#450 - Building Rockets and Brands: Jerry Vida on Scaling Smarter with AI & Data

#450 - Building Rockets and Brands: Jerry Vida on Scaling Smarter with AI & Data Kevin King: Welcome to episode 450 of the AM-PM Podcast. I've got a rocket scientist on this week who's been doing e-commerce about 17 years and then about five years ago was bouncing around between PPC agencies, just couldn't get anybody to do it right. And so he decided to start his own, but he still sells today, still doing a hefty millions of dollars per year selling on Amazon. And also is helping others, a select group of people, manage their PPC. Not just the PPC, but their entire ecosystem when it comes to Amazon. We talk about AI. We talk about how to do that. Some of the cool stuff that's happening right now in the space. I think you're going to really enjoy this episode with Jerry Vida. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Kevin King: Mr. Jerry Vida, how are you doing, man? Good to see you. Jerry Vida: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I'm good. It's an honor. I have followed a lot of your stuff for a long time, so I'm excited. Kevin King: I think we were brothers at the Prosper Show. We were both Prosper exhibitor virgins this past month. We had booths right next to each other. I guess that's what happens when we get stuck over in the corner when you're a brand new exhibitor. You don't get the pick of the lot or the best places, but we were next to each other. I remember you coming up to me and you saying, I've been following you and I hear that quite a bit because Helium 10 and 220,000 people have gone through the Freedom Ticket and some of the other stuff that I do, but then you're like, you know what, you made me millions of dollars. Jerry Vida: Yes. Kevin King: And I'm like, what, what? You got my ears, my ears perked up. You're like, yeah, you said something on some webinar or something a few years ago. We implemented it and we made millions of dollars. What was that again? Jerry Vida: So we were part of the Helium 10 elite and I was watching the webinars that you were doing for it. At the very end, there was a ninja hack. And basically what it allowed you to do was there was a loophole with the way that you could manipulate the day and time that you would schedule lightning deals, right? So what we did is we analyzed a year's worth of sales data for all of our main ASINs that qualified for those lightning deals. We determined what the best day of the week in time range was where they were getting the most traffic and the highest sales volumes. Then we built out internal SOPs to use that hack to schedule every lightning deal every week to fall on that specific day in that specific time window. When we did that, I'm telling you, I was probably pushing through $80,000 to $100,000 in sales on Lightning Deals a week with that hack. It made us a lot of money until Amazon pulled the plug on it. Kevin King: That's awesome. That's why we do it. That's why you should be in the Helium 10 elite. If anybody's listening, it's h10.me forward slash elite if you want to check that out. So what that is, is since 2017, every month I bring on a couple guests and we talk about different topics, hot things, tactics, whatever's going on in the world of Amazon. And then at the end, I do something called 7 Ninja Hacks. I've done, I think, going on almost, I was thinking the other day, it's nine years now I've been doing this thing. Moved on to other things. Jerry Vida: We've moved on to other things, but I do subscribe to your newsletter and we pull a lot of stuff out of there. So I read that, you know, a couple of times a week. So we're still connected in that way. Kevin King: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, the newsletter is billiondollarsellers.com for those of you that aren't aware or listening. It's every Monday and Thursday. I try to provide, uh, what do you, what do you find different about that newsletter than some of the others that you might get? Jerry Vida: I think it's more actionable, right? Just, um, um, you know, things that we can actually implement into the business right now. It just gives us some insight. Um, I really like a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about with AI in there. Like we embrace it a ton. Um, I was at a, A conference a couple of years ago at the Venetian Las Vegas held by Perry Belcher, right? One of his AI summit type of summit. Yep, exactly and it's just opened my eyes, you know to things so I enjoy a lot of that stuff You know in the newsletter that you do. Kevin King: Yeah, I was at that AI bot summit too. Jerry Vida: Oh, no kidding. Kevin King: Yeah, I was actually there. I was actually at that summit and that's why I started the newsletter actually. Jerry Vida: Oh, no kidding. Kevin King: I've been doing newsletters before that. I'd done them back like 20 years ago, but I'd gotten away from it then. He just He reminded me and he's talking about using AI. I'm not so sure that AI is going to do a newsletter like he was showing. I didn't subscribe to that at all. It's proved I was right. It's failed. The fact of doing a newsletter is still one of the most powerful things I've probably ever done in my business. I think you guys at Peak ROI should have a newsletter. Everybody should have a newsletter and it should not be about your company. The newsletter should actually be about your industry and most people that have newsletters are just completely doing them wrong. That's a whole other subject, a whole other topic. So you've been doing this for a while, like almost 17 years or something like that? Jerry Vida: Yeah, I started with e-commerce in 2008. So I come from a technology background. I was programming robotics and doing automation work for the big three outside of Detroit, Michigan. And when the whole financial like meltdown happened, learning e-commerce was kind of necessity to survive, right? And I just found that I excelled at it. And you know, that's history now, right? It's like I've been doing it since 2008 with work with every major e-tailer out there. I'm starting off with places like CSN stores, which is Wayfair, with niche commerce, which is Hey Needle Jet, Walmart, ATG stores, which is Lowe's, Home Depot, like all of those guys. I mean, it was a dramatically different dynamic back then than it is today. And then, I mean, this is before Amazon was even a thing, right? Kevin King: What kind of products was that or what were you doing on that? Jerry Vida: So I was doing IT work for a outdoor furniture and decor manufacturer at the time. And I was running their exchange servers, data servers, all their IT infrastructure. And the owner, you know, when the financial crisis happened, she was primarily selling to small mom and pop garden centers across the United States. And overnight, because of all those businesses closing, she kind of, you know, lost half of her customer base. I was kept on staff just because of the IT infrastructure stuff. We were having a sales meeting about what we were going to do to keep the business going. I kind of raised my hand in the back just because I saw a lot of people talking