#364 – The Power of AI in Transforming E-Commerce and Brands with Jon Derkits

#364 - The Power of AI in Transforming E-Commerce and Brands with Jon Derkits Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 364 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week my guest is Jon Derkits. Jon worked for Amazon. He's worked for an aggregator. He sold on his own. He consults and we have a pretty in-depth discussion about everything from travel to starting newsletters. He's got a newsletter of his own to what we think is happening in this space to building brands and raving fans. It's a really great discussion. I think you're going to get a lot of good value from this. Don't forget to also sign up for my newsletter. It's totally free. It's like a $25,000 mastermind. In an email, that's totally free, twice a week, BillionDollarSellers.com. And like I discussed in this episode, I'm also doing a webinar on December 1st. Look for some information on that. It's a free webinar about how to set up a newsletter for your physical products business and do it right. What are the tools? What's the way to do it? What are the mistakes not to make? That's coming on December 1st. Totally free webinar. Enjoy this episode. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Jon Derkits, welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. I'm so excited to have you as a guest on the AM-PM Podcast. How are you doing, man? Speaker 2: Kevin, I'm doing great and I'm pumped to be here and I also can't help but notice that we both have maps in our background. Yours is a little bigger than mine but I don't know what the connection is there but we're both clearly world travelers and people that study cultures. Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a big one, a big wall mural. It's like 10 feet across on the wall of the world. And then I have, you can't see it, but I have another one on the side that has little pins in it, kind of like the one you have on the right to the right of you that has, uh, everywhere I've been, I've been to 94 countries, so I've done a lot of travel. And then I have another one sitting right up here facing me that's like, uh, similar to what you have there. Um, it's, it's an old, it's like, I don't know, I think I paid like four grand for it. 300 years old and it's like the Caribbean and an old map from like 300 years ago and some book that sailors had. It's all framed and everything. So yeah, I'm big into maps and travel for sure. Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, 94 countries is ridiculous. I have a lot of catching up to do, but that's super cool. I'm sure we could talk about places that you visited all day. I got to say, one of the things I really love about your newsletter before we get into anything is your stories of your travels. It's such a unique way of injecting your personality and voice into your newsletter. I just wanted to give you props for that before we meander here through a conversation. Speaker 1: I appreciate that. For those of you that don't know what he's talking about, it's the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, which I've told everybody on here to actually go sign up for. It's like a mastermind, a free mastermind. On Thursdays, I do two a week. Mondays is more business oriented. Thursdays is a mix of business and personal. So I do a personal story. I call it the six second story. So it introduces, and some of them are a little edgy. Some of them, you know, I've had a few people unsubscribe because I talked about a naked girl on the balcony. I've had a few other, but other people, they just love it. So I try to inject some of my, I talked about meeting Michael Jordan and basically blocking him from getting laid. And I talk about the whole, all kinds of stuff in there. I got tons of more. And then that Thursday one, I do something called the Dream 100, where I say, This is someone in the business that's, I have a list of a hundred people. It's totally random out of a hat. I don't, uh, they're not in any particular order. And these are people you should pay attention to because there's so much, I'm sure we might talk about this. So many fake gurus and so much BS in the space, like who is legit and who's just trying to market themselves and get some money from you. And so I, I do that. And then I put a travel cause I've been in all these countries when I was traveling, I was shooting video back and I traveled basically for seven years. I was gone two weeks of every month. Sometimes by myself, sometimes with friend or family. And I meant to do it for a year, but I just turned into so cool and I was like, there's more places in this world I want to see. There's more stuff I'd hear about something else. I was like, I got to do it. So that's where a lot of that travel happened. Not all 94, but a lot of it. So I would leave for two weeks, come back for two weeks, leave for two weeks and I could work remotely. I wasn't staying, you know, in four seasons or I wasn't staying in hostels either. I was doing it right, but I was traveling around and I shot video. It wasn't here's Kevin eating a sandwich or having fun in a disco. I shot it more like documentary style. And so when I came back, this is before Instagram existed, and I sent out an email, like a newsletter, if you will, to about 45 people, my family, friends, and I would do trip reports. So I would write a little trip report. Here's Peru and put some pictures. And I had a video production company at the time. And we had three full-time editors. And so sometimes we'd have a lull where they weren't doing something. So I'd say, edit my travel stuff. So they would edit like 20-minute travel shows. And I would write a script and have a professional voiceover person come in and voice it. And then have this 20-minute video of me in Peru. And it's more National Geographic style. It's not, here's Kevin. It wasn't a, look how cool I was. It was more like a, Educational. And then I said, some people don't want to sit through a 20 minute video, but so I had them all create trailers for like two minutes long. And that's what I put in the newsletter. Every Thursday, I put a two-minute trailer that I personally shot, my team actually edited. I have all these trip reports from 10-15 years ago, mostly. I quit doing this in 2014. I still travel a lot, but it's heavy. I go back and I just summarize those. I use AI a little bit to take those that are already written. I was like, just shorten this up. You know, here's the pasted into chat GPT and just shorten this up and then I tweak it a little bit. And those go in those Thursday newsletters. And the reason is to inspire people. A lot of us do this for the freedom or that we're doing this, you know, we don't want to work for the man. And there's a big world out there that most people don't understand. You know, they've been to Mexico, maybe they've been to London or maybe they went to the Canton Fair, but they really haven't seen what's out there in this world and how many amazing things there are. And to get the understanding of other cultures and other people, it just makes you a better person. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to do to influence with that. So that's why that's in there and it makes it a little bit personal. Speaker 2: No, I love it. And it almost feels like Amazon is a side hustle to your life, which is the right way to do it for the record, right? All of us, we're kind of in this E-commerce, Amazon game to give ourselves the ability to live the life we want to live on the terms that we want to live. Exactly. And travel is clearly a big part of it for you. Speaker 1: You worked for Amazon for a while, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: I mean, your back story is that you actually worked for Amazon, then you worked for an ag... I mean, what is your story actually? Speaker 2: I'll give you the two-minute version here. And I'll fast forward through the first decade of my career, which was in kind of management consulting, M&A. It turned out that that was really good foundational professional experience for jumping into an aggregator later. But my Amazon journey started at Amazon. I was kind of roped into leading the third party marketplace for consumer electronics. On Amazon Canada, it was a role that when I looked at the job description, I thought to myself, number one, I'm way unqualified for this. And number two, is this the right path for my career? Because again, I kind of came from that finance world, that consulting world, very