Amazon is always evolving. What tools and processes that worked last year may not work this year, and what works today may not work tomorrow. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends and best practices. In this episode, Kevin King, an Amazon expert, will share his insights on the future of Amazon product research. He’ll discuss the latest tools and strategies that sellers can use to succeed on Amazon.
Topics Covered in This Episode
- About Kevin King
- Ways to do product research and tools sellers use
- Criteria in product selection
- Sourcing options and pricing
- Launching a product in Amazon & the norm budget
- Question & Answer
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Podcast Transcription
[00:00:00] Do you want your product seen by more buyers on Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces? Do you want to get more traffic, make more sales and scale your brand? Welcome to the Signalytics podcast. Signal code unlocked, where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen converting and profiting fast with your host former top 50 seller on all of Amazon, the [00:00:30] professor Howard Thai.
[00:00:32] This is the Signalytics podcast signal code unlocked. Hello and welcome everyone. And thank you so much for joining us today. And today we have a very special guest with us. Kevin King. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kevin and Howard. You’re always welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right.
[00:00:56] Awesome. So Kevin, we really don’t need an [00:01:00] introduction, but still I would request you to tell a little bit about yourself, how, how you started. Your Amazon journey. I’m Howard’s best student. He taught me everything. I know. So , I I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years on, on Amazon. I started selling on Amazon in 2001.
[00:01:20] I’ve been selling e-commerce since, before Google existed. So back in the 1990s, I started selling like email and e-commerce right now I have four different [00:01:30] Amazon companies that I’m either a partner or I own. I have I do the billion dollar seller summit, which is a, a big event, one time virtual and one time in person for, for large sellers.
[00:01:40] I also do a company called product Sevan with Steve Simonson, where we help big sellers find new products and I, and source them. And then I also, I do training. So for helium tin, I do the training called the freedom ticket, which is the course for new people. To teach them how to sell on Amazon. It’s totally free.
[00:01:57] If you have a heat 10 membership, it [00:02:00] doesn’t matter what kind of membership you have, the cheapest one or the most expensive, you can get it for free. And then I, I do their advanced training called heating 10 elites, which is for the bigger sellers and some once a month training where we, we bring on some guests, I do some, uh, some things every month.
[00:02:14] And then I speak at lots of events all over. I, I was at Howard’s most recent event at the castle in Paris. I, I speak at a lot of different events. And so, yeah, I. Do a lot of stuff in the Amazon and e-commerce space. All right. [00:02:30] Awesome. That’s great. So, uh, our today’s topic like Amazon product research. So what would you to add into this?
[00:02:38] Like how do you do the product research? Well, for me, product research, there’s a lot of different ways you can do product research and the tools have gotten so good. Now I wish these tools existed six or seven years ago. I would be a billionaire now. Okay. The hate existed six or seven years. But the tools are so good, you know, at, at 1.4 or five years ago, the, the [00:03:00] tools were okay.
[00:03:01] And the, the big sellers to get the data that they needed to get the information they needed. They had to, to go to like find people in China that were willing to share secrets that worked for Amazon or something like that, just to get this data. But now these tools are so good tools like Signalytics that the professor has.
[00:03:16] And other like that are so good. If you know how to use these tools, you can really find great opportunities. I personally, I use a custom tool that we developed in conjunction with helium 10 [00:03:30] and in conjunction with a, a, a Brad Young’s data dive. Those are the three that I primarily use for product research. I always start by product research with Brand analytics.
[00:03:40] You know, some people will use software like black box, or maybe they look around their house or they’re looking out their websites around Etsy. Uh, looking at that frequently bought together. Those are all good ways to get ideas. There’s lots of ways to get ideas. But for me, I want to know what’s already selling on Amazon because if something is not already selling, maybe I have a good idea for a [00:04:00] product, but nobody’s selling it on Amazon.
[00:04:02] I don’t know if it’s gonna work. Maybe it will. And maybe it won’t, but if I take the chance that it works, then I, I. Have to spend more money usually because you have to educate people more money on the PPC. People don’t know it, are they even searching for this thing? So that’s where people sometimes will say, they’ll test a product they’ll buy only 10, 10 or 50 units or 100 to kind of get an idea to me.
[00:04:26] That’s a total waste of time and, and, and not smart [00:04:30] unless the product is brand new. You know, if I went to. Guatemala. And I found some carpenter that was making some sort of special hammock that nobody is selling on Amazon nobody’s ever seen because this hammock looks like a, I don’t know, like a cocoon or I don’t know something crazy that there’s nothing in like it anywhere.
[00:04:46] Then maybe I would buy a few to test it and see at the market. But if there’s already a market on Amazon, I don’t think you need to buy a small amount to, to quote test it. Because if you do that, all you’re doing is showing all the other people that are using the tools. This is [00:05:00] working and they’re just gonna come and maybe be faster than you and get the product in.
[00:05:03] And by the time you get yours out, you know, you have a hundred competitors. So I start with what’s where the demand is, and I use brand analytics. So what we do is we, if you brand registered on Amazon, you could a access brand analytics, which is data directly from Amazon. It’s not helium 10 or, or somebody else that’s, that’s scraping it and, and making a, an algorithm it’s straight from.
[00:05:25] And it tells you the top keywords that everybody’s searching for. So we download that every week, [00:05:30] right? Cuz you could do it every week or every month or every quarter and or you can look at it online and we download that data and it tells us a lot of, of good information. If you’ve never seen it, it tells you what’s called SFR or search frequency rank.
[00:05:43] So it’ll tell you what’s the most popular keyboard on Amazon right now. It might be iPhone. Case is number one. Number two might be, I don’t know, hand sanitizer, whatever it is. I’ll tell you 1, 2, 3, it ranks everything from one to about 2 million and the lower, the, the, the bigger, the number, the, the less, the, the [00:06:00] popularity, it is on Amazon, but it also tells you what are the three ASINs that everybody is clicking on.
[00:06:05] So, you know, which of the three ASINs or for every one of those keywords that the most popular clicks. But to me, it’s not, what’s the most popular clicks because it’s the, what’s the most popular conversion. So it also tells you what are the three that are having the most popular, the most conversions.
[00:06:20] And to me, that’s where the real data. Is because sometimes people do manipulations. It could be sellers that are doing add to carts or, or some sort of manipulations to get all the [00:06:30] clicks, but to try to rank. But it’s the conversions that matter to me. So I look for the, the three that are converting and I look at those three products and I say, Hmm, what are these three products?
[00:06:40] Is there a way for me to compete? And so I look at the re I, I, I look at that keyword. I pull it up an X. And then I look at x-ray at, at the results of that key, where they say was iPhone case. For example, I would never do an iPhone case. I don’t recommend anybody ever do an iPhone case, but if it was an iPhone case, I would type in iPhone case into the Chrome browser on Amazon, I would hit [00:07:00] the x-ray extension to the extension that pops up.