about e-commerce back then. And she just said, hey, go pursue it. And it exploded actually starting back then. I was able to do in the first year of working on it, which was 2009 when we were fully doing the deal, 2 million in wholesale. So back then, I mean, that's a ton of money, right? And that's where my whole journey started. Kevin King: And what made you decide to get into the Amazon game? Jerry Vida: So I had transitioned from from working for that manufacturer to another one outside of Chicago that was doing lighting products and we were selling a ton on like Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowe's, like that type of thing and somehow Amazon got our contact information and a 1P account manager reached out to us and And said, Hey, do you want to sell, you know, as a vendor, the lighting products on Amazon? And that kind of started the whole deal. And from there, what year was this about? That was probably, that was probably 2014, somewhere there. Like I remember going to the first Amazon vendor conference in Seattle in like 2015, when they handed out the first iteration of the Amazon fire sticks as a door prize for people who show up to the conference. So it's, it's, it's been a minute. So the journey started with Amazon asking us to be part of their vendor program and then we opened up 3P and the whole thing kind of exploded from there. But the magic really didn't start happening until probably 2017 or 2018 with the organization that I'm with now. Kevin King: So you work for that company, then you went out on your own and started selling your own stuff with a partner? Jerry Vida: Yes, in between there though, I was actually headhunted to build a brand. Have you ever heard of Seagate Technology? Kevin King: The hard drive guys? Jerry Vida: Yeah, yeah. So I got headhunted by the founder of Seagate to work on a startup. It was cool. Inevitably, it failed. And then I started with my business partner on the brands that we have now. Kevin King: And now you're still selling today, right? You're still doing seven, eight figures, a hefty amount today. Jerry Vida: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we have three brands that we do. Our flagship brand, which is a skincare brand. We scaled it out to a little over 7 million US and then combined with Canada, The EU countries and Shopify, it was just shy of 10 million. In fact, we were INC listed three years and one of those we were the fifth fastest growing company in the Midwest. Kevin King: You say were, is that brand still? Jerry Vida: Yeah, we still have it. Kevin King: Oh, okay. You're talking in like a past tense. I thought maybe you sold it or something like that. Jerry Vida: No, we still have it. So I'm still, you know, Amazon seller, right? Like every day. Kevin King: So you have a big team working that or is it just a few of you? Jerry Vida: Well, we do run lean. We have had more team members than we do now just because we've incorporated a lot of technology just for efficiency, to trim some of that out. Kevin King: With an engineering background, I see this quite a bit. I think there's a pattern. Someone should do a study on this that engineers that get into selling e-commerce tend to do better than a lot of them. I think that may be because of the math and analytical skills. A lot of people get into Amazon, they think of it as a glamorous thing. I'm going to pick cool products to sell and create some pretty ads and pretty pictures and stuff like that versus the analytical people get into it and it's all about the numbers. And they don't really care what they're selling. They just want to know about the numbers and make it work. And I see that pattern. Do you think there's any truth to that? Jerry Vida: A hundred percent, right? One of the core values of our organization is data drives our decisions. Right, so personally like I don't care what it is, right? You know, like I do skincare hair care products and some supplements, right just because The numbers said that that was the biggest opportunities that that you know that we had available, right? Like I mean, I Know nothing about skincare stuff, but I can sell it on Amazon. You know, I mean, so I absolutely believe that and I do think that having a Funny thing is my business partner is is, you know engineering as well But I think that that gives us the ability to be problem solvers at heart as well right which allows us to overcome a lot of the hurdles that Separate people from success on Amazon and it allows us to look at things in a much larger picture You know for success. Kevin King: And I know with your selling and with, we'll talk about your other company here in a second, but you're also, like you said, you were at the AI Bot Summit two years ago. So that means you're on the leading, cutting edge. I mean, AI has been around 30 years, but it's really taken off big in the last couple of years and it's making leaps and bounds by the day. And I know you're implementing that into your Peak ROAS business as well as your Amazon business. Jerry Vida: Sure. Kevin King: Where do you see this going with AI? I mean, I think there's a lot of sellers that don't quite have their head around this. They hear of Rufus, they hear of Cosmo, they hear of, oh, I can use it to analyze my reviews and maybe help me do a little bit of a PPC analysis of my reports or something, but that's just touching the surface. I mean, that's nothing compared to where we're going with it. Where do you see this going? Jerry Vida: I see this Basically creating levels of efficiencies and automated teams, right? Like unlike anything that we've ever seen, like talking about agents. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, um, like just for an example, you know, we were talking about team members, right? Kevin King: Well, you said you cut them earlier because of technology. Yeah. Yeah. Jerry Vida: So one of the biggest things that, that we do with, with AI right now is, uh, we have some pretty sophisticated internally developed prompt stacks that we, that we use where, We analyze product, right? We analyze an ASIN. So AI understands what it is, okay? And then we tell it to put together all of the relevant industry knowledge that it understands about this and we use it to build out very specific Ideal customer profiles, personas based on what the product is and what it understands as far as the industry goes about people who are most likely going to need the product that we sell, right? Then we incorporate in data out of, you know, advertising reports, search query performance reports, those type of things. To craft a series of buyer decision questions, right? That we then use to build out product copy, descriptions, the type of copy that we put into our infographics and also use that to answer a lot of those Cosmo questions to train for Rufus. And, you know, to sit down and do that manually, that would have taken, you know, like days to do. We can do it in an hour now. And it spits out content that you wouldn't believe. Like I can train These different agents to say, okay, it understands what this product type is. This is the copywriter who I want you to model off of because