corporate. And although Amazon was a beast back in 2016, It was still a tech company, still a startup without being a startup. So I had some reservations about joining, but I knew that at that point in my career, if I didn't take a jump into something like that, I would never do it. The opportunity cost, the switching cost would be too high as I advanced in my other career. I jumped into Amazon and it was a role that I grew to love and embrace. My role, unlike I think a lot of people who worked at Amazon, was truly focused on the third-party marketplace. My role was to go out and recruit third-party sellers to join the Amazon Canada marketplace And then when they were on the marketplace to nurture them, to help them grow, to get them to adopt new Amazon features. Speaker 1: You're like in business development basically. And like you had, you're the one that could say, I can get you lightning deals or I can get you this, or we'll give you X amount in PPC credit if you come over and we'll hold your hand for what that lasts, what for a year, right? Or it's a calendar year. Speaker 2: It's not even a year. Speaker 1: So if you sign up like in September, they'll help you till December and then it's resets or something like that. Right. Speaker 2: Yep, I had a team under me that were doing that business development work and I was kind of crafting the overall strategy. What brands did I want them to go get? What selection, what assortment on the marketplace were we lacking that we needed to fill? And then I had a team of account managers who were hand-holding some of the biggest consumer electronics brands on the marketplace, the likes of Anker, Spigen, probably two dozen more Chinese brands that are no longer on the marketplace. For reasons we won't get into. It was an intense role, but I learned a ton and I got to ride sidecar with a lot of brands as they grew on the marketplace in the mid-20-teens when the marketplace was really hockey-sticking. It was a great role. At the same time, I got a front-row seat to seeing how much money third-party sellers were making. The opportunity for a third-party seller on Amazon and I said to myself, well, I can do this myself. So I left in 2019 and really did two things. Number one was I started consulting for brands. The funny thing that happened on my way out the door was a lot of the brands that I had worked with while at Amazon said, Jon, we want to keep working with you. So I started kind of a boutique consultancy as a vehicle to continue working with them. And then number two is I started my first Amazon business and it's a business I still run to this day. I won't share too many of the details about it but suffice it to say I kind of lucked into it because my partner in the business, old high school buddy, his family had been running a B2B business for the better part of 25 years at that point but they had no kind of D2C So my offer was let me start us up on Amazon and take a percentage of that business. So that's what I did. That was how I got started on selling on Amazon. Speaker 1: So they already had existing products and you just basically started doing their marketplace stuff. Speaker 2: That's exactly right. I maybe went into it a little arrogant, thinking that seeing how the inner workings of the marketplace functioned with one another, how the sausage was made per se, I was maybe under the impression that that would give me a leg up. The truth was, I had a lot of hard lessons in the beginning. Selling on Amazon is not easy. Really, no matter what So as much as my Amazon background working there is interesting, and yes, I know certain things about how the teams work with one another, how different systems are set up. There's a hack that you shared at one point that is something that I used to use with clients. But it's really the selling and the consulting for brands once I got out of Amazon that really leveled up. What I've been able to do. But fast forwarding a little bit, ended up joining an aggregator when that wave kind of really started to crest in 2020. Helped stand up that business, hired a ton of people, as it were, and oversaw the acquisition of a lot of brands, which again, kind of going back to my M&A background, I was well positioned to do. And then life happened, wanted to have a family, have kids, take my foot off the gas a little, so did that and just kind of leaned back into my Amazon agency, into my Amazon business for a little while. That was around early 2022, took a break, which I hadn't done in 16 years of professional working, right? It was at that point where I kind of had a reset moment and looked inward and said, well, what do I want to do? And what I found was I really enjoyed continuing to run my Amazon business. I thought I maybe had an advantage in going out and acquiring Amazon businesses and growing them past the point that I kind of inherited them from the existing owners or the previous owners. And I continue to do consulting and advisory for brands. It's all a little bit of a flywheel, maybe even an ecosystem of Amazon things that I love. Consulting, operating, going out and acquiring interesting businesses. And that's kind of where I am today. The only other thing that I'll add is like you, I've started a newsletter and it's part of what I, I guess, enjoy doing on the content side. I like sharing. I like sharpening my own thinking and skills by writing. That's primarily how I do it and the newsletter is my vehicle for that. Speaker 1: And you do a really good job with that. I mean, I'd heard of you, but I didn't really know you just until like two months ago, I got on LinkedIn. I think it was in early August. I'd been ignoring LinkedIn. I was on Facebook and spending all my effort there. And I had something on Instagram, but I think I've made one or two posts ever on Instagram. Nothing on Twitter, I was just a Facebook guy, always maxing out the 5,000 followers and having to delete people out so someone else that wanted to follow me could come in and go through there and look for the dead people or their icon is no longer there or whatever, accounts closed and delete them. But then I was like, you know what, I think I'm missing something here and someone's telling me about LinkedIn. So I went over and said, let me get on LinkedIn. And you know what, I was missing the boat there. That's where the action is. And this Amazon space with everybody that's anybody And I'm like, you got to get over there because that's where people are sharing the good stuff. And I saw you on there and I was like, who is this guy? He's saying some really good stuff. There's a lot of garbage, you know, a lot of people just marketing themselves or putting up some BS, but you're actually writing well thought out, actionable, good stuff. I'm like, who is this guy? So I started, I started following you. And then, then you came out with that thing where you said, here's my favorite 10 podcast or something. And I'm like, and you put AM PM up there as one of your favorites. I'm like, all right, this guy's really cool. I got to get him on. And then you're like, I saw you post, I think you posted somewhere. It's like, I'm very selective in where I speak or what I do or where I go or something like that. And I'm like, all right, let's see if he turns me down. Let's see. But no, it was great. And so your newsletter, I signed up. If you're not, what's the website for that? Speaker 2: Man, I need to get a proper domain. It's called Best at Amazon and I'll give you a little origin story there behind that. But the best way to find it is to look me up on LinkedIn and it's linked right there under my beautiful headshot. Speaker 1: The spelling of the name if you're listening to this is J-O-N, so no H, and then Derkits, D-E-R-K-I-T-S. If you're listening to this, you're not online, that's how you look him up on LinkedIn. But yeah, your newsletter is really good. You put it out once a week, right? Speaker 2: Once a week and I go deep on a single topic. That's kind of the model that I've kind of refined over time. That's the voice that I wanted to have. I wanted to be known for deep dives for the 1% of Amazon sellers, the top 1% of Amazon sellers. And, you know, in some ways, I obviously monitor the newsletters in the space and Billion Dollar Sellers is probably my favorite behind mine. Speaker 1: That's all right. Speaker 2: But, you know, people have asked me about that and I think about my newsletter, your newsletter as totally complimentary because, you know, to give a really maybe silly analogy. Speaker 1: I'm at USA