#440 - From High School Hustler to 9-Figure Amazon Boss: Pat O’Neill’s Wild Ride

#440 - From High School Hustler to 9-Figure Amazon Boss: Pat O’Neill’s Wild Ride Kevin King: Welcome to episode 440 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week, I've got a pretty amazing guest, Pat O'Neill. A lot of you probably don't know who he is. He's actually a speaker at BDSS Iceland next week, but he's involved in lots of things AI. He runs the ZestyPaws, a nine-figure pet supplement brand on Amazon. He runs their account. He's got several businesses of his own. He worked for an aggregator. He's done arbitrage. He's been around this game. Since he was in high school and he's got some really cool strategies and we're going to talk some shop with some cool stuff. I think you're going to really enjoy this episode with Pat. 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. Kevin King: Another week, another awesome guest here on the AM-PM Podcast. This week I've got Pat O'Neill. Pat, how are you doing, man? Pat O’Neill: Doing well, glad to be here. Appreciate it, Kevin. Kevin King: I know. We ran into each other, I think the last time was at a Halloween party. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, in Austin, right? Kevin King: In Austin. And you came up to me and you're like, dude, I want to go to Iceland. I was like, well, you can buy a ticket. You're like, no, I've got some good stuff that I can talk about. I was like, well, I hear this all the time from people that want to speak. And I was like, well, send me something. And then the next day, I think, or a couple of days later, you followed up and sent me this stuff. And I was like, all right. All right. This sounds pretty good. I'm excited, man, to see you next week at BDSS in Iceland. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, I can't wait. You know, I'm really excited for the talk I'm going to give. I think there's, you know, a lot of fluff in the industry and I think what my goal is to, you know, cut through that and give people actionable steps they can take right away and, you know, they can leave the conference with, you know, something completely different to their game plan. So, yeah, I try to avoid all that fluff but, yeah, you threw a great event and I couldn't stop myself from coming up to you and seeing what I could do to Get in there. So I'm really really happy and really glad that I got that opportunity. Kevin King: That's one of the things about BDSS That's one of the reasons I started it because there's there's so much fluff. There's so much people that come to events I mean we were just I don't want to name it. We were just at one and this week that there's some good speakers but there's also a lot of just, I call it corporate BS. It's just corporate people and they're just going by a script and it's just a promo and it's not really a value to a seller. It's like, what am I supposed to do with this? Or it's a recycled podcast or it's a recycled presentation they've done 22 times on different online virtual summits or something. Pat O’Neill: Or they'll go ahead and tell you how much, how valuable your time is and kind of give you the spiel of, you know, uh, you know, starting a business and not having to work for somebody else and stuff like that, which we all are aware of. That's kind of why we're in this space, why we're in this game. So, um, I don't think we need to hear that. I think we need to hear the next steps of how do we do so and what action items can we implement today. Kevin King: That's why I'm BDSS. I push the speakers cause I'm like, look, you gotta go tactical. People don't want to sit here and listen to a bunch of like rah, rah, They want to know like, what do I need to do to make another $100,000? What is the tactic? It could be a hack, but hacks are often short-lived. Sometimes it's more long-term strategies. Like if you do this, oh, if you're doing your social media wrong, you should be doing this, this, and this. Or you're doing your listings, if you added these three things to your listings, or you know this is in the backend, if you use a flat file, these five fields that nobody knows about and never knew what they were, you understand what they do. This is what you put into them and watch what happens. That kind of stuff is what we do. And so at BDSS, The speakers are not only carefully selected based on that. They're also incentivized to not do fluff because it's a competition. It's a $5,000 cash prize. That's not a lot of money to some of these speakers. They're pretty successful but it's real money and it's more the honor because I published the top 10 and I think there's 15 speakers. So there's gonna be five people that don't get their name mentioned and typically that means you didn't do too good and for a lot of these speakers, there's ego and there's pride and they don't wanna do that. So what they do is they bring their A game And a lot of times throughout the events, what happens is they're seeing, they may see you speak and they're like, oh, I gotta like change three of my slides because I'm a little bit too basic or whatever. And so at the end of this, at the end, the audience gets much more value. If you're listening to this and you could not make it out to Iceland for the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, you might be able to get a replay of it or a live stream. And the live stream is going to have some stuff that the replay does not have. So if you want to check that out, go to BillionDollarSellerSummit.com and check out the option there to actually stream it live. The live stream does include a replay of the live stream. So if you're in some odd time zone, You're not gonna miss it, but you'll get things in the live stream that will not be in any kind of replay that's offered down the road after the event. So check that out. Pat O’Neill: I couldn't agree with you more. I think you found a really great way to gamify it, a healthy way to gamify it. And so we can kind of compete against each other, but at the same time we're all working together because we're all trying to, you know, provide new insights. But yeah, it's not a motivational speech. It's a how-to. That's how I look at it, you know. I don't need to tell anyone what they want or what they think they should do. I just, from my experience, putting out what is working for me and then I'll just share that along. Being a proponent of yours, Kevin, I'm really glad that there's someone in the industry giving it a good name and providing these events. Kevin King: That's what I try to do. Whether it be with a newsletter or any of the trainings I do, I just try to say it like it is. Good, bad, I'll even share my failures. I've lost a million bucks selling on Amazon on a product. We've shared those and I just want to keep it real and that's what I like. Speaking of keeping it real, what's your background? How long have you been in this game? Pat O’Neill: So I've been an Amazon seller since about 2017. So I started actually in the retail arbitrage game. So just buying and selling while I was in high school. So I'd go to Walmart, I'd go to pretty much any wholesaler I could find. You know, when Toys R Us went out of business, I cleaned them out pretty good. I'd travel around to Toys R Us all around the country and I'd fill about- Were you one of those guys with a U-Haul and like- I was one of those guys driving my mom's Honda Pilot. So I was doing whatever I could to make it work. But I had an angel investor, Flyman Chicago, kind of teach me some of the ins and outs. And then from there, yeah, I was just filling up that car with whatever I could find. So like, you know, it was pretty funny going into Toys R Us and having like six shopping carts full of toys and just everyone kind of You know, it's it's like I was living my ten-year-old dream but That business, as cool as it was and as thankful as I am that it kind of opened the door for me, it's just not a sustainable business practice. You run out of inventory, you're constantly worrying about other sellers and buy box and you have to split a portion of that buy box, so you have to make sure your inventory is gonna get in and out fast enough and the margin is pretty low. There are some people I have met that have been able to scale that, but you typically need some really good connections in either a retail game or a wholesale game. I eventually ended up dissolving that business and giving the account away and then I moved into the aggregator model. So I worked for a large aggregator and I kind of learned the difference of just selling