Zero To $1 Million On Amazon In 12 Months (Updated Edition)

What's going on? Sellercon.

It is great to see you. Thank you for having me back. Just out of curiosity, is there anyone here who has no idea who the hell I am?

That fucking hurts. Okay.

Hey.

It's such a privilege to be with you. I consider it an honor and a privilege to be in front of you. I mean, my company is called capitalism.com. i kind of like entrepreneurs and Matt said something that I just want to edify.

That it drips down. Your success affects other people. Look, contrary to what anybody tells you, there is no fixed amount. We are all making this pie as big as we want. I know what it can feel like to come to an event like this and to see someone on stage, the person next to you, lying about how much they're making. I know what it's like to be in the audience and play that game where you are comparing yourself to somebody else. That comes from the false belief that someone else, them being successful, threatens yours. That's bullshit. We're all making this as big as we want. You can have as much as you want and. And your success is not a threat to somebody else's. So you can go make as much as you want. Let me give you permission. Go make as much as you want. You in?

I'm also humbled and honored because I'm one of you.

I was an entrepreneur age 5.

Knocking on doors trying to sell hand drawn pictures with colored pencils and computer paper for a penny each. I made five cents that night. My dad bought two of them.

He also supplied all of the paper and the colored pencils. Hundred percent profit margin, great business to be in.

And we all start.

At the ground floor. And over the next couple of days you're gonna hear from people who are running literally billion dollar companies. Your path is not theirs. In fact, is there anyone here who can proudly say I'm doing under a million dollars a year? I haven't hit my first million yet. I'm doing under a million. Give it up for these pioneers.

I bet on the person doing under a million. I bet on that person.

Because the game changes so quickly that the person who is at the ground floor, or at least the person who is willing to be nimble enough to follow the trend, I bet on that person. So I want to honor you and congratulate you for being here. There's one more thing I have to say.

Do you have any idea how rare this is? Any idea how cool it is that this community has been so incredibly successful? Do you have any idea how rare that is. But beyond that, do you know, do you have any idea how rare it is to have the founders of an organization like this who are talking about money, talking about business, and, and not spending their time taking pictures in front of Lamborghinis and girls. Do you have any idea how rare it is to have founders who are better people offstage than they are on stage and they continue to pour into this community? Would you please give it up for Matt and Jason?

So this is my seventh time on the Amazing Stage and I started in 2013. I was in ASM1. I was an affiliate marketer before that. I actually got started because I was on a trip in Thailand with Matt and I was looking for a change in my career. And Matt is talking about all the success that he and his community are having with Amazon.com and. And I realized for the first time that if I took this much marketing ability, if I took this much attention, this much of what I was doing, working so hard to do, and I built what I call a real business.

Then the world really opened up. And I've been teaching this process of going from zero to a million dollars in about a year for the last several years. I first taught it here in 2014 and during that time hundreds of people have come up to me unsolicited and said, I built a million dollar business because of that. I built a million dollar business because I followed that. So I was still in the ramp up period of that business. I later. I've had a couple acquisitions at this point. One of them was an eight figure exit. I now spend most of my time as an investor. That's primarily what I am now. I now invest in companies that are exciting, companies that are doing cool things in the world, companies that are growing really quickly, companies that I'm personally excited by. I put out pretty much everything I know for free on a podcast just called capitalism.com with Ryan Daniel Moran. I will have the slides at the link that's on the screen at some point. That's how I spend my time. Investing in entrepreneurs who are creating change in the world. I now am investor in Onnit, investor in Outstanding Foods, an investor in Flex Foods. This is how I spend my time. I bet on entrepreneurs, quite literally, I bet on them. I bet on you. I have a little group where we open up opportunities. I sometimes invest in. This group has done a few hundred million dollars in sales and acquisitions. The numbers don't matter. What I want you to know is that I'm all in on this.

I am so all in on this sector, on where this is going. And I'm really, really pumped for you. I'm putting together a fund called the capitalism.com fund, which just exists to invest in businesses that are making a change in the world. Some of them are already in this world, in this room. In 2014, I gave this talk for the first time. It's been seen on YouTube 1.6, 1.7 million times. The biggest question that I get from this talk is what the hell was I wearing?

