#672 - 7 Figures of TikTok Shop Live Sales!

#672 - 7 Figures of TikTok Shop Live Sales! Bradley Sutton: Today, we're talking to one of the TikTok shop sellers who has probably been one of the most successful with TikTok shop live selling. He has sold millions on the platform. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we have got a serious seller on the show here, podcast listener, he tells me, for years, successful Amazon seller, Very successful TikTok shop seller. Jared, how's it going? Welcome to the show. Jared Mortensen: It's going really, really well. I'm super excited to be here. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. As you guys might, maybe if you're just listening to this in the car, maybe we sound a little bit differently. We're here in the Helium 10 office today in the famous tequila room where we film Freedom Ticket and other things because we just filmed a course on TikTok shop. We'll talk a little bit about that later. But first off, since this is your first time on the show, like I usually like to do, like to get a little background. Now, You flew here today from Wichita. Jared Mortensen: Yes. Bradley Sutton: But you said you were from Utah originally? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, I grew up in Southern Utah. Bradley Sutton: Southern Utah, like what about or like, not wait, what is it? What's the one that's right on the top of Nevada? There's like this town on southern Utah and I've done Zumba classes there. Jared Mortensen: St. George? Bradley Sutton: St. Jared Mortensen: George. Bradley Sutton: St. George, Utah. That's right. The hottest Zumba class I ever taught. It was 115 degrees and we're outside. People were like almost passing out. We had to go into this air-conditioned room, but I'll never forget that. St. George, Utah. Jared Mortensen: Hot Zumba. Bradley Sutton: So, yeah. Jared Mortensen: So, I'm about an hour north of St. George. So, a little tiny town called Parowan, about an hour north. It sounds like heroin, but was a peat. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Harrowing Utah, never heard of that before. How long did you live there until? Jared Mortensen: So I lived there 19 years. So that's where I grew up. And then I went and spent a couple of years up in Canada for working for doing a mission for my church. And so I did that. Then I went back to the school down in Southern Utah, Southern Utah University. Bradley Sutton: I say the Saluki? Southern Utah? Jared Mortensen: No, it's the T-Birds. Bradley Sutton: What's the Saluki? There's something that's Saluki is like the weirdest mascot. Yeah, the T-bird. Southern Utah, T-birds, okay. Jared Mortensen: Yeah, it's the most prestigious university in southwestern Utah. Bradley Sutton: What? Which is not very acceptable. The only university in southwestern Utah. What was your major then? Jared Mortensen: I studied finance. Bradley Sutton: Finance? Okay, so what were you trying to be? Jared Mortensen: I liked math, but I liked math with dollar signs, but I started as a math major and then I switched to finance and so I wanted to Yeah, I'm not sure. I wanted to move into some type of business at that time. I worked at an aerospace company to put myself through college. And so, I studied engineering there, but the engineering program wasn't accredited there at the university. And so, I really was interested in aerospace. And so, I did a minor in engineering and then a major in finance. Cool. Bradley Sutton: And upon graduation, did you get into that field at all? Jared Mortensen: Yeah. So, I went to work for Boeing in That's why I ended up in Wichita, Kansas. I went to work in a business development program there in Wichita for Boeing and worked for them for a year. Then the division was sold to a private equity company from Canada. I went with the spin-off. It became Spirit Aerosystems. Anybody that flies in a 737, those are all made in Wichita. Nobody knows that, but they're made in Wichita. Then they're trucked up to Seattle and they put the wings on up there. Bradley Sutton: What's that 737? The one where the doors were falling off like in Alaska? That was after you left. Jared Mortensen: I was at Spirit Aerosystems for a while and then I actually left and started a business in Idaho for a while. I sold furniture, bedroom dinings, furniture, pool tables, random stuff. Then the housing market crashed and I went back to Spirit, did that for a while. Then I went to Coke Industries, an oil and gas company. For a while, and then I went to Textron Aviation. So, I was there seven years. I worked in finance, operations, supply chain. So, it was aerospace for like 20 years. And then I got recruited to work at a pet products company in Wichita, which is totally random, and a private equity-backed pet products company that we put together. And one of the businesses that we purchased was an Amazon pure play. It was a They guys started selling dog beds and cat scratches on Amazon and so that's where I first learned about Helium 10 because they were using it and I learned about selling on Amazon. Bradley Sutton: Did you start your own business on Amazon? You were working for a company that you were kind of like optimizing for them. Now then, was it while you were doing that, did you start saying like, shoot, I could do this on my own or I want to run my own thing instead of just working for the man? Was that the thought process there or how did you start your own e-commerce business? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, well, that business that we purchased, we brought these guys in that really understood Amazon and I saw that Hey, they had gone from nothing to $18 million a year in like six years, like on Amazon, without a warehouse, without offices, just working from home. And then they took our portfolio of pet products and then they blew it up. So Walmart was our top customer when we first joined, but those guys really just took these products and supercharged it. So then Amazon became the largest platform or customer within the business. And so, I'm like, hey, there's a lot of opportunity here. And so, as we got closer to exiting, then I'm like, we want to go and do something here. And so, that's where I was. I'm always thinking about products, like, can I sell this? Everything I look at, I'm like, how much does it cost to make that? And so, I'm always looking for opportunities to make products better. And so, that's, yeah, it's just what can I sell and what can we make money at? Bradley Sutton: Yeah. So, what year Did you launch your own Amazon product? Jared Mortensen: Well, I started designing stuff in 2021 and then it took a while and that started kind of during the COVID stuff. I was hardcore designing stuff for probably six months. Bradley Sutton: This is a brand that you currently have, The Underwire and stuff, so you were designing The Underwire. I don't think that that would have shown up as like an opportunity per se in like Helium 10. How did it come to you where it's like, hey, I need to design some new kind of underwear for you? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, well, men's underwear is traditionally designed as if guys don't have genitals, right? It'd be like if all women's bras were all a training bra. Women are different shapes and sizes. Guys are different shapes and sizes. And so I was actually trying to find products that actually fit better for me. And I literally purchased stuff from all over the world, like thousands of different sets, trying to find things that actually fit. And I just couldn't find things that really fit really well. There's a couple of brands that had some like a pouch product, an external pouch product. And one of them, they had their pouch sizes like Mega Man and Superman or Prime Man or something like that. I'm like, how do you know if you're Mega Man or Prime Man? And most guys don't even know their waist size, let alone this pouch size type thing. And so that's why I was looking to try to find something that was out there. And so that's where I started designing and testing. And I probably reached out to like 50 different factories on Alibaba, sent them designs and did samples. And so it took me a little while to find stuff that actually got the price and the fit and the style that we wanted. Bradley Sutton: So then when you actually put in your first order, it was right in the middle of COVID? Jared Mortensen: Yeah. I mean, it was on the tail end. Bradley Sutton: All right. And then how did your first product launch do on Amazon? You can almost say it's a new invention, a concept. Obviously, underwear has always existed, but that particular kind of me will show some shots right now of some of your product on Amazon for those watching on YouTube. But That would be pretty nerve-wracking. What kind of validation? Did you do any test runs or how did you have the confidence to come in to tackle this existing market that's been around for thousands of years? What gave you the confidence to just move forward? Jared Mortensen: Well, there were some brands that had some pouch products, but now if you look at the reviews, Okay, I like this. It gives me more space, but it's just like still not enough, right? And so they just didn't have enough space. And so some of it is looking at reviews. And that was one thing that we learned from the e-commerce business, my prior business, is that the guys that came into our business in the pet products company were really good at looking at reviews, high selling items with low reviews. They're going in and redesigning those products, fixing those issues. Based off those reviews, so using Helium 10, other analysis to really identify those products where there's these gaps and then going and fixing those and then launching the products. And so it's really just like that, right? So you're finding a product where there's, I mean, find that most guys wear underwear, right? So there's some guys that don't, but so it's a pretty large market. It's like, as far as what they're wearing, some people buy a lot more than others. And so there's a huge addressable market, right? But it's like, are people really being served by the products that are out there? So if you look at the reviews, You can see that there was opportunity. Now, it's like, how do you effectively go and market that? Now, there are some D2C brands that were selling some external pouch products, but they weren't really doing anything on Amazon. So, they're selling really well off Amazon, but they're not even really doing much on Amazon or if they are, their listings were horrible. Yeah, and so that's where, but it took a lot of faith for us, right? Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Jared Mortensen: It's like, hey, is this actually going to work? And the thing is, the keywords that we want to target, there's not search volume. Bradley Sutton: I thought I was going to ask, like, what kind of keywords are you going after? Some of the more generic ones or the few people who were actually searching for the specific kind of product that you were doing? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, so a lot of long tail keyword stuff where there's not as much search volume for those. And because, I mean, you have these high search volume keywords for like in our particular category for men's underwear, right? But they're like massive search volume, like horrible conversion rates, right? So even the top Like, selling brands are not converting on that because it's just too generic, right? And so, like, I thought, oh, we're going to convert on this. And I spent a lot of money on PPC, wasted all sorts of money, like, running ads on this. And I was like, oh, we didn't convert at all, right? And so, we really focused a lot on very, very long tail keywords that were very specific related to pouch and external pouch underwear. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So then, you're Did you start well from the very first product? I know fast forward, you've got thousands of SKUs literally now, but did you knock it out of the park? Was it a slow ramp up? When did you know you're like, hey, I did the right thing, this is going to be a success? Jared Mortensen: I mean, we had sales our first day, right? So that was good. And now it's all ads, right? And so, yeah, we're just running ads because we've got to get some ranking. And I was still learning. I mean, I'm using Helium 10 to go write all the listings and work to optimize that. And so, yeah, we had sales right from the beginning. We launched a boxer brief set, had some briefs and a jock. So it was actually three different products we kind of launched all together with different parents. But yeah, we had sales right from the beginning. Now, it took us probably about I think it's three months before I actually got a payment from Amazon. It's all the money. I get the PPC, right? But we understood that, right? That was really important for us because that was part of the value of the podcast, listening to that and just going in with eyes wide open that, hey, I'm not just going to launch this and all of a sudden, I'm just going to start printing money. You have to expect that, hey, I'm going to have to have so much in for my inventory and then I'm going to have to invest so much in my PPC and it's going to take some time to start cash flowing that business. Yeah, so, I mean, we saw a decent ramp up with the business, but we did a million dollars in our first 11 months, so that's awesome. That was a decent amount. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, and profitable, I would assume, which is more important. Jared Mortensen: Yeah, so it took us about six months before we were actually profitable, and then we just ran. I mean, we launched in March, right? And so, I guess, decent timing because we launched early in the year and then ran through the holidays. Bradley Sutton: Now, what made you decide to start on TikTok Shop? Jared Mortensen: So, well, TikTok, that was, you know, so we were, you know, so we did a million dollars our first 11 months there on Amazon. So, in 2022 and in 2023, we were growing really, really well on Amazon and launched a number of different products and we brought in a ton of inventory for Q4. We're super excited about, of course, we have some, brought in some new people to help us with some inventory management and we double ordered some POs. And so that was the other thing as well. And so like I had way too much inventory. And so I tied up a lot of cash, right, in inventory. And so this is an issue when you're dealing with so many SKUs. At that time, we only had a thousand SKUs, right, that we're dealing with, right? But I mean, it's really easy to make an inventory mistake when you're doing that and trying to forecast demand seasonality and things like that as you ramp in the holidays. So we brought in too much inventory. So I was really crushed for cash. I had no idea what we were going to do. I literally, it was the first time in my life I didn't know if I was going to be able to make my mortgage payment, right? And so, like, what are we going to