Transcript of a Capitalism.com #FFLTV episode (Ryan Daniel Moran) reviewing a student business, Taste Drink Go, which sells travel gear to backpackers. Moran advises pivoting from opportunistic product-selling toward intentional brand-building (e.g., creating a parent brand, keeping product names) and recommends marketing via travel blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, Facebook groups, and targeted advertising while maintaining Amazon sales. The aim is to leverage cheap, passionate travel audiences to grow revenue.
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This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses and we analyze what they're doing well and how they could make more money. Today's submission is from Andy Smetana. He owns a brand called Taste Drink Go. You're going to see the confusion look on my face and I'll explain why in a second. But they sell travel gear to backpackers and with the intention of inspiring people to travel the world. They're currently selling between 10,000 and $20,000 per month, both on Amazon and their own web store. And they wanna know, how do we make the pivot from seeking an opportunity to building a brand? Now, first, let's address the confusion that is on my face because, Andy, I'm a little bit confused as to what the name of your business means in the context of inspiring people to travel. So I would recommend that you be very obvious about that in your branding and in your marketing message. Because even as an entrepreneur, I'm looking at this going, I don't get the brand right off the bat. So that pivot from you're just putting products out there to having a brand, I bet that somewhere in there you had a drink product that you're now trying to pivot into a travel company and the name of it didn't quite go through with it. Assuming that I'm correct about that, I would leave the Taste Drink Go name for a specific product and create a brand name that houses all of those products. And that's how you can make that transition from just having a specific product with a specific name that you just put up there because you wanted to make some money, you wanted to take some sales, and now you're trying to build something bigger out of it. That's how you can play that dance. Have the big brand name and then the little product name for that product and any other products that you want to assign a name to. Now, how are we going to grow this business? You specifically, I think, are sitting an opportunity that not a lot of people have access to, and that is that there are all of these different travel blogs, travel podcasts with individuals who have huge audiences, but they have no idea how to monetize that audience. The travel niche specifically is kind of is kind of notorious for having big followings that don't make any money. So you have really cool cheap traffic that is passionate and loves to get behind brands, but they don't have a lot of things that are catered directly to them. You are. So you're in a really sweet niche because you've got people who will want to buy into what it is that you're selling, but the traffic is really cheap to get in front of them. There are podcasts with huge followings that do interviews. Go on there and promote your products. You, you'll need some sort of an info hook, like what's the reason somebody is putting a travel entrepreneur onto their podcast? You need to be able to address that question. There are blogs especially like these points blogs, they're all travelers. They're all people who are traveling on the cheap. So what's your hook? How do you get there to provide guest content, blog content, be interviewed by them, do a feature on their website? What's the reason why they're featuring you on that website and featuring your products? There are YouTube channels all about this, and if you don't want to do the interviews yourself, you can just advertise to those specific audiences. There are Facebook groups, there are YouTube channels that will all serve as great foundations of your marketing, foundations of the paid traffic that you will advertise to. And you'll put your marketing message right in front of them to be able to build that audience and sell your products to them. So my recommendation is for you to keep selling these products, do the traditional Amazon stuff that most people associate my strategies with, but at the same time go out to where all these audiences are because it's really cheap traffic, especially in your niche. And if you do that one, two punch of leveraging Amazon as a channel while also going out and getting all of this cheap traffic, I think you'll have no problem turning this from a one trick pony into a big brand.
