5 Tools to Build Viral Video Ads With AI | Andrew Erickson

5 Tools to Build Viral Video Ads With AI | Andrew Erickson Speaker 3: AI has changed everything and sellers who know how to use it are winning the game. In this episode, we break down the exact tools and workflows Andrew Erickson uses to create high converting video ads in minutes. Plus how he's using AI to navigate tariffs, automate sourcing and scale smarter. Our guest is an engineer turned entrepreneur. He's created several multi-million dollar brands. He's designed and launched over a hundred private label brands. And as a head coach over at the Titan Network Mastermind, he shares his expert strategies and insights to groom the next generation of successful entrepreneurs. So please welcome Andrew Erickson in just a second. Are you spending more on Amazon ads and getting less return? There's a smarter way to grow and without increasing your budget. Levanta's affiliate shift calculator shows what you could do if you really allocate just a portion of your ad spend into affiliate marketing. If you're an Amazon seller doing over $5 million a year, This is for you. And guess what? It's free. All you have to do is click on the link in the description to go to your custom forecast today. If you have any questions or comments, you can throw them over in the comments section. And now let's bring in, we'll sit back, relax, and then we can bring in Andrew Erickson. Speaker 1: All right, Norm, excited to be here. Thank you, thank you for having me. Speaker 3: Hey, you know, it's a pleasure. It's always great talking with you. I don't know if it's just your attitude. There's something in the air that I just go, man, this guy knows his stuff. Unknown Speaker: You know what it is. Speaker 3: It's when you came out on stage with, you know, the other guys with the beard at the Titan conference. Speaker 1: Yeah, so before Norm came on stage, we had a Titan Mastermind Network conference and four of us all dressed up with the same beard and glasses. And that's a foreshadowing to what might happen later in the hour, though. Uh-oh. Speaker 3: All right, now you got me nervous. All right, Andrew, why don't we just get into this? You're deep into AI. And you've been playing around with it for some time and you're constantly coming up with new things. Speaker 1: I tell people that I have sort of like reverse ADD. Where I get like obsessed with things and I can't put them down and I can't like stop. And of course the YouTube algorithm also like knows what tickles my brain and feeds more of it to me. And so I just been obsessed with AI for the last two years, especially when ChatGPT 3.5 came out. So I was, whatever that was, the beginning of 24 or something. And so yeah, I love it. I'm always looking for new things. And we've just, we have so many of our flows now that we, in our, in my business that are using AI constantly, right? And we don't, of course we don't want AI, we don't want to sound like AI. So that's kind of like, that's like the professional way of doing it. It's like use AI, but use AI to make sure it doesn't sound like AI, right? Speaker 3: It's a challenge. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. And there's this new one, the big thing I'm excited about. You know how like when the technology comes out, there's like there's four stages of AI, what I found, four stages of all technology, but really with AI. That's the, it doesn't work at all. It sucks. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 1: Right. The, it's interesting, but not useful. You know, it's like, oh wow, that's really cool. I can't really use it yet. It's not quite there. Then there's the, wow, this is amazing. This is augmenting like my professional who knows how to use this and knows how to make this like bigger and better and do a great job with it. It makes them better. And then the fourth step is you don't need no people anymore, right? AI just takes over the entire process, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: And video right now is in that stage of going from interesting to like, oh my gosh, this is 10xing my flow with the, if you know a little bit about marketing and videos and how to stitch things together. The AI is just like, this is the year. 2025 is a year of video. Speaker 3: This is, I guess, my first question really is, where have you seen the changes over the last months or even weeks? I mean, it's constantly changing. I'm on top of AI. I love it. I'm doing all sorts of things with it. Not probably to the extent that you are. But I'd like to get what you're seeing. Like what's the big difference from three months ago to now? Speaker 1: The two big things I think in the last since You know, basically, whatever, since the year started, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Look at January versus April, April, May that we're in right now. And the big thing is agentic AI, right? So that's using like little agents, right? That's starting to become much more mainstream now. And so it used to be that, you know, you can only let the agents run by themselves for a few minutes. It kind of worked, kind of didn't. But now they can run for hours by themselves without needing intervention. And there's a lot of Chinese versions that are working pretty well. And the big one right now that I've used that works like shockingly well is Manus. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1: You've heard about that. Speaker 3: I'm sure. Yeah. Oh yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. That one works really well. And of course the, the other ones I'm using a lot of right now, the Manus, you know, some of these things like you just let it run by itself. It doesn't, again, it's very interesting. It's semi useful, but it doesn't have that. I still like having a little bit more of the control. I'm also using make.com. Right now. Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: And it's great because like he really pulls AI in very easily. You can pull stuff from social, you can pull stuff from email campaigns, you can and you can kind of like bring it in, change it, use AI, and then resend it out. And that's been it's been great. Speaker 3: Yeah, with with make the other thing I like about it. I started using make probably about a year ago. And I'm sitting there going, how the hell do I do this? It's looks so complicated. They give you incredible tutorials. So it's so easy like once you understand make you can do anything with it and it's less expensive. I think it's still less expensive than Zapier. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm on the $10 a month plan and it's great and I have five other. Apps I'm using right now to make video that we can go through and I have a little slide deck here for me to run through it really quick to show my process of how I'm making AI videos. Speaker 3: Sure. So right now, I just want to, you know, mention that you've mentioned two tools that you guys should check out, Manus and Make. But let's talk about these five tools. Speaker 1: Yes, the five. Here's your good clip. Here's your snack for you, right? The five best AI tools for creating AI videos right now are using a regular text LLM. So ChatGPT or Grok both work very well. MidJourney is for image creation. We use images to kind of seed our videos. We use 11 labs for voice. It's the best by far for voice. There's other apps that do voice, but 11 labs, the best. Also, all these things are very cheap, you know, free or $10 a month kind of thing. Runway ML is fantastic for, that's actually the video part. And then I use CapCut, which is a subsidiary of TikTok to edit all the stuff together. And that's my flow. ChatGPT and SlashCrock. Mid-journey, 11 labs, runway ML. CapCut. Speaker 3: Forget the fluff. Watch Andrew Erickson break down his full AI video workflow using just five tools that cost less than $30 a month. Speaker 1: So AI videos, this is just a shortened version of something I presented at a conference in Cancun a few weeks ago. So the thing that is just amazing is that there is this competition I saw a few months ago. It was 100% AI generated content. For an ad, for an advertisement, these are all 15, 30 second ads done by real professionals. They don't use any studios. You know, it's again, it's all 100% AI. Now there is a lot of, there are professionals who are editing this. Just like I said, the AI tools, like a good tool partnered with a good worker who knows the flow and knows how to create stuff. That's where AI video is right now. It's not just a push one button, it's all done. It's a like, let's do this flow and figure out how to twist and make it great. This is kind of an example. This is a good inspiration. Speaker 3: Oh, and by the way, Andrew, if you could just describe it because the podcast, they're only going to get the audio version. Speaker 1: Oh, sure. Yeah. I'll play it and I'll talk over the top of it here. I'll turn it off. What we're seeing here is a whole bunch of culture pop is a soda pop, right? A kind of a fancy soda pop, whatever. And you're seeing a bunch of closeups of the can and it's twisting, there's bubbles and there's all sorts of colors and there's text and everything. Speaker 3: The sound is not coming through, but the picture quality, video quality is very nice. Speaker 1: So it's just amazing. This thing, this is an award-winning video. And I thought, okay, man, this is, looks like it's about ready for us to do it. We see first here at the beginning is this product. This is one of my members inside of Titan Network. She has a patent on this product and it's a little gold clip. You use it to basically tie the back of your necklace so that it's the right length. Very simple, nice. It's kind of a nice little elegant thing. All of these Videos here all came from still images. Still image was created by the AI and then I use RunwayML to animate the still image. Then you edit all that stuff together and you can also create a script, an ad script. I use ChatGPT to create the ad script and we'll go through that here in a second, like what the prompts look like and stuff. We use ChatGPT and Grok to create the ad script and then use 11Labs to create the video or the audio and then make this whole video. So it's pretty, pretty cool. The workflow use ChatGPT or Grok to create the ad script, MidJourney for image creation, 11Labs for the voices, Runway for video and CapCut for the editor. A tip here is just keep everything short, like small clips together. Already people, you know, you want like short clips already. That's just what people like to pay attention to. Also, the longer clip goes the more it gets Weird. Here's my prompt for the script. Help me create a 10 second ad script for my product. Create five different scripts. And so what we'd like to do here, so 10 seconds, for whatever reason, the video, the ad scripts they create, they're twice as long as they should be. If you want a 20 second ad, ask for a 10 second ad. I don't know why they do that. That's just what I found, right? And so in this example for the special necklace shortener, it's get the perfect layered look instantly. Our necklace shorteners adjust chain length effortlessly. No jewelry needed. Just clip, style, and shine. So make your own video. We then go to MidJourney. MidJourney is an AI image creation tool. And the one thing I've found that works really well to create MidJourney prompts is you ask ChatGPT to create a MidJourney prompt for you, right? So there's, if you go onto the GPT store, there is its own custom GPT created for mid-journey and it works fantastic. You just type in mid-journey, you'll see it. So that one works really well. And there's a direct link here too, if you guys just want to grab that link. And here's an example of the prompt that I use to get the women in this video ad. I won't read the whole thing, but it starts off as a photograph of a millennial woman, light