Tribe Hangout 5/24/14

It.

Okay.

If you're watching this on the recording, this is what I have to do in order to set up the hangout. Start it, stand here awkwardly for a while and wait for people to join me. Hello. Morning.

Here.

So this is you and me hanging out watching the recording while we wait for other tribe members to come hang out with me.

It.

Good morning, Ryan.

Hey, man. How are you? Great. Good. And Brian, are you with us?

Yep.

Hey, Brian.

Gotta put my headset on, though.

Give me a sec. There he is.

And close my office door.

Forgive me for the delay this morning. Google. I also have to relearn Google hangouts every Saturday. Let's refigure out how they work. You'd think that at this time they'd have a simple way of doing hangouts. No, not so much.

Not so much. Pat Welch is in the house, everybody. Pat Welch.

What's going on? How you doing, Ryan?

Here.

Are you? What?

I said he's here. He's with us.

I am here. I missed you last weekend. I took a trip down to Maryland. My cousin had her first baptism or first communion.

Cool.

Very cool. So you guys have to forgive me. This is my dedication. I'm in a hotel in Dallas because I'm marrying a couple today. And.

Since I'm in a hotel, I'm literally sitting in a stairwell where there's wifi sitting on the ground. I'll show you guys.

What's up, Anthony? What's up, Jesse? What's up, Greg? Wow, you're pouring in. Hello, people.

Hello.

Roberts is among us.

Whoa.

Hey, guys. We're among greatness here today. Wow.

Wow.

Thank you.

I like that introduction.

And Tim has arrived. The whole gang is here.

How's it going?

Yo.

I'm gonna show you guys my badass office for today's call.

We got plenty of people on the live part now.

So this is my office for the day. This is the stairwell in my Hyatt hotel.

This is where I'm hanging out.

So I'm actually.

Are you guys familiar with Posi Rank, the SEO company? Anybody familiar with Pasirank?

No.

No.

Let's say that you were. You did know Pazurink. I'm marrying the founder of it to his fiance today. There's a whole bunch of marketers. Andrew Hanson is here.

Kachin is here. A bunch of decent sized marketers are here, and we're all kind of crashing together. And the guy I'm crashing with is asleep in my room. So I'm sitting in the stairwell right now talking to you guys.

So I wanted To. First of all, can you guys hear me okay? It's kind of echoey here in the stairwell, but am I coming through okay?

Yes.

All right, good. So what I wanted to cover with you guys today, first of all, I mentioned this quickly in the Facebook group, but I wanted to give a quick overview on what our process with retail has looked like, because a year from now, hopefully some of you will be looking at this. We all know that Amazon's going to get harder. The competition is going to get harder. There's going to be people getting savvier and smarter coming into the marketplace. Our next frontier, if you will, is going retail. We are building our own sales sequences, our own funnels, but we're also looking at going retail. And we scored our first retail deal with chain of six stores. They did a 2000 unit order, and they're looking at doing more if it sells. All of you just froze on me. Can you guys still see me? Yeah. All right, good. Thank you, Jason.

They found us by a bunch of customers going into their stores and asking for us, saying, hey, do you have these guys? Do you have these guys? Do you have these guys? And they kept saying, who the heck are these guys? Guys? So they look us up, find our Facebook page, look us up on Amazon. And they're like, whoa, these guys are the number one people in their space. And all of a sudden we have a conversation that's being started, and very quickly they place an order for 2,000 units.

The lesson here is that if you continuously do the right things, the small right things, over and over and over and over and over again, they compile into massive success. If you've ever read this Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, this is his entire point. In that book. It's the best book I've read in years. He talks about how most people have this idea that success is this big leap, when really success is the building of little tiny until it starts to grow, and then all of a sudden it's exponential. And people go, who the heck are these guys? So they asked us, they said, how long have you been around? We said, a year. You were like, you've only been around for a year and.

We know who you are. And you said, well, who are your best sellers in your store? And they started listing all of our competitors. We said, oh, yeah, we outsell them on Amazon about 12 to 1. And they were like, who are these people? Retail people. Look at your Amazon listings. Retail people pay attention to where you rank on Amazon. Retail people, pay attention to your reviews. I was Talking with someone this week who sells lunch boxes. All right, cool. And he has them in Crate and Barrel. He has them in Kohl's. He has them in one other place, I don't remember. Maybe Bedeff and Beyond. I don't know what's special about his lunchbox, but he has them in these retail stores. And he said that the first thing that people look at.

When they're evaluating him as a company is if they want to keep him retail, is they look at his Amberman page. They look at their description, they look at their reviews, they look at where they're ranked, they look at how they're competing. So it all matters. It all builds on itself. So if you've only. If you're not seeing where this is all going to end, it just keeps building on each other little by little by little by little by little. Does that make sense? Give me a nod.

Yes.

I love seeing the plant heads.

Congratulations on that, Ryan.

That's.

Hey, thank you very much. Thank you.

