#690 - The Amazon Seller’s Guide to Building Wealth

#690 - The Amazon Seller’s Guide to Building Wealth Speaker 2: Today, we talk to one of our all-time favorite guests, Janelle. She's going to talk about everything from her current e-commerce launches to brand strategy to making money with real estate, franchises, and even oil wells. 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 the 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. Today, we've got one of our favorite guests back on the show, Janelle. Janelle, how's it going? It's awesome. Speaker 1: How are you, Bradley? Speaker 2: I'm doing just delightful. Now, for those I said favorite get one of our favorite guests. So you might be like, wait, this is the first time I'm hearing about her. So we're not going to go too much into her backstory now because she has been on the show. So if you want to take note and listen to a couple of her episodes before so you can see a little bit about her humble beginnings to superstardom. Check out the very first time she was on the podcast was way back in 2021. That's episode 294. So make sure to check that out. And then she was also on episode 401. Latest one was episode 558 from last year. And so we try and have our favorite guests back on once a year. And so it's been over a year. So we want to come back and see how you've been doing. Are you still in, is it Utah where you live? Speaker 1: Yep. Still in Utah. I've got a new house. We bought an old Victorian 1890s. It was a totally like condemned and we've been fixing it up. It's pretty rad. Speaker 2: Are you doing one of those Facebook or TikTok progression videos? I'm addicted to those on Facebook. There's this one guy I watch. He bought a house in the Balkans. He doesn't say where, so it could be Serbia or wherever, but it was like 5,000 euros and it was just completely just bricks pretty much and he's been building it up. Did you do that? Speaker 1: Yeah, I did a few TikTok videos on him and it's pretty cool. Everyone that's into old homes loves to follow along, see what we're doing. There's a big upstairs and we just blew out the back wall because it sits on half an acre and overlooks a reservoir with the mountains in the back and I was like, I want that view. So we just blew out the back wall and a lot of the Victorian purists were like, sacrilege, you've destroyed a historic home. It is a historic home but I was like, I mean, the ghosts haven't come to haunt us. I think they enjoy the view as well so I think we're okay. Speaker 2: Part of the reason you can just go buy fancy homes like this is because of your e-commerce success and that's what we're going to be talking about today. I remember the last couple of times we had talked about some projects you were doing with different celebrities. Did any of those products ever get launched? Speaker 1: Oh yes, so several of them. I've partnered with many YouTubers and celebrities and done six and seven figure launches. Some of my favorite, most fun ones like Dr. Ekberg, he's got a very large channel on YouTube and he's like a holistic doctor, helps people, chiropractic is kind of his background. We launched a supplement line with him. But first, usually before I launch a physical product, I like to test the market with some A lot of creators, they're really good at creating content and they can build an audience, but what they've never done is tried to sell. The first time you try to sell, it can be a total bust. What I like to do is test it. An easy test is just some merch. If the merch sells, then you know, okay, the audience will buy. Then I'll test with a digital product. Not all creators have a digital product, but I can usually figure out an angle for something. We did a blood work course. It's done several millions now, but a couple of years ago when we launched it, it did six figures within a couple of two days and a million dollars. It's been really fun to work on that project. We started a supplement line and we started with one of those electrolyte powders. Now, he's got a couple more and it's called Uvexia. That went really well and then I've done with John Malecki. If any woodworkers here, I think it's so fun to watch people build live edge furniture but he has one of the largest carpentry channels on YouTube and we launched his shop shades which are super cool. In the shop, remember in high school you wore those big old goofy protective eyewear and he would never wear it and his guys would never wear it in the shop and he's like, I'm like, we got to make some cool glasses like Oakley, like designer shop shades. That's what we made. We called them Shop Shades. Those were really fun. I did the same thing with a DIY design. Natalie, she's got—I'm trying to think what her channel is—Design to the Nines. We did Safe is Sexy series and we launched her some Cheetah eyewear and then we did her whole Athena power drill line, all the power tools. Those were just a few. Speaker 2: Okay, so you know, like, like, you know, somebody might be listening, like, well, I'm not a celebrity. But hey, there are some people out there who might have a following somewhere. Maybe