Today and you're the Wall Street Journal. You're going deep and I'm going shorter nuggets and that's one way. Speaker 2: Here's the analogy I came up with after having dinner last weekend with my wife and a few others. We were at a Brazilian steakhouse, Fogo de Chão. And you go to a Brazilian steakhouse, for anyone that hasn't been there, they have a great buffet. They have all sorts of fruits, vegetables. It's very quality food. But at the same time, you go to a Brazilian steakhouse for the meat. And most people, again, if you haven't been there, Brazilian steakhouses are notorious for maybe over-serving you. They have a little red light, green light system where you basically will get food until you tell them to stop. I think about our two newsletters kind of in that same context. I'm the guy who goes to the Brazilian steakhouse and I find one piece of meat, the bacon-wrapped steak. Keep bringing it. Keep bringing it. Keep bringing it. I think your newsletter is the one for the people that love to sample the buffet, love to sample all the meats. They're getting great food all around but they like to kind of fill up with the panoply of food there. I'm just the weirdo that eats a bunch of bacon wrapped steak. That's great because everyone in that scenario leaves the steakhouse very satisfied. It's a good analogy. Speaker 1: I like that actually. I don't do heavy, deep dives like you do. I save those more for like the Billion Dollar Seller Summit or something like that. I do have those in my arsenal, I guess you would say, but I don't put those in there. One of the things that I've become just by default, I guess, kind of famous for hacks and in this business, hacks are awesome, but you need to focus on the fundamentals. The fundamentals is what matters. It's not the quick hacks, but sometimes there's cool tools or something that can solve a problem for you or something that people and people love that. So I started doing those like I think I started ASGTG like four or five years ago and did it and people just went nuts. And so now that's basically when I speak publicly, everybody wants me to do those. And so that's, they love those little short little things. And so that's what I'm known for. And so I kind of take the news, it goes a little bit beyond a little hack, but that's what I'm trying to do. But I think a lot of people have, we're sitting here saying newsletters and there's a lot of people will probably roll in their eyes. They're listening to this like, Dude, I get so many emails and so many newsletters from every service provider in this space and everybody. I think newsletter, those are not newsletters to me. I mean, maybe we should change the name to magazines or something else to delineate the misperception because most of those newsletters are just promotional emails. It's email marketing and it's just here's our latest software tool. Here's the latest this or that or they're really basic. You know, they may have their blog posts and here's how to set up an ASIN on Amazon or something. They're not, in my mind, they're not newsletters. They're promotional emails. And I think we're doing it different. And there's a couple other people trying. Out there now that are doing stuff, but it's difficult. I mean, putting out a newsletter is difficult. I mean, to write that, to come up with the content, to curate it, to edit it, it's not easy. And I know we were talking before we started. I was saying that this newsletter space is hot right now. I mean, forget Amazon, in internet marketing world, this is super hot. It's gotten hot. It started probably with my first million podcast, Sam Parr, talking about how he sold The Hustle for $27 million. How they sold Milk Road for around 10 million bucks in eight months, which was a crypto newsletter. Others have sold for 75 million. Morning Brew, another one sold for 525. So a lot of people start paying up and there's a whole sub-industry out there of newsletters now and software tools. And now with AI, a lot of people are like, oh shoot, we don't have to have journalists anymore or writers. We can just have AI do all this and automate it. So a lot of people are getting into that. And my opinion is that's gonna fail massively for most people. A few of them rise, but you're going to start getting inundated with junk. But I think there's a major opportunity here for product sellers, whether it's Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, whatever, to actually combine the journalism aspect and the power of a newsletter with product selling. And the problem is that all the Milk Road and all the ones that have sold, they're very good on the journalism side, selling sponsorships and getting some eyeballs in there. And retaining people, but they don't know squat about how to leverage that into brands and products, but we do. I think if you mix those two, you have a one-two punch that's unstoppable. And so that's what I'm doing. The billion-dollar sellers one is I started initially because I already have an audience. And I'm like, let me figure out what works. What are the best tools? How much work is this really to do it? And how can we automate some of this and what's it take? And then we're expanding that into my brands. So I have a dog brand, Sustainable Dog Products. And it's what we sell. We do life jackets for like body glove and we have poop bags and we have some other stuff. And we're like, how can we build an audience for this? And at one point we're like, you know, the traditional methods go out to Facebook, do all that, but you don't own that audience. On an email newsletter, you own the audience, you're building trust, you're building rapport, you're building a brand, the personality, the way it's written and everything. If you do that right, you can leverage that into product sales to launch a product immediately to the top. On Amazon or Walmart or anywhere. There's a lot of power and there's a lot of cool things you can do with AI to customize that. Not have it written, but even customize so everybody has a different newsletter. It's basically a newsfeed in an email. And a lot of people say, well, email is dead, Kevin. Nobody over under 40 reads email and it's bullshit. Email is still the most powerful mechanism if it's an email that they want to read. And the email newsletters, done right, are the new magazines. They're the new Cosmo. They're the new Newsweek. And there's a massive opportunity right now, I believe, done right. 95% are going to fail, but done right. And so that's why I was just at FHL, Funnel Hacking Live, a couple of weeks ago. And Russell Brunson, now he had 5,000 people in the room. He has this new ClickFunnels 2.0, which is a marketing system for internet marketers. And the fundamental thing, it's called the linchpin, his fundamental thing is first step, start a newsletter to build an audience. Quit relying on Facebook and everybody else, social media, use those to drive traffic, but you need to own those people, which is I've been saying for decades. And you're gonna see a lot of stuff come out. So I'm doing a webinar actually on December 1st to actually show people in this space How to actually do webinars right. Here's the tools. I mean, not how to do it, but how to do newsletters right. Here's the tools. Here's everything you need to know. Here's what nobody's telling you. It's kind of like the guys are selling courses on Amazon. They show you, look at my screenshot of a million bucks in sales, but they don't tell you that 90% of that was a search, find, buy giveaways, or they don't tell you, you know, that here's my $20 product. I sourced it on Alibaba for five bucks. I've got a 75% profit margin. They don't tell you about all the shipping and fulfillment fees and the storage fees and advertising. That's what everybody's leaving out and making this sound glamorous and like amazing. And it can be, but you got to do it right. So that's what I'm going to be showing in this webinar. So, and I think you understand that because you're in the weeds doing this now. