#470 - The Great Shift: Why the Next 24 Months Will Redefine Amazon Seller Success

episode 470 of the AMM podcast. This week I've got Anthony Kof Francesco on. We're going to talk about his journey from creating images to doing split testing to doing data to education. He's got some really good tips on how to optimize your listings on Amazon, how to do split testing, how to actually analyze the data. This is going to be a great one. He's placed well at several of my billiondoll seller summits. always a popular speaker. Enjoyed this episode with Anthony. 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, plus this is the podcast for money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the A.M. and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you you ready? Ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host. Here's your host, Kevin King. Kevin King, Francesco, how are you doing, man? Finally got you here on the AMM podcast. What's going on, Kevin? I'm doing good. Thanks so much for having me and I'm excited to be here. You you guys you started off uh like you mentioned 2016 2017 doing you had like a a I remember you were in Asia somewhere and you had like a was it graphics agency or something like that doing images or what was it? Yeah, we were probably one of the first ones um to start doing conversion optimization just for Amazon sellers. So everything from graphic design to video copywriting like everything for the listing. And now it's a lot more common. you know, there's a lot of different agencies out there that are for sure better than what we had. Um, you know, we were just very early on. And so, was this your company or you worked for a company or you partners with somebody in it? I was business partners with a guy named Eric Rodriguez. Um, so we had met in college at the University of Florida. He was running the entrepreneurship club at the time and started to like get free tickets to these uh Amazon FBA events as college kids and then we like all started launching products. I went and worked for Amazon for a year and then after working there for a year he's like why don't you quit your job moved to the Philippines and helped me scale this agency. So I was like a a part a co-founder in the company. He had started it a year before I got on and then you know I helped it grow. So how was that moving to the Philippines for a little while? Freaking awesome. I mean before I started working full-time at Amazon I uh had gotten to live in Sibu over the summer for 3 months. That's where Eric taught me how to launch my first product. I lived with another guy, a really close friend of mine, Danny. So, we just spent the summer, got an apartment, and we just focused on launching uh launching products. And uh so, I had been to the Philippines before. And I had never lived in Manila, but I was kind of under the expectation that it would be similar, Manila would be similar to Sibu in the way that most areas are not very nice, but then there's like a couple small areas that are very nice. And how it turned out is this area of Manila called BGC, Bonafasio Global City, is probably one of my favorite cities in the entire world. Upscale, modern. If you didn't know that you were in the Philippines, you'd have no idea that you weren't in the nicest US city. Um, and so it was great. We lived there for two and a half years and there was probably 20 to 30 people who were, you know, relatively young, mostly guys running online businesses, mini Amazon FBA and uh you never ate a meal alone during those couple of years. Like you would just be walking around and hey, let's go get some some dinner. It's like you're always masterminding, always talking about businesses. So for uh for my life, I think living there was definitely uh one of my one of my favorite memories for sure. It's really cheap to live there, too. I mean, I mean, a lot of people know that the Filipino wage, they got VAS, it's it's cheap, but just the cost of living in the Philippines is cheap. Oh, yeah. I mean, when I moved out there, I was making $2,000 a month, and that was totally adequate. Uh, in fact, probably double what a normal Filipino rate would be. So, it's it's great. And if if you're out there later, I was making more money, but if you're out there making 10 grand a month, you're just You can live whatever kind of life you want. Yeah, you're balling uh at that level. Yeah, for sure. Um so, so what happened with that company? Did you sell it or did you just move on? Because you went from there to what uh Pikfu, I think, right? Yeah, we sold it. Um I always get asked about this and I wouldn't try to replicate it, but it was a we we got acquired. We got acquired by a small aggregator in Southeast Asia called Alpha Rock Capital. they were growing a portfolio of brands and at a time they you know they actually were doing quite well they wanted to acquire the agency not only to grow the agency services but really as a strategic acquisition to service their own brands um and so I stayed on for about 6 months after the acquisition and you know acquisitions are acquisitions it doesn't always go according to plan I don't want to uh get into any specific details But um you know the company is still around in one form or another. Uh but yeah, we were able to exit exit the company. Um and uh yeah, it's cool because I still go to conferences, I still go to events that I meet people who are our clients from way back in the day. Um it's it's pretty cool. And so uh yeah. So then I I remember when I first I don't remember where I first connected with you uh to actually come like and speak at was that BDSS 2021 the first time you spoke? It would have been the it would have been the virtual uh is what I did first. Yeah. Right after I started with PFU. Okay. So after you sold the agency, you bounced around traveling quite a bit, right? I remember you were like in Brazil at one point and you were all over all bouncing all over the place. Yeah. The story was I was um I was living in the Philippines right when we sold the agency and then right around that same time is when CO started happening. Um, and so I traveled to a a work, you know, work event, Augustus' event