#373 – Keith O’Brien on the Intersecting Worlds of Online Selling and Pickleball

#373 - Keith O’Brien on the Intersecting Worlds of Online Selling and Pickleball Speaker 1: Happy holidays everybody and welcome to episode 373 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week, my guest is Keith O'Brien. Keith and I go back to the old days, eight, almost nine years ago now. We started selling on Amazon and doing Amazon stuff. We talk a little bit about that in this episode. Some of the old, good old days of when you could rank stuff super easily within a day. We talk about the agency business and how that's evolving and changing. And we talk about one of the hottest things going on out there in the world right now called Pickleball. 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: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. It's great to have you here finally. Keith, how are you doing, man? Speaker 2: I'm doing great, Kevin. Thanks so much for having me on. Speaker 1: I think we've known each other, of each other, for quite some time. Going back, you've been doing this since, I don't know if the egg or the chicken came first, but you were one of those two, right? Back in the old days of Amazon. Speaker 2: Yeah, I started, I joined the company in like December 2014. That was a service provider. You were actually a customer of ours. Then I partnered into that company a couple of months later. That was I Love to Review. So way back in the day, glory days when incentivized reviews were completely legit. But yeah, so that's when I got my start. I think I opened the office here in Florida in January 2015. Now wasn't that an Australian company? Speaker 1: There was an Australian person involved in that, right? Or something? Speaker 2: My previous business partner, who's Australian, started that company in like October 2014. I think we were the first to launch just before SnagShout back, God, man, we're waxing nostalgic for the old guys. Speaker 1: Yeah, we are, we are. Speaker 2: Yeah, and then I partnered in and then I took over as CEO in May of that next year. And Adam moved on to creating a very successful training company out of Australia called Reliable Education. Speaker 1: Yeah, so back for those of you that are new to this that aren't OGs like Keith and I. I remember the date, it was October, was it October 3rd, 2016, right? That's D-Day. That's like, you know, everybody knows Pearl Harbor Day or they know 9-11 or something. In the Amazon space, October 3rd, 2016 is the day that, I think I have that right, that Amazon said no more incentivized reviews. And it was a game changer. I remember Manny Coats calling me. He was running the AM-PM Podcast back then. It started Helium 10. He called me and said, Kevin, we got to do something right now. We got to get a podcast out right now. The word just came down. This is going to go crazy. So what you used to be able to do just to explain to people is there were companies and you had, I think, the first one. I Love to Review was the name of the company. And then there's another one called Snag Shout. And there's basically the idea is you snag a product and you shout out about it. And then there's several others that were in the space. I mean, BioLaunch was doing it. Everybody was doing it. And you could write or you could buy a product at a discount on Amazon. So a lot of people were issuing coupon codes. For like 99% off. In some cases, I think at one point you can even do free, but they took that away. And so you could basically get a product for free. So you would sign up for, you know, Facebook groups were doing this. There were companies that set up to do this and they would, you would go and get the product. Here's my new garlic press. You would get it for free. And then you're able to actually, once the product came, you could go and you could write a review, an authorized review on Amazon. As long as you put in a disclaimer that said something to the effect of, I'm writing this review in exchange for a product or something along those lines. And then on October, and that's how everybody would rank. So there's companies that started up like Zonblast was another one and you guys, and it would not only help you rank, but you could also get reviews. And that's how you could instantly launch in a day or two on to the top of all the results on Amazon. It was crazy times. It was a wild, wild West. And then Amazon clamped down on that in October of 2016. Didn't stop a lot of people. They just kind of worked or what did it a little bit differently. But you were one of the first guys I think I'll have to review that kind of moved in. You saw the writing on the wall and moved in a different direction, right? I mean, you're one of the first ones that said, OK, enough of this. We're not going to play this game anymore. Speaker 2: Yeah, as soon as I mean, we got emails from Amazon Legal, right, a bunch of us. And so once we verified that the email was legit, right, and we went through a bunch of certain sources that do that. Speaker 1: What does the email say? It basically says like a cease and desist or? Speaker 2: Yeah. Unknown Speaker: You're in trouble? Speaker 1: Come to the principal's office? Speaker 2: I didn't say we're in trouble, but it went a step further and it said, you know, with Amazon's recent policy updates to TOS, we have deemed your service as against terms of service. And then the last part was why we stopped, which is said, continuing your services will put your business and your clients' businesses at risk of suspension. So, or further legal action. And so as soon as it put in there that clients would potentially be at risk, It was a game over for us. And so, you know, that was never something that we would do. And ironically, I announced that we are going to shut that company down on a like 2000 person CPC strategy webinar that we were all scheduled to do with Pat Petrillo hosting and navigating, basically unpacking this big change. But you know, we pivoted, but you know, our company name was now against Terms of Service. There wasn't a lot of coming out of that one. Speaker 1: So was that the only thing you guys were doing back then? Or were you doing other services? Were you like a precursor to the agency model or were you just doing launches and reviews? Speaker 2: That's all we did. And, uh, you know, we took a lot of pride in doing it right. I mean, we modeled the company after Vine back in the day. So like we were the, a unique service where you couldn't contact the reviewers. You didn't know any of their history. Like there was a firewall and so, you know, I kind of, I'm an idealist, right? So I knew the day was coming, but I was hoping to be the Bubba Gump, Forrest Gump, the