they had a newsletter, you know, maybe they have a big Instagram following. And when we say big, it doesn't have to be a million or something. Maybe you've got an email list from something you have done. Maybe it's a YouTube channel. So let's just say there's an average Joe, not necessarily celebrity, but but still, you know, built up an audience. Because of one of their previous endeavors or whatever it is, I can understand the reason behind testing. It's like, hey, just because you've got an audience doesn't mean it's an audience that's going to buy a product. I think you mentioned merch and some other things. How could just somebody out there go ahead and do this same process where it's like, all right, before I jump in and invest $20,000 into a product that My audience might not work. Are you talking about merch by Amazon or print-on-demand stuff or what are you talking about? Speaker 1: If you've already got an audience, I would recommend doing not print-on-demand because the quality is a little bit not awesome. So if you're partnering with Ryan Tran or Mr. Beast, we're not going to do a print-on-demand. That would just not look well on the brand. A test for you or whatever, if you're small, just dabbling, a print on demand would be fine. People buy shirts and use Cricut. If you go to Etsy, a lot of people are making shirts and apparel and stuff with their Cricut machine. To answer your question, this is what I've been doing just recently. You asked me what I've been up to. I'm building for the first time a niche audience. I tell you, just like you said, it doesn't have to be a big audience. I've worked with creators that have the largest audiences, you know, I'm going to say in the world, but some of them have very, very large followings and some of the largest YouTube creators. Those are slam dunks. You can do million-dollar launches all day long. But I was like, I'm a case in point. I just started building an audience in the pickleball space. It's kind of a hobby of mine, a passion. I started what, like eight weeks ago, so not even two months. I just crossed 1,100 subscribers on my newsletter and I'm doing nothing awesome to grow it besides just creating really good content in my newsletter. Speaker 2: And you started this from scratch. Speaker 1: Nothing. Speaker 2: So this is like to the to the rest of the audience who's like, well, not only am I not a celebrity, not only do I not have a big following, but I can actually start from scratch to build something. Speaker 1: If I was smart, and I'm smart but I'm just saying, the play for me would be build a newsletter in marketing and product launch strategy where I've made millions and done all these awesome things. That would be really low-hanging fruit for me to build the following there. But I was like, I'm just passionate about pickleball. I can't stop talking about it. I research it whenever I've got a free moment. I'm watching YouTube videos on it and so I thought, what better way for me to like feed my passion and to write a newsletter, see if I can grow an audience. I don't even know what products I'm going to offer yet. I mean I can see some digital courses. I have ideas because I've launched so many products in the past but I'll tell you what, in just eight weeks, I just, what, two days ago got offered to go on a private yacht It has a floating pickleball court. They're paying my way and my husband and they just want me to create content and help them with their branding and marketing. So I was posting on LinkedIn my most recent newsletter episodes. I always do like this week in 5Dink Friday. 5Dink Friday is what it's called. If you want to go check it out, you can go to the website and just see like what I'm doing. I should probably build it in public. Anyhow, I'm just saying, the things start happening. I only had, like last week, thousands of followers. So I'm not even that huge, but she's like, this girl is serious. She's making good content. We want her on our ship. She'll just cover it. It's Croatia. It's nine days. It's $4,000 a person. I know, dude. I've never been on a private yacht. You should see the pictures of this bad boy. I'm like, this is so cool. Even if I never launched a product right there for two months, like writing a weekly newsletter, maybe I'm 80 hours into it and I just got like an 8,000 ROI. Think about the people I'm going to network on that yacht. The people that can afford to go on that, totally my target market. They're going to be like, Wealthy retired or business owners. So I just want people to understand like it's not that hard and I didn't do anything but start creating content when you create value. That is what earns money, creating value, educating, teaching, sharing. So it's how I built all of my businesses. Speaker 2: So for this newsletter, were you just like, hey, I'm going to start a newsletter or was the end game like actually you're looking to maybe start a pickleball brand as well, like a physical product? Speaker 1: I have a partnership. So when I moved to Utah, I started playing pickleball about a year and a half ago. The facility that I was playing at was super cute. It was called The Kitchen. They were like, ìHey, you do marketing. Could you help us?