster. New opportunities that were on the horizon are now our present reality. So today we're going to talk about the state of what all that looks like and how it affects the overall landscape of opportunity when it comes to building an E commerce business. Now I've told this story before and it is even more relevant now. I'm often asked the question have I missed the boat? Are all the opportunities gone and am I too late? And I tell them the story that I built my first business on my parents dial up computer in our living room in 2006 on a 56 6K modem and I hand built my websites with HTML and Dreamweaver. If you know what those are, you're old. And I didn't have high speed Internet. I couldn't wait to go to college for the high speed Internet. There was no high speed Internet. There was no wifi, there was no.

Amazon in the There was no FBA, there was no WordPress, there was no Shopify, there was no Facebook advertising platform, there was no Spotify, there were no podcasts, There was no YouTube, there was nothing that we have now. I was an affiliate marketer. I knew how to get websites ranked in Google so that I could get the traffic from Google for keywords and sell things when they hit my website. And I made several hundred thousand dollars a year from my college dorm room doing just that. In fact, we're talking about it in one of our upcoming lessons inside the 1% because it's still relevant today. Now, a few years in, things changed and a lot of people ran away from affiliate marketing or search engine optimization because it got too hard. Because the wide open west period of being able to rank websites in Google had closed affiliate programs changed. Yet had the those people stuck it out they would have seen that all kinds of new opportunities opened up. WordPress made it easy to build websites and Facebook ads created a whole new landscape of traffic opportunities. This thing called influencers would pop up and there would be free traffic from people who had followings. There were all these new opportunities that started to pop up, but people were not willing to change along with them and, and to bring those new opportunities into what they were presently doing. This is the case of E commerce sellers today who are used to selling products in a specific way without seeing all of the new opportunities that are quickly opening up. And that's why if you're starting a business today, you're in the position to take advantage of all of those new opportunities without the baggage of how you think things are supposed to be or how they used to be. Right now, as I record this, retail stores are starting to close up shop theaters are closing up. Dress Barn, which I invested in when it became an E commerce platform, closed their retail stores. They're doing great on e Commerce. Pier 1 just announced that they're going bankrupt. And other major retail stores, theaters, in person, entertainment companies are either talking about bankruptcy or are filing for bankruptcy. Even Walmart shoppers are starting to shop online. That's a sign. Those who are used to going to the grocery store and buying Walmart groceries are now for the first time discovering direct to home delivery. They're discovering Instacart, they're discovering Amazon. They're discovering they're the last people in the marketplace to do it, but they're discovering the convenience of having everything delivered to you.

We are on the what we call the laggard side of the adoption curve. That means that the late adopters, the laggards, those who held onto the way things were supposed to be, are now coming into the marketplace. It's your grandma with a cell phone. Your grandma might have resisted getting a cell phone, but now she has a cell phone. This is a fun fact. My 101-year-old grandmother still does not have a cell phone. She held out, but my 90 year old grandmother has one.

This is what is happening with E Commerce. We have the final last group of people being pushed to buy online. And as a result, the pace of change is about to get faster. Old established businesses, and I'm talking businesses like Jif, very old established, Brawny, Bounty.

