Amazon FBA Predictions for 2023: NFTs to Launch Products! with Kevin King

Amazon FBA Predictions for 2023: NFTs to Launch Products! with Kevin King 00:00:00 One of the biggest issues you have on Amazon or Walmart or anywhere else is building an audience to launch a product with. You can go out and build a Facebook group or an Instagram group or try to get an influencer, but you need to build an audience. And by having an NFT, it's like a membership card. It's people of a similar mentality that want to participate. By buying the NFT, that then gives them rights to actually help us develop products. 00:00:29 King, if you've been in the Amazon space for some time, you surely know Kevin. But I think you'll find this a little bit kind of a different kind of interview. I've known Kevin since 2015. So we have really good rapport. We kind of spoke a little bit about actually when we met, but then a little bit about different topics. Amazon, we spoke about NFTs and e-commerce. We spoke about the current project of NFTs that we're in that was started by Manny, the original founder of Helium. Why we both kind of invested into that project. We ended up speaking about the predictions for 2023, which I think you'll find interesting and some of the different projects Kevin is working on. So I think you'll just find it to be a really interesting conversation. 00:01:12 Podcast as always is sponsored by Incrementum Digital. At Incrementum Digital, we help you scale your business using the power of Amazon advertising, Amazon DSP, optimizing your listings with better titles, bullets, A-plus content, images, helping you with Amazon posts and really helping you. Use PPC to both rank products and lower your ACs, and also optimize your business as it's gotten more challenging over the last year or so. So visit incrementumdigital. com. The podcast is also sponsored by 8fig. co. 8fig is your best solution for growth capital for your business. 8fig helps you not only just get growth capital, but it's one of the most or the most flexible solution for e-commerce sellers to get growth capital along with a dashboard. They have to help you see your profitability and manage your supply chain, check out 8fig. 00:02:06 co. They also recently launched a mobile app, which allows you to see all that data as well. I think you're going to really enjoy this podcast with Kevin King. Okay, so we have with us Kevin King today. If you've been in the Amazon e-commerce space, you must know who Kevin King is. Otherwise, you may not be in the space. So I wanted to introduce Kevin, who's got his dog there in the background. Kevin is, you know, Amazon seller, speaker; he has been involved in Helium 10, creating Freedom Ticket, Helium 10 Elite Events. He runs a virtual and live event called Billion Dollar Seller Summit. Another project with Steve Stimerson called Product Savant. And we're going to talk today a little bit about e-commerce, NFTs, and some of what Kevin's been up to. 00:02:50 So welcome to the podcast. Hey, I'm glad to be here, man. It's always good to talk with you. There's always a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm glad to, really glad to have you on. Yeah, I'd love to hear. I remember when I first met you, actually. I think it was like 2015, 2016, like in Atlanta, wasn't it? It was like Cellar Labs, I think, was doing like an event. Yes. And I went out to that event. Jeff Cohen said, Kevin, you got to come out. You can't speak. Because back then we were doing the Helium 10. Oh, it actually was called Illuminati. Right. And it was a little edgy. And he's like, we can't have you speak. But you're welcome to come out. 00:03:26 So I came out and I remember like the night before we were all sitting around some like break room or conference room or something. And there's this guy over there like you're the only one in the room that knew anything. You're like talking and like you had something information on whatever the topic came up with. And I was like, who is this guy? He actually knows a thing or two. I never heard of him before. And that was you. Yeah, we go back a ways, yeah it's crazy to think that was like you know seven years ago or so, you know, so that was before what, two babies, and yeah it was that was, yeah my daughter's eight, so probably right you know right after that, and then yeah I had a, I have a 10-month-old now, so yeah it's long, long, long time ago, I'm sure a lot's happened in, in your life and business since you know 2015. 00:04:12 Well, I'm just, I'm doing the same thing. It's kind of a, you know, it's, I mean, we got, I've got a couple of new projects, but it's just like, why mess with something if it works, you know? So Illuminati was something that Manny and Guillermo started with Helium 10 back in 2017 to be like a more advanced kind of, it's modeled off, you know, Ben Cummings has his thing and there are a couple of others out there and they're like, Hey, we need something like that. So we started that and then we got pushed back on the name. A lot of people say that name's a little offensive, you know, some of the religious people and stuff. It got rolled into a Helium 10 as a membership level called Helium 10 Elite. 00:04:43 And so I still orchestrate that. Basicially, I come on every month and do seven Ninja Hacks and I bring on three guests. You've been on it a few times. Some of your team has been on it. Mentor has been on it. And then I do the Freedom Ticket course. I've done three versions of that for them, which is A to Z on how to sell on Amazon. And then, yeah, I do the Billion Dollar Seller Summits. I still sell. I have three active. I have four Amazon accounts. One of them is not active, but three of them I still sell on and then do Product Savants. I speak at different events. You know, coming up, we have one in Brooklyn. I think I'll see you at in Brooklyn, which is a really cool event. 