last boat standing after the storm. And, but it didn't happen that way, Kevin. So, yeah, we had to kind of firewalled it and you couldn't contact anyone, you couldn't influence review, none of it. But, you know, we felt like we were running it all completely white hat per Amazon TOS. I mean, we used Amazon's review guidelines to train the reviewers. And, you know, we were the first ones to, like, be able to scrape the review to see if they actually put that disclaimer in there. And those that didn't, we just kicked out. So we kept it really, really clean. Ironically, when we shut down, we were generating about 25,000, 30,000 reviews a month. And we had like a 97% review rate on products distributed. It was just really getting awesome. Speaker 1: I remember there was guys that were gaming the system back then, too. They would sign up under like 10 different email addresses, 10 different Amazon accounts, and they'd get 10 products. And then it was a fight. It was like slapping that because they would then turn back around and sell it on my listing. So they're basically getting the product 100% free. And then they would just turn around and just sell it at full price or undercut me by a few bucks and take sales away from me. And that used to be a, what did you guys do to fight that? Speaker 2: We actually implemented in our membership terms, a financial penalty for doing that. And so it really kind of scared people into submission. So it was like $1,500 per incident incidents. And then we had part of our customer service team actually went after and policed Amazon and actually sent cease and desist on behalf of our clients. Speaker 1: What was it? I can't remember. What were we paying back then? It was like three bucks, five bucks. What was it? Speaker 2: It was like we had a small like $400 campaign fee and then it was like I think $3.99 or $4 per coupon redeemed. Speaker 1: So you're doing $25,000 to $30,000 per, you said per week or per month? Per month. So that was a multi-million dollar business. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. We had a run rate of about $2 million when we shut down. Speaker 1: And where did you, how did you recruit the reviewers just off of Facebook or they come to you guys or do you, this is early days of social media and what it is today? Speaker 2: Yeah, we found like a lot of the other ones ran like, you know, referral contests and things like that internally and generate a lot of them for free. And we found when we did that, the quality just went way down. So we actually advertised for most of them. And so we were paying early days, we were paying to, you know, Facebook to generate those reviewers. But it worked, I mean, because the quality was better and, you know, we were able to...most of our competitors ran review campaigns like you could do $100 a month and you could do all you want. And, you know, our average campaign was about a grand and, you know, we had a huge client retention rate and people just stayed, you know, for a long time and just ran product review campaign after campaign. Speaker 1: How back then the tools weren't sophisticated. I don't even know when you first started Helium 10 didn't even exist. And there was a few other tools, but how were you determining how many people How many did Recommend A Client give away or sell to actually rank? Speaker 2: Yeah, we built our own internal software for that. So we built a system that would generate, we'd load it in the codes. You know, you could do all single use codes. And so, yeah, we had a system that we built that distributed them, tracked it all. And yeah, there wasn't any ranking tools, right? So we had to go manually back through the campaigns, look at the listing and see how much the client had climbed. Speaker 1: Remember that one guy that he had one of the first keyword tools. It was a, the user interface was garbage. It was like a program. He's a programming guy. There was another fellow that had a tool, keyword planner, keyword tracker, something, something along those lines. And it was a really rudimentary, you do it. You had to kind of be a programmer to understand it, but it was actually really good. But he also, He actually wrote a little program to watch. You're talking about the coupon codes because one of the things that would happen is people would go in there and they set their coupon codes up wrong. And you want it to be like, I forget the exact wording, but it's like one per limit, one per customer, one per redemption or something. But if you didn't click this one little button and it wasn't always the most obvious, you would basically, that coupon could be used over and over and over. So people would get, they would say, they would send in a thousand units. Say they want to do a promotion with somebody for 100 or 200 units, but they forget to restrict the coupon code. So someone would figure out that this coupon code is not restricting, go wipe out your inventory. And this guy had this software tool and he would look for that. So he actually wrote a cron job to actually go and look for that. His business was not to sell on Amazon, but it was to provide keyword tools and to take advantage of people that were setting up discounts and giveaways and didn't set it up properly. And he would go under a different name, different company and wipe them out and then resell that stuff. Remember that? Speaker 2: I feel like I remember that same guy had an embedded script in that software to turn His customers' computers into mining crypto. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's him. Unknown Speaker: That's him. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. You can't make this stuff up, Kevin. Speaker 1: It's crazy. Yeah. This is the Wild West. So that came out in October 2016. And how quickly after that did you all shut down? I love to review. Speaker 2: Almost immediately. And We knew we were going to pivot and do something else. We had a good reputation in the industry for providing goods. We had made sellers a lot of money in those couple of years. We made some money ourselves, but we made people a lot of cash. We knew we wanted to stay in the industry. It was a tough time though. We were down for a couple of weeks. We launched back with, you know, just a promotional campaign services that didn't, you know, didn't create reviews, which was still per terms of service until it wasn't. Speaker 1: Kind of like a search, find, buy kind of thing without the review component to it? Speaker 2: Sort of, yeah. Speaker 1: And some people would accidentally leave reviews? Speaker 2: No, we actually instructed them not to, right? Because we didn't want to get anyone in trouble. So we launched that and listing optimization services pretty much straight away. Speaker 1: It was under a different name though, right? You changed it. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a company called Market Hustle, which I in turn rolled. We had Market Hustle, then about six months later, we launched photography and design services under Seller Photo. And then about a year later, I rolled them both up into page one. Speaker 1: And page one still exists. That's your agency today. And what is page one? So what's all in now, eight years later, seven years later, what's incorporated into page one? What do you guys do now? Speaker 2: Yeah, so about half of the business is managed services. So we manage ad spend and then we manage full account brand management. And then the other side is project work on creative and content services. And so, you know, the project side supports obviously our own clients, but then, you know, most of our other clients on the project side at this point hasn't always been this way, but at this point, our large brands are where we do bulk orders. And then we actually do a lot of creative and content work for other agencies. Speaker 1: So it's this so your agency are these big companies or smaller sellers or a mix or what's your specialty? Speaker 2: I would say you know our avatar would be the Two to $20 million a year company on Amazon. Um, uh, we have some manufacturers, uh, you know, a couple of manufacturer clients, you know, so based in the U S older companies, um, I think our oldest that we have a client that their company was founded in 1882, uh, fortune 500 company. We work with their, one of their DTC divisions. Um, So it's a little bit of a mix of everything on the project side. Speaker 1: It's mostly larger brands and agencies And back with like this what we're talking about back in the day It was people it was keyword tools and launch tools that were the the big focus Yeah, and now I think there's I don't know what the count is there's got to be thousands of software tools in this Amazon space and now it seems like The agency model really didn't exist back then. And now it seems like every failed seller is an agent. And it's become inundated with service providers. And you go to some of these shows. I mean, a few months ago, we were at Accelerate, and that was mostly sellers, which was a nice, refreshing change. But a lot, and that's because Amazon, you had to have a seller account to actually go to the event. I know a few people that kind of Backdoor that a little bit, but you're able to work around that if you want to, but it was mostly sellers, but you go to a lot of these events and you and I, you know, different events all over and sometimes you feel like the sellers are 10% of the 20% of the room and everybody else is there to sell you something. And so it seems like anybody that tries this Amazon game and it fails for them or it doesn't work becomes a service provider like, oh wait, this is a little easier. I can sell air and time instead of trying to manage inventory. And it's become where there's some great agencies out there and some good people, but there's a lot of garbage. What's your take on what's happened and how has that affected your business and you guys as a service provider? Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think that I mean, we used to not bump into other agencies, but you know, now like most of a lot of the other agencies are colleagues and friends of mine, right? So, you know, most of the midsize agencies are run by people I know and and they do really good work. I think It's easy to kind of like there's a difference between like a consultant that has a handful of clients, right? And I think that that's different. I think if you're really good at managing advertising, and you want to consult on the side of maybe you ran your brand or whatnot, I don't see any problem with that. But that's not an agency, they're not there yet. It's just a solo entrepreneur that's doing consulting work and probably doing all themselves. And I think there's a need for that. They're generally less expensive. But at some point, if they want to keep growing their business, they're going to have to make decisions about Do I become a company, right? And there's an inflection point to that. You know, I think that on large scale agencies, the biggest challenge I see is agencies that overwork their staff. You know, they bleed them really thin because we're all selling time. And so, they're going to pack a brand manager on with 10, 12, 15 clients. Like, how do you do it? The hours just don't make any sense. You know, you can't manage a large or mid-sized brand on 2 to 3 hours a week. It just doesn't work. So, I think that's an inherent problem. That is an agency problem dating way back before Amazon, right? People just fill them up, fill up their staff with way too many accounts. But I think, you know, it's a brand's job to vet an agency or a consultant before hiring them. And, you know, there's a lot of ways to do that. You know, I've had clients that have literally asked for client referrals and Go and call out and actually call our existing or previous clients and interview them. So, you know, I think there's a lot of due diligence on the brands part that's required, especially now with so many people in the space. Speaker 1: But agencies, I think I've always said this and correct me if you have a different opinion, but the agency is only as good as the person assigned to your account. And so a lot of agencies can say, well, we have systems and we have SOPs and we have ways, but I still, that's great. And that helps, or maybe you have special tools that you've developed, or you know how to actually use the tools that are out there that a lot of people don't know how to use, but it's still only as good as that person on your account. And going back to what you said too, it's not only their skillset, But it's also how many accounts are they managing? It's going to affect that too. So I think that's where you see a lot of people bumping from agency to agency to agency. How do you find these people that you're training? Are these VAs in the Philippines or Pakistan that you're training up? Are these people that used to sell and they actually have a kind of a sense of how this stuff works? Or how do you find those good people and put in good systems to make sure you're not having churn with your clients all the time? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question and one that's probably not addressed very much to be honest, but there usually is a gap, right? Agencies are generally run by people with big personalities and they can get out and promote, but they are generally not the people working on your account. I mean, I still do strategy on a number of accounts, but I'm not internal inside accounts pulling levers, right? I think, and it's become more challenging, the rise of the aggregator the last couple of years made it way more difficult to find quality staff and they drove the price up of staff massively in 2021 and 2022. Because aggregator is basically just a big agency that buys their clients, right? I mean, they're all buying accounts, but they need all the same staff that we do. And so with DeepPockets, they're willing to pay people, you know, a fairly absorbent rates and they've come down a little bit, Kevin, but they're still way higher than they used to be. So we do a combination of a couple of things. So we try to hire out good talent, all of our brand managers, and we have a newer VP of advertising. They're all US-based with experience, mostly with experience at agencies previously, and some of which were brand owners or currently are brand owners as well. And so our client-facing folks are all here in the US and we've got to pay top dollar for that. And then we have support network behind that is both onshore and offshore. You know, any agency that has, I don't know any actual agency, maybe one advertising agency that doesn't have any offshore staff. It's almost impossibly price competitive if you don't. Speaker 1: So once a client comes in and you assign them to somebody, does anybody cross-check them? Like do they ever trade places? Do you ever have like a guy who's working on XYZ company and the other guy's working on ABC for a week, they swap places to see what the other one might have missed or have a different perspective on it? Or is it just that you've got one guy working on it and y'all have weekly meetings and you kind of go over whatever? How does that work to actually keep people on their toes and make sure you're giving the best? Speaker 2: Another great question. Yeah, we cross audit a lot. So we have team leads that are not actually working any accounts so they can stay very objective and go in there and see what is happening without being the one in the weeds all the time. But you got to put really solid SOPs in place, really solid training and then audit yourself all the time. And so, like our VP of advertising audits the PPC managers to make sure that they're on task and meets with them weekly. I often audit the brand managers and come back over and looking for things that they've missed, if they've missed anything. But we're constantly revising strategy within the team as well as with the client. Speaker 1: Is it better to hire someone with experience in those positions or better to hire someone that has aptitude and skill rather than experience and you train them up? Or is it better to get someone that actually has dabbled in Seller Central because those people could be stuck in their ways and may have learned improperly from another agency or another client? Speaker 2: I think it depends on where you're at as a company. Training someone up from ground zero takes a long time. I think if it's catalog managers and account health people back end, like handling the Amazon issues and listing suppressions and all the back end stuff, I think you can train someone from scratch on there. But I would rather have someone who's got a couple of years that they've learned on someone else's dime. And not our client's time and then go and do really proper evaluations the way that they work and then teach them our processes and make sure that they're on our path. Advertising people, we don't hire anyone fresh off the boat. There's just too much to learn. It changes too fast and it's too long to bring people up to speed. Same for brand managers. We look for a couple of years at the agency level or inside of a brand. Speaker 1: What's the hardest thing to manage out there? So when the clients come to you, what is the toughest thing that clients are always complaining about or they're always the least happy about? What's that one area that's just a pain in the ass? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, probably not the answer you're looking for, but managing expectations in general is probably the hard part, right? We try to set very realistic- You think you're magicians, right? Yeah, like why isn't my A plus up already? Well, we submitted it, Amazon needs to review it. It's a process, right? It's not instant, like we don't own Amazon, right? They approve everything. So I think if you do a really good job of setting a clear vision for the brand, aligning on the strategy to get there, And then managing the expectations within that process and then just communicating very proactively. You do get in front of a lot of the questions and you kind of eliminate like reactive brands and sellers and things like that. But we don't work with a lot of folks that came out of the DIY space. They used to do it all themselves internally at the brand and then went and hired an agency. An agency is never going to run your business like you did when you started. It just doesn't work, right? You stared at Seller Central 24-7 while you were launching your brand and fixated on all these nuances. And we're going to get into the weeds on a lot of things, but we're going to set strategy that is going to be big rocks that are going to move the brand in the right direction. And then try to eliminate all the stuff that stop it, you know, like, you know, listings getting suppressed or, you know, rank dropping or sessions dropping and deduce why those things are happening and fix it as much as we can and quick as we can. And we have a pretty good success rate with that, but it's impossible to get everything. You know, again, Amazon's its own beast and you've got to sometimes be reactive with even within managing an account. Speaker 1: So how are the new tools that are automating a lot of things that you might have had to have VAs in the background doing manually before? A lot of new tools have automated that process. And then you have AI. That's the hot talk right now. That's, you know, people are saying, ah, this, some people are of the school thought that, well, you're not going to need a PPC managers anymore. This AI is going to be able to do it all. Instead of 10 people, you will be able to do it with one person. Babysitting. What, what, where are you seeing this going? Or what are your predictions for how this is going to affect? Or you're like, ah, that's just a bunch of overblown smoke. Speaker 2: No, it's definitely not overblown. I think to ignore the value of AI would be short-sighted. I think that there's a lot of opportunity within the space. Like a lot of things, it's not there yet in many areas. Like you said, we came back from From Accelerate a few months back and you know when we