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny. I think we're both motivated in a way by doing it right and showing people that path. I forget the name. There's a kind of eponymous law along the lines of if you want to spot or you want to get a right answer on the internet, post the wrong answer and then you'll have 50 people correct you. Speaker 1: That's a good one. I like that. Speaker 2: I understand that at a deep level because to your point, You see someone, a guru posting a screenshot or someone kind of promoting AI as the unlock for scaling out a newsletter and I look at that and I say, well, you're omitting key facts but also it's not that easy. I think the right way is often the hard way but you don't have a lot of people that are predisposed toward doing things the hard way and taking the time to build. But that's ultimately what creates enterprise value. Speaker 1: It is. Speaker 2: But I want to go back to what you said about newsletters and creating an audience for product brands and that being the opportunity. So, I mentioned briefly that one of the things I do now is I buy and build Amazon businesses. I'm generally looking at micro acquisitions, sub $1 million. And a lot of this is informed by my experience at an aggregator, understanding how to go source businesses, how to construct a deal that's balanced and favorable to both parties, and then how to integrate the business and grow it. I've acquired a few businesses with a partner so far and in the beginning they were pure product businesses. Ones that were just under-optimized and there was a lot of, call it low-hanging fruit. I hate that phrase but the reality was they were missing A-plus content, they weren't running ads, they didn't even have five images or video on the PDPs. So just easy optimization. Speaker 1: Easy fixes with someone that knows the basics of what to do, right? Speaker 2: Exactly. So those were attractive candidates as I was kind of getting my sea legs under me in the acquisition world when I'm playing with my own money and not other people's money. My acquisition criteria as I built my pattern recognition muscles, one of the things that I've discovered is that there's better businesses out there in the Amazon space and they tend to be the ones that have both kind of product and audience built in. So I'll give you an example. This is a real deal I'm looking at and I'll kind of adjust the details a little bit so as to not give anything away. But there's a $300,000 business out there. It's cash flowing about $9,000 a month. Speaker 1: It's for sale for $300,000 or it's $300,000 top line? Speaker 2: For sale for $300,000. Cash flowing I think about $9,000 a month. But over half of that is from display advertising. So the business is a website related to kind of the lifestyle of the products. The product brand is a personal care brand. So there's a website that has a lot of content around kind of the personal care products within the brand. And the business itself has display advertising revenue and then sells products on Amazon. And it also has an email list that isn't being used at all. I'm looking at this business and thinking, well, number one, continue to invest in content on the website to ensure that the display ad dollars continue to flow because it's very high margin, as you can imagine. But this email list, which I think was about 12,000 strong, let's start to nurture it. Let's start to seed them with information and promotions and drive some of that traffic over to Amazon. Then there are some other things on the product side that I would do. This is a $300,000 business that's cash flowing close to $100,000 a year. It's a great business. If it was purely a product brand, I wouldn't be interested at all because it's kind of a me too product in a very saturated category with relatively low ASP. There's a lot of things that make the product unattractive. But what makes the business overall attractive is the website with display ads, the large email list that I feel like I can capitalize on and grow and I think that's something for Amazon owners to think about deeply if they have a plan to exit in the next 12-24 months. Speaker 1: That's an important point too on that email list. You said some people may say, well, Jon, 12,000, that's not very big. 12,000 is awesome if it's a good list. It's not about how big the list is. I hear people say, I got 100,000 people on my list or I got 200,000 on my list. I have on my personal list over 100,000 Amazon sellers that's on my list. But I know a lot of them either have quit selling, they're junk, they're Not, they don't like me or whatever it may be. So, I don't just blast this out. You know, there's other people in our space that, you know, a couple we talked about before, I don't want to name them here, but that have a big list and they just send out what they call a newsletter to their entire list. They just blast it out every week and that's foolish. That's absolutely foolish in my opinion. Do that occasionally for a marketing promotion or to get them onto a, you want to do that to get them onto a good list? And so I have my list of 100,000. I will send them out an email saying, hey, I got a new newsletter. It's on a totally different domain, totally different IP, totally different everything, so that I don't start getting blocked in spam or start getting bad reputations in email. There's a whole science to that, most people don't understand in this business, a whole science to that. And then I have my newsletter, which right now is a little over 5,000 people, but they're all double opted in, which means you sign up and then you gotta hit another email to confirm to actually get activated. So it's a two-step process and you go through a captcha and you go through answering. So that's a highly qualified list. And those 5,000, a lot of them came from my 100,000. But there's 95,000 of that 100,000 that either don't care Maybe they're not getting the email, they don't even know about it, they're just not paying attention, but these are the 5,000 that are paying attention, that I'm getting 60% open rates, close to 20% click rates on every newsletter consistently. My worst performing newsletter right now is 52% open rate. Worst performing. And so that's with Apple. A lot of the open rates don't track now. A lot of people don't realize this with Apple. Apple has a new privacy. It's really cooked into OS 17, the new OS, but a lot of people haven't upgraded that yet, but it's partially cooked into their past two where a lot of open rates don't show up. So that open rates probably higher. And one of the reasons I absolutely know this is I sent out, I had about a thousand people that had not opened the email and last eight emails I sent them. And I'm like, I sent them a message saying, hey, I'm sorry, but I'm taking you off the list. I'm unsubscribing you from my newsletter. Unless you go and click something, go open one of the emails or go click it. I got hundreds of people emailing me back saying, Kevin, I've opened every single one of them. Please don't take me off the list. Please don't take me off the list. I've opened every single one of them. A lot of them were Apple users. Some were Microsoft users. It's because the opens are not tracking. And opens as a metric are becoming, there's a hot topic, there's a webinar some email marketers just did last week from validity talking about how opens are not gonna be a good metric to track your success anymore because of all these changes going on and UTM changes with Apple. But my point of that is those 5,000 people, if I knock 1,000 of them off because they never open it, I'll do it. Those 4,000 with that open rate, they're super passionate. They're your loyal fans, they're your raving fans. If I go to sell them something, if I say, hey, we got the new billion dollar seller summit coming out or whatever, they're going to pay attention. Or if I'm a product brand and I'm a dog, I'm selling dog products, I have a newsletter for dog lovers. This newsletter is not, hey, our dog company is great. We just announced a new dog bowl and Charlie's our new mascot and whatever. This is a newsletter all about dogs, dog training tips, dog Some dog that's a fire rescue dog and his story and we customize it. If you're into poodles, every single newsletter you get has a poodle story. We know that. We can see there's all things you can do with AI and some software out there where you can basically make it a feed so it's custom to them. We can have them upload a picture of their dog and I can actually use AI with some tools that we're doing. Take your dog's picture and put it into a background. So if today is the first day of fall, here's Fido in a picture with the fall leaves on the ground behind him and it's in your newsletter with Fido and you're like, oh, that's really cute. That's really cool. There's a share button there. Hit share. They share it on social media, look at Fido, you know, this is so cool. And people are like, where'd you get that? Oh, this newsletter creates this flywheel. And