00:05:19 And so, yeah, I'm just kind of sticking my head down, doing the same old thing. Right. And, you know, it is one of those things, like if you kind of stick into one thing long enough, you know, like; you eventually just become, you know, hopefully eventually become very successful and, you know, you gain a lot of like knowledge network, right? Like I think so many people along the way that probably we've met that are no longer, you know, in this, in this business, you know, over, over the years. And also some of the, you know, sort of gurus who were really out just to kind of scam people, you know, have come and gone along the way too. They either faded out because they didn't deliver or the FTC came and got them. 00:06:02 Right. Yeah. There's a bunch of people. I mean, not to specifically name, but, you know, I just heard that Just One Dime just filed like bankruptcy court. They were selling like an Amazon automation, you know, thing. And you had Kevin David and his partner automation. Dave Arnett, I think, or what's his name? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know. Unfortunately, many innocent people got hurt along the way who were kind of naive and bought into bought into this stuff. But, you know, one of the things that that always like for me is like you get when you get to, you know, you're a public figure. You're out there is people sometimes will try to use you. And speaking of one dime, he's actually based here in Austin where I'm based. 00:06:44 And I was at a like a cilantro, you know, like one of these like salad places where you make a. you know, a bowl or whatever. Yeah. About a year, year and a half ago. And he happened to be at the same place and he, I didn't recognize him, but he recognized me. He came up afterwards. Like, Hey, can we take a picture together? Right. And I was like, you know, what do you do in that situation? You know, I took a picture together, but is that, you don't know, is that picture going to be used in some sort of marketing? Am I then validating? Right. I'm with, you know, people do this. I'm with Tony Robbins, you know, sort of validation that you're right. 00:07:18 So I was like, yeah, you gotta be careful, you know, who you associate with. And I mean, you, you've known it, you and Brandon used to, I remember a few years ago, you guys were calling everybody out on online. You're like, someone did something. It was either you or Brandon, like, Hey, this is BS. And you call people on the spot and it was awesome. Right. And it needs to happen more in this business because there's just a lot of riffraff. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of automation stuff. And, you know, I know people personally, I know a guy who told me what, you know, messaged me about. Kevin David stuff like a year ago and he said, 'Yeah, me and like others, you know, in a group together, it's like 10 million dollars that we've been conned together, everyone put in a hundred thousand dollars, whatever, and money's gone. 00:08:01 You know, good luck, good luck getting it back, you know, it's like the FTX guys or the crypto guys, yeah, the money's gone. Sounds good but the money's gone, yeah, it's yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, it's what it's kind of the importance of why having a network is good because you can ask people, you can find out about people, you can, you know, new, new sellers just see ads for this stuff and they don't know anyone. And I mean, a lot of these guys are brilliant marketers. I mean, you look at their marketing, it's like, man, right. They could just be legit. Right. The marketing is really, really good. Right. But there's no substance behind it. And it's just a pyramid scheme. Right. 00:08:41 You know, and I've, I've known you to always be very blunt upfront, you know, like it gets me in trouble sometimes. Sometimes I speak, I speak too freely. Right. But you know, it was also something to be said of being blunt upfront and, you know, telling it like it is, you know, in, in, in, in everything that you do, because yeah, a lot of people take advantage or make money short term and don't, don't do that. But you know, at the same time, it's like good business because you end up having longevity in the space and people trust you because. you know, you're not looking to take advantage of it. You're looking to help people. Now everybody needs, everybody needs a little helping hand sometime. And there's so much mentioned information. 00:09:21 I like to like try to help, help people the best I can and set that straight. You know, I don't have time to answer every little Facebook post and stuff. I mean, you were at one point, I remember before you started incremental digital, you were like avid on there. Like someone would post within seconds. You were like responding. I don't know how you, I mean, it didn't matter if it's three in the morning. You must have the phone glued to your hand and just coming in and you were like super good at responding to everything. And I haven't, maybe it's my feed is not showing it as much anymore, but you're really, really good about that. Yeah. 00:09:52 And I still, I mean, generally we'll answer every single DM, you know, that I, that I, that I get, even if it's a quick sort of response or if it's not immediately, I still, I still try to, to do that. I don't know. It's a combination of guilty conscience maybe, or not feeling like I'm not really responding to somebody or whatever it is. But I do try to help when I can and if I can respond to something. I want to get into some of the other things you're involved in, but one of the reasons you asked me to sort of like, hey, let's talk is the idea of using NFTs in e-commerce and how sellers can leverage it. 00:10:31 And maybe it's not as hot of a topic today because the whole kind of market has gone down, unless you're in bulls and apes, which we're both in, which I think we're probably both up nicely with what we have. But I think it's a really interesting topic. And one thing I'll say about it is that a friend of mine, David Guillem, who owns Mary Ruth Organics, big brand, nine-figure brand, he brought on Gary Vaynerchuk on their board. And then shortly thereafter, I saw they had a promotion where the founder signed some of the bottles in the warehouse of the supplement. And if you ended up getting a signed bottle, then you won like a V friends NFT or something. So it's kind of a cool way. And they did this promotion basically. 