You're my hero, man.

Yeah, that's awesome.

What's that?

You're my hero. You're my hero.

You're so sexy now, man.

That's sweet. I might high five you later.

Not in front of the others.

Okay, you have a point. I want to hear from our neighborhood friendly Jesse Jane's Ayers.

Hey, good morning. Morning.

All right. Hey, everybody. Yeah, Jesse James Ayers here. I'm doing pretty good. I'm hovering at around the $2,000 a month mark, but I'm just trying to see. See how I can. I'm just trying to see how I can keep, you know, keep breaking through. I'm just like you mentioned at the last live event, which I hope everybody here is able to go to, focusing on reviews. So I am slowly getting some of those. I think I'm hovering at around 11 reviews right now. I've sold. I think I've sold about 250 units so far. So I definitely have a lot of catching up to do.

Okay, would you guys like to hear our super not so secret but very badass way that we're getting reviews right now? Yeah. Okay. So it takes some money.

Hold on.

I'm managing the. I'm going to keep you in suspense pause. I'm managing the.

Same time, and people are saying I'm going to pause. We'll come back to this when you guys are logging in. For those of you who have both watched a hangout and you have attended a hangout, like in here, is it a confusing process between the Two, because it sure is a confusing, wonky ass process to set up.

No, super simple.

You can jump from watch to join.

Really easy.

Like one click easy.

Okay, cool.

Good to know. Because some people are responding to the thread in the email saying the call is full. And I'm not sure if we should say, brad, you just need to watch it, or.

Okay.

Cool. So our cool way that we're getting reviews right now, this costs some money, but if you do it even for a month, you get a whole bunch of reviews and then you can stop if you want. Sean and I started doing this with our yoga mats. And that is that when we have. Well, it's kind of twofold. Either when we have someone on the phone, we say, hey, thank you so much. You guys know my script for calling people, right? Yes, it's. Did you get your product? Was it what you expected? Can we send you a coupon? We tweaked it a little bit and it's been killing it. And it looks like this. Did you get your product? Was it what you expected? Thank you so much for leaving me feedback. I just credited your account with a $10Amazon gift card. Where should I send that email? Okay, is it okay if I leave a link for you to leave us a review in that same email? And the people that are like, what, I can't believe you gave me a gift card. Usually leave a review now, again, we're not giving them a gift card in exchange for leaving a review.

We're giving them a gift card because they gave us feedback on.

Now, we got a notification from a nasty letter from Amazon this week that says, we just got word that you've been sending unsolicited messages to your customers and your account is receiving a warning. Now, we don't think that this has anything to do with us calling our customers or emailing our customers, because everything that we do is totally within the lines of Amazon's terms of service. We think that one of our competitors is falsely reporting us because they've done this before. But we're being safe and we've stopped activity. Until we can clear things up with Amazon, we're thinking about doing it in a different way that doesn't throw up any flags. Just in case we were doing something that wasn't. I mean, if it was against terms of service, we would stop anyway. But just in case we did something that was a little bit unkosher, we would modify it by sending our prospects an email that says, would you be willing to give some customer feedback on the product? In exchange, we'll give you a $10 off or a $10Amazon gift card. And the people who reply with yes, we get on the phone then, and if they've had a positive experience, we ask them to leave a review.

One thing that Travis Sago taught me very well was always ask people for the smallest yes first. Hey, would you be open to having a conversation? Or, for example, we were talking about it in the confines of recruiting JVs. Most people, when they're meeting new people and they're recruiting these, they say, hey, I'm Ryan. You should promote my products. And everybody rolls their eyes, and it's annoying. But if you say, hey.

We could help each other, I wanted to jump on the call, see if there was any connection here. It's an easy thing to say yes to. So with your customers, what is the easy thing for them to say yes to? It could be leaving customer feedback in exchange for a $10Amazon gift card. It could be replying to this email and letting us know how your experience has been. So a really good strategy has been the first autoresponder email is, hey, this is Jesse from isellstuffedbats.com and I just wanted to check in with you and see how your experience has been and make sure your stuffed bat is delicious and cooks exactly how it's supposed to. And if they reply with a yes, it's been what we expected, then you say, great, thanks so much. Would you be open to leaving a review for us? So what is the first, smallest yes that you can get people to do? And if you do that, then your opportunity to get reviews goes up a lot higher than just going to everybody and saying, hey, leave review, Jesse, for you. You're still not at that 30 to 50 review point. You can contact me at everyone you've ever met. Your mom, your sister, your brother, the Pope.

John Stamos, everybody you've ever met, in order to get you until you're at least 30 reviews. Because when you're at 30 reviews.

You'Ll trouble yourselves. It's still your only job.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely been paying attention to my bsr, and, like, the more. The more reviews that I get, the lower my ranking is, so that, you know what you're saying. Definitely works there. But, man, you. You won't believe how difficult it is to try and.

