#372 – Building Real Brands with Amy Wees: Harnessing AI in Product Development

#372 - Building Real Brands with Amy Wees: Harnessing AI in Product Development Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 372 of the AM PM podcast. Hope everybody's having a great Q4. This week, I've got an amazing guest for you, Amy Wees. She won the billion dollar dream 100s. This is a great show because we're talking about how she's maintained one of her products for over seven years on Amazon and still growing strong about that product lifecycle. We talk about using AI to develop ideas and products. We talk about Some of the events that she does and just a lot of really cool actionable stuff in this episode. I hope you really enjoy it. And don't forget, make sure you sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com. It's totally free, comes out every Monday and Thursday. Enjoy this episode with Amy. I think you're gonna learn quite a bit of stuff and hear some things you haven't heard before. 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. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Look who it is, Amy Wees on the AM PM Podcast. Actually the first billion dollar Dream 100 person to actually come on the podcast since I started that. Can you believe it? Look who is here in the house today, the famous Amy Wees. How are you doing? Speaker 2: That's amazing, Kevin. I can't believe that. First of all, I'm honored to be in the billion dollar dream 100. And I'm honored to be here on the AM PM podcast. This podcast is legendary in the space. So you know, and I've been on a lot of podcasts, but I'm excited to be here. Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one of the old school OG podcasts that Manny Coates started it back when he started his selling journey before there was a Helium 10. Started I think in December 2014, maybe it was, or 2015, one of those. Speaker 2: I remember listening to this podcast back when Manny was still doing it. Speaker 1: I did. I started listening on like the 6th or 7th episode. And then he did it for a while. It's actually the podcast that got me my start in this whole teaching, podcasting, speaking thing, because I was just a seller, keeping my head down. And then for those of you who don't know, we mentioned the Billion Dollar Dream 100. That's something that I started in my newsletter back in August when I started my newsletter. And every Thursday, the way the newsletter is set up, it's totally free, BillionDollarSellers.com, but the way it's set up is every Monday is kind of more technical. And a little bit more hacky, I guess, not hacky, but strategic and implementable. And then the Thursday one, I incorporate some of my travel, trying to inspire everybody to travel. So I have all these videos that have been I had edited when I was doing extensive travels. They've just been sitting. I'm like, it's great content. So try to inspire some people. And then I do announce someone in the industry that gets inducted into the billion dollar Dream 100. And there's a lot of stuff coming for that. You guys will see there's going to be a lot of benefits, a lot of stuff coming around. I just haven't announced it yet. But these are the people that I believe, they're in no particular order. You were one of the first ones to be on there. It's in no particular order. Someone you may say, well, why am I the 98th one to be introduced? Is that me? I'm number 98? No, no. It's just random. We literally draw them out of a hat. We have the list, and then we draw them out of a hat. And it's meant to be like, these are the people in the industry you need to follow. These are the people that are legit. There's so many gurus, so many YouTube people, so many Facebook people that are just full of shit. And these are the people that I vouch for, that follow them, do what they say, listen to them, go to their events. And so that's why I've done this. Some of them may have spoken at one of my events, some of them haven't. I mean, you're speaking, you haven't spoke at one, you spoke at a virtual event, but you haven't spoke at the in-person, you're doing that in May in Hawaii, but that's what it's meant to be. I'm trying to recognize the best of the best and who people should pay attention to and you're one of them. So I'm glad to have you, it's my honor to have you here. Speaker 2: Thank you so much. It's been an incredible journey and it's So cool to hear that your journey on this with this podcast has come full circle. I feel that way. I don't know. This industry just surprises me so much. I just started this to, you know, I invented a product. I started my own brand and that's where I was focused. I wasn't focused on doing what I do now. You know, I was just focused on head down, get this product to market. But at the same time, I wanted to share Because there wasn't a lot of people out there that were doing unique invented products. And so I thought kind of the only path that I knew about was Shark Tank. And I was calling all these design firms and stuff like that. And it was so, there were so many scammers, you know, it was like $30,000 to turn your drawing into another drawing. And it really just made me angry. And I was like, you know, it can't be that hard. People bring products to market all the time. And so I just started sharing. And I guess that's what happens, you know, like Kevin, you said, you called them out and said, no, that's not actually how it works. Like, I've been there. I've been through this. And that's, you know, kind of what fueled me and I'm surprised every day at how much this industry has blessed me and I hope that I can just continue to give back at least, you know, just a fraction of what the industry has given me. It's been amazing. Speaker 1: You started with your product and it's in the pet space, right? That's the one you're talking about? Speaker 2: Yeah. You started with that in what, 2015? 2017. I started selling on Amazon in 2007. But it was just a hobby then. I was just like flipping my textbooks. And, you know, back then it was merchant fulfilled only there wasn't FBA yet. And I was in the Air Force at the time. And so I knew when I when I went to invent my product, I knew I could launch it on Amazon. But I hadn't thought of Amazon as a major channel, as a major business, you know, yet until 2017 when I came up with this product idea, even though I had been selling as a hobby all those years. Speaker 1: Now the product that you started in the pet space, you're still selling that today. So you're not one of these teachers slash event organizers that's not selling. You still have your hands down in the grass. Speaker 2: Yeah, and not only that, my product is made in the USA and I still kit every single one. Speaker 1: So yeah, you just told I'm looking here in the video. You said I have a living room that's a prep center in my living room. I'm looking back there. I was like, yeah, it doesn't look like a living room with lamps and a TV. I can't I can't make out anything. I was like, yeah, it looks like I see a tape gun or something back there. Speaker 2: Yeah, we have a warehouse that's basically like across the street from our house. It has a loading dock. We have four 40 foot trailers. And we literally, because our manufacturer in the US, talking about sourcing from the US, it's different if you're doing supplements or something like that from the US, but my product is plastic injection molded and I can't source it from China because it's too large. So it would cost me more to actually source it from China than it does for me to source it from the U.S. Speaker 1: It might be cheaper to manufacture in China by the time because shipping from China by sea is not based on weight, it's based on volume versus airplanes are both. So if it's big volume, so you maybe can do it for half the price in China, but by the time you factor in landing