î I was like, ìOh, you know, maybe.î At the time, I was working with a lot of the athletes, helping with developing a pickleball supplement line. And so they kind of knew she must be kind of smart. So they were like, Hey, you know, do you want to help us with our marketing? And I kind of told them like my fee structure and they're like, Oh, wow, they're just like a mom and pop shop. So they were like, maybe, how else can we work together? And I was like, I love pickleball. Maybe there's, let me just take some equity, you know, or, or we'll figure it out. So that's how I became a co-owner of the kitchen. And so we actually have right now eight physical locations here in Utah and we're franchising and I've helped them build out their franchising and consulting. So I kind of head up, I guess I'm like the chief growth officer helping them just grow the business. I started an e-commerce shop for them because they had no, they weren't reselling any products. And I was like, guys, you have like 10,000 active members between your locations. Like they're going to like Pickleball Wholesale or Pickleball Central and buying paddles and balls and like why not? I have a website that we sell our own stuff. I showed them that model and they were like, whoa. We don't even have to carry inventory. We can white label through other big companies. There were so many different ways we could put this together because they were like, how are we going to outlay all this cash to bring all that inventory? I said, let's just start out white labeling and if you decide you like it and then you want to make higher margins later, we'll start sourcing and creating our own. We're about six months live and we're selling anywhere from 15,000. That's in profit because we're not carrying inventory. That was the first thing and then they were kind of like, all right, what else do you got? I'm like, well, we could scale a lot faster, open more locations. I love coaching programs and teaching and consulting so I was like, why don't we turn to your model? We started a coaching program that's like $35,000 and we help people open. The difference with our model is we're small and profitable. A lot of these big facilities come in. They have massive overhead like with staff and heating utility bills on a big like 12, 15-quart facility. Those won't pencil. So we build intimate small locations that are staff-free, totally automated, and they're highly profitable. Speaker 2: Want to keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce in other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like Newegg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP, and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me forward slash blog. I think just in general, what you're talking about is, is something that entrepreneurs, you know, like might be listening to this, like, I'm never going to open my own pickleball court. But guys, you know, gone are the days where everybody or most people selling on Amazon is just like, I'm selling on Amazon, and that's it. The next stage of that, nowadays, you got to be selling on Amazon. You got to be selling on TikTok, Walmart. You got to be selling on Amazon Germany. But then it still doesn't stop there. There could be a global pandemic and it shuts down supply chain and stuff. But the more you can diversify your cash flow, is the better. Janelle is in all these things. She's still an entrepreneur, but she's selling on Amazon. She's starting content. She's building brands. She's opening pickleball courts. She's consulting with companies. But guys, most people I think who are interested in selling on Amazon are like, hey, I want to make generational wealth or I want to just have a great job where I don't have to work 40 hours a week and diversify my income streams. Janelle, you're literally living that life. But I think five, seven years ago, not many people are having this kind of conversation because it's just like, no, just be focused on Amazon and you're good to go. Speaker 1: Like you said, what do you do when you have that exit or you're making a lot of money? You're either going to give it to the government in taxes or you start doing some investment strategies, right? So that's how I got I'm super into real estate. I can either buy this portfolio of homes or invest in a syndication or I can just write a check to Uncle Sam. Sometimes, to be honest, I hate being a landlord or my property managers suck and I'm like, I should have just written the check to Uncle Sam. They say more money, more problems and it's like boo-hoo but I'm just saying no. There are some times where I'm like, wow. The ROI on that, yeah, it's awesome, but for the headache it caused, not awesome. People talk about passive income and I'm like, I don't know, besides like oil wells, I've done oil wells, I don't know that there's anything that's truly passive. Everything has taken work and takes up some mental bandwidth and I do try to just do the things that I love knowing that you're going to have to put some