Profiting From Print On Demand with Gearbubble CEO Don Wilson

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. If this is your first time joining me and you stumbled across this because one of my loyal listeners shared the episode with you and like, bacon sounds amazing and the topic sounds really good too. What am I listening to? Well, I'm Brad Costanzo, I'm the host and this is my platform where I invite people who are doing amazing things in the world of business, in marketing, and even in finance, as some of my listeners have heard recently. And I invite them to come on the show where I can dive deep into the things that they're doing that's making their business work. And they share ideas and strategies that you normally may not get the chance to hear because maybe you don't have access to them. I like to think of this platform as me letting you eavesdrop on conversations that I want to have anyway with people that I'm dying to talk to. And I encourage you to listen closely because a lot of podcasts out there will go deep into the basics and, you know, assume that you know nothing about this. But I like to think that my bacon wrapped listeners here are a little bit more advanced and astute than that. So I like to dive into the strategies that not only myself that I can use in my business, that my clients can use and, you know, also provide insights to sometimes my guests. And it's a lot of fun. So I encourage you to listen to the entire thing and if you like it, share it or give me feedback, you can always reach me at askbradaconrapped business.com that is my personal email. I answer that. And if you're having any challenges in business, if you're stuck, if you're, if profits have plateaued and you're just looking for a second opinion on how you might be able to get those up, shoot me an email, tell me your situation, and I may invite you to either be on the show or a private consultation. See if we can help fix that. Now, today's guest is Don Wilson, and Don is the founder and CEO of gearbubble.com so gearbubble is an amazing platform and some of you guys might be familiar with it some of you may be familiar with the general business model. Years ago, one of the most popular business models out there, you know, started really with probably Teespring and these print on demand T shirts. And if you're at all familiar with this, the quick model is create a custom design, upload it to a site like a teespring or one of these other ones, and run Facebook ads or other ads to it. And if you, in essence, it's like you're building your own affiliate program and you're starting to make money from it, that.

You'Re targeting demographics and interest on Facebook, it was great. And things started to evolve over the years, and people like Don realized that there's a much bigger opportunity in offering.

Not just T shirts, but a lot of different types of gear and print on demand items. So he built Gear Bubble. And I've been paying attention to this and using it a little bit here and there for about the past, I don't know, six months to a year. And I'm really impressed. And one of the reasons I invited Don on the show today is because Don is also a master marketer. He's been in this game way before just teespring. He's been a master of Facebook ads, a master of sales funnels, and he gets it at levels that other people don't. And he's constantly upgrading this and making changes. And as somebody who's been like a, you know, a user of his system, I've seen it. I'm really impressed. And I invited him on the show today to talk about some of the cool opportunities in the industry that you can do, whether you're just looking to be, you know, have your own business and have just do nothing but print on demand gear, or you want to add it to your business, like I'm doing with stiletto coffee.com, which is, you know, my loyal listeners know that this is my wife and I's coffee business. So we're going to dive into this, these topics and a lot more, and I'm going to go ahead and bring Don on the line right now. Don, are you with me, my brother?

Yeah. Can you guys. Can you hear me, Brett?

I can hear you perfect, man. It's great. Well, dude, it's great to have you on the show. This is. This is going to be fun. I love what you're doing. I'm really impressed by all the advances you guys have been making.

Thank you. I appreciate that, man. We're working really hard to not just be any platform in the market. But to bring real innovation, new products and things that don't currently exist. So I appreciate it, man.

Absolutely. So. And I've noticed that like, before we dive into the. To the sizzling hot business advice, let's dive in a little bit to just the background. So, like, how long have you been part of the whole Internet digital marketing game? Like, when did you get your start?

Oh, man, I don't remember exactly when. It was probably around five, six years, something like that. It was more in the Warrior Forum days. I started kind of the same way everybody else did. Failed, put up a blog, tried to make it work, didn't make it work. Eventually, after a bunch of failures, figured out how to run basic Facebook ads. I bought a course from simple Spencer.

Back in the Warrior Forum days called One Penny Clicks. Maybe you bought it. I learned how to do really cheap traffic from that and then I got better and better and better at it. Ended up getting to be probably one of the best in the world for a while at Facebook ad traffic and launched my own courses, did some big, huge launches. And most importantly, I had a lot of successful students because we got really good at Facebook traffic. And then Teespring came along and a couple other platforms came along and they said, hey, you guys got the traffic down. Now we're going to make making products easy. And then when that kind of happened, we had just this massive explosion of, I'd say more successful Internet marketing students in a short time period than pretty much any phase I've seen since I've been in Internet marketing.

I. It blew up. It absolutely blew up. And it looked like everywhere you turned around, people were making a good amount of money selling T shirts and selling, you know, customized items, etc. Then you made a. So you made a. You were. You were kicking, you're kicking butt doing that. Right? And then you made a switch to say, I'm going to start my own platform and I'm going to do this. What was kind of the impetus for that? Because there's a big difference between starting a SaaS business and just mastering Facebook ads and selling stuff.

Yeah, I mean, there was holes in the market for one and two, I was friends with the owners of the platform that I was using and simple features that were really great for marketers, like an upsell. No matter how much I baked for them, they wouldn't happen. So when I was probably the top referring affiliate ever for the platforms and they're still not doing simple things for me, I didn't really have a choice. Had to make it, because like I said, I've been in this market for years before this boom and I was already serving this market. And I'm going to continue to serve the market for several, several years is I'm going to give the marketers the things that they want and need. And I, I, that's the one thing I think I'm the best at is listening to the pulse to market and actually delivering on what marketers want.

Well, yeah, and you've been on both sides of the table, so you, you know, and a lot of people there's like, yeah, let's start this platform because I think there's a great opportunity. But, you know, they're like, yeah, we don't need upsells. We're, we're, we don't like to pay those extra taxes on all that extra income we're going to make. Taxes are a bitch. So, so that's awesome. Now, so you started Gear Bubble and you know, now, like, tell me about some of the items that people can customize and sell.

