#729 - The $3M Amazon Seller Who Still Sells His First Product

#729 - The $3M Amazon Seller Who Still Sells His First Product Speaker 2: Today, we've got a seller who learned how to sell on Amazon from Freedom Ticket. Then he found his first product with Helium 10 and in the last few years, he and his wife by themselves have scaled their business to over $3 million annually. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We have a serious seller on with us. He's been on the podcast a couple of times before, Andrew, but we're going to treat it as if it's the first time because this is now the new format of podcasts where we get really deep into the seller stories out there. Andrew, welcome back to the show. Speaker 1: Hello. Yeah, thanks for having me back on. Speaker 2: Let's go ahead and go back to your history. First of all, where are you located right now? Where are you calling in from? Speaker 1: I'm in Des Moines, Iowa. Speaker 2: Okay. And is that where you were born and raised? Speaker 1: I was born here, but I was actually raised in Sioux City, Iowa, but I've been in Iowa my whole life. Speaker 2: So, Iowa your whole life. That is, is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? Speaker 1: I think it's pretty good. I think it's pretty good. I mean, during the winter, I mean, in the winter, it's a little, it's a little rough, but other than that, you know, we get to experience all the seasons. That's for sure. Speaker 2: So are you a Hawkeye fan or a Cyclone fan? Speaker 1: Oh, Cyclone fan. Yeah, look at my hat. Okay. Speaker 2: Is that where you went to college? Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2: And what did you major in? Speaker 1: Mechanical engineering. Speaker 2: Wow. And did you get, did you start working in that upon graduation? Speaker 1: I was, I was, um, I didn't, I did mechanical engineering and then manufacturing engineering, like together for 10 ish years before I started doing this. Speaker 2: And what got you interested into e-commerce? Because that's a pretty fairly lucrative career, I would imagine. Speaker 1: Kind of. I mean, engineering was fun. Engineering is hard. Sometimes it can be boring, you know. This is definitely a little bit more exciting to do. Sometimes you don't want the excitement though. Sometimes it's too exciting. But I don't know exactly how I got into it. I worked at a couple of different places that sold products and it just seemed like the companies that I worked for, when they would sell products, that's where they made most of their money from. Not necessarily the service side where they would go fix things. You know, something like that. It was kind of always seemed like the money was on that side. And then there was a My brother had a friend who his parents or something were saying that they were selling, you know, something on Amazon and we're making decent money. I'm like, Oh, that's cool. So just one of the times when I had saved up some money, I kind of looked into it and I chose one product and it took off and that's kind of, what year was this about? 2019 is when I started. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But so you're still working full-time and you're like, hey, let me try this as a little side hustle thing and you actually hit a home run in your first product. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I actually had, I had my full-time job and I already had one side hustle and this was going to be like another one. And then quickly within like two years doing this made more money than, you know, any of the other stuff I was doing. So I had to kind of pivot and I went to this full-time. Speaker 2: So in about 2021 is when you kind of like was like went all in with e-commerce. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2: Okay. Now fast forward today, we'll, we'll fill in some gaps, but, but you know, 2020, 2025 not sure if you look at the year end books or anything yet, but approximately across all platforms, how much gross sales do you have? Speaker 1: I think this year we're going to be around 3.2 million total. Speaker 2: Okay, all right, and your profit margins pretty decent enough to support? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, it's been a, it's been a little bit of a battle going back and forth with, you know, tariffs and all their stuff, fee changes and all that stuff. But yeah, we're, we're usually around 15%. You know, net income, you know, like net profit. Speaker 2: Do you splurge a little bit? Are you invested all back into the company, take trips, buy some Lamborghinis? What do you do with some of that money? Speaker 1: We do. We do go on pretty good trips. Most of that comes from like credit card points, though, just because we, you know, just from using that for advertising. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, we go on trips. Lately, the last like couple years, the business has been like paying back some debt. So it's been like, you know, going back into that. But at the middle of next year, we should be kind of pretty much all the way out of that, which will be exciting, be very exciting. So maybe we'll go on even more trips. Speaker 2: There you go. Maldives, hopefully that's on your bucket list. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I keep seeing you going there and it's like, looks cool. Speaker 2: I'll never get tired of that place. Now, that $3 million, what's the breakdown as far as marketplaces? I assume the biggest is Amazon USA. Are you selling in other Amazon marketplaces? Are you selling on TikTok, Walmart, eBay, etc., and Shopify? Speaker 1: Yeah. I would say between like North America, like Amazon North America, it's about 90% is Amazon. And I think about 5% of that is Canada. Speaker 2: Do you actually have inventory there? Or are you just doing the remote fulfillment thing? Speaker 1: No, so that's just on remote fulfillment. And that's something I kind of want to lean more into is actually doing FBA from there. But then probably the other 8% comes from Shopify. And then like the other 2% comes from like eBay and Walmart. Speaker 2: And nothing on TikTok yet then? Speaker 1: Nothing on TikTok yet. That's untouched territory for us so far. Speaker 2: Do you remember how you, I believe you had said it was using Helium 10 before, but how did you find that first product that took off and are you still selling that product today? Speaker 1: So yeah, we're still selling the first product now. And to find it, I mean, we just use black box. I think it was like Freedom Ticket 2.0 was the one that was out. So I got I think I got a free trial or paid. You know, I can't remember what it was like 50 or 90 bucks a month or something to like go through that course. And which is awesome. Right around like right after I launched, I remember Project X came out. And after Project X, I was like, Oh, man, I wish I would have like done. I was like, I would have changed a whole bunch of stuff, you know, but it helped. It was really early on when I started selling. So, so that helped a lot. But yeah, we're still selling that. Speaker 2: That product we found it on on black box and then has everything since then been like expansion of that original brand or have you gone to other brands we started we had some other brands. Speaker 1: But honestly, this one, this first one that we've had has been growing so consistently that we're finding it hard to like put time into the other projects just because this one, you know, this one pays the bills and it's working and growing really well. So we just keep putting more and more time into that. Speaker 2: All right. Interesting. Interesting. Now, we recently had somebody on the podcast talking about Amazon business. I'm actually another Helium 10 Elite member, Brian. You've mentioned in the past too in our Elite Facebook group that you've leveraged that. Has that just been like the last year or so or has that been something from day one you've been leveraging? Speaker 1: Not from day one. It's kind of been in this past year that we really started to focus on that because for a while we had like 10 or 15% of our sales would come from businesses and we weren't even trying. Speaker 2: You just like had put the price and then nothing special on advertising or anything, just organically. Speaker 1: Yeah, just our products can be used by consumers and by businesses. And then we started to like really look into that because we're like, man, these business orders, they're big and they keep coming back. So we started like, you know, setting up dedicated, you know, advertising for it or using the ad multipliers for, for business like bid multipliers for business. And we've grown that like we're about 30% B2B now. Speaker 2: And would you say your product is, is like very business-y, like attractive to business, like obviously coffin shelf? You know, it's not necessarily something that businesses would care about, you know, unless you're a Halloween supply store or something like that. But, but your product is, is it more something that, you know what? Yeah, this is like something that people like to buy in bulk or that businesses need. Speaker 1: Yeah. Like businesses do need this. Like consumers can, can use the smaller pack sizes of the stuff that we sell, but. Businesses will use it and kind of all of our products, we've kept them together. So, you know, the same person that buys one of our products would buy the other stuff too. And that's kind of, we've always wanted to keep it that way. But that's kind of helping us in the business side because businesses when they buy one thing, they usually are buying a whole bunch of other stuff too. And we can do some things with ads or with audiences to try to push more of our products towards them and try to get them to buy more. So yeah, it's a business-friendly product. Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Now that you actually are paying attention to the business program, my first question is what's your pricing strategy? Because I learned from the last episode that It's not like, you know, Amazon price discounts where, oh man, you got to be like at least 15% off, like you can have a discount of even just five cents and it'd be fine. Do you have a general percentage off or dollar or cents amount off that you're putting, first of all, for what shows to the Amazon business customers? Speaker 1: I used to just do whatever Amazon had if you added a business price. Either I'd do a dollar off or something or I would have some blue business savings badge or something that you can get if you put it at a certain price. But I was talking to someone at Amazon accelerate during the seller cafe and talking about Amazon business and they were like, Specifically told me to go into, um, I think it's like custom pricing or like automated pricing. And you can set up a rule for, for all your products to just do. I think it's 2% off, uh, we'll get you the badge. And then if you do like 3% off of like, if they buy multiples, then you'll get unlocked and get into this, like other thing on Amazon business. So that's, I just kind of followed what they said. And, um, uh, it's been, I mean, that was in September, so it's been a little while, but things are. We're working with that and that's actually really easy now because even if we add new products that just automatically the business price gets put on there. So I kind of like doing it that way now. Speaker 2: And now for your advertising, do you just put a modifier on your regular campaigns for business customers or do you have standalone like campaigns that are specifically just for business customers? Speaker 1: So we started off with having the bid modifiers, but now we have dedicated campaigns for for business stuff. And we still have those modifiers on the original campaigns, too. But the ones that are, at least for the time being, we do. But those Amazon business like dedicated campaigns do amazing. And we go like pretty broad with those, like lots of autos, lots of broad match. I mean, we do some some Like phrase and exact match stuff too. But you can go like pretty broad because I don't know if a lot of people are doing it quite yet. And usually businesses buy so much more and everything. The ROAS is so much better that, you know, you can keep those bids high and they'll keep pushing it out there. Speaker 2: What have you found then, you know, since you started segregating the advertising What have you found as far as like, are the same keywords performing for both? Or do you have like separate funnels? Like, do you have auto and broad discovery campaigns going for the business? And then if so, like, do you find some keywords like, never even are not even good for regular customers, but but they're great for business or vice versa? Speaker 1: It's been the keyword on the keyword level, it's performed pretty similar. I don't know if we found any like new You like new big keywords, but I know one thing like our unsponsored brands. So we've been we've been using a lot more sponsored brand ads lately just on the consumer side and on the business side. But we noticed when we were going through and setting all these like business modifiers earlier this year that we're like, wait, the sponsored brand ads don't have a business modifier. You know, but they, but you can go and actually create a sponsored brand, you know, business campaign. So we started doing that and those are doing amazing. Those are some of our best campaigns now. And I think it's because like the other ones were targeting businesses, but you'd get the consumer sales in there too. And it would just drag the ROAS down where you can have these sponsored brand business campaigns like wide open and it will just be there all the time. Speaker 2: How long has have first of all, Who makes up your team? You've scaled to over 3 million. I doubt you're handling everything 100% yourself. I hope not. Do you have VAs? Do you have partners? Do you have employees? Speaker 1: It's a pretty lean team. It's mainly me and my wife. And then for a while, my nephew was helping pack in our warehouse. He was playing football and stuff, so he's back in school. Doing that but it's mainly me and my wife and then we're going to be hiring some people this year to kind of help take us to the next level here because we definitely need people. Speaker 2: So everything from making the listings, customer service, advertising, inventory, 100% in-house, just your family. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Yep. So big, big shout out to Chelsea, my wife, for helping me out with that. Speaker 2: There you go. Yeah. Maybe she should have been the one on here. Usually it's the unsung hero of things. How long have you guys been using Helium 10? Speaker 1: Um, since like, since the beginning, I mean, since even, even before we were selling, like, I think it was the first set of tool. It was the first tool we used. Speaker 2: You got the education, you know, that's how you say you learn. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I mean, before your first, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. The, the, um, yeah. Freedom Ticket was amazing. And, um, I should probably go through even, you know, the other iterations of it, but. I did Freedom Ticket 2, really the whole thing, so that helps. Speaker 2: Obviously, you use Helium 10 to find your product. Are you still using it to find product line extensions, some of these? Are you mainly using it for keyword research? What do you use it for these days? Speaker 1: Helium 10? Man, we use it for Everything like day-to-day operations wise and tracking stuff. Unlike the launch side, we use Listing Builder, Scribble. Well, it used to be called Scribbles. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Now it's Listing Builder. You know, Magnet, Cerebro for sure. Listing Analyzer to check out different stuff. We also use Listing Analyzer kind of on a day-to-day basis just to check competitors. We just kind of got in a habit of doing that and now we, you know, we just keep that going, I guess. Just to check our rank, our BSRs compared to competitors and all that stuff. Yeah, profits, I mean, checking. We use Helium 10 pretty much for everything, unless it's our own like custom tool or something. Speaker 2: Now, something I ask people who like weren't using Helium 10, And then they started after they had their business. It's like an easy question. It's like, all right, how did it transform? What did you do that saved you a lot of time or that actually got you revenue? But you've been doing the right thing, which is using it from day one. So you don't have that kind of anecdote. But imagine a world without Helium 10. Where would you be impacted most? Where it's like, you know what? First of all, this is not even a manual thing. Like maybe something like, yeah, I would have to hire a VA. I'd have to go every day and look where my ranks of keywords are or something like, you know what? Not even hiring a VA could do this because there's just literally no way to do it. What would you miss the most if there was a day? Not that it's ever happening since Helium 10 is here forever, but what would you miss the most? Speaker 1: Probably the keyword tracking and just making sure that you're, like the keyword tracking and the alerts just to make sure every morning you can wake up, make sure everything's good. It would be impossible to track all that stuff even if you had You just wouldn't be able to do it as well. You would just notice that. Why isn't the selling, you know, and you'd be, you'd lose a week or something until you figure out what was going on. Yeah. We would, it would at least be like an extra person that their whole job would be just to gather data on the internet. Yeah. That would be it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Now you've talked a little bit of Amazon business that a lot of people don't use. What else are you doing that that's fairly, you know, um, unique that has helped you scale to where you are now? Obviously. Sponsor product ads, you know, I'm sure you're doing them. It's not unique, you know, 90% of Amazon private label sellers, but something that you think, hey, probably less than 10% of people are doing at all, or maybe at least doing like you. Speaker 1: Sure, sure. Actually, at the last, right before Amazon Accelerate this year, we had the Helium 10 Elite meeting, like right before that. I can't remember who I was. It was in one of the groups where we were coming up with hacks and he was saying how, you know, Amazon Marketing Cloud, it just came out for everyone and I was interested in using that. And he was talking about how you can you can type in, you know, in natural language like AI, like what you know, what custom audience or custom, you know, thing you wanted Amazon Marketing Cloud to make you and then it would just make it, you know, it would write the SQL stuff for you. And I was like, that sounds amazing, because I don't know how to do that, you know, so I've really been using that a lot. And I've gotten some really cool like custom audiences that I think are really helping us out. Including like, it's kind of unlocked some things where we can use sponsored display, like reach campaigns, like the VCPM campaigns that everyone kind of hates. We're going back and using those a little bit because we can narrow it down so much into what we know our audiences and we can just push it right out to them. Speaker 2: What's an example of like one of these audiences? Is it like a. Speaker 1: Um, so like B2B general contractors, like, uh, or I think it's like business lookalikes, uh, yeah. B2B like general contractors or something. It's a big audience on its own, but then we say, okay, look at this audience segment, but we want to make sure that if the customer has clicked on one of our ads, make sure they have not viewed our detail page, bought one of our products, or clicked on one of our ads for the last 365 days. So it's like a pure reach campaign and it updates every day. So if someone, if, if we go and like put these ads out and then someone clicks on it, they get taken out of that. So they don't keep getting served the same ads, you know, they kind of like fall down into like the next level of the funnel and stuff. Speaker 2: So like what, you know, give people an idea about how this has transformed some of your advertising. Like, is it just a purely amount of, hey, you're converting more or your ROI has improved because of this, your ad generated revenue, your, you know, what exactly is better by getting, niching down to