[00:07:02] And it gives you the estimates of all sales, or you could use jungle scout if that’s your preferred tool or there’s other tools. But I use, I see the intent. And then it’ll show you all the sales. And I store it by sales, not by dollars, but by actual units sold from the highest to the lowest. And then I take a look.
[00:07:18] And how many reviews do they have? You know, if, if five or more of the top 10 have more than a thousand reviews, it’s gonna be very difficult to compete. If, if, if I look at the review [00:07:30] ratio, the rate, how fast are they getting reviews or are they losing. I look at how long have they been selling on Amazon?
[00:07:35] If most of the people I’ve been selling on Amazon for more than two years, it’s gonna be hard for you to compete. There’s, there’s a whole list of things that I look at there. And, and then if I see an opportunity, then I like it. I really like products where the pricing is not the same on page one. So if you look, if you pull up iPhone case and everybody’s selling their iPhone case for $10 and 99 cents, and maybe one’s 11.99, one’s 9.99, but they’re basically all the same price.
[00:07:59] It’s [00:08:00] gonna be very difficult to. Um, because everybody’s competing on the price. And so unless you have really good sourcing and you can really compete on the price, it’s gonna be hard. And for most sellers, they don’t have the budget to compete on price. They get, they get killed. So I look at for products where there’s a range of prices, one’s 10.99, one’s 19.99.
[00:08:19] One’s 8 99. That tells me if there’s a lot of price differences on the page, one results on. That’s a good thing for me, that means, okay, now I can find an opportunity. Maybe I can sell for [00:08:30] $14 and 99 cents because I make mine better or it has an extra feature or it has something I don’t have to worry about always being the lowest price I can, I can compete different.
[00:08:38] So that’s important to me also back on brand analytics, I look at the conversion rates. So the remember I told you, it gives you the three ASINs that have the most conversion rates and conversion rates means. Someone clicks it and they buy it. So it’s like a, it’s like a percentage. So it means if I search iPhone case and it has a conversion rate of 10%, that means one of every 10 people that search for iPhone [00:09:00] case bought that ASIN.
[00:09:01] It tells you this in brand analytics with the top three, I combine those three together. And what I’d like to do is I like to look for the, the total of those three together is either really high or it’s or, or it’s low. So like below 35% or above 80. If it’s above 80%, it tells you one or two things that tells you that either there’s maybe a patent on the product and whoever’s selling that product is able to kick everybody else off because there’s a patent or some sort of IP, or it tells you that there’s one [00:09:30] guy that’s just crushing it and maybe he needs some competition and maybe I can come in and I can steal some of his 80% and maybe take 30% of it or whatever.
[00:09:39] Or on the flip side, if it’s 35% or less, when you add these three together, That tells me that the top three guys have 35% of the sales. And then that means 65%. So 35% plus 65% is a hundred percent. So 65% is people on spot number four on down. And so then I look at the competitive nature of it. And if the competitive nature of [00:10:00] it looks really good, then I’m like, I can take outta the 60.
[00:10:03] Even if I don’t rank in the top, if I can just get to the spot, number four, I can take a significant portion of that 65. And so that’s where I look for those types of opportunities. And that tells me there’s a window where I can come in. If I can differentiate the product, if I can sell it for a good price, create a good listing and all the other good things that you have to do on Amazon.
[00:10:22] So those are some of the things that I look at. And then I even take it further on helium 10, if you’re an elite member on, he tens only for the top tier [00:10:30] people, but there’s a special tool where you can down, you can import all the keywords that you found. And it will tell you the estimated sales for every keyword.
[00:10:38] I think how everybody with in the Signalytics has something similar, but it’ll tell you like, okay, this keyword gets 6,000 sales per month, not searches but sales. But then what I do is I compare it to the searches. So if it gets 6,000 sales per month and has 60,000 searches, that’s a 10% ratio. So temp, when you compare the sales to the, the searches, that means it’s a 10%.[00:11:00]
[00:11:00] But maybe another product only gets 4,000 searches a month, but it has 1000 sales from the 4,000 searches. That’s a 25% ratio that tells me that product. That keyword might be a better keyword, especially if it’s a lower volume search volume. It, it might be an easier keyword to rank on and go for. So that I, I look for those kinds of things.
[00:11:18] So when I start off my product, I’m not gonna try to get this big keyword. I’m gonna try to get the, go for the lower keywords and work my way up to the big ones. Everybody always has big dollar signs in their eyes and they go after the big keywords. That’s not [00:11:30] the way to do it unless you have a lot of money or a lot of patients, one of the two.
[00:11:34] So go after the small ones and work your way up. And then there’s a tool called data. Dive that, that that’s really good. I think it’s data dive do tools is the, the address that Brandon Young, a big seller that I’ve known for like four or five years, he’s created this tool that goes on top of x-ray. So when you run the x-ray, you hit a little button.
[00:11:51] Uh, I, when you have his, his extension installed and it takes it to his tool and they analyze all the, in, in about two minutes, he analyzes all the [00:12:00] competition and he’ll tell you how many people are good at Amazon and how many people are not. So I, I use that. And if I, if I’m doing an iPhone case, that’s, for example, I would never do an iPhone case, but if I was, I would do the iPhone case and I would pick the 10 best sellers and I would run it through his tool.
[00:12:15] And he’s gonna come back and he’s gonna tell you. Seven of these 10 guys. They don’t, they’re not good at Amazon. They’re missing a lot of keywords. They’re listing. It’s not good. He runs it through a big criteria. Two of ’em maybe are okay. And one of ’em is excellent, but sometimes you do that and it’s like [00:12:30] eight of them, eight outta the 10 are excellent.
[00:12:32] That means holy cow, there’s this, these, the competition here is gonna be really, really tough. So I don’t use that to, I, I don’t use go after. That product. So those, I mean, this is a big overview of, of how I do it, but it that’s how I personally do it in the, what we look for. And then, then we have to source it.
[00:12:51] So if we find a good opportunity based on the keywords, I like to see that there’s multiple keywords. So that’s called the root. So if you have the root, like if it’s, if it’s hand sanitizer, for [00:13:00] example, Well, the root word might be hand sanitizer, or it might be just sanitizer. But in this case hand sanitizer, then you have hand sanitizer, gel, hand sanitizer, gallon, hand, sanitizer wipes, all these different words off it.
[00:13:11] The more of those you have the better, because then you can rank for, for root words and those root words help you rank for the longer tail words. So that’s an important criteria of product selection. Two, let’s say we’ve found a great all these we’ve gone through all this criteria and we found an awesome.
[00:13:26] then what we do next is we have to source it. So we go to the sourcing. In most [00:13:30] cases, we start in China. Sometimes we go to Pakistan sometimes to the Latin America. Sometimes the us, it depends, but most times it starts in China and we go and we try to find the factory. And then once we find a, a factory that can do the product in the way we want, we get the pricing and then we have to look at a lot of people, stop there.