We have a lot of stuff and we are always adding new things. We've got mugs, we just added posters last week, which are doing pretty good, but shirts just like pretty much everybody and their brother has. We've got lots of really unique jewelry, circle pieces, square pieces, heart piece jewelry that we spent a long time developing and remanufacturing to make it look really, really good. And we've developed a lot of different opportunities out there. There's cell phone covers and bracelets and a few others. We're about to actually start bringing on gold jewelry and a few other different ones shortly. So we have a lot more things planned and pretty much anything that you can print on or mold into, we're working on making it easy and simple.

Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah, it seems like every month I see a new product that comes out. I have really liked the necklaces. Those look really, really cool. And what I like about this too is it's very much these, these products are all impulse buys, right? Like you, you dial into a certain demographic and interest a psychographic, and you present them something that they just feel like, oh, my God, I have to have that. And is that, is that one of the things that makes this one of the easier methods of selling things online?

I think so, because you don't really need to be an expert in any market to sell into it. You just have to be a brand of cool products and you can sell into pit bulls, cows, family baseball. Doesn't really matter because if you're going to sell high end, you have to really understand the market that you're into, really develop a brand, get them with a lot of different ads with a lot of different touch points and talk to them over time so they can know like and trust your brand. Now on a platform, we kind of do that for you already. But the goal is that you want to keep it beneath a certain price point so that it still remains an impulse buy. So you maybe need to hit them once with an ad, maybe twice and hit them with a retarding ad. But you don't need to hit them like six, seven, eight, nine times like you'd see in like a thousand dollar product launch. So we kind of have the teeter totter in there. If you get the price too high, it's no longer an impulse buy. So you know, like a diamond ring, probably not going to bring that onto the market. But things that are a little bit cheaper, we absolutely will.

Right. So what do you think? I know. So, you know, I guess backing up. I remember when I first discovered the whole idea of the print on demand, the teespring, the gear bubble, you know, all of these other companies who are doing this and this is, you know, maybe a couple years ago and I kind of got, you know, the shiny object syndrome. I was like, I'm gonna, I'm toy around with this and play with it. And I had a little bit of success. Not a ton.

Right.

I just, I was profitable, but not, not enough for me to just go full bore into that because that's not my primary business. But it was, you know, there were aspects of it that were frustrating. Even though I was having a little bit of, you know, a little bit of success. What do you think is the, what do you think is the biggest determinant of success for people who are like, yeah, I just want to, I just want to master this and, and make this happen. Like I've got ideas for designs and I've got this, that and the other and I've got the willingness to sit through it. What do you think causes people to fail versus succeed?

Two things. You need to minimize your fail points and you need to be realistic. And I mean that in certain weird ways. And I'll explain that. The realistic thing is when you see a Shopify stat every day that says, oh, just did $60,000 yesterday or $50,000 this day and you started six days ago, it's not realistic for that to happen to you. So just make sure that you take everything you See, online with a grain of salt. And that everybody that's got a big screenshot started with a small one.

That's great. That's tweetable right there.

I do big launches. My first launch flop. I think I sold like seven copies. And I worked so hard just to even do it, to even get those seven copies. And it took a long time. Now I do a launch, and I can sell hundreds of thousands of dollars instantly and show you that big screenshot. But I started with seven. I went 12. And then the minimalization of the fail points. What worked really, really good when we first started in 2013 to make this work so successfully was it was design or targeting. That was all that the fail points were. And if you can minimalize things down to where it's either your design or your targeting for your advertisement to at least say, all right, is this campaign a complete pop or doing okay? Well, if it failed, is it your design or your targeting? So when you're starting, you need to make it to where you can understand in the simplest way possible while it did or didn't work, so that you can get more of every single day. And you can analyze them, and then you just grow your strategies with more steps in them, and then you can take that same thing and apply it to scaling. Why did this way I scaled work? Is it because I duplicated my onset or did I do something wrong? I don't want to get too advanced into it, but I think that's the best way for anyone to get successful. That's not. No matter what level you're at, is to minimize the fail points into a way you can understand why something worked or why something didn't work. Right.

That makes a ton of sense. On the. One of the most overwhelming parts I know for in the very, very beginning is the. Is also one of the advantages of this, the sheer infinite number of potential niches and targets and. And, you know, things that you can layer on top of each other. Like, you can go after the most obscure markets and make a killing because it's so dialed in. But is there any guidelines for people who, you know, kind of want to do this for start, like, just starting off, like to say, okay, pick a. Pick a market or a niche or an interest and kind of go with it. Like, for instance, I know that, like everybody says, okay, go after, like nurses, you know, in the very beginning, they're like, go after dog lovers. Go after this, that or the other. What advice do you have? Especially now that things have kind of changed for people who are just starting off on this and kind of want to start to pick something to go with it with the highest probability of success.

The best thing you can do is to pick anything that you or yourself is interested in.

Okay.

If you know the market, you're always going to have a, like at least a 10 times better shot at getting the right targeting, understanding the right things, knowing how to talk to them, knowing how to speak to them. After that, the second best thing you can do is pick something that's proven and doesn't. You know, like hiking, camping, wine, dogs, family, all these different things. You know, veterans are all very, very proven, but they also have the most advanced marketers in them. So I think you need to start with what you know. Second, go with you know what works, and then third, then go with something a little bit more obscure and see which method is working the best for you.

Okay, nice. What about one of the things that's rampant in this industry, which is just copying off of each other? People see, people see somebody else with the design and they just take that, they slightly change it and run with it. I mean, how big of a problem really is that in the market versus, you know, what's kind of the best practice? Because there's very few totally original, original ideas. But you know, what's your take on this whole.

Well, the thing is, if you're new and you're trying to make it work, nobody's gonna steal your stuff unless it's selling.

That's a good point.

So just say it is a problem. It is in the market, it is reality. You have to deal with it. But there's two things that happen. One, if you're not making any money and selling, nobody's stealing your stuff. Don't worry about it. Two, if you are making money, then people are starting to steal your stuff, then what you need to worry about is building up data, building up conversion pixels, building up things that people can't steal. Yeah, it's just two phases. Don't let it stop you at all because it makes no difference to your success. What it does make a difference to is your ability to scale once you become successful. So do not think of it as an obstacle because it's only an obstacle to scaling.