these audiences in your advertising? Speaker 1: I would say, I mean, just that we've kind of seen it in our tacos has been, You know, trending lower. It's hard with like top of funnel stuff to get like hard numbers on it. But even in Amazon Marketing Cloud, they'll show you like the path, like the path of conversion, you know, for the last however many days. And you can see like, ever since we started really pushing out with the sponsored display, you can see like some of the first touch points are those campaigns. So it's getting out there and it's working and you can see the conversion rate if they, you know, first see this and then they go to some of your other ads, but it's a lot to track. I mean, it's kind of, we're still coming up with methods and kind of systems to track how effective it is. Speaker 2: You doing anything with AI as far as creative, you know, like, you know, coming up with things for sponsored display ads or sponsored brand ads or video ads or just doing those kind of old school? Speaker 1: It's like, it's like hit or miss. So We don't do any of it consistently, but if we're coming out with a new product or something, we want to try a new ad style, we can go and use usually ChatGPT and we can create different pictures or a mid-journey or something and just try different stuff out. Speaker 2: What's one of the biggest mistakes you've made running your business? Hindsight is 20-20. We're like, Oh, my God, I can't believe I did that. Or it could have been something, you know, like it was an accident. But it turned out bad. And then how did you fix it? Speaker 1: I would say it's probably the Like we we got it. This was back in 2023 or something. We started taking out some loans to expand, you know, to buy more stuff because we were growing and everything was working great. I think what happened was, we really hadn't had any like, We really hadn't had anything bad happen to us. Like, everything we did was just gold. So like, we're like, whatever, let's just keep pouring money. Speaker 2: You just angered like thousands and thousands of Amazon sellers. Ah, this stinking Andrew. Speaker 1: It's like everything just keeps working. So let's just like, let's borrow some money and just keep keep feeding the beast, you know, but then right as we were like getting, you know, some bigger orders coming and we were like, okay, we probably don't want to take on any more debt. Let's like let this Let's let this go. We had a big competitor come in on our main product line and like take half of our market share. So like a bunch of the money that was you know, planned, forecasted to be there to like pay all the loans back was drying up. So we're like, okay, we got to like We got to really lock it down, but we're, I mean, we're still kind of digging out of that. So like by, by June of like next year, I think we'll be out of it completely, which will be amazing. Yeah. That's taken years to get through. Speaker 2: Yeah. So then what would your advice be for people out there so that they avoid something like that? Speaker 1: I would say, look up your debt to income ratios for like businesses and stuff. And don't go, you know, make sure you're tracking that because I was not tracking that at the time. We're like, yeah, we're kind of like just going on vibes and kind of like we have this forecast, this financial forecast tool that we made where it's like, yeah, the money's gonna be there, you know, the money's gonna be there. And we're kind of pushing it a little bit further than we should have. So but then, you know, we figured out like, oh, this bad things can happen. So we got to pull it back. Speaker 2: What's the what's the flip side? What's the biggest win you've had? Like it could have been again on accident or you actually tried to do something and just like did. Speaker 1: So, I'm actually really excited for what happened at Amazon Accelerate this year. I heard everyone talking about, this was the first time I had went, but everyone was talking about how great Seller Cafe was and all the different things you can get fixed and all this stuff. And on our main product line, we could not get our reviews to link together, like to like group together and add together on our, our main parent. And I was like, Okay, I want to come and like, bring it, you know, bring this to them. And then I also want to, or actually, like before even got there, because you submit the problem to them, you know, like a week before a couple weeks before, even before I got there, they had fixed it. And I was like, I had tried for months, I tried for years, like multiple times over years to fix this problem. And I just like gave up, you know, because I just couldn't do it. And they fixed it in like a week. And I was like, what? So they're like, you know, we could just hang out or if you have any more problems, I'm like, Oh, I got problems like I just started like listing all this stuff. But one of the other big ones that they did was They fixed some of our referral fees. You know, we're in the business and industrial category and some of our referral fees were still at 15%. They brought those down to 12. So that's good. And