Green Giant, I mean the oldest Campbell's soup businesses that would never ever be threatened are now going to be threatened because all of the activity is moving to E Commerce and you are in the position, especially if you have fresh eyes or you are looking to start something new or you're ready to go in a new direction or it's time for you to double down on what's been working up to this point. This is your spot. In fact, I'd be willing to say that if you've been on the sidelines for this long, that your procrastination has been rewarded. Because we are entering into a new era when it comes to E commerce in which things are about to get real real. It's about to get real interesting. Shit's about to go down, shit's about to change real fast. Some things are happening in the marketplace, some things are happening that are opening up more opportunities that almost require that you get good at this stuff. You're gonna be an e commerce participant in some way or the other, whether you are running the company or you're working for one. Because it's about time we drop the E. It's just commerce at this point. Commerce is now online. Brands are now online. Business is now online. Advertising is now online. It is all online at this point. So we can drop the e. If you work for a company, you're in E commerce because you're in commerce. Where we stand in this whole life cycle right now is more and more big brands are buying up small ones now. This has been the case for several years now, but. But it is reaching its full maturity. On the day that I am recording this, Joe Rogan just announced that his podcast is being moved over to Spotify in an exclusive deal worth over $100 million. What we're seeing in this is an edification of podcasts and online media to the point where a publicly traded company will now acquire that business for nine figures. I said business. It's not really a business. They acquired the to Joe Rogan's content for over $100 million. There was no specificity yet about if Joe gets to keep the advertising revenue. So he might actually get to keep the advertising revenue and have $100 million sponsorship. Kind of like Oprah did, right? Oprah had a big contract, but she also had her own businesses underneath that. Joe Rogan was a case study in my book 12 months to 1 million. Because Joe launched Onnit. He worked with Aubrey Marcus was the influencer behind Onnit. But that was nine years ago. So this was before Joe was Joe and still it launched a nine figure business that was onit and now a nine figure deal. That is Spotify's deal with Joe. So we are seeing the full spectrum happening now of big businesses. And by the way, Spotify was a small business just a few years ago. Acquire other audiences and now they're going to be the network. So what does all this mean, what this means is where we are right now today. We are in this part of the cycle where big brands are acquiring small ones, but the, the, the small brands are becoming the big brands. So the way you win now is by starting a small brand that focuses on a very core group of people who want what you got. I was talking with Jason Hartman this morning. We did a podcast together for his show and he brought up the example of Airborne. Airborne was an immunity supplement that got big because it was on Oprah. And what I told Jason was if you back the story up just a little bit earlier, that was a product directly marketed to teachers. It was made by teachers for teachers who were tired of getting sick around their kids. That was the story. So that was the story of this small little entrepreneur who had this cool idea, who then, after telling that story over and over again, got picked up by Oprah and it went bonkers. Now most people will say, oh, that got big because it was on Oprah. But that's not the truth. The truth is the product in the business got big because it targeted a very core group of individuals. Oprah saw that, edified it, and then it was acquired by another firm who wanted that market share, who wanted to be in front of those buyers. When you realize that the entire name of the game is distribution, getting in front of people, then you become a really good entrepreneur because you choose the person you start with, knowing that they're going to bring it to everyone else and knowing that someone else is going to pay you. Not because you have a great product idea, not even because you have a great business, but because you have the market share of a specific group of people and another business wants to tack on that distribution into their current business. This is the only reason why Amazon is the best place to start selling physical products. They have the distribution and boy, do they ever. But the minute that changes, there will be a new girl at the dance. Think about Google advertising. When I started as an entrepreneur, people thought the only way to make money was to run Google pay per click ads. And then they, quote, stopped working. People went over to Facebook and all of a sudden, and still to this day, people think only way to drive attention is through Facebook advertising. And of course that consolidates a bit and then it moves over to a new platform. The name of the game is who has the distribution at the lowest cost. When it comes to physical products. That's Amazon might be Shopify at some point. They seem to be doing some pretty cool stuff. So it might be the, the Combination of Facebook and Shopify. Just this week, Facebook and Shopify announced a partnership where you're going to be able to take orders directly through Facebook because of their relationship with Shopify. Do you see what's happening? Everything is moving to make it faster, easier, cheaper to get in front of customers and to give them what they want. And it's becoming so frictionless. It's so fast. And there's more of this innovation happening over and over again. If you're an entrepreneur and you're not a part of this, you're.

I want to say an idiot, but I'm a nice guy.