[00:13:46] They’re like, okay, I can I look on Alibaba? And this product, this product is $4 and I can sell it for. $15. Okay. I’m good. There’s $11 profit there. No, there’s not. I see this mistake over and over with people that [00:14:00] don’t do the math. If you’re not good at math and you’re trying to sell on Amazon, don’t sell on Amazon or partner with somebody that’s good.
[00:14:07] Good. At math. It’s so critical to know your math and know your numbers because that product is $4 in China. From the factory one, you may have a, is it export or is it fob? You could have an extra cost depending in there just to get it to the ship or to the air. And then you have duties and taxes. If you’re bringing into the us, you might have 25% Trump let’s called it.
[00:14:26] The nickname is Trump tariff. It’s a, a tariff that the president [00:14:30] or ex-president put on China for every, almost everything coming in, some medical things and some things to qualify, but, and then you have a duty. So it might add as much as 0%. So as much as 50% to that $4 price. So maybe your price is really $6 and then you have the shipping cost and you, then you have duties.
[00:14:47] I mean, import fees. That $4 product might turn into a $9 product. By the time it gets to the Amazon warehouse. When you pay all the shipping, you gotta know all that stuff. And then you’re trying to sell it for 14.99. You’re never gonna make any money because [00:15:00] Amazon’s gonna take 15% of that 14.99. So they’re gonna take $2 and 25 cents.
[00:15:05] Yeah, that’s right. And then they’re gonna also take a fulfillment fee depending on how much it weighs. So, but, and then you, maybe you gotta do PPC. So at the end of the day, you’re not making any. Maybe that maybe you’re making a little bit of, Amazon’s depositing some money to your account. And you’re like, ah, I got some money coming in, but when you do the math and you, you figured everything out, you’re not, you’re not making any money.
[00:15:24] And that’s a very common problem that, that people have. And, and then the other [00:15:30] thing I look at is you need two and a half time in my, you need at least two and a half times your initial product cost to, to launch a product. So if, if you’re starting in this and you’re in Pakistan, you. Being able to get a thousand us dollars together to, to launch on Amazon.
[00:15:46] That’s all the money that you have. And you’re gonna start to try to launch a product. You need to find a product that you divide that by two and a half. So that’s gonna be $400 cuz 400 times two and a half is a thousand. So you need to find something that [00:16:00] you could get to Amazon into the Amazon warehouse for $400.
[00:16:04] If you spend more than that. You’re gonna, your chances of success are extremely low because what’s gonna happen. Let’s say that you succeed. Let’s say your product’s a big hit and it starts to sell. Well, then you’re gonna need to order more and you’re not gonna have the money. If you spent $800 of your a thousand dollars to get your product into Amazon, you don’t have any money for PPC.
[00:16:23] You don’t have any money, maybe for the software. If you’re using a software tool, you. Have any money to launch it or to do [00:16:30] some influencer things or whatever you might need to do, but let’s say you don’t need to do any of that. You don’t need to do any piece pieces. You just put it on Amazon and you, you think people will find it, cuz it’s so good.
[00:16:38] And so niche, you still need to place an order with the factory to get the next one coming. And that’s gonna take the, factory’s gonna take a month, maybe more 45 days, then it’s gonna come on an airplane or a ship. So it’s some more time. So it might be anywhere from two months to four months. Before you get more in.
[00:16:53] So if you only order you sell through those first ones really fast, you’re gonna be outta stock on Amazon for a month, [00:17:00] two months, three months. And which means when you come back into stock, you’re basically starting over again because Amazon is all about what have you done for me lately? You lose the honeymoon period.
[00:17:08] I mean, there’s ways to, to reset that, but that you lose the honeymoon period. You lose everything. And so you’re just shooting yourself in the foot and then that’s why a lot of people give up and like this Amazon thing doesn’t work it’s cuz they’re doing it all. And they don’t think it all the way through with all the math, all the numbers.
[00:17:22] So the reason for the two and a half, so $400, if you only have a thousand dollars to start with, get your product for 400 [00:17:30] bucks landed, that means if you’re buying a thousand of these, it has to be a really cheap product. Or if you’re buying a hundred has to be, you know, no more than $4. That’s not the factory price.
[00:17:39] The factory price might be $2, but all the shipping, everything, because Amazon’s not gonna pay you right away. They’re gonna hold your. In most cases for two, two to four weeks, because there’s a, there’s a, they have to ship it out. There’s a, they don’t, it doesn’t go into your account until 10 days, at least seven to 10 days until after the customer’s got it, just to make sure they don’t return it.
[00:17:59] And then it goes into [00:18:00] your account balance to be able to withdraw. And so there’s a cycle there. You’re not gonna have the money to pay the factory. So that’s why you need that extra $600 there if you’re successful to pay the factory. So that’s things, things like that people don’t think about and that that’s what hurts them.
[00:18:13] And that’s why a lot of people fail. I could talk about this for a long time, but that’s to give you I’ve for 15 minutes, not anybody asking a question. So that’s but that’s the general that’s yeah, that’s that’s uh, that’s ton of our information. Howard, you would like to add something here. [00:18:30] Sorry. I was on mute.
[00:18:31] So what kind of, uh, price range of a product or selling price would you recommend the audience here? Well, for me personally, I don’t do anything less than $20. because it’s not worth my time for me. I’m a different, you know, I’m experienced, we have money, we have resources. So for me, anything that I has to sell for less than $20, I usually don’t.
[00:18:51] I’m not gonna say I never don’t touch it, but it’s rare that I, I touch anything less than $20. And I, I need to, I personally want products that I can make a [00:19:00] profit of at least $10,000 a month on. So if I can’t make $10,000 a month on the product, it’s not worth my time. But for a lot of the audience. That would be life changing for them.
[00:19:09] So, so, uh, the price point that you’re looking at, but it depends on your budget. It all depends on the budget. So like if you only have a thousand dollars and like I just said, you can only spend $400 on your product and you’re only gonna buy a hundred units. That means you. And it’s say it takes 90 days for your product to get made, to get shipped.
[00:19:27] And you’re selling. That means you can only sell three a day. [00:19:30] So if you’re, if you’re selling three units a day, if you sell more than that, you’re gonna run outta stock before you have more come in, cuz you don’t have enough. So you need to find something that has low volume and start there and you can work your way up.
[00:19:41] You know, you can add more products later or work your way up, but if it’s selling three units a day and you $400, that’s that basically is a, about a $2, $2 50 cents cost at the factory at the maximum. And so what I like to see is I like to see at least a five X. So to answer the question. So if, [00:20:00] if, if this, you gotta look at the numbers.
[00:20:01] So I can’t just say, well, I like products that are $15 or less. It depends on. How much money you have. So if you only have a thousand dollars, like in this example, so only four, hundred’s gonna go to your product. Maybe you’re gonna have some shipping costs of a hundred, $200. So that means your product cost needs to be a maximum of $2 at the, at the factory.