on Amazon versus building a brand. And what I saw from that aggregator and what I've seen a lot over my career is, you know, the inefficiencies created by scaling. So I eventually, you know, as I noticed those and as I kind of saw the direction that we were going, I did end up leaving that company to start a brand for a new investor in San Diego, California. And that was a supplement brand. So pretty much my bread and butter has always been dietary supplements. We started a brand called Dr. Safe. It did About 2.5 million its first year in an extremely oversaturated category in 2021 and it was going great for about two years and the owner of it just wasn't really an Amazon guy. So he was taking money out of our account and paying real estate bills and everything like that. So when I would go to pay my supplier, my manufacturers, There'd be no money to pay them with. So it built a lot of bad relationships and it was really killing the brand. Imagine building a product with a BSR in two digits in a term category and seeing it just be out of stock all the time. That was, I... Kevin King: It sounds like I took some money out to do real estate investments to roll it back in. Pat O’Neill: Right. And I was just watching my baby just fall apart and crumble before me because they say the first rule on Amazon is don't stock out. Second rule on Amazon, don't stock out. Kevin King: Yeah. Pat O’Neill: I ended up having to walk away from that. It's sad because I was a founder of it. I really felt as if I had a very intricate part in the design, the manufacturing, the formula, everything. It was really hard to walk away from that, but I knew it was needed for my future. In parallel with that, I started some brands that I now own myself. Then I also took a job running the Zesty Paws brand on Amazon, one of the largest dog health supplements brands on Amazon. That's going great. Kevin King: Zesty Paul, you actually working for them or you're managing their whole Amazon account or you just are helping them do certain things? Pat O’Neill: I'm managing their whole Amazon account. Kevin King: Do you do managed services or are they like the only one or do you actually have other clients? Pat O’Neill: For them, I work for them. I do manage services as a boutique agency but all that really is is a hobby of mine because Like I said, I was driving my mom's Honda Pilot as a seller. I see a lot of these sellers with great products out there. They don't have the marketing budget. They can't pay an agency $12,000, $15,000 a month and get a couple hours of work. I've worked on the agency side. I know what is truly being delivered. I wanted to start an agency, but everyone's got a bad taste in their mouth. So we call ourselves a consulting group, but it's full service. It's just I'm very picky on the clients I take. I don't want to scale the business. I don't have a website for the business. It's totally word of mouth. And it's just to kind of help the mom and pop shops have a fighting chance on Amazon. Kevin King: So when you're at the aggregator, so you did the in 2017, you're still in high school. So that means you're about 24, 25 right now. 26. 26? Yeah. Okay. So you're 26 right now. You did the arbitrage and cut your teeth on that. So you figured out how to ship in stuff and how kind of Amazon system works. Which is a good way to do it. You had an investor that was helping you so you weren't having to go up on your credit cards to buy inventory and someone was helping you there. And when you went to the aggregator, what did you do at the aggregator? What was your role? What were you hired on to do and where did it evolve to? Pat O’Neill: Right. So I started off as an associate. Basically, you know, coordinator position, promotions, Facebook ads, listing attribute edits, case management, you know, all that stuff. And I was quickly promoted to a brand manager where I had, I'd say about like three to five accounts at any given time. And these are pretty large accounts, generally doing anywhere between two to $10 million a month. Some of them on the client side were a little bit smaller because what they would do is have... Kevin King: 10 million for months, not per year. I just want to clarify that it's per month. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, that's per month. So like a brand like Havas Nutrition, that brand does pretty well. So there was an agency arm of that aggregator and there was a known brand arm. So I did a little bit of both. From the brand manager role, I was then promoted to a campaign lead. Which is really kind of just a bird's eye view overseeing much more accounts. I was running 17 accounts, which I think no matter how you cut it, that's too thin. You know, that's just spreading yourself way too thin. I did have a team but they consisted of VAs that you get what you put into them, just like any employee. They just didn't have that much training and I didn't have a whole lot of time to give them the training. It was a really good experience to kind of just have to control everything and delegate as much as possible. There was definitely a lot of tricky moments that came up with that and I honestly felt like I wasn't being true to an Amazon seller anymore because I wasn't able to execute all of the things I wanted to execute anymore. Kevin King: Does that aggregator still exist or are they one of the ones that went out of business? Pat O’Neill: They still exist. Kevin King: When you left there, that was because You met somebody that said, hey, I'm looking to partner up with someone. I got some money. I want to do this supplement. And then you come on as a partner and you're like, oh, you saw a dollar sign. You're like, oh, finally, I get a piece of the action. I'm not just working for the man. Pat O’Neill: That's a big piece of it. You know, what's funny is I kind of had that mentality before I got the offer. And, you know, I've told this to a lot of people is I woke up one day and I realized that I had really learned how to optimize a product for a specific customer. And then I was looking at my LinkedIn one day and I thought, why would I not just treat myself like a product? And LinkedIn is my product listing. Now, optimize myself for my customer. Who's my customer? A headhunter or an investor? I optimized my backend with keywords. I got skills. I got people to endorse them. I just gave myself as much of a lift on LinkedIn. And mind you, this is without posting at all. I don't really post on LinkedIn. I'm not huge into social media. It's something that I do want to get into a little bit more. It's something I'm trying to branch into. Um, but back then I wasn't posting, I was just optimizing the backend of my LinkedIn profile. And I tell you, I made that conscious decision. I made a couple of tweaks two months later, a headhunter exactly for what something I was looking for found me, gave me a job a couple of weeks later and I was on a flight to San Diego and I lived there for three years. So, um, just goes to show that, you know, your life can change just off of, you know, a positive attitude and some actionable steps to take. Kevin King: Was that a job or were you a partner in that? Pat O’Neill: That was a job. I had equity and I still do have shares in the company, but it doesn't have the management anymore. The investor, he does very well in his real estate game and I think this was more of a kind of hobby. I want an Amazon brand thing and for me, it wasn't just a hobby. It was kind of my My blood, sweat, and tears. So, uh, you know, I, uh, I, I had to walk away. Kevin King: Zesty Paws is a big, that's a, are they nine figures or are they high eight figures? Pat O’Neill: No, they're nine figures. Kevin King: That's what I thought. I thought, so that's a nine figure brand. They're not, they're not farting around when they hire somebody. I mean, these guys know, know their So for them to actually bring you on to manage the whole account, I think that says quite a bit about what they think of you. Because that's not something they're going to just pass on lightly. They know what they're doing. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, you know, it's a little daunting, a lot of liability, there's a lot of questions and a lot of Just weight resting on my shoulders. We have very, very ambitious goals. I'm sure most companies do. I've talked to a lot of C-level people now, and a lot of people can be overly ambitious, but no, we're doing really, really well, and I couldn't be happier there. Kevin King: Zesty Paws is, they're multi-channel, right? They're not just Amazon. They're in Walmart, they're in Chewy. Pat O’Neill: I'm sure they're- Yeah, I mean, you could go to Walgreens, Walmart down the street, and you're gonna see Orange in the doggowl, no matter what state you're in, or city, or anything like that. Kevin King: And they're just doing supplements, or have they branched out into any other kinds of accessories? Pat O’Neill: So, you know, it's owned by a larger company that does have other brands under its umbrella, but the Zesty Paws brand has pretty much just stayed in supplements. Technically, they do have a couple in treats, because you have to identify the difference between feed and supplements for dogs, but it's generally just health and wellness for dogs. Kevin King: I think when people say, What's the most competitive category on Amazon when it comes to PPC? It's always pet supplements or pets. And then I think pet supplements and then human supplements are right up there too. So that's a super, super competitive niche. That's a niche that supplements for dogs especially is something that's growing leaps and bounds that more and more humans are treating their dogs like they would themselves and they're willing to spend money. They're willing to spend big money on taking care of their dog because it's just like a child. It's not a farm animal or domesticated animal anymore. It's actually part of the family and so that presents some opportunities but also some challenges. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, and as the science expands, I mean, I think, you know, the supplement industry is going to constantly growing, but I think the dog supplement industry is going to be growing at an even faster rate because as people get more acquainted with these supplements, they'll generally start to try to push them in for the dogs as well. I mean, it makes, you know, it makes people feel better when they know that the dogs are healthy and the more science we get behind how to make our dogs healthy, the better availability we have for that. Kevin King: I mean, I lost my dog back in November. I'm sorry, October, October 27th. Of last year, she's 10 and a half and she had had several different issues. She had had some kidney, bladder stones and had to have a surgery when she was like five. She broke her back when she was like seven and then at 10 and a half, she got this rare liver disease. I was given 30 to 45 days to live in January of last year. I was actually in Iceland, coincidentally, scouting the hotel because we don't just book a location for BSS. We go there, we eat the food, we stay in the hotel, we check it all out. We were there and I got a call from the kennel saying that she's Bleeding and throwing up and they took her in and she had a little bit of pancreatitis So we put her on some supplements then and then she had this itch on her feet that and I thought she had gotten into some Poison ivy or something that just have an allergic reaction. So they treated that and then didn't go away so a month later they did a biopsy on her Paul came back with this rare liver disease that the Dermatologist said that she's only seen eight cases of in 25 years and I was like they gave her 30 45 days to live and they said well you can You can just to enjoy your time or there's this one special amino acid That's kind of hard to get but we can get it and we got to do these IV injections every every week And it's like 400 bucks a week you bring her in the morning leave her and then bring her back and at night And so I did that and put her on some supplements. She had a nutritionist. I didn't know there's dog nutritionist There's like specialists that charge you to make a menu for dogs I have a private chef and so he started cooking for her, you know, I was paying him to cook all her meals well And then I was able to get her from 30 to 45 days. I was able to get 10 months, 10 and a half months with these amino acids and supplements. So they're definitely powerful and people are willing to spend the money. I don't know what I spent. Welcome to the five figures, but I'm sure you see that with ZestyPaws too. People are just, they go, they want to do anything. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'm sorry to hear about that. You know, I'm really, you know, happy that you were able to make it, you know, those additional months, make it 10 whole months, but you know, that's never something that's easy to go through. But yeah, and you know, count yourself lucky that, you know, Amazon. Kevin King: You're extremely well and I can afford that. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, you're in a position where you can do stuff like that because there's a lot of people out there that kind of just have to make the decision to not go for that. So I think preventative care is only gonna get more and more important as people, like I said, learn more about the science. They are like our kids and they have feelings. I mean, I can tell when my dog's in a good mood, bad mood, bored, happy or sad. Kevin King: They have that sixth sense. They just know who's a dog person, who's not, who's a good human, who's not. Pat O’Neill: Not my dog, he just loves everybody. Kevin King: They're amazing creatures. There's only one flaw with dogs and that one flaw is that they don't live long enough. That's their big flaw. When it comes to positioning, when it comes to supplements, how do you I mean, is it just leeching on the brand of Zesty Paws because they've been around for a long time and you're able, they've kind of got a moat around them with reviews and with a brand name or is it still a major challenge to actually launch a new product or to maintain and hold position? Pat O’Neill: I mean, it's definitely a challenge. So, you know, we're talking about a few separate issues here. I mean, maintaining position, you know, it's always going to be a challenge because As your listing evolves and you get more reviews, you're also going to eventually get more negatives. You're going to get Amazon make mistakes. You're going to get a mistake with packaging or something like that. Eventually, you're going to get to a point where you have so many reviews that it's hard to really make an impact or anything like that. Absolutely, maintaining is pretty tricky because if you have new competitors launching every single day and they're using all these review manipulation tactics and they're always constantly at five stars, That can take a huge portion of the market share. Along with that, just trying to launch new products. There's a lot of resilience in the branding for sure, but I think one of the things that we're trying to do lately is educate a little bit more. Not just rely on, because back in 2017, 2018 when the brand really got started, you could put a really high quality product with a really high quality listing with some good images and assets and it's gonna do well. Now not so much and you have to not only be creative with the way you're building your listing, but the way you're building your product. So what we've been doing is investing a lot more into just the science and the effectiveness, the efficacy of our products. And then what we're trying to do is bridge the gap of how to educate that to a consumer. Because a lot of consumers, they don't want to hear that it has this ingredient, so it does this, because a lot of them generally don't understand that. They don't necessarily know what this branded ingredient is. So what we're trying to do is find a way to bridge that gap and just improve upon the marketing to show the consumers that it's helping your dog, not just because we say it is or not because of some overly complicated scientific fact, but because of these simple factors and what your dog needs to do with his diet. It's a little bit trickier. It's hard to get a lot of that messaging across in just some APIs and listing images, but we're slowly kind of cracking away at it. It's definitely something that we're continuously working on. It's just our education piece and trying to nurture our customer base so that they fully understand why we created this product, why we formulated it, and why it works. Kevin King: You could do that very easily on your own website. But on Amazon, that's difficult to do because you can make a claim that you have complete backup for from the scientific research or scientific testing and Amazon will just shut you down. And then you got to fight it like, look, no, here's our documents, here's this. And in the meantime, you're down for a week, two weeks, a month or whatever. So how do you overcome Especially