If you are an entrepreneur and you are not exposed to this in some way, like what are you doing? What are you thinking? What are you thinking about? And that's not fair because what you are thinking is, yeah, but. Or there is fear over what you're doing right now, changing. And so you're clinging to that rather than embracing the speed and the scale that is happening in the world to make it possible, faster, easier and cheaper for customers to get the products and services that they want via the mechanism that they prefer. Which it is now official, that's online.

When Walmart shoppers are going online rather than walking into Walmart. We won. We did it, guys. We won the game. And now it's a new era. Now it's a new round. It's a new wide open west period. It's a new opportunity to build great micro brands. It's a brand new opportunity for you to build something that puts you in front of the brands who want to buy you as a business. It's a new gold rush because there's more buying behavior online than there's ever been. There are more opportunities to get in front of customers than there's ever been. Advertising is somehow miraculously cheaper right now than it's been in a long time because so many companies have pulled out of advertising due to Covid and quarantine. There is this magic moment right now, right now that is probably the best opportunity for entrepreneurs in the history of the world. On page seven of my book, 12 months to 1 million, I have a headline that is how to create a billion dollars with a Tweet. And I tell the story of Carl Icahn tweeting about Apple stock and how after he tweeted about it, the stock valuation soared. And it was the first time that I saw real influence when someone could have the attention of a core group of people and it be so influential that you increase the money in the economy by A billion dollars. That's amazing. And now I look back on it and it seems archaic because Oprah can do that, Tim Ferriss can do that, Donald Trump can do that.

If enough of us got together, we can do that. We're here to do that@capitalism.com in fact. Hold on, let me run the numbers here for a second. If a thousand people have built million dollar businesses, that's a billion dollars, right? So it's not quite with a tweet, but we here as a community have created probably a billion dollars worth of value with a podcast. That's pretty cool. That's just a realization I just had collectively work Carl Icahn.

I'm basking in that thought for a moment. It's real influence. We've done some pretty special things here, folks, and it's just now beginning because what was strange in 2014 when Carl Icahn made that tweet is now getting more and more commonplace. Elections are now being decided online. Do you realize this is the first election we're not going to have debates.

And if they are, they're probably going to be virtual or no audience at least. Right? So it's all going to be online. The whole election's online. We're deciding how we're going to be governed via the Internet.

So what was strange in 2014 is now commonplace. We can influence the size of companies, the growth of the marketplace.

And what was important about like still to this day, Carl Icahn doesn't have a huge audience.

But the point being that if you have any attention of a core group of people, you're powerful, you're very powerful. And that is faster, easier and cheaper to do today than it's ever been. And if you put something in front of them that people want, which is also faster, easier and cheaper to do than ever before.

They buy it. And you have a profitable business that can be scaled and sold, which is also faster, cheaper and easier than it's ever been. And there are more people who want to pay for those businesses because they want to build portfolios of businesses. Do you realize how many portfolio brands are out there now going out and buying e commerce companies like the ones that you build? This is the opportunity that exists right now. And if you are not paying attention to it, you are missing out on one of the greatest shows on earth and the greatest opportunity to have a massive change in your life and life around you. I wrote a book on it. It's called 12 months to 1 million. You can grab it on Amazon and things are getting real interesting and real good, real quick. I hope you decide to jump in and at least dip your toe into this water of all this opportunity. Whatever life you want, it's faster, easier and cheaper to create it right now. Whatever you want. And I hope you don't let that opportunity pass you by. I'm Ryan Daniel moran. This is capitalism.com thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next episode. There are two kinds of people in this world. There are members and non members. If you are enjoying this stuff, you have got to join us inside the 1%. 1% members get access to our courses on building businesses and investing the profits. They get access to experts who are bringing in lessons on a regular basis, some of the best in the world. And they're joining regular calls with myself or members of my team to keep the community happy. Growing the 1% is a community of entrepreneurs who are actively building businesses and investing the profits. And every month you get a community newsletter to see what's going on in your community and what the opportunities are to create the change that you want to see in your world. Join us at capitalism.com the number one that's capital capitalism.com 1.