[00:20:19] And then you’re getting a hundred of ’em. Once you add the shipping cost in and the taxes, your unit cost is $4. Each you order a hundred products for $400 once, including all the fees. [00:20:30] I, I wanna see you sell that for at least 19 95, 5 times that price. The worst case is three and a half worst case, and some is three and a half.
[00:20:39] Now, if you get into really expensive products, you’re selling something that costs $500. You don’t have to buy it for like a hundred. You know, that you can work a little, you have better different margins that it’s like when you’re selling anything under a hundred dollars retail price you need between a three and a half and five X minimum, multiple.
[00:20:54] One of my products we sell. It’s a calendar, it’s a wall calendar. You hang on the wall. We make ’em in Korea [00:21:00] and they print ’em in Korea for us. It’s cheaper than print in the US. My landed cost, which means the cost to make them the cost to put ’em on the boat, to cost all the duties. Everything is a, is a dollar 60, so it’s a dollar 60 for the, and we sell it for $20, 19.95.
[00:21:15] So you can see that’s way more than even a five times markup that that product is super profitable. So if someone comes in and starts. Um, spending more money on PPC than me, or they start selling theirs for 14.95 and they’re killing me because everybody [00:21:30] wants theirs. Cuz it’s cheaper. I can lower mine to 14.95.
[00:21:32] No problem. I still have a lot of margin to make a profit if, if, and so if I need to spend more on my PPC, no problem. I have the margin. So that’s, that’s very important because if you’re successful, people are gonna try to copy you and they’re gonna try to come in on your coattails. And if you’re using a tool like black box on Amazon or some of the other tools out there.
[00:21:52] Spit out product ideas. You have to remember there’s thousands of other people seeing those same things. So when you see something that looks good, um, [00:22:00] by the time you, if time you get it to the market, maybe a hundred other people also saw the same thing you did using tools or whatever. And so you gotta be ready for that.
[00:22:08] So that’s why you need those good margins. It it’s a mistakes. I, I used to see students in the freedom ticket. They said, I just can’t make any money at this. I’m like, well, how much are you selling your product for $11 and 99 cents? I said, what’s. What’s your cost from the factory. That’s like $5. So I have a $6 profit.
[00:22:25] Like, no, you don’t. What, what’s your Amazon fees? What’s your shipping fees. What’s and by the time it’s the [00:22:30] end of the day. They’re not making anything. Yeah. There’s money coming into their accounts because Amazon is taking 11.99 minus their 15% minus the fulfillment fee. So they’re paying ’em $6 or something for every one of ’em.
[00:22:41] So there’s money coming into their account. So they think they’re making money, but by the time they pay the factory and the shipping and everything, they’re not making any. And they don’t have any money left over at the end of the day to, to put into their pocket. And so that’s, that’s difficult and you need another thing is for new people is to remember that maybe your first order is not gonna be profitable.
[00:22:58] So if you’re thinking, oh my gosh, [00:23:00] I need to put some, I need to buy some food or I need to pay my, for my family’s rents or something in three months, I’m gonna sell something on Amazon and take some money. It’s probably not gonna happen. Maybe the, sometimes you hit the lottery and you win and it happens, but it’s rare.
[00:23:15] It usually takes six months to a. Sometimes longer, but six months to a year before you can start taking some profits, because if you’re successful, you’re gonna have to take the profits and you’re gonna have to buy more inventory. So maybe you bought a hundred the first time, but you’re bought a cold account.
[00:23:29] I was selling three a [00:23:30] day, but I could sell six of these a day. You know, it’s getting good reviews. Everything’s going well. So I need to place an order now for $800 from the factory instead of $400. And you’re, that’s gonna come outta your profits. So you’re not gonna be able, if you start putting that in your pocket, You’re not gonna be able to, to grow your business and to make, actually start making real money and make it making good money.
[00:23:49] So you have to keep that in mind too. So don’t think this is an overnight to get rich, save your life thing. It takes some time and, and sometimes you, you lose, you know, sometimes you do a product and it just [00:24:00] doesn’t work. But that doesn’t mean Amazon doesn’t work. I see a lot of people, they try one product, like I lost a thousand dollars and what’s, I forget this.
[00:24:07] I’m gonna go sell and shopify. What’s the next course I saw on Facebook that I can take. That’s gonna make me. Now Amazon works, if you do it right, and you have patience and you know, and you, and you know your numbers. So if you, if you do it the first time and you don’t succeed, consider that, like going to school, you’re gonna learn a lot.
[00:24:24] You’re gonna learn all the mistakes you made and you’re gonna learn like, okay, let me, let me regroup [00:24:30] here. And let me try again. I’ve seen people that lost on the first two products and they are so disappointed. They lost like $10,000. And it’s like, it’s my life savings. I borrowed some money from my mom.
[00:24:40] You know, I don’t know how I’m gonna pay her back. You know, my wife is really sad with me. She’s like, get a real job, quit doing this that’s crazy stuff. And then on third product, they learned on each of the tune, the third product, boom. They did everything right. They fixed all their mistakes. And now, you know, the guy just sold his business for $3 million.
[00:24:57] So, I mean, so, you know, this is like [00:25:00] a 21 year old guy, so it, you, it, it can be done. So stay with it and, and, and, and learn, but, and try to minimize your mistakes. It can be painful. Sometimes it can hurt, but it’s a, it’s a great opportunity. I, I remember, I remember there for any of the members, you can actually subscribe for the freedom ticket.
[00:25:21] Right? It’s free. Like you said, Kevin. Yeah. There is a tool. I think he’s teaching about like launching and how much you need to allocate [00:25:30] for launches and everything like that. Correct. I teach that. Yeah. And freedom tell you, so, so that’s a really good thing to budget. How much you. You have into it. John, I wanted to ask you in Pakistan, what is the normal launch?
[00:25:44] How much people are using to like initiate the first launch? Like, do they have like a, a $10,000 lit like a set aside for the launch for, for new product launches or, or what is the norm in Pakistan? Yeah. So here in [00:26:00] Pakistan, mostly people start with the 15,000 to 20,000 in the us. And like 10,000 to 12,000 for the UK and Germany and for rest of the markets, which are much smaller, like the Canada, the Mexico, the UAE, or the KSA, they start with like $5,000.
[00:26:21] So this is the minimum they are doing here, but for the us, mainly they know it’s capital intensive. So they [00:26:30] come up with at least 50,000, $15,000. That’s good. That’s good. That’s good. I think I, I talked to Kevin last time. I said, Hey, Kevin, what do you think is a good amount set aside for doing Amazon? Uh, launching.
[00:26:44] And then I think Kevin says like 25,000 or something like that. Is that what you said? No, it depends on depends on the product. Yeah, no, 25,000, maybe, maybe more than that, but it depends on the product and the competitive nature. And what it takes to get to, to the top of page one, uh, on anything. [00:27:00] So on a $15,000 budget, you should be doing a product that’s, you know, you should be spitting about six, $7,000.
[00:27:06] Probably about, about six. Yeah, $6,000, actually that’s two and a half, $6,000 on your initial inventory. It depends on the product cost on that. It depends on how much, how many you gotta give away or promote, or how many you gotta sell to get into those top positions is, would be determined to launch cost.