did we immediately started testing the listing creation AI tool. I would never put a listing up with that, you know, like, you know, early days, it was like, it was like scraping other competitors brand names and putting them into your listing. And it was all kinds of, you know, garbage. So it's not there yet. It gets better quickly. I think the, you know, the, you know, the, in our space, advertising is, has had the longest run with AI. And, you know, we work with a platform that uses AI. We have for years. You know, there's AI around setting rules and having those apply and then there's AI around bid management, right? Bid management makes the most sense because it can just, you know, like try to run bid management manually on a catalog of 300 products, right? Like it's just, I mean, you can do bulk uploads, right? But either way, it's still daunting, right? So you need some support there. You just got to, but you have to, someone, and this is the job of the agency if they're using a tool, you have to become an expert at how to train that tool. Because it just doesn't work out of the box the way that, you know, it's like the project management system, you go into and you look at the sales video and my God, this is amazing. And then you get the SaaS product and it's just like, it's like an Ikea piece of furniture. How do you get it to do what I saw in the video? I want that version. And the reality is you've got to customize it to fit your brand and your goals and your budget and your vision. So it takes a lot of human interaction to get there. Speaker 1: I see the AI right now, where we're at right now, at least, and this could change, but it's great at some of the menial things and some of the just repetitive tasks that a robot could do. Download this spreadsheet. Move these columns over here, do that kind of stuff that you might've had to have a VA in the Philippines at one point doing, you know, for four bucks an hour. It can automate a lot of that. And it's, but it's like you said on the listing manager, that the listing creator, the AI listing creator, I wouldn't trust that damn thing either. I don't trust Amazon when they tell me how much to ship in. You know, when they give you these estimates, I don't trust any of that. The only thing I trust is that they have traffic and eyeballs. I think where a lot of people, they're too lenient on the AI and AI is not a creative tool. It's great with the right inputs and so some of the image creation can be pretty cool if you know how to input, do the inputs right, just kind of like what you said, watch the video and how do you make it do this thing. And when it comes to writing, like on listings, I think to write a listing from scratch based on a picture or a single line, it's impossible. It's going to suck. It's got to suck, at least now. But if you have a listing already done and you want to fine tune it, I think it's great at that, at finding some of the holes or rewriting it in a more clever or better way or including some additional keywords that you might have missed. But, and that's where like with my newsletter, you know, I don't use AI to write any of that, but I sometimes will if I'm in a brain fog, I'm like, okay, let me take this story that I wrote. I will tell chat GPT, rewrite it. I'll write it out the whole thing. And then I'll say, rewrite this in a certain style or in a funny way, or what's a good line for this. And then I go through and I cherry pick. You might come up with a good sentence here or there or a better way to say something like, that's creative, that's actually pretty cool. And I swap it out, but I don't just take it as is. And I think a lot of people are just looking for the lazy way out. And that's where I think some of these agencies that start leaning on that too much are gonna have problems. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right. It's almost like call the AI bot, like an employee, right? And so, hey, I want you to do this. Okay, so I like what you did there, but let's make it more like this. And then I like what you did there, let's leave that and do more like this. So it's like you're editing drafts, right? And you gotta get really good at the prompts. But we've never, we use it in the same way you do. We've never ever had a listing that's generated by AI come out like even 90% there, let alone 50 or 60. And I think that the tricky thing is, Over the years, like we've had to evolve to continue to write listings differently and differently and more specific and more tactile and you know, more on specific to the brand, the experience the brand wants to create and less generic, right? And the AI tends to be a little generic. I do have a funny AI story though. We were, I'm in an entrepreneur group out here and we were in Jamaica on a retreat a few earlier this year and We were on this rooftop bar and one of my buddies was talking to this woman and she's like, oh, we're from New York. And she's like, what do you do? And he's like, she's, I write children's books. And this guy is super into AI. And so literally, as I'm talking to her, he's on his phone on chat GPT, and I'm mid journey. And we're like, Three minutes. He's like, Oh, you mean like this one? And it had written out an entire children's book and illustrated the entire thing. I mean, and it was awesome, right? It was unique and clever. So, you know, mid-journey or AI is good for that stuff, Kevin, but it's got a lot. Speaker 1: But you speak of that, Amazon's just cracked down on that because that became one of the new get rich quick themes on YouTube. Over the last spring and summer is how to publish on Kindle children's books and it was a big issue with travel books where people were becoming, you know, Rick Steves and National Geographic and writing, having AI, write me a book about visiting Italy. And they would spit out a travel book and they'd make some fancy cover that looked legit and put this travel book up on Amazon. People were buying them. Um, and it, they were pure garbage, like giving wrong directions, like saying missing things, like in, in Rome, they don't even say to go to the Coliseum. Uh, you know, it just, it was crazy. And so it's been a big issue, uh, on, on Amazon and Kindle and they've just come out and really cracking down on, you have no AI books are allowed anymore on there. I think I don't know how they're policing that exactly, but it was a big get rich quick thing that was a major, major problem in the publishing industry. Speaker 2: It's unbelievable the amount of things that people that are trying to scam people think, like the amount of effort and energy they put into this stuff is unbelievable. And this has always happened in this space and it's really interesting. It's hard