do? I'm praying, praying, praying. What do we do? And the answer, God told me, you need to live stream on TikTok. And I'm like, that really sucks. I don't want to live stream on TikTok. That's like the last thing I want to do. That's not my personality. I'm better behind the machine. I'm a designer. I'm not an influencer or anything like that. I had no experience doing that. But when I, you know, I go to China to my factories every two to three months. And so, One of the factories I worked with, they are live streaming on Doyen and so I went and saw their live stream. I went to their studios and watched them do the live streams and they're doing like $80,000 to $90,000 an hour. USD on their live stream and it's like, it's women's apparel, but like, holy cow. And so my eyes were really open to what was possible with the live stream. Now they have a host, they have two assistants, they have a manager. I mean, they have a whole team, but they really know what they're doing. And so it just opened my eyes. I'm like, this is where lives, I mean, this is where e-commerce selling is going. And so just a huge percentage of apparel in China is sold on live streaming platforms. And so I knew that's where it's going. We're just like four to five years behind in the US. And so my answer was, as far as my cash flow problem was, I need to start live streaming. And so we started a week before Black Friday, 2023. And for us, there wasn't a lot of competition at that time on TikTok. TikTok was pushing the live streams like crazy and it just blew up for us. Bradley Sutton: So, today, total, regardless of the source of sales on TikTok Shop, how much would you say you've done? Two million? Jared Mortensen: We're just under two million. I think so. Probably just right around two million. I have to go re-run the numbers for the last month. Bradley Sutton: And what percentage of that would you attribute to the live selling that you do? Jared Mortensen: Over the whole time, probably like 60% to 70%. When we first started, it was like 90% lives, right? And so it was like all lives. And then gradually, we've transitioned to do more posts. So at the beginning, it was like 90%. Now, it's probably more like 50% to 60%. But overall, we're probably, yeah. Unknown Speaker: Thinking about selling on TikTok shop or maybe you are already in it and you're ready to scale? Unlock all of Helium 10's brand new TikTok shop tools with our diamond plan. Everything from bulk Amazon to TikTok listing conversions to instant Amazon MCF fulfillment. Best of all, you use the code TT10 to get 10% off Diamond for six months, even if you've used a coupon before. So go ahead and upgrade and let Helium 10 do all the heavy lifting for you so you can focus on what really matters. For more info on our new TikTok shop offerings, visit h10.me forward slash TikTok. I'll see you there. Bradley Sutton: In a one hour line, what's the most number of units you have sold? Jared Mortensen: Oh, most units, or they grow sales. Yeah, I mean, I think 12,000 is the most we've done in a one hour live. Bradley Sutton: So if you guys like to generate $12,000 with one person streaming live in one hour, that's a pretty good ROI right there. Okay, so outside of live, how are you getting sales on TikTok? You have an affiliate, kind of like an influencer outreach. Jared Mortensen: We work with an agency that helps us with affiliate outreach. We're using the TikTok tools for that to identify affiliates to reach out to and reaching out to them via TikTok or they're requesting samples for us. It goes both ways. Affiliates can come and just request samples and so we review those and then approve those and send samples. We're trying to do roughly 100 samples a week. Bradley Sutton: That's awesome. All right. We're going to go into a little bit in a couple minutes or in a little bit more detail, especially on Amana's live, because I think that's where probably more than any other TikTok shop seller in the US I've met. He's really got a great strategy for the lives. Now, for those who want to get more in depth on the A to Z of TikTok shop, as of the time that this podcast was released and that you guys are watching this, Our brand new course should be ready in Freedom Ticket. So those of you who have Helium 10, go into the Freedom Ticket program and you're going to see a whole new section called TikTok Training. Half of the modules are with somebody from TikTok, corporate headquarters. Half of them are with Jared right here talking about more ins and outs of his journey, be it from influencer reach out to advertising to variation structure of his listings and everything in between logistics, et cetera. So if you guys are Amazon sellers right now in the U.S. and you're interested in expanding your TikTok shop, we've got the blueprint in there. So most of you listeners are already Gleam 10 members. That means you've got full access to this course for free. So hop in there and make sure to get at that. For those who already just started selling on TikTok Shop or they're going to