it you know, they have the the best type of copy, you know for this product type, right? So we can get like super specific. I mean if you want like I can spit out copy that that sounds like William Shatner wrote it, you know what I mean? And like AI allows us to do all of that and in you know, do things in minutes as opposed to things that would take days before right and we're embracing it in that way and We're using it for some of our, you know, campaign structure builds, you know, the way that we segment keywords, you know, based on intent and all those type of things. And that's just kind of scratching the surface where we're starting to look at how we can incorporate a lot of the low code, no code stuff into the internal tools that we do to improve efficiency and repeatability where I could have a PPC account manager that has a support specialist under them. I can use AI for the support specialist now, right? And just to prove efficiency that way, it allows us to be sharper on pricing. It allows us to be quicker, more repeatable. So yeah, we're trying to incorporate AI into every aspect of the business. And I think over the next, you know, year, you know, two years that You know the vast majority of thing is going to be able to be done by agents. Kevin King: I do too. I mean, I think it's we're just touching I mean right now it's still kind of a crude version with make or innate in or Zapier or something like that, but you can see where it's going and you can see where these things are going to become autonomous I mean, I liken it to the autumn the the cars, you know Waymo cars you're south of Phoenix there So Phoenix has one of the big Major cities for driverless cars. Everywhere. As of San Jose and Austin now. It's like the third, I think the third one in the group. And then Tesla is launching completely autonomous cars, I think, later this month, here in June, in Austin, where you're actually going to be able to use your Tesla autonomously, your own Tesla, and actually job out your Tesla. If it's sitting in your garage, you'll actually be able to use it to actually do Uber rides while you're sleeping. With no driver and stuff like that. It's going to be, it's interesting, but I see we're going to get to that point where those things are working on their own, basically without a human, just a human at the top of the chain. I think that's what's going to happen in e-commerce too, from the sourcing to everything. And the people that aren't adapting to that, I think are going to be losing out. Jerry Vida: Oh, those people are just going to, they are just going to get overwhelmed is what's going to happen. Right. Like, I mean, even with the stuff that we're starting to see, I mean, we develop our own tools, like internal tools for PPC management, like that type of stuff. I can literally, you know, go into some of the AI tools now and describe what I want and it'll write out the code for me, right? And then I just get like my coding guy just to kind of brush it up a little bit, but it gets it 95% of the way there, right? And it does that in 30 seconds as opposed to, you know, two days of coding. It's getting scary how good this stuff is. Kevin King: Yeah, it is. I'm actually just back in May. I took a trip. I took a weekend trip and went away to the Caribbean. And one of the goals of that was just to get a break and change the scenery and take a little vacation. But also I took a laptop and a big like 20 inch monitor and I just played with AI just because I want to get my head around. I just wanted to just devote like a weekend to just playing with some of the stuff. I use it daily, but it's changing so fast. There's so much cool stuff that you can do to automate and to have an advantage over your competition no matter what you're doing. You don't have to be an expert at it. You just got to be a step or two ahead of everybody else and just stay a step or two ahead and you're good. Jerry Vida: And that's really what it is, right? It's understanding kind of where the puck is going, you know, and with how complicated everything is with Amazon these days, right with how competitive things are and how all the fees are any way that you can improve efficiency. Which, you know, to me is being a steward of your resource, right? Like your time and your money, right? And if you can save in any way at this point with using technology, I fully embrace it, right? It's what's gonna separate people from profitability or loss, you know? So, very important stuff. Kevin King: I mean, and the technology, you're using it in your other company, Peak ROAS, which is something you guys started about five years ago. I think you told me or maybe I read it somewhere or you told me that you guys needed some help on your PPC, so you hired a couple of agencies. Even one of them, I think you said the owner got involved, which usually happens to me too. People always ask me, Kevin, who's a good PPC agency? I don't know because usually the owner gets involved when it's me because they don't want to F it up because it's bad reputation because I have a platform and stuff. They want to make sure it's right. Exactly. I think you used one and then it didn't quite work out and you bounced around and you got frustrated and then you guys said, Screw it. We know how to code this stuff. We're building stuff internally for ourselves. Let's just do it ourselves. Tell me that story. Jerry Vida: When we were really, really scaling hard with our brands. Kevin King: When the lightning deals were crushing, right? That's when the lightning deals were crushing. Yeah, exactly. Jerry Vida: Not only lightning deals, man. We were also doing deal of the days. I had a direct line into the deals team at Amazon. I'd run deal of the days and I'd sell $750,000 worth of product in a day. Those type of things. Kevin King: Awesome. That's awesome. Jerry Vida: Yeah. One of these days, I'll tell you how we kind of manipulated some of the deal of the day stuff, which is very interesting with your friend, Michelle, by the way. Kevin King: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Jerry Vida: So we were really scaling hard on that at that point and just as the complexity grew within the advertising space, it was taking more and more of my time to manage all of it. So I was working in the business as opposed to working on the business, right? And we sat down and said to ourselves, if there was any one thing that we could possibly offload because it's systematized, it would be the PPC stuff, right? So we, I won't, you know, say, you know, any of the agencies, but we were with three or four of them over the course of a couple of years. Some of them, you know, did decently well. And some of them in one of them just decimated things, right? So we work with agencies that started with an A all the way to the letter Q, right? And the one that started with Q decimated stuff. I'm sure anybody watching knows who that is. Yeah. So, but the problem was, None of them quite aligned with what our goals are or what our, you know, what, which is profit, right? We would always come into these conversations because alignment is very important to us as an