[00:27:23] It’s a product cost plus plus the, any, if you’re paying a service or you’re paying influencers or whatever, whatever [00:27:30] that cost would would be, but it could be, it could be significant depending on the, and some products. It may be nothing because there’s just. No competition, or it’s a deep, there’s a lot of deep keywords, but for a product for, for if you’re $6,000 on your product, I would expect to spend probably at least half of that or more on, on the launch, 6050% of that, or more on the launch.
[00:27:52] So 6,000 plus 3000 minimum on, on the launch. Yeah. Much. Yeah. So it could like, it [00:28:00] could be a lot more though, if you’re selling iPhone cases or hand sanitizer or something crazy, it’s gonna be a heck lot, heck of a lot more than. So mostly the mistake people are doing over here is that they are selecting the product with the very low price, like the five or $6 price range.
[00:28:17] This is the major mistake I have seen in Pakistan. People are doing. And another thing is they calculate the profit stability in terms of percentage like the six, the 25 per 25% of [00:28:30] $6 is like nothing. They just ignored the percentage profit percentage in terms of dollars. So that is the biggest mistake people are doing here.
[00:28:40] And the second biggest mistake they are doing here is like, they do not differentiate the product. They just sell the, they just copy past copy, pasted, just they, we was, it just, they the source the same product and just launch it. So this one is the second biggest mistake people people are doing here in Pakistan.
[00:28:59] [00:29:00] Those are big mistakes. You have, you, you have to differentiate you, you have to differentiate. It’s not just put a pre PDF with it. You G you gotta, you know, what I look for is if on page one, everybody’s selling a, a round one, the product will say a round thing. I look for the square one, you know, something that when you’re, when you look on the page, whoa, your eye stops that one’s different.
[00:29:21] You know, take, take your product. If you’re, if you’re thinking about doing something. And take a screenshot of page, one of results of the keywords that you’re going after and [00:29:30] take your product or Photoshop it in there, like on the second or third line, and then go to something like PicFU, or you can ask your friends, even if you don’t wanna spend money on PicFU, but, and say which, which ones of these catches your eye first and second and third, if your product is not in one of the first, first, second, or third, that it catches their eye, you need to change what you’re doing.
[00:29:50] Cause you’re not gonna succeed. Yeah. I, I agree. You know, like Amazon raises price every, every so often, like two times a year, [00:30:00] three times a year. So with that kind of margin being like, you are looking at percentage, it’s not gonna work. Right. So you need to make sure that you have something like a higher maybe profit as well as the dollar amount profit.
[00:30:12] Right. So yeah, dollar amount profit is more important than, than the actual percentage. So like you said, like the $6 and the 25%. That’s a dollar 25 cents profit. You have no margin there. What if you need to spend 50 cents on PPC? All of a sudden, cuz all the, your product is not differentiated. It’s the same as [00:30:30] everybody else.
[00:30:30] And you just outbid each other on PPC. You have no, no place to work, but if you had a margin of $10. and maybe your competition, uh, you have margin $10 and if it costs you 50 cents or even a dollar more on PVC, okay. It comes outta your profits a little bit, but you’re still fine. You’re still gonna be okay.
[00:30:46] And that’s a big mistake. A lot of, a lot of people made to me. I always say the money on Amazon is not made in the selling it’s made in the sourcing it’s made in the sourcing. So if you know people that just go to Alibaba and just accept the [00:31:00] price they get off Alibaba, maybe do maybe they do a little bit of negotiation, huge mistake.
[00:31:04] Huge mistake. Another thing I look at is how many sellers are from China, and this is not anything against Chinese people. It’s just, I look at, you know, tools like helium 10 will tell you this, how many, how many of the sellers on page one are from China? There’s other extensions you can put in to Chrome browser that put little flags, but if more than 50% of the sellers are Chinese based that are on page one.
[00:31:24] I usually don’t launch that product because those guys have a competitive advantage over me. [00:31:30] Maybe it’s the factory. I always ask my factories. Do you sell on Amazon? If they say, yes, we, we sell some of those. I say, sorry, I’m not gonna work with you. So if, if so, but if over 50% of the sellers are based in China that are selling on the keyword, you’re gonna have a tough time unless you completely differentiate, unless you can make it like, you know, made in the USA because people will like it, cuz it’s made in the USA or it’s made in Europe or whatever.
[00:31:55] And so there’s a reason that people will buy it. Something made in China. [00:32:00] That would be the only time I might consider that. But those guys have a, a huge they’re they’re local. They speak the language, they negotiate hard. They’re hustlers. They, they compete hard. They’re super competitive. So to me, that’s a, that’s a big warning sign.
[00:32:13] And so you gotta be careful with that. So I always say the money is made in the sourcing, not in the selling. So you gotta find, like, I know Howard has good access to a really good sourcing person. I don’t know if he shares that here or not, but she’s really, really good. And the, the people that do stuff with him.
[00:32:28] but you, you gotta, [00:32:30] you gotta get that price, right? Cause if, if you’re buying your iPhone case for a dollar and your competition’s having to spend a dollar 75 instantly, you have an advantage for, so you, you gotta, you gotta, and sometimes you can have an advantage. Maybe if you’re selling, like you’re you said, you know, they’re just selling the same thing as everybody else.
[00:32:48] You can have an advance in the way you package it. So look at the sizing. Maybe everybody else is sizing it. 10 inches by. Five inches by two inches. But if you, you look at the numbers on Amazon, like, look, if I make this [00:33:00] 9.75 inches to the box by five inches, by two inches, it goes from a large standard size to a standard size or something like that.
[00:33:09] It knocks the category down. So the fulfillment fees are now $2 less. You instantly just made money. That’s done in the sourcing and where you figure out, how can we get this package smaller? How can. Maybe the product, can we take it apart? You know, it comes a similar, but is there a way to take it apart and put it into a smaller box or get it lighter or, or something so that you can even save money on the Amazon fees where [00:33:30] your competition is not doing that.
[00:33:31] And they’re not thinking to do that. They’re just taking the product directly from the factory as it is. So there’s lots of ways you could do. That’s why, I mean, the money is made in the sourcing and, and a lot of people kind of overlook. yeah. If anyone needs this thing, you can contact us and we can see what we can do, but you, it is true because in China, a lot of the people of the factory and the buyers.
[00:33:52] I mean, the buyers are, which is the sellers, right. For Amazon sellers. They actually like go in and talk to them and drink with them and socialize with [00:34:00] them with the same language, you know? So there’s like this really, and you’re, and they see them often. So it’s hard to say no when trying to get negotiating a better price.