take that training and now get started, what are some tips of do's and don'ts for Amazon Live? Have you done Amazon Live, by the way? No, I haven't. For TikTok Live, what are some do's and don'ts that they should, you know, we don't have to go over everything because we've got the course. A lot of it's in, but what are some main points that you can share? Jared Mortensen: Well, I would say the biggest thing with TikTok Live is just do it, right? And it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be like overly scripted and just beautiful, right? TikTok is a lot more raw, right? It's really popular with teenagers, just with raw cell phones. And so most of the content out there is just cell phone content. And so, I mean, you could see these polished lives. And sometimes you go and look at a polished live on TikTok and it just has 10 viewers, right? And you might see another live stream that looks like super like rough and like what's going on here? And you're getting like tons and tons of followers. And so the biggest thing that I think people have is they just overthink things. And so one, you need to get out of your head and just go and just try it and just start. As far as, and it doesn't take a big setup, a nice studio to go and start, right? I was live streaming for like, for, I don't know, five or six months just with my cell phone, with my iPhone, right? And some relatively cheap Amazon lights. I didn't even have a really good mic at the time. I do recommend, if I was to do it again, I would start with a little better lapel mic, but you can pick one of those up for like, off TikTok, for like 20 bucks, right? Or if you want a stationary mic. You know, a decent video that you can get off your phone, but a recent iPhone is going to work fine and a decent mic. People will drop if you don't have good sound. And you want to have decent lights, right? I was relaxing in my warehouse, so I needed a little better lights. If you're in an area that has good natural lighting, you might need some ring lights or things like that, but it doesn't have to be a lot. The big thing is just to really start, right? Check out live streams, see what people are doing on TikTok now and try to learn from them. But I would say just start. You need to get your product front and center. You need a little depth in your shot is usually the best and then you have the host. So just set up the studio and then just get started. Bradley Sutton: All right, let's go ahead and I'm going to take out my phone here for those watching on YouTube and hopefully we can screen share a little bit here. But what we want to do is we kind of want to like just take a look at some of what people are doing on live right now and then see if we can critique some of these and get some ideas here. So, first of all, let me... Oh, this lady, I saw her on live earlier too. We were filming the content. Man, she must be going crazy. Vibrated on this... Jared Mortensen: What do you call it? Viber plate. Bradley Sutton: Vibration plate exercise. Is it actually like burnt calories? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, they're trendy, right? So, it's... Bradley Sutton: Now, there is just a lot going on. I see here, I didn't see this the last time, she's doing like some discount where it says she wrote like a chalkboard here. I remember you gave a training about TikTok Live and says, hey, don't always just have everything just like these modules and widgets and professional boards, but have like handwritten things. It might like, you know, stop the scroll a little bit, right? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, people want to read something that's handwritten, right? If it's computer generated font, it's really easy to ignore it. So, you'll see that on some live streams where you see it and you might think, hey, it looks like kindergarten level, but it's very intentional, right? That they're handwriting things. It might say free shipping. It might say the price. It might say some other feature. So, for us, we have these mannequins and we have the names of the mannequins written on there and, you know, handwriting. Bradley Sutton: She's got the product like would you say that she's just an affiliate or she's the brand owner? Jared Mortensen: What do you she's an affiliate? Bradley Sutton: She's an affiliate. How do you tell just by looking? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, just just her As far as her account, right? She's not a branded account. So this Merge Fitness, right? And so she's probably, if you click into her shop here in the shopping bag, you're probably going to see other products that are fitness related sort of stuff. And so she's got kind of a thematic shop as an affiliate. And so she's I'm selling exercise-related equipment. So typically, most branded accounts will like, okay, this is the brand of the product and that's going to be the name of the account. Now, you can have like marketing accounts where you might have a different name if you want to market more broadly. But yeah, so it's kind of the difference, right? So if you see like a Neural Gum, right? Up there in the upper left-hand corner, you're going to see their brand or Dude Wipes, right? You're going to see that. You're going to see their brand up there in the tag in the upper left-hand corner. So in the upper left, you see the likes, the number of likes that she has in the live, and you got some coupons going on there. But the most important thing with the shot is, I mean, you got to be able to see the product, the host, and then, like I said, the depth. But she's got the flash sale going. Does she have a flash sale? Bradley Sutton: It's not actually up yet. That flash sale is going to start in 30 days. Jared Mortensen: I said it's not started. So she's got the product pin there at the bottom. That's at the full price. She's probably previewing it right now. And then the price is going to drop here in a second. So she's talking about it. So, with TikTok, a lot of the sales are going to be impulse buys. So, some people are going to come in there. You want to drive urgency. That's why you have the flash sale. So, it's like, hey, if you're missing out, you want a flash sale. So, you're going to get a good deal. You want urgency. So, there's usually a timer on there. Okay, we got four seconds before the flash sale starts. And so, it's like building anticipation. Okay, this flash sale is going to start. Bradley Sutton: Oh, look at that. Jared Mortensen: The price dropped. Bradley Sutton: Well, the price is only going to be $12 or 12 minutes more. Jared Mortensen: Yeah, so she's got the flash sale going on for 12 minutes here. And sometimes you might do a limited stock, right? So when we go live, when we start off, like our very first product that we might launch with, we would do a flash sale, but we're only going to do five units and I'm going to do it at 60% off. And so I'm going to limit that. So one, it's you're getting a short amount of time, you get only a certain number quantity and in a certain price. And so it's like, oh, I got to jump on that. This is one of the food cutting ones right there. Bradley Sutton: This guy's DJing right here. He's not even selling anything. Jared Mortensen: Yeah, he's just talking there. Bradley Sutton: Well, here's why this is not even showing their face. It's a POV, right? Jared Mortensen: So, he's got the flame going on the background. That's for interest, right? So, they've got the screen in the background with the fireplace, the fake fireplace kind of flame thing going on there. So, a lot of tech products, you'll see that where you're demonstrating the product, it's a POV type product. You might see people that are selling the consoles in their car. So, they'll actually be sitting in their car and they're showing that Like the thing where you can watch videos on your console in your car, and so those are POVs. So you have a couple different, and depending on your product, you might do a POV, which is like what this is, where you're actually just showing hands with the product versus an apparel product where you actually need to see the product to have a little more depth. It really depends on the best way to demonstrate your product. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. All right. So, I mean, this guy's got 77 live viewers and he's not even showing his face. He's holding his phone up. Let's see if he can see any more. We have somebody showing the picture of their phone. Oh, there's another Vibrate. If I would have paid $79 for the other one, I would have been mad. Jared Mortensen: This is a Vibration Play for $59. See, she's just showing it here, but she's showing it on her phone. She's probably showing how to checkout, like she may be going through kind of a checkout. Because there's still a lot of people learning to sell or to buy on TikTok. So as you're live streaming, that's one thing you have to do sometimes is actually show someone how to actually go to the cart, how to add it to the cart, how to checkout, right? And so how to add the coupons. And so there's some education involved with helping people because you might even have people that are TikTok natives, they spend a lot on TikTok, but they haven't actually purchasing on TikTok. And so you actually have to show them how to buy. Bradley Sutton: I've been seeing this so much on my feed because I have cats, this automatic litter thing, but this guy's got a lot going on in his background and the foreground. He's got somebody else's hands on him. He must have an assistant who's showing some stuff here. Jared Mortensen: He's got some ears things going on there, so there's like some character type things. He's got a lot of people in there. He has this little cat mitten and so they've got some pop-out stuff going on. So they've got a little more sophisticated software that's going on here that's running all those different images and in-screen videos. Bradley Sutton: Okay. So there, guys, this is not, I mean, some of these look pretty good, but it's not necessary. You saw the one guy, he