then, or they can, there's another button that says print on demand, takes them over to merch on Amazon or one of the other tools, get it on t-shirt or coffee mug or whatever. And it's sitting on your desk, it's branding. And then when I come out with like, hey, we now we're launching a new sustainable anxiety jacket for dogs, what should we do? What would you like in it? And they participate almost like our own little pick-fu and they're making suggestions and they feel part of it. And then we say, when it's launched on Amazon, hey, this is launched on Amazon, go and get it. We're giving everybody 20% off or if you buy it, we're gonna give you a free gift. Send us your receipt and we'll send you a free bonus gift from the newsletter or whatever, whatever it may be, a free dog chain. A caller or something and instantly you're launched with legitimate sales, legitimate people who are passionate, most likely leave good reviews because they got into it and it starts this flywheel. Other people buy it on Amazon, they just randomly found it and then there's an insert in there, hey, join the newsletter. Get a free gift when you join the newsletter, not go to some stupid warranty or whatever but get something of value and I'll send that out to them. It might cost me five bucks, ten bucks to send that out to them but I know I mean, the average right now for a valid, a good newsletter subscriber, if you talk to the big media companies is about 30 bucks. So someone like if you look at Milk Road or Morning Brew or Daily Hustle, these vary, but the actual value just on the advertising side, just on selling sponsorships and ads in the newsletter and maybe some affiliate link stuff is 30 bucks. That's the average in this industry. I don't know what it is yet on an Amazon, but it has to be more than that because I can sell ads in that newsletter. If I got a decent newsletter with good open rates and they'll want to, I can self-support that. And then I'll make even crazier money off the product side and creating this whole ecosystem and it gets people into it. And then we were hoping to tie, it's kind of crashed now, but I think we're still going to be able to do it, NFTs into it. So we're going to tie, not NFT, JPEGs where you You're trying to get rich by buying a bunch of pictures of apes or something, but we're using the technology. So we'd have a digital element to the newsletter, which is like, here's Fido, your dog, uploaded his picture. We created NFT out of his picture. And then there's almost like this little metaverse. And when you buy the product on Amazon, there's an NFT, I'm sorry, NFC, not NFT, but NFC And on the product box, you scan that, that's proof of purchase on your phone, that automatically triggers an accessory in the blockchain to go to Fido and he gets a cool, you know, gold collar or whatever it may be. And you can display that and stuff. So we're doing this whole gamification. Not everybody will participate in that, but enough of them will. And those people are going to be rabid about everything that you do. Look at what Taylor Swift's doing. I mean, look at the, I was looking at Taylor Swift back in the, and like, I've seen stuff of hers in August and I'm sorry, April and May on TikTok and what people are doing. I was like, holy shit, this is freaking brilliantly amazing. The passion that she's created from these pans. And I was like, this needs to be textbook Harvard freaking MBA case study. This needs to be, everybody needs a reverse engineer, like her or hate her, reverse engineer what's happening. Some of it I think is calculated. Some of it may be by chance, but look what's just happened just recently with her showing up at games. I don't know if you're a football fan or not, but showing up and all the stuff that's online now, all these memes of, she put Kelsey on the map. He was a famous football player already, but it's just that branding. She's got a movie coming out in theaters in two weeks of her tour, shot of her tour. It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant to a T marketing by whoever's behind this. And that's what you can do if you do this whole product stuff right. And nobody is willing to put that time in. They're just looking for the latest hack, the latest trick. How can I get rich quick? That's what the guru told me. I can quit my job and sell my business for five million bucks in three years. Some people have done that. They've been right place, right time. But that's not the way to do it. And like you said, buying a brand, which one do you want to buy? You want to buy an Amazon brand that's a product that may be dead in two years and has a life cycle or do you want to buy something that if that product dies, no problem. We got a massive audience behind it that's raving that'll buy whatever we do. Speaker 2: I think it's a clear answer. I almost am kicking myself now for using the term audience because it's really about building a tribe. Speaker 1: It is. It's community. Some people call it movements. Some of the marketers are saying, don't build an audience, build a movement. That's the big catch word. That's kind of like a tribe, but build a movement. And then people are passionate about it. And if you can do that, and that's what I think a lot of people now on this, we know the e-commerce side, a lot of people listening to this are good e-commerce sellers. You know that side. Now, that's one of the reasons I like going to Funnel Hacking Live and some of these other outside, I go to Driven Masterminds, a few others. Outside this Amazon space is because there's brilliant people that are doing other things in the same e-commerce or marketing world that you can take pieces of what they do and combine it with what we do. You could put everything that we do on steroids instead of just focusing on going to one Amazon conference after another. And that's what I'm kind of trying to do in the newsletter a little bit. You'll see it's not all about Amazon. There's stuff about TikTok and there's stuff about psychology. Do you put a person in the picture on your product photo or not? I'm trying to mix some of that in to actually show people, look, you need to be well-rounded if you really want to do this right. Speaker 2: I preach that and I think one of the patterns I've seen amongst successful Amazon sellers is they come from different realms, from different sectors and they're really good at synthesis. It's about idea cross-pollination. It's about taking little kernels from different places and saying, oh, I can apply that here or I can take this piece of psychological marketing and apply it to my Amazon business. It's so cool to see it happen, but I love that you actively venture out into those realms. I tried to do the same thing because it's so easy to get caught up. Find a nice home in your own little echo chamber. You hit on a really cool topic as it relates to tribes and communities. A natural question is how do I know when I built that? This is very recent. I don't know if you follow – you were talking about LinkedIn before. I don't know if you follow Brian Porter. He's one of the co-founders of Simple Modern. Great person to follow on Twitter or LinkedIn. Both him and Mike Beckham, the other founder, post a lot. But Brian posted a video, a user-generated video from TikTok of a Simple Modern fan creating this real viral, at least I think it was viral, but she was literally railing against all these people that pronounced the brand wrong because the Simple Modern logo is just an SM. You could look at it and read it as slim just because of the font and the typography. And so in a kind of joking way, this girl is railing against all these people that are calling it slim and saying, no, it's SM, it's Simple Modern. And I think if I had to draw a line as to when your brand has created a tribe, it's when you have people on TikTok organically Advocating evangelizing for your brand and the cool thing is though. You know. When that happens organically is different in every brand's journey, but I think you can compress time and accelerate that by putting your product in front of a lot of influencers, in front of a lot of customers and encouraging them to share their own experiences with it, to instill in them a sense of ownership of the brand because that's ultimately what tribalism is. You feel like you have a piece of the community, a piece of the tribe. I'm working very hard to do that with my brands. I'm trying to put my product in front of as many TikTok micro-influencers as possible. I have a baby brand and I think