Get my friends and my family to freaking, you know, help me out. It's. It's been ridiculous. It's like, come on, people. Like, I have a free product for you free, Frank? E. E. Come on.

Now you've already given free ones out, right? Yeah, and we haven't up reviews yet.

Hold on, I'm hearing a lot of noise here.

Yeah, somebody's vacuuming.

It was Tim. Are you vacuuming.

My computer? Yeah, I'll stay on mute. I got a couple questions for you I'm gonna throw in the chat box. Alright, cool, cool. So, Jesse, have you already given them the free product or are you saying, hey, here, have a free product if you leave a review?

I've already given about 20 of them away. I'm just waiting for these people to receive them and then I'm going to send them a link here in like a day or so to go give me a review. Like that one I've already got settled that they would give it to me.

Yeah, call them up.

Bug them like heck.

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know what it is, but we all know, I know this from the information marketing world. If you give somebody something for free.

They won't treat it like it's a value. But that's what we have to do on Amazon in order to collect reviews. So you just gotta bug the heck out. Just keep bugging.

Yes, sir.

We went from getting like.

Three to four reviews a week on our yoga maps with this gift card idea to four to five review. Like three to five reviews a day when we started the gift card. Yeah. So no, I'm exaggerating. I remember now it was two and a half, 2.5 reviews per day. So we were like actualized over one year. One year from now. Okay, cool. That's 700 reviews in a year, which would give us the most in the market. The most in the market by just doing two per day. But compound and over time. Great. At that point we have the number one yoga mat on all of Amazon.

Awesome.

That's the power of taking small things consistently over time. Jesse, just blow your customers away with awesome customer experience.

Yes, sir.

No other job except getting 30 reviews. Because at 30 reviews your sales will triple.

All right, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Scout's honor.

Tim.

Are you sending an actual gift card code or a promo code? It's an actual gift card, a digital gift card that credits their account $10.

What we've done is we've given our assistant a credit card with a $200 limit so she can just go in, buy the credit cards on Amazon. Hopefully it's an Amazon gift card, like an Amazon credit card. So we get the 3% back from the gift cards we're buying and she goes in, buys them, credits them to people and that's it.

Makey sensey.

How are you delivering the yes through the Amazon.

Have all give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

If you have chosen a product and secured a supplier, give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Basically yeah, I'm seeing thumbs up. Greg says no ladies.

Awesome. Tim.

Thumbs down. Okay, so for the couple of you that haven't done those things, what are the things that are holding you back from getting to that point?

I've got a couple questions related to shipping.

Sure.

We've got probably a half a dozen suppliers that we've got good correspondence with. First question I got is do people go with air or do they go with sea based delivery of the product?

Great question. If you have a light product like.

Clothing or something that's under 2 pounds, it's usually more beneficial to go airlift. If it's a heavier product like our yoga mats or like Michael's flycatcher, it's an adapter that you put on your hands in order to catch flies when you're in the office.

If you have a heavier product, the economies of scale just aren't there. For air you have to go boat. So I unfortunately have never done an airlift. We've only ever done and it takes for freaking ever. And it's annoying and we hate it but it's the only way that we can do it.

Okay. And then many of the suppliers have asked us do we have our own account to use or do we want to use theirs. And usually they've got FedEx, DHL, maybe UPS.

Do folks normally set up their own shipping account or how does that work?

I never have done that. Where is Sean for my detailed questions?

I've been looking into that a little bit this week.

Ryan. Yeah.

Tell us if it's what they call a one time shipment. They're talking about DHL Air freight. They suggest that you do not set up an account. Now if you're going to they're interested in are you going to be shipping something monthly.

And so they'll do it a one off thing. But there's no really discount doing that. If you can use your shipper's account like in my case from China, then the rates are, you know, I guess they're a little better now I will probably go air freight.

And I'm getting four bucks each piece and my piece sells for a north of 40 bucks each. So that's acceptable.

Does that answer questions?

Yeah, it helps it's just we've seen a big varying degree when all these have been quoted with air freight. So it's pretty much exactly the same product. And one Shipper will charge $2,000 for a quantity of a thousand to ship them air, and another one might say it's 4,000. We're just trying to get grounded on.

What the best approach is. How heavy is your product? Pardon? For Greg. How heavy is your product?

I would guess less than a pound.

You should be able to air it. Yeah.

And then the last thing is this product. With some manufacturers, it by default comes in a box, and other ones it's just loose. So I'm assuming you just can't have a box with a bunch of loose product in it that you ship to Amazon that at least has to be in a plastic bag or something like that. Anything you can offer on that?

That's a great question. How do ours come. I think ours come loose.

I think ours come loose without a cross, which is fine. Yeah.

I know on the ASM call, they said that it had to at least come in.

A poly bag.