organization, right? It's not all about success. It's about values and just how well we work together and things like that. And there always seemed to be some level of misalignment in goals. So our goal was always profitability. And a lot of the agencies that we work with, they get paid by driving revenue. They get paid by increasing spend. And that's not always the answer to profitability. So there was always a little bit of misalignment in those ways. So it never quite worked out. And on top of that, They just weren't ever really able to completely replicate the levels of success that we were driving when we were doing it ourselves. So yeah, I know it was a thing of getting frustrated and just finally saying, you know, forget this. We will take our processes. We will automate them and we'll just do the deal ourselves. Kevin King: So that's how you started Peak ROAS. You started internally for yourself and then you started doing other clients? Jerry Vida: Nope, we started internal where we were running it and then we were in a couple of different various mastermind groups and you know, just know people, you know, peers that we've met over the years at, you know, conferences and again mastermind groups and we ran it on a couple of our friends, you know, accounts and it did pretty well and that's when we were like, hey, light bulb moment, like let's do this legitimately for real. Kevin King: So how big is that business now? How many clients are you guys managing now? Jerry Vida: We are very, very selective with the clients that we take in just because of the amazing guarantee that we have. So right now we're in the 12 to 15 client range. And because of our amazing guarantee, which is we will double your ROI on the investment in our agency within 90 days, or you get your money back. So we're very selective with... Kevin King: Do you get all your ad money back too? Jerry Vida: No, just... Oh, damn. You got it, absolutely. For you, we'll do that, yeah. But it really comes down to, again, it comes down to alignment, right? So the clients that we work with, we need to feel reasonably confident that we can do that for them and that we're aligned on goals. So we go through very very detailed account audits to determine as to whether or not we're a fit and they're a fit for us as well. Kevin King: What do you think is the right way for an agency to charge? Should it be a percent of ad spend? Should it be a percent of ad spend once they hit over a certain level? Should it be a flat monthly fee? Should it be a combination? I mean, how do you align those goals properly? Because everybody does it differently. Jerry Vida: Everybody does do it differently. I was never, you know, a hundred percent fan of, you know, based on spend or based on revenue or anything like that, because I'll tell you what, right? If you give me a bunch of money, I can spend a bunch of money in Amazon and sell you a bunch of stuff. That doesn't mean that it's profitable, right? We tried some of the performance-based stuff and honestly, we never saw any type of improvements. Even when we would try offering a couple of these agencies even better performance bonuses, So we just kind of settled on the idea that we are going to structure our fees around the current revenue model or the current revenue that the client is doing and just charge a flat fee for it. It just makes it a little bit easier, a little bit more predictable. And a little bit easier to swallow on some of this stuff for people. Kevin King: Well, some people would argue with you take on a client and they're doing a million bucks and because of you, of your strategies, you grow them to 5 million bucks. If you're just charging them $3,500 a month or 5 grand a month or whatever it may be, you're not sharing in that what you've helped them do. So that's where a lot of people have a They argue with themselves like, which way should it be? Should I, if I helped them, shouldn't I get a little piece of that? Or should you just be, that's what you're hired for. This is your fee and make it there. Jerry Vida: There's part of that. I mean, we have an ideal customer profile, you know, like obviously that, that we're trying to work with. And if it, if, if a client kind of falls below that, we may work out some type of, of, you know, percentage as well as, as a flat fee. We try to stick a flat fee if we can. Kevin King: So agency, you hear this story, I mean, you said you bounced around three or four different agencies in a couple of years. I think that's a pretty common thing. So a lot of people listening here probably tried, either they're considering using agency or they've been bouncing around between agencies. I think the life cycle is like three or four months at the average agency because they all over promise and under, not all, but most of them over promise and under deliver. And there's, I think I have a list. There's a guy that monitors the agency business and Amazon and there's like 869 or 870 something like that on his active list. I have several clients and I think there's like 3,000 something total when you count Pakistani VAs that are hanging on shingles saying they're an agency or whatever. That industry, and I've talked to a couple of other people who have them on the podcast, they say it's just a race to the bottom. Everybody's just looking for the cheapest price. The big sellers that understand it are a little different, but the bulk and the volume is coming from people that aren't as sophisticated. And it's just a race and it's hard to differentiate. Is that why you guys are so selective and you're like, okay, we just want our 12 to 15 and you have to, we pick you, you don't pick us kind of thing? Jerry Vida: That's part of the mentality for it, for sure. Right. What differentiates is we look at things a little bit different than your typical agency. We are sellers. I am a through-and-through Amazon seller. Kevin King: You're still selling. Jerry Vida: I'm still selling. Kevin King: You were one of these guys that was sold in 2017 and started an agency. You haven't been in Seller Central no in eight years. You're not one of those you're like actively in there right now. Everybody else you're getting affected by tariffs and fee changes and everything. So you understand the pain. Jerry Vida: Oh, absolutely Like I was just you know Like we're trying to figure out like what we're doing as far as these tariffs go right now half of my product assortment is made in the US the other half isn't right and So no, we deal with that stuff on a daily basis just like, you know, anybody else. I'm a peer, right? And then we look at things from the perspective of profit, right? A lot of people are chasing vanity metrics, you know, like ACOS and revenue and tacos and all that type of stuff. We really look at it from the perspective of what can we do to maximize profitability on an ASIN to ASIN basis. And that's the systems that we built within our brands to scale things. Those were questions that we always asked the agencies that we ended up partnering with. What can you guys do for us to help us to get each ASIN to the point of diminishing return, right? Where No matter how much more