costs, it's more. I just want to explain that to people, why would that be? Speaker 2: Yeah, and the thing is, if you look at most like big totes, like the big plastic totes, big garbage cans, anything like that, they're all made in the USA. So that was a learning experience for me and my manufacturers in the US. Just finding a manufacturer in the US to do plastic injection molding for you, I had to basically put together a whole pitch. I had to pitch my business to them. I had to forecast everything. It was a completely different path to market and road than a lot of people take when they're just going straight to China. Now, I have other products that are made in China. And that's a different process, right? But yes, my product is made in the USA. So I do have to, I still kit every single one of them. And we do it as a family, like we're out there sometimes in the hot Texas sun, like, you know, putting these things together, shipping them to Amazon. And so, you know, I posted a picture of my mastermind group the other day of me, you know, next to the truck, you know, I'm showing people, this is what a 40 foot trailer looks like, this is what a 20 foot trailer looks like, this is how you have to prep a pallet, you know, and so all of that, I'm in there every day, I'm not just a seller that gets my product from China and it goes straight to Amazon, I wish, because kidding is kind of a pain, but yeah, I'm still kidding every single one of my products. Speaker 1: I feel you. I mean, I use 3PLs for a lot of my stuff, so I never really touch a lot of it. I used to, when I first started, I had pallets dumped on my driveway. I lived in Buda, Texas in the suburbs and 12 pallets dumped on my driveway and I would bring them into the garage or do whatever and sort them out and usually try to turn them around, get some of them out that day into the UPS. But now I have a calendar business I talk about sometimes. It's seasonal, so I don't need a permanent warehouse. I live downtown Austin in a high-rise. We have garages here for cars, but I have two of them. One of them is storage for extra stuff, and the other one is set up as a shipping center. So I have a computer down there. I have a PrepDesk, I have all the boxes, I have everything. It's set up as a ship. There's no internet down there, so I have to use my phone as a hotspot and connect the computer to it to get to ship station and all that. But then I also have a warehouse out in the suburbs where it's cheaper. It's a 10 by 30, I think it is, that I get for like four months of the year. I just actually got it. It's from like September to December is when I usually get it. And I have pallets delivered there of these calendars, and they just back the truck in, and then I'm out there Slaving away in the summer, or the heat of September of Texas, sometimes, labeling these myself. I'm still doing it. People are like, why don't you just hire someone to do that? It's not... It's not worth it. Because, you know, sometimes I had one time where the pallets broke. And I'm like, I'm not carrying 850 pound boxes down the little place into the deal. So I went to Home Depot and got some of those day workers, like you guys come do this. But the rest of the time, I'm doing it. And I like it because it's a change of pace. I'm not, it gets me out of the office. It gives me some exercise. It's a change of pace. It's not hard. It's just a, it's just a nice, and I'm usually brainstorming while I'm doing it, you know, about something I'm getting my mind off of other things. But I remember one year, speaking of the heat, the reason I'm bringing this up is about three years ago, it was during COVID actually. And I went, the truck was coming, the local delivery truck was coming to bring them, South Korea. So they're coming to bring all the pallets. And this was a different company that they had used this time, not the normal one. The guys come, there's two guys get out of the truck and one guy's Big old heavyset guy. I mean, he must have weighed 400 pounds, just sweating protrusely. And this is July. They came early that year. So it's early July. And my wife was sitting in the car in the air conditioning with the dog and just watched. She'd been down there with me. She's like, I'm not getting out. You go out and help these guys. But make sure you wear your mask because it's COVID. So I'm out there in the heat and eventually I took my mask off. I'm like, the heck with this. I don't care. And she got so mad at me. But these guys, one of them, he's like sweating like crazy. And we bought a bunch of bottles of water and have to unload all these pallets. And one point I asked him, dude, you should go back in the truck. Just take a break. We got this. And the other two of us, we'll get this. He's like, no, no, I'm good. He said, I just came in. I was actually in the hospital yesterday. I'm like, what? He said, yeah, I got out like four o'clock this morning. I had a heart issue. I'm wearing a freaking heart monitor right now. He pulls up his shirt and there's like a string and all. I'm like, dude, get the freak in that truck. So I feel you out there doing this stuff. It's crazy. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I am like you, I really enjoy, I enjoy mindless work because then I can listen, I'll listen to a book, I'll, you know, whatever. And it's exercise as well. I'm a little bit of a, I love the gym. I like to lift weights. I like to do high intensity interval training, you know, that kind of stuff. But this is just, like you said, it's a change of pace. So I do enjoy it. And, you know, we've run the numbers of outsourcing to a prep center. And storage with a prep center. And it's, it is expensive. Like it would, it would cut into our profits a lot versus just hiring a few people to come and prep. Like we can prep a hundred units in an hour, you know? So it's really, when we look at, you know, how much a prep center wanted to charge me to basically, we put a, whatever, we put a little sifter in there and we put a bin, some pulls and a full, and our insert, right. Our, our information book. And then we take the box shut, right? And that a prep center was going to charge me like $2 a unit. If your supplier does it for you, it's usually like 20 to 50 cents a unit depending on, you know, how big your product is, what everything, you know, but, you know, I know that from like sourcing in China and helping my clients source in China, like the prep cost. So I just couldn't justify paying, you know, paying a prep center $2 per unit. And then they want an additional like 50 cents just to put the label, the shipping label on it. It's like, You really need 50 cents to put a label on it? Like, you know, that's going to take you two seconds, you know, so it just, it really adds up quickly. Speaker 1: And then you just make sure you wonder how much markup they have in the actual product. If it's 50 cents to put a label on, what's the real markup in these products? Speaker 2: Kevin, I run a return. I used to, I just shut it down. I used to run a return service for Amazon sellers because Because a lot of overseas sellers, they sell, you know, in the US and they have no way to process their returns. It really can destroy them. And so what they're doing is they're destroying all these returns and they have no idea if they just launched a product. They have no idea if there's a quality control issue or anything like that. So I had a concierge return service where basically I was charging $10 per product to receive your product, to take pictures, to tell you what was going on. And the pictures could be used for safety claims as well. So you could get your money back. Right. But the idea wasn't for you to stay with me for five years and have me process your returns. Right. The idea was you just launched a product. You have no idea. You're kind of blind. You don't want to just