So I was just kind of curious because right now we're just testing the waters. I mean, I like your approach of just going with a white label and just keep costs at a minimum just to get a test, see what's going on. That's basically been it for us. We've come across a lot of the Chinese manufacturers that they don't have very good English, so it's been a little bit of a challenge. And then just with the time change, keeping up and trying to set Skype calls up and whatnot, but we're getting through it. But we just want to be really patient and not rush into something.

We'll get there. We want to take each step a little methodically.

This is the first. Usually when people haven't caught up, I kick them in the butt. But for you, I would say you're not behind, you're just being patient.

Yeah, we want to make sure we're getting the best deal, that we're not getting ripped off on shipping, and that we're doing everything. I guess the other thing is, has anybody ever had an encounter. How do you know that if you're sending Amazon a quantity of 1000, that they're not going to potentially reject it, saying we don't contribute X amount of space for this type of product, or something like that? That was a little bit of a concern I had.

Reject the quantity.

Well, if you send. Does Amazon have any constraints that says if I ship if I receive a product. I know you mentioned, I think it was your exercise, Matt, that because it's oversized, they're only going to dedicate so much shelf space for it. On an undersized or a normal sized product. Is it just infinite or 5,000?

5,000, yeah.

But they'll raise that over time, too. Okay.

That's more than plenty to get started.

If anybody has done an initial order of over 5,000 units, we should talk. I don't think that's.

Okay.

That's all I have.

But we should have something secure this week, so I'm not concerned about it.

All right, ladies, let's hear from you.

Hello from sunny County.

Mostly for selfish reasons.

Mostly for salvage research.

Let's hear from some females. What's going on?

Not much.

We've been. We find a supplier for the product we're going to run with. So we're just waiting on some samples and hopefully that all works out. Good. We're hoping to place our order by mid next week. Yeah.

Do you feel confident in the product you've chosen? Yes.

Yeah.

We're a little fortunate in that we already have. Well, I have a business already set up. This is almost just like an extension of the business, so it works pretty good for us, marketing wise. We already have a website. It's fully functional. So we're really hoping that we can use that to market. Market to our existing clients.

Beautiful. You guys got it. Easy, easy.

Hopefully. Hopefully.

Good. It'll be a nice extra channel for you. And as this channel builds up, it will help your existing business as well.

Right, Right.

Yeah. That's what we're hoping for. So hopefully the samples work out. The pin on the backside for us is that obviously we're in Mexico, so just to get a sample takes about two weeks, which is ridiculous. I suppose it's the same if you're sending something from China to the United States.

Are you. Sorry, I gotta call out the elephant in the room because everybody here, since you have an accent. Americans, they've done studies that Americans psychologically believe that people with accents are smarter than them.

It's true. Or they always tell the truth. Maybe I'll start doing all the customer service.

They have done studies on this because, well, we're 3,000 miles of land and we all talk exactly the same.

Assume that you're smarter than us, which is probably actually true.

Where are you from?

I'm from Northern Ireland.

Beautiful. Beautiful. I haven't been to Northern Ireland. I've been to Ireland, but we can talk about that. Because maybe we'll argue about it.

Maybe. So I have a question.

Has anybody dealt with a manufacturer out of Canada?

No.

No.

Okay.

All right.

Well, we'll be the first then.

I'd be willing to wager that that's going to be more convenient than dealing with an overseas supplier. Supplier. If you can find. If the economies of scale are there, if the profit margins are there, go for it. It's very rare that I see a US or Canada based supplier be able to compete on price.

I mean, what's the minimum profit margin that you would be content with? 40%. 40?

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

If it's a second or third product, I'd be okay with 30 or 35.

But for my first product I would say 40.

Okay.

Mickey Sensei.

Yep. Mickey Scentsy.

Ryan. That 40 is before any of your promo costs.

That is before promo costs, after shipping in Amazon cost. Got it, thanks.

So calculate shipping, Amazon inventory.

What I like to do is just take all those costs, double them. That's where we start our pricing. And that leaves a little bit of flexibility for things like Amazon ppc.

I have another question. What's your free thing that you give to your clients in addition to your yoga mat? I mean, do you actually give them something physical or is it just like your guarantee or do you recommend. We're kind of talking about.

We don't do any extra.

We were talking about maybe like a sample of our second product along with. You don't recommend that.

A sample. So if it's like a consumable. Yeah, that'd be fine.

Okay.

Be careful with consumables coming from Canada. You might have different rules and regulations on things that people are putting on and in their body from overseas. This is why you can't do supplements coming from overseas. Because if you get a supplement from China, you'll end up with ground up babies in them. Now, of course it's not going to be the same thing in Canada, but you may have some.

I don't know the rules, but you might have some interesting rules as far as consumables go.

Okay. We've spoke to the manufacturer quite a.

Bit about it and they're already importing into the US with no problems. Okay. Ask them if there's any contracts or legal ramifications that you need to be aware of.

I want to address the people who are watching that aren't attending the hangout because.

My hangout just went wonky.

Oh.

The people who are watching just invited me to a separate video call and now I'm all Confused.

