“It’s Not That Easy?” Sam Launched Overnight to Prove It Is

So this Guy has sold 20, 30 million dollars of sugar water on Amazon. And so naturally, I posted on Twitter. And then this anon account pops in. Dude. And he's like, it's not that easy. Bada, bada, bada. And he put a chip on my shoulder. I was like, dude, it is that easy. And so then I woke up the next morning and I launched hummingbirdfood.com I literally built the whole thing in, like, 12 minutes.

It's not just, like a free offer to entice him to check out $14 all AI generated, 100%.

I'm to do it. And y' all can do it too.

All right, this is part two of my conversation with Sam Thompson about all things E commerce, Facebook ads, video generation through AI. Hey, gen, hummingbird nectar, E commerce business, yada, yada, yada. You're going to love it. You don't need to listen to part one first, but if you like this one, you're going to like the one a week ago. Enjoy and share with a friend.

So my mom texted me. My mom texted me a couple weeks ago, probably about a month ago at this point, and she sends me this picture of the kitchen counter at their house, and she's got a bag of sugar and a pot of water and a hummingbird feeder. And she goes. It was like in our family group chat. And she goes, it's hummingbird season. I'm making homemade hummingbird nectar. Right? And I was like, all right. Like, what does that mean? And she goes, you put sugar in water and boil it, and then it is hummingbird nectar. It's like, super. It's sugar. I was like, it's sugar. It's sugar. I was like, that's crazy. Like, if it was me, I just pop on Amazon, you know, and be like, dude, I'm just gonna buy some hummingbird nectar.

It's sugar water, Basically. It's very thick, kind of like a syrup.

Yeah, yeah. Basically, it's just sugar water. Technically, it's. It's one part sugar, four parts water. Whatever amount you want to do that with. I pop on Amazon just to see, you know, as we do just like, to explore. I come across a few listings of people selling hummingbird nectar, and you can buy it pre made in the jug. You get 64 ounces of this. It's. It's sugar water. Like, let's cut to the chase. Sugar water. And they're selling a 60. I think it's 64 ounces for, like 11 bucks, right? And I click on the listing and it, it says 80,000 people have bought this more than once.

Wow. Okay, now that's like just Amazon is showing you that. Or a third party tool.

Just Amazon. Just Amazon, straight up.

More than once.

80,000 people have bought it more than once. They have 24,000 reviews on the product.

Real quick. They're buying it in a powdered form. So are they just buying sugar?

No, no, no. They're buying the premixed water. They're buying a jug. Like they're buying the premix. And it's loaded. It's crap loaded with preservatives and all this stuff. Because, you know, sugar and water left out just causes mold and bacteria. Whatever. Well, okay, so 24,000 reviews on Amazon, right? On average, 1% of Amazon purchasers leave a review to 24, 2.4 million purchases at an $11 price point. So this $26 million has sold 20, $30 million of sugar water on Amazon. Sugar water. And so naturally, I take a screenshot of it and I post it on Twitter and I say, just an FYI as a reminder, this guy. And I forget the number. I think it was like maybe 10,000 people had bought it or 20,000 people had bought it in the last 30 days. And so I was like, there's somebody making a quarter million dollars a month selling sugar water on the Internet. And then this anon account pops in. Dude. And he's like, it's not that easy.

And he put a chip on your shoulder.

And he put a chip on my shoulder. I was like, dude, dude. It is that easy.

Yeah.

And so I outlined exactly what I would do if I was going to launch this in that tweet. Right? The bag, the sugar, the whole thing. And it just sat wrong with me for like 12 hours. And so then I woke up the next morning and I launched Hummingbird Food.

Co. Did you leave the tweet up?

Oh, the tweet's up.

Okay.

Okay, yeah. And so I used AI Chat GPT. I designed the bag. So I'm selling nectar mix, which is I'll be so real. I say it on the website too. It's just sugar in a bag branded as Hummingbird Neck. It's just sugar. I literally go down to the Smart and Final, which is the local grocery store, and I buy 50 pound bags of sugar for 39.97. I take a scooper and a bucket and I load these bags in my garage. And then I got a little 20 heat sealer on Amazon. So I heat seal them, I pack them, I've got, I've got probably £120 of sugar in the back of my Jeep right now to drop off at UPS later. And so I start running ads. I download mock up of the pouch, I give it to ChatGPT, and I say, hey, generate, you know, a woman holding this. Generate this laying on a table. Generate all these different scenes, all these different product photos. I turn those into ads. I use solo drop to build the store, and I launch the ads.