destroy your returns. I mean, 90% of the ones we get are, there's nothing wrong with them. They haven't even been opened, you know, and all those returns are being destroyed from all these overseas sellers. Right. So, you know, we're running this and we shut it down. Because, you know, we're moving and stuff like that and getting out of our warehouse and the sellers that were with us in our return service, they ran the cost of, we thought our return service was really expensive because we're like, it's concierge and we're taking pictures of everything. We're, you know, really processing these returns. Every other return service, 3PL return services, all that kind of thing. Every one of my clients said, it's more expensive to move out of your service than it is to stay in. I thought we were expensive. We're not, because by the time they add in all the other fees that are charged, it was more expensive. And I'm not picking on 3PLs. They've got businesses to run. They've got to have a scalable business. They've got to pay for insurance and facilities and workers. So I'm not picking on 3PLs, but I thought at $10 a return that my return service was expensive and turns out it's not. It's actually more expensive if you're using another service. Now, if you have enough margin, it might be worth it for you to process your returns. But man, have I learned a lot about returns doing that service. Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet you have. So this product though, that you said y'all can do 100 of them in a couple hours, you've been selling for what, seven, eight years now? Speaker 2: Yeah, since 2018. Speaker 1: That's a long time on Amazon. I mean, most products have a shelf life of a couple years and either because just it fades or competition comes in, they lose rank or whatever. What has been the key for you? It's a good learning lesson for people, like how have you maintained that for seven years and still going strong? I'm assuming you probably have quite a few reviews and everything by now, maybe, but what can someone take away from it? How do you make your product last that long? Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's completely unique. It's a utility patented product and nobody else solves the same problem that my product solves. Speaker 1: And they can't because of the patent, right? So people can't really, they can try to knock you off. Speaker 2: They could, they could try. Yeah, it is a utility patent, so it is harder to To get around, right? And design patent, they could just change the shape of it. It would be fine. But my utility patent actually is my claim for my utility patent is I own the patent on sifting anything. So whether it's a kitchen product or whatever, right? Sifting or straining anything with a space underneath, a holding bin underneath. So you've seen those kitchen strainers where they have a bowl right directly underneath them. They're not infringing my patent because there's no space on that bowl, right? But if they had like a bucket underneath and the sifter or the strainer was up at the top and then there was space for that water or whatever to come through and build up in there, then that would be an infringement of my patent. So, it really is, this patent covers, you know, multiple categories. But the thing is, Patenting alone really doesn't protect you, right? It really is about solving a real problem for the customer and really doing something better than other solutions on the market. You know, it's like when we think about I always call it the Shark Tank test. In my program, I call it the Shark Tank test. You know, could you pitch it on Shark Tank and compare to, you always have competition. I have competition. I have a litter box cleaner, right? My competition, even though nobody else has created or invented a litter box cleaner, So I could say a lot of inventors say, oh, I don't have any competition. Nobody has anything like me. That's true. I started a new category. Nobody has anything like me, but I still have competition. I have scoops that you can buy for 99 cents, right? Supposedly self-cleaning litter boxes, which I know don't work because I am my customer, right? We have all these, but those are my competition. You have sifting litter boxes that also don't work. They're gross. So all of that is my competition. So how your original question was, how do you manage the life cycle of a product? Well, it still works better than anything else out there. And, you know, it allows you to do the job of cleaning the litter box, which is a major pain. You know, that's one of the worst things. Like we had a famous lady with a famous, like a ragdoll cat. She had a famous Instagram page for her ragdoll cat, all these followers. And she did a video using my product. She had been using it for two years and she did a video and she said, I love this thing. It's the only reason I still have cats. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: She honestly said that. Speaker 1: She just did it on her own. Speaker 2: Yes. And I've had bloggers do it, you know, and now I can even turn off my PPC and my sales don't change because I'm highly rated in multiple categories on page one. I also sold through like StatCommerce and some of the other like media agencies. And so my product has been mentioned in gift lists, all kinds of, So my web footprint is really, really high, right? And that just is a snowball effect. So yeah, it's been really good. And even to this day, my tacos is like 5%. I mean, I sell more organically than I do with PPC and PPC does- What's the selling price on it? It's $50 a unit. Speaker 1: $50? Yeah. Do you hope to keep building this because it's a passion and you have cats and stuff or do you want to actually sell it and exit it at some point? Speaker 2: I do want to exit it. I'm actually in the process of listing it now. So, you know, I hope to sell it because I kind of want a fresh start, right? You make a lot of stupid mistakes when you first start a brand. There's my life has changed a little bit, you know, and I have a lot of passions that I want to build brands around now. And so it's not that I don't still love cats. It's not that I don't, you know, love what I've built. Speaker 1: It's ready for the next challenge. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It's, it's gonna be it's such a great opportunity. It still has so much lifecycle left in it. And, you know, I have not scaled into retail. Well, I'm in small brick and mortar retailers, but I have gotten offers. Like I got a purchase order from Walmart. They wanted to take it internationally and they gave me an end cap at no cost because they have nothing like that in their pet aisle. But I couldn't do it, Kevin, because I'm still kidding every product. And I didn't have the staff at the time, you know, So working with my supplier, trying to like figure out how can we streamline this. Where we could scale it to a major retailer. So there's still so much opportunity. Any one of the big brands could pick this up and just crush it. So I'm excited to sell it at a time when the sales are good, the profitability is good, the advertising cost is low. It's a great opportunity for someone and it also will open the door for me for what's next. Speaker 1: Are there any other products in this brand or is that the only one? Speaker 2: Yeah, we do have four different products in the brand. Yeah. Speaker 1: Okay. But in this, this one is the, is the money winner though. The others just supplement or some of those do pretty good too. Speaker 2: The others do pretty good too. I have a 14 X multiplier on my, uh, on my floor runners that I sourced from China and those do really well. My PPC on those is also low. When I said I have a tacos of 5%, that's across all of my products. Um, so yeah, I, I, I have a very simple brand, different styles and colors. So I think we