Guys, easy there. If you're watching the hangout, I want to address you. Do me a favor and just comment in the hangout section because either you guys are being quiet or I'm not seeing the questions that you're posting. So there's about a 40 second delay on this. So in 40 seconds if I don't get a slew of posts on this, I'm going to be a little bit concerned. But do me a favor and make a post there.

Actually, would one of you do me a solid and just post a question on the.

In the watching area so we can.

I have yet to figure out how to do that.

Yeah, Google's walking.

I'm headed over there to do that.

Ryan.

Should be down at the bottom, right?

Not in the chat box here but I mean where people are viewing. Where people are viewing.

And Kelly Fettio, why are you inviting me to a.

Just join.

What.

There, Ryan?

I sent a question over through the Google hangout.

Okay.

They're not showing up. Maybe I'm neglecting.

Actually I posted my comment but it didn't post. It disappeared.

Now I'm just confused.

Sorry everybody.

Oh no, it just took a really long time. Now it showed up okay.

Weird.

Yeah, I don't know, maybe it's just got some kind of lag going on or something.

This is weird. Well, if you're watching. Apologies for the confusion. Google is being really, really wonky.

Take it.

My comment made it through.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. And I see Anthony's too, but those are the only people who are who's. But in my dashboard I can see there's 20 people watching. So I don't know. I'm all kinds of confused by Google hangouts. Every.

I keep getting invited to a different video call too. It's really something's obvious.

I don't know what the heck Google is doing.

Alright, so.

I've told people this in previous ASM groups, but after you have ordered your product, this is kind of the sequence of your workflow since you guys are kind of, you know how to pick a product, you know how to secure a supplier, all that you've got a good feel on, even if you haven't completed them yet. The next flow of your work is going to look like this one. Putting up a really good listing which comes down to images, good copy, and that's about it.

And the second is really just collecting reviews. There's a big gap at this point. Oh, we have the ladies that brought a third member into.

This is Wyatt.

Do you Want to say hi.

This is their mastermind group.

That's right.

We also have a chihuahua who's been.

In the picture as well.

Oh, wow.

That's a big mastermind group.

Does the dog have an accent when it barks?

Absolutely.

Smarter than me then.

I mean, they can.

Man.

Okay, that was exciting. I think that kid should do the speech at ASM instead of me.

Very relevant, I'm sure.

All right. Anyway, the workflow, putting up your list and then you have this gap. You have this gap of what the heck do I do while my product's on a boat? And I'm waiting because everybody else is talking about how they're making all these sales and I don't know what the heck to do. There are a few things that you can do in the meantime in order to start setting the groundwork for selling a lot once your product is in inventory. The first is building up a list of people that you can get reviews from. This can be friends and family. It can be people on a Facebook page. It can be starting to make connections with people who have blogs.

Guest posts on blogs are great. They're a great long term strategy for building relationships so those people can do giveaways on their blog.

Making connections, building Facebook lists are three things that you can be doing in that interim period once your product's on a boat somewhere so that once your product is live, you can start to make sales from day one. That's how you can hit the ground running. When we did the yoga launch, we did it with the Facebook group. The people on Facebook. If you wanted to just shortcut the process and do pure relationship marketing, start doing guest posts regularly on blogs that have decent followings and build relationships with those blog owners. So when you're like, hey, I have a product in stock and I do a giveaway or a half off discount on your blog, they think, sure, why not? That's no problem.

But you have this gap and you need to be setting the ground floor for when your product is inventory, it's time to start making sales. From day one.

I have seen Facebook not approve a post that you're trying to boost if.

It.

Links to something they don't like or if it requires a share, meaning they no longer allow you to use shares as an entry.

Sometimes they won't allow that. Does that answer your question, Jesse?

Yes. Yeah.

Okay. So the way we've gotten around that instead of doing share this to be entered to win, we just say the first 20 people to email helpenactivesupports.com or whatever it is will get a free coupon code.

Comment below with the email address that you emailed us from or something. And that way we get some activity on there. Or comment below if you emailed us and we get all these yeses or whatever. And we do that in order to find the fast movers. So before we were going for the viral effect, since we can't do that anymore, we now focus on getting the fast movers because the fast movers are probably going to be people who are willing to leave a review as well. Okay, Tim, you mentioned that when making a phone call to customers, you ask them which email address would be the best one to send them the code. Are you still collecting email addresses?

Trying to think of what we do. I don't think we do collect their email address. We might even just send it through the Amazon system. But you certainly can collect their email address here. The perfect system would collect their email address here. We opted not. I think we opted not to just because it's not our focus at that point. At that point, our focus is just getting the root review. The same reason why we.

Don'T reimburse people to buy something for free. We just give them a free coupon code. Because we're not after the buy, we're after the review.

And the BSR rank.

It was not perfect, but we're getting what we're aiming for.

Still no activity on this thread on Google. I am just puzzled.

Sorry for the 20 of you, 22 of you who are watching and probably mad at me.