Facebook ads. Instagram, Facebook. Just Facebook.

Yeah, just Meta. Just like all meta products.

Let's get tactical. Are you only in the news feed stories? Just let Facebook ride.

Just let it ride, dude. I just put the. Just put the creatives in there.

Advantage placement.

Sure. I don't even really remember. I just run abos.

What is abo?

Ad Set Budget Optimization. And so you can either do an ABO or a cbo. It's basically like, where do you want Facebook to distribute? Spend? And so I generally run.

So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is, is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you.

I like running two campaigns, each with ad sets within them that are ABOs. And so I have a testing campaign, and I have a winning campaign, and then I'll go launch new sets of ads on the testing campaign. Abs. So I'll put in, I don't know, let's just say five ad creatives at $100 a day on an ABO, meaning Facebook will decide which of those ads get the most spend. Because inherently, Facebook is incentivized to spend your money the best so that you continue to spend them. They want to push the content that's performing the best. Yeah. Just launched a quick little abo. A couple of the ads. Classic Pareto principle. A couple of the ads perform way better than the others. I move them into ad sets in the. In the winning campaign to scale and. And let it ride. Oh, my gosh.

Okay. Well, yeah, dude. Like, what was your cost per acquisition? What are we talking? And you're welcome to share your screen too, if you want to get real nitty gritty.

Yeah, Yeah, I will. So I really want to show people the ad side because it's like, this is the stuff that's super popular. So I've done about $5,000 in sales in two and a half weeks.

Okay.

People are buying them. I've spent a bunch of about.

So that's a six figure business.

Yeah. Yeah. Like if I was really going to go run and gun at this. And so gross margin between the bags and the sugar. Cost me about three bucks or something around those lines to produce a unit.

Not including any labor or shipping.

That's just me messing around in the garage. Yeah. So like it. Yeah. Very bare bones. Like let's just see if this works.

Packaging labeling, raw materials, cogs, cost of goods sold 3 bucks.

COGS is. Yeah, like 351 or something along those lines. Selling them for 18 bucks, you get 2 pounds of sugar for 18 bucks. And so the math is roughly like 80% gross margin. And I'm only selling them as multi.

Packs for those listening. If you want a cpg, a consumer packaged goods product to sell on a shopify store through Facebook or Instagram ads, you really got to start with a 70, 80% gross margin. You just have to. I don't care what the product is.

It's almost impossible. Like you're not going to do it on a 30% margin.

Right.

And similarly like AOVs less than 30. Just like mathematically hard like you got to get north of 50.

Yeah. Even if you're selling like a thousand dollar mattress like Casper style, your cost per acquisition is probably going to be like 400 bucks, 300 bucks. So that thing's got to cost like 200 bucks.

Yeah, 100%. Once you get through the first two, like week or two of ads, you start to get a pretty good feel for what's good. And so I was able to get up to like a 1 1/2 x roas mostly because I stopped selling single packs. That was the one big learning was like I gotta, I gotta sell two of these specifically because the thing that's killing hummingbirds right now is shipping. Like we should actually talk about the shipping stuff because like me shipping six pounds of sugar from Los Angeles to Tennessee is costing me a fortune, dude. It's insane.

How much are you spending on shipping?

Average is like 12 bucks a shipment, which hurts. Dude.

What are you shipping in a poly bag?

Box boxes. Unless it's a one pack, then I ship it in a poly.

And how much does the product weigh? One pack?

Yeah, they're 2 pounds each. Like 1.8 pounds each. Again, I'm not even, I'm not using a ship station. I'm not getting any details pricing like any, any of those things. But what I was able to prove is that people will buy Hummingbird nectar on the Internet that's well branded at a reasonable row as like, I'm not mad at that. It's a super seasonal business for sure. May to September. Like when I did, you know, classic. You go to Jungle Scout and you use that to look at the Amazon stuff. Like all of the purchases that are happening for any of the competitors on Amazon are. It's May to September for the most part. Right. Like, oh, interest, Hummingbird season.

Your cost acquisition is going to go way down.

Yeah.

Presumably.