was just showing his phone, like with maybe a computer screen in the background or something. So you don't have to go, you know, like really hard. Now, how many hours a week is your team live streaming, would you say? Jared Mortensen: We are typically live streaming four to five hours a day. Bradley Sutton: Four to five hours a day. Wow. All right. Now, if I'm just getting started on TikTok Shop, How much should I plan for that? Probably not four to five hours a day. I'm not sure if I have that time to try to do it. Jared Mortensen: I would encourage you, when you go live, you need to go live at least an hour because the algorithm has to learn the audience that you're going to. People may be liking your product, right, or interested in your product. And so you got to spend some time teaching the algorithm. And if you go too short, if you go less than an hour, the algorithm learns that, hey, you're just not serious about it. And so it's just not going to give you traffic even on that live or future lives. And so you have to go longer. TikTok really wants you to go live on I'm a live stream, but preferably if you can get to two and three hours to start to help train the algorithm, that can really help, but at least an hour. You want to go live. Rarely do you want to try to cut it less than an hour. Even if something's going wrong or you're not getting the viewers, try to get past the hour mark and so you can make sure that the algorithm thinks you're actually serious. I would recommend trying to go a few times a week just to start with. We did test some different times because depending on your product, you might have different viewers that are watching during different times. There's some groups of people where they're buying during the day, right, and they're really good. It just depends on the product. We go live in the morning from like 7 to 8, 9 because we're catching people before they go to work. Now, you might have people that are at lunchtime and then we do more at like the 7 to or the kind of 6 to 9 p.m. range from central time. But you need to test different times, right, and really see what... Sundays might work really well for you. Saturdays might work better for you. But in the afternoons, okay, people are sleeping in, or they're doing, you know, things, they're out and about in the morning, but in the afternoon, they're better. It's going to be different in the summer versus the winter, right, because of the daylight and... And things like that. So, you just have to test different times and see what's going to work better for your brand. Bradley Sutton: So, if you're interested to take a look at what a professional live streaming operation is like, follow Real Men Apparel on TikTok if you're in the United States. Actually, you can see it. You just won't see the shop outside the United States, but get some ideas from what he and his team are doing on their lives. They've got some cool stuff. They named their mannequins and And everything, you have Bill and Tyrone and Haas. I already know the names of their mannequins. I've been watching all of their lives so much. But it's kind of like shocking. You can get some really diehard loyal fans on TikTok Shop that you would never have on Amazon. You said you have a guy who drives hours and hours just to moderate your lives for free of charge or something crazy like that? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, it's crazy. We literally have people that have signed up as moderators We only let people moderate, we don't let people help us on our live if they're customers, right? So these like loyal customers that come and hang out on the lives. And if they do enough, then we set up as a moderator. And literally, this is not paid, right? They just want to do it. They are very passionate about the brand. And we have one moderator that he will drive from Minneapolis on a long weekend for his holiday. He'll drive from Minneapolis to Wichita to come and moderate in studio, right? And so that's the amount of connection that we've been able to build with our tribe. Through TikTok, and we couldn't do that through Amazon, right? It's completely different. And so it's really helped us build a connection with our tribe and the people that are our customer base that we can't do through Amazon. Bradley Sutton: Makes sense. Now, something that maybe made you take a step back is when you heard him say, oh, hey, you should try at least always in Howard. Now, maybe you only have one or two products and you're thinking, how in the world do I come up ...with an hour of contents and things to say about a coffin shelf and a coffin bath mat or something but... The way you explained it to me before is it's not about coming up with a full script or a full hour of unique content, but what do you guys do? Jared Mortensen: Yeah, so I mean some people think about it like I can't live stream for an hour. It's like you think of it like a television show or something like that where it's like unique content for that entire time. With a TikTok live