to even fathom when you don't think criminal, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, you can write, I mean, AI can do something cool. Like if you're doing it for your kid or something like that, but I think people that are doing it, AI books and putting them up on Kindle, you get, I don't know. You know, there's, there's people that are, if you want to summarize something, you know, if I have like my freedom ticket course, for example, that's 60 some odd hours of training with helium 10. One of the ideas has been to take that and create a book out of it. Well, if I don't want to actually pay someone to edit that and do that, then having AI just summarize that and go through it might be an option, but you're still going to have to have someone go back through it and make sure it didn't mess something up. That could be a practical use for it and that's a legitimate use to turn that into like a, you know, the cliff notes version or something of the course. But to just have it spit stuff out randomly or from scratch, I think, could be problematic. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, you're an author. I wrote a novel many, many years ago. You know, these are, you just think if this thing takes off, like, you know, where's our culture going to be in 10, 15 and 20 years? And, you know, people actually haven't cultivated their own work that comes out of their, you know, heart and mind. And it's, yeah, it's scary and a little sad. Speaker 1: Well, it's not just the Kindle stuff though, too. It's also newsletters right now. Newsletters are a hot topic because there's some newsletters that sold for millions of dollars, you know, the Milk Road, Daily Hustle, several that have sold for millions. So it's attracted a lot of people into the, into the SEO people, into the newsletter space. And they're using AI to crank out these newsletters that 90% of them are pure garbage. And they're making these big promises that you can build this thing up and sell this for gazillions of dollars and it's just not going to happen. You're going to have one or two sneak through and those are the poster boys or poster girls and that's it. Every new technology brings on new opportunities, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, and a new wave of people trying to take advantage of it, right? Speaker 1: When it comes to the agency side of things, what's the end goal? If I'm starting an Amazon FBA business, Your end goal should be to eventually exit that business because that's where you're going to make the most money is when you exit it, not in actually running it. From the agency side, that's a little bit harder to do. I mean, there are some agencies that get bought and sold, but it's a little bit tougher game. So what's the building up an agency with all these people and all this overhead and all this stuff to manage? What's the end game there for someone like you guys? Speaker 2: You're making me sound crazy for doing it, Kevin. Unknown Speaker: So, yeah. Speaker 1: Is it to pay the bills and retire or is it actually, is there some sort of merger or in-game or get bought by a Procter & Gamble to have them do all their stuff or what's the... Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity. I mean, I probably like my fellow agency owners get, I mean, I probably get contacted about every other week of someone looking to buy or invest in an agency. So there's plenty of people out there that there's plenty of a market for solid agencies. There's been a lot of acquisitions in our space, you know, Buy Box Expert got acquired a few years back by Spreetail. Some of my friends have made, you know, smaller acquisitions underneath their agencies. I think, you know, the goal is exit at some point. I don't, you know, I'm 52. So, you know, I've got years left. I enjoy it right now, Kevin. We're growing. And I love working on brands and doing the strategy work and helping them grow. So there will come a point in time where I don't want to do that anymore. And so we'll either promote from within and I'll become a minority shareholder at that time and go do other things, maybe play pickleball full-time. Or I'll look to button up underneath a larger agency and then potentially be part of a bigger exit. Speaker 1: You said play pickleball full time. I understand you are like a massive pickleball player, like you carry your racket. You know, I think it's Scott Dietz. He's a massive music audiophile and he actually, he has this like $3,700 speaker. It's like this little speaker, some company in Europe. It's so cool that I actually ended up buying one too, but he had a custom, Custom case made, like one of those custom roller cases or whatever you take on the plane or backpack, whatever it is. And he takes this everywhere he goes. In every hotel room, he puts this speaker in the hotel room and relaxes to music at night. And this speaker, I have to admit, it does sound like, I've never heard anything like it. It sounds like you're right there at the concert when you know you play some ACDC or something it sounds like you're right there next to the amp. It's really really cool and he's been to a few events where he'll invite somebody up, you know, hey come listen to Leonard Skinner or come listen to whatever and you know so it's kind of cool but you don't do that with speakers you do that with a pickleball racket so you told me like on all your trips You pack your pickleball bracket if you're going to an Amazon event or taking a little trip because you're playing like four or five times a week or something, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. When I'm home, I play. I mean, I try to give my body a couple of days rest, but I play at least four days a week, sometimes six. And yeah, I try to work it into travel. I mean, for me, it's like people that take their workout clothes or go for a run when they're traveling. I like to play pickleball. It's an incredibly social sport and it's one of the unique things that you can do it with other people that you don't know anywhere in the world that you are. So like, you know, I know where there's courts in Vegas, you know, off strip and, you know, travel through other locations. The only reason I didn't play when I saw you at Accelerator is because I spent four days in Utah playing once or twice a day, every day leading up to that. So I love it, man. I'm like mildly addictive, but it's a healthy obsession and it's something that I hope I do for as long as I can. Speaker 1: So for those of that don't know what pickleball is can you explain it's kind of like a mix between what racquetball and tennis or something or what's it? Speaker 2: Yeah, probably the best analogy would be you know tennis meets ping pong meets