00:11:21 And, you know, I mean. If you were going to order one bottle, maybe you're going to order now for the next six months of the supplement because during this promotional period where you want to order more so that you have maybe a better chance to get one of those signed bottles, which is pretty cool idea of kind of how to do a promotion and kind of integrate it with NFTs. But we'd love to hear, I know you mentioned to me, you've done like hour-long presentations on this topic on kind of how you see it integrating and do you see it primarily as something off Amazon versus, you know, on Amazon. Yeah, I did like an hour presentation at the Sale and Scale, Helium 10 Sale and Scale event back in September on stage, which if you have access to that, or I also did one for Augustus for Orange Click channel. 00:12:05 So it's on YouTube. You could probably just Google Kevin King NFT, Orange Click or something if you want to see the full explanation. But, you know, NFTs are one of those things-it's kind of a tricky thing. There's a lot of people that are like, 'Ah, that's just a bunch of JPEG pictures.' And yeah, some of it is just a bunch of JPEG pictures. And it was a hot thing. I get this daily newsletter called Nifty NFT, and they have all these little stories. And I just saw one the other day that the market's down. I think the Guardian, they linked to an article in the Guardian and said it's down like 95% or something like that. There was something like $12 billion spent on NFTs in the fourth quarter of last year. 00:12:42 And then now it's like $270 million or something. It's like way down. And that's true. There was a lot of speculation. There was a lot of get rich quick. There's a lot of fly by night. People that were coming in just trying to make a buck, creating all these crazy things. And most of it had no substance. Kids in their underwear that were 15 years old that had never built a business before. They would set these roadmaps and all these things and all these promises they couldn't deliver on any of it. And it became a problem. So a lot of it's just crashed and burned. And you see negativity in the press about NFTs are dead. They're not dead. This is the internet's 1998, 1999. You probably remember pets. com. 00:13:18 People said there was companies selling furniture online and people, those, they all went out of business and people. I mean, look, in 1999, I think there was, or I think there was a article, there was a cover of Barron's was Amazon dot bust or something. Right. They're predicting, you know, Amazon, Amazon's not going to make it. Nobody's going to buy furniture. Nobody's going to buy dog food online. And look now, Wayfair and Amazon, everybody's selling furniture. It's the same thing. It's a shakeout going on right now in the whole crypto world. I mean, there's a lot of fraud. You have the thing with FTX. I was a 30-year-old kid with no business experience. Yeah, his parents were Stanford law professors, but he was running it like he was running something out of his backyard, moving money. 00:14:03 There's an issue that there's a shakeout. It's going to get, it's going to get real. And like, well, maybe we can talk a little bit later, but like bulls and apes, that's a real project. Right. And that's like, you said, we're up what three X or something on that right now, everybody else is down. We're up three X. And I think that's about to go to maybe five, 10 X with what they're about to do early next year. And that's because there's real business behind it. They've got 40 employees. They're doing it right. They have experience and that more of those people are going to come in, but back on, on the original question on NFTs with e-commerce. What we're doing, we have a company called Green Ocean Labs, and we do recycled sustainable products. 00:14:38 And NFTs are a lot more than just a JPEG. NFTs can be tied to contracts. They can be tied to a whole wide range of things. If you go watch that presentation on YouTube, you'll see I outline it all. But it's a whole wide range of things. It's going to change the way we live over the next 10 years as this takes root in a lot of different industries. And so what we're looking at is using these as something tying it to e-commerce, it's almost like a membership card. So the NFT itself, we're not selling NFTs speculatively. We're not saying here, buy this NFT and it's going to, you hope it 10Xs. No, you're buying this NFT and it gives you special rights. It's called utility in the NFT business. 00:15:17 And those special rights are related to the products. So one of the biggest issues you have on Amazon or Walmart or anywhere else is building an audience to launch a product with. You can go out and build a Facebook group, or an Instagram group, or try to get an influencer or something, but you need to build an audience. And by having an NFT, it's like a membership card. It makes it's people of a similar mentality that want to participate. And so by buying the NFT, that then gives them rights to actually help us develop products. So they will be, it's almost like our own pick food. They'll be our own pick food. And we'll say, we'll say, you know, if we have 5,000 NFT holders, we'll say, what do you, what do you want in a sustainable, all sustainable? 00:15:56 You want a baby stroller made of a hundred, sustainable materials. Okay. What should it look like? What should, and they'll help us through the design process to the iteration process. And then if it makes sense on Amazon, you know, we'll do our homework and our keyword research and all that kind of stuff. If it makes sense, then we'll go launch it on Amazon or we'll get it developed and made using different companies like, like Zach Leonard's company or some of the others. Yep. And yeah, Gimba, and we'll get it made, then we'll put it up on Amazon, and we'll say, 'Look, This audience, since you're an NFT holder, you get a discount. Or maybe not even a discount, but if you go buy this product on Amazon, it's live on Amazon, go buy the product on Amazon. 