Any other questions? As you guys are wrapping up the supplier process, you're going to be moving into the marketing process, which is what we'll start to move into next week. But know that the most frustrating part of this business is the part that you're about to go into where you're waiting for stuff to arrive at Amazon's warehouse. Any questions on moving forward?

No? Okay. In that case, I think for me. Go ahead, Mike. Go ahead.

Hey, for me it's just all about making sure I have enough people signed up who will do a review.

Or the better.

What I'm going to tell you in a couple of weeks intent is that until you have 30 to 50 reviews, you have no other job. Only job is to get those first 30 to 50 reviews.

When people are like, my product's not selling, I don't understand why. And then I look at their listing and they have two reviews, I say, have you not heard anything I've told you in the long story? Your Only job is to get 30 to 50 reviews any way you can. We have paid for advertising to go to a sales page that gave away a free product. I mean, we will do anything to get those reviews.

That's exactly what I'm doing now, too.

And until you have those 30 to 50 reviews, it's pretty much worthless. It's kind of like.

I dug out my old savings bonds, which my grandma gave me for my birthday every year.

Since I was 1 years old.

By the way. Savings bonds, the worst investment ever. I don't know who ever thought that was a good idea. Give us 25 bucks and in 20 years it'll be worth 50 or whatever it is.

Anyway. Worst investment ever. But.

I'm waiting for them to mature. Until they mature, they're worthless. But once they mature, I can go cash them in. Your listing is kind of the same way. Until you mature with 30 to 50 reviews, your listing is pretty much worthless. You're going to be chugging around here and going, why can't I get ahead? As soon as you mature with that 30 to 50 review point gold, and it just scales from there. But until then, all you have to do, all you have to think about is how do I get 30 to 50 reviews?

So, Ryan, you think a good strategy then is to do a Facebook page with Facebook PPC to help build your list up and then you reach a certain number of people and potentially going to get a product out and then you wean off of that once your product goes live and then go to the Amazon ppc.

Yeah, that is one way to do it. We've done that and it worked beautifully. Another way to do it is to build up a list of blog owners that you contribute to. Another way is to combine friends and family into a spreadsheet and give them all away. All of them work. It's just a matter of how many can you get and how quick.

I started building up a Facebook following, but I swear my fans aren't. They don't read.

They don't read.

I've got the same problem.

They don't read.

I was just testing the responsiveness of it and I was giving away like a $25Amazon gift card and all they had to do was like and share and. And I boosted the post and it reached like 3,000 people and I have a pretty big Facebook page already and only one person followed the instructions. Everyone else just gliped.

Yeah, that's annoying.

Yeah, it's a frustrating audience I've built.

Hey, Michael, let me share a notion I cooked up yesterday. I don't know if it'll work or not. Your avatar product, the one that you're competing against.

Go through their reviews and see who has reviewed their product either positively or negatively. If their real name is there in their city, you might be able to, using the.

Facebook Spotlight, find their page, scrape their UID and target advertising right at them.

Oh yeah, okay, great.

I've not tried it. I've just thought of it yesterday.

No thanks, Brian. Yeah, I'll take a peek at that. That's a great idea.

Hey Tim, thank you for the heads up that the comments are coming in the Q and A section.

There must be a change in Google this week. So forgive me everybody. Kathryn, Brad, Ken, Mark, I'm just now seeing all of your comments. Jeff, person with a name that's not in English.

Randy, I've just now seen your comments, so forgive me as I. As I get to all you slowly.

Brian, I had dinner and breakfast this week with your neighborhood friendly Danny Enie. Cool. He said to say hello. He was in Austin this week.

Yep.

I joined his mastermind for next year.

Yeah, he told me that.

I want to hear from our neighborhood friendly Anthony Lee, who quickly turns to the camera.

I want to hear an update from the Leonator.

That's a terrible nickname. Can we work on that?

The Robinator.

The Toninator.

The book. War Hunter.

Indeed.

At any rate.

I guess at this point I can give you an update as to what's going on. I'm figuring things out. That's a beautiful thing. Probably the most valuable lesson that I've learned is if you just go out there and start asking for quotes to freight forwarders and shippers, you will find all of the.

Little bitty charges and things that you need to know so that you know what to look for in a good quote. I could not get anybody on the forum that had been in a similar situation to me because they're all like, you need to ship that by air. Like it's almost £1,000 in 17 boxes. I'm not shipping that by air. So I just kind of figured it out.

So you're going ship, you're going boat instead of air.

Yeah, that's the most cost effective way to do it. I think actually I'll end up using the freight forwarder that you and Sean use for the yoga mats. I finally got in touch with somebody and told him my frustrations with Shapiro, which is the company that Amazon tries.

To get everybody to use.

And he assured me that they could probably take better care of me.

Good. Yeah, they do a good job.