Yeah. That's the. That is the hope. And so the shipping is its own thing. But cogs will also continue to drop as I order more volume. Specifically on the bag side because I only ordered 250, which is if anyone is starting to do some sleuthing. The reason there's no ads running right now is I ran out of inventory and have to wait for them to ship me more bags that cogs will. Will drop shipping. I have to like, if I could even just cut the shipping expense in half. My math.

You will. And so I just texted Kirk to see like what that should cost. And I think it's like as low as four or five dollars.

And I'm open. Like I like whatever needs to go down to be able to drop that cost. If it's moving to A3PL in Texas, like, fine. Like I'm in. Right. Like whatever needs to go down.

You should also experiment with dropping your product weight to like 15 ounces. That way it can still be under 16 with a poly bag because that's 16 ounces is a cutoff for first class shipping. And it's, it's the difference between like $8 and like $4. Like 1.1 pound versus 15 ounces is literally like it's twice as much.

So smaller bags.

Yeah. And you. Even if you need to drop the price to compensate. But then your cogs will go down too.

Yeah. Yeah. And because I'm selling multi packs, AOV will go up because I just started doing that where like you can't, you can't buy one anymore. But I've been with that of I want to drop. Yeah. Dropping from. Because it's £2 right now. Like they're heavy. Like, yeah, dude, I'm sweating walking in and out of the ups, dude. Like it's, it's a bunch of trips with a bunch of weight.

Everything you described, I could hear a hater writing in the comments. What are you going to go to the grocery store, buy a 50 pound bag of sugar and then go online and buy some packaging with a 20 heat heat sealer and then put up a solo drop on and you.

Yes.

Oh, and it did you think $5,000.

Of sales in its first 21 days? Yes, that's exactly what I did, dude. I filmed the whole thing popping the pops in the, the link in my Twitter bio, dude, you can watch me do it. I literally filmed the entire thing. And so, but yeah, it's literally, it's sitting there. Lauren thinks I'm absolutely insane. I'm out there in the garage for two hours once a week just scooping sugar.

Used to it.

I know, that's what I said, dude. And then I'm on Amazon. You can buy like, you can buy machines that you just pour the sugar in, you press a button and it automatically dispenses 15 ounces out the slot. And I was like, dude, it's only 1200 bucks. Can I put one in the garage? And she goes, no one might show up, dude. I don't know. But yeah. And then I'm just going to go to a baking mix manufacturer, co packer and say, yeah, I want to do a custom baking mix. And they're going to be like, awesome. What are you making? You want like cookies or like, you know, cake mix? I know, just sugar. Just sugar in a bag. Be sick. And so then they'll handle that. And what I've realized is this summer is going to be a total testing. I'm only going to go direct to consumer next summer. You'll see me on Amazon. Like, you'll catch your boy. I was like, dude, I think I can do, I think I can do $1 million a year on this.

Of course you could. You would have like 1% of the market.

If I can get 10 to 20% EBITDA margin, like for four months of the year, I make an extra 100, 200K selling sugar. I'm going to do it. And y' all can do it too. I'm just, I'm just going to do it. Like, I've just decided all the skills.

You pick up in the process of optimizing your Facebook ads and launching a Shopify store, like, you could use those skills across so many other businesses.

Sharpen the sword, dude. Like, it's why, like on the past episodes, I've always been like, yo, you guys should just go launch digital product shopify stores. Like, because you'll just learn, you'll learn how to run ads on easy mode with zero cog, zero shipping. Like you're not going to deal with all the stuff that I'm dealing with in terms of operating an E commerce brand. You just get to send an email as your fulfillment, you get to play with offers and you get to understand what makes things work. And you like I'm in the middle of doing one of those right now because I'm annoyed that I gotta ship units. I'm like, I'm just gonna launch a digital product and see if I can do the same thing. Like you get more flexibility on it. I can't charge $60 for a two pound bag of sugar, but you can charge 70, 60, 70 bucks for a very niche specific digital product. That solves a very specific pain point. Yeah, like we watch it happen all the time.

What do you think you're going to be able to get your cost per acquisition down through Facebook ads too?

We've had days times campaigns that I'm getting purchases for like 14 bucks which works on. Because my AOV has, has been hovering at like 45 to 50 thanks to my in cart bump offer which is Hummingbird Attraction 101. The ebook for 14 bucks. Zero dollar cogs pushes my AOV up 5, 6% of people.

So they're paying for that. It's not just like a free offer to entice them to check.

$14. $14 AI generated 100%. It helps. Well and then you set your, you set your free shipping threshold to incentivize that add on in cart.