00:16:39 There's an NFC, not NFT, but NFC, near field communication code on every single product. If you scan that, we're going to airdrop an additional NFT into your wallet. It's free. It's a collectible NFT. So what we've done is we've created this. This cycle where people that are passionate about sustainability, people that are passionate about helping develop products and having an input will then in turn launch the product on Amazon and they get a benefit by launching that product. And then what we're going to do, there's, it's a tricky situation. And then you essentially can add them into like a Discord, right? Where. Yeah. Yeah. And then we're going to have, there'll be some gamification to it, just like there is with Bulls and Apes where they can do different things and, and earn like. 00:17:21 different things on their NFT. We have a lore. So we have a story. We have these different worlds. We have this concept where there's this alien that came down to earth and said, 'Hey, this planet's totally effed up.' I know my buddy over here on the water planet. He can come and help. This is my buddy here on the forest planet. All the sustainability type of stuff can come and help. And so you can earn different things from these different worlds. It's mixing collector mentality, community mentality with e-commerce. It's blending those three things together. To solve a problem of launching on Amazon and cutting through the clutter, and giving people what they want, and then by holding the NFT, you also get some you have rights to say like a certain percentage of every product we sell, whether it's on Amazon, Walmart, or direct-to-consumer, whatever we'll. 00:18:05 We'll go to sustainability efforts, and they'll get to vote; they'll say, 'You know if we sell a thousand, ten thousand baby strollers, and we raise I don't know what he's going to sell for a hundred bucks. We raise a million bucks in gross sales, right? Certain percentage of that, let's say 5%, $50,000 is going to go to a sustainable or maybe more sustainability fund. And they'll get to say what we use that for as an NFT holder. Let's say this is great. We want to go, you know, clean up a river in South America, or we can clean up a beach, Long Beach, you know, and go and take all the plastics off. They've been floating up. So they'll get to vote on that. So they feel like they're part of it. 00:18:38 It's not just, I have a membership card and I'm in a group. I'm part of this. I'm making a difference in the world. And the NFT will be the mechanism, but the NFT allows us to do all kinds of tracking. So we can track what their purchases are. We can track who's participated in different things because it's all on the blockchain. And then every time one of these baby strollers in this example sells, they will earn points just by since they bought one to launch it. It's almost, I can't say, you know, you have to be careful here on the securities. Just to explain in layman's terms, it's almost like a royalty. By holding an NFT, they get a royalty. We have to do it differently, but they get a royalty on every one of these items that are sold. 00:19:19 So they're making money there. So that's what we're doing. And then we can track, since we're doing sustainability, if we're taking plastic bottles out of the ocean, out of the Mediterranean near Spain to use as the raw materials, we can track it and tie an NFT to the invoice where it came out of the water. There's companies that do this one called Plastique. And then track that raw materials all the way to the factory and all the way through the process. So, you know, a lot of companies say, 'Hey, we do, we donate 10% to, you know, to this, or we are products are 10% made of this.' How do you really know? Right. That'd be all in the blockchain, all transparent. So that's what we're doing. 00:19:55 We're so we're, we're hoping to launch this, this brand and the brand's already live, but we're making a pivot on it. Well, we're hoping to launch it. In March of next year, but we're having to wait now because there's a big company and one of the partners knows the guys at Animoto, which is a huge company based over in Hong Kong that's really big into the crypto and animation space. And they're coming out with a green token, just like you have the token, the ERC-20 tokens with Bulls and Apes. They're coming out with a green token and it's going to tie across a whole bunch of sustainability products. And we were going to develop our own and it's going to cost us about $600,000 to $800,000 minimum. 00:20:34 But they're doing it. So we're waiting for them to launch that, which is probably going to be summer and tie into that. And that's going to get us just like Bulls and Apes. So it brings all these other projects in, brings all this other audience in. It's going to create this whole flywheel. And that's how we're using it as it relates to e-commerce. And I think this could be huge. This is not something a brand new seller is going to be able to pull off. This is not something I'm going to be teaching in Freedom Ticket. Hey, here's how to, everybody should do this. You shouldn't. It's more for sophisticated sellers, but I think it's going to give us a major competitive advantage. be key to brand building and key to launching anything we want on Amazon successfully. 00:21:09 Right. And so, I mean, essentially it's the idea of developing an engaged community around your product, along with, I guess, what's called like a DAO, right? Which is what it stands for, but basically a group of people that are making decisions. Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Yeah, there you go. So they're making decisions around what's going to happen. I've seen, you know, when NFTs kind of originally came out, I think I saw that certain movies even, right? We're going to sell NFTs, raise money to make the movie. And then the DAO, the organization would kind of vote on like what happens, right? What's the ending? Do you want this ending or do you want this ending or whatever it is like around the movie and kind of help? 00:21:55 Create it right so you can kind of do that with e-commerce with like you said future products or what do you want to donate or as far as like sustainability efforts or and you utilize that that community and I guess if somebody does sell that NFT which has some benefits maybe discounts or something tied to it then there's also a royalty that goes back to the some of which can go back into that DOW or whatever it is. And then some of the products we'll develop ourselves, but there's one of our partners in this. I've got some pretty key partners that are really tied into a lot of different aspects of the sustainable world. And one of them is on the board of a VC firm that sees all these deals. 00:22:32 Also, all these companies that have done sustainable products, whether it be, you know, bamboo towels or whatever it is, they're in these incubators and they come to him and he sees all the best ones. And these guys don't have a clue about how to sell retail. or how to sell DTC or sell on Amazon. But they have a great idea and they develop a good product. So we'll bring those people into our ecosystem because we'll have an audience. We'll have a community. And so it won't be just stuff that we develop. It'll be brand new stuff. We're not talking about going to Alibaba and putting our logo on something and changing it slightly. We're talking about brand new stuff. And they're doing all the dirty work of developing it and getting it up. 00:23:09 And we'll say, hey, does our market like this? We have 5,000 or 10,000 NFT holders. If they like it, okay, let's launch it. And it doesn't make sense on Amazon or Walmart or Shopify or wherever. And that's what we're doing. We think it could be very, very successful. Do you know, I mean, are there any like known or any companies out there that you know of that are kind of leveraging this at the moment or not? Not that I know of. Not in this way. Because it takes that you gotta know people in the NFT world that know how to pull that off. You got to have the people for us, sustainability. You got to know the e-commerce side. So we have a really good team from all these different worlds brought together that are expert, top experts. 00:23:50 So we have an advantage there. Now, if we're sure some people are going to be watching what we do. And if we're successful, I'm sure others will come along and try to do the same thing. Right. And they should. And I'm not worried about that. I just, I mean, you know, it's difficult. PPC is expensive now. It's difficult to launch. It's more about brand building. This ties, it's almost like the perfect storm. It brings everything together. And like on NFTs, I mean, you mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, he, he has the V friends, which was successful. He was hot on NFTs like a year ago. And then he kind of backed off a little bit, but I just heard a recording recently where he said he's buying up stuff right now. 00:24:27 He’s like, this is coming back. It may not get to the level it was, but it's, this is the internet. You know, we're, we're such in such an infancy. Infantile states and NFTs and the crypto world and all this negativity and gloom and gloom. And people are losing their butt right now. I mean, one of my buddies just lost $15,000 in the FTX deal. And he's kicking himself because three days before it went down, he had planned on moving it out. And he just didn't have his ledger with him and he didn't move it out. Lost it. It's going to happen, but this is not going away. But, you know, look, at the same time. Everybody who has a stock portfolio is also heavily down in the last year. 00:25:04 I mean, Amazon, you know, all these stocks, right? Like Amazon is down 50%. That's all today. Yeah. Facebook, 75%, 50%. Shopify, you know, like I bought into the Coinbase IP, you know, like all this stuff is down, you know, that's probably down like 80% or something. This is just life and business and gambling. Yeah. And if you're a long-term holder, at least on the stock side, I think, and you continue to buy when things are down, you make it up. I think on the NFT side, there's, I think, blue chip type of NFTs, right? Like Bulls and Apes. Like Bulls and Apes, which we can talk a little bit about. I was going to say, you know, Bored Ape Yacht Club, right? 00:25:48 That one's down there quite a bit, too, and going through some legal issues and some claims. They're just a really high-level public profile, so they're going to be subject to some of that. Right. So yeah, so Bulls and Apes, for those that don't know, the original founder of Helium 10, Manny and Guy, who exited out of Helium, started along with, I guess, a couple other people, started an NFT project called Bulls and Apes. I didn't go into it right away when it launched, but about a week or so later, I started buying. So the price was low. And then maybe a month later, I started just buying more. And really I did it because I was more betting on Manny, right? 00:26:28 Who I saw, first of all, I knew him from, I don't know, 2017, 2018, you know, time, maybe 2016 or whatever, until he exited. Obviously he executed very, very well. I also know he's not a guy who's going to, after, you know, a, you know, a multi, multi-million dollar deal is going to go, you know, take advantage of people for, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars or so, or a million dollars or whatever on an NFT, and I was really betting on kind of what he's doing and how he's doing things differently in the NFT space, and you know, I ended up owning a lot of, a lot of, a lot of the NFTs, there some of the God Balls and all that stuff has gone up a tremendous amount. 