Yeah, well, Sean was singing their praises and when I talked to a guy, he was real helpful answering my questions. And it looks like I'll probably end up going that route, so. But then end result will be once the product is made, I will more than likely have that freight forwarder handle everything so that I don't have to. But at this point, I actually know what it is that they're handling just because of poring through like at least seven different quotes full of all kinds of acronyms and crazy things that I've had to learn what are in the process.

I know what you mean.

It all looks good now.

Good. I want to answer one question from mj and that was regarding the money back guarantee that we have on our yoga mats. We control that. So no, it does not come from our manufacturer. We just guarantee that ourselves. So if somebody wants a refund, we take that hit. If somebody returns it, we. We take that hit. Now, it's not from our supplier. It is, we take that liability.

Alrighty.

I want to hear from our neighborhood friendly Patrick Welch.

Pat updated.

What's going on?

Sir?

Tell us what's going on.

We actually.

We were actually ready to or getting ready to ship our product right around when ASM started. And then we had an issue with our supplier. The product basically went bad and we had to kind of start all over again. And of course those restrictions on the healthcare space came about. And so we just got X or we just got approved to sell in health and personal care yesterday. So we are getting ready to place a new order next week to get our product rolling.

Would you. That experience was like where you were going to get approved on in that health and wellness section. Because this is the first I've heard of somebody going through the process and completing it. So what was that process like?

It was incredibly easy. It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. So all we did was we went to. We basically just found a random supplier that we're not even using. We bought three of their products on three different days, three different consecutive days. I think we bought them on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this past week. We bought a sample of one for each one and they invoiced us separately. So we basically just went through, went on Amazon into our seller central account.

Asked to get approval and then they sent us an email requesting, I think three invoices and our business registration. So I attached my business registration and actually only two invoices because that's all I could attach. And a day later, I got accepted. We crossed out our pricing and the quantity and all it had on there was the supplier's address, phone number, and all that stuff.

Very cool. So it was the same supplier, but you just placed a couple orders.

And you attached that.

We placed one order.

Yep. Placed one order on Tuesday, one order on Wednesday, and I think one order on Thursday. And the order on Thursday I didn't even attach. When I sent it over to Amazon, I only had two invoices and they approved me.

Very interesting. I think they give some hope to some people who are worried about those regulations. Kind of easy to circle by.

And just to clarify, you said that's not even the. You said that's not even the supplier that you ended up going with?

No, it's not. We bought three generic products. We bought one Garcinio Cambodia, one green coffee bean extract. They're not even products that we're going to sell, and they approved us.

So I guess Amazon is just trying to make sure that you actually have a factory that's making legitimate products.

That's clever.

That's what it seems like. Yeah.

Cool.

Thanks for that, Pat.

So we're actually getting. Yeah, no problem. We're actually getting ready to. We started a Facebook page about two weeks ago.

We've got about 300 followers, and that's kind of one of the questions I wanted to ask you was, as far as boosting posts go, how often do you guys do that? I mean, did you guys just do that when you were promoting your actual product? Were you consistently boosting posts? Because I'm noticing, too, with my engagement that we've. We're getting maybe one or two likes every once in a while. And I'm worried that if we continue spending money on Facebook and we're not getting any engagement, it's just going to be a wasted, wasted process because nobody's going to be even seeing our posts.

Yeah, it's an algorithm just like anything else. So if you boost a post and you get some likes, the next post you do organically is going to be a little bit better. If you do a couple boosts and you get a whole lot of likes, the compound and the next organic ones will be a little bit better.

The only ones that we usually boost are the ones that have either we really need some engagement, we want to push something viral, or we are actually promoting something like a sales page or a giveaway or something like that. It's pretty rare that we boost something apart from that.

Okay.

All right. By the way they use the similar algorithm for your personal posts, which is why some people get a whole bunch of likes and some people's personal posts get put into oblivion. The same thing. They just want engagement.

All right, any other questions before we call it a day?

Greg just leaned forward, all excited.

Yeah, I got one quick question on the returns. How does that really get handled? You get contacted by Amazon or the. Or the customer contacts you directly and then you facilitate it, or can you take me through that?

One of two ways can happen. If you just want to refund it because it's a nasty.

Somebody who's not happy. You just log into your back panel, hit refund, and you're done. We use.

Stitch Labs to handle all of that. Stitch Labs is an API that or software that integrates with Amazon's API, integrates with all of your sales. You can go in and hit refund and it'll connect to that. The other way is if they ship it back to Amazon, Amazon will refund them, contact you, destroy the product, etc.

Okay. So you yourself don't have to hold an inventory in your house or wherever? Some product.

No, never.

Okay.

I keep one unit of our product in house and it's the one that I use and don't.

I got a quick.

I got a quick question, Ryan, if that's okay.

Go ahead.

We were talking earlier about Canadian suppliers. I want to flip that around. Canadian customers stay on Amazon.com or create a listing on Amazon.