we put into it right like profit is is is you know not going up right like it's like What can we do to drive to those type of points? Can you get there? You know no probably not but We work And our systems are designed to push and pull the different levers within Amazon to be able to drive the maximum level of profitability, whether it is, you know, conversion optimization with the way that the detail pages, you know, present to people or how we are optimizing pricing or promotional offerings, inventory management, you know, brand protection reviews, refining product to fix problems, you know, of course, advertising. You know those type of things and we really look at all of it as a complete ecosystem where you know, think about it like a combination lock. You're off by one number and the whole thing doesn't work the right way, right? So we have built strategies, you know within within our brands as sellers that we actively use today. And we take those strategies, tactics, tools, and bring them into our partner brand businesses as well. Focusing specifically on the end of day profit, because that's what pays the bills, man. Like a lot of revenue or super low A costs that don't pay the bills. Kevin King: So you're looking at more holistically versus a lot of agencies, all they care about is the advertising side of things. Correct. They're not focusing on how does this, everything fit into this big picture. Correct. When it comes to the advertising side, are you just doing on Amazon stuff or are you helping people off Amazon as well? Jerry Vida: We do some stuff within Shopify too, especially with building out like Klaviyo stuff, working through some of the different various Plugins that you can put into Klaviyo for upsells and downsells and or excuse me into Shopify and in that type of stuff We really don't dabble too much in Walmart. I do a little bit of that for myself but I guess if you know somebody wanted an eye on it, you know like from a You know advertising, you know perspective. Kevin King: I'd take a look at it any social media stuff to talk or meta or anything like that? Jerry Vida: No, we're not we're not offering that. Kevin King: What do you see the AI, how's the AI affecting the PPC stuff? I mean, we talked about it on the product side, but how are you guys utilizing it to really get an edge when it comes to the PPC side stuff? Jerry Vida: Right now, we're using it to analyze reports and then we're using it to build People will say one thing, people will say another thing. We're using it to build out intent groups to help us to do that with the way that we're grouping keywords. In the search terms and whatnot within advertising, we still do have a lot of the human presence, but the biggest thing that we're doing with AI right now is using it to write a lot of the code that we do for the automation and tools that we use for managing the accounts. Kevin King: What do you see? I mean you talked about you do some stuff in Shopify. OpenAI about a month ago announced a partnership with Shopify for search, product search and stuff. And you're seeing more of these AI engines, Perplexity has been doing it for a while, seeing more of them start to integrate that. And then now you have Cosmo and Rufus in this, like you just said, optimizing, using AI to optimize for intent-based. Where do you see search going? I mean, the old game, the way is game the system with keywords. And now the new way is you got to figure out the avatar and the intent. And right now you've got to kind of ride that line between both of them. But where do you see this going? Jerry Vida: I see it getting to the place where, and you kind of already see some of it right now, like at least I think, where I think Amazon is just building like massive, massive customer profiles of every single person that uses the platform. It's using AI to understand what their shopping behaviors are, the way that they search, and it is going to use a lot of the intent information that is in those listings to put products that it deems as having the highest likelihood of conversion in front of people. So a lot of the stuff that we're doing too now is we are looking for some very specific Search terms that we're pulling out of search term reports and whatnot. And we're literally incorporating those search terms into images. We're answering buyer decision questions like really like within an image. Because I think that AI is going to be scanning all of that stuff for different signals and cues for what the product is. So it can put what it thinks is the Optimal product in front of that shopper when they're ready to buy. So I mean, I think that it's getting to the place where it's not just going to be keywords in any way. It's going to be the entire way the listings created from images all the way down to the copy to what you have in the back end. Kevin King: Do you think there's going to be a formula to that? Or do you think it's going to be throwing darts against the wall trying to figure this out? Because people have figured reverse engineering. Nobody really knows how the A9 works, but we have a pretty good idea. I mean, just by reverse engineering and enough experience and enough heads beating on it and a lot of leaks coming out here or there from China or India or wherever. But what do you think the new method is going to be for ranking and selling online? It's not keywords anymore. It won't be keywords anymore. It's going to be this intent-based stuff. Do you think people are going to be sophisticated enough to actually know how to give the AI what it wants so that you actually show up? Or is it always going to be constantly changing as the AI just evolves? Jerry Vida: I think that there will be constant change, right? Where, you know, just like with anything else, the way that we incorporated keywords and the way that we had all the backend data, like that stuff has changed, you know, over, over the years. Kevin King: We have reports of keyword, this keyword shows up here this many times, this many conversions, all that stuff. But we don't know, like you just said, Amazon's creating this massive database. They've been doing it for years. But they know everything I've ever done. I mean, you can actually request from Amazon your dossier as a buyer. And mine was, when I did it about two years ago, a 750-page PDF. And it had every single thing I've ever done in the Amazon ecosystem, not just buying products. Anything I've ever put to my cart, took it out. Anything I've ever looked at, how long I stayed on places. Anything I've ever watched on Amazon Prime, how many times I paused it, where I paused it. Anything I've ever done on Kindle. Every single thing is in that file. They have access to that. We don't. We can't really scrape that. Our thing is we have to use the tools like what you're doing where you said you're creating these avatars and this intent-based stuff and these profiles of people. I think it's going to become more of a branding profile marketing than it is a keyword hacking marketing. Jerry Vida: Yeah. The way that I like to describe it to people when we talk about it. Think of the company Jeep, for example, who's