00:27:10 And actually, I think in a, in about a month, in February, I think the, the Apes are going to launch. Yeah. There's a, there's a pre-mint in January. Yeah. That's a certain number of them, a limited number. And then the big public mint will be in February. But yeah, I think, I think it's going to jump in what they're doing. They're smart. They're, you know, they're, they have business experience and they're executing, you know, tight on this tokenization that they're doing, bringing in all these other communities where you can earn tokens. It's brilliant. To bring in this other audience and the the utility that they have, like you and I, I know I've seen you post sometimes Manny's brought what 18, 19 deals to the table where you can invest in, you know, SpaceX and all these different things. 00:27:48 You know he when he exited Helium 10 it was a a very healthy eight-figure exit for him, and gee so he had a lot of money, so he started investing. And, he his He gave me this book for Christmas a couple of years ago. He lives here in Austin as well. And he and I are friends, and we go to dinner and hang out sometimes. And he gave me this book for Christmas a couple of years ago about like his theory about buying 500 businesses and putting $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 in each of these 500 at the very beginning, and realizing that 499 of them are probably going to go kaput or make you a very small, if any, return. 00:28:22 But one of them is going to be the next Uber or Lyft or Facebook or whatever. And so he has access to a lot of deals that we don't have access to it because we're not big $10 million investors or something. And he's bringing those to the table if you hold one of these NFTs and you can get it on them. Some of them are really, really good. And they just did an event where they had a handful of people come to Austin and they did some crazy cool stuff. They're really pumping the community and pumping the gamemanship of this and getting people involved. And they launched, like you said, the Bulls in May. And the Apes are coming out soon. And there's a synergy between them. 00:28:58 They're coming out with a card game, which I'm sure will be on Amazon, like a card game version of it. It's just really smart execution and gamemanship. And that ties in. Manny, before he did Helium 10, he was involved in the software business. He ran a joke site years ago and he was doing apps and and Guy is a brilliant marketer and that's it that's his background so the two of them together plus the other guys they have on the team it's just it it's a no-brainer and so my wife and I both put in U.S. Dollars $20-25,000 bucks and the equipment you know at the time ETH was a little bit more than what it is now and we have like 100 between us, 140 of the OG bulls; we have I don't know how many teams, 140 bulls, wow, and we have like 10, that's nothing. 00:29:43 There's a guy that has 600. And that's, that's the, that's the big, the big player has 600 and he, and he's figured it out. This guy was at the event. I didn't go to the event, but I, you know, because it was in Austin and my producer from the billion-dollar seller summit, Mark, he produced the event for them. And so I, and I've heard from him and Bradley Sutton was there and he went and, and they, they said that this one guy, this guy that held 600 bulls, he's figured it out. That within a couple of weeks, I think it was early January, he's going to get to the point where he can make one ETH per day in profit off of his bulls. 00:30:18 One ETH, what's ETH right now? $1,200 or $1,300 today, or something like that. And hopefully that'll go up in 2023. So he's going to make over 30 grand a month in profit. He could sell some of these bulls and make even more money if he wants to, but that's just pure passive income, profit daily. Without selling anything or trying to leverage it. Is that from selling the meth? Yeah, I think it's from selling the meth, which is in demand. So, that's assuming this will continue, but I'm like, damn. And then we kind of got busy and didn't do anything for like three months and we didn't mend a bunch of our teens and stuff. So Manny's cousin, who's heavily involved, said, Kevin, I'll come over to your house and I'll do it for you. 00:31:05 If you don't have time, I'll make sure you're maximized. A couple of weeks ago, he came over and made sure our account was maximized because he knows like every little, we're not up on all the latest little tricks. Like how do you get extra five here and extra this? He is. And so we're ready to go for the A's. But that's an example of an NFT project that's won a few. I think they did the math and we're up, what, 300% or something like that? Right now. And it's because it's a real deal and a real company, a real project that's got real execution. And you're going to see more of that. So this is not going away and it's not disappearing. 00:31:38 And who knows what's going to happen with Bulls and Apes two years from now, maybe Kaput, but I don't think so. The reasons I joined is number one, I knew that Manny was going to attract other, let's say, successful entrepreneur type into this. So I joined one for the network. You know, at the beginning, they didn't want to dox themselves. At the very beginning. They were really keeping Helium 10 and the NFT project separate. And then they realized exactly what you just said. They're like, people don't trust anybody. They don't know us. You know, people in the NFT world, they don't know me and Guy from Adam. And so they said, we need to bring in people that A, have the money to spend, which is our, you know, the e-commerce, some of the e-commerce guys that you and I know in our network. 