I sent out a case of 30 units to 30 different influencers last week and I'm waiting for the videos on TikTok to get posted. It all comes back to what you said. You can have an audience, you can have a tribe, you can have a community. Of 100,000 or you can have one of 5,000 who are just rabid and passionate and fervent. Speaker 1: There's a saying that you need a thousand raving fans and you can make millions of dollars. That's all it takes. You need a thousand raving fans and you're set. You're set for life. If you have a thousand raving fans, Taylor Swift has a lot more than that. She's set for life. But one of the things that I look at too, I mean, there's a couple of things that you touched on there is like in my newsletter. So one of my deliberate goals in the beginning is like, I'm not going to be another corporate newsletter. I'm not just going to summarize news. I'm going to add humor to it. I'm going to be, I'm going to cuss. If I need to cuss, I'm going to say, this is bullshit. I'm going to call some people out. You know, one of my headlines, one of my subject lines was naked girl on balcony. People get in that subject line like, what the heck is this? A lot of people would never do that. They would not open that up. They're like, what is this? Some smut or what the hell? How dare you send that to my email? And I had like three people out of thousands that got that particular one about a month ago say, unsubscribe me. They messaged me. I had like 12 people total out of four or 5,000, whatever that number I had at that point was, subscribers unsubscribe off of that one email. 12, 12 people. Nobody reported a spam, but three people email me back and say, take me off of this list immediately. I don't want this garbage in my house. I'm like, yes, I was so fired up when that came in. I'm like, yes, get the F out of here. I don't want you. You're not my tribe. You're not my community. But then I had 30, 40, 50 people reply back saying, I can't believe you did that, but that's freaking awesome. I can't wait to see what you're going to say next, what's going to be in the next one. And that's part of, that's very, very deliberate. My stories are true. I've done a lot of stories. I mean, they're not, I mean, I've got 82 of them that are in the hopper and they're not all written, but that's, you know, what I can write about. And new ones come up like the naked girl on the balcony just happened. Unknown Speaker: But that. Speaker 1: is part of it. And I try to tie that in to a lesson around selling or on whatever I'm talking about that week. I try to somehow tie that in so it's not just some random story and it's straight and to the point. It's not long and rambling. There's people out there right now putting blog posts out and social media stuff. It's they're telling their stories. And I think that's an important thing to do as a brand or as a if you're listening to this and you're a brand, you need to tell your story. Or if you're an individual influencer or you're teaching people or consulting people, you need to get your story out there. And be authentic with that story. And here's the problem, this was just, there was a really good speaker, I'm looking for her name right now on my phone, that just spoke at McCall Jones, M-C-C-A-L-L Jones. I want this girl speaking at my Level Up event in Hawaii, because after BDSS we're doing a Level Up event, which is next level stuff. And I want her speaking at it, but hopefully I can get her. She came on and said, look, there's something called the attractive character. And this goes for, you can apply this to a person, whether you're a consultant or you're a brand, you need to find your attractive character. And she said, there's 54 types of attractive characters and there's three fundamental buckets, those 50 of characteristics that make up those 54 characters. And she went through them. I'm looking here on my phone. She says, too many people are two-faced. They get it wrong. They look at like Gary V. And they're like, look how Gary Vee is doing this, I wanna be like Gary Vee. Or they look at, look how Nike is doing this, let's be like Nike, if they're a brand. And like, you're missing it. You gotta be authentic to yourself and you gotta know which of these, where you fall into these categories. She gave about 50 examples of celebrities. She's like, look, this is The Rock, he's these three. This is this guy, he's these three. This is Jennifer Lopez, she's these three. If you're trying to mimic as a brand or as a person the wrong one, You're going to fail. It's not going to resonate. But if you know, you dial in, this is the, of these three categories, these are the one characteristic of each of the three categories that I am, and you double down on that, you're going to blow it out of the water from a brand point of, a personal brand or a physical products brand point of view. And it was an excellent talk. And I think it went over some people's heads that were in that audience. But if you, those kinds of things, you're going back to what you're talking about, when you know you've made it or how to make it, those are important things. And you're not going to hear that from some Amazon guru, you know, trying to tell you the latest hack or how he made 20 million bucks on Amazon. Speaker 2: I mean, you hit it on the head, Kevin. Authenticity is so key, especially as you're trying, whether you're talking about a product brand or a personal brand. You can exaggerate certain characteristics of yourself or of your product. You can invoke hyperbole. But at some level, the only thing that is sustainable over the long term, whether it's for a person or a product, is if it's rooted in truth and authenticity. I think a lot of people forget that they try to become someone that they aren't because they see something trending in a tangent space. Speaker 1: That goes for products or Amazon sellers too or individual people trying to be a celebrity or an influencer or whatever. It goes both ways. Speaker 2: That's exactly right. And it's the best brands that have a... A firm grasp of who they are and a deep sense of that identity and purpose. They do the best marketing. Liquid Death is a great example. They know who they are and of course, they position themselves as the anti-villain or maybe the villain depending on who they are. Uh, how you would look at it against regular water, uh, and they do some great us versus them creative. Um, but they, they know who they are and that, that comes out deeply in everything they do. Same thing with a local Chicago brand like dude wipes, right? Uh, and even that deep sense of identity. It goes all the way up to the founder, Sean Reilly, who doesn't call himself the chief executive officer. He's the chief dude. I think it's really special when you found that as a person, as an influencer, as a product brand, but it's hard. So many people rush through that phase of understanding, what is my North Star? Who am I? What is my authentic voice? Speaker 1: I mean, we did it for our dog brand. We sat down and one of the, I'm partners with two other guys in that. And one of the guys, I forget what the name of it, some brand development thing he found. And we went through a process for like three weeks of like mapping out all these little categories of like, what do we stand for? What's this? And ask these really interesting questions. And you would answer those like, what do you feel about this? Or how do we want to be portrayed as this? And then you put them all together. And it really funnels it down to like, this is who you are and this is what you're trying to be. And then you create all your messaging and everything around that. And that, it was a brilliant exercise. I mean, it was a kind of a pain to go through that. Most people don't want to sit through and go through that or think that creative process. But if you do that, that's not making money to pay your rent next week. Like a lot of people are trying to do or to quit their job. So that's not attractive to a lot of people. They're looking for the quick fix. But if you want to do something that you're not going to sell to some Amazon aggregator that you're going to sell to Procter and Gamble or you sell to a big, look at native deodorant. Sell that for a hundred million bucks. It created a real brand off of that. And that's where, I think everybody needs to be trying to focus. You might need to do a few things in the beginning just to hustle and keep a roof over your head. But if you need to be trying to make that switch at some point or