kind of effort and brain power into it at some point if you want that return. Speaking of e-commerce though since this is why people are watching and probably be like, why is she talking about all this other stuff? I do still launch brands. I still have brands. In fact, Tomer and I partnered on a brand. We've been working on this for two years. It's launching finally. August 11th, we're having the launch party and I'll be posting about it on LinkedIn and my social medias like starting tomorrow, leading up to it because on August 11th, we'll have a big old launch party and we're going to show the strategy behind it, how we're launching, just free education. Tomer, if people don't know, he's really awesome in the Amazon space. He does a lot of coaching and consulting, his top dog community and he just brought me in. He's like, hey, I want you to help with the brand strategy and help. Speaker 2: I remember a couple of years ago he was talking about it was like a business bag or something like that. Is that the same one or this is completely different? Speaker 1: It's similar because that's what it took so long, the R&D, to create. We call it the alpha charge and we're going to be launching that on Kickstarter. But right now, we're doing some testing, driving a whole bunch of traffic, Facebook ads, just to do price testing. It's a 3-in-1 charger. It's a laptop protector. I wouldn't say necessarily a bag but it does have a shoulder strap. It serves as a charging bank. It can carry your laptop and then it's a workstation, portable workstation. It's 3-in-1. It's pretty sleek and sexy. In fact, I guess I can't share a link but you can put it in the notes or they can go to LinkedIn and check it out. In the meantime, we are working on the supplement line. It's a brand made by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. That's the thing I'm huge on. If you're going to go into a space, niche down, pick a person, solve their problems. Tomer is like, we're going for entrepreneurs. I'm like, excellent. I don't know a brand right now that anyone could say, oh, that brand is made for entrepreneurs or digital nomads. There's nothing there. So, that's where I'm like, hey, there's a gap in the market. We can go in, we fill that and now we're going to make products and it gives you laser beam focus in your PD, which is your product development. You now say, what problems do my people have? It even helps if you're that person and how can we create products that solve those problems or fill those needs? So, it's given us really good focus and we've got three products that are now hitting the market all at the same time pretty much and yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. It's called Mess Less. Speaker 2: I can already tell what it might be about so I like that. Speaker 1: As entrepreneurs, we wear so many hats and you can get unfocused on the 80-20, the 20% that moves 80% of the business forward and so we're trying to clear the noise, the clutter, get you focused and our flagship product is Mess Less Focus, which is a productivity supplement designed to help you, you know, get off the caffeine You're not gonna have the jitters and the crazy crash, but it's a nootropic with like five clinically studied ingredients It's super incredible formulation because I'm a nerd about formulas, you know that and then we created a A stack, so restore is the nighttime, because rest, you need to be refreshed and wake up so you can do it all over again. So that's the, you know, the supplement stack that we started with. And then we have alpha charge. And then I won't talk yet about the other products in the pipeline, but I'm super excited because we have been working on the launch strategy. Like we're going full on, like Amazon to me is just one sales channel. Right now, the fastest way to build a million-dollar brand is TikTok. We use it with our brands. We can blow things up super, super fast on TikTok so we have a full We've got the TikTok launch strategy that we'll be going over and sharing with you. We've been working our butts off on that. We've got the organic content strategy, of course, our Shopify and everything built out, and then our Amazon strategy as well. And that we'll all kind of talk about on the launch and then through. We're going to build this in public, although we haven't been showing the two-year journey. We'll kind of do it in reverse, but it'll be pretty cool. Speaker 2: So then let's say, again, going back, I want people to understand some things are different when we're talking about celebrities. Some things are different when we're talking about what people like to call gurus, if that's what you consider Tomer or Janelle. And then so you have, there's a tendency, it's like, oh, I could never do that. That's me. But a lot of what you guys are doing, it could be anybody, regardless of your stature in the industry. So let's just say there's an average Joe, average Sally in 2025, They've got $10,000 to invest into a new product and let's just say that the product is not anything major like an appliance. So just the product alone, maybe you're only talking like $3,000 or $4,000 or maybe $5,000 maximum landed here in the States. What would be your your kind of like launch strategy? Like, are you like, hey, no, nowadays, it's important to have that audience first. So you know what, before you even think about the product, do what you did with the pickleball and start the start that. Regardless of what that is, once the actual product is launched, do you preach simultaneous Amazon and TikTok and somewhere else, you know, and Shopify maybe? Or are you using, you know, Kickstarter? Like, what is the $10,000 blueprint per Janelle Page here in 2025? Speaker 1: Well, you probably already know this but I've never been like the person that's like find a keyword and like just go do a product and stick it out there and try to capture the traffic. I mean it works. That's like a lot of people do that but I build brands and a brand is a feeling and it's meeting needs from a person and you want them to be like to feel like they belong to a movement or like they found their people and so I'm more focused on building the story, building the brand and solving real problems, creating products with the solutions and even if it's like a me too product, if you have a story that you can tell that makes it look like you've done something different like they always tell the story about the beer. I can't remember if it's Coors or Miller Lite that basically started saying that our beer is made from spring, fresh spring water. They were all pulling their water from the same place but it wasn't until like Coors actually made it sound like theirs was something special so they were able to create that product positioning, that differentiation in the market that made them feel special and cool and so it's like If you're about to launch a product and you just basically saw it was an opportunity on Amazon, well guess what? Amazon is a freaking flea market and it's a race to the bottom. Whoever is willing to make the least amount of profit, you got to build a brand. You got to be like – because unless you have made that product yourself and you've got a patent on it, if you're getting it made in China or Pakistan or India, I don't care wherever, those factories can go right in and compete against you and guess what? They cut out the middle man. So your only advantage is your branding and your marketing and your storytelling and the feeling that you create with your consumer and that connection. And so if you're not going to do any of that, I would tell you keep your $10,000 and go buy a window washing business that's actually going to be something that you can control your destiny within. I don't feel like the world needs another like spatula or dog leash or you found – if the factory can make it, and you haven't done anything unique and you don't have a story to tell, like you're really going to last like not long at all. And it's a constant rat race. They're constantly having to find a new product to launch because it's just understand the cycle. Understand the game you're signing up to play. You're not building a brand. You're looking for product opportunities that have a certain life cycle and then it's going to turn and burn and you've got to launch another product. So it's a fine business model if that's the part you enjoy because I imagine if you enjoy looking for the product opportunities and that's the thing you love, then you'll probably be very successful with that system. But that's not the part I love. I love the branding, the storytelling, the connecting and thinking about how do we launch the next product in the line and building a bigger list and getting passionate, loyal, raving fans. That's what I love. Speaker 2: Let me just completely flip the script. Let's say I'm an established I'm an Amazon seller. I'm not becoming rich on my Amazon products, but I have decent cash flow. I was able to get $10,000 just sitting here. That was all pure profit from whatever time period. Some people are like, hey, I'm just going to take that $10,000 and go into a new product. Nothing wrong with that. You got a formula of what works with your brand, go ahead. But let's say, you know what? I was inspired by Janelle's diversification podcast here. If I only had $10,000, What would you do with that $10,000 as far as like, is that enough to like invest somewhere doing something with real estate? Is that enough to invest in a, you know, like at least to get a down payment to have a loan for a franchise or something? What would you do if you were just average Joe or average Sally with an extra $10,000 looking to, you know, not have all your income come from e-commerce? Speaker 1: I invest in myself first always. Personal brand is like where all of my opportunities have come from. I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars I would say a year just in education alone, mentors, business coaches. And so it's like what is it that you want to do? I hired the number one creator on LinkedIn to be my business coach because I'm like I want to build, you know, I want to learn LinkedIn and I know it's a massively under utilized platform right now. I mean people it's