badminton. So the court's about a third of the size of a tennis court. You're playing with hard paddles, no strings on the paddles, and the ball is like a wiffle ball like we used to use as kids in the sandlot, right? Speaker 1: So it bounces funny ways. Speaker 2: It doesn't bounce very much at all, right? So it definitely bounces, but you don't get a lot of height out of the bounce. Like every bounce is going to be lower and like a tennis ball really is springy. This is made out of plastic, right? And the paddles are like, newer ones are like carbon fiber. And yeah, the court is small. So it's a position game with a massive variable and pace throughout one point, right? So it'll go from really slow to really sped up and fast. But unlike tennis, you play most of the game literally standing 14 feet away from your opponents, like right up to what they call the kitchen line. So it's fast, it's strategic, it's a phenomenal workout. I think I lost 15 pounds in the first couple of months when I started playing. And it's just super fun. So I've made friends everywhere I've played and it's a very unique thing. Like tennis, you can't do that. I mean, I don't know any other sport that you can just walk on and create a social circle. Speaker 1: So the ball can't hit the ground. Is that right? Speaker 2: Oh no, it can. Yeah. Yeah. One bounce. Um, uh, there's a zone on each side of the net called the non volley zone. It's like seven feet off the net on each side and you cannot play a ball out of the air when you're standing in that area. So it prevents you from going right up to net and slamming it. Yeah. Once the ball bounces, you can play it from within that area. Um, but you can play the ball in the air anywhere else outside of that, that zone. Speaker 1: Is it a one-on-one game or two-on-two all the time? Speaker 2: They play singles but predominantly people play doubles. Speaker 1: So I hear they're now, they're converting like the old Bed Bath & Beyonds into like indoor pickleball courts. And it's like, I know here in Austin, I think the world headquarters, there's something, they're building the world headquarters or world federation of pickleball or something. They're building some huge thing here in Austin. They have like 82 courts and like some sort of like, you know, the NFL of pickleball or something. Speaker 2: In the sports world, pickleball is currently the gold rush, right? You know, on Amazon, there's a lot of opportunity in pickleball products and gear, you know, paddles is a kind of a red ocean at the moment. It's so competitive, you know, but there's lots of opportunities outside of it, you know, there's There's large companies that have built, you know, from 2 to 10 facilities. There's a couple of franchises, Chicken and Pickle, Pickler, Club USA, Pickleball. And, I mean, in Florida, there's crowdfunding going on to be part owners of facilities. It's crazy. And they're converting old unused tennis courts and old unused retail shops like nuts. Speaker 1: So is it free to play? Like when you show up, when you're in Utah and you played four days in a row, do you have to have some sort of membership or you just show up at a court and buy a beer and you're in? Speaker 2: Depends on where you play. So public courts are generally free and there's a lot of them, right? I mean, where I live in Florida, we probably have 70-ish, maybe more public courts that are all free. different locations, you know, 10 years, six years, six years. We did play indoors once in Utah when I was there at a club called The Pickler. And, you know, that's a membership based program. And, you know, you pay a membership fee, you pay a little amount for court time and you play. But you're inside under AC, no wind. It's awesome. Speaker 1: How do you control it if you said you just randomly come up and you You put your racket in a little hole or something and say, I want next game, kind of like putting your quarter on the edge of a pool table or whatever in the old days. What if you're new? Me, I've never played it. I've wanted to, but I show up and you're on the court. And I jump in, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Are you just like, dude, get the freak off of here. Go over there and play with the little kids or what do you, how do you control that? Speaker 2: I've brought lots of my friends into Pickleball over the last couple of years. So I always recommend the same thing. It's very similar to the Amazon journey, right? There's tons of free training on YouTube. So I'd say, you know, go watch a couple of videos on the rules, go watch a couple of videos on strategy, beginner strategy. So you know the basics, right? And then find in your local area, a group clinic for beginners. And that'll probably put you in a group with 20 or 25 other people. But at that point, you don't need individualized coaching, you need The basics, right? So it'll teach you how to hold the paddle. It'll teach you to go over the basic rules, you know, the basic shots, you know, and then once you've done that, you know, you can actually get out and the first time you go grab a group of people that are all around, you know, brand new and just go play for fun, right? And the reason that one of the reasons the sports growing so fast is because you'll have fun the very first time you play, regardless of what level you're at. You know, so it's very hard as an adult to start something and suck at it and still have a good time, right? I mean, we just don't do this very often, like we want to be good at something from the beginning. So, and then you can make gains really quickly and you'll get to a point where it gets hard to improve, but you can get to a, you know, a level that is least competent fairly quickly. Speaker 1: Is it always on a hard court or do they do it like volleyball is hard court and sand? Speaker 2: No, it's all hard court. You have indoor around the country like playing like on a basketball court but it's a very different game and you know the true purists of the game don't care for it very much. Speaker 1: So what is it that makes it so much fun? Is it just, it's very, you said it could be slow or it can be fast paced. Is it just, is it the challenge of it or what is it that just, you're everybody's competitive. What is it that makes it so addictive and so fun? Speaker 2: So, I kind of compare it to pizza sometimes, right? So, pizza's just got this very unique set of things that together make it very addictive, right? There's sugar in the sauce. You can have all these different ingredients. It's really easy to eat. You can do it with your hands, right? It's somewhat interactive and, you know, there's yeast in the bread. All these things combine to make pizza a very, very addictive