in Prague, European Seller Conference. And that's when the whole world shut down. Like Trump, I got a message saying that Trump was going to put travel bans. So I was like, I couldn't at that point get back to the Philippines. So I could really only go back to the US. So I go back to the US. The girl that I'm dating at the time is Filipina. I've been dating her for 2 years. She was in the Philippines. We couldn't see each other for like seven, six, seven months. And so after enough of that, anyone who's location independent, you're kind of like, "All right, screw this. I'm not going to wait until CO is over to see them." So Brazil was one of the only locations that we could both travel to uh with between visa and between travel restrictions. So we both moved down to Brazil for a year. You know, you roll with the punches. Oh, all right. That's cool. And and then you ended up going over to Pikfu. um and kind of help them get going, right? Yeah. I wish I could say that I founded Pikfu and I don't think anyone has a perception of how long they've been around cuz when I joined I think it was 13 or 15 years Justin and John have been running it. Uh I approached Pikfu after uh after selling the agency cuz we had collaborated with Pikfu on a project. I really like Justin and John. I like the product and I thought there's so much potential in AB testing that just not a lot of people talk about. Back then it was still kind of a hack. Oh, you can use Pikfu and get some feedback. So I approached them and I pitched them, hey I will come on board with Pikfu and I will make sure that everyone in the industry knows about Pikfu and market research and split testing. And uh they were kind enough to give me a shot, you know, and this is a few years ago when I was even less disciplined and less focused than I am now. Uh, and so I feel like I did a good job with that and now there's a lot more competitors out there instead of just Pikf Fu. Um, but yeah, we we grew a lot. We grew a lot over over a couple years and I'm still very close I think with Justin and John. I talked to them uh frequently and we still work together on projects. What did you see that was I guess a couple questions around the AB testing because you you had private you were doing a lot of experimentation yourself because I remember on some of your presentations you were showing the results of different things but just having being able to see under the hood and behind the scenes. What are some of the what was something that was shocking to you that people were were doing that when they they run a test you're like holy what is this? Um, and then on the flip side of that, what's something that an amazing result that you saw from AB testing? The big thing is that your gut is, it's not that it's always wrong. It's just that whatever your gut tells you is probably the least important thing. Um, and not always a good indicator. Some, some brand owners are very good at getting a feel for what is going to work in the end, but you just don't know what you don't know. And so I can go through best practices and a lot of my presentations would do that of like I think this is going to work. I think this is going to work. But what I'm I'm finding is that it's very specific to a niche and um yeah, you just don't know what you don't know you got to test a lot of different things. Um in terms of in terms of what actually worked well, I mean I don't know. I guess we'll get into it, but do you remember someone that came in and they they ran or maybe it's something you did. They they were doing I don't know $10,000 a month. Uh I'm just making stuff up here and then they did an AB test and the results of that catapulted them to 50 or $100,000 a month because they they changed out the image. Do you remember any anything like that? I mean, everyone knows the thoracio angry orange example. That one was so sexy. Everyone loved it. You know, Angry Orange, the pet deodorizer, has their old packaging. It's a thoracio brand. They go in use Pikfu. And we had a promo video for a while that showed this where it's like dozens and dozens and dozens of different bottle designs. They have this big nice orange bottle. It says instead of angry orange, it says pet deodorizer. This is before people thought, "Hey, let's put the main hero keywords on the front of our packaging. Nice, big, and bold." And I don't remember the exact numbers, but like astronomical growth for the brand. And I want to say like 10x or 30x just something ridiculous. And not just using that for main image, but secondary image, A+ content, everything like that. So I I mean I don't know why I'm having such a difficulty pulling up all these examples because uh it's like I see it all the time. I just did a case study with um Sharet Studio and uh this brand called Pink Miracle, a shoe cleaner. We went from a quarter million a month to more than a million a month. Now they're rolling that strategy across the rest of their portfolio. heavy in Pikfu testing. I mean, they had 30 different types of main images uh that they were testing, like 50 types of secondary images, multiple versions of A+ video, sponsor brand video. So, I don't know why I'm blanking on that. It's just like if you test and commit to the process, you can you can probably like 2x to 4x your brand if the product is good. So, a lot of people when they go in and they test, they might test uh image A against image B and then image B wins and they're done. But like what you just said, no that that you need to take it much much deeper and like have 30 images. When when Thrasio did that with Agent or Agent Orange or whatever it's called, create 30 images. They had to have a graphic designer sit there and create 30 different images and move stuff around. Nowadays with Nano Banana or something, you can do that in about 5 minutes and have 30 different angle images and backgrounds and angles and stuff. So it's it's a no it's it's a no-brainer. But a lot of people are like, "Well, that that's going to cost me a,000 bucks or 1,500 bucks or whatever the whatever it may be to do all those tests. That's just too much money." What would you say to those people? It's I I get it. I get the