Cause I was just talking with somebody, one of our tribe members, Kendall, who's in Canada, and it's a completely different channel. You can certainly set up a CA listing.

But it's a completely different channel. Your reviews don't carry over. Your seller feedback does not carry over. So it's setting up a completely different channel. Channel. In order to do that long term, we want to be able to do that. It's not going to focus for us. We've looked into it if anybody would like to do it. More power to you. It's just a completely different channel that you have to manage.

Amazon's got some stuff on the page about how to do it. You got to get a Canadian business number. You got to get GSTHST registered. I filled out all the paperwork, got ready to send it in, and said, do I want to spend my time and focus doing this yet?

Exactly.

I've not actually pulled the trigger on it. I just wondered if. I don't know if we have any Canadian folks in the tribe, but somebody in Canada buying product. You can buy it off Amazon.com I just don't know how convenient it is or if there's actual selling advantage being on Amazon.ca you can buy it on.

Amazon.com but FBA won't ship to Canada. Interesting. I expect that to change over the years.

Are you sure on that? Because they've got the sign up for global export stuff and I was talking to a friend in Vancouver who buys off Amazon.com Interesting.

Every time we've tried to do it they sent us a can't do.

I used to send stuff to Canada from Seattle and there's an extra surprise when the person in Canada receives it. A lot of time they have to pay extra duties.

Yeah, they would pay the duty and then the GST as well.

And you know that's not a good customer experience either. That's why I was kind of asking the question of selling on Amazon. Cause we take as the seller we.

Would take care of all that and.

The customer wouldn't have to take deal with it. I think my answer is wait for later.

Hey, I want to wrap up with Is there a story behind the Chucket nickname? Did I miss that story at some point?

Tell us all the story because as much of an elephant in the room as a Northern Ireland accent.

Well.

I like travel writing and I came up with a.

Pen name and I thought what's better for a travel writer than be called Chuck It? Let's go.

So I made up a Facebook page which I've resisted for years. I think Facebook's creepy. But I'm slowly changing my opinion.

And when I joined the tribe it's like well gee, I've got this built already and I'm lazy so let's use that.

So there's the story behind the name.

Ryan, would you like to be addressed as Chuck? As Chucket, how would you like to be addressed?

Depends where I'm at.

Search.

I don't care.

Ooh, that's a state of being.

But I don't care. Sir Chuck it is Chuck Itness. But anyway, that's the story and I'm prepared to answer to either name.

Okay, well Sir Chuckishness.

I still would like to hire you.

Commentate on my life because you have the best radio voice of all. You get the award for best radio voice in the tribe.

Woo hoo.

Thank you.

Jesse. It's so funny you should say that because I have the exact same thing going on right now. But I wasn't going to say that publicly.

My man Tim asks what percentage of people you give the gift card to leave a review. It depends on how aggressively you follow up with them. With our supplements.

It was Fairly probably like 50% if I followed up with them one or two times. My partner Paul, on one of my other companies, he just absolutely hounds those people until they leave a review. He has almost 100% review rate, and he just bugs them and bugs them and bugs them and bugs them and bugs them until they leave a review. And they know they owe it, so they always leave it. And as a result of that, we've had almost 100% of people leave it. He'll email me and he'll be like, who the hell is Pamela Rockhill and why hasn't she left the review? That's my girlfriend. Hold on. Call her. And who the hell is Janet Moran and why does she have to review? Like, that's my mom. Hold on, Let me just.

He's a hound about getting people to leave the reviews. So with him following up with people that aggressively, he gets almost 100%. When I'm not as aggressive, it's more like 50%.

Brian. He bugs them via Facebook and email.

All right.

All good, guys.

All good.

All good.

Coachribe. Go Tribe is right. Type in the chat box what you're working on this week. What's your one thing? What's the one thing? If you could do one thing this week that would make an immediate impact in your business, what would it be? If you could only do one thing and it would make my first order.

Good, man.

I love these.

I have an interesting.

I have an interesting supplier story.

Please go ahead.

Okay, I've got a product. Been trying to narrow down to two suppliers, and I finally got the second of two samples yesterday.

And one supplier treats me like they really want my business. They're working real hard. The other treats me like, hey, who are you? Our minimum order quantity is such and such, and if you don't like it, go somewhere else. So I was leaning to the one that strokes my ego until I got their sample yesterday. My product is a fabric, the fabric based product. And examining the stitching and some of the materials. I can't go with my ego. It's tough.

Now it's negotiation. Yeah, now it's negotiation, and I probably shouldn't tell them my preference while I'm negotiating. Maybe I can get a cheaper price.

Yep.

So that's where I'm at.

Break up with your ego and go where the numbers make sense.

But that sample is what turned the corner. I couldn't believe it. Online, they look the same.

Okay, tribe.

And I'll see you same place, same time here next week. Thank you to all of you who are watching who dealt with the hangout.

Issues. Hopefully Google gets their act together next week.

Have a good weekend.

Bye, guys. Happy wedding.