Who let me leave the house wearing that? And this was before I was a dad. I didn't even have like the I'm a to touch dad excuse. Like what, what am I wearing? The struggle is real, ladies and gentlemen.

So this has been seen a few million times. And today what I'm going to give you is the updated path, the updated plan to 1 million. For those of you who raised your hand and said, I'm doing under a million right now, we're gonna fix that. This has only been tested and proven a few hundred times. This, that I know of. I'm sure there's a lot more than that. But question before we dive in, does anybody wonder, is the game getting harder? Does anybody think the game's harder than it was a few years ago?

Let me tell you a quick story.

I actually started. I took my first sale on the Internet in 2006. I was 18 years old. I was working on a dial up computer.

On my shared desktop in the summer between.

When I graduated high school and when I went to College. I made $44. I was stoked. Like poop my pants kind of stoked. I was hand coding websites in something called Dreamweaver, which, if you know what that is, you're old.

Was hand coding HTML websites and my 56k modem in 2006. We couldn't afford fast Internet. I went to college. I almost didn't go to college because I was so excited about the Internet. I go to college because I'm pumped about fast Internet.

I built my second website on something called Iweb.

Which was Apple's really, really janky.

Website designer. There was no WordPress. There was no Amazon Prime.

I was hand building links to rank in Google. None of this existed. This is why I bet on the person who's just starting. Because we tend to romanticize how things used to be. We tend to romanticize how we got into the game. And if you're under the illusion that things just get to a point where they maintain for the rest of your life that does not exist. There are more opportunities now. There are more opportunities open for entrepreneurs across the board than there's ever been. There was no crowdfunding. There was no FBA. There was nothing.

Seven, eight, 10 years ago. So we can piss and moan about the fact that certain strategies change, but that only happens if you are building a business that is dependent on tactics. If you are building a business that is dependent on anything except creating real value in the world, you will always be vulnerable to when the puck moves. But if you are building something that goes beyond that, then all of the tactics that you learn to just become ways to amplify good work. That's the purpose of money, to let us vote on good work. So over the next 40 minutes, I'm gonna give you the updated plan to get to a million in 12 months. It works faster than it ever has. It's more effective than it's ever been because there are more opportunities than ever. And as you grow, you get better and you get to take advantage of those new opportunities. For those of you who are on the fence, let me tell you, this gets real easy when you just commit.

It's like weight loss. For those of you who struggle from diet to diet, the only thing you struggle with is commitment. Life gets real good and real simple and real easy. When you just commit, it just opens because it's binary. At that point, you are either going all in or you're hedging. When you just commit, it just happens. That's how life works now. For me.

Life had to give me that. Life had to shake me up and punch me around a little bit in order to get me to commit. It came in the form of this beautiful little girl right here. When I found out I was gonna be a dad.

That was when it was like, okay, I don't have time to learn new shit.

I don't have time to have this side project. I don't have time for side hustles. I don't have time for anything that does not amplify what is my primary focus right now. I don't have time.

Hit a million right after. Hit 5 million shortly after that, hit 10 million after that because we were all in. It's funny, two months after the first person I called, I found out I was gonna be a dad. Was my business partner. I was like, I think we should go all in and get health insurance.

And two months after, he calls me and he says, ryan, is there anything. Is there any such thing as a false positive pregnancy test? We were both in it. We Were both all in. Now, I thankfully cannot give this to you. I cannot give you that shift. I don't know what it takes for you to say, all right, I'm all in. I don't have time for all of this other stuff. I'm all in on this. But the minute you have that, everything opens. Is there anyone here who is just willing to say, fuck it, I'm all in?

Is there no one else?

Is there anybody else?

That's when shit gets real good.

So for those of you who are all in, let's make you a millionaire in 12 months. Let's go.

Here's why a million dollars matters. It's proof of concept.