sentiment. And uh I think even even more common is people get sellers get some initial wins and then after they get the win, they're like, "Okay, sweet. I've won now. I'm done." I don't think anyone realizes how much potential is still left on the table from this high volume variation testing going in with the expectation that the vast majority of assets you create are never going to see the light of day. Um but that's okay. And uh I don't know I'm trying to think of a good way to make a make an analogy of this but well in the direct mail business there's something called the control. So, in in old direct mail copywriting, u for those older guys, you remember getting in the mail like a letter, like a long uh it'd be like a two-page letter or something, which is now long form content online. And that that they would have one letter that's gets a 4.2% response rate or whatever it is. And they're always trying to beat that. So, they're always coming up with other letters and sending those out and they're trying to beat what's called the control. And if one of those beats the control, then it becomes the new control. And they're constantly trying to beat it. So, I think that's maybe what you're trying to say is like you get one that's that's doing well and instead of stopping you you're constantly trying to beat it and see if you can get another one that's the the control. Is that that kind of what you're trying to say? I I think I think that's pretty on point. I know for anyone who looked at the scores of BDSS it's like oh you know Anthony I might have not done as well as previous years but um the whole basis of my presentation is is exactly what you're talking about now. My recommendation to people is that you should be testing four variations of each asset class. So four versions of your main, four, four versions of your secondary images, four versions of your A+ content that you're going to test in one month manage your experiments test over the period of one year, one test per month. And my whole pitch is that there's a very very low chance that the exact configuration of main secondary uh images and A+ content that you have on your listing at right now is the best it can possibly get and there's no chance for improvement. That if you go through the process of validating in advance using market research and you try to figure out what are the best versions of my main secondary A+ content. if I test, you know, four of each of those over a period of a year, you're almost certainly going to find something that uh improves. And so, if you would just try the first version and you say, "Okay, this wins. I'm going to stick with that." What if one of the other three variations of each of those asset classes or a different configuration like your V2 of your main image, your V4 of your secondary images, and your V1 is actually the best. If you haven't kind of like tested to figure out what is the best in each of those asset classes, then you're probably leaving some money uh on the table. What is it? So, a lot of people will go to Pikvu and they'll run an experiment on Pikvu and they'll get a winner and they just go with that winner and they they consider well the people voted and there was a clear winner. But what you just said is you need to make sure you run it through AB uh Amazon's actually AB experiments testing because and what I found in the past is what people say sometimes and what they do are two different things. So what what do you see along those lines? Um PF fu product opinion and televse aren't people who are actually buying your product. It's pretty close and it gives you a a good indication of what might work. Even when I was there, it's not about which one won. It's trying to read the feedback and determine why a specific asset won. So, and this has been shown. You can get a win in Pikfu. You run it through Amazon and it's the exact opposite. So, validation is certainly helpful, but it's not like an oracle that's going to give you the answer. So, the only way you'll really know which asset performs better, it's actually running it on Amazon. Can manage your experiments is not, you know, it could be a lot better. you're doing a main image test and they give you conversion rate as your metric instead of CTR. You know, it's not always the most well thought out. It takes a while to execute these tests. But what I see is um people who are doing a lot of manager experiments tests over a period of months and months and months and months. Sometimes the difference is going to be like very minimal, you know, uh but you're just going for those little marginal gains. And if I can stack up a quarter of a percent in improvement in CVR and I can do that every month for 4 months, that's 1%. And sometimes the gains you're going to see in CVR are even uh even bigger. Pikfu is built into Helium 10. So what should the proc the work process be? Should someone come up with 30 images uh in different A+ and all the stuff like you said? uh you said four actually but uh and then run those through pick through pikfu and get some initial response if one of them just completely tanks don't even run that and manage your experiments or do you should you what what's why do you need pikfu I guess now when you can just run the stuff through manage your experiments what's the what's the workflow there yeah manag your experiments is slow you know it's a a minimum of one month typically to run a test and so pfu market research is going to be way faster My workflow is um if I can create this is ideal time. You have unlimited time and budget but with AI it's faster than ever. So if I can create six versions of the initial asset class. So six versions of a main image is easy. It's like product plus packaging. You can do all this with AI now. If I have six versions of an asset class then I can baseline test that. So that's just the six tested against each other. Then out of that baseline test, there's going to emerge a winner. And so the winner, the top one or two, depending on budget, you would do a competitive test. Okay? Now that I know the best main image out of those six, I'm going to take that and test it against my top like two to three