Okay, what are some of the things that are, I guess from an, from a legal IP wise frowned upon. So like obviously you can't use unless you have a license for certain things. You can't use that, like a, you know, like a university name, logo, etc. You know, you can't like do a Star wars shirt unless you have a Star wars license. Are there any things out there, like, you know, you know, like let's say like a music lyric. Like if you have a. I don't know, I'm just picking like a Justin Timberlake lyric that he says. Maybe like one line and you want to put something like that on there and then advertise it to Justin Timberlake fans. Are there any of these kind of like no no's that really. Some of them are like, maybe that's okay, maybe it's not. It's kind of skirts. The, the gray, the gray edge of it is there. Do you have any insights on what should either do or avoid there? It's, it's.

There's so many of them are case to case. I mean, you just gotta ask yourself logical questions. If this is something that I'm trying to leverage somebody else's brand to make money off of it, then just don't do it.

Right.

And also you're gonna see a lot of it out there, a lot of it in newsfeeding. Unfortunately it is profitable, but doesn't mean that they're going to be profitable in three years when they get sued.

Yeah. Getting shut down or slapped is like the probably the least of their issues. If they get sued by one of those big companies that.

It's really hard to say. I mean, most of it honestly at a design level is common sense.

Yeah. What's one of the more unique or just cool success stories that you've either done or seen? Maybe with Gear Bubble, like, you know, talk about the biggest potentials out there. Just the ones that blew you away. Like, wow, that was amazing.

Yeah, there's been a couple of them. There's a couple sellers that are that are doing some stuff where they're scaling from niche to niche to niche. JD had that one necklace that he randomly one day, he's like, hey, I'm gonna scale this into every single country and do really, really large numbers. And he sold like 11,000 units of the necklace. I was like, are you kidding me? That's some pretty crazy numbers. But there's been a few things like that where it's a brand new product like jewelry that we were the first to ever bring anything like that to the market. And then somebody sold 10, you know, 15,000 pieces of it. And I'm just like, that's pretty amazing.

Yeah.

Anything got huge, massive numbers where you've got one design that was made in a day selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of anything. It's still. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah, that really is, you know, one of the things I do like about this model too. Having. So I've done pretty much every type of entrepreneurial business model out there. Some wildly successful, some wildly not not successful. What I do like about this, especially for people who are brand new, is it. It takes a lot of the other guesswork out of it. You know, you don't have to handle fulfillment, you don't even have to handle the payments and all this stuff. It's almost like you're creating your own affiliate. You really are. You're creating your own affiliate product. You create the product with just really a design and you throw traffic at it and you get paid a portion of the sale. And it takes away a lot of the brain damage that goes into, you know, building an entire business, you know, whether you're selling info or physical, etc. And it's a great way to kind of cut your teeth on that. You and I talked a little bit about this offline about, you know, integrating this into a current business. So if you have. If you already have another brand and you want to start to add this to what you're doing, talk about some of the capabilities that Gearbubble gives you to just, you know, add value to your current brand.

I mean, it's very easy to sell physical hard goods to anybody that's doing digital online businesses in any way, shape or form. Like the Stiletto coffee one, that's a pretty easy one for you and a pretty obvious one also because we have coffee mugs. But the same type of thing can be done with pretty much anyone's business out there. We allow people to brand things to them. If you're doing anything where you're creating awareness, we do a lot of charity stuff and stuff like that as well. Works really, really well. So there's a lot of applications. I think the coolest way to think about this is in terms of if you look at it like a product launch, almost a JBZoo product launch, everybody's seen them go really, really well. And most product launches, if you're decent on it, they make money. They really do. If you. But there's a lot of headaches. There is optimization, there's sales pages, making sure it works on desktop, mobile, your buy button set up, getting your product up there, having actual images, everything, and then having to make a course, having a members area and all these different things. Think of this as different. Think of it as if you could make an entire digital sales page for like A product launch, but all you had to do was upload the ebook cover. Yeah, that's what, that's what you want to look at it in terms of how much simpler the model can be or you upload the ebook cover. Don't worry, we'll build the course for you. Don't worry, we'll reply to all the emails of all the people, but we're going to make sure everybody gets their access. It's gonna take a little longer because we got to ship it to them, but we're gonna handle everything for you. So if you look at it in terms of that, if you have an audience as well, you can, I know people that have giant blog audiences and different things like that. They can, they'll treat an actual product, a physical product, just like a product launch. And you're basically getting a sales page built for you as soon as you upload a product.

Yeah, that's one of the things I love about it and is that you don't have to take care, you don't have to worry about any of the technology. You can totally upload it on there and you've got a beautifully highly conversion optimized design. But relatively recently you guys also came out with your drop ship program to where like I know I can sell it on, is it Amazon and Shopify.

You can sell it pretty much anywhere that you want because you can manually import orders, get them to say whatever you want in the packing slips. You can, you can sell on pretty much any site in the world. And then we can fulfill the orders on Shopify and Amazon and places like that. We have technology to where it autofills and makes it really, really simple. But with our drop ship program, you could set up a lemonade stand down the street, sell the lemonade inside of a mug and sell the mug at the same time, whatever you wanted to do and you could, you could make it happen.

Well, the drop ship program is great and I know that I've played around, looked at other, you know, when I was doing some research, looked at some other companies and I was never really a big fan until and then, but, but you guys didn't have at the time, like, I don't know, six months a year ago, you didn't have the drop ship program.

Official when you came out with it. And I immediately plugged it in, it started working really well and I liked it. And I like how it's not only like if somebody buys it on my Shopify store, it sends the order and then you guys send it out. I don't have to do a thing. But like you said, I can take orders in something totally different. Non Shopify. Like, I'm setting something up through Click Funnels right now to where somebody could buy that and buy the coffee. Like buy a mug and then upsell the coffee and then upsell a few different things and then correct me if I'm wrong because I have not done this yet. All I would have to do is then take the orders like once a day or. Or whatever, have my assistant do this and export the orders from Click Funnels. Just upload. Upload them into Gearbubble and zoom, off they go, Right?

Absolutely. And if I'm not lazy, I should call Russell and see if I can make an integration happen.

Exactly right. Yeah. That'd be huge. That'd be. That'd be really, really good. I like that. The. Did you wait? Were you just about to say something?

I said, I'll call him, see what we can do.