When you're at a million dollars, when you're at seven figures, that's when you have enough profit margin to go full time. Leave all the chips on the table until you're at that point. That's when you can go full time. It's when you can be at the position. Do I scale this thing? Am I not passionate about this? Have I just learned my skill set? Now I'm gonna apply it to something that I'm really excited about. Or do I wanna sell this thing? Do I wanna scale it? Do I wanna sell it? Do I wanna go full time? That's when you've got choice. When you cross seven figures, now you're in a position where you can scale it, you can sell it, you can get out, you can automate it. You're at choice when you're at seven figures. That's why this matters. It's the only reason why a million dollars matters. A million dollars is very simply 100 sales a day at 30 bucks, that's about a million dollars. 100 sales a day. So that's all we have to solve for. That's all we've got to figure out. We do not have to learn a thousand different things. We do not have to stay up to date on what everybody is doing. We do not have to stay up to date on what someone who is doing 10 million is doing differently than you. We don't have to do any of that. All we have to do is solve for x.x being 100 sales a day. In most cases, 100 sales a day is 3 to 5 products doing 25ish sales a day. That is a million dollar business. And if you're beyond this, tune in for a second. I have sold companies and advised companies that have grown beyond this level and they collapse because they forget this. They hire executives, they bring in advisors, they spend money on Bullshit forms of advertising. They try new things, they get away from basics, and it is only a matter of months that they start to decline. And guess what fixes it every time. Coming back to this, coming back to, what are your core 3 to 5 products? What are they selling right now? What are their price points right now? And we go all in on those and you rebuild from there. I have seen it. It actually kind of breaks my heart. I've seen really good companies.

Start to scale and break because they move away from this idea that you have a core group of products that are selling really, really well, consistently to the same person, to the same demographic. Please do not follow their lead.

Now, confession for you. This is humbling, but so freeing for me to say. I am not an Amazon guy, guys. I'm not. I didn't get into this game because I wanted to be an Amazon expert. I got into this game because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. There are people in this room, some of whom will be on stage, some of them will be very quiet in the corner of the room, who would know way more about the ins and outs of Amazon than I do. I still to this day don't know how to print a damn stripping label.

No idea. Now the temptation is often to get obsessed about fine tuning the little pieces of the sales platform and optimizing that. The danger in that is that you start to make your decisions based on the platform and the algorithm rather than building a business. I don't want to be an Amazon guy. I don't want to be an Amazon expert. I need to know just enough to be able to deploy resources to help me hit the million, the 10 million, the hundred million. That's how you get real good. That's how you become an entrepreneur. This is why I cringe when I hear the term Amazon business. Because that means that if Amazon goes away, you don't have a business. No one says I have a Walmart business. No one says I have a Kickstarter business. No one says I have a Facebook business. You have a business. You take your sales on Amazon because it's the best opportunity that has ever existed for entrepreneurs ever.

That's what you are if you're an entrepreneur. If you're an Amazon person, you have a really nice Amazon consultancy business. You want to be an entrepreneur. You know enough to be able.

To give Amazon what it wants while giving your customers what they want even more. That's the game. I look at it like 80 20. I swear by the 8020 principle was I need to know Enough to be able to perform well on the platform again. I got into this game while I was in Thailand with Matt and I heard what he was doing and I realized that everything that I had known up to that point, it was like a fire hose. I could point it at Amazon. It was like all of the skill set of being a marketer, of being a business person, of being an entrepreneur, now applied to the greatest platform that has ever existed. Here's the 8020 for performing well on Amazon. 80% of your sales will come from where you rank for keywords. That's 80%. That's all we have to solve for. 80% of keyword positioning is from sales through keyword. And I see you in the forums and the comments and the blogs debating over what tactic is gonna get you this. But the truth of the matter is 80% of it is sales through keyword. You can solve for that however you would like. There's a myriad of different ways that you can do that. I'll show you mine. 80% of of sales through keyword comes from.

Audience.

Who pays attention to you, who shows up when you speak or when your brand speaks. 80% comes from the audience that you control. So let's put this into a nice little mathematical theorem here. This is my entire thesis. This is it in 30 seconds. If I control an audience, even a small one, and they do what we or I tell them, then I can get sales on any platform. If I can get sales on any platform and I do this across three to five products selling an average of 30 bucks, that's a million dollar business.

So that's all I have to solve for. That's a business that can be scaled or sold.