selling a Jeep Liberty, right? That car itself is sellable to two different avatars, right? You have like the soccer mom, okay, who's looking for reliability, who's looking for safety, who's looking for seating capacity, like those type of things. That's one important to her. And then you have the guy who wants to take the thing off-roading, who wants to know about the torque and the ruggedness, all that type of stuff. So you're selling the exact same product to those exact same, those two different, completely different avatars. So I think a lot of this is, and that's why we structure a lot of the campaigns, you know, with intent based keyword groupings. So we just, it's a little bit easier to understand where a lot of the traffic is coming from, where a lot of the conversions and stuff like that are coming from. Because when we sit down and use AI to build out our listings, we typically end up with three or four different avatars that we're selling to, right? And we're using that data that we pull the, you know, out of Amazon from the search term reports and other advertising reports, conversion rates and business reports, you know, what we're getting out of search query reports and things like that to understand what resonates the most with people in doubling down on that stuff. Right. And we can see almost in real time with advertising data that this search term is driving all of this. Let's talk about that more, right? And let's start incorporating that into the images. Let's incorporate that more into the way that we depict the product and tell the story. And I think that AI is just going to get better and better and better and understanding all of that, understanding how a particular individual customer shops, And using what it is, has like learned about the product, right? To try to solve what it thinks is the problem that the individual shopper is having. I mean, I think that the entire search game is going to be changing over the next couple of years to complete intent-based, you know. Kevin King: Right now, if you take that example, you have four or five different reason or avatars or people like the Jeep example, even the two, the two avatars, Right now, you're having to combine those into one listing on Amazon. So your images are like, okay, here's the guy, the soccer mom that wants to carry the net and the soccer ball and all the stuff in the back and take her kids to the game and then the guy who wants to go off-roading in the desert. That's all in the same listing is that that may actually confuse the AI like which one is it or is it for both or whatever or if the AI figures it out, which it probably can, when the customer comes in, he's like, wait a second, I don't want something for soccer moms. I want something for off-roading. I see there's an off-roading picture here, but it's also like, nah. So what I see is you're going to have to have separate listings for the same product. A good example of this, I do another podcast called Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and it's not about Amazon. It's about marketing. We recently had a lady on the episode that invented a light. She was an aesthetician. And doing eyelashes and all the lights that they were using in the studios were not bright enough or they cast a shadow or the stand is easy to knock it over and knock it into the client. So she developed a special arc shaped light that just lights up the whole face so they can see all these little fine hairs and all this kind of stuff. And she developed it and put it out and it's crushing right now. But once she came out, she realized, oh, wait, there's other markets that actually want this. Tattoo artists need this. And there's other people doing facials and other types of things need this light too. So they tried to do a one combined website and it didn't work and the ads didn't work. So then what they did is they split the websites up into one. It's the exact same product, exact same packaging, everything. But one website's all for tattoo artists, one's all for eyelash people, one's all for facial people and so on. She's got like 10 different use cases for it that she didn't realize in the beginning and each website speaks to them and speaks to them only and sales went up like 10x. Do you see where we're going to have to do something like that on Amazon? Jerry Vida: Absolutely, but I almost see it to the place where like to me and I was talking with this about you know so many about a month ago. It would be great if Amazon gave the ability, right, where you could put multiple versions of back-end data in there and Amazon displays... Kevin King: Let them just choose which one they know. Jerry Vida: Right, exactly. Right? So it'd be like... Like it knows like we're both shopping for you know, like whatever right and it says okay Jerry this we think this version of this this detail page is best suited for you Kevin. We think that this detail page is best suited for you. It's the exact same product, you know, so I mean, I wish Amazon was a little better at that. We do exactly what you're lighting, what you're lighting front, you know, said with Shopify, right? Where we build out our meta advertising funnels and landing pages, exactly the same thing where we speak to, you know, a specific avatar, you know, through the entire funnel. And I wish Amazon would adopt a little bit more of that type of thing because you're right, man, products, Definitely can be multi-category and appeal to different people in different ways and right now it is very hard to do that stuff. We do a lot of A-B testing with that to kind of see You know which versions of what resonate the best and then obviously go for the one that has the highest sales volumes. But I would absolutely like the ability to appeal to both of them on separate listings without having to create multiple ASINs and send in different amounts of inventory to both just because that's a cash flow crunch. Kevin King: One of the other things that she did that's interesting is she wasn't on Amazon really originally. She was a direct consumer from her Shopify site. Then she got on Amazon and sales started taking off and this is a $500 light. So it's an expensive light. And what sells are taken off and then all the Chinese start knocking her off. And so she's fighting this IP battle against someone. She's spending quite a bit of money, but it's like whack-a-mole. She'll get them off and another one will pop up. But they're selling a similar light for $69 or something. But that light, what she finds is a lot of times the people who are buying that light, It just wasn't the same quality. They'd buy that and they'd go, oh, I shouldn't have done that. I should have bought the real thing. So what she did, she knocked herself off. She actually said, well, if they're going to do this, I'll just knock myself off and I'll actually come out with a $79 light, you know, and it won't be as solid as steel. It won't be as heavy. It won't be this or whatever. And what she would find is a lot of people would end up buying that and then going, oh, this is pretty good, but now I want the real thing and they would upgrade to the real thing. So