have 12 SKUs total, but it's very easy to manage. And yeah, I've really enjoyed growing it over the years. I've learned so much. I've made so many stupid mistakes, but I learned from them. There's so many things that I would do differently. But at the same time, I'm really proud of what I've built. Yeah. Speaker 1: That's awesome. Congratulations there. So I know one of the things that you're big into right now is AI. I know you did the AI you put on your own AI summit back in, I think it was August, I think it was. And I'm sure you're probably going to be doing another one at some point because it looks like that one was a was a big success. But I know you were at the Alibaba show back in September talking about AI and I know you've been on a couple other stages, I think CellarCon and stuff, talking about how AI is really cool when it comes to product development. Just like what you're saying, you invented this thing and you got IP on it and everything. A lot of people know about AI as AI can help me optimize my listing, read my reviews, do the standard kind of stuff. But you're using it in a little bit more of a unique way than a lot of people. Can you talk about that a little bit when it comes to product development? Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, I would love to if you, hopefully you don't want me to shut up in the next three hours, because I can go on and on about this. Yeah, I have a little bit of a tech background. So I'm, I'm a little bit of a nerd. And I really am a sponge. I love to learn. So when I saw that, you know, people were having these cool conversations with chat GPT, I immediately, and this is kind of a good lesson for everybody. Whenever, and I learned this also from, I'm a lot like Tony Robbins. He's one of my favorite mentors, right? And he says the key to mastery is actually learning from the best and repetition and just completely immersing yourself in whatever you're trying to learn. And so for me, that's what I do. Whenever I see a squirrel that I want to go chase, and in this case, it was chat GPT, I was like, wow, you know, this is really neat. What is this about? So I started joining all these Facebook groups. Where people were talking about what they were doing with chat GPT and all of that. And I saw this blog post by one of the people in one of the groups that I was in. And he, this guy Viral Spinu was his name. He wrote this blog about how he created an innovative dairy brand with, um, Chad GPT and mid journey, which is like an AI image generation tool. And so he wrote this blog and he showed exactly what his prompts were. And he showed the pictures of the mock ups, the visualizations that he created. And for me, I went to this blog and he was just having a conversation. He was just having a conversation with ChatGPT. Hey, I want to start a premium dairy brand. You know, my products are going to be sold in these type of outlets. This is what I'm going for. This is my customer, you know, help me design a logo. And all he did, and this was my big aha moment. So ChatGPT came back with this logo concept. All he did was take ChatGPT's output and copy and paste it into MidJourney. And MidJourney came out with these awesome logo concepts. And then he took it the next step. He was like, okay, all right, now design a website for me. And, you know, then he asked it, it designed a website. And then I was like, oh my gosh, MidJourney can do websites too? Like, this is crazy. I spent so much time, I have seven websites, Kevin. I spend so much time working with my designers and mocking up landing pages and all this stuff and saying, oh, colors, these things, that things, you know, helping people develop brands. And here, in one conversation, in a few minutes, He has a website mock-up that looks like nothing I've ever seen before. And I was like, wow, the potential. And then he was like, okay, think of something that's totally, let's do a totally out of the box, out of the ordinary website. And Chachi Petit came up with these, you know, these rainbow colors and these just crazy, like, you know, looking cows and, you know, all this stuff for this dairy brand. And the mock-ups that Midjourney did were just insane. And I couldn't, I couldn't believe it. I was like, there's no, there's no way. And then he did storefronts. He was like, I want to do a store in the mall, like design me a store. And he copied and pasted that. And so I took that and I thought about this product. So, you know, my cat product, it sifts poop for cats, right? Like it makes cleaning the litter box really easy. And I've been working on a product for dogs, Kevin, for years. I wanted to create a product for dogs that would make picking up poo easy. And I was thinking of all these ideas like, you know, they have the incinerator toilets, you know, where you just push a button and the poo be gone, right? And I was thinking, You know, over the years, I just kept working on this idea and thinking about it and like, okay, maybe I could build like a mini version of the incinerator and I can make like a pooper scooper that you take with you when you walk your dog, right? And you put the poop inside the canister and then you bring it home and you put it inside of a machine and you push a button and it incinerates it, right? I was thinking of all these things, but I didn't have the know-how. I'm not an electrical engineer. I didn't want to invest in somebody else designing that because I really didn't have the whole concept down. I just had some ideas, some rough ideas, right? So when I saw this blog post, I had this aha moment of, oh my gosh, every idea I've ever had could be developed. And so from my phone, I learned how to use Majority, and I started kind of playing with it and studying. I looked up all these blogs. And from my phone, I just used Viral as example and ideas. And I started having a conversation with ChatGPT about this problem that I wanted to solve for dog people. And we developed together, me and Chad GVD, we developed two different, really cool products for dog owners. One was a, um, one was something that turns your dog doo-doo into fertilizer that could be sold, reused, used in your garden, whatever. And another one was actually a robotic, um, picker upper for your yard. Um, and so it was so cool. I even wrote up government contracts to sell the, The fertilizer version to the government because I was like, Hey, chat GPT, like this is cool, but you, you want me to get it put in parks, but I don't know how to sell that to the government. How could I sell it to the government? It wrote up this whole thing. And let me tell you, I worked for the government for 18 years. It was a legit government contract. So really Kevin, you know, what was so cool about this is something, you know, I've helped so many sellers now develop unique products. I've developed my own unique products. And I realized what a game changer this was and how from my phone in a few hours, I could develop something that I worked on for years on my own and really couldn't get there, you know, and then the ability to be able to visualize it. Visualizing your wildest dreams from an entrepreneur standpoint. I'm big on mindset. I'm big on, you know, really visualizing your dreams, uh, bringing those things into reality through visualization. I'm big on making dream boards, stuff like that. Imagine what you can visualize now. Imagine the designs you can put on your products, you know, and it's really as simple as a copy and paste. And I think. A lot of people don't get into AI because they're afraid. They're waiting for some roadmap. They're waiting for someone to tell them, yeah, this is exactly what you have to do. Here's your prompt library. You don't need a prompt library, people. It's like you're best friends with a genius. You can just have a conversation in your language and then you can Paste that conversation