That's all that I am figuring out at the beginning of a business. This is all that I am figuring out when I'm advising someone. This is all you need to figure out in order to get to the million. We break this process into three stages.

Stage one is about three months from getting started. I call this the grind. Your entire job in this stage is to perform a product launch through an audience that you control. You are grinding your way to every sale, every follower, every eyeball, so that they pay attention to you and the next three to five products that you will release.

That will take you about three months. Your second three months, I call it. The growth is where things get good. This is when you are maintaining at least 25 sales a day across at least two products. And your last six months, the last half of your year, is when you cross the Million, we call this the gold. This is your only job is to release more products through the system. Stage one is proving the system. Two, optimizing the system Three, deploying the system over as many products as you can comfortably handle at decent profit margins. That's all we have to do to get to the million. That's it. You can do other stuff if you want. And there's gonna be other people who talk about how they killed it with this and, and how they're smashing it with this and how they're crushing it with that.

If that helps you go through this process, great. If not, ignore it doesn't matter to you right now. Stage one is getting to 25 sales a day through an audience that you control. Now, in 2014, the strategy was to give away product, beg for reviews, begun manipulate the algorithm however you could in order to get it to give you what you want. Today, I would submit to you that it's actually easier and faster when you do.

This. Getting in front of where the audience already is, giving them the product they already want, and send them to Amazon.

We can get through that initial stage real fast if we do only that. I was inspired and I called. I had a brain gasm on stage. I do an event called the Capitalism Conference. That's Brian Lee. He's the most underrated entrepreneur I've ever met. Keeps a super low profile, very humble. He has 3 billion dollar companies on his resume. 3 LegalZoom, the Honest Company, and a company that. He was the principal investor, as far as I know, behind Honey, the app, the discount app. Three billion dollar companies on his resume. I asked him on a podcast recently, brian, do you feel successful? And he said, I'm not Zucks.

Ah, we've all got it. Ah, we've all got the comparison trap, even Brian Lee.

And.

I was on stage with Brian. His new company is called Art of Sport. He partnered with Kobe Bryant, Odell Beckham Jr. A bunch of athletes. And I said to him backstage, I was like, bryant, okay, so on the Honest Company, you partnered with Jessica Alba. With Shoedazzle, you partnered with Kim Kardashian. With Art of Sport, you partnered with Kobe Bryant. It sounds like your entire thesis is to go where the audience is and then launch products to the audience. And he goes, yeah, what other way is there?

I said, huh, that's interesting, because I remember at the first ever seller con, Matt Clark saying.

I know a company that every time they do a product launch, they just mail their previous customers. And he said, he kind of shrugged and he was Like, I mean, I guess that's not feasible for all of us to just launch a product to millions of people. And I went, what if I just solved for that? What if I just had the list and I could control that and launch to that? So I started testing this very early. One of my companies, it was like maybe our fourth or fifth product. We had a tiny little email list. I mean like 3,000 people sold 1,000 units of a brand new product with no reviews. There was no internal data on Amazon saying this was a good idea. Our customers wanted it.

Just recently we did a promotion through a tiny little Manychat audience. Went from position 200 something to position number one for pretty competitive keyword.

I have equity and I advise a company that they manage their audience on Instagram. They launch a product on Amazon not because there was search traffic for it, because their customers wanted it sold 10,000 units in 10 days.

No reviews.

That's a really, really nice start.

For us to build from there. I built an eight figure company with 10,000 followers. So this is not to say you have to be in front of millions of people. You need to be in front of hundreds, hundreds, not millions. Not hundreds of thousands, not even thousands. Your minimum viable audience is about 100 people on a hot list. A hundred people who are like, oh, I want that.

You want 100.

Oh, what's the character from Napoleon Dynamite who's trying to break the nylon polymer going? I want that.