skin tone, short wavy hair, dainty pearl necklace from her neck, blah, blah, blah. And then has a bunch of camera and lighting prompts to kind of get that nice professional quality. And then, uh, and then also has a few little kind of tags for make sure the ratio is correct and all that fun stuff. Speaker 3: What if you're not a photographer? How, like, how can you get those prompts? I, I went through, uh, I am a photographer, so. I'm lucky when I'm writing a prompt, I can talk about the F-stop, the aperture. Will that help you with using this custom GPT? Speaker 1: No, not at all. You don't need to know anything about photography, about videography. You don't need to know any of that stuff. That's why the prompt is so great. So like, let's put a nice guy with a long white beard. Speaker 3: Not Santa. Speaker 1: Not Santa. And so what it's doing here is I'm showing inside the custom GPT and it's going to create a prompt that looks exactly what I just said. It's going to have description of the person, description of the video, description of the lighting, description of the weird little tags you have to put in there to get the right ratio and stuff. But have you tried any of these things before, Norm? Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Exactly what you're doing. I just did an animated little short with Kevin and I and I played on teaching Kevin how to smoke cigars. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Speaker 3: It turned out really good. Speaker 1: Love it. Yeah, here we go. There we go. Now it worked. We'll create five different prompts, right? So with AI, it's always going to create a lot of content and then you pick the best one from there. So this prompt is a portrait of a kind elderly man with a long white beard, gentle smile, wearing rustic woolen sweater. I don't know if you wear wool sweaters, but near a cozy fireplace. The background features a log cabin interior, blah, blah, blah. It's really long. Then it talks about the Gold, Dutch Golden Age Inspiration, 85 millimeter lens. It doesn't really matter what that stuff means. What I do is I just, I don't even read it. I just copy it, go to Discord, then create it on Discord. Speaker 3: So you're not just creating in ChatGPT anymore? Like you're going over to Midjourney to do it? Speaker 1: So you can use ChatGPT's image creation tool. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Right. The problem with it though, is that's slow. So with Midjourney, you can create 20, 30 images in 90 seconds. Three minutes. Whereas ChatGPT, which I love, and the image creation tool is good, you can create one every two minutes. Then I also get blocked on it. I have the pro account, but I get blocked. I'll say, you already created six images this hour. You're timed out now. I'm like, ugh. Speaker 3: And that's with the pro. That's with the $200 a month. Speaker 1: Oh, no, the $20 a month one. Speaker 3: Oh, okay. Okay. Speaker 1: It's good. It's just six is not enough and it takes 30 minutes to create those images. For me, I need the volume. I find that, you know, From quantity comes quality. You're talking about AI. Which image tool are you using, Norm? Speaker 3: I'll use MidJourney. I'll use Image, IMG Creator. I don't know if you've heard that. That's kind of in the background. Speaker 1: The chat here is saying, I can see how this works for static products, but what about something like clothing or something that moves like a bicycle? RunwayML is starting to get pretty good at that kind of stuff. The more moving parts, the more chances it screws up, right? So moving bicycle, if you want the hands to move and the face to be correct and the hair to flow and the dress to flow and the background to move and the feet to pedal, but a face talking or something moving slowly, that kind of stuff works really well on RunwayML right now. Here's an example of what the script or what the images look like when they're generated. So you can see I'm a woman here sitting at a dinner table. One thing we can make, we can make the faces consistent now too. What I do is I generate a face first and then I do the expand on it. And that makes the face very consistent. So you can see this woman is, her face is the same on every, everyone there. Speaker 3: So what was that face? You just used the prompt expand. Stay ahead of the competition and learn how Amazon sellers are using Amazon Marketing Cloud or AMC. Watch my newest episode right here with Manzoor Nooroozi. And don't forget to subscribe. Remember new episodes are published every Monday. Speaker 1: Yeah. So on mid journey, you can, you know, zoom out. And so what I do is I generate a face. So that's the same face, right? And, but I just, I just have it framed kind of above the eyebrows, inside the ears and down to the lips, right? Cause that's, that's the kind of the frame of the face, right? So from that frame of the face, you can ask Midjourney and Photoshop and a bunch of these other tools do it, but I use Midjourney to expand. So what I do is I take that face, the face of a woman who I, you know, my avatar is a woman. I take that woman's face and I'll say, okay, expand this view, but expand it so she's sitting at a dinner table or expand it so she's sitting in a car or expand it so she's at the front of a classroom. And that works really well to have a consistent character throughout all of your images. Speaker 3: We are at the bottom of the hour so we do something completely different in this podcast and that is at the top of the podcast we give away a prize every podcast. It's called the Wheel of Kelsey. To enter it it's hashtag WheelOfKelsey and to get a second entry you just have to tag two people and you'll get that second entry. Today's prize it's This is something I'm giving away and that is an hour-long consultation. It could be about brand, it could be about video, photography, AI, your Amazon listings, retail, anything that you want to spend that hour on. Anybody who