Yeah, I think that'd be tight. Especially. I mean, you guys are growing so much right now, aren't you? Have you. What kind of growth have you seen in the past?

We're doing really well. We're doing over a million dollars a month in sales.

That's beautiful. That's beautiful.

Summer's the downtime for E commerce in comparison to, like, obviously the holidays.

Try selling coffee in the summer. Hot coffee. I need to switch to iced coffee. I think sales definitely slowed down, but trying to. I'm trying to gear. Quote air quotes, gear up for Christmas time in the fourth quarter when things.

Really so really, really well, when it's cold out and it's gift season. It's really good. Yeah.

As I was. As I played around with this business model, some more intensely than other. I see that the big areas that it seems like you have to, I guess, master or not even master, but just have a good control of is you have to have, you know, ideas for, you know, who you're gonna sell to and what kind of general designs. Obviously, if you're not a designer, you gotta hire a designer.

Yep.

And then you have to do the typically face. I mean, Facebook is probably where 80 to 90% of these are being sold. I imagine like Facebook ads to this.

85% or more. How much? I'd say 85% would be 90.

Exactly.

Most of it.

And I know you can touch on this, but I know. Was it Rachel who came out with the low hanging fruit system or something like that?

Yeah. I mean, Gearbubble's overall traffic, I think like 85% of it comes from Facebook. And I'd say probably 90, 91 would be buyer traffic comes from Facebook.

Yeah. Right. Well, where I was going with this is that. Would you say that those are the three primary areas that you just have to either have skills or resources in. So it's the ideas, the design, and then the.

Facebook ad management and optimization.

Yep. And I wouldn't even. Just make sure that you just keep it simple on the Facebook ads at start and be patient. Start small with your money. Be patient. Give it a decent amount of money to test if you get a designer. If you have a good. I would start your designs on mugs because mugs yield to having. For lack of a better term, you can get a crappier design to sell in a mug easier than a shirt.

That's a good point. Because they don't have to wear it, they just kind of have to like it. And, you know, they're drinking their morning coffee out of it. They're not.

You put a funny woody, say, on a mug and if just font only and people will buy it. Some of the best ones I sold were like, pit bulls make me happy and dogs make me happy. We sold tens of thousands of dollars of that mug and it was just a bold aerial font with a like a little small silhouette of a blacked out dog. And it was really simple, really easy. I think I spent 15 bucks on the designs.

That's awesome. When it comes to.

So this is a personal question here because I'm like, I manage a lot of stuff. I have a lot of stuff going on, and my skill set is more on the creative side as a marketer and a business owner and working with people as opposed to being the, especially when it comes to Facebook ads, the technician. I always have hire people to manage the ads for me, etc.

And one of the things that I was thinking about doing for this to actually add a profit center into my business is I'm good with the creative on the words. I can easily find a designer to do that. I've actually got a designer, so that's not a problem. And I was sitting here thinking, okay, if I don't want to sit here and just manually bang out all the ads and optimize them myself, should I A, get, you know, one of my other Facebook managers to just kind of add this, which, you know, I may end up doing, or B, find someone who's brand new, give that. There's a lot of training that exists out there on, you know, how to, how to optimize and manage these ads. Or C, should I find somebody who's already doing really well, doing kind of the gear bubble, the print on demand, the Teespring or whatever, and has got some experience in there and then pay them and fund all the other stuff. So these are some of the decisions I'm making right now is how to best roll this out to where I can put some real attention on it without having to put a ton of manual time into it. Do you have any recommendations there?

I mean, you just gotta. You gotta break it into a departmentalized model.

Yeah.

You have the design department, which is gonna be creative and a design. So if you're gonna be originally doing like maybe the first 10 creatives or whatever yourself, then a designer is going to go design them. Then you have the setup process where they're setting them up on your actual gearbubble account and they're setting them up on a Facebook fan page, getting them ready to run ads. Then you have the testing phase. Run a small amount of ads just to see if the designs are even worth a credit to the audience. And if they are, and you maybe get a sale and you start to try and scale them and make them work. So you have different phases. I would think that you can get somebody in to go up to at least test phase. But getting somebody to do your designs for you or not designs, doing your data and your ads for you is very tricky and very hard.

Yeah, right. I know.

Recommend biting that off until you are making good money with this. Because it's very hard. It's very difficult. Because if you get someone that's already in the industry, they will eventually leave.

Yep. Yeah. You can do it on their own and.

Absolutely. I mean, that's the thing about this. There's not a lot of barrier to entry. You got a design and the platform takes care of the rest. So if somebody knows how to run all the ads and optimize and do everything else, there is nothing taken. And you'll get somebody loyal. I'm not saying it's gonna happen every time, but I've. It does most every single time. Because if you get somebody that's entrepreneurial enough to actually run your ads aggressively and do it right, they're going to be entrepreneurial enough to leave. Yeah.

Why would they. Yeah, why would they just make you all the money when they can? Because the magic is in the Facebook targeting and optimization that they can shadow.

You later once it's working. I would much more recommend you hiring out the creative department that you think that you're good at, like, and focus on the ads because of the headaches that you're going to have to deal with on the ads department are much more difficult than research and funding design. Okay, great. Now, you have no idea how we sell this, so you're just gonna keep doing this anyways, right?

Well, that makes a lot of sense. And that's one of the things I've been struggling with, because, as I said, I'm proficient at Facebook ads. You know, where I'm most proficient at is getting them set up and strategizing what we're gonna do. In the beginning, it's the management and optimization and constant monitoring of it that just drives me batshit crazy. That's not fun.

It's not creative. Not enjoyable. A data nerd, though. They love it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And that's where, you know, that's probably my. My next big step. And I played around, you know, with Gearbubble, I've probably created, I don't know, like, 20 different designs and tested a few of them out and just wanted to play with it. And like, to my listeners out there, I highly recommend going over to gearbubble.com and checking it out like people can. You can start an account and get going on this. It doesn't. You don't have to pay to be a part of Gear Bubble, right?

Yeah, it's all free. I mean, you don't have to pay to do anything. The only thing you got to pay for is a decent. And if you're a designer, you don't get nothing.