You want a hundred of those, that's all. And I add into that 10 personal friends who will post about you on social media who represent your demographic, who are excited to be a part of your journey. And if you want to be, if you want to be perfect, one influencer. And an influencer does not mean a celebrity. An influencer doesn't even mean a person. It just means one other source of media, one other place where you can drop a promotion in front of a group of people. This is all you need. You don't need to create a bunch of content. You don't need to partner with a bunch of people. You don't need to sponsor a bunch of posts. You need about 100 people on a hot list ready to buy in order to give you the lift that you need in order to start creating the machine that gives you three to five products selling 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. That's what we need to do. This is one of my favorite case studies. I use it all the time because it eliminates all excuses. This is a. I don't think she's even ever bought, like, a training on anything. She was at one of our events. Her name is Sophie, and she started this company called Seed and Sprout. And Seed and Sprout sold like zero waste type of products, so reusable lunch boxes and bags and stuff like that. Well, she's based in Australia, so she couldn't use Amazon at the time. So she does a Kickstarter launch. Her Kickstarter, she doesn't have an audience. She's got like a thousand fans on her Facebook page at a time when fans don't really mean much. And she has. She recruits, like 10 of her friends who believe in what she believes. And she has one Facebook group that she's a part of where she shares a little bit about what she's doing. She. She does a Kickstarter to raise the money that she needs to build up the business.

$34,807 from launch. Australian. Australian dollars. Not real money.

No such thing as real money.

Sophie had every excuse in the world.

And she launches this company on Kickstarter and a little tiny following and this video of her holding up her product, talking about it because she had a little itty bitty audience. Now today, if you look at her Instagram page, she's got hundreds of thousands of followers. She has a bunch of products. She sells millions and millions of dollars worth of products. She's in retail stores. And it started with this tiny, tiny, tiny little push.

That's where it starts. So often we want to skip to the end. Nope, starts here. And the more you get good at the really little stuff, the faster you grow.

These beautiful people over here gonna cringe that I'm calling them out. Jenna and Travis, I fucking love them. They make me feel like less of a person because they have the perfect life and perfect family and perfect marriage and perfect business and perfect everything.

On social media.

I told them this wouldn't work. They did it anyway. Started a Facebook group, started doing Facebook lives just to give to their audience.

Started with what, 800 people or so.

A few hundred people listening. Started doing product launches at higher prices than their competitors with zero reviews. We did a podcast about it. And now the community has continued to grow, continued to flourish because they started with a little itty bitty tiny audience, serving one specific person with one specific pain point. Now, I know a lot of you are going, I don't know how to build an audience. So let's go through it real quick. Number one, document the growth of your business right now. And for the next 18 to 24 months or so. The organic reach is on Instagram, so there's your window right there. At some point that will change. Document your business. Say these are the two prototypes I'm considering. This is why I went with this one versus this one. I'm really nervous to place my first order. Document everything on social media. Spend $10 a day on ads to get followers. That's it. Reach out to every single person who follows you, every single person who comments on your stuff and say thank you. I'm really pumped about this journey. I really appreciate you being a part of it. Then when you are starting to get ready for launch.

Send your following to a first in line group, an email list, a Facebook group, ManyChat. Because the reality is you're probably only going to order 1,000 units or so, maybe less. So you've got real built in scarcity. To the audience of a few hundred people who are following you, make them get first in line.

Post every review and every piece of good love, every picture someone takes with your product back to where you are documenting your journey. If you do this for 60 days, you will have an audience. That's it. You don't need to sponsor any posts. You just need to document the journey to the point where you have fans on your business who want to be a part of your business. Put them on a first in line list. Launch the products to them. That will give you the starter fuel to be able to launch products real quickly out of the gate. Here's how to do a launch. Announce when your product is going to be live.

Give an incentive for why they need to buy quickly. It could be a discount, it could be a bonus. It could be a buy one, get one. It can be a Q and A with you. Give them a reason to buy early.

Close the incentive so that you got a date when the launch ends. Because everybody waits until the last minute. Probably how most of you are here. We all procrastinate, especially entrepreneurs. Put a date at the end. Celebrate every action. Joe just bought a so and so. Just left a review. Look at this message we just got. Document all of it. You get a negative review. Post about it. Say what you're doing about it.

Don't hide it.

This will get people to rally around you and then you can simply ask for reviews.

Do that until you're at 25 sales a day.