in supplements, making all kinds of claims, I'm assuming it's similar in dogs as it is in humans, some of the words and some of the triggers and stuff. Pat O’Neill: It's actually hard, and this was hard for me to believe because I'd been in human supplements, and it's actually harder to dog than it is to do human in terms of claims. Kevin King: And the reason for that is that humans are property instead of humans, so they're considered the legal liability if something goes wrong. It's totally different than if you kill a human with a supplement. That liability is different than if you kill a piece of property. Pat O’Neill: It's not just the liability as well. It's also the fact that the claims that you make on humans are very defined of what you can and cannot say. We all know that you can say promote, support. And you can't say, like, it'll completely stop or cure or anything like that, right? Well, in dog, you can't even say promote and support if you're following that up with a claim. And trust me with, you know, a brand like Zesty Paws, when you become number one in, you know, multiple categories, you have a target painted on your back. So we have to be extremely careful about the claims that we make, even if they are what really should be acceptable. And when we look at all the other listings, they are completely 10 times more egregious than anything we would even want to say. But we'll get emails and a lot of reasons for us to not make those claims. So yeah, what we've learned is that it's just, it's actually not as easy as human supplements because the rules aren't as well defined. So, yeah, claims are very, very tricky. You kind of just have to be pretty good with your trademarks, your product title and just ensure that it's very closely related to what the general search term is that they're looking for. Kevin King: Do you have people that are attacking you though? Like in the reviews or the Q&A where they'll go in there and they'll say, my dog, total bull a lot of times, my dog ate this and started going in convulsions and like was shaking and throwing up and whatever, just so that the algorithm sees like two of these or three of these and like flags you and like shuts you down. Pat O’Neill: We've definitely gotten, you know, competitor attacks like those before, but I think where the trouble really lies is in the, in just lawsuits. It's just people hunting to write a lawsuit and I've, I've worked with aggregators that make a tiny little mistake on their label and a lot of aggregators launch the same product across multiple brands. And what a lawyer does is just finds each one of them, writes a lawsuit for each one of them, and then typically the aggregator will just settle each one of those. So yeah, I mean, Zesty Paws is definitely a little bit more advanced than that and is walking a little bit more of a tightrope. But yeah, I mean, there's constantly people trying to take us down, whether it's a lawsuit, whether it's our listings, whether it's our reviews. It's a mess out there, but I think we've all been kind of used to that with selling supplements on Amazon, especially anyone competing against the Chinese market. I've seen some pretty nasty stuff. I did work on a dog brand at The Aggregator in about 2022. They, uh, um, we would find AK 47s in our backend listing. We would find like a picture of an AK 47. So what they do is they'd make a listing in Canada where we wouldn't have a listing already. And then they would, uh, those attributes would, would eventually leak over into the U S one. And sometimes they're pretty sneaky with it. Sometimes they'll sneak just like, you know, the name of a drug in our description, just somewhere very hidden, very hard to find. And especially if you don't know what you're looking for, you know how many attributes there are on Amazon? It's pretty hard to find. So yeah, the product would go down and we might be in the middle of a company party event and then it's all hands on deck and everyone is just writing a POA and removing the images and trying to figure out who did it. Kevin King: How many SKUs are you managing right now? 150. 150? Is that different products or that includes variations? Pat O’Neill: Includes variations. Kevin King: Okay. Are they typical like a lot of sellers? Is that 80-20? There's three or four or five hero products and the rest of them are just okay, or are they pretty spread out? Pat O’Neill: I'd say the 80-20 rule applies, but not as much as it typically does with most brands, especially with human supplements. There's usually the 80-20 rule. Sometimes it's 90-10, but for Zesty Paws, we do pretty well across the board. Obviously, our best sellers drive a lot of that, but we have a lot of products and none of them really do too poorly, so it's pretty spread out. Kevin King: So is it Amazon first then Chewy then Walmart or what's the order of like what what's accounting for most of the sales? It's Amazon. Pat O’Neill: Yep. Kevin King: So Chewy and Walmart and other places are just a little small little sliver. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, I mean they're great to have and the Chewy marketplace is definitely growing and you know, it will it's hard to it's hard to tell because Amazon's always trying to steal some of their market share, but I It's not peanuts, I'll tell you that, but it's not as much as Amazon. Kevin King: Do you guys work with social media influencers or creators? Pat O’Neill: Sure do. We use joint brands. We do some outsourcing ourselves, just working in the Instagram DMs. We try to find influencers that are passionate and motivated and actually want to produce high quality content. We want someone to spend some time on it, not just take a picture real quick and then move on to the next one. We definitely understand that not every ad is going to make money and that's sometimes on us, how our targeting is set up. We just love passion. So when someone is passionate about wanting to make a video with us or post with us, then that's when we'll go for it. We kind of look at that first and then we worry about the ROI after. Kevin King: I'd imagine being in supplements, subscribe and save is a significant portion of the business. So you can afford, so I'm sure you know your lifetime value that the average person buys Whatever it is a glucosamine for dogs and they're gonna stay on for 8.2 months or whatever the number is So are you from customer acquisition on the PPC? Are you guys willing to go negative on that? Pat O’Neill: Because you know, are you are you someone that's like no we want to make money on that first sale, too I mean, I'm one that I'm someone who would typically be okay with going negative you know, especially when regarding PPC and I'm someone that when I run PPC, I think I your ACoS doesn't really matter. Your tacos is what matters. Generally on a lot of brands that I've managed, I keep ACoS at 80% sometimes, but I keep my tacos under 10%. And you know, what I'm doing is I'm bidding for ranking and I'm going for organic rank. And as long as I'm ranked organically well enough, I'm going to get enough organic sales to the point where it doesn't really matter. So, We don't really lose that much on the first sale. Our customer acquisition cost isn't really that high. Sometimes we do do a first-time subscriber coupon or something like that, a little incentive to push if we have a specific product that we want to increase the subscribers on. But generally, we don't really lose too much on the first order either, unless it's from an off-Amazon traffic like Google Ad or Meta Ad or something like that. It requires multiple touch points or it's a brand new product launch that just doesn't have the reviews, doesn't have the infrastructure yet. Kevin King: Do you use any of the outside services like LaVonterre, StackInfluence or any of those guys that are kind of like affiliate networks? Pat O’Neill: I have in the past. We currently aren't right now besides joint brands. Kevin King: What are you doing when it comes to community and owning the customer? Do you have package inserts? Are you building? I mean, at the sales volume you're doing, you should easily have I'm well into the hundreds of thousands of people on an email list. I don't know how big your list is, but if you don't, that's a major oversight. What are you doing to actually build community around ZestyPaws? Pat O’Neill: Yeah, so that's going to be a little bit more on the D to C side, more so than my department. We don't do inserts anymore just because, like I said, we're too big of a target and it's just too