Yeah, it's. Do you find. This question came up and I don't know how closely you know who the customers are, because you guys have. So, I'm sorry, this. The vendors, you have so many, but do you find a lot of them are more marketers who are trying to do this because they're. They like the marketing side and the design comes second? Or do you get quite a few designers who just love this and they come at it more from that passionate aspect there?

Currently, it's by far more marketers, and that's mainly just because that's who I marketed to. That's my industry. That's who I care about the most. And not that I don't care about designers, but designers didn't get me to where I am, marketers did. So that's who I serve and that's who my focus is. We are going to build a designer marketplace, but the focus on it is to bring good designers into a Marketplace inside of Gearbubble so that you don't have to wade through the crappy ones. So it's still a focus for marketers, but we'll probably get more designers then. But it's like 95.5 and then I'd say that most all marketers and then people will hire designers. So there's a lot of room for great designers to partner up with marketers too. I know a lot of people that are very successful at that. But partnerships are very difficult to make work.

Right. Yeah, I agree with that. If a designer was really smart, they would find a great marketer who just knows how to knock these things out of the park and just. Yeah, let me manage the ads, let me manage the funnels and let's talk a little bit more about the potential, like what you can do with a sales funnel on Gearbubble. So let's go through a scenario. I have a Facebook ad. It runs to a coffee mug that somebody really likes. They buy it. What's possible after that?

Okay, say you're doing a Pitbull's mug on a coffee mug. You'd probably want to run a flex ad for that to happen. Pitbull interest, then an and statement and then coffee as an interest. So you get people to like coffee and like pitbulls run that. They come through, they buy it. You can do a matching item upsell. So if you put a pit bulls make me happy you not so much on a mug. It's funny witty. People like funny witty on a coffee mug because it kind of matches their mood as they get in their caffeine for the day. But it also works really well on a shirt. I sell just as many on a shirt and just having the same design as an upsell most of the time across our testing gets a 10% conversion rate on the upsell. Sometimes it's a little higher, sometimes a little bit lower. So you're going to increase your margins by quite a bit. You sell 100 mugs on the front end, you're going to sell 10 more shirts on the back end and you're going to get an extra, you know, 120, 130 bucks in profit just by putting an upsell there.

So that was actually going to be one of my second questions which you just answered, which was if you, if you have the mug with the saying as opposed to selling another mug with a different saying, you. You see it being better typically to go the same saying on a different item. Like a shirt. Yep.

So anytime you're In a sales funnel doesn't matter if it's just one or this or a different one. The best thing, the awesome thing about an upsell is that you can preconceive things about the traffic because you know, things you know, they just bought. So what I can preconceive about the traffic is they like coffee, they like pit bulls and they like this specific design enough to buy it. Yeah, I'm, I'm not going to change any of that. I'm going to, I'm going to put it on a shirt because they're probably not. They might buy another mug twice. And that does work as well. Same item but putting it on a shirt, it's usually working a lot better because the one thing you do know for a fact is they like this design enough to buy it. So you don't want to change that to a different design. You can, it does work, but I mean consistently I'm going to get a better conversion rate using that knowledge. Right.

Do you, do you have a limit A on the number of upsells that can happen right after one? Like is there only one upsell or is there. Can you do multiple. Okay, that's fine. No daisy, you don't want to go, you don't want to overdo it in daisy chain.

Not on a, not on a platform with like 55, 60,000 people because. And we made everything very non aggressive, especially when we first started it. And now we're getting a little more aggressive on our upsell. A little more aggressive to making one clicks and different things because that's. Our delivery times are so much faster than they were when we started. So now we can actually do that because the time we deliver matches the aggression of the marketing.

Nice, Nice. Now just recently you and Rachel came out with the. Or Rachel did. I don't remember exactly the. Was it the low hanging fruit, Low hanging system? Low hanging system. Tell me or the audience basics about that. Like what was. What was kind of cool about that? Because she started doing some stuff that was a little different than just going Facebook to.

Yeah, it was really cool. So basically she would just upload an image from whatever on a mug or shirt or whatever it is that she wanted to sell. And she used the understanding that, you know, Key Robo is good. We're like 15,000 top site in the United States, which is pretty.

Oh wow, that's great.

But then you look at Amazon, they're four. I'm like, oh, we're doing awesome. But they're doing a little bit better. So Amazon probably gets in like maybe two minutes. The amount of sales we get in a whole week. Yeah, they're just that much larger than everyone. It's not us, it's. It's everybody. So if the understanding that Amazon is the largest marketplace online, period, getting to be part of that marketplace, has a lot of sales just organically. So that's what she's been doing. She gets a couple hundred sales every single month. Just doing mugs, uploading the design to Gear Bubble, taking the pictures from Gear Bubble, uploading it to Amazon, basically tagging with some proper SEO stuff that I'm not very good at. And it starts to rank inside the marketplace organically and she starts to get sales with no ad costs.

Pretty cool. And that's, and that's fulfilled by merchant. She's not, she doesn't have to buy a bunch of inventory and then send it to Amazon. Am I right?

You just do the like this stuff we talked about before with the drop ship program. You import your order and it's done.

Yeah, that's, that's genius because that, that happens automatically right in the back dashboard. You can either integrate with Shopify or Amazon automatically.

It's like automatically. It's like mid next week. They actually pushed it on the server for me today to test. So I want to make sure it's perfect before.

But I mean, it's not a manual. Not a manual. Download the orders from Amazon and upload them into Gearbubble. There's like an API connection or something.

There's an API connection that we're still working on and finishing off. Because the reason why is the SKU number inside of Amazon has to be unique every single time. SKU number inside of Gear Bubble has to be the same every single time. So matching them up has been a little bit difficult. They're really easy manual and it's click simple. But by this time, by the time anybody listens to this, it'll be full and fully automated.

Right. That's cool. I think, I think that's genius to be able to take that over there and do it. I mean, it's, it's really a just, I mean the entire industry of the print on demand.

You know, customize this print on demand stuff. It really levels a playing field for so many people in being able to get something out there to get those first sales online and take a lot of the brain damage out of it. A couple of the other kind of maybe more micro tactical questions I had when you're. I know you guys have got some cool developments Such as, you know, when I, when I create a mug, you've got various pictures that I can put it on, like, right. Like a woman holding the mug and you know, backdrops. Do you find that, do you find that on the Facebook ads? The kind of, the lifestyle style pictures or ads tend to convert a little bit better than just throwing a picture of the product up there.