You can do other stuff too if you want. But don't skip this because this is the 80, 20. This is what will get you there. Your challenge in this phase of the process is that you are going to be tempted to think about products, not people.

The thing that will keep you stuck during this grind phase is that you will want to think about what do I sell? Not who do I serve. You will make excuses like, I don't have an audience, I don't know who my person is. You will think, who buys this? Rather than who do I serve? You solve this immediately when you address these questions. Who's the person I'm targeting? Where are they trying to go and what challenges do they face on the way?

That's your business. That's why your business exists. You think, and you started it because you want to make money. Everybody else is on their own journey. Your job, the way you get paid, is to look at who that person is, where they're going, and give them the products that they need to go on that journey. Yeah, but I sell knee sleeves. No, you don't. You help people get out of pain. Who's in pain?

That's where you start. What else do they buy on their journey? To be pain free, to be a pain free runner or whoever it is that you're targeting. That. That's how you build a business. That's how you build an audience. That is how you build a company that's scalable and sellable. You graduate from this stage when you've got an audience that buys from you and they're buying 25 times a day, 25 sales a day, you get to move on. We move on to stage two, your next three months. When you're doing under 25 sales a day across two products, you're in the growth. Here's how we get through this. Number one, your primary goal, maintain sales on product number one. You do that by going all in on your audience and getting reviews. Notice I did not say anything about incentivizing reviews. I did not say anything about discounts.

It's going all in on the people that want your brand. That's how you scale. That's how you build. No one here follows a brand because they got cheap shit.

Nobody.

If you get people to buy into your business and how you're showing up for them, you get reviews just by asking.

You can continue to stoke the fire by running Amazon pay per click. And if you drop and rank, repeat, repeat the process. Go back to the grind. Go back to your audience. Go back. Go back to serving them. That's how you maintain 25 a day. Then you launch product number two. Now, here's an important question. What does Your person need next? Not what's a good product to sell. Not what does the Amazon algorithm tell me, what does your person want next?

I've seen way too many good businesses and good entrepreneurs have a really successful first product and then they say.

I don't know if this next one's gonna sell on Amazon.

Punt that.

What does your person want?

That's how you grow a real business and Amazon supports it. What does the person need next on their journey? Not what's a good product to sell.

Think about, what can I sell to make money? You're thinking about what you can pull out of the system that only gets you so far. You think about what people need and serve them on their journey. You build seven and eight figure businesses.

So a quick story. Our first product violated all of like the Amazon search criteria. It's something we were excited about. We hit bestseller status at about 25 sales a day. We're like, awesome. We need like four of these. We have a million dollar business. Except when we released product number two, same thing, did not have data to suggest that it was going to be a big winner. Release product number two. Sales on product number one doubled. But I thought the market tapped out at 25 sales a day.

Three years later, as we continue to roll out new products, product number one, which was a best seller at 25 sales a day, was doing 300 units a day. 300 sales a day. Did the market grow that much? Or did we get referral business? Did we get repeat buyers? Did our conversion rate go up? That's what happened. That's what happened. So if you're just looking at what the data tells you right now rather than what people actually want, you are always going to be playing for the system rather than building a business. You fix that by going back to the person saying, what do they need? Let's go all in on people. People are scalable. There's a lot of us.

There are a lot of human beings and we keep making more.

That's scalable. Thinking about what's in the system and how can I get mine has diminishing returns. Your job during this process, your second three months, is to maintain 25 sales a day while launching product number two. And when you do that, your audience will be bigger, they're more responsive, and hopefully you've put deposits into the relationship bank account so you have more goodwill. And so product launches get easier and easier every time rather than harder and harder. If it's something that they actually want.

Then it continues to compound rather than running into These walls and looking for a new product to sell. How many of you are familiar with bulletproof? He's speaking later.

Dave had an audience. He was a blogger and a podcaster. There was no demand for mold free coffee, none.

But he served a very specific person. And had Dave wanted to be a coffee company, his second product would have been a dark roast.

He didn't want to be a coffee company. He wanted to be a performance company. And so he said, what's the next thing that people buy on their journey? My person.

At the time, there was no internal data to say that there were a bunch of people buying MCT oil. There was no data saying that you needed caprylic acid in your coffee. There was none of that.