competitors. And then um depending on the results of that test, you're going to go and upload to manager experiments. You could go straight into manager experiments for people who are running on limited budgets. Like sure, go straight in. Uh if you have a lot of variations too, this is people have portfolios with 50 variations. You can test a whole bunch of different uh main images per acid. So it's up to your budget and how much time you have. What I'll say is that AI is is going to dramatically reduce the barrier for asset generation. Uh, I think there's some components of AI that are going to I don't want to say replace market research, but I think maybe start to estimate and there's already tools out there that'll look at an image and give you some analysis as to why it's uh, you know, powerful or going to give you a good click-through rate or something like that. For those that don't know and manage your experiments, how many experiments can you run at one time? Can I dump all six images in there and it's spinning rotating them around or is it one against two and then you got a winner? Then two against three and you got a winner. What? For those that don't understand it, can you explain that to them? It's one at a time um per per listing per per individual as so I could like test my main image. I could test different secondary images um different A+ content. You can also do some copy related things but uh I try to stick to the the images. But within the im I understand it's like you only want to test images and not test images and copy. You only test one element at a time, but within the images, is it only one image against another image or is it the whole portfolio of images that can be tested when you're just running an image test on manage my experiments? Oh, it's there's a lot of different test types. Um, you can definitely test entire galleries. One of the highest performing test types I've seen is someone is testing secondary images, but they're not even changing the images. All they're doing is they're just changing the image order. So, imagine I've got an image that I have in position four and I try let's see that exact same gallery, but instead of that image being in four, I put it in position two because more people are going to see image two than four. And I've seen uh like over and over again examples of conversion rate increases just from that. And it makes sense, right? Like if I can do a better job of aligning in order of priority what the customer is looking for and I show that to them earlier in the gallery, there's a higher chance that they're going to see, oh, this is what I need to see. This is the product I'm going to convert on versus bouncing and checking out at a competitor page. So, you know, you don't have to overthink it. You some of the more nuance test types are very valuable. Now after Pikfu, you moved on and you got to see inside the back end of uh data analytics and uh keywords and all this. What what's what are some of your biggest takeaways from uh actually working on the inside of one of these tool companies that you just opened your eyes like, "Holy cow, I had no idea it worked that way or this is a major thing that moves the needle that I didn't that most people don't realize or something along those lines." Yeah. Well, one thing I'll say is software is expensive. I think I'm okay to say that. You know, I know that's more of like an industry thing and not so much of a, you know, practical for sellers, but um anyone who is a seller using software, I think you should take a moment and just appreciate how much goes into building software. Uh and uh for bootstrap companies, it's like you put everything into it and it it just is so much satisfaction when people use the tool and they're like, I get a lot of value out of this. The biggest thing that I saw is sellers. I don't want to say that sellers don't know where to go or what to do. Um, but we're getting into the phase of our industry now where before you could just do a couple of things well and do very well on Amazon. But now it is about being so dialed in on everything from sourcing to product development to ads to creative uh logistics. Everything has to be dialed in and we're playing a game of you're really splitting hairs to decide at the top end who's going to maintain those top positions. And so it's not enough to just say go out there and grow your business or go to an event and uh try to learn what you can. I mean, you got to run these things. I don't want to say to the level of Fortune 500 companies, but you can see a big disparity between the companies that are super well-managed and then there's everyone else who's struggling and they're just never going to figure it out. And so, the biggest thing I saw is like if you can put together some kind of system, some kind of system where I can just say it's more than just a SOP because it requires some creative thinking steps in between. It's not just like you got to click here, click here, click here. there. It's like you use this tool interaction interacting with this tool and this is the flow to move around. Um there's a lot of parts about the business I think that are that you can teach and that you can really help people uh help people with and uh yeah, you got to give them some kind of system because it's just like uh the teams are getting too big and there's it's very complex and technical now. Yeah. Well, so speaking of that, what have you seen since 2015, 2016 when you got into this with the agency? What have you seen to to from then to today that's changed the most? Is it that Amazon is now, you know, it used to be like you said, you could do a couple things well and and and do well, but now it's a real business and you got to wear 27 different hats and actually manage those hats, right? Or is it becoming more brand oriented? Um, what what is more mature? What would you say the biggest difference between now and 9 years ago? Uh what is? It's just uh a very competitive game now. Um it's a it's a really competitive game and if you're not ready to run a proper business, it's uh you know it's going to be extremely difficult if not impossible to do. I think for the longest