[00:34:09] So that’s, that’s why it’s. They usually get like 20, 30% cheaper than what normal people usually get when, if they’re like, you know, from like the us or, or not. And the same thing with the logistics as well. They have really good, really good connections with logistics and suppliers. Mm-hmm yeah. They have a big advantage.[00:34:30]
[00:34:30] Yeah. Major advantage. So it’s hard to compete against that. So that’s why I, I, when I’m sourcing products, I steer away from. If, if that’s the dominant factor, Sean, can you look into the, the notes? See if there anyone has questions so we can kind of, he’s got one on the screen. Yeah. Yeah. It says on average to reach 10,000 us dollars, how much do you spend and how much to do you take to reach that user?
[00:34:54] Do you mean $10,000 per profit sales or profit profit? [00:35:00] He means profit. That I can’t answer that question with a, a nice little answer, because it depends on the product you’re selling, how competitive the niche is. I could make $10,000 in, in two days on some products on Amazon, others take months. It, it, that, that’s a difficult question to give you a, a very nice answer on, because there’s a lot of factors.
[00:35:19] What’s the selling price. What’s the margin. What’s the competition. What are the reviews? Like how much money did you have to launch it? Are you slow? Launching it fast, launching it? There there’s a lot of variables. So [00:35:30] do you prefer a launch of five variations at once at a low price? Or do you instead prefer one single product in a mid, a mid price range?
[00:35:39] More than $20? I would go with a single product. I don’t like to do a lot of variations at the beginning, and sometimes I might do you know, if you have clothing, you or something, that’s a size, you might have to do some sizes. If you’re doing something that’s colors, I might do one or two colors, but you don’t really know what colors, I mean, you can use the tools like Helium10 to get an idea of what colors are selling best, but you [00:36:00] really don’t know.
[00:36:01] So, and I’d rather what the product doesn’t work. I don’t wanna have five extra products. So I usually launch with one, maybe two it’s and if it works, then I’ll start adding to it, adding, adding additional various things. But I, I usually don’t launch, unless it makes sense, you know, like clothing would make sense or.
[00:36:19] A few other things would make sense, but most things don’t make sense to do variations when you launch. So the ranking strategy that I’m using now, it’s getting much more difficult. [00:36:30] You know, it used to be the big ranking strategy was most recently up until last year was search find, buy where you basically, you do it yourself through Mancha or Facebook, or you have a company that helps you with the ranking and you, they, they have a list of people that will go buy the product at full price.
[00:36:45] And then you reimburse ’em the entire money. Plus you pay the company a little bit of fee. There’s still some companies that do that. It’s it hasn’t gone away, but it’s, it’s much less than it used to be. And it it’s, Amazon’s really cracking down on that. So you have to be extremely careful if you do [00:37:00] that, they call rebates.
[00:37:01] Some, some people call ’em rebates, some call ’em people, call ’em SFB or search, fine buy. I think that’s going to continue to get less and less and less. You need an audience to launch on Amazon is what you really need. Up an audience. You need an audience of passionate people. So in the past, people would say, go build an audience on Facebook, go, and, you know, before you launch your product since spend three months or six months, you know, if you’re selling a dog product, start posting dog pictures on Facebook and get people to follow you [00:37:30] and to come into your group and, and do that kind of thing.
[00:37:32] And that’s great. And maybe you’ll get a thousand people that follow you or a thousand people in your group, but those aren’t buyers. You have to remember psychology here. Those aren’t buyers, maybe 10 of ’em or 20 of ’em. Aren’t gonna buy your product. But that’s not enough to launch a business. That those are people that are like dogs.
[00:37:46] It doesn’t mean they like your product. You need people that will actually spend money on your item. So that means either going out to other people that already have that, that spend money or partnering with influencers, but what I’m working on now, and something I’ll be talking about is the [00:38:00] billion dollar seller summit, and also Helium10 has a big event in September in the us.
[00:38:04] I know most of you can’t come to that, but they’re doing a big event, but I I’m, I. Doing stuff with NFTs. So we’re, we’re doing building communities with, with in the crypto world around NFTs that also relate to products. So we have an audience of people that spend money on the NFT. So I know they spend money and they’re passionate about the subjects that we’re, that we’re, we’re building the audience around.
[00:38:25] And then I can easily leverage that into launching products on Amazon, by because [00:38:30] when they buy the NFTs, there’s some gaming, Sy some gamification to it and they get points and rewards and they can redeem those for products on Amazon. And then they can. Buy the product on Amazon, which helps launch it, increase this whole cycle.
[00:38:42] And then people that buy the product on Amazon, they see it in the insert about this NFT and like, what is this? I never heard of this. I don’t know. And they go to the website and it gets them into the game, into the system. So it’s, it’s barely new. It’s it’s advanced. So it’s not something that the average person can use, but.
[00:38:56] that that type of thing is where this is gonna get to in [00:39:00] the next couple years. We’re one of the first to do it. We’ll be do it this fall, but I’ll be talking about it at those two events. We’re in the planning, we’re in the final planning stages right now of everything, but that’s what it’s gonna take.
[00:39:11] It’s gonna become harder to launch. And so the opportunity still though, or on the, not on the popular products, you know, Amazon has gotten so big. There’s so many people searching. You can do good money on things that you don’t need to spend a lot to launch on. Like for my, my calendars, for example, that I do every year.
[00:39:29] It’s seasonal. So [00:39:30] from about November until January is when people buy ’em cuz they buy calendars for the next year. Usually Christmas presents or something at the end of the year, they’re getting ready for the next year. Those, those particular products, I don’t have to do any launch. I do. I do zero PPC.
[00:39:43] I do zero. I have a customer base of about quite a few people. Then I go to about a hundred of them. I say, well you just go buy. I don’t give ’em rebates. I don’t give ’em any extra bonus. I just say you can buy it from me directly from my Shopify site for 19.95, plus a shipping charge of 20 [00:40:00] buck of 10 more dollars.
[00:40:01] So $30 or why not just go buy it on Amazon for 19.95, use this link and I give ’em the, I give ’em the, uh, the canonical URL and they go and they buy it and that’s usually enough to, to get it to go. And I start early enough because it’s seasonal. The big sales come in the middle of November till the first part of January.
[00:40:21] So I, I, I get that in stock in like August. And so I start selling in August. So in August to get to the top of page one for the keywords, I only need like one sell a day, [00:40:30] cuz nobody’s searching for it in August. So if I can just get one sell a day or at the top of the keywords, and then when people start searching more in September and more in October and more in November, I just kind of, it’s like riding a wave in the ocean.
[00:40:40] You just kind of ride that wave as it goes. . And so that’s, that’s how we launched that particular product, other products without the NFT stuff, we’re doing a lot of heavy PPC. We lower the price. And so I, I lower if my price is 1995, I might, I might make my price $4 and 99 cents. And, and then I run a [00:41:00] lot of PPC and because the, the reason for that is everybody.
[00:41:03] If everybody else is $19 or 95 cent, you and they have a hundred reviews or a thousand reviews. And here you are at $19, a 99 cent, and you have one review or no reviews, or just a review. They don’t trust you. But if your price is so ridiculously low and your listing is really good, they’re like, what the heck?