He did it for his person.

And he built will probably end up being a billion dollar company that gave him the ability to sell fat water, whatever that is. I love you, Dave. To sell unfair advantage, to sell supplements, to sell in retail stores across the world, to sell the bulletproof vibe.

Does that fit into a coffee company?

I will have my coffee on a vibrating plate. That's how I will spend my morning.

No. He was building something much bigger. And he could have only known that had he thought about serving people, not what is going to sell. And guess what? People buy on Amazon regardless of what the reviews are, because it's for them. That's how you build a real business. Your biggest challenge in this stage is funding. Can you fund the business to sustain the growth? Now, I've talked about this on the podcast a hundred different times. I'll give it to you in 15 seconds. If you're taking consistent sales, funding your own inventory is a waste of precious dollars. My opinion is if you are taking money off the table to buy more inventory, it's a misuse of dollars.

My first order was like a thousand bucks, like 600 bucks. I built that into a $16 million company. It would be a really, really bad use of funds to take that. If I know I can take a thousand unit thousand dollars and create a product that's going to end up selling 100 units a day, I need that money to be able to put into new products, to put into new advertising, to put into new strategies, to put into events and networking, that's a better use of dollars than buying more inventory. So what do you do about that? There's a couple ways. Amazon lending is phenomenal, but you only get it when you've been selling consistently for a year and you put a personal guarantee on it. So it's great. We Use it. But it has its limitations. If you're still ramping up, getting a bank line of credit, phenomenal. Great interest rates, easy to deploy once you're approved and a laborious process. I'm really interested in a company right now called Sellers Funding. I think they come from this world actually. Is anybody from this company here? Okay. So they specifically fund Amazon based businesses and I think they just rolled out Shopify. Really, really solving a cool need in the marketplace. I think you need three to six months history and then it could ramp up so it's all customized to Amazon Sellers. If you're primarily an Amazon seller, that's a cool resource that I'm really fascinated with. So Amazon Lending is available. It's the coolest thing ever. Hit a button and it shows up. Line of credit is great. Has its limitations. Sellers Funding is another option as well. So you have access to, to be able to clear through this. If you're using capital, well, that is how you get through the growth. Let's move on to stage three, the gold. This is where you finally get paid. This is where we cross the million. Your primary goal here, release as many products as you can comfortably handle. Because we only need three to five in order to cross the million. So we continue to roll products through the system.

Launching them, getting reviews, maintaining 25 sales a day. Here's your second goal and primarily I want you to see where this fits into the system. So you can say I'll save all of this for later in stage three. When you've got multiple products that are selling consistently, that's when you can turn on new forms of advertising. That's when you can distract yourself. That's when you can try new things. That's when you have the profit margin to, to be able to invest in new forms of advertising. Number one advertising source in the world. And this has been true as long as I've been selling things on the Internet. The number one source of advertising is MySpace. I'm kidding.

The number one source of advertising, other people's audiences.

This takes many forms. It's podcast sponsorships. I have one team that I advised. Once I just looked at my like you just need to spend more money on podcast ads. Three years later they came to me and said, hey, that added like $4 million to our revenue. Thank you. Should have charged more. Okay. Other people's audiences, podcast, YouTube channels, blogs, influencers, anyone who controls eyeballs.

That is how you think of advertising. Other people have the distribution. You are paying to be in front of the distribution. I could Spend a whole hour talking about this. But this, this is the 80, 20 of advertising. If you know your person and you know what they buy and you've got the solution for them, find out who's in front of those people.

Pay them, partner with them, get them to be fans, become BFFs with them.

That's your job. That's what you do at this stage of the process.

So how many of you have ever eaten one of these?

Quest Bar came out of nowhere. $100 million. You know how they scaled.

Other people's audiences?

They got good at a couple flavors that gave them the audience to really start to scale. Do you know what the number one when it launched, what the number one selling flavor of Quest was? Blueberry muffin. Why? It's when their audience was biggest. Had nothing to do with anything except the audience was responsive at that time.

Now, the reason I tell you this example is because at one time, Quest bars were the number one selling product on all of Amazon.