stream, it's Groundhog's Day every 35 seconds, right? And so it's literally like you're saying the same thing again and again. And you feel like you maybe go braindead, right? Because you literally, I've said this like 10,000 times the same script, but you take your Amazon bullet points, you kind of script them out, put them on a whiteboard and you just talk through the benefits, right? You demonstrate the product and you talk through it and then you just loop, right? Now, you're going to get comments. People are going to ask questions about it. The key is to not have those to distract you, but you just integrate it. And the more you do it, the more reps you get, Then the more easy it is to integrate those comments seamlessly into your narrative, right? And so you can just talk and it can flow, but you got to get reps. It's just like a sport or like a musical instrument. You got to get repetition in there. And so you can't be afraid to just start because that's where you're going to get your reps. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. Before we get to your 30 and 60 second tip, you've been using Helium 10 for a number of years. What's your favorite tool? Jared Mortensen: My favorite tool, so, well, BlackBox, but there's a lot of things that, yeah, when I was first starting, I think, I mean, we're using that a lot, so, but yeah. Bradley Sutton: All right, BlackBox, and if we were to, there's something that we don't do now, whether it's for TikTok, whether it's for Amazon, that could make your life easier. What is something that Helium 10 can make for you and your underwear company, Real Men Apparel, that would make your life easier? Jared Mortensen: Affiliate outreach, working through some of that, that's a big gap that we have right now is automating the affiliate outreach. Bradley Sutton: That's coming probably by the time you guys hear this episode. You're getting a sneak peek. We have our Influencer Finder and it helps you to automate some of your outreach to the TikTok influencers and we did launch that for Amazon. We have an Influencer Finder for Amazon that elite members have access to where you can look for Amazon influencers where, hey, show me all the Amazon influencers who are in this, who have made videos for this product and who have done at least this number of videos and who have an Instagram like link in their bio or something. So you can actually do that now with Helium 10. All right. You know how we do it on the podcast. I ask the guests give a 30 or 60 second tip. So let's maybe make it about TikTok or TikTok shop. What's something that you haven't said today that can eat a quick hitting? What's a good tactic that people can use for an instant win on TikTok Shop? Jared Mortensen: Well, on TikTok, I mean, key is content, right? And just getting a lot of content out there. And you might feel that you're actually getting rep... You have to create all this very, very different content all the time. So again, you just overthink. It's similar to the live streaming and you just need to start. But with posts, just do different... Take some simple videos like your product. Okay, I'm doing a video on this mic or a post on this mic. You're just doing some very simple shots of the mic and you're testing out different hooks, different voiceover hooks on that and then just iterating on it, right? So TikTok is very much about like volume on the posts and the videos. And so it may be a three second, it may be a five second, it may be a 10 second video, but just getting content out there. So creating different content, you can literally do Videos of your product, just these really, really simple videos. You throw it in a CapCut template and then it's amazing how much different content you can create with the same just couple of video shots. You might be holding yourself back because you're not willing to go and put content out there that looks nearly identical, right? But it's crazy because you might have 20 videos and they almost all look the same and one of them just takes off, right? And so it's literally about just it's a volume gain, getting more volume out there and then just certain things will just take off. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, Jared, maybe by the next time you're on the show, you might have reached $10 million worth of sales between Amazon and TikTok. I know you're working on some exciting stuff that potentially we could talk about next time, but thank you for helping us out on the TikTok training course. Thank you for sharing your knowledge on the podcast. His theme is pay it forward, right? He listens on the podcast. What I want is somebody right now who just learned about TikTok Shop You guys become successful. I want you to come on the podcast and help us and help other people pay it forward, guys. That's what the game's all about. So thanks a lot, Jared, for doing that on this show and we'll definitely be reaching out to you next year to see what you have to share with us. Jared Mortensen: Awesome. Bradley Sutton: I appreciate it.