do it from the beginning to where you're building A group of raving fans and a true brand. And Amazon is a great place to start. There is no place better in the world than to start on Amazon. But that's a marketplace, a shopping cart of choice. And so that's just one. So you need to expand off of that. And the TikTok shop, which I think is going to blow up and Walmart, I think is going to blow up and you need to be willing to adapt. You know, I remember when the panic, the COVID happened, everybody's using this app called Clubhouse. I don't know if you were on Clubhouse or not, but everybody was using this app called Clubhouse and just hanging out on there and it got really popular. Now it's basically, I don't know anybody that goes on there anymore, a few people, but I've been on a couple, I think I even deleted it off my phone. But everybody was going on there building massive audiences. And I remember the aggregators at the time, that was a hot time. Thrasio and Casey Goss was on there, the guys from Thrasio. And Casey's a brilliant guy, but the guys from Thrasio or I got on one of their things and I was like, you guys aren't going to be around in a couple of years. And they're like, there's not enough businesses to buy, they're decent, number one. Like, oh yeah, there's plenty to buy. They're like, no, there's not. You might wait till you get into operating these that look good. They're not good. And I got in arguments with these guys, like you're going to be, most of you are going to be gone. There's going to be like five of you left. And they just like, no, you don't know what you're talking about, Kevin. It's like, I think I know a lot more than you. I don't have $3 billion, but I know a lot more than you. And we'll look what's happened. The same thing I believe is going to about to happen with Amazon search. And I don't know if you just saw this. It's going to be in my newsletter. Well, it's, this is coming out after, but it's in one of my, the newsletter from last week. On Thursday, and actually Joe from, she does a newsletter called, what's the name of it? It's AI for Amazon sellers or AI for E-com sellers. She just started, she came to my Billion Dollar Seller Summit, saw me talk about newsletters, said, I'm going to start my own newsletter. What niche can I do? And she's doing AI for E-commerce sellers or something like that. And she just broke the story today in hers. If you haven't, Joe, I have to look up her last name. She's also going to be a guest on the AM-PM Podcast in about a month or so. But it's called Nile, Amazon Nile. You can look it up. Speaker 2: Project Nile, yep. Speaker 1: Project Nile, yeah. And it just started from some sort of leaked documents from Microsoft or somewhere. And it basically is saying how Amazon is going to radically change search. And I've been saying this since late last year when AI came out. All these tools, they're going to go the way of the dinosaurs if they don't adapt. I mean, they're keyword tools. I mean, they have other tools, but finding these individual keywords that other people are missing and capitalizing on, that's going to be history pretty soon. But now with this Nile, what they're saying they're going to do, it's basically some of my predictions are Basically what they're going to do. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And it's going to change everything. And so that's one of the, how do you see from you going from Amazon to having your own brand to working with aggregators and now consulting in, what do you see as the biggest thing that's changing and what's hard for sellers to get their heads around, like to actually make this thing work? Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, the Project Nile news is, is quite fresh. And I think Business Insider just leaked a story on it as well. Yeah. One of the things that, You have to confront when you're working at Amazon or any tech company for that matter is what I'll call coastal bias. All these very cool, innovative features or tech, they're developed kind of in these weird worlds of Silicon Valley, of Seattle or maybe they're done over in New York. But for the most part, they're built kind of in a vacuum. And as hard as you might try to get user or customer input on these features in advance, it's hard to kind of get out of your bubble and really understand how something is going to travel through the rest of the country. I say that because Chat GPT, I think, has been top of mind for people like you and me and the Amazon seller community for the better part of a year now, since call it October, November, when it was first launched. But there's a lot of people in the country who don't use it, let alone know what it is, and it's meaningless to their everyday life. And I say that as context to my main thought here around Project Nile, which is Project Nile, for it to be successful, It needs to almost be a seamless alteration of the search experience for customers. A very customer friendly and intuitive search experience that is almost indistinguishable from the way it is today. I don't think the average Amazon customer, who you and I both know, they don't know that they're buying from three-piece sellers most of the 60% of the time, right? The average customer is going to need to continue to search using their previous search behavior. And that's the engineering challenge for Amazon as they build AI and kind of semantic search into the backend, if you will. So, I think about that on the customer side a lot. How can you launch something like this that's so revolutionary and make the everyday customer in small town Ohio still want to shop on Amazon, still like the experience, in fact, love the experience even more than before? Now, on the seller side, the truth is I don't know. When it's going to impact us, how it's going to impact us, I probably fall in your camp that the impact is going to come swifter and harder than the people that are in the keyword camp think. Speaker 1: Brutal is when Google updated their algorithm from Penguin to Walrus or whatever the hell it was and like all these affiliate guys overnight were out of business. All these SEO guys and affiliate people were overnight out of business. I think that level of something, and like you say, I don't know what it is or how it's going to work and there's some things to be worked out. I think they'll figure it out though. And I think it's coming. Speaker 2: And that's the beauty of the Amazon seller community. I said at the top of this podcast, I took a lot of licks early on and I thought I was super smart coming out of Amazon, having seen the backend, but you got to get punched in the face a ton. And I think the Amazon seller community, if nothing else, is like Rocky Balboa. Takes a lot of punches, but adapts quickly and comes out on top. And I think that'll be the way it works when Project Nile kind of manifests itself. Speaker 1: Because a lot of the bigger sellers right now, I mean, unless you're a pre-existing brand coming onto Amazon and people already know you, if you're a no-name brand and you're coming on, you know, Chinese sellers or a lot of American Western sellers, You're having to game the system in a way. I'm not saying cheat, I'm not saying do black hat, but you're having to game the system with figuring out which keywords people are missing or who doesn't have A plus and who does and who, whatever. You know what the algorithm looks like and what makes better conversions. And you're fixing holes where other people are missing opportunities. AI, I think, is going to completely change that and it's going to reverse that. We're at Amazon's going to know based on your past history. They have a massive database of what you bought. I mean, I can go back to the 19, whatever, 1999 or 1998 when I first bought something on Amazon, maybe 95, whatever it was, they know everything I've bought. They know everything I've done, everything I've looked at. You can request these reports from Amazon, by the way, and it's like a dossier of like a hundred something pages of everything you've ever done. They know that and they're going to be. To somehow figure out how the AI is going to show you instead of me looking at, I'm typing in umbrellas, or yeah, maybe that's not good. Yeah, whatever, umbrellas. Instead of me showing me the people that I type in some long tail keyword, umbrellas for the beach or something crazy, long tail keyword. People have gamed the system to make sure they rank for that. Amazon's no longer not going to be able to do that. They're going