It depends on how you do it. If you're doing like a gender specific ad that's going to get you most your sales. So typically like a female that's doing a mug and you can put a female older on the mug and that's your typical demographic and you know that in advance. Absolutely. It's going to convert better because it's more proper to the vision of whoever you're trying to get the sales from. But if you put like a woman in a male mug in a veteran design or something that's targeted to men, it's going to do much less. So it really, if you're smart with it, it works better. But if you're not smart with it, I would make sure that you want to use one that's generic in terms of it's maybe on a table with no people in the background because that's going to apply the same to both audiences. But getting a properly, even just getting the dimensions Quite correct, like 1200 by 1200 to 1200 by 6,628 on your ads is massive because then it takes up the most landscape on Facebook possible. So it's not so much getting the perfect ad photo as getting it really good. And then once you're making a lot of money, then it's about making sure it's perfect. Even taking your own ad photos of real products, you'll never even, you'll never be able to beat a real photo.

Yeah, exactly. So order your own product, get some.

Photographs of it creatives. Because the ad creative outside of targeting is the number one thing that you can control in your ads. Yeah.

Do you find that a lot of products have a, you know, a certain life cycle? Like it's, it's really cool for maybe the first month or so when, when you're advertising it to that target and then they just kind of die down because people have seen it and you have to constantly turn out new designs over and over. Have you seen or experienced some designs that just perennially work really, really well?

It's a mix of both and it depends on how you kind of attack it in your strategy and how big the audience market is. So if you're doing like pit bulls. That's a one size market. If you're doing like yoga, that's much larger or if you're doing dogs, that's much, much larger. So the ability for you to scale your campaign over time is much bigger because there's more data that you can build with pixels and things over time that can extend the life of your campaign that Facebook gives you. It's all more advanced things, but there's a lot of things you can that are variable based on how long your campaign will be. Did you eat up the margin by paying too much in the beginning? Did you not build your data correctly so you can't keep scaling with lookalike audiences? There's a lot of variables to that, but for the most part, nine out of 10 campaigns, there is a product lifecycle. It does become pretty understandable within. After you've hit it a few times, you get a really great roi. Out the gate for a few days starts to dwindle a little bit. If you duplicate your ads and scale properly, you can keep high for a while. If you raise your budgets and screw up the optimizations of your ads, you can completely kill your roi. So a lot of it in the, in the product life cycle depends on the art in which you scale and how good you are at it over time.

Right? Okay, that makes, makes a lot of sense. And you know, the other thing is, I've heard this from some of my buddies who just kill it in this market. They said, you know, if, if the, if the saying, if the quote or whatever, if it works in one market, you can oftentimes make a very slight alteration to that. And I mean totally change the market. But the same concept, whether if it's sarcastic or funny or whatever, if it works elsewhere, you have a, it's like you have a brand new product with a slight modification.

I do that all the time. It's one of the best ways to scale because once you prove one product, even if it's not the exact same ROI from market to market to market, you can make different designs like the one I give example. Pit bulls make me happy. We have pit bulls make me happy. Rottweilers make me happy. Pit bulls make me happy. You not so much. Which is a pretty funny one for a mug in the morning. Yeah, I like that one. That's how people's attitude are in the morning until they finish their cup. And we've done it with 10 different dog breeds. We've done it with dogs make me happy. You not so much and we've used the pixels and data from all the different ones in there and we go even more broad. So there's a lot of options. You can do. You can do Nurses make me happy. You not so much. LPNs make me happy, you not so much. It's probably not the best example, but you can kind of get how you can niche down. You can go laterally from sub niche to sub niche, or you can go, you know, more broad. There's a lot of options and it's one of the best ways, I think, to scale.

Nice. So turning this back towards me selfishly, for Stiletto Coffee, the, you know, as I told you a little bit about it, offline, etc, the entire brand is, you know, it's really for the classy, sassy, professional driven women who, you know, they're go getters. Right. They, they're fashionable, they take care of themselves, they look good, they're probably, they're probably professional. And there is also a very women's empowerment, feel good program or, you know, feel good vibe to it because, you know, we do give back a portion to charity. And as I was playing around with some of the designs and I can send some of these to you offline if you're just even curious. So I've been playing with certain things, like how can I layer these? Like, some of them are just like sarcastic stuff. Like there's one of them that was, you know, my body's just to filter coffee. Goes in, sarcasm comes out. Right. So that's kind of cool. It's not super specific based on somebody's interests or demographics. I think it's pretty broad. But one of the things I was thinking, I mean, tell me if I'm probably off base on this, but is to take that general attitude, then, you know, cut that down into more either.

Certain other demographics or certain, like maybe you have a certain job type, maybe you have certain. Where's my little list here? I was writing this down for our podcast here where I was saying.

I love how when I need it, it's not there.

But you know, you know what I'm saying?

It's like a stiletto copy one here. I mean, there's a. It's. This is a. It's very broad in terms of where you can go. I think you want to sub niche this down almost.

Yeah.

Into some different. You can do so much with this because you're looking for like, like women empowerment coffee. Ish. Yeah, ish. And the brand that you have. I'm just checking your site as we're on the call here, it's a really great brand. There's a lot of different things that can you. You can do. But I'd have to see more of the purchase details, like how broad can we go and get people to continue to buy into this? Because if it's just getting lots of women that buy coffee, you can do that very, very broad ways. And I would almost look to see what type of markets you can flex in the middle of like meditation, yoga, things that also these successful people and driven people have in common. And I would maybe sub niche it down and go in a different way to bring in bigger volumes because the easy one is like entrepreneurs and people that are in our market, but that's a small, small market in terms of where people can be filtered and funneled into it. Because it's this kind of like attitude driven, solido driven thing is a great attitude. I know a lot of people that are all entrepreneurs. When you we brought it up, I immediately thought of like three or four different people, right?

Exactly.