I think, Right now, the only way to do this is like what you said, you'd have to have multiple ASINs and multiple things actually targeted. It might get to where that's the stopgap until Amazon allows us to actually create multiple backends, which That's actually a good idea. They should actually be looking at that. Jerry Vida: Yeah. No, like, I mean, we were at, oh geez, what, it was a conference probably, maybe it was like CellarCon or something like that in 2019. And we were talking about trying to develop that into our skincare website where when a customer, like the, like they would put in some data, right. We would know, answer some questions and then it would tailor the website experience with, The image is, you know, to match their demographic, you know, just to, just to do those types of things. So, I mean, Amazon obviously has demographic data. You can pull all that in there now, right? So I don't know why they don't leverage some of that. I mean, there are definitely some things that Amazon should adopt from some of these different platforms, right? Like that they should make some of the, I mean, they're, they're doing some, some better stuff with subscribing safe now, but that monthly reoccurring revenue stuff, they need to really, you know, turn that up a whole bunch. So, I mean, we can only hope, you know. Kevin King: What are you doing to control your own destiny? Versus just depending on Amazon and the marketplace where you don't get the customer data, there's ways to try to get that off with package inserts and stuff. You get it on Shopify. But what are you doing to like future-proof yourself with owning your customers or having that data? Internally not just being relying on others. Jerry Vida: Yeah, we've been using so that's the thing, right? A lot of people tend to look at Amazon as a revenue channel, right? We look at it as a revenue channel and a customer acquisition channel for sure. So all of the product that we sell or at least our high-volume product we do include very Very decent offers for, you know, scanning QR codes and getting people out of Amazon, right? Where I will give people like a free product, you know, 100% free. Here you go. Just to get in there. And we've had we've been doing that probably for the last I don't know, you know five six years and have built a massive list of customers Driven all out of out of Amazon. Do you get them all? No, but you know if you're selling a Hundred thousand products a month and you get a 10% opt-in rate that adds up very quickly, right? So it's all about how you I think how you create that product insert and the offer that you have on there to get people to take action. And we spent a lot of time testing stuff out where I work with my factory and I tried 20 iterations of product inserts. And, you know, would do small batches and build out individual Clavio flows for each one to understand which ones have the highest opt-in rates, right? To figure out like the exact language, the exact design, the colors, what offer we have to give people to do that. So we've taken a lot of time in doing that. And I think that that is one of the most important things that we have done to leverage that Amazon customer base and start to make it our own. Kevin King: So what do you do with that? A lot of people, they do these package inserts and they get the emails or the addresses and they don't do anything with them. They're afraid to email them. They're afraid to send them anything. What do you guys do to market to them or engage them or use that? Jerry Vida: So we typically start out with value-added content, honestly, just to kind of build a little bit of that rapport. So the initial couple of emails are value-added content, thanking them for being a part of the brand, right? Like here is the best way to use the product. Here's a routine, like that type of thing. And we may include some soft sales in there, but then they get put through very specific Clavio flows for upsells, cross-sells, all that type of thing. And as people progress through there, if they make a purchase, it puts them into the next flow where it kind of restarts that again. And like on our skincare brand, for example, All of it is designed to work together, right? Like every piece in it is designed to complement one another. So we just have a massive, you know, flow, a web of flows that, that, you know, gives them value added content and just takes them through different sequences of buying different products to complete, you know, their entire skincare routines. Kevin King: Is the value-added content just in relation to your products or do you add value-added content in relation to their avatar or pain points? Jerry Vida: Both, right? So it's a series. So like what we did is on the skincare brand, we worked with licensed medical professionals to build up the brand, right? And one of the things that we did that I thought was cool is we sat down with a licensed medical anesthetician And built out the entire routine specifically around the pain points that the majority of the clients that would come into the spa would you don't want solved and we speak a lot about that stuff. So we're actually solving problems for people who are coming into our brand to solve a specific issue. Kevin King: Do you have a newsletter or is it just just marketing emails? Jerry Vida: Just marketing emails. Kevin King: Have you ever considered doing a newsletter? Jerry Vida: We have. It's just been a resource thing, but with AI though, right? Like we can, we can start do that, but we've just been growing out things in other, in other areas, especially with the agency. But these are the type of things where we're starting to incorporate these type of offerings. Like I met some people at Prosper where we've been talking about, you know, customer acquisition, you know, from Amazon into Shopify, the ways that we, that we have done it. And we were starting to help some people do that as well. Kevin King: What's this? I see behind you there's a couple little skinny little things. Those of you watching here on the YouTube, you can see this as you're listening. Right behind him, there's two little pointy head, skinny little things sitting there with some wings on the bottom. What are those things back there? Are those tequila bottles? Jerry Vida: Yeah, they're tequila bottles actually. No, those are rockets. It's a funny thing. My beautiful wife, Stacey, You know, shuffles and rolls rise every time I say it, but it is absolutely true. In my spare time when I'm not, you know, selling things online or helping people sell things online, I design, build and launch large high-power rockets. In fact, I have the highest certification level available in the United States to do that. So I'm a rocket scientist in my spare time. Kevin King: So when you say build, are these kits? Are you out there with the tools in the garage, welding round tubes together and stuff? Jerry Vida: Yes. It's nothing that you're buying in the hobby store. I'll say that. So I use software. And a lot of math to build these things, you know, cutting pieces using laser cutters and CNC machines and all that type of stuff to put these