food, right? And so, you know, Pickleball, easy to play from the first time. You have a blast the first time you play it. You're laughing with people almost every time you play. It instantly kind of creates a new social network over this. It's very like the ethos of the game is very community-based and inclusive. And then as you progress you can get more competitive like I'm playing in a tournament next weekend I never thought I would compete at sports again, you know after high school and now 30 years later 35 years later I'm now competing actively against peers, you know, so I Yeah, and you can continuously like you can make improvements by working on your game Intently, you know over time quickly. So all those things combined just make it just awesome. Speaker 1: Is this a fat man's game or for someone that's in shape to do this or is it for basically you have 90 year old grandmas and 20 year old kids all playing on the same court because it's, or does it take a certain level of athleticism? Speaker 2: Well, I think you can play at all levels regardless of your athleticism, right? And that's another really cool thing about it. I've been on a court where I'm playing with a 14-year-old kid and on the other side of the court is his dad and his grandfather and all could be really good at the sport, right? So that's super unique. There's not a lot of things like that. Speaker 1: So how long do you play? Is it like for an hour? Do you play several games an hour? Speaker 2: Do you play 15 or 10? Games are over in 10 to 20 minutes generally and so that's another part. It's constantly rotating. It's quick. It doesn't take a long attention span. You're kind of in and out and then when you're not playing, you're talking to all the people that are waiting to play and so that's where a lot of the social part comes in. I will say although all fitness levels can play, Yeah, you got to take care of your body, right? So as we get older, things hurt, right? That didn't hurt before. Pickleball has kind of put occupational and physical therapists back on the map, right? So it's easy to get injured. So you got to kind of prep, you got to stretch, you got to warm up and, and just take care of yourself and be smart while you're playing. Speaker 1: So back on the Amazon side, if I'm an oven brand out there listening to this right now, and I'm like, I need to hire an agency to help me with my listing, to help me with my PPC, to just do it. What are some of the criteria, what are like three of the top criteria I should be looking for when I'm interviewing you versus your competition? What are some things that I need to take, three most important things I should take into consideration before I hire an agency? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think track record of success is one. They should be willing to share client examples, whether it's creative or advertising. You know, generally speaking, you know, the days I don't like back in the day, no one want to tell anyone what they sold and all that stuff. But, you know, if they're working with larger brands, these brands don't care, right? They're like, come on, you know, compete. So, you know, getting some references from them, you know, if they're saying that they're good at creative work, get examples. They should have hundreds of them, right? So, You know, if their examples are not of A-plus content, you wouldn't put on your own listings, they're probably not a good fit. Find out what their wheelhouse is, right? Like, so we started as a creative agency and had to build our PPC business over time. So, you know, for years, our wheelhouse was creative that converts, and that's what we were really good at. We're still good at that, but it took us a while to build the advertising side. And, and then, you know, all brands are going to be in a life cycle. So like if, you know, if, if you're going to be the smallest brand in their portfolio, Probably not a good idea, right? Because you're just not going to get the attention. You're paying a lot less money than other people. And so, and then just dig a little deeper. What, you know, how do they set up their brand managers? How many accounts they work on? Find out who actually is going to be working on your account, right? Whether you're going to have a figurehead and then have all the works done, you know, somewhere else. All that makes a difference. And then I think ultimately, you got to want to be in relationship with them. And these are generally year-long contracts or sometimes longer. And you got to feel like you've got someone that you want to take to dinner that knows what they're doing and how to run your brand because you're going to talk to them a lot. And so if your personalities just don't mesh, then it's not a good fit. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, Keith, I've got some pickleball videos I got to go watch here to learn how to play. So this has been great chatting with you. If people want to find out more about your agency or find out more about you, what's the best way for them to do that? Speaker 2: Yeah, just hit our site we're at page dot one so not dot-com but dot one I think we come up for both but and then I generally do my Networking through LinkedIn. So I'm on LinkedIn. I keep be O'Brien. Speaker 1: Awesome. Keith, I really appreciate you taking the time today. It was great chatting about the old days and what's happening today. Speaker 2: You're the master interviewer, Kevin, man. It was really a pleasure. You asked phenomenal questions, man, and they're great. Thanks so much for having me on. It's good to connect and certainly always a pleasure to spend some time with you. Speaker 1: It's always a good time to speak with someone like Keith who's been around this business. We can reminisce about the old days. Some of you that are new to the business, you get to hear how it used to be and how it was quite a bit easier than it is right now. It's still a great opportunity to sell on Amazon, but those good old days were some crazy times. Just printing money left and right with hardly any effort in some cases. It was great. Hope you got a lot from this episode. We'll be back again next week with another incredible episode. Don't forget to sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com. I have a virtual event coming up in February that you can attend from anywhere in the world. And I have my event in Hawaii coming up in May. But in the meantime, sign up for that free newsletter. It's twice a week. BillionDollarSellers.com. Before we leave today, I've got some words for advice for you. You know, your gift is what you do well naturally. Your gift on this planet is what you do well naturally. Have a great week. See you next time.