And so how many minutes of prompting did it take to make that ebook?

Dude, I did it during like the first quarter of the Lakers playoffs game a couple weeks ago. Like I think I literally built the whole thing in like 12 minutes. The prompt is easy. Dude, it says I want to write a book about this. Write a detailed outline of 10 chapters, 12 chapters, whatever it is, right?

And they write the outline, you got to do the outline, then you got to take it one at a time.

Chapter one. Sweet. Now write chapter two all in the same chat so it knows the reference and builds it all out. I've done that a bunch of times. I got a digital product that's just sitting in my back pocket that I got a launch that I did that on. And so here's the reality of it is all V1s. All of this is V1s. Like it's not like I'm gonna go sling this AI book forever. It's like if people are actually buying it, yes, I will take the three days and like actually try to make it good. Like for sure. But, like, I'm not gonna go do all that work until I know people want it. Why would I? Let's go. If the market tells me they want it, I will build it. None of this build it and they will come stuff, dude. It's like, no, no, no. You come to me, you tell me you'll pay for it. Sick. Then I'll build it.

Absolutely build it. And they probably won't come sell it first. And you know they're coming before you.

And you know what to build because they.

Yeah. Know what to build. Yeah.

Like, I see so many people doing it. The flip, dude, it's crazy.

But the more people listen to this, the less. The fewer people doing.

Look, listen. Get rich.

That's right, baby. You know, so video is cool, but.

You know what's better?

Long form audio via podcast and my newsletter, tkopod.com go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week. Very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. Three episodes a week. Stuff like this. You're gonna love it. All free. No sleazy sales pitch. Tkopod.com all right, so I got a paid account for exploding topics. And anyone listening to this, if you're not. If you're not watching, I'll describe what I'm showing. But these are technology topics sorted by growth from last three months. And they're at the quote, exploding part of their growth cycle. Not at peak, not at regular. First of all, if you're like an ADHD like, idea addict, this is like the best thing you could do. So let's brainstorm real quick some, like, ebook ideas that you could generate with ChatGPT and sell that that matches some of these topics that we're seeing. So I'm just going to name out loud some of the ones that look interesting to me. Robotic lawnmower. Okay, awesome. Interesting. Let's see. I don't know what a lot of these are. Inflatable screen projector.

Cool, huh?

That's interesting. Let's see. Portable neck fan. Lovable exploding.

Oh, yeah, there you go.

Maybe like a $19 ebook on, like lovable hacks.

Yeah. Or a $99 how to build X app.

Yep. Or maybe like some mini portable air conditioner. That search term is growing 200% almost, dude. Maybe an e book on how to build one.

Dude, I thought about that. For the robotic lawnmower, I was like an e book on how to build your own robotic lawnmower.

Smart lawnmower.

Yep.

Digital planners is exploding. How to make your own Digital planner with AI use. You build it. You use AI to build that and sell it.

Yep.

Any of these stand out to you? Phone cooler devices designed to manage the temperature of smartphones during high heat activities like gaming and live streaming.

It's all the summers, dude. The summer stuff too.

I know. It is like lawn mowing and.

Yep.

Air conditioning.

Let's go out a lot of SEO type searches. You see all those there a lot of off page on page. A bunch of people searching for stuff like that.

Let's do that. Let's do this. Health and wellness. Okay. Let's do time frame one year because then it won't be seasonal.

Yep.

Let's look at growth exploding. Let's do non brands.

So dumbbell bracelets. So weight. Almost like dude, that's so good. You know how people have like ankle. Ankle weights. You just rebrand those as wrist weights.

PDRN mask, a skincare product designed to improve skin firmness and elasticity while promoting youthful. You can't tell me people wouldn't buy that anything.

I like. I like the rye serum eyebrow eyebrow specific. I like that a lot.

Skin care product design for eyebrow.

I'm just going to tell some people what's good real quick. Is that cool?

Yep.

Okay, so eyebrow serum, you're going to go to suppliful.com. they have two separate products. One that is a peptide hair serum. The other is they have two different hair serum products that you can go and brand and essentially just white label. They'll do all your shipping. It's drop shipping of supplements. You could go and rip an eyebrow growth serum pretty easily. Like solo drop store branding in Canva. Put that on the template that Suppliful gives you. Connect your Shopify directly to Suppliful.

What does that do?