to know these are the ones that the people that have gone to the beach before, because they also bought books on going to the Bahamas and to Panama City Beach and whatever. And they also bought Umbrella. They're going to know all this stuff. And you're just going to have to be able to be good at branding. That's why I'm creating these audiences and everything. You have to be good at branding and good at the whole experience and good at creating actually decent products that people want instead of gaming the system. And I think that's going to be a big shift that's coming for a lot of people and a lot of people are going to have trouble with this. Speaker 2: I think so too, but the fact remains that, and this is one of the things I try to lean on knowing how dynamic and challenging Amazon is, like what are the durable truths? You talked before about mastering the basics. You know, you're known for hacks, but you always counsel sellers to master the basics first. And for me, I kind of do the same thing. I talk about retail math, traffic conversion times order value, right? But what are the basics of building an enduring, valuable enterprise? And I think it's a high quality product. A raving tribe and then really just meeting your customers where they are. And if you can do that, all wrapped in some really great branding, you're going to win kind of regardless of how the goalposts shift. I mean, frankly, that's the way I advise people to compete. Categories that are heavy with Chinese brands, right? Just out-compete them on your branding, on your understanding of the customer, on your messaging. These are all things that you can do even if you can't win on price. And more often than not, they tend to be enough to succeed. Speaker 1: So how do you find time to do all this stuff? You're writing a newsletter, you're writing on LinkedIn, you're buying businesses, you're running a business with an old high school buddy, you're consuming a lot of stuff that's out there, and you have a family, you said. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I have two little girls who, you know, they're my true bosses. Five o'clock rolls around and they pop in my office and everything shuts down. But you know what, Kevin? The truth is it's super hard. And task management, focus, I struggle with it just like many other sellers. What I try to do, what I've maybe learned over time, is to try to… I orient myself toward the things where they're most likely to have the biggest impact. I kind of do an effort versus impact two-by-two matrix and try to live in that corner where I'm low effort, high impact. You're not always gifted with opportunities like that so I'm often in the high effort, high impact category but that's where I try to live. That's how I try to prioritize and outside of that, I stick to things that I'm passionate about because even if they aren't high impact and remunerative, at least I can do something that I enjoy in my heart. So yeah, the truth is don't have it figured out. Jumping around to different things like everyone else, but the hope is I can continue to deliver value to the Amazon community with my newsletter. The hope is that I can continue to go out and find some good businesses to acquire and build up a little portfolio. The hope is that I can get in front of more people. In live events in the future, you mentioned ASGTG, I don't know if it's come out yet, so apologies Ed if I'm leaking this, but I know you're speaking there and so am I. Yeah, so it'll be fun. Speaker 1: That's January 10th in Brooklyn. That's a really cool event. It's an intense crowd. They're in your face. They're eager to learn. Lots of questions. They're sponges, but that's one of my favorite events to speak at. The buffet is amazing that he puts on. And then you're speaking at Billion Dollar Seller Summit, the virtual event in February as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Thank you for the invite. Speaker 1: You're speaking at that, so that's going to be really, really good too. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm finding time for some of these little events and speaking engagements where I really respect the audience or I really respect the organizers. So of course, it's always an easy yes for you. It was an easy yes for ASG, TG, but outside of that, I usually just say no and put my head down and keep working. Speaker 1: I got to learn to say no a little bit better. Speaker 2: It's hard, it's hard. Speaker 1: But I enjoy, you know, I like going to some of these events because it's my tribe, it's my people. You know, I sit around with Norm and I'll see you in Orlando. You know, I wasn't, I wasn't, I'm not speaking at the event in Orlando. I spoke at his last one, but I'm going to New Jersey to speak on the 18th at an event over there that Gatita and some of the guys from the e-com cooperative are putting together. But I'm going to Orlando for one day just because I'm like, you know what, there's some people there, like I've never, I want to meet you in person. So I haven't met you in person. So you and a couple other people that are on his list, I'm like, all right, I'm going to head over there for a day and then I'll pop over to New Jersey. But that re-energizes me and that gives me time away from just working and getting ideas and making connections. And I think that's an important part of what we do. Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is and it all goes back. I'm going to bring this full circle since we're probably getting close to time here, Kevin. We started this out talking about travel. You're a world traveler hitting 94 countries, but you're also kind of a people traveler. You genuinely want to meet and connect with people. I'm the same way. I can't do it as much these days with two young kids but you get so much energy and you get better because of it. Hearing people's views, hearing people's hacks, you learn so much from just sitting in the room with someone that has been in different places or is ahead of you a couple of steps. I love that you do that. I try to do it or I'm trying to do it more. But it's tough. Speaker 1: It is. It is. Well, if people want to reach out to you, again, it's the best thing is what? LinkedIn, you said? Speaker 2: Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to connect with me. I also am pretty active on Twitter. I have kind of a fun handle. It's called Bearded Egg FBA. There's a story behind that involving a bet that I made with a guy named Molson Hart, who is the founder of a toy brand called Brain Flakes. But yeah, Twitter, LinkedIn, those are two great places to reach me and always happy to talk shop with Amazon sellers. Speaker 1: Can you spell that again for the people that just in case? Speaker 2: Yeah, so Bearded Egg, B-E-A-R-D-E-D. E-G-G-F-B-A. Speaker 1: Awesome, that's at Twitter and then on LinkedIn it's Jon Derkits, right? Yeah, that's right. J-O-N-D-E-R-K-I-T-S. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Speaker 1: Awesome, Jon. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today, man. This has been awesome. I'm sure we could sit here and do this for about four more hours. Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Speaker 2: Next time we'll do it in person over some drinks and cigars. Speaker 1: There you go, man. Awesome, man. Well, thanks again for coming on. Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Kevin. Speaker 1: Really enjoyed this episode with Jon. Some great stuff we talked about there. We kind of bounced all around. But I think you got some good takeaways from that and hopefully got you thinking. We'll be back again next week with another great episode with Perry Belcher. Perry is one of the most famous internet marketers out there. He's not a Amazon seller per se. He sells on Amazon, but he does a lot of other stuff. He's exited multiple businesses, generated like a billion dollars in sales. So that's going to be a really fascinating and interesting episode. So be sure to tune in for that next week. Also, make sure you sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com and look for an announcement soon on my free webinar, December 1st, on how to set up a newsletter for your physical products business. Before I leave you today, I want to leave you some words of wisdom. The present always determines the past, but the future determines your mastery of the present. The present always determines the past, but your future determines your mastery of the present. Have a great week and we'll see you next Thursday.