time, like back when I saw you in Hong Kong at Global Sources, there's always been this arbitrage of um just knowledge and understanding. If I knew how Amazon worked, I can win. It doesn't even matter. It's if I can create products, great. If I can do advertising, great. But like, if I just understand how Amazon works, I'm gonna have a huge moat over everyone else. And you'll see this with like how do massive brands come on Amazon that have huge brand recognition. They launch on Amazon and their performance is terrible. There's all these random people who are just destroying them, you know. Um how is that possible? It's because you have to understand, you have to know how Amazon works in order to win at Amazon. As time goes on, that gap is going to decrease more and more. That moat is going to decrease more and more. And so that's why you can I don't know if you agree or disagree but I think that we are in the last in my opinion two years of the industry as we know it which is like random person with not a lot of um you know maybe not a lot of funding, not not a lot of prior business experience being able to just dominate and take these categories that do millions of dollars sometimes a month. um that over time, especially in the next two years, through agents, uh people aren't going to take courses anymore. Like these agents are going to know everything that the courses have already taught and they're going to be able to execute on these things. Okay, I know I'm rambling here, but this is like link linked into that is there's also always been this moat around execution. So, I can do extremely well at Amazon if I can just execute better than my competitor, right? there's this laundry list of things that I need to do in the business. Uh and the person who checks off the most, their business is going to perform better than the person who checks off half the list. Like we see it in Titan, it's uh we give people action plans. The people who do the action plans do really well. The people who don't do anything don't do well. And so that barrier of or that moat rather around execution is also going to go away because you're not going to have to be disciplined or focused to go and ex you still will have to do some tasks manually but more and more you're going to be able to execute click a button or you're going to be able to hand this off to your team and say okay I need you to click a series of buttons to go and make this happen. I see that same thing happen at market masters. I mean, I've done two Market Masters events, doing the third one next month and November 13th to the 17th in Austin. In the past ones, we've had someone we've had 24 people now sit through the hot seat process and three three of them I know of there's several there's more than this that not everybody wants to talk about it, but some of them have it's it's made no difference because they haven't executed. They they got fed a lot of good information and they just did the status quo or maybe implemented one little thing. But the ones that actually took it to heart, uh, like Pallic, she went from, who's been, uh, on this podcast, she went from a million and a half to 5 million. And all she did was execute what everybody suggested. Another person was doing 110 million, now's on track to do a billion with a B. Now, we can't I can't take credit for all that. he had some other momentum, but he implements some of the stuff that was and then someone else, you know, speaking of you mentioned Titan, they had they have the CM1, CM2, CM3 framework that they talk about, and we had uh Julie who said she her CM3 was a negative 8 when she came into the hot seat. Now it's a positive 24. Um, and so th those are the people that execute, but what you're saying is the fact that they execute it is going to become less important as a human executing because agents and AI is going to execute that. Is that what you're what you're saying where they're just going to have to kind of babysit it? Not all of it. And I think we're we're still a couple, you know, the point where you click a button and an agent's going to run your entire Amazon business, I think, is multiple years down the road. But big chunks of it um are it is going to happen like that. Um, even just look at creatives. Like I used to own a creative agency. We'd spend all of this time concepting images and going out to shoots and booking the models and transportation and props and all these things. And uh, this guy Dorian released a product. It's not perfect, but uh, called Keplo a few, you know, maybe a couple months ago. And it'll like read everything, make you main images, secondary images, A+ content. And it's now it's not perfect, right? It's not, you know, you still do more work, but we're talking like you click a button and within 15 minutes, you've got full image stacks that are likely better and around the same level, if not better than what our agency would do for $1,500, $2,000 like five, six years ago. So, if you look on this trajectory, some of this stuff is really easy. Every single tool, they all have um a listing writer that'll like write your listing in, you know, title, bullets, and description with the keywords that it needs. Then they have different versions now that'll write it in Rufus or Cosmo or whatever format you want. So like there's things that we used to pay copywriters to go and write these listings. That part you can already like copyriters are gone. You don't need a copywriter anymore. And so eventually it'll be like that for every task. Alibaba has this AI sourcing tool. It doesn't eliminate the need to have a sourcing agent, but like these things are just going to get better and better and better. So it's conceivable that eventually most tasks are going to be click a button. And when that playing field is leveled, it kind of brings into question what are the brands that are going to be at the top. And my hypothesis is that it's going to be the brands that are at the top are going to stay at the top. and new ent people who are new entrance, it's going to be very difficult unless you have crazy crazy budgets to uh you know, you want to go and compete with Zulle for a garlic press or the