[00:41:20] I’ll, I’ll take a chance for $5. You know, I could always return to Amazon if it doesn’t throw it away, if it doesn’t work. So I have a really low price. That’s just all they, they just can’t say. But do I [00:41:30] spend a lot of money on that? Heck yeah. I mean, I’m losing money on every one of those I sell because it’s below my cost.
[00:41:35] I had to pay Amazon their fees. I’m spending a tremendous amount on, on Amazon ads at the same time I’m doing buying reviews. So everything goes into the buying program to try to get a bunch of reviews there. So to, I get those first initial reviews, I like to get up to 20 or more before you can really start wrapping things up.
[00:41:53] So that’s, that’s kind of how I launch stuff. Right. all right. So Howard would I [00:42:00] believe this question is for you? Well, if you contact us, we can probably connect you to one of our, a sourcer and they’ll go out there to the factories or, uh, to the, to see how they can negotiate better prices. It’s really hard for people to just go online and never seen.
[00:42:18] The the factory or the sales rep and tried to get the best price there’s so that we’re on the ground in China, being able to help you on your behalf to negotiate prices mainly, [00:42:30] and making sure that QC and logistics side is that you’re getting the best price for everything. Yeah. Competing products do matter.
[00:42:39] 1 million product selection. Absolutely. The competition. You have to analyze the competition. How good are they at Amazon and how good are they means? How good is their listing? How good is their photos? Are they missing a lot of keywords? That’s like tools like data doc. They’ll tell you, they’ll tell you these, these top competitors, they’ll, you’ll give you a percent.
[00:42:55] This guy is on all the keywords that are relevant for your product. They’ll say [00:43:00] this guy is ranking on page one for 32% of ’em. This guy is ranking on page one for 95% of them. And so that, that tells you how good they are on the listing, how good they are on Amazon. Absolutely. You have to look at competing products, not only what the product is and how it looks and the price and the quality and the reviews, but also how good is the.
[00:43:18] because that’s your competition is seller. So this is the big question. It says I won’t go into products that has more than 50% Chinese sellers. [00:43:30] Currently they’re working on a product with some really good stats. The main brand is doing over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Congratulations. All the other sellers are new with less than 100 reviews and they’re, they’re doing good revenue too, so we can do such product.
[00:43:47] we do a bit design change and follow our own design patent and we can achieve 40% gross parts pro gross margins with competitive prices. Right? Yeah. I, I don’t know. I’d have to take a look at that, but I [00:44:00] don’t know what, what, what your question is. Maybe you’re saying that you’re doing well, despite there being a lot of Chinese sellers, is that what, maybe that’s what you’re saying, Abraham.
[00:44:07] I’m not, I’m not sure what your, what your question is on that. Okay. Ibrahim, if you can just elaborate a bit. So we can take that question again. Yeah. I got the idea, the situation, but what’s the question. I think it’s trying to prove that that 50% Chinese sellers are still able to, you know, products like those can still be able to [00:44:30] get into niche the niche, but I mean, yes, you could.
[00:44:33] There’s always a percentage of probability, but you still that’s a little harder, right? You want to see if there’s like less of a competition in order to get into it for a higher success rate . Yeah, I’m not saying they can’t be done, but, but it’s, it’s very difficult for most people. Mm-hmm and if you’re first, like you are not, maybe you are one of the first ones and now there’s a bunch of Chinese sellers that come after you.
[00:44:56] That’s different. There’s already Chinese sellers selling there. [00:45:00] And a bunch of when you started that, I don’t make it much harder. But if you were one of the very first ones, and now there’s a bunch of Chinese sellers that are basically copying you. And like you said, they all have under a hundred reviews that I’m not too worried about you.
[00:45:13] A big head start. What would be the minimum profit and dollar value that should be considered for products to launch? I can’t answer that. There’s not a, there’s not a one answer for that. That’s like saying which girl is the prettiest, you know, everybody’s gonna have a different answer of which girl is the prettiest in the room.
[00:45:26] It, it there’s so many variables in that I can’t, I can’t tell you that [00:45:30] possible. Let’s do a live demo on screen. How you decide your marketing budget after seeing a good product. I can’t do that today. I only have about, uh, six more minutes or so here. So yeah, maybe another time we could do that. All right.
[00:45:42] Perfect. So guys, like, so the last thing from my side, let’s wrap up. So I would like to ask, we are doing this for every year, every year for our session. What is the fun fact happened to you from Amazon? What is the funniest thing happened to [00:46:00] you in your career from Amazon? Really? Uh, okay. So in two, in 2020, we decided to launch some hand sanitizers, you know, the COVID.
[00:46:10] and everybody was doing hand sanitizers. And I was like, I’m not gonna do hand sanitizers. That’s like doing iPhone cases. It’s like crazy, you know, or hover boards or something crazy. Everybody’s gonna be doing it. But my partners, it’s three partners. And they said, we have the money, Kevin, you know how to do the Amazon.
[00:46:25] We have the money. Don’t worry. I’m like, okay, you, you know, we could lose all this [00:46:30] money because it’s gonna be very competitive. And they’re like, don’t worry. Let’s do it. Like, okay, if we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna do proper branding. We’re gonna do proper everything. We’re not just gonna find some bottle and say hand sanitizer with a cross and stick it out there on Amazon.
[00:46:43] We’re gonna like create costumes for the characters, you know, have a brand, you know, with a costume and do all this crazy stuff. And real branding. We had a jingle, like we wrote us a radio advertising song and everything, and talking about washing their hands. And we did everything right. We launched the product on [00:47:00] Amazon and was crushing it.
[00:47:01] And this was in, we launched it in June of 20, 20. So two years. And we’re selling 40 to $50,000 a day of just one skew. It was going crazy. Well, Amazon at that time was freaking out about all the people selling hand sanitizers. So if you had the word hand sanitizer in your listing, they would, you know, sometimes turn it off and we’d be in the middle of a launch.
[00:47:20] We were even using Howard’s company one time to help us with some of the launching and right in the middle of it, boom, the listing was dog pictures, you know, and it’s like, we just wasted all this money on getting ranking and [00:47:30] spending money. And that happened to us like nine times. But we even had someone at Amazon, we were authorized at Amazon.
[00:47:36] We were in the COVID store. We, we had, we had, I had a guy at Amazon, not some seller support, but like one of the top guys, I had his home cell phone number. I could call him and say, dude, the, our, our product just went down again. And he is like, ah, and he would, he would escalate it up, you know, I’d have to deal with seller support.
[00:47:52] That’s how we were tight. He’s like, you guys are doing this right. You’re like the model company that we want selling on Amazon. But still the algorithm just [00:48:00] kept knocking us down, knocking us down, just cuz we had the word sanitizing there and we’re like, can’t you just flip a switch that says we’re approved.
[00:48:06] We’ve gone through this so many times. And they said, no, there’s no switch on Amazon. That, that does that. Unfortunately. So after we sold about $2 million worth of a stuff in about three months, and then we, we got, we got a little bit B eyes, big eyes and like shoot man. We could sell a lot more. So we placed some big orders and we, we switched it from China to.