joins is going to be entered in today's draw and then we're going to put it into our newsletter, send it out and then we'll give another opportunity for people to join. We did this the other week and we got some really great response. You enter and then we'll put you into the draw and next week for the wheel, you'll see who wins. And also I think let's go to a sponsor and then we'll be right back. Tired of negative reviews dragging down your star rating in sales? TraceFuse has your back. Traceview specializes in removing non-compliant Amazon reviews the right way. I'm talking 100% compliant with Amazon terms of service. And with over 11,000 reviews removed for 400 plus brands, they know what it takes to protect your reputation and boost conversions. And here's the best part. You only pay for performance. That means you only pay for reviews they successfully remove. No contracts, no monthly fees, just results. Plus, as a Lunch With Norm listener, you get two reviews removed for free. Ready to clean up your reviews? Visit TraceFuse.ai. That's TraceFuse, T-R-A-C-E F-U-S-E dot A-I. Speaker 1: So I gotta tell you a story. So Norm seems like a nice guy when you hear him talk and, you know, hostings and all this different stuff. And that is not an act. It is true. Norm really is an awesome, nice guy. He really, like, he's very, very authentic. Like it's not, I don't know. I just, I'm, I'm just. Speaker 3: I paid him to say that by the way. Speaker 1: And here's an example. So Norm came out for a conference a year or two ago in San Diego. And I live in San Diego. I came out for this conference of the Titan Network, where I'm a coach inside of. My daughter at the time was three and a half, came over to my house. Speaker 3: She was sleeping, yeah. Speaker 1: She was napping and it was November. So we were kind of like, we're beginning of Christmas season. And I was like, Norm, can you do something for me? He's like, of course, anything for you. I said, okay, I have a Santa hat and a Santa outfit. Do you mind being Santa for my three and a half year old daughter? He's like, heck yeah, let's go. And then when she woke up from her nap, I was like, Eliza, look who's in the living room. And she was just completely enamored with Santa Claus being right there in her personal home. And it was just absolutely amazing. So she loved it. Speaker 3: She was so shy at the beginning, and then she warmed up to me. And I remember it was, it was really cute. When I was leaving, she was actually holding on to my knee. Oh, that was fun. Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. Love it. Cool. Alrighty. So I'm going to load up my screen here. Speaker 3: So we've gone through ChatGPT in the prompt and now we're going into mid-journey. Then we went, now we're starting with 11 Labs. Speaker 1: Yes. 11 Labs is fantastic for voice. It's also very, very cheap. This is, this is all these tools are, Free or $10 or $30 a month, right? So they're very, very approachable. And Eleven Labs, I think you get like 20 generations for free per month. And I have the $5 or $10 a month package. And it allows me to, I've never hit the limit on that package. So it's on that subscription level. It's hundreds, it's a lot. There's a giant library of voices you can pick from. You just put your script in. I use ChatGPT or Grok. Grok I find to be pretty good. Speaker 3: Unhinged. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fun. Speaker 3: It's great. It makes me blush. Speaker 1: Some people don't like Elon for whatever reason. I don't care. I just like the tool is great. So I'll use the tool. Speaker 3: Have you ever used Grok Unhinged? Speaker 1: Yes. That's why I like Grok so much is that they don't. Speaker 3: It's crazy. Speaker 1: Yeah. There's just less filters on it. And I don't know. It's good. It just it's less PG-13. So so anyways, there's some settings here that I found to work really well. If you're making these things, you speed up the voice a little bit. You want to keep the exaggeration up a little bit. And so the exaggeration is kind of gives it the more of the and oh, huh. Let's see, those kind of weird little exact, those little not talking things that adds in there and it makes it sound really real when you hear those non-voice sounds. So and again with all these things from quantity comes quality. So you create 20 different versions and then you pick your favorite one of those. And finally, we come to RunwayML. So there's two different flows inside of RunwayML that we do. One, so everything in my demo video is using Gen 3. Gen 4 just came out like three, two weeks, two, three weeks ago, and it is substantially better. Shockingly better, right? And so this, the next, what I said, when we went from, remember the four levels of AI, we went from use that can't do anything to interesting, but not useful to extremely useful. I think we're basically kind of just took that step just now with RunwayML going from interesting But not useful to like very useful that just happened like the end of March, right? The beginning of April is when they released that. So check it out. It's really cool. And then what we do is we generate a video by just uploading a still image and that way we kind of, you know, use, in our case, we used a woman with a necklace and you just add in an action and a camera movement. You can even use ChatGPT to create the prompt for you too. And so the prompt I used was woman talking slowly. That allowed me to create the woman sitting at the table and her head is moving. Now the second step, You take that video that you just created where her head's moving a little bit and her shoulders are kind of moving and maybe there's somebody walking in the background or a light turns on in the background and then you use the lip sync feature. That allows you to upload the audio that you create with Eleven Labs. Lip-sync it to that video and it moves her mouth and it purses her lips and it changes all that stuff and it