And I don't think they had anybody internally who was the Amazon manager.

Now they can do things like chips and pizzas, and they're in targets and they do cookies and all kinds of stuff because they built the audience. That's quite literally on a quest, on a journey. Your challenge in this third stage, your challenge in this phase, is going to be managing Amazon. Many of you want to be Amazon experts. That's awesome. I have no interest in being an Amazon expert. The idea that I'm going to be the best in the world at a certain platform while I'm trying to build something big doesn't make sense to me. For me, where I want to spend my time. So if you're an entrepreneur, you have to learn to let go. Amazon's a really, really good opportunity for you to learn to let go. Now, there's a couple things that we've done to be able to clear this hurdle. You can hire somebody in house. That's what I started doing. Brought somebody in house, told them, go to all the events, go to all the conferences, read all the books. You can hire a freelancer on upwork. You're gonna have to vet them, make sure they're good. There's also agencies now popping up. There's one in my back room. They're called Turnkey. I think that's their website. They're called Turnkey. They've done a really good job for some of the people. I know there's other ones out there, too.

But can you get it off your. I shouldn't even Say off your plate. Can you hire someone who is better than you at managing the sales channel so you can go launch new products, so you can go lead the vision of the company, so you can go build a real empire so that you can.

Start new sales channels or take half a second off.

That's when you start to pivot from.

Amazon optimizer to being an entrepreneur. And that's gonna be your challenge. Can you break through that hundred K, that 100K a month at this stage of the process?

So this is what it looks like in 12 months.

It's taking sales through an audience, knowing who your people are, serving people.

Releasing multiple products to that group and having three to five products selling 25 sales a day at 30 bucks.

Then you do things like advertise to other audiences and scale and all of that. Beyond that, everything else is noise.

So here's your thesis.

Here'S what you build a business on. If you launch products to a small audience, you'll rank for keywords and get reviews. If you rank for keywords and get reviews, you'll have 25 sales a day across multiple products. That means you have a million dollar business. And if you have a million dollar business, you're a seven figure entrepreneur. And depending on what you do next, determines if you're financially free for life. That's what it takes. That's the process in order. But here's the secret.

Your life will change when you stop thinking about what I can get.

Your life will change. Everything will be easy when you have the perspective that it is not about you.

The minute you have the shift, that it's not about what I can get and that all of these douchebags who are black hatting and faking and trying to just maintain long enough to get acquired.

Knowing that somebody else is going to be held holding that bag.

It's not a business.

That's not even entrepreneurship. That is all about them and what they can extract from the system. You're better than that. You're an entrepreneur. You create change in your life and other people's lives.

Every time I have a lesson that life needs to give me, it gives me a wake up call.

I got mine recently looked like this. That's my little boy in there.

Look at him. He's doing keyword research right now.

I'm like, buddy, it's about people, not product.

So every time I have a lesson that life needs to give me, it just throws me a kid.

And I know that little boy is going to grow up and watch everything I do.

And he'll model me.

That's the legacy you leave on the world. How you do anything is how you do everything. And life opens up. It gets real easy and real good when you stop thinking about yourself and you start thinking about the people you impact. You're an entrepreneur. You have the ability to change the fucking world. Even if it's not the world, it's your world. It's your family, it's your community, it's your customers. And what I wish someone had told me when I started out was how many people were impacted by the one product that would rank by how many people would buy it, by the employees that you surrounded yourself with. It impacts everybody. And so life gets real good, simple and easy. When you make the shift that it's not about you and it's about other people, that's when the world just runs to you. I put my slides here at this link.

There's also some podcasts there I think you should listen to. But I want you to know something.

You're among the 5% of people.

5% of people who take personal responsibility. 5% of people who actually do something to create a change. 5% of people who build the skill set and the influence to be able to change things around them.

Do not waste that doing things that don't matter. Do not waste it.

On anything that does not create the impact and the life that you want.

Do not waste the very special and unique ability that you have.

On what you can take. You're better than that. Everything that you want in this life is on the other side of what you do for someone else. And everything you want as a result of that is available to you. Go out there and take it. Thank you.

Thank you.