into another type of AI, which is also smart enough to interpret it, and it'll visualize it for you. Speaker 1: But how much creativity do you need to have in doing that? I mean, AI, there's a lot of people that say, oh, if you're a photographer, you're out of business now with AI. Or if you're an artist, and a lot of artists and photographers are like, no, I'm actually, this is cool. Because now I know all the f-stops. I know all the camera lenses. I know all this stuff. How to tell it to do an abstract painting with a blah, blah, blah shadow and a this and that and the other. I can now create exactly what I want to create. So how much though of it is maybe that's something that scares people is like, yeah, they can have this conversation. Like you said, maybe they're scared initially because they think they need to have technical skills versus what you're saying is no, just have a conversation. But what if they're just what type of creativity does it still take to do that? You have to have that conversation and it's a creative conversation. And some people may have trouble with that. What would you say or recommend to them? Speaker 2: I would say to keep it simple. So if you're of the belief, we're all creators. We are either creating or we're dying. And a lot of people say, I'm not creative. And I say, take the T's out of your language because you are a creator. All of us are. But either way, keep it simple. Something I learned in the military, keep it simple. So if you're not creative, you're saying you're not creative, if you are worried that, oh, you know, I don't even know what to say. I don't even know how to imagine that. I don't even know where to start. Well, ask it. Unknown Speaker: Just start. Speaker 2: When it comes to AI image generation, you're right. The photographers of the world, they know already what lens type to say inside of that prompt. They can make some really cool stuff. But just like they had the ability to learn all those things about photography, you also have that ability. You have the ability to immerse yourself and learn anything you want to learn and the information is at your fingertips. And I would argue you can learn it so much faster now that AI is on your side. There are now plugins that can help you with prompting image generation AI. There are, you know, I even chat with my AI and do language lessons. I'm like, okay, we're doing Spanish lessons together. Come up with Spanish class for me today. You know, make it fun, make it engaging, right? I use my AI to help me with my meal planning. It used to take me hours to meal plan. I would go through all my recipes and everything and try to You know, pick them out and then I would manually put that in the shop, the HEB app and like get it, you know, added to my cart. Now, I literally just ask my AI. I say, okay, I'm on this kind of diet. My kids eat like this. They're with me for dinner. I just, it's just me for breakfast and lunch. I need a seven day meal plan and a shopping list and recipes. I want them to be easy. I want to use these kinds of foods. And literally in minutes, I have an amazing meal plan, I have an amazing shopping list, and I didn't have to do any of that hard stuff, right? That stuff I used to do, like going through recipes, everything like that. So I would just encourage people that you have to start somewhere. You know, we see the same thing in entrepreneurship, where it's like, you know, I'm sure you can see it in people, Kevin, when you talk to them. I can tell with clients, if they're coming to me looking for the exact formula, they're like, Oh, I just give me a product. Just give me a product that's going to sell. And I'm like, honey, if it were that easy, we'd all be billionaires. Okay. Like, you know, if, if company promises you that they can find you this perfect selling product and they're going to make you a millionaire, they're going to make themselves a millionaire by the money that you're giving them. Right. The thing is, you can be afraid of it, but you're not going to get anywhere. So yes, a photographer is going to do a much better job of creating an AI generated image. But you also have the capability to learn and start and the AI is smart enough to kind of lead you. So sometimes I find the simpler my prompts are, the better off my images turn out. And so that would be my advice there. Speaker 1: So for your dog thing, taking that as an example, you have all the ideas, you talk to it, it comes up, let's say it comes up with a hundred different designs for this. You're like, this is pretty cool. You knock out 50 of them because that's not what I wanted. That sucks. That sucks. Then you have the other 50 and you're like, okay, which one of these should I do? What do you do then? Do you go and you poll your customers? Do you go and do a PICFU? Which I know some people that recommend that, but there's a hole in that. Because yes, that can give you some good idea, maybe some good feedback, some good perspective of things you didn't think about that they see in it that you just kind of overlook because you're so close to it. But that doesn't mean they're going to buy it. So even though you have, there's 50 designs and you run a PICFU or something else and everybody says, this is my favorite one. And it's by far the clear winner. Then what do you do after that? Because that doesn't mean just what people say and what people do are often two different things. And so how do you take it to that next level? It's a cool tool to do that, because if you have an idea conceptually, this is what the general audience thinks. But maybe the people who would actually buy this will like the fourth choice, not the first choice. The first choice looks the coolest, it catches their eye. It's all in how you prompt the people to vote versus the fourth choice is the one actually, the people that actually will part with their credit card would actually buy. So how do you work that part out? Speaker 2: So that's such a good question and it's the same problem that people have whether they're developing a product with or without AI. And I have great examples of this because I've actually done this with clients now and that's what I've been speaking on all these stages about. I've actually brought the products that I developed with AI with my clients on these stages to show people, right? So the first thing that I would say is, and you can use AI for this, But it's to make sure that from the get-go, when you're first designing, when you're first coming up with your development, right, that you're basing that off of market research. Unknown Speaker: You're not just going, oh, I think that the dog poop picker-upper would be a good idea, right? I think that. Speaker 2: You wanna use market research. You wanna look at, okay, what are people already, so for example, I have a client that sells chocolates. He is in New York City, they make their own chocolates every single day, premium ingredients, kosher, amazing products, right? And they sell on Amazon, they sell locally, they're really awesome. And he comes to me and he says, Amy, I want to compete with Godiva. Godiva is doing this little four pack of chocolates, right? And it's great for margins, right? Because I just got to put four pack in a box instead of put these big boxes of chocolates out, right? And, you know, he comes to me with this idea of competing with Godiva and he sends me some samples of, you know, I love, I love my clients that sell chocolates. I also love my clients that sell purses because I get lots of great samples. But, you know, so he sends me some samples and the packaging that he's got it in, it's just a white box with like a gold foil with his logo on it. Right. And I'm like, how is he going to compete with Godiva with this? So then I get to thinking of my AI, right? And I'm like, okay, well, first of all, let's think about the