[00:48:27] And so we could say on taxes and different [00:48:30] things and not say it’s made in China. Cause people were freaking out. We had this big order coming in and then Amazon shuts everything down again in like November of 2020. And at that point we couldn’t get it back. We were down for a couple weeks and when we tried to relaunch, it’s just, we lost all the momentum, all the honeymoon period, everything was just, it just became a disaster.
[00:48:48] So we just said the heck with it. You know what? We’re just gonna liquidate this stuff out, sell it. 10 cents for every dollar that we, we spend on, just get rid of it, wash your hands and move on to the next [00:49:00] project. We we’ve gotta lose the. We couldn’t liquidate it. Nobody would, no one would buy it. We’re like, you know, it cost us a dollar to make it.
[00:49:06] We’ll give it to you for 10 cents. Just come get it. We’re like, no, we don’t want it. There’s so much of this everywhere. And we have it all enough. So we ended up having to give it away. So at the end of the day, we, we had 460 pallets of this stuff sitting in a warehouse in Washington state. And we put an ad out in the local newspaper and this Korean church, a big church of all these Korean people, I guess, passed the word.
[00:49:29] And they [00:49:30] came to the warehouse one day on like on a Saturday, everybody with their cars and their SUVs, you know, their trunk open their back doors and they just throwing the stuff in their car, just filling it in there. We just gave it away for free. And we’re like, thank God we’re, we’re finished with this.
[00:49:42] It’s done. We lost a million dollars between all the partners. And I, I ended up losing about a hundred. So I had to put a little bit of money in, even though they said they put all the money. Some, some money came from my pocket too. We lost about a million dollars on this whole project. Because we had to give away all this inventory that we paid for.
[00:49:59] [00:50:00] So that happened in the early 20, 21 about in February of this year, I was doing my billion dollar seller summits online virtual one. And there’s a price for the winner. Howard knows this. We give a, a cash price. He does it, his events too, whoever was the best speaker. And I like to show the money on the screen.
[00:50:16] You know, I like to like show look, all right. Here’s $5,000. Somebody is gonna win this money. Look. Boom, boom, boom, boom. It’s it’s real. It’s it’s right here. So I had to go to the bank to get the money, my local bank here in Austin. I live three and a half hours [00:50:30] playing right away from where the warehouse was in Washington, where we gave all the stuff away.
[00:50:33] I’m in the bank, I’m touching money and I’m like, I better just clean my hands. I don’t know. The money’s maybe dirty. Who’s touched this. I reached up to the counter at the bank, you know, I’m waiting for the person to gimme the money and to clean my hands. And I’m like, wait a second. That bottle looks familiar.
[00:50:49] I turn it around. It’s our bottle. And it’s the newest version, the ones that we gave away for free, you know, to get liquidated. And then I started, I was like, that’s mine from the bank [00:51:00] teller. Guy’s like, what are you talking about? I was like, that’s my company. He’s like, yeah, yeah, right, dude. Yeah, of course.
[00:51:05] He was like, no, that’s that’s ours. And I started looking around the. And the bank has different, you know, different windows and every single window has our hand sanitizer. And then I look behind me, all the officers sitting there that make the loans and everything, they have it on their desk. I’m like, holy cow, someone took this free stuff that we lost our shirts on and then turned around and sold it to this bank, you know, [00:51:30] 2000 miles away.
[00:51:31] And here it is in my local bank. What’s the eyes of that happening. And I’m taking the money from the account that we lost all the money from. So I was like, I almost wanna tell him, Hey, you owe me some money for this stuff, but that’s so that’s probably the most interesting story. It was a big like knife to the heart.
[00:51:53] All right. Okay. So I think time is up and like, thank you so [00:52:00] much, Kevin, for joining us. Sure, no problem giving us the valuable time. And how would, would you like to have some closing notes here? Just for, just for the fun of it? You know, like the first time I met Kevin was like 2018 at one of my ma my first mastermind in US.
[00:52:17] I think it was in Las Vegas. And then we, and then all of a sudden he was saying that there’s rats in the, in the mansion, you know? Cause I, I, I hold my mastermind in mansions back in the days now was a castles. Right. But, and then he says, rat, what? I [00:52:30] spend a lot of money on this place and this is this rats.
[00:52:32] And then he’s like playing around. And so like, oh, look at the cookie. There’s a, so a rat bit part of the cookie. So, you know, and then, and I say, okay. And then all of a sudden, and then fast forward it to like 2020 or 19 or something like. Uh, he’s like he, we, I went to one of his, his mastermind, right. A billion dollar seller summit.
[00:52:54] And then all of a sudden he put me into a ghost room, a room that there’s ghosts known to have ghosts in there. [00:53:00] And people died in there. I’m like, and, and good thing that I had, my friend David, the Chinese seller. He, he took, I, that, that room that he has actually is 17, which is my birthday. Right. So he gave me his room and how he took my room.
[00:53:14] And then he got, got scared when there’s all these weird stuff happening in his room. So it was like, kinda like pretty, he is, Kevin is a funny guy right now, even today, even today, I don’t think he admit that [00:53:30] he did that on purpose, but I have a feeling it is planned, right, Kevin? No, that was pure coincidence that hotel, someone did get murdered.
[00:53:39] Someone didn’t get murdered in that room and it’s, it’s on a ghost tour. So they actually lead the tours to run on ghost tours and that’s one of the rooms they show them. And so the Howard’s supposed to have that room. And then he traded with the hi his friends. Who’s also from China. Doesn’t speak very good English.
[00:53:55] And one night he was in the room and we’re all sitting in the lobby of the hotel and we see him running down the [00:54:00] stairs, like freaking out. And going to the desk and, and almost like you gotta change my room, you gotta change my room. And we, we got up to see what the problem was to try to help him. He’s like, I just saw ghosts.
[00:54:09] The ghost just came, they were talking to me, but thank God. They don’t understand Chinese. They don’t speak Chinese. They were saying, and they, he was freaked out. It was funny. That’s funny. Thank you. Thank you for coming on Kevin. No problem, man, take care and [00:54:30] good luck and your Amazon venture. Keep at it.
[00:54:33] It’s a good business to be in if you do it right. And have some patience and the best of success to everybody and their families. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys for joining us today. And uh, this session has a ton of information, so I will request you all of you to. To, to let other people know as well.
[00:54:54] So other people can learn from it and correct their mistakes. Thank you. Thank you, Howard. [00:55:00] Thank you guys. Take care. Bye bye. Do you want your product to be seen by more buyers on Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces? Do you want to get more traffic, make more sales, and scale your brand? Welcome to the Signalytics podcast.[00:55:16] Signal code unlocked. Where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen, converting and profiting fast with your host [00:55:30] former top 50 seller on all of Amazon, the professor Howard Thai. This is the Signalytics podcast signal code unlocked.