orange juice squeezer and they're dominating. They've got the highest reviews, they've got the rank, you're going to be spending millions and millions and millions of dollars basically giving away units in the hopes of moving up ranks to get to that point. I I agree with you. I think there's a big shakeup coming. But but so you're saying what you said though is that you're not going to need courses anymore. Um because AI can just spill it out, but now you're you're doing some stuff with Titan who's actually they they don't really have courses per se, but they have training. So what do you see the difference is, you know, that companies like Helium 10 or Titan or whoever need to do, you know, Helium 10 has a freedom ticket and it's a like do-it-yourself, self-paced kind of training. Do you do you see that the training is still necessary for the people that are already in the game to keep them on edge or to help hold their hand or where do you see education just going to go in the the Amazon world or is it going to disappear and you can just ask GPT you know what what to do? Yeah. Um it's a really good question. So just to be clear I don't think we're there yet. I think in 2 years or less we will be there. We're at this step right now, I think, with education that if I give someone 200, 300 hours of content and say, "Go watch all of this." That's not helpful. What I need to do is like, if I have a way that I can look at their business and say, "Okay, you don't need to watch 300 hours of content. I need you to focus on these like 3 hours of content, and this is exactly how you're supposed to go through and and do this stuff." Um, that's where education is going. Very specific, very prescriptive. Uh, so it's almost like a freedom ticket. That's take you answer five or 10 if it was freedom ticket for say let's say on helium 10 you'd answer five or 10 questions about your budget your size your capability whatever some qualifying questions and then instead of you getting the exact same freedom ticket course that everybody gets the AI behind the scenes takes all that content and mixes and match and says okay here's the three hours that you need and just watch those three hours this is going to move the needle the most don't waste your time going down all these other rabbit holes You see that's that that could be a good good way to do educate. I agree with you on that. I think that's where it's going to be is every course is going to be tailored to that person rather than just a generic onefits-all course. Well, and and I don't want to I don't want to give too much away, but imagine if Freedom Ticket 2 in addition to giving you, hey, these are the modules that I want you to watch and they're going to take 3 hours. Imagine if it was like, okay, first you're going to watch this 30 minute video. It's going to take you one hour to execute this task. And then the ROI of doing that is you're going to incre you're going to increase revenue by $3,000. And then it's giving you a list. And it's like if you spend 10 hours in the next month uh and then 20 hours executing, it's going to lead to $275,000 extra. And it's going to take you 10 hours of time, 3 hours of watching content. And you can motivate people or build out these simulations. I think that's the future. It's kind of like a little tool that's guiding you along and going and saying this is exactly what you need. This is how you do it. Here's the expected ROI. The future stage of that and I think most education companies are at least partnered with software tools is you start looking at what are those tasks that take the most time and give the most ROI and then how can I have those be automated with software or with agents. So the things that are really long, laborious, time inensive, how can I maybe not automate it completely, but how can I shrink the time down while still keeping the ROI high? Yeah. Yeah, I agree with with I I I agree with that. Um but on the educ on the education side too I think the companies that you can go on to chat GPT right now and ask it how can I get reviews or how can I and do certain things but I think there's something to the people that have massive amounts of content like Helium 10 or like me with Billion Dollar Solar Summit or like Titan or like um my Amazon guy or some of these others and actually taking that and putting it into a walled off LLM uh where It's this is instead of it going after the whole internet and catching and maybe catching some stuff from some of these YouTube guys that are speaking out the side of their butt. Uh and it counts that as authority. Um it's not really and having something where you can interact with that. And I've done that with a billion dollar sellers uh club um where I have my own LM that you can interact with all the BDSS prior BDSS's, all my newsletters, all my podcasts, everything. I know uh Titan's got something like that and a couple other people are working on it. I have a free one at billiondollarellers media which is keyword based. It's not an LLM, but it's keyword based. So, I think people that are sitting on massive amounts of content can still use that in a way like to to augment what you just said. And I think that can be an advantage. Yeah, it's the future. And uh it's even better if you're able to, you know, if you're able to pull in some real business data uh and have some LLM that actually understands certain metrics. Um I don't I still have to make it out to one of the market masters things, but it's just so cool to think that one day I know I I I think it was your talk in in Vegas with Josh Hadley and you were saying like, "Hey, I want you to think from the standpoint." It was the deep research. I want you to think from the standpoint of like these people and here's the data on my business and maybe that's what your billiond dollar sellers club AI LLM is based on. But it's just this stuff is unthinkable, you know, 3 4 years ago and it's just going to get better and better and better. The question is what does business look like when execution is no longer the the big challenge? Because with business, it's always been the idea. What I've always been told and what I've realized is the idea