growing, but like how do I take advantage of that and grow my personal brand on LinkedIn? So and I've done that all throughout my life when I wanted to build an agency. I said who's got the most successful marketing agency that I know of and I hired him as my business coach. Same with YouTube. When I wanted to figure out YouTube, I said, who's the most successful creator on YouTube? It leads to so many different opportunities. From hiring my business coach for YouTube, we created a business together because he knew all the YouTubers but he didn't know how to launch products. That set me up for making very, very good money and connections because I got to now work with the largest YouTube creators and help them launch products. So even already in LinkedIn, hiring the coach, just the people I've met, the top creators in the world on LinkedIn. It's like $10,000 can buy you a course in anything you want to learn and one-on-one coaching with probably the best in the world at whatever you want to do. So it's like another product, sure, figure out what the ROI is on that and if you enjoy the model and stuff, great, but if you're kind of like, yeah, you know, I don't know that I love this model and I want to diversify, it'd be like, right now, AI, I wish I loved AI. I don't. I'm creative. I'm marketing. I tell my kids, I'm like, freaking go into AI, learn how to build agents. It's just the coolest, coolest thing. It doesn't excite me. I don't want to get up in the morning and freaking learn about AI. I truly, truly wish I did. Unknown Speaker: It's such a... Speaker 2: I'm kind of in the same boat. I understand You know, like some some of it you need to know nowadays, you know, like and And just yesterday I downloaded ChatGPT to my phone for the first time. Never had ChatGPT on my phone. I use it on the computer. I'm like, all right. Yeah. So little by little I'm going, but yeah, I'm a little bit similar. Like I wish I could just dedicate myself to it, but it's like so new. I'm like, oh my God. And so frustrating sometimes with all the hallucinations of like, it just kind of makes me crazy. But yeah, I get your point. Speaker 1: There are more billionaires made in the next few years in AI than any space. So if you're just an opportunist, that is where you would go all in. Go all in you know and and I know what all in looks like I do it when I get passion about something like pickleball right but to me I love money, don't get me wrong. I think money is wonderful and I'm motivated by money, but there's a point where I'm like, I'm not willing to do something where I wake up in the morning and I'm not excited. I'm excited to get up and talk about marketing and branding and pickleball. If it was AI, I'd be like, just, it'd feel like work and I don't feel like I've worked a day in my life for the last few decades, but I am. If you ask my husband, he'd be like, you're always working. I'm like, I am? It's so fun. So I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world. Speaker 2: Okay. So per, you know, investing yourself is good. And then just in general, what about like once you, once you know something and you're better at something, what about in like businesses? Uh, what's the, you know, there's nothing that's zero risk and no matter what kind of business you start, no matter how perfect your playbook or how perfect your coaches were, just like with Amazon, there's nothing that's a sure thing. But, but the whole point is like, Hey, we want to try something that, um, you know, is, the least amount of risk possible. Speaker 1: Is there anything that you could, you could, uh, you know, say, I always say like, uh, my, my wealth advisor is like, you are so risk taker. And I'm like, I am, cause I would not consider myself that, but I think I read a book, The Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and I was like, oh, that's kind of how I think and that's what he was saying is like people who do really well with money and attract money are people who just see it kind of like as a faucet and it flows. And so like when I like make a lot of money, I like take it and I'm not extravagant at all. I'm very, very frugal. Like I wear the same shoes, same watch. Like I just, the things I like to buy are assets. The other things that make money and so I'll always try something different. I was like oil wells. I'm going to do oil wells. I love my oil wells. So I love learning. I did that and then real estate. Man, I've done so much in real estate and like I said, I love hate it. My husband and I, we buy fixer-uppers. We own a roofing and remodeling company. And then we're just on a bunch of wholesalers list. So anyone on here who's like, I want to get into real estate, the best thing to do is just go Google wholesalers in my area. The people basically come across deals all the time. They're meeting with people that are going through divorce or maybe someone in the family died and they don't want to deal with selling the house. It's a hoarder house. So literally you can pick these houses up for like 50% off. A lot of people do the tax sales. I always think that's just too much work. But