market. I always like to think about the customer and what they want. What would make the customer a woman? Let's say she's getting a box of chocolates. What would make a woman feel special? Like what would make her go, Ooh, wait, that's not Godiva, but what is that? Right? So I thought, well, what are the little boxes that women love to get? And the box I thought about was the Tiffany box. Tiffany box is iconic, right? Women cannot wait to have a Tiffany box. And I wish this podcast, I could show you. The mock-ups that I did, but basically I used chat GPT and I said, Hey, I own a chocolates company. I'm selling these chocolates. I want to do a four pack. I want to compete with major brands. I want to design packaging for this four pack of chocolates. That is based on the Tiffany brand, the Tiffany box, but make it for chocolates, make it for food, make it feel like a special experience. And chat GPT, and of course, the part of the prompt that you must include is describe it in great detail. That is the part of the prompt you must include at the end because it will help you be able to use that output for image generation. So it came up with the most beautiful, incredible idea for a box. Unknown Speaker: And I put that into a mock-up and I could not believe it. Like, okay, Great. Speaker 2: Amazing. Now, what do we do? Now we put that in a pick food poll. Now we put that into an audience survey or now even better, we actually go to market and do some market survey and go, Hey, you know, like which one, let's do a taste test. You know, which one do you choose or which one would you choose here? Right. So you can do surveys. You can do that, but first you always want to start it with your market research. Same thing with this client that I did, we made wallets. So he's selling wallets, he's doing seven figures on Amazon annually in wallets, in men's wallets, and there's nothing cool going on in the wallet space. And so I went back to the market research and I said, okay, what are men spending a lot of money on when it comes to leather? And they're spending money on this leather Office, these mid-century modern office chairs, right? So same thing, went into chat GPT. I said, okay, I sell leather wallets. The market's pretty saturated. I wanna do something new and different. Help me come up with a design based on these mid-century modern office chairs, blah, blah, blah, right? Comes up with this amazing design and we come up with these wallets that have wood grain in them. And we take that to the supplier and we actually get the supplier to make them. Then we put the made versions of it on PickFoot and we don't just do, we do multiple polls. We don't just do polls of, you know, which design do you like the best? Because that doesn't tell you anything. That doesn't tell you that somebody is going to buy the wallet with the woodgrain over the classic black wallet that's already the best seller, right? So we have to do multiple polls that actually said, which one would you choose and how much would you pay for it? And we learned that out of all the mock-ups, we did like a gray one with a pine wood color. We did a black one with like a darker kind of a cedar wood color. And that was based on that. I mean, that's the most expensive office chair you can buy is that color. And people said the two winners were one of the gray ones and one of the black ones. And people said they paid $20 for the gray one. And they said they pay $70 for the black one. So that's the difference in customer perception. And then we did a poll based on that black one with the woodgrain versus just regular black wallets. And we learned that people still would choose the one with the woodgrain on it. Some people still chose the black one, but there was enough for us to move forward with launch. So my advice there, Kevin, to wrap that up is just make sure you're designing based on market research. Make sure you're validating and make sure you're not over Producing, like you're not spending so much money to produce it that it's not competitive anymore. You want to go to market with the wallet people pay $70 for and be able to sell it for $20 if you want to, you know, so that people choose it every single time and you can just, you know, totally, you know, rocket that launch and the amount of money and time that you can make with that product. Speaker 1: So has that product launched? Speaker 2: It's actually launching within a week. It's a listings almost live. We just finished the images. Speaker 1: It'll be interesting to see how that one does. With the new chat, was it 4.5 or 5.0? They're saying it should be out next year. Right now, most of the chat is text to image, but it's going to be image to image to text. So you're going to actually be able to do something along the lines of take the 10 best sellers off of Amazon, and it doesn't have to be just Amazon, it can be anywhere, and take the 10 best dog pooper scoopers or whatever, have it read the reviews to see the pros and cons, and then come in and if you want the dog pooper scooper to become in a Tiffany's box, upload a picture of a couple box samples, you know, Tiffany's boxes and other things, and then give it the prompts and say, create something based on this, all this feedback here. And you and then it'll come up with a whole bunch of product designs based on what's existing based on those images, what the people said they like and don't like and where you're trying to get it to go. And when that happens, that's going to be pretty incredible. Then you can take that do a pick food poll. And then get feedback from PICFU, refeed that back into the same model and have it redo it all again. Speaker 2: And the one thing I forgot to mention is don't forget about crowdfunding. You know, when I'm thinking about my robotic dog pooper picker-upper for people's backyards, like, that's expensive. So we're talking about, are people actually going to put their money down for it? Well, I have visualizations of this product. I have all the components. I know exactly how it will work. I can build a Kickstarter page with that. Speaker 1: They're going to want you to have prototypes before you actually can launch it though on Kickstarter now. They won't let you just do it with just 3D renderings and ideas. They actually now are getting, some might slip by, but I just had someone on the podcast recently, Kristen, and she was talking about how they're really cracking down on, they want to see a prototype, like a cinema picture with your phone, you know, of a prototype because so many people show renderings and people invest or spend their money and then they take the money and it never comes out. So they want to make sure you can actually execute. So that's a, That's a little bit of a roadblock there, but you can do advanced orders. What I've seen someone do on their own Shopify, I think it was Shopify site, is they said, we're coming out with this robotic, it wasn't a robotic dog cleaner, but let's say it's a robotic pooper scooper. This is coming, this is what it looks like. Here's a little cool little video that you've created, all with AI and everything. It's going to be $199, put $25 down. We're only making a thousand of them initially. And I've seen some people launch and get proof of concept by doing that. Someone's willing to put, same as the tripwire, $7 to get a PDF for something. It's showing that they're serious. And if they spend the 25 bucks, someone will drop off, but they'll at least tell you that, okay, people are actually willing to spend money for this. And that's the way you can actually do that and prove that. So if someone comes up with that kind of site, a new... Actually, I'm just brainstorming here. Maybe we should do this. Some sort of version of Kickstarter that's an Indiegogo that's actually that. New innovations coming soon. Which ones would you invest in? 25 bucks to