then a lot of our, a big portion of our products were not eligible for subscribe and save for some reason, especially for like business products. I'm like, man, we really got to like, Fix that like why you know nice. It was similar to the review thing. I just couldn't get it fixed no matter how many times I asked him or how nicely I asked you know. But they fixed that too. So that those were those are huge wins because we got our our reviews now on the main product or like over 10,000 and like the the next like the next highest competitor is like three or four thousand. So we're like way ahead. And we've noticed our conversion increased immediately. The day that we learned, we could see it. And then our subscribe and save is taking off big time on all those products. I was so excited flying home from Seattle. That was so fun. Speaker 2: Amazon Accelerate, that's where you can get your stuff fixed. Some of the stuff you mentioned obviously helps with profitability, but I think the question I'm asking a lot of our guests this year is, You know, 2026, I mean, every year this is an issue, but 2026 especially, I hear more like sellers lamenting profitability because of tariffs or rising costs of manufacturing, rising costs of advertising, increased competition, whatever it might be, inflation. What are you guys doing to make sure that you're still profitable? Is it a mixture of raising prices, cutting costs? How are you doing it? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's tough. One of the biggest problems we had this year was the tariffs. It's not necessarily the terrorists themselves. It was like how fast and how quickly they're changing. That was wild. We just didn't know what our cost of goods was going to be from like month to month, you know, and then kind of like money management around that we were when they had like the tariff pauses. It's like 90 day tariff pause. It's like, okay, put in a huge order because like, you know, we don't know when it's gonna If it's gonna, after 90 days, is it gonna go back to where it was? I don't know. But we were kind of just doing everything we could think of. Canceling any subscriptions and stuff that we're not using. We changed up how we're doing some of our shipping. For some of our stuff, our stuff is really heavy. And we used to buy like full containers. And actually we found it was cheaper to do LCL like less than container load. So like pallet shipments, even if they're like eight or 10 pallets or something, if we ship those, LCL, it was actually way cheaper. And it's just because our stuff was so heavy, like we would, like we would hit the limit of the full container, the weight limit of the full container way before the volume, you know, our containers would be whatever the way limit is like 20, like 22 or 24 tons, but it was only like 25% full like volume wise. So We're able to save some money that way. Speaker 2: Are you shipping that to your warehouse or directly to Amazon? Speaker 1: A little bit of both, a little bit of both, mainly just to Amazon. And we were kind of like, I'm sure everyone had the same issue, but Amazon really kind of forced people to start using AWD. So we're using AWD. We have our own warehouse as well, and we ship directly to FBA. So it's kind of a mix. Speaker 2: What else, other kind of secret sauce you might have that you're willing to share? Speaker 1: Oh, like some of the Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences. So some stuff that's cool in there. We would take, like if we're going after business customers, We would take, there's some setup, some like easy setup audiences in there where you can say, okay, for these ASINs, so you can say just for like these products that are all grouped together in the same family, create a lookalike audience from my customers that I've bought multiple times and then create an audience for that. So then we would do that for like every product family that we had. And then we hit so it's lookalike. So it's, you know, not your current customers, but people who look just like them. And then you can send all your ads and stuff like directly to them. You've had really good response to that. That's a, I would highly recommend doing that because it's, it's very, you don't have to even like use the code or anything. There's like a no code option just to create those. Speaker 2: It's been great catching up and we want to maybe bring you back at the end of next year or so. Let's see if you hit that $4 million mark and get some TikTok sales perhaps. Once you're ready, obviously Helium 10 can help you with that. Just get all your listings up there in like five minutes to migrate it over. Very interesting. I see a lot of success. Even with stuff that you might not think are that TikTokable, it actually ends up having success just because there's nobody else selling that stuff. So that might be the case with you. So I wish you and your wife all the best. And again, maybe we'll party in Maldives together one of these days. Speaker 1: That's right. Sounds good. All right. Speaker 2: Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you in the next episode. Speaker 1: Yep.