00:32:20 And then that know them, like you said, you know, the reason you got in is because you know Manny and you trust him. Trust him. And that's, that's why they had to merge the two. Right. And yeah. And because I knew that other people in the network, there'll be a bunch of people in e-commerce and it's going to be live events and it's a good networking opportunity. And two, because of the, because of the, you know, deals that many shares, which, you know, a lot of, I I'm on angel list. I was on angel list before. And Manny shares some deals from there, but the advantage is one, by the time a deal gets to Manny, it's vetted by multiple people and he shares the ones he's investing in. 00:32:57 And he also typically negotiates lower fees on these deals that have a percentage of profits. If profits are made on the deal, You pay a percentage of profits and Manny typically because he's getting you know, larger quantity of money and relationships into it, he's, he's negotiating a lower, a lower fee. Those are kind of the reasons that I joined. Because I said, okay. Worst case scenario, let's say even if I just buy one bull, right? Like now I get into this network and I'll have, you know, opportunity to join. And then kind of, I saw the benefits of the deals and kind of being more active. And then I, today I have a couple of God bulls, I think 24 bulls and maybe like 30 of the teens or something like that. 00:33:41 Yeah, which is, you know, more in NFTs than I put into anything else. And, you know, I don't really; I didn't really have much. In terms of like, I didn't invest or lose really in any like NFTs. I bought some, I flipped some, whatever, when it was hot, but I didn't really, really invest in anything. But, you know, in this particular project, I thought, okay, if I can bet on anyone, like I'll bet on somebody who's done it before successfully and is going to treat it like a real business. Because, you know, usually if you, let's say, let's say, let's say Manny had a million-dollar exit, right? Which obviously we know he had multiple eight-figure, but if he had a million-dollar exit. The next one you want a 5x, right? 00:34:18 Or whatever it is. You're not looking to do less. So, you know, I knew that he's going to look to make this, you know, bigger than Helium and, you know, kind of invest and had the money to invest in it too, right? They did that guarantee. I mean, that had been never heard of. I mean, they said, if you buy one of our NFTs, they're $0. 17 ETH at the time. Right. $0. 22, depending on when you got in. $0. 22. Which at that time was, you know, three to 500 bucks, depending on where you got in on the ETH in US dollars terms to get in. And they said like, look, if you hold, we'll buy this back. 00:34:52 If you think we're full of crud, we will buy this back from you anytime you want in the next six months. There's a few rules. You can't have sold it. You can't have done a few things. You have to buy it at the mint, right? But we'll buy it back. It's a money-back guarantee. So they raised $4 million on their initial mints in five days. And they didn’t spend a dime of that. That money all stayed in an account with a couple of guards on it. No, I’m just kidding. But it stayed in an account and they didn’t touch it. Like you said, they funded the whole thing themselves. They funded everything and they didn’t touch that money. 00:35:23 And I think they told me they had four people or something actually do take it. I think it was four. I could have that wrong. It was less than 10, right. That actually asked for their money. It was next to nine, right. And those people would have been able to sell today, you know, at three or four times what they what they paid. And when they introduce these apes, you know, there's a whole for those of you that don't know, you can go to Bulls and Apes Project dot com and see it. You got to make sure you go to that specific link. There's there's a couple that aren't the same, but Bulls and Apes Project dot com. But they have a whole lore. 00:35:57 So there's this whole story, like comic book story, like Avatar kind of story about. these different worlds and they give you a few hints of what of how you want to play the quote unquote play the game of owning these things and so they're they're introducing these apes and they're going to be synergistic with with the bulls and it's i think it's going to shoot the value up of everything and i think you know we're going to see some big jumps here and in the next like you said in the next couple months Yeah. Yeah. It should, it should get, it should get, it should get really, really interesting. What else, what else are you working on? I know you have products from Vont and you also have a virtual and a live billion-dollar seller summit coming up. 00:36:33 Yeah, we got, I got, I'm wrapping up right now. I got a seasonal business that does really, really well. I'm in the calendar space. Right. So this time of year is just, it's like selling milk because calendars expire. Right. You know, come January, even though you still have a full year left, nobody wants to buy a full-price calendar. So, and you, you've got to make sure you get rid of your inventory. Worst-case, I can sell into February or March at a discount. Right. But, but so that's, that's a big focus right now is, is we're totally sold out of one unit. We're about to sell out a second one. And I got a couple others that, you know, just managing that, just totally get rid of that stock. Right. 00:37:10 But one of the things I do on that, just from an e-commerce perspective is sometimes I miss guess, you know, I make a forecast. How many calendars do we need? We're going to sell 10,000 in this unit this year on Amazon. We're going to sell 5,000 because last year we sold 4,000 or what are we going to sell? So I mess it up. Like the one we're sold out of, I raised, I doubled the number and it's still sold. It's sold out. But another one, I raised the number and it could be because of the cover. You know, the cover can make a huge difference. Just like it's your primary image. And that one is not doing quite as well. And so. 00:37:41 What I do with the extras is every calendar that goes out, there's a little four by six card inside, just like those magazines, you know, magazine subscription, things that fly out when you buy a magazine. And it says, congratulations, you've won a free random calendar. Just send $10 postage and handling. And then you get a free $20 calendar. And I use that to get rid of all the extra stock and I build a mailing list. And so I get a lot of people that get the calendar, like, cool, I'll get a free one. Here's $10. Send them the excess stock, which gives itself liquidates. It costs me about $6 to actually send it out. And my cost in the account is $1 and a half. 00:38:18 So I'm making $2. Right. On every one of those. And I'm getting a lead. Right. Which then I send a direct mail postcard. So that I'm tied up in that heavily right now, working on the Green Ocean Labs project, like we mentioned about the NFT project. And then, yeah, the billion-dollar seller. So I'm going to have a virtual one coming in February, February 22nd to the 24th. Which you know a lot of there’s a lot of virtual events and a lot of them are pre-recorded or they’re they’re just they’re on Zoom or something but we don’t do it that way. It’s it’s I think you’ve been on it, yes it’s totally different. 