syncs it and it's shockingly good. That's the flow. That's the flow you do that. So you first need to create the video. What I found is a lip-sync video. It doesn't animate her body. So she was like completely still like a robot and then her mouth would move like this and the mouth looks good, but everything else was a robot. Animate the image and then lip sync the animated image and that works very well. That's it. And then of course, the very end, you clip it all together with CapCut. CapCut's a really easy app. You can just like kind of drag and drop. It's great. It's free or freemium. It's also freemium. All the features are great. And then if you want the extra little filter thingies, it's really cheap. I don't know, 60 bucks a year or something like that. So it's great. Speaker 2: That's it. Speaker 3: Very cool. Now, I don't know if you've ever used faceless videos or produced faceless videos, but it's something that we do. And I use an app called Sibley. Oh, it's Awesome. Oh my God. Yeah, it's S-Y-B-A-L-L-Y, inexpensive, and you can create these incredible faceless videos. So just for stories, stories that I've done, you can create your own avatar and all of a sudden, like you know that with the newsletter, I always put out these personal stories. Well, I can start doing that. We're in Sibley and it's very inexpensive to do. It lip syncs automatically. It's very cool. And the other thing that I'm using, don't forget to subscribe and leave me a comment saying I subscribed and I'll personally reply to your comment. One of the things that I do with the podcast, Kelsey and I have been playing around with this and it's a notebook. It's been around for a while. It's advancing all the time. So notebook LM. And what I do is I take something from the podcast or the newsletter and I get it to discuss. So they go back and forth, the people, the narrators, and they talk about, you know, your four points that you were talking about a bit earlier. And I'm going to have it do that. And it'll talk about how accurate it was and how they liked Andrew's point of view, blah, blah, blah, blah. It'll give me a series of frequently asked questions that I should post about it that I can add to the newsletter. But what I love is the audio. So I can interact now and say, well, with those four points, the first point, what did you think about it? And I can actually interview the interviewers, the people who are narrating. And what I do with that is I can put that into HeyJen. And what I've been doing is I've taken that and I've got the female who is talking and is kind of a laid back lady. You know, kind of, she looks like a journalist kind of just sitting on a couch. And then another guy, and it takes some editing because there's a little bit of ums and you know, those fluff words that they use. And you can get them not to say that as well. But so it could go back and forth between them. I got to get an editor to do it. But at the end of the day, they look so bloody real. It's so cool. So I can use that as a separate podcast if I wanted to. Or I could use it in the newsletter or like Kelsey and I have been saying, let's do a deep dive in our newsletter. And by the way, guys, if you're interested in this, I was talking back and forth and, you know, I'm saying, hey, want to do this for sort of our Thursday newsletter or our Wednesday newsletter and just put a deep dive. So, hey, let's pick a part. Let's put it into Notebook LM. Let's see what it has to say. And we'll bring out all sorts of more research into what you said, Andrew. And it's just another way of helping build the community on certain things. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. And like you said, the podcast style audio creation thing it makes, it's crazy, crazy good. And we were doing some real estate projects here in San Diego, and the new zoning laws came out, and they're really complicated. It's like 80 pages of all these like, if then, in the case of this, comply with the blah, blah, blah. I was like, oh boy, this is, this is tough to read through. Right. And I uploaded that and a few other, like a couple of news articles and then also the actual, script or the actual like law or whatever it was, the, the, the ordinance, I think is what they call it, the ordinance into the, into notebook LM. And then I had two people discussing it together and so much easier to follow. Right. Cause they like, they interrupt each other and like, wait, can you clarify that? I don't quite get it. It's beautiful. And then I got, I interrupt, I'm like, hi. And then they, it's silly. Cause they're like, oh, we have a, We have a guest speaker coming in and it's silly that they're kind of like playing out the podcast thing, but I'm like, hi, I have a question about blah, blah, blah. They're like, oh, that's a great question. Let's discuss. It's incredible. Speaker 3: So yeah, if you haven't heard of it, it's a product by Google and it's just called Notebook LM. Check it out. We'll put a link in there for you. And that's another one that we could do a deep dive into. As a matter of fact, you know what I'm going to do? I'm gonna ask NotebookLM to do a deep dive and it was made for educators. So it gives you a course curriculum. It gives you frequently asked questions, but it's something that I think we should look a lot deeper into. And by the way, if you don't look at the Google Labs, you gotta. They've got so many cool tools in there that they're not promoting. And if you can be like on top of them and be the innovator, people are going to wonder how the hell you're doing things. And there's some really cool labs in there. And maybe that's what we can share in the show notes and get you a list of what there is right now that you can use for your brands. So there you go. There's just a couple of little things now. Speaker 1: Love it. Speaker 3: Let's see. Let's talk about tariffs. Should you wait out the tariffs or move fast? Andrew Erickson shares how he's using data, not gut feelings, to make smart sourcing calls. Speaker 1: Yeah, dude, it's been frustrating. It sucks. It's kind of existential for us, honestly. Our business model is import from China and sell in the US, right? It's exactly where the terrorists are attacking and we've tried sourcing in the U.S. I did do some sourcing in the U.S. and we can't even source our products for under our retail price. Speaker 3: Wow. Can I give you an example, Andrew? So Quinton, you've never met Quinton. He's my son. He came down the other day and he wanted to buy a rain jacket. Okay. So we went to the store to get a rain jacket and it shows pre-tariff and with the tariffs. This is a jacket coming in from the US, from the US. It was $118 of tariffs put on it. It's crazy. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So it's frustrating. And what we're doing, there's two, I'd say there's three solutions we're doing right now. And this is why, you know, I figured it'd be good to talk about it, you know, the fun, sexy AI stuff that's like the new cutting-edge, silly kind of fun stuff, but also the very practical stuff, right? Because I like to have both. For me, I always think of it like it's dessert and vegetables, right? The practical, youthful stuff and then there's also fun. So there's three things we're doing right now. Of course, one of them is DDP. That has a separate company doing the tariffs for us. I'm very nervous about that though, because I kind of know that they're skirting the law a little bit. We are using that, but it's, I don't know. I don't like having my business built on that kind of infrastructure, right? So that's, but DDP is great. Right now, if you want to get, you should be able to get, we're getting quotes of DDP about $1.60 per kilogram. Just to put it out there so you can anchor, because some people in my coaching program, they were getting like $3, $2.50. I'm like, no, we can get sub $2 for sure. These quotes we're getting, we're not at a certain scale where we get something special discount, right? We're importing 2,000 units at a time. That's, I don't know, 10 cubic meters or something of eight pallets. It's not, it's not, we're not doing like for that kind of quote, we're not doing like full containers. Right. So, so it should be pretty approachable to most people. So that's a good anchor. That's a good practical tip for you. Speaker 3: Just in case you don't know, DDP is just an acronym for Delivered Duties Paid. Speaker 1: Yes, duties paid by someone else is not you. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: And it's legally separated from you. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: So that's one solution. Okay. And then the other thing is I'm using AI to find suppliers outside of China. And so I'm using the deep research one. So ChadGBT has one, and Grok has one, and Manus, ironically, the Chinese. Bot is helping me find factories outside of China. And so we're already, we have a sourcing team. So the sourcing team's already, we already have one factory in Vietnam that we're using. We're trying to use them more, right? Vietnam's good. We prefer China minus the tariffs, but Vietnam's good. Very similar to China. And then we're also pushing hard on Mexico. And of course, India is also a great one to look at. Speaker 3: How are you finding Mexico? Speaker 1: We use a source in Mexico. It's for whatever reason. Do you know what? Mexico actually is the largest importer to the US. They just exceeded China's imports like two years ago. So they're basically equal, but Mexico is technically more. So there's more manufacturing in Mexico or more importers, I should say, from Mexico than China. And I live in San Diego right next to the Mexican border. So I wanted to connect with a factory, but they, and I cannot, I had such a hard time finding them. I went to a meetup, a random meetup for tech people in San Diego. And I met a guy who helps you find factories in Mexico. They're nothing to do with tech. And I used that guy for a while. So it's just like a guy connected me to a guy. We call it very unscalable model. That factory worked okay for a little bit. They kept raising our prices and like it was hard to work with them and the whole thing was kind of tricky. We went back to China. Now we're coming back to Mexico. We're finding, you know, find me factories in Mexico that I can source my product. My product is made of this. We have this. We have this certain compliance we have to follow. We're expecting to do, you know, a thousand units a month or whatever it is. Help me find a factory. And so far it's been good. Not great, but good. And so we're talking to factories and we're getting quotes and we're finding it that way. The other one that has worked well for us is an app I just found out about called Nearshore.ai. Speaker 3: Oh, never heard of it. Speaker 1: Nearshore.ai. And I don't know why it's .ai. It doesn't really have any AI component to it. It's just a regular website. CB in the chat asked, do you have to pay the cartel? There is legitimate issues with corruption in Mexico. I mean, there are a lot of countries, maybe even ours, right, that you have some potential corruption. But honestly, the cartels, they kind of, it was really bad about 10 years ago, 15 years ago. They've definitely settled down quite a bit in the last five years. So I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. It's not a major concern with Mexico. It's definitely a minor concern though. So far, I've not had any issues with that. You know, you've got to be a little on your toes with that too, you know. Speaker 3: That's like many countries though. Speaker 1: Exactly. So that, and then the last thing I wanted to add on the tariffs. The other thing we're doing is just not importing this stuff right now. Waiting, you know, we've lost stuff just sitting at the factory, hoping the tariff goes away. But I need to make informed business decisions on how long I can hold that