Like a medium like that woman, that one that's kind of got a little attitude right there. That one that's like, that's exactly who you're looking for. And I think that you just got to get some designs that match that attitude, really flow into that and get some people. And I think a good way to grow this is also power influencers and product placement. Because the people that you're getting into here, a lot of them can have followings. A woman that's an entrepreneur that could have a classy, sassy mug and they have it in their actual live videos and different things. You could get a ton of exposure just working deals with people like that. I think is.

That's true. Yeah. Send them some cool sweets, swag. I've kind of been doing that a little bit with some folks, you know, doing some influencer marketing on Instagram, YouTube, etc. And just kind of trying to get that a little bit of product placement going on. But I like what you're, what you're saying. Like I remember when I first started this, I was like, ooh, Marie Forleo would like be a perfect, you know, like avatar for this if people don't know who she is. But.

And you know, just some other folks that, yeah, I can create a, I could create mugs or sayings for them. Heck, I could create. Take one of their sayings or one of their things like that. If they, they do a lot of videos but they don't have their own Mug, I could send it to them. And, you know, one side has their own saying. One. One side has my stiletto coffee logo.

That's how I kind of started my. When I. When I was doing year roll before I started to get a lot of traction in the very beginning is I was making custom mugs with phrases that Internet marketers had. Like, I would have one pixie dust, and it was for Brian Johnson. One that was like coffee shine on mug that was for barbling. And it was. I would just take something that was part of their personality and I would put it on a mug and then I'd send it to them. And almost every single time, guaranteed, like four days later, post on Facebook picture.

Yeah, that's beautiful.

So it works really well. It takes a little bit of work, but it's not that much work.

Well, you know, it's leveraged work. You're finding somebody. If they're already an influencer, they already have a big audience, it can really help. Plus, I could send them the mug and a bag of coffee.

You send them the mug, send a link to the mug where they can buy it. Send them a bag of coffee and then say, hey, if you send your people over here, you're going to get 50% commissions on the profits.

Yep.

And then they have an incentive to share it on Facebook for you.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So this and then adding the mug in there. Actually, one of the things I like about that is it. It's one thing to just send somebody some coffee, especially if you don't know them that well. You know, you kind of admire you from afar, but I just send you something that I want you to put in your body. People don't really, you know, especially if you're like a celebrity or something else. But yeah, sending them something like a mug, a shirt, a necklace or something like from Gear Bubble, you're giving me a lot of cool ideas here. That can be another interesting way. The coffee is kind of like the ride along.

Well, the good thing about the mug is you can enjoy it instantly. The coffee you have to make.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the good thing is you have really beautiful branding, beautiful packaging. Like, it's a great feel when you see it and you look at it, which is that's why you've got to do so much on that just to make sure that ensures that happen. With a mug, I just got to make sure the damn thing doesn't break in the mail.

Yeah, right.

Strong Styrofoam. Because as soon as you pull it out, you Experience the phrase on it.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's beautiful. Do you. What are some of the bigger plans? Like, you may not want to reveal some of them because you do have competition out there, but do you have any big plans that you'd like to reveal? Like some new developments that are coming that people should watch out for.

Working on right now is different ways to where you can like increase average order value. We're working on like bundle campaigns where you can see sell pitbull mom and Pitbull dad mugs in the same campaign. Things like that. Yeah, that's all in the works. We just did our car stuff. So basically all the stuff that me and you and like marketer nerds want, that's what's coming.

Oh, sweet. Yeah, I love the bundle. Like, yeah, get a, get a T shirt, get two T shirts, two coffee mugs, something like that. Like all in one bundle where you. Yeah, like almost like a gift pack.

Well, we're going to start it with pairs because I've done a lot of stuff where I'll target veteran mom, veteran dad, and then I'll target people that, that are married as a demographic and I'll show them both in the ad. And it's just another way that you can like a big dream that's made me successful with ads is I like to do assumptive marketing. So if I can say this girl likes pit bulls, this Jersey girl likes pit bulls, I'm going to go females live in New Jersey that like the topic of pit bulls and also like coffee as an interest. Now I'm going to dial that down to like probably like 50, like 40,000 people. But if that's what the design says, this Jersey girl loves pit bulls and coffee. Yeah, they're going to want to buy that as soon as they see that. So that's one I don't know. I think that's a really great thing. That's why I think the bundling is really great. Because you can do Pitbull mom, Pitbull dad on mugs and then you can target people that are married. And you're basically anytime where you can do assumptive marketing and still keep the audience a decent size. You're going to by nature get higher click through rates and a better performing ad. But usually when you layer, you drastically cut your audience size down. But Married is a really, really great one because it still keeps it pretty big.

Usually, you know, you brought up a question. So based on your personal experience in doing this, I know a lot of people Will buy these for themselves because like, oh my God, that's me. I have to have that. How much success have you had going toward, you know, to where you're doing it? Like, it's a gift like a, this is for my wife or this is for my husband or this is for my, you know, grandpa or something like that. Is that. Because that's a little bit. I would think that's harder to target the gift market. But I know for a fact that, you know, people see that and they're like, oh, my wife or my mom would love this.

That's been done a lot. I think the first person I saw do it well, long time ago is Keith Doherty. He did reverse targeting on T shirts a long, long time ago. And you're basically. That happens really well when you're targeting people that are married and they're getting it for their significant other. When we saw it working really, really well, it's like Mother's Day, Father's Day and the holidays. Because those are the times where the person that is receiving it should not be the person buying it. So those are the times that that actual method works better than any of the other time of year. It can work any time of the year, but it's going to work by nature much better. That season of impulse e commerce buys are going to be done in more of a gift format.

Right. And I see those sometimes, like, I'm proud mom of a something or something or this, that or the other. And that's one. And that's one thing, like, because they're maybe buying it for themselves. But I was curious how you target like, you know, okay, I have a mother, but how do you know? Like, how do you put something in front of me just because it's Mother's Day? Like, I don't like anything that is necessarily mother oriented. And I know Facebook doesn't have a feature like target people who have living mothers.

I mean, there's a lot of things you can do if you think about it, that you're going to advertise like that at a design core level. Like, for example, one of the top sellers on our site is a veteran one that Pedro and Mariana did. They sold almost 10,000 units of it. And it's featured on our site. It says this girl is protected by a veteran. Yeah, it's somebody that's a veteran buying it and giving it to the people around them that they love. So you can do it, but to do it year round, you actually, you need to be smart about it. Not just it can be another way to scale a proven concept. But if you.