doesn't matter. You know, like I can come up with a million ideas in a day, but if I can actually sit down and make it happen, you know, it's not going to lead to anything. Um, that's an interesting an interesting question. Yeah, that that's where you get the people that are bouncing from course to course, from seminar to seminar, from webinar to webinar, and they're not actually taking action. They're just hoping for that one holy grail moment or something. And what do you think about that? There's I mean I'm sure you get approached by every Tom, Dick, and Harry to come on their their summit on their on their stuff on to speak on their webinars and everything. What it seems like there's a just a way too much of that out there right now. I maybe that's because I'm on all their lists and I'm getting all their emails. But how does someone choose that's either a successful seller or maybe someone listening to this that's just kind of getting started? How do they choose what to pay attention to? Get and get rid of the noise and not sit through a webinar for an hour and there's like nothing in it. There's no value. I don't know if you agree with this or not. I'm curious to hear your take. But our industry, you know, like everyone that we know, the speaker circuit, we know, the events that we know, my understanding is that the vast majority of Amazon sellers know nothing about our industry. They're not plugged into conferences. They're not plugged into events. And there's some overlap maybe between they're using some tools or others. But like, correct me if I I mean, I you might even know Helium 10's numbers a little bit better, but let's just say this is not the right numbers, but let's say there's a million sellers. Think about how what's the most amount of people you've ever seen at our events or that are even on our the people that you know their email lists. Do you know anyone with an email list of a million sellers? Like nowhere close to that. Amazing. Amazing used to have like 800 and something thousand, but I don't know if they were all sellers, but they were interested in being sellers. And I know uh yeah, that that was one of the bigger lists. And Jungle Scout at one point had a list. Helium 10's had over a million installs of the Chrome extension. That doesn't mean people were using it. Um but they've had over a million installs on the Chrome extension. It may be even 1.5 by now. I'm not I'm not sure what that is. But I think the latest data marketplace pulse said uh recently there's like 2 million people that have had a sale uh in the US on US Amazon. So that's 2 million there's like 5 million registered sellers or something like that. But 2 million are considered active. They've had a sale but the but was it 100,000 of them have done a uh a million bucks or more in sales. Uh so it's a very small percentage that are moving a large number. And then if you look at an event like Accelerate that just happened um uh last month in September uh in Seattle, you know, they had 3,500 4,000 people there out of out of 2 million or even if you count that down to let's get rid of 75% of those 2 million 500,000 that are doing 50 grand or something a month. That's a very small percentage. And yeah, you're right. I agree with you. We're in like this little click like this little click. And uh most of the sellers are are they have no idea who Anthony or Kevin or they might know this the Amazon seller forums and that's it. It's reaching those people um from an educational point of view and from a opportunities point of view that a lot of the service providers and education people are are struggling to get those people. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's I think that's I think that's part of the key is because I see it the last Prosper show I was at people come up to my booth there's a guy doing $20 million a year on Amazon private label came up it's like what is who are you guys what's billion dollar sellers I'm like explain it to him and he's like this is our first show to ever go to we've been selling for nine years we didn't know this whole world existed yep I hear it all the time yeah I was amazed um but speaking so you you're saying that the education stuff and thing is going to be a radical change in two years. What do you see uh AI doing to uh what are you seeing you're you're kind of keeping your pulse your hand on the pulse of AI not only just in image creation and but just in general where do you see it going? Do you see this going to a total agentic type of selling future? Do you see AI playing a major role in not just ranking on Amazon but ranking off of Amazon? What do you what what's your what's your thoughts your state what's the Anthony state of the union on uh AI when it comes to e-commerce? I think it's going to dramatically expand the capability of sellers to to check off all of those boxes. Like you're a business owner, you're an Amazon seller, you have all of these boxes that you want to check off. Um AI is going to help you do that. So, if for the past few years it's like I'm focusing on Amazon and I know everyone's telling me I got to go multi-channel and I got to go international, I got to launch new product lines and I want to try to expand. Um, now that I think that AI is going to allow people to do that a lot faster and with a lot more limited resources. So, like don't get me wrong, I still very much believe in education or else I wouldn't be with Titan. But like we are expanding Tik Tok direct to consumer Shopify. You're going to plug in your business, get it dialed in with Amazon. We're very good at that and it works great. Um, but it's going to be like, "Okay, now I'm ready to expand to Shopify. Now I'm ready to go retail." And there's going to be AI that is going to build out that whole strategy way faster um than you've ever done before. I think you're going to see the point uh over the next couple of years where you can easily run a $10 million company uh with a founder and maybe like one director of ops that's basically running a team of agents and you're going to see 30 40 $50 million companies with less than five employees. That's where I think we're going. I do I I do too. I