a wholesale list, I'll get like, I probably have every wholesaler in Utah and they send me deals. And I just look at it and I'm like, dude, that's a sweet, you know, that's a sweet house. We'll go check it out. And, you know, I do have enough cash sitting around that I can just buy them in cash. And then it takes us three to six months. We'll sell that and we usually want $100,000 profit and just do two or three of those a year. That's pretty sweet. Getting started though, you could get a loan but it's really difficult with wholesalers because they want a quick close. You're going to need to just work with a hard money lender and I do hard money lending. I'll 100% give someone half a million dollars at 15% interest. Imagine if you're doing the fix and flip on that. You're only needing to have that loan for three to six months. You can make the numbers work and then you just hire a crew, a contractor who does the fix up for you. You sell it and then you would pay off the loan and you'd keep the profit. That's kind of a good way that we made money fast is doing that and then ones that we like or maybe they don't sell as fast, we've just held on to as rentals. So I think I have like 20 doors and I have like several syndications. Syndications is where you come together with other investors. I think I talked about this at Helium 10 event a long time ago, but you just give them like $100,000 or $150,000 or $50,000, some of them. Most of them require like $100,000 minimum investment. And you buy like big apartment complexes. I'm talking like 50 to 500 units. All you do is you just get a check in the mail like every quarter. And your returns are only going to be like 8 to 12%. We're going to do a fix and flip. You're going to make $100,000. If you take $500,000 and in six months, you make $100,000 as your return, that's a pretty phenomenal return. There are so many different ways and everyone says we have to make money. We have to have money to make money. It is kind of true because a lot of these things, you have to be an accredited investor But if you can like scrape some of your money together or start saving, you really can unlock some of these cool opportunities out there because there are a lot of ways to make money. There's a lot of ways to lose money too, but yeah. Speaker 2: I love it. We're hearing stuff that probably half the audience never knew was an actual thing here, but I love it. Going back to the last question, going back to e-commerce, from the beginning, you said you're really into branding. I think it's obvious that people can see it now, the way that you tackle your projects and things. In 2025, People are just starting or they're realizing that like, man, I've never paid attention to my brand and I think that's why I'm not doing well. What would you say to them as far as like some just bullet points of things that will help them build their brand story and their image, etc? Speaker 1: First, I always like to say, would someone tattoo your logo on their face or if not even on their face, on their arm or put it on a decal on their truck or on a hat? This is the first thing whenever I'm looking at like People's logos are their brands. I'm just like that is the stupidest thing. No one would ever even buy merch or wear a shirt and that's a free billboard. If you can't give away your product with the logo on it and have someone that would be like, that's sick, man. I want to wear it, like start over. So I've called myself like a brand Nazi in that regard even though a logo is not a brand. You know what I'm saying? Like you should be so in love with your logo and just be like, man, that is so sexy because sexy sells. It's cool. A lot of the time when I see someone's logo, I'm like, we got to start. That's not even acceptable. It looks like clip art. We're not doing that. Then the story. Everyone will be like, I don't have a story. I've never met anyone that I cannot pull a story out of and create something that's incredible. Maybe I'm just a really good storyteller. People will come to me and they'll be like, well, I have a story and then they start telling me about their product. I was working with these ladies and they sell incredible products on Amazon. They're lotions and creams and they're from Taiwan and they're telling me they don't have a story but they're telling me that their mom used to, when they were kids, they had eczema and their skin was terrible and they had psoriasis and their mom made all these blends from the herbs that she found in the garden and in the natural landscape of Taiwan and I'm just sitting there being like, are you kidding me? This is the coolest story. They come to America in college and they break out an eczema and they can't get any products here that help them with their skin. So their mom's sending them over the lotions and potions that they make and they kind of have this light bulb moment of, hey, we should like make these products here. I'm like, that story is killer. It's just so funny. Every YouTuber I've ever worked with or just even regular company, I work for just regular companies all the time and they're like, I don't