Supple does all of the fulfillment for crop shipping supplements.

Oh okay. We've talked about that.

Yeah. And so yeah, you could literally go and run that immediately actually like you get. You get it live today. Solo drop Suppliful. Canva chat, GPT Facebook ads manager. Bing bang boom. Get your ads. Oh, filtered shower head. Dude, I just bought one of those.

Loneliness epidemic is booming.

Yep.

Mop soap. We need special soap for mops now.

Dude. Dude, you do. You have to. You never. You. Dude, I can't believe you.

A breathing necklace. A device worn like jewelry that helps control breath. My gosh. What? It just. It blows my mind what people pay for.

Lymphatic drainage is a big one. That's about the massage but like a lot. Dude, I spend A lot of time talking about the difference between offers and vehicles, and I think people get them confused, dude, right? And so, like, dude, when you think about, like an offer, right, I'll use B2B. Just. I feel like more people listening. But if you're talking about B2B, your offer generally is we're either going to help you make more money, save time, or save money, right? Like, those are the worlds that you live in. That's what people are paying for as the end result of what you're doing. So then you back that into like a service, right? Or a method. So we'll say, like, we help you automate your business to save time and make more money. Now that's an offer, right? Now there's multiple vehicles that that offer can live in, right? Like, you can launch that as a service. We will do automation for you for X amount per month. You can launch that as a digital product of, hey, buy this $99 guide on how to automate your business to save time and money. Or you could sell it as a software. Zapier. That's what Zapier sells. Like, Zapier sells. Automate your business to make more money saving time, right? Like, you could sell it as coaching. Like, hey, join this community that'll help you automate your business, right? There's all of these vehicles that exist similarly to form factor on CPG product, right? There's protein shakes, there's protein bars, there's. Dude, there's protein pop tarts. Now shout out. Legendary, right? Like, there's creatine gummies, creatine powders, creatine drinks. Create, like all of the. All of the vehicles that exist. And so when I look at these and see collagen supplements. Mm. I go, okay, what is. What is the vehicle like? Create. Try create.com. phenomenal. Like creatine gummies. Yeah. Amazing founder, amazing product. Like, so good and all. He did not to, like, water down everything he's achieved. He's a great operator, but he just changed the form factor of creatine.

Yeah.

Creatine historically has always been a power.

We need to be gummying everything. Like, everything, everything.

It's all a gummy, dude. Like, it's all a gummy. Like, it's literally whatever. And so it's like, when I look at all of this, I just implore people to explore the vehicle side of the game with different price points, different requirements of, like, everyone's over here saying, I'm going to launch a SaaS to do ABC and D. And I'M like, dude, you probably make more money selling that as a service, a digital product, a coaching program, a community. Yeah, whatever.

Fewer skills, right?

Like, you don't have to go learn. Just because lovable is an exploding topic doesn't mean that that's the only way for you to make money on an offer. But everyone just, like, wants to run a software product. Any software that I've ever had success with started as a service business. Like, Creative OS was an agency called Better Creatives. Three years ago, I sell the same thing that that agency sold, which is higher. Converting ad creatives. We were just doing it as a service. Then we sold it as a digital product. Buy our template pack one time. Then we transitioned it into a software, have sold the whole, like, the same offer all the way through, but the vehicle changed. And so I'm like, start with the vehicle. That's the easiest. Software is arguably the hardest. I'm sitting here being like, dude, I might just try to sell the book. Top of Funnel for Hummingbirds, right? Like, it proves that more people want the thing.

It's not even that we're trying to do the easier thing. It's like, if you choose the harder thing, then you're gonna be less likely to ever get to launch, right? It's just more friction, right?

You know, like, there's people that pop in saying, hey, I want to do this as a. As a software. And it's like, awesome. Have you ever sold this to a human being before? And they're like, no. It's like, dude, I promise you, just, like, go sell it as a service. First. They'll tell you what to do. They'll tell you what that, like, what they actually care about. And it's easier to go and update an ebook or a service or a Than it is to go and make those product iterations on the software. And, guys, you'll make more money selling it as a service. Like, yeah, at 1,000 customers, software makes more sense. But if you're gonna go fight for 10 customers on an offer, I promise you, you'll make more money doing it as a service than a software right now. So do that first and then use what you learn and the cash flow that you got to then invest in automation and technology that supports that offer in the best way. Yeah, like, what are we doing? What are we doing, bro?

All right, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.