inventory. Because it might make sense for me to import half of it, or a third of it, or just all of it. Because if the tariff's going to be here for the next two years, all right, well, nothing's going to change in the next two years, so let me just import the whole thing. And so what I'm using right now to help me make informed decisions, and this is not, I'm not trying to be political, I'm just trying to be realistic, and how do we use, I'm a big data guy, big numbers and data, how do we use numbers and data to make good decisions? And the thing I like using right now is this website called polymarket.com. And it's a betting website. The betting website is, people have, let me see if I can share my screen here, so it makes sense. It has a little poll. And yeah, so you can see here, hopefully, well, I don't know, because I'll describe it for the audio listeners. But we're looking at this poll, this bet, this bet will look at what will the tariff be on April 30th. And this is created the day after the big tariffs were announced, right? And so you can see here, you know, there's a lot of noise. I'm just kind of showing you like what it looks like as you come to an actual answer because April 30th is today, right? And so we know the answer, but you can see as you look back in history on this, we can see what it was looking like. And three, four days, some people said, oh, well, you know, he got rid of the first tariff, the liberation day tariff in four days. So maybe the Chinese tariff will go away in four or five days also. And some people are saying, no, it's going to be years. We were saying it's going to be months, weeks. We don't know, right? Well, here's a way to inform our decision. And we look at this and just a few days, like a week after the tariff was in place. It's showing what do they expect the tariff to be, and it's saying there's a 60% chance that it's lasting throughout the entire month of April. We use this data to make informed decisions in the middle of April where we said, okay, there's a really good chance that the tariff is going to be very high still for weeks, right, at this point, and so we're going to, since we know that there's a really good chance it's going to stay, We're going to make the decision that we're going to have to import it through DDP or whatever and we're going to do a small amount because the next poll I'm going to show you here in a second will kind of give another indication of what it might look like next month and next six months, right? So you can kind of see as we get closer and closer and closer to April 30th, there's less and less chance that it's going to go away. So it's kind of growing from 60% and then a week ago it was 80% and then this week it's 95%. Of course, today is the 30th and so it's at 99.9% chance that it's going to be still high, still at the 145%. Now it's flawed because it's a betting website. But this to me takes in all the headlines, takes in all the random people, takes up the foreigners and the domestic people and the Republicans and Democrats and the libertarians and all the peoples and it puts all their decisions together and they're betting against each other and I'm using that information from the market to make an informed decision by myself. Speaker 3: Very good. Speaker 1: And then here's one that hopefully is Scottish news. What we're seeing here is will Trump lower the tariff on China? Now, you have to be careful because lower means you can lower it from 145% to 144%. That would technically be lowered, or you could increase it to 200 and lower it down to 190. That would technically be lowering it inside this time period. Okay, well, but again, I'm just using, I kind of put all these pieces together to figure out how likely, how long these things are likely going to stay. And what we see here is that there is a 60% chance it's going to be lowered in the month of May. And we can also kind of see the history on this too. So in the middle of November, it was getting higher. And as we get further and further along, it starts getting less and less chance that it's going to be lowered, but it's still 60% in the month of May. And then people right now are predicting 80% or 70, 80-ish, we'll say 80-ish percent, that's lower by July 30th, so the summer. So the way I interpret this is, you know, I have an applied math degree. So for me, I think of the world in numbers. And so for me, this helps a lot. Maybe people who hate numbers hate this graph, but I love it. What this means to me is that there's an 80% chance or there's a 60% chance that there's basically a 50-50 that the tariff is going to be in place for another month. And there's, I don't know, one in three chance, one in four chance that it's going to be in place all the way through summer. Now that to me means it's worth taking what we're calling evasive maneuvers to get away from the tariff, which means, like I said, DDP and sourcing outside China. If this said there's a 99% chance it's going away in May, we wouldn't necessarily want to pursue that relationship in Mexico. Because by the time we even get the first quote, the tariff might be away. The first sample and the tariff is gone. But this to me is saying that there's a good chance it's going to be here for weeks or small months. And so for us, it's worth our effort to continue looking for We're sourcing outside of China. So anyways, I thought that was just kind of like, I hope that's like a new special thing. Your audience hasn't seen a new way of interpreting it. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's pretty cool. Speaker 1: Practical data to make practical decisions. Speaker 3: Very good, sir. Now, let's see if we could have one of our sponsors, Kelsey, and then we'll get right into a couple of questions. Speaker 2: Start, scale, exit, repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created 58 chapters over 30 illustrations 180 call outs and we quite frankly made this book. For the ADHD entrepreneur, it's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories and has won 12 awards globally. Get your book today either on eBook, paperback, hardcover, or Audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. Speaker 3: All right, very good. If you haven't read that book, by the way, Andrew, it's very good. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah? Speaker 3: Yeah, it's excellent. 26 awards now and he's got workbooks. He's got QR codes. He's a pretty smart guy. All right, Kels, let's get into some questions. Unknown Speaker: So we do have one from Cool Hand here. And how can we find factories in Mexico? Any suggestions? Speaker 1: There's no Alibaba, unfortunately. There's no alibaba.mx or josebaba.mx, right? I wish there was. Please, Latin American entrepreneurs, please make this for us. I would love to pay you a bunch of money if you had a good directory set up. And have some validations. There are some random websites that I've looked at and they're not that great. I'm happy to share them with you if you want. Not a huge endorsement of them, but I can find them for you in a second here. But what has worked for me is using AI to do a search for Mexican factories. That's one. The other one is just Googling it. And then also that website, I actually do like Nearshored with a D, Nearshored.ai. I just Google Nearshored. That's good. It's like $40 a month. That's been the best site so far, but there's nothing like Alibaba, unfortunately. Speaker 3: If you go to the WhatsApp group, Luke, you can You can put a question in there. I know that I have three sourcing agents that I've used in Mexico, so you can DM me for that too, but I believe all three of them are in the WhatsApp group, so check it out there. Unknown Speaker: Okay, and our last question goes back to the video and AI from Simon. So could I make a sales presentation video with my phone and then sharpen it up and replace the background etc? Could I then use this video to create more sales presentations? Speaker 1: Like it's your own face that you're recording? And then editing it. Don't know about that. Runway.ml, it likes using, the best way to use it is with images or just prompting it, right? I haven't seen a feature, at least I haven't explored a feature where you can just like take your face and then use AI to make it better. Do you know, Norm? Speaker 3: I don't know. Something we can explore, Simon, and see if we can get back to you on that. It's probably a way, but I'm not sure. Speaker 1: Maybe look at what Norm mentioned earlier, HeyGen and Syllabi. HeyGen I've used and it works great. I see one more here in the chat. Could you use images at a trade show? Yes. So it does use still images very well. And the demo that I used, all those are still images. Half of them are created by AI and half of them are actually We're here to talk about photographs. One thing I found that works really well for us is if you have a picture of a product, having to do a slight spin, that kind of stuff works very well with runway.ml now. And it even kind of generates like, it's actually pretty good even knowing like what the backside of a product would look like if we're looking at the front side. So obviously, you know, it depends on how intricate the product is. I mean, something like an AirPod case is pretty simple. The front looks like the back, right? But if it's like a very intricate jacket with a bunch of zippers and stuff, maybe it doesn't do it as well, but it's pretty good. Speaker 3: Okay, very good. All right, Andrew, I think that's it. How do people get ahold of you? Speaker 1: LinkedIn is fantastic. I'm Andrew Erickson on LinkedIn. Facebook and Instagram. Instagram, I am the Andrew Erickson. I answer all my DMs. So you're welcome to DM me there. I love talking to people. And then also my email is andrew at the Titan Network. If you want to check out the Titan Network, here is a link. Fantastic place for, we're a top tier network of Amazon sellers. Half the network is doing over seven, two thirds of the network is doing over seven figures a year in sales. And then about 20% are doing eight figures, meaning $10 million or more a year. So it's an elite mastermind. for Amazon sellers, share all the tips and tricks on how to become very successful on Amazon. Speaker 3: Very good organization, very well organized, have some top people in it. So check it out. That's Titan, the Titan. It's Titan Network. It's not the Titan Network, right? It's just TitanNetwork.com. All right, Andrew, thank you so much for being on and sharing this with us today. It's been awesome. Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. And Beardo, it's great talking to you. Go out there and crush it. Speaker 3: All right, Kelsey, anything to say? Unknown Speaker: Well, we've got our Wheel of Kelsey from last week that we need to spin. So if you are entering today's Wheel of Kelsey, we're announcing that next week. So we're going to shuffle these up and see who the winner is. So if you are the winner, please email me kate at lunch with norm.com. This is for Manzur Nerozi's consultation and it looks like Justin Patterson. Speaker 3: All right, and that'll also be published in our newsletter as well. Unknown Speaker: That's right. So congratulations Okay, everybody. Speaker 3: Thanks for joining today. Just remember the YouTube channel We've got two one for long form and then we've got the clips. So if you haven't subscribed we'd always love that new subscription follower With our YouTube channel. It's I think we have two Two, and those are two people that listened today. So it's brand new. If you could go over and these are all nuggets. These are clips that we extract from every podcast and we share over there. And we're looking at probably posting three-ish clips a week over there. So three new nuggets every week. All right, everybody. Thanks a lot for joining us today and we'll see you next Wednesday. Unknown Speaker: I'm Norman Farrar.