much of a liability. We've gotten dinged by Amazon in the past and we just don't really want to take that risk. Amazon sales are so great. We definitely as a team transitioning to capture those customers and bring them over to DC, but the strategies are definitely not entirely connected. Kevin King: So when you launch a new supplement, what do you do? Do you have a list, a customer list of previous buyers or are you just doing it the same way as everybody else is getting buying reviews and lowering the price and running heavy PPC and using outside influencers? What do you do when you launch a new product? Pat O’Neill: Yeah, I mean, all of the above. We definitely, we don't really want to use a list too much because if we're launching a product, we're also launching it on D2C. So we're typically going to use that list for D2C customers. So when it comes to Amazon, you know, pretty much everything you said, Vine, any other routes we can get reviews and then starting PPC. We don't like to start PPC until the product gets around 25 reviews and hopefully they're healthy reviews. But, Other than that, there's a handful of other small tactics. There's a lot of cross-sell tactics. There's a lot of linking it in your other products, A-plus content. There's making a brand story for it across all your other listings, stuff like that. It really depends on the product launch, how much opportunity we think it has, and what investment we're willing to put behind it. But yeah, there's a whole slew of kind of micro actions that we like to take, you know, Amazon posts, doing some social traffic, getting some Google traffic to it just so Amazon knows that we're sending traffic, because they're always going to reward you when you send them traffic. So, you know, a multitude of many things, but they're generally Amazon-related strategies. They're generally not relying on some large infrastructure that we already have. We're still kind of selling, you know, we're on the same level as a lot of other people in terms of our tactics and strategies. We're just really, we really go after them and do them. And that's, you know, I think people find it a little bit hard to believe sometimes of how can you grow on Amazon. How is this product ever gonna sell? But if you follow the formula, it works. As long as you're creating a good, efficacious product, you're offering it at a decent price. I mean, I've started brands of products that I thought would never work. I own a nuclear radiation protection supplement company, and we just crossed over a million dollars in 2024. So it is kind of a crazy world out there, but as long as you kind of recognize that, You can make moves. Kevin King: So who's buying nuclear protection supplements? Are these people living next to reactors in like Long Island, New York or outside of Houston in Texas where there's these big reactors? Or who's buying that? Or just people, what do they call them, doomsdayers or whatever? Pat O’Neill: It's going to be doomsday preppers. Um, there has been a handful of, um, people that are next to, like, I've actually gotten content from someone who happened to live next to a, uh, a nuclear power plant. So he actually offered to go drive to the power plant and just make the content there. So he's on vacation. So that was great. And he was passionate about it and you know, he wanted a few extra free bottles so that he could stock them up for his family. And I was happy to oblige. But yeah, that company is funny when I, um, I was at the Dr. Safe company at the time and I'm a data guy so I pay attention to a lot of data that other people wouldn't. I was on Helium 10 one day and I saw a search volume trend increase like I've never seen before. It was a 70,000x trend increase for the term iodine. I've been in supplements, so I know of iodide, but I'm really trying to figure, I mean, I was like, is Mary Roots just taking off right now? And it wasn't that. It was what people were searching for on Google after that search was iodide in high dosage for nuclear radiation protection. So what iodide does, if you take it in a high dosage, is it will soak your thyroid. And your thyroid is really what gives you trouble if you have radiation poisoning. It's what's going to affect the rest of your body and also any potential children or anything like that. Your thyroid is really what you want to protect. And I pitched it to my boss at the time and said, no, it's a fad. It's probably gonna end real quick. And this was during the war, as soon as the war with Russia and Ukraine started is when this happened. So, you know, a few months go by, I learned a little bit more about the product. I learned that the NRC has stated that the shelf life can be extended up to 10 years for a stable iodine salt. So I asked him, you know, do you think nuclear tension is going to increase or decrease over the next years? Over the next 10 years, he said increase and I said, okay, great. Well, your inventory won't expire until then. So you're absolutely fine based off the sales line we're seeing today. He still said no. I reached out to an investor I had met through previous Amazon events. I asked him the same question. Do you think nuclear tension is going to increase or decrease? He said probably increase just based off the media and the whole doomsday clock that they're always talking about. So we went forward with it. He gave me $100,000 to start and we did about $600,000 the first year and we just did a million the second year. Kevin King: So that one product, one SKU. Pat O’Neill: One product. I mean, there's multiple SKUs. We have size variations now. Kevin King: Okay, yeah. Pat O’Neill: But yeah, just one tablet. And it just goes to show, nobody really knows. The data doesn't lie. So I wasn't out there thinking that the world was gonna end and now I've gotta start this company, but I did wanna provide an efficacious product against these competitors because As I was launching and especially after I launched, you know, the market got saturated like a lot of these other ones with a lot of China products selling for $9 or $8. And I know what iodine costs to a manufacturer now. I just know that there's no way that they're buying stable iodine salt and selling it at that price. So, you know, I just want to make sure that any product I create is going to be safe, effective and efficacious. Now that said, I'm willing to jump in almost any category after that. Kevin King: So was anybody selling it before you got into it? Pat O’Neill: There was one real player selling it and we've since overtaken them but now I tell you this brand is pretty hard to manage from a cash flow perspective because the fluctuations in sales. I mean on a normal given day the sales aren't that huge but the second Putin opens his mouth or the second even though we like when those drones were over America. Kevin King: Yeah. Pat O’Neill: That was crazy. We like 60 X. On a daily basis, so it was absolutely like it's hard to keep inventory. Kevin King: So what were you marketing around that or that was just just natural? Pat O’Neill: I don't do any fear mongering. I don't want to create an issue or problem with this brand. I don't want to sell it to people that I don't I don't want to sell to people who don't think they already need it. Now, if it's something that you need and it is something that people potentially need, because if you look at Chernobyl, what happened there is they did give iodine salt the exact same product, the exact same doses that I offer. Um, and they give it to, they gave it to the citizens nine days into exposure. That's. Way too little, way too late. So you need to have it immediately. You need to have it within 30 minutes of exposure. It needs to already be in your thyroid by the time you're getting exposed to it. Kevin King: Is this just a salt? You just put it on your tongue? Pat O’Neill: It's a tablet. Kevin King: Oh, it's a tablet. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, it's a tablet. The government gave it for the Chernobyl incident. And if anything like that in the US happened, that's immediately what they would start doing is start giving citizens iodide. So I like to just, you know, Get it out of the way, put it on the shelf, hope you never need it. You know, a lot of my reviews say, I hope I never need it. Great product, great packaging, hope I never need it. Kevin King: There's no reviews that say, this freaking saved my life. It's like, I'm glad I have this on the shelf, five stars. It works perfect, it works great. Pat O’Neill: There's a lesson in that too, because a lot of people on Amazon, when they launch products, the placebo effect is a big deal to a lot of customers. So if a customer is buying a fat burner, And they don't feel a rush of energy, or they don't feel their appetite get suppressed, they're gonna leave a one star. So if you're selling a product where people expect their body to feel different immediately after taking it, it's always gonna be, it's never gonna be a five star product. Now if you're selling a product that people don't expect, like a multivitamin, you know, people aren't gonna naturally feel a multivitamin the second they take it, or something like this, then they typically will rate it much higher, especially if you're, you know, customer service and packaging and everything else is on point, your price and everything like that. Kevin King: There's no subscribe and save on this really then. Pat O’Neill: I do offer subscribe and save. I mean, we have a few hundred. The churn rate is pretty high obviously. I don't know. Kevin King: People just mess up. They mess up and hit the wrong button. They probably don't realize they got to switch it. Where's this going? You're just sitting there being like Dr. Evil. Man, I hope Putin makes some threats. I hope someone makes some threats on the flip side. No, I hope there's actually not a nuclear war. I don't want to die. I do want to sell some iodine. Pat O’Neill: I look at that brand like a hedge. Like I said, I don't do a lot of marketing for it in terms of fear mongering and stuff. The drones work so well I could put some balloons up in the air in my sales. I could tie some lights to them and probably get a big boost in sales, but no, their brand is a hedge for me. It's a hedge against the end of the world. As crazy as it seems, we are. Kevin King: If the end of the world comes, you're going out with a bang. You're going to have some money. You're going to have the best party. High end of the world party is going to be. Pat O’Neill: It's an emergency use product. Hopefully no one's ever taken it. It says only ever take if exposed to radiation on it. Probably not the most healthy thing in the world to take that much iodine on a daily basis. The shelf life from the manufacturer is three years, but that's kind of like a best by date. The NRC has stated on multiple occasions that any stable iodine that has a COA that passes these results can have their shelf life extended up to 10 years past its original shelf life. So technically it's 13 years. Now to make that compliant for Amazon, Let's say my inventory expired, I'd have to send it back to my manufacturer and just have them repack it and apply a new expiration and get a new certificate of authenticity. But yeah, I mean, it can be extended, yeah. Kevin King: So is that the only other brand you have? You said earlier you have several brands. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, so I have a handful. I've got a creatine gummy brand, a creatine powder brand. I have a A couple other supplement brands like nicotinamide, riboside, niacin. I have got a couple in the pipeline. I've got some gut health support supplements in the pipeline. But yeah, it's all supplement related and then my agency is where I'm willing to branch out a little bit more to other categories. I only got a, you know, three to five clients at any given time on that. Kevin King: So these other brands, is it just you or do you have a team that's helping you or a co-VA that's helping you manage all these? Pat O’Neill: Yeah, you know, I've made a lot of good friends over my career. You know, I've always said that the most valuable resource in this industry or really any industry is ambition. And whenever I find an ambitious, like-minded person, I give them the world. I train them up as much as they need. And it's gotten to the point where I now work with a lot of my friends that I even knew in high school that wanted to kind of follow the same path as me. I taught him up and actually one of my best friends who I got a job at the aggregator, he was actually one of the ones who referred me for the job at ZestyPaws and he actually manages another brand of their umbrella. We do a little bit of co-op here and there and leverage each other's resources. I don't use any VAs and generally it's done by me because the agency, like I said, it's not really to make a paycheck. I don't want to grudge. I don't want to get to the point where I'm managing a bunch of people with a ton of brands and charging a lot. I just want to help the moms and pops that don't really have a shot. I charge very fairly for my time with that. Learn more, make new connections. And the beautiful thing, what I've learned about the agency is it's been a stepping stone for me because I wouldn't know in the nuclear radiation company if it weren't the agency. The agency introduces me to one person who then gives me a couple clients. Then those clients introduce me to investors and it just kind of cascades from there. I truly believe that the more good business you give people, the more good business is gonna come to you. It's just the natural order of things and it sure hasn't proved me wrong yet. Kevin King: So what would you say are your three top keys to making a brand succeed on Amazon? Pat O’Neill: Well, from a tactic standpoint or from the founder standpoint? Kevin King: From a tactic standpoint. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, I mean. Images are a lot. Images are 90% of the battle a lot of time because that's what people are looking at, that's what they're buying. They're not reading the bullet points. They're buying a product that looks good, that has proper packaging, that looks like it's from a trusted source. That's why for a lot of products, I'm switching over to photography rather than renders. So I think images have to be a must. You have to have real lifestyle. The days of pasting a render over iStock are over. If you really want to make an impact in a saturated category, you can't really do that anymore. So imagery has to be best in class. Customers are instantly reassured in their purpose if they see a collage of 100 people that also are taking the product, right? So get that right away. Get product into people's many hands as possible. Here's a really, really good tip. When you launch a product, get a travel or sample size when you manufacture it. Just get it done 100% because you're going to be able to add that to Vine. You're going to be able to put that on joint brands. You're going to be able to have people buy it from there. And you're going to be able to get reviews at a much, much cheaper rate. And also you're going to have an entry-level product where people are going to be a little bit more willing to buy it rather than the high-priced version. You can use it as a loss leader as well. Other than that, I would say you have to have a really strong PPC strategy. You have to really know what you're doing, but you also have to be willing to pay for the data. You're not going to convert day one, but you have to start gathering data day one. You have to learn where you are going to convert. You have to learn about the keywords you didn't know about, Spanish keywords, everything like that. And then I'd say, you know, um, I I'd say off Amazon traffic is getting more and more important, you know, just a presence off Amazon, social media, email, um, anything you can do to prove that you aren't just an Amazon brand, because, uh, you have to stand out of the crowd. Now there's just so many people and there's so many people getting really good at off Amazon marketing and going viral on Tik TOK. I mean, sometimes I see these products do it outrageously well, just by putting a went viral on Tik TOK sticker on their Amazon listing. Kevin King: It's kind of made in USA sticker, but went viral on TikTok. Yeah. Pat O’Neill: And some of these products didn't even really go that viral. Like I'll look into it and I'll be like, this isn't even viral. This is just like. Kevin King: It's social proof. People aren't going to go check that. Pat O’Neill: Social proof. That's. Kevin King: We are as a seller. Like what do they, what do they do? We got to figure out reverse engineer what they did. And you're looking at it like they didn't do nothing. Let's put a sticker on there. I can do that. Pat O’Neill: Yeah. A hundred percent. You know, but it's ambition, man. It's, it's, you want to have to test things like, I know someone's great or going to be great at their job when they ask, hey, can I try something? And the first thing they do when they log in the morning is check what they tried, because that's always been my favorite thing. And that's like magic to me, especially when I first got to the aggregator, when I first started running a brand that was doing millions of dollars a month, I just thought how amazing it is that I can make a few clicks, I can either change an image, I can re-optimize it, I can change some PPC, and by tomorrow morning, I can see thousands of dollars of difference. That's always been the dream for me. That's always what's been exciting for me. That and getting a product that I started in every retail. I want to go to Walmart and be like, I put that there. I don't know if I would add as the one for that, but. Kevin King: You can put that at the Armory Surplus Store. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Kevin King: Go into the Armory Surplus Stores and put that in there. How's AI affecting what you're doing with all these brands? I mean, what role is AI playing right now in everything? Pat O’Neill: It changed the game for me. You know, I used to think one of the biggest things like stopping me from starting a brand was You know, the creative overhead and not knowing how to make the brand look good and not having to know how to do the label and the packaging and everything like that. I started messing around with Dolly. I started messing around with Adobe's generative AI and it really changed everything for me. This right here, this was all 100% AI generated. I'm not a graphic designer and I designed 100% of it. Every piece about it was originally AI and it looks extremely high quality. The second I take that package into retail stores, they take it right away. They place an order right away because it just stands out from the crowd and looks really good. I've been able to do some really, really cool things with AI. I can't wait to speak about them at BDSS. Kevin King: I think you said you're a data guy, so are you using it besides pictures and are you using it from a data perspective or maybe that's what you're going to talk about at BDSS because you can do some pretty cool stuff. On the data side with AI. Pat O’Neill: I am and I also am using it as like an execution. Like I have a GPT prompt that basically will, if you download all your Amazon reviews and just upload them and then paste the prompt, what it'll do is it'll start spitting out case logs for review removals. So it's the same thing as like what you'd see with TraceViews or Refix, except all it is is a GPT prompt and all it takes is somebody to enter it. I've been messing around with the new operator model and the new SORA model and those are incredible. So the operator model through GPT is you can give it a task and it'll go on Google and do it. So today I gave it a test. I said, generate me means to sell more Zest-Deposit products. And it goes to a meme generator website. I can see what it does. It goes to the capture and it fills out the capture itself. And then, you know, it makes a witty little meme for you. And you can pump out hundreds of those a day. And all you got to do is click and it's going to do it. It doesn't do it very quickly, but you can have that running in the background while you do something else. Kevin King: I mean, when I mess with it, there's a few times where it'll stop. There's certain things that you can't do, like log into a bank account or something like that, where it'll stop, and you've got to actually hit a few buttons to actually confirm that a human is driving. But it'll do. It's pretty amazing. At the time of this recording, this could have changed by the time this comes out, but that's on the pro plan at $200 a month is the way you get that. But that, I think, is where everything's going. And I've talked about this at a few different events. And I'll be talking about it a little bit in Iceland as well, where I think it's going to start going to agents. To where you're going to be having very specialized agents, similar to what operator, that's just the very beginning, but agents that specialize in different tasks for Amazon. One agent is nothing but a product opportunity agent. It's looking for those iodine things and looking for these big jumps, but it doesn't even come to you. When it finds that, it doesn't say, hey, Pat found this iodine thing. It's got a big jump and you got to go look at it. It's going to then talk to another agent whose specialty is sourcing. It automatically ties into an API at Alibaba and global sources and maybe whatever manufacturers are in the U.S. or can scout their websites and say, well, you can source this thing for $1.27 a bottle and you can sell it. It looks like the selling is It's going to be $19.95 a bottle or whatever it is. Pat O’Neill: It's going to give you all your fees and be like your actual money. Kevin King: They're going to talk to each other and it's going to say, well, the supplying agents could say, I'm just using Alibaba as an example. Alibaba says that we also have this other version. It's going to talk back to the original agent that's the opportunity agent and say, hey, we found this other version. Does this look like there's opportunity in it too? And then it's going to pass it on after the sourcing, it's going to pass it on to another agent. Let's do the Helium 10 research or look at the Amazon reports or whatever. And another agent is going to actually create the images like the graphic you just showed me on the packaging. It's going to create like 10 different mock-ups. It's going to send it to PickPoo automatically or ProductPinion, whichever. And it's going to actually give you the results back. And it's going to do all this stuff towards the end. You're going to wake up in the morning and go, here's seven things that you could sell right now. And we're projecting based on deep research from Gemini, because that's a pretty cool tool that will actually look forward-looking. And you can actually do some forward-looking stuff based on the past. Because right now, everything that we do when we're doing research is based on past. We're like, oh shoot, look, last week, this went up seven, whatever you said, 70,000% or whatever that crazy number was. Pat O’Neill: Right. Kevin King: Or this is what it sold last Christmas. We're looking in the past and then we got to scramble and go, shoot, we need to source this, we need to get this out to market. I think it's going to get to where you can actually predict with 80 to 90% accuracy what's going to be hot six months from now. That's not hot right now but in the AI and deep research on Gemini can do some of this right now and even if it's only 80% accurate. If you have an 80% success rate on a new product launch on Amazon, you're doing well. If it's 80% accurate, you're going to be like six months ahead of it. Shoot, this is what's coming. Iodine stuff is coming in February of 2026. I'm going to start making iodine laced jackets because everybody's going to want a jacket or whatever it is with salt all over it. And you run a test and you got a hundred, a thousand of them sitting there. So the day that Putin comes on and says that he's now going after Romania or something and everybody's buying iodine jackets, you're there. That's where I think it's going to get to. I think it's going to get to where this is all, it's going to become a quality of product. Like you said earlier with Zeftifaz and it's got to be Really good and it's gonna be a speed to market thing and I think that's where AI is gonna make a major impact. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, I think there used to be all these barriers to entry and now AI is kind of knocking those down one piece at a time. So it really is like I can't emphasize it enough if you're not using it, you got to start watching YouTube, you got to start seeing what these kind of more niche people are doing with it and ignore all the buzz and there's a lot of talk about AI but there's sometimes not very much talk about how to implement it into your actual daily Life and you know people like talking about as a buzzword, but I mean it has changed my life absolutely I can do things I can build listings that I couldn't have dreamed of doing before I can do things that graphic designers will look at me and ask me How could I have possibly done that? And I am not a graphic designer by any means whatsoever. Do not know Photoshop. I just know how to talk to AI because I've been doing it a long time. But yeah, I mean, with Sora too, I mean, I can't wait to kind of go through a demonstration for you guys at BDSS. I mean, I'm going to show you guys how to take an iPhone and take Today we're going to talk about how to not only make the highest quality APIs that you can get for Amazon listing images, but then how to take those, integrate real people from iStock into those without paying for a dollar and then take that one step further by integrating that into Sora. And now you're going to have videos of people actually using your product. And all you did was you took a little picture with your iPhone in a light box studio that you can get on Amazon for 30, 40 bucks. And if you compare it to someone who did it professionally, like Suna, someone like that, it's going to be at or above the quality because you have unlimited props. Every prop they have, they have to buy. And every image has to be taken separately and has to be done by a shoot. They have to have lighting models, actors. You have all of this at the touch of your fingers. Kevin King: Who was it when Sorin first came out, the first version? You're on 2.0 now, which is a big jump from 1.0, I'm sure. But when 1.0 came out, was it Tyler Perry? He was about to spend $800 million on some big, huge production studio in Atlanta. Pat O’Neill: For films and stuff and he can he canceled the whole project as soon as he saw stories like no, this is stupid Yeah, I am honestly kind of worried what it's gonna do the movie industry, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it Yeah, I definitely don't want to underplay the skill of actors, but I don't think we can we want to replace that just yet but I mean when you think about stuff like that you start thinking about like When is Tesla going to drop their Optimist for retail consumption? I mean, this is the world we're moving into, guys. So if you're not getting ahead of it now, then You're going to fall behind and it's going to be harder to catch up. This isn't just like an iPhone or the internet anymore. I mean, we are really getting to the next level. Kevin King: And I think a lot of people in the Amazon space, they've dabbled a little bit here. They've used it to analyze some reviews or to write an email or something, but they have no clue. Really under the hood and really what this thing can do and what's about to happen and how it's going to change everything. And you don't need to be an expert. You just need to be a couple hours ahead of everybody else. Pat O’Neill: You just need to try it. You just need to talk to it. Kevin King: Try it and experiment. That's one of the things that I recently did is I was like, because I follow this quite a bit and I'm pretty in tune with it, but I was like, I need more time to just play with it. I mean, I use AI, but I was like, I just need creative time where I can just sit down for It's eight hours and just like just play and because I'll get ideas of like, oh cow, you can do that. You can do that. Pat O’Neill: Oh, wow. Kevin King: And then let me apply this to this and this and this. So I actually carved out in my schedule time like it's AI time and just to sit there and play. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, prompt generation is going to be, I mean it already is, but it's going to be a very, very valuable skill moving forward. You're going to see jobs that are just prompt engineers, you know, and that's just someone who knows how to talk to the AI and ask for it, you know, the right way. Kevin King: Some of these prompts are pages long. Pat O’Neill: Yeah, and some of them don't need to be that long. Some of them just, sometimes you need to let the AI make a mistake first so that you can correct it. You know, putting all that upfront work sometimes that just kind of convolutes it and kind of gives it a little bit of tunnel vision. But if you, what I like to do is I like to, you know, take it one step at a time. I ask you to do a task. If that just doesn't do it right, you know, I go at it. I say, what, what, this is what you did wrong, correct it. And, you know, after three or four or five or 50 generations, we eventually get to the point where I'm like, wow, That is incredible with the output it just gave me. Kevin King: I think in prompting, one of the major mistakes a lot of people make is they tell the AI what to do. They don't tell it what they want. Your prompt should be what you want and let the AI do its job. Let it go and do All of it's research and it's vast. Don't tell it how to do it. Tell it what you want. And then if it doesn't give you exactly what you want, tweak it from there. You're gonna get much better results with that mindset shift. A lot of people are used to programming like, okay, I gotta code this and tell it step by step by step what to do. That's not the best way to get the best results. Pat O’Neill: It has to understand your intention. You have to make sure that you're both aligned with, hey, this is the goal of this. This is the outcome I'd like. But by the way, you're gonna have to take step X, Y, and Z. I could talk AI all day. Kevin King: Yeah, so can I. I can geek out on that. I'm looking forward to your talk next week at BDSS. That's going to be amazing. Those of you that are listening to this, you probably can stream it. Check on the Billion Dollar Seller Summit website. There might be an option there to actually stream it. If you can't make it to Iceland because I know it's a week's notice right now, there might be an option to actually stream it. You don't want to miss it because there's going to be some amazing stuff, not only in BDSS, but at the event right after it, Elevate 360, which is not Amazon. I have the number one guy that made Mr. Beast famous. He's the YouTube master. This is how you know he's really good at YouTube. He runs an event, a video summit for creators. It was in Dallas. Back in, I think it's early September, I went to it and I was sitting there waiting for a presentation to start in this big room and a girl comes up and sits next to me and she's like, I recognize you. I was like, okay. That happens a lot, but usually not at a video event. She's like, yeah, you're the Helium 10 Freedom Ticket guy. We just started doing your course. I'm like, oh, okay, great, cool. So you're selling on Amazon? She said, yeah, we're there. I said, well, how long have you been doing it? She said, like six months or something. I said, okay, cool. So the course should help you get going. She said, well, what are we doing $200,000 a month? I'm like, what? You're just now learning? She's like, yeah, we're just now learning. I was like, how did you get to $200,000 a month? And we just started doing stuff on YouTube and we just put something up there and we're selling $200,000 a month. This guy is speaking. It's next level type of stuff, but it's gonna be really cool, but I'm looking forward to having there. So if people wanna reach out to you or learn more, do you want people to find you? You said you're not really doing LinkedIn right now, but do you want people to know about your agency or anything you wanna share? Pat O’Neill: I'm just here to build businesses, guys. My name is Pat O'Neill. You can find me on LinkedIn. There's a lot of Pat O'Neills, so put an F in between. That's my middle initial. If you want to reach out, feel free to ask me any question. I'm happy to jump on a call. I'm not really trying to sell anything. I'm not really trying to acquire any new clients. I just want to make a big network and work with some great people. I'm just happy to be here and happy to talk shop with one of the best in the game right here. I'm just thankful to be here, guys. I appreciate everyone's time if you made it this far. Kevin King: I appreciate it. Thanks, Pat. Awesome, speaking with Pat there, a really good successful guy, really knows his stuff. That was awesome. Hopefully you got some good value of that, just like we try to do in every episode of the AM PM Podcast. Going to be back again next week with another episode with Kate. This episode is going to be really eye-opening as well. She's got a very unique product for women. She's going to talk about her journey of actually developing that product and getting it launched. Just since we were talking about iodine and nuclear radiation and Dying and everything, you know, one of the things that I think Steve Jobs was really good at was showing you how, you know, when you think about death, it actually makes you think about what's important in life. And there was a Stanford talk he did, I think back in like 2005 or so, where I'm just going to read this quote to you right here that he said, he said, death is the destination that we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. See you again next week. Take care.