together, building electronics packages, you know, for safe deployment of parachutes and barometric pressure sensing altimeters and all that type of stuff. So yeah, it's not SpaceX, but it's as close as you can get as an amateur. Kevin King: How high can these things go? Jerry Vida: Miles. Those ones behind me, those might be, I don't know, 1,200 feet, 1,500 feet, but I've launched rockets three or four miles, three or four miles up. Kevin King: Do you put a camera on them? Yes. Jerry Vida: Yeah, I've done that. Yeah, we've done cameras. But depending on where you are in the country and how they regulate the airspace kind of dictates how high you can go. When I was living in Chicago, 16,000 feet just because of O'Hare Airport. But now that I'm out here in Phoenix, we have some launch ranges out here which are 48,000 feet. In Nevada, as long as you get the proper permits from the government, there is no limit. Kevin King: So that's about nine mile, 48,000 feet is about nine miles. Jerry Vida: Yeah, it's up there. Kevin King: Yeah, so you haven't gotten one to, you haven't gotten one, uh, what, where, where is it? Gravity is at 200, no, was it 270 miles or where's gravity, where's weightlessness? Jerry Vida: Uh, the Von Karman line, I think it's 80 miles or 80 miles. Kevin King: Oh, you're 79. I couldn't remember. Yeah. Okay. Jerry Vida: Like a launch like that, like I got some money, but I don't got that kind of money. Kevin King: You need some powerful rockets on the bottom of that thing. Jerry Vida: Yeah, you do. And just like with everything else, right? The costs of things have increased so much over the last couple of years. You would literally need funding as a single individual to do something like that just because that gets expensive. Kevin King: You ever have them like just go up like, 50 feet and then turn right back around and plant themselves in the dirt? Jerry Vida: 100%. So I've had them explode. Kevin King: Yeah. Jerry Vida: I've had all kinds of stuff. But it's a pretty complicated certification process that I went through, you know, to be able to do this. The government does let me have, or the regulating bodies, you know, do allow me to have propellant and stuff like that. And it's the exact same Essentially the exact same stuff that the that the solid rocket boosters in the space shuttle would use. So it's ammonium perchlorate based and I mean, it's highly regulated. It's it is at the end of the day. It's safe. It's it's just one of those like loud fast fun things that I like to do and I like the design side of it. I enjoy building them and all of that. So it just speaks to the engineering stuff. Kevin King: So they're reusable then, you're like space. Jerry Vida: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't want, you know, like a $3,000 rocket, you know, crashing at 800 miles an hour into the ground because then, you know, it's a little bit of a waste. Kevin King: You have to go out outside. I mean you're in Arizona there, so there's lots of open space. You have to go out like is there a rocket launch area or you just find a place out next to a Breaking Bad's trailer? Jerry Vida: I wish it was that easy. No, you have to work with the FAA and designate specific areas for launching. You have to coordinate with them to get Flight waivers where they literally reroute air traffic around your flight areas and things like that. So it's not a case of just going out in the middle of the desert and doing stuff. They will pick that up on radar, right? Not to say that they're going to show up and arrest you or anything like that. But, you know, to do it legally and do it the right way, you've got to coordinate with the governing bodies that designate an area and then work with the FAA for your launch day and launch time just to make sure that they route the air traffic around your area the right way. Kevin King: Yeah, that would kind of suck if a plane coming out of Sky Harbor came in contact with a rocket shooting up. I was living in Chicago. Jerry Vida: Chicago here was always complicated, but there is a small airport in South Bend, right? And we would notify them that we were doing stuff and it would literally draw the pilots, you know, small like little prop planes. They'd get curious and it's like, dude, you're at like 5,000 feet right now. I can literally like knock you down. Don't do that. You know, serious. I mean, some of these rockets weigh, You know 30, 40, 50 pounds are made from reinforced fiberglass going 800 miles an hour. So it would definitely cause an issue if something like that would happen. Kevin King: So when you're driving onto the launch pad, is that fuel and stuff that's sitting in the back of your truck or your Jeep or whatever you have, is that dangerous? If someone rammed into you, would that be an explosion? Jerry Vida: No, it doesn't quite work that way. It does require like igniters, but if you just took it and if you just, well, if it's inside the motor case and you lit it off, absolutely, it's dangerous, right? But it's impact resistant. It won't go off by impact. And if you took the propellant just outside of a motor case and tossed into a fire pit, it would kind of resemble that super bright light from a sparkler, but times like a million. It's really not Super energetic unless it's built into the final motor that you would use for, you know, to launch the rocket. Kevin King: Cool. Well, that's a cool hobby. That's a different one. That's actually really cool. Now you got me thinking like, what can I do that's really cool? I need a cool hobby. I need to go build something. Yeah, for sure. Well, Jerry, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing today. If people want to find out more about you or your company, what's the best way to do that? Jerry Vida: They can just go on to the peakroas.ai website and there is an account audit button in there or they can just reach out to me on LinkedIn. Kevin King: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining today. It's been great. Jerry Vida: Kevin man, anytime. And again, thanks for all you do and look forward to talking with you again. Kevin King: Hopefully you've been listening to the AM PM podcast, or if you're new to this, you go back and you listen to some of the previous episodes, because as you can see from this week's episode, With a rocket scientist, every episode of the AM-PM Podcast can help propel you to higher and higher limits of the sky when it comes to selling on Amazon and in e-commerce. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Jerry. We'll be back again next week with another awesome episode. Don't forget you can subscribe to my newsletter that we talked about, BillionDollarSellers.com. And coming up in August, I've got a virtual, another Billion Dollar Seller Summit virtual event happening August 19th to the 21st. And if you want to get insider tips every single month, just like Jerry did that, where he said it helped him make millions of dollars, you can join the Helium 10 elite. That's at H10.me forward slash elite. Get all the information there. H10.me forward slash elite. See you again next week. Unknown Speaker: Thank you for watching.