hold your spot instead of spending all that money. And it's refundable or something. You hold the money until the prototypes are made or something. So it's refundable. That could be a pretty cool little thing. So if someone's listening, don't steal that idea. I'm gonna get some IP on that right away. Speaker 2: I was gonna edit that out. And the thing is, with the AIs now, we have like Dora AI that will build you a really awesome website from just an idea with really cool, Animations, you know, we're going to be able to bring websites to life in a matter of minutes compared to what used to take us sometimes months, weeks or months before. There's so many cool things that are coming our way. And even with MidJourney now, you can upload an image and ask it to change it. I was at Wendy's with my daughter the other day and she was eating a Wendy's Frosty. And I tried to take a picture of her because she's a teenager. She doesn't want me to take pictures of her. And so she just kind of did this kind of frowny smiley face thing that she does. And I told her she looked like the old man from the movie Up. When she made that face in the photo, I uploaded that picture to MidJourney. And I said, put this in the movie up. And sure enough, it cartoonized her, my daughter, I don't know if that's the word, made her into a cartoon and put her in that movie, like in a scene that looked like it could belong in that movie. And it was so cool, even holding the cup, the frosty cup, all of that, and put her in the movie up. So like, there's so many cool things you can do Even with that creativity, you know, we redesigned the garlic press. We took the top sellers of garlic presses and we put them, we put all the content into chat GPT and we said, you know, use all of this ideas and then think of something completely out of the box that would actually work better than the current garlic presses on the market. And it actually came up with some really cool ideas and we developed a whole brand. I did that with my mastermind group and then we developed logos and website mockups, everything for this new kind of garlic press. And everybody after that session was like, okay, Amy, I'm going to go lock myself in a closet for three weeks and just play with this, you know, because it's so cool. Speaker 1: Well, some of the AI now too, like with your daughter with the facial frown, you could put her in that background, but then some of it will actually change that facial expression. You say, make it actually so she's smiling or makes it so she's doing this. And then some of the other AI I've seen is pretty cool. I saw what they're doing with animals, like lions and stuff. They're turning its head. So if its head was faced at 30 degrees, like, no, I'd rather have the head faced at 45 degrees. You could type that in. It would actually recreate the picture with the lion at 45 degrees facing you instead of 30 degrees facing you. Speaker 2: And you can do that too with Photoshop's new Firefly. You can download Photoshop beta, right? And you could, so let's say you have a picture of a lion or whatever, right? You can actually just draw a circle around the head of the lion and put smiling, laughing, whatever, and it'll completely use generative AI to match the rest of the lion's body, but then change it to a different type of face. I use that for my A plus content because I had pictures of the product with somebody's arms kind of cut off at the corner of the picture. And so I just brought it in because I needed the banner for the A plus content. I brought it into Adobe's Photoshop with Firefly and used Photoshop beta for this. And I just circled the area around the arms that were cut off from that square photo that I brought in. And sure enough, it just filled it right in. Speaker 1: So you can do that. A lot of times you see people put pictures of people like you're saying something's cut off. You don't ever want to cut off an elbow in a picture. You know, some people that they'll cut the picture and you see part of the hand, but it's just cuts at the elbow. And that actually is psychologically distracting. So you could use that same thing and just extend the picture 50 or 100 pixels or whatever and say, fill this in and it'll put their elbow in there. Speaker 2: Yeah, I used, and you can actually, you know, it's on my Amazon listing now. I used Adobe's Firefly to put a cat in a superhero costume. And then I used Photoshop beta to put that cat in a banner for the top of my A plus content. And I asked, I selected that section behind the cat. And I said put this in a comic book, like make it a comic book city behind this, right? And so it filled the whole thing in with the comic book city and then I added the logo and you know that and of course got the ideas for what text to use, the titles to use. And you know, chat GPT recommended unleash the litter box hero in you. And then you've got the cat within the superhero costume with the comic book city behind it. I mean, the content that we're going to be able to create with our brands is just insane. I'm just loving it. And this is just dabbling, you know, I can't, I can't imagine being a full on designer and really knowing this stuff, like our friend Mark, right, who's, you know, just really got that brain for design and photography. You know, what they can do with it is just. Speaker 1: It's interesting too to see how when Chet GPT first came on the scene was November of 2022 when it's been around for a while, but when it really made its big, huge splash and everybody, all these schools and started banning it. Uh, uh, governments, uh, offices, businesses started banning it. And it's interesting this fall when the new semester started back in August for a lot of people. So I'm on a lot of different newsletters, AI newsletters. So I follow it pretty closely. And it's interesting how a lot of them have reversed their tune. And it's like, OK, no, actually, these kids, actually, that was a mistake. We shouldn't be banning this. We need to actually make this OK, but approach and teach them how to properly use it. And there's too many advantages here to just ban this. This is stupid. And so they changed their tune on it. And that's a good thing. Because I believe if you're not If you're not in on this AI right now, you're going to be left in the dust. You don't need to be super proficient at it, but you need to understand it. You need to follow it. You need to understand it. It is the future, not just in what we do as e-commerce sellers, but everything from cars driving to planes flying to robots in your house. It's going to permeate in the next 10 years. It's going to be life changing for us as the industrial revolution, as the invention of fire, as the invention of the wheel. It's going to radically change everything. We're going to look back 20 years from now and make a joke just like we do now. Us older people are like, remember when we had flip phones? Remember when there wasn't a cell phone, you had a pager and you had to go find a pay phone? You know, put a quarter in to actually call your mom or call your business partner because there's some emergency. And all the younger people look at us like, what the heck's a pay phone? What's a pager? What's a CD? You know, it's going to be the same thing 20 years from now. We're going to be looking back. So pay attention to that. You're going to have another AI Summit coming out in 2024 probably, right? Unknown Speaker: Yes, for sure. Speaker 2: I definitely want to do it again. You know, up our game this time. I'm so proud of the first one we put together because, you know, AI changes so quickly, but we've focused on broader concepts, like really teaching you how to fish instead of just saying, oh, here's a prompt that you can use in chat GPT. I'm also proud to be one of the first to host an AI summit that covers multiple technologies and not