know what the story is. Sometimes we make one up but most of the time, they're sitting on one and they just didn't know it because we get so close to everything that we're up close and personal with that we can't see the awesomeness that it is because It's like the fish in water. David Foster Wallace has that incredible speech. A fish in water, he doesn't know he's in water because he's swimming in it. What else was the question? I think I was answering something larger than that. So the story is super important. For the brand and then it's just your people. Like if you obsess about your person, if you can't in your mind picture the person that is perfect for your products and who you're making it for, I just feel like you'll never really catch fire because everything that I've ever done that's just gone super viral or super awesome as a brand is because there's a person behind it that I feel passionate about and I can speak their language. I tell this story a lot because it was when I first realized this and it started my marketing career. With my very first company I was working with, we were launching a supplement product. We had launched it and it was recovery proteins and stuff made for athletes. They were at the Arnold one weekend, which is bodybuilders. Then the next weekend, they'd be at an MMA competition. They're trying to sell their recovery protein and their creatine and all this stuff. They just were not getting traction anywhere, like a couple of buys here and there. Then there was this little sport that was just starting in Cucamonga, California. It was called CrossFit. It was brand new and it was blowing up like pickleball. We were like, why don't we just go all in on CrossFit and let's pretend our supplement is made by CrossFitters for CrossFitters. We kind of re-rent back into the positioning and the storytelling and then it gave us laser beam focus. We knew now who our athletes were that we needed to lock up. We weren't spending every weekend at different events. I went after every single CrossFit athlete. I created a pro tier and an amateur tier because I wanted the up-and-comers too. I gave them free product in exchange for endorsements. I knew what magazines I needed to advertise in. I knew the language to speak. You don't talk about a gym if you're talking to CrossFitters. They go to boxes. You don't talk about doing your workout. They do wads. You know and they do Ralph and Murph and there's all this like language and there's secret signs and symbols that you build this lexicon and now you have people that are so freaking passionate about your product that you freaking blow up and we became the official supplement sponsor of the CrossFit Games. We were everywhere. Progenix was like the shit bomb and then and then you can start branching out. Once you've like created that foothold in a market, guess what happens? CrossFit is not just a sport in and of itself, but there's doctors. There's firemen, there's policemen, all these people that like to do CrossFit for a workout. They're not necessarily like CrossFit athletes, although we locked down that market. Now we start attracting surfers who are doing CrossFit. So we got the surf community. We had a bunch of yoga instructors that love doing CrossFit for like their hip days, whatever. So now we got the yoga. We get mountain climbers. We got spear fishers that do CrossFit. And we then could move into these other segments and start growing. So you go narrow. First so you can go wide later, and that's how I like to think about the journey of a brand and how to gain traction and then grow. Speaker 2: I love it. I love it. All right, so guys, I don't know what kind of demographic we didn't touch today, but if you're an influencer, you're a celebrity or just an average Joe or Sally or you're somewhere in between, you're a I'm an experienced Amazon seller looking to invest in other things. We talked about it also. So thanks, Janelle, for covering such a wide variety of topics. How can people find you out there on the interwebs if they want to reach out for more guidance? Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Go to JanellePage.com. That's my website. Or if you like pickleball for sure, go to 5DinkFriday. It's spelled 5 like F-I-V-E. And LinkedIn I post. My Instagram is kind of like my scrapbook. I've been using Helium 10 since 2014. I'm not kidding you. I don't get paid to say that or anything. All my employees, all my VAs, everyone uses Helium 10. It's a great product. Speaker 2: I'll be seeing you at Amazon Accelerates or what events are you coming to next? Speaker 1: Probably BDSS. We always see each other there. I don't know. I haven't even looked at what I'm going to next, but I'll probably Top Dog. Do you ever come to that one? Speaker 2: I have not been to that one. I think one was recently in Portugal or something. Speaker 1: I learned how to kite surf. It was amazing. Speaker 2: Oh my goodness. All right. I'll try and go to the next one for sure. Speaker 1: For sure. So anyhow, but super fun to be here again. Speaker 2: Thank you so much. We'll talk to you later. Speaker 1: Okay. Cheers.