think that's exactly where we're going. And I think becoming multi- channelannel, you know, Helium 10 now integrates with Tik Tok. you can just hit a button in your listings from Amazon. They trans they they translate them to the Tik Tok world and uh there and then the Shopify. I think those are the three. Um, you know, some people would throw Walmart or retail into that mix, but if you're going to start, I think it's Tik Tok shop and for discoverability and then, uh, for the standalone and and the branding, Shopify, and then after that, maybe consider Walmart or retail or or unless an opportunity just presents itself, uh, you know, in the middle of that. But I think that's where people need to go and and be omni channel. It's a whole new world. And and and then a AEO I think is huge, too. optimizing not just on Amazon, but optimizing off of Amazon uh and Google. And I think you're going to start seeing chat GBT and Plexi and Claw and those guys driving a lot more of the top ofunnel traffic over to Amazon than just people going straight to Amazon and typing. And I think that's going to be an important place for people to uh optimize too. Can I say one more thing? Yeah. I I also think there's a a big possibility and even Jeff Bezos has I know he doesn't run Amazon anymore, but he's alluded to this. I think there's also a world where um Amazon actually gets you know I don't want to say completely goes away but you think about this right people have very strong attachments to their political beliefs or certain causes or whatever and if I say you know you can already see cracker barrel change their logo stock drops like American Eagle does this gene ads people don't like it barrel changed it back right there's all this public people not just based on a brand, hey, you know what? Screw Amazon. If I'm buying a product, most people buying products online don't realize that when I buy a product for $30, only $10 goes to this seller and $10 goes to ads and $10 goes to Amazon as fees. um giving me the option to say, "Hey, I want to support US businesses." Even if the product's not made in US, I want to support US businesses. Um I want to know where my money's going. Screw Amazon. I have issue with Amazon. I don't like Amazon. I don't want 30, 40, 50% of what I'm spending on a product going to Amazon. that there is going to emerge whether it's an AI agent that does the shopping for you or a new platform that is going to give uh a lot more control to the customer in terms of where the money is broken down in terms of how they spend. And I don't think something like that would be possible without AI. Amazon has such a dominant position, but I think you're going to see certain platforms totally swap uh because of of of AI. Not saying Amazon will ever go away completely, but it'll be different. No, Amazon's got their hands on too much stuff from TV to entertainment to AWS to everything. But I I do see where Amazon people going to Amazon first to do a search. If they very specifically know what they want, they're going to do that. But for top of for discovery and for recommendations, I think less and less people are going to go to Amazon. That's why Rufus, they have came out with Rufus. But I think more and more are going to go to their browser where you have fully integrated agentic browsers and they're going to ask questions there. They're going to then direct to Amazon. Amazon's going to become more of a fulfillment type of thing and their fulfillment infrastructure. You can't duplicate that. You can't beat that. So, I think that's their that's their biggest moat. But I do think you'll see an increase a decrease in traffic to Amazon itself for the initial uh initial search. I think that's going to be slowly diminishing and diminishing. But cool. Well, Anthony, this is uh been been awesome having you on, man. Uh if people want to follow you or reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that? LinkedIn or or where where where do they go? I mean, I don't want to set any false expectations, so you guys can send me messages and I'll do my best. If you just follow up over and over, I'll uh probably get back, but I'm on Instagram, Anthony Kofrand. You can find me on LinkedIn, just I think it's Tony. Francesco. um Facebook, just look around, you can find me. Uh if you ever see me at an event, uh or in person, feel free to come up. I just am not great at answering my phone, as Kevin knows. Uh but I'm a really, you know, fun guy to be around. I don't mind talking to anyone. And uh I'm so happy to be in this industry. So happy to know you, Kevin. It's been a wild ride, man. Like, seriously, it's been freaking fun. It's It's been It's always changing. That's what I like about it. It's never the same. Never the same. Well, cool, man. I'm sure I'll see you uh maybe I'll see you at Market Masters uh next month. Uh you never know and uh here in November, but uh if not, I'll see you at uh some of some other event somewhere along the way. I'm sure we will, Kevin. Thanks again for having me on and have a great day. Appreciate it, man. I agree with Anthony that we're going to see a lot of change in the next two years selling on Amazon. It's going to be exciting times to see where this goes, but I think it's going to become much more efficient and much more profitable for those that can survive. It's exciting times, like I said, exciting times also to be listening to the AM podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back again next week with another awesome episode next Thursday with uh Rob Stanley. So, be sure to check that out and go back and check out some of the past episodes as well. If you like this one, be sure to make sure you didn't miss something. And there's been a lot of awesome guests over the last three and a half years I've been doing this. Go back and uh peruse that library here on YouTube or on Shopify or Apple Podcast and check those out as well. Don't forget to subscribe to the billiondollar sellers newsletter, billiondollscellers.com and check out Market Masters happening November 13th to the 17th in Austin. You can get information at billiondollersummit.com. We'll see you again next week. Heat. Heat. Heat.