just chat GPT, right? So we covered everything from content to You know, to prompting and you know, all these all these different aspects. So it's pretty cool that it was my first content to ever get pirated. So I guess I'll take that as a compliment. Yeah, exactly. But it was it's it's really good. I'm looking forward to doing it again. But I can't. I can't believe how cool this is and how I just get to be like, I love doing the summits because I get to be a fly on the wall. I don't even speak at them. I just like bring in all my favorite people who are doing the most amazing things and just sit and learn. Speaker 1: You're involved in a lot of stuff. You're doing these conferences, you're selling, you're also leading trips and you're really big on the sourcing side of things and helping people figure that out. You've run a couple of these sourcing in Mexico trips that you got another one coming up in 2024. You've just led a bunch of a group of people to China with your amazing at home China trip back in October. You're working on one for, I think, was it Jordan or Turkey or somewhere over in the Middle East. How the heck do you find time to do all this stuff and why should someone actually even consider going on one of these trips? Speaker 2: Well, you know, Kevin, the first time I met you in person was in China and going to China Really changed everything for my business. Um, when you're sourcing, no matter where you're sourcing from India, Mexico, anywhere in Latin America, anywhere in Europe, um, Turkey, uh, Jordan, you know, um, no matter where you're sourcing from actually meeting your suppliers, meeting people in person, Really changes things in any business, you know, we look at the relationships that we built, right? You know, how long have you and I known each other now? And we're, you know, we still have barely scratched the surface of what we can learn from each other, you know. So it's really just game changing to actually go and see and When you think about your communication with your suppliers, when you've actually stepped inside of a factory and saw how something was made. You know, I was just in India, in Faroesabad, going through a glass factory, and these folks were making these really awesome vessels, vases, planters for Crate & Barrel, which is a major, you know, retailer in the US. And to see these people in this factory, in these hot, you know, huge, you know, furnace, glass furnace, all these pieces of glass coming out, and then to actually make the designs on the glass, they're sitting there in their bare feet on the dirt floor, like manually cutting into this glass and manually polishing it and manually frosting it. You know, to see that is it changes the way that you communicate with your suppliers. It changes the way that you see and you think about your products being developed and made. It changes your partnerships. It just it changes everything. So I really would encourage people to stop standing on the sidelines of their business and get in their life and get in the damn driver's seat and go just like AI, right? Get integrated, get immersed and learn this stuff because it is going to change everything. It's going to make you an authority. It's going to help you understand things you didn't understand before. And so that's that's really It's really it. You have this opportunity, you know, in e-commerce, in the e-commerce industry to travel the world like Kevin has done and, you know, really see so many things and explore this life, you know, and tomorrow is not promised. So that's why I would say, you know, get out there, go to these events. When I first started, you know, after I launched my first, uh, my, my invented product and my brand, I made a commitment to boldly walk through every door that God opened for me. I said, okay, I'm going to be the yes man. Have you seen that movie with Jim Carrey? You know? Yes. Right. I'm going to be the yes man. And I did that and it was hard. It was hard and it was scary. But it changed my life and I started going to all these events. I started meeting people. I started, you know, swallowing my fear. I was so scared to go to China. I mean, I was in the military for 17 years. I did not get, I was banned from going to that country. So for me, I was scared to go to China, but I swallowed that fear and I went and damn, am I glad I did. So I would just encourage people to live your life, man. Live it to the fullest and you will be surprised at what the universe has in store for you. Speaker 1: That's awesome, Amy. If people want to find out more, follow you or find out more about your mastermind or about one of your upcoming trips to India or China or Jordan or wherever, Mexico, wherever it may be, what are some of the best ways to do that? Speaker 2: Yeah, so you can visit us at amazingathome.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn. You can follow me on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. My alias on all those channels is at amazing at home. We have a free Facebook group as well. It's also called amazing at home. So we have a website for seller events called seller meetup. You can go to sellermeetup.com and check out the event schedule. And yeah, that's pretty much the best way. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, I'll be seeing you in Hawaii in May for the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. It's going to be awesome in Kauai. Have you been to Kauai before? Speaker 2: Yes, I used to live in Hawaii. So I lived in Hawaii before I moved to Texas and lived there for four years. Speaker 1: In Oahu or which island? Speaker 2: Yep, I lived on Oahu and Hawaii where you guys are going is actually one of my favorite islands. That's the Garden Island. It has its own canyon, Grand Canyon. It's a version of the Grand Canyon called Waimea Canyon. It's so beautiful, really beautiful waterfalls and parks. And the thing about Hawaii, you know, if you ask me of all the places that I've traveled and visited, Hawaii is one of my favorites because Hawaii, that island, whatever island you're on, there's I think five of them, it has like a life of its own. It kind of breathes, I don't know how to explain it. Speaker 1: Each one's totally unique. There's a certain energy there. Every time I'm in Hawaii, I've been to Hawaii 10, 15 times, I'm like, there's just a certain, some people say it's a vortex. If you're into those vortex kind of things, you know, like Sonoma and Arizona is one, there's several of them. They say it is, but I don't know, there's something just about being in Hawaii that is very, I don't know, you just have a different feel to you. So it's just, I don't know what it is, but it's really amazing. It's going to be an awesome time. So that's going to be great to see you there. I'll probably, I'm sure I'll see you at some stuff before then in Mexico or on a seller's cruise or on something. There'll be some event somewhere where we see each other. So thanks again for taking time today and sharing. This has been great. Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. Speaker 1: As you can tell, Amy is one of the sharpest people in this space. She really loves to give back to the community, really knows what she's talking about and super passionate about products and AI and helping everybody have a chance to win at this amazing Amazon game. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back again next week with Keith, another great episode of the AM PM podcast. Don't miss that. And today, before we leave you, got some words of wisdom for you. Remember, people don't buy products or services, they buy outcomes. People don't buy products or services, they buy outcomes. Sell the outcome of your product or service and not the actual bells and whistles of it and watch your conversion rates and your sales skyrocket. Have a great week. We'll see you again soon. you.