Not your primary strategy, if you really.

Want to make it work, you got to make it work at the design level so that that's the way you want to sell it.

Oh, smart. I like that. So you're growing. Things are awesome. Things are coming on board. What is, you know, what is something right now that you're trying to kind of get a handle on? What's a nut you're trying to crack that you could either use resources, people, money, anything. Is there anything? This is kind of like where I like to turn the tables and let me and potentially some of my listeners go, oh, crap, Don needs some help here. Maybe, maybe I have a resource for him.

If you could get Zuckerberg to quit changing the pixel, right, that would be great. I'll call him up.

I'm interviewing him tomorrow on the show.

Okay, well, let him know. Actually, probably don't mention my name to him.

Yeah, right. I know that story. I know that story.

Let him know that pixel. He needs to calm down with that.

Right? Yeah. Make a pain in the butt for somebody like yourself. I mean, is there anything else? Are you guys doing anything and.

We're doing great, man. Things are still growing. We're still, we're still. Honestly, we're still very early in our company. I mean, I'm looking three, four, five years later and I still have a billion things I want to do with it, but, you know, I adjust all that based on the feedback from the sellers and the different things and no, I mean, we just got to keep growing and keep moving and just keep listening to the sellers and we'll do just fine.

That's great. That's great, man. I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of these really cool strategies with us and what's going on and just kind of giving a, you know, some more insight into really what's working. You know, I could have had somebody on who's had some success with this model, but I wanted to have somebody on like yourself, who's not only had success on one side of it, but then you built the platform and what's, I guess, really cool for you, you get that cat merge, you get to see really what's working industry wide. I could just imagine how much more powerful that makes you. Oh, by the way, do you also just run your own campaigns right now or are you just so busy?

I pretty much just run stuff in, like the dog market mainly 99 out of 100 times. I run stuff in the Same markets I've been in before any of this stuff happens because I feel weird that it's confliction with sellers. So I don't, I don't ever run anything to really make money as much as I run it to test, make sure everything's working perfectly, optimize and I'll do a lot of split testing myself so that sellers don't have to do it.

Yeah, but it's awesome that you get to see this.

You know, I get to see a lot of crazy amounts of data, crazy about it. It's really cool. And so I always get a really good pulse on what's working, but I don't need to do it too much myself. There's a severe lack of time and it's a conflict of interest for me to try and use it as a, as a more than like a kind of mess around the side model.

Yeah, that's beautiful. Well, this pretty much brings us to a close here on the interview. Man, I, as I said, I really appreciate your time. You've given me some really, you know, great insights that I know I'm going to use personally as I start to scale this part up. On the Stiletto Coffee. From day one, when I knew that we were going to go into this, this was one of the primary strategies. I've just kind of been late on diving headfirst into it as I was trying to figure out, you know, Stiletto Coffee is our first physical product model. I've tons of experience in selling advice and information and software, etc. So, you know, just kind of having to figure out all the moving parts of this makes me late to the game on this. But I see it as also, as I was mentioning earlier, it's a much, it's a much easier first sell to get somebody to go, oh yeah, it's an impulse buy. I like that mug, I like that shirt, I like that necklace or something else. And then back end them into potentially trying out the coffee because I've already got the trust with them. So I know all my listeners, you're going to see a lot more of what I'm going to be doing, both on Gearbubble, both on Shopify, but I will absolutely be using Gearbubble as the platform to build this out and scale this out with. For all my listeners who have liked this, I recommend, if nothing else, even if you don't want to make this your primary business, go check Gearbubble out. Because if you do have a business out there right now, whether you're selling info SaaS or whatever. As you've heard, Gearbubble gives you just another profit center. It's brain dead simple especially. And Don, you'll agree if you have a list, if you've got a built in list, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand people, you may as well just, I mean it's free money for you.

People will buy shirts and mugs and jewelry all the time. Just might as well buy it from you.

Absolutely. And because you don't, you know, you can now integrate it into your own upsells, you can integrate it anywhere else. There's really kind of no excuse not to, you know, to kind of have this aspect into your marketing and get your brand out there in ways that you really could have done if you were just selling information. If, if anybody out there has any questions, Don, you know, or they want to just get started, they just go.

To gearbubble.com yep, just go to gearbubble.com there's live chat during the daytimes and lightning fast support and probably find a way to reach me pretty easily too.

Yep. And you've got a great Facebook group for Gearbubble sellers that you know, there's tons of people, including yourself, always sharing strategies and answering questions inside the Facebook group. Do people get invited to that after they become a seller? How's that work?

Yeah, it's free. It's a really great place to be. There's 8,000 like minded marketers and people in there. So it's always great to be part of a community headed in the same direction.

Exactly. Cool. So yeah, I highly recommend you guys go check it out. Create a free account and you know, if there's anybody who's listening. If you are a designer and you may want to potentially work with me, I will be working with, you know and hiring a designer to help me knock these out. And if you have any other experience in this area and you may want to see if there's an opportunity to work with me and help, you know, help me create and perfect this profit center there, there may be an opportunity, just send an email to ask bradakenraptbusiness.com I'm always looking for some people who can help me bring my ideas and things to fruition.

And once more if you have any other questions about your business non related to this, you can reach me at the same email. The single best way you can repay me for bringing you this information and for getting Don on the phone. Really busy guy, but he spent some time with us is just to share this episode in your social media with your friends because it not only helps bring exposure to to me in the show but it also helps bring exposure to Gear bubble. And as you can see Don's been just super generous with advice and he gets it. He's one of the people who just like us he's been on both sides and he knows what it takes to really grow a business. So Don, thank you very much for your time today brother. It's been a lot of fun. I look forward to making a bunch of money with you.

Of course man. I appreciate you and thanks for having me.

Thank you. Alright guys, I will see you next week.

Thanks.

Keep on listening to the show. If you haven't hit the subscribe button on itunes, do that. If you're listening on the blog, join the newsletter. You'll get this stuff before anybody else does along with some other really cool bonuses. So until next week I will see you guys next time.