00:38:48 We use a software called Hopin and it’s got like breakout rooms, live chat, everything is presented live, it’s it’s totally different, has a totally different feel. So I started during Covid because nobody could travel and I was just going to do it once but it became so popular I was like why not continue doing it? So yeah that one’s coming in February. It’s about $1,500 for that one, but it’s all high level. The speakers, this is not stuff you hear on podcasts. This is not stuff you hear on some other free summit or something. So it's all high-level stuff. The speakers are motivated with cash prizes to actually come and deliver. And then I have a live event that I've been doing. 00:39:24 It's been in Austin the last four times, started in 2019. But I said, you know what? Austin's cool. People love coming to Austin, but it's time to make a change. Let's do it in Puerto Rico. So in June, we're doing in Puerto Rico and we don't have the dates yet. I'm actually flying out there with my producer, Mark, next week. Actually, we won't confirm it until we actually go to the hotel, eat the food, stay there, you know, before I bring a bunch of high-level sellers. We want to make sure this is going to meet our next standards. So we're going out there to sort all that out and then we'll be announcing the dates for June. That's a little bit more expensive event, but we do do it. 00:40:00 This last one we just did in September was probably the best one. I'm sorry, August. We didn't announce the best one yet. People were raving. I mean, we did the scavenger hunt type of thing that at the beginning, everybody was like, 'Hey, what is this?' And by the end of it, they were like, 'That's the best freaking thing ever' on the way we did it. So we do a lot of cool stuff. It's not just listening to a bunch of presentations. It's a lot of networking, a lot of cool activities. We're going to maybe even be doing something. Yeah, I can't say yet, but a really cool game out there that's going to be pretty cool. A lot of fun. I think people will be talking about like Squid Game type of thing. 00:40:35 It's going to be good. Buy a one-way ticket to Puerto Rico. One-way ticket, exactly. Go to Puerto Rico to retire. So, I mean, I have, I organize the speakers on that and sell the tickets. But Mark takes care of all the nitty-gritty. So I don't really have to deal with, you know, all the little small details and stuff. He handles all that for me. We've been working together like 30 years. So it works. It works good. And then, yeah, Steve and I are doing some stuff. The products are awesome. We have something called Brand Genesis, where we basically, it's five products around a similar, aimed at a similar avatar. And it's aimed at more of the big sellers. This is not a done-for-you thing or anything. 00:41:14 We basically find opportunities, source it, and then that's it. We turn it over to you. It's up to you to launch it, to brand it, to modify it, to do everything from that point forward. We just take some of the dirty work out. And we're doing that for a few big sellers and aggregators out there. And so far, that seems to be going all right. And then I'm selling on. My other accounts, I have fitness products and dog products. I don't talk about those a whole lot, but been doing that for since 2015. And I saw that Helium, actually I was over at Helium HQ and I think you were supposed to be there the next day, but you got, you had flu or something. Yeah. 00:41:51 When I came out to AMZ Innovate back in November in New York, I came back and, and I felt sick. I was like, 'Shit, did I get COVID?' And so I did a COVID test. It was negative. But I felt really, really, really bad. And I was like, well, maybe I got the flu. The flu is going around everywhere. This RSV. Yeah, whatever it is. And I was like down and out in bed. And that's not like me. Even my wife was like, I've never seen you like this. Usually if you're sick, you still plug on. You're like totally out of it. And I was like, I did another COVID test a couple of days later, still negative. And like, what is this? 00:42:27 So I got one of those little pulse meters and put it on my finger and it's showing my blood oxygen level was like 77%. Oh my God. So I call my, I call my doctor. We have a concierge doctor called him and he said, 'If it's below 88%, when you're resting, you need to go to the ER. Right. Really below 90, but 88.' And I was like, 'All right.' So I went into the ER, they checked me all out and they scanned, they did an X-ray and said, 'Oh, you got pneumonia.' They took me in and admitted me to the hospital and put some tubes in my nose to help me with the breathing, try to get the oxygen levels up. 00:43:00 And the next day they did a CT scan and the CT scan showed I had water on my lungs. And so they're like, 'We got to get rid of that.' So they got rid of that, ended up staying in the hospital a few days. And so, yeah, I was in no condition to come to speak at the Helium 10 event. And I was like, 'I can't do it.' It took me about until really about two weeks ago before I fully recovered from that. Well, it's good you recovered. And Helium Elite will continue to have kind of live. They do four of those a year. It's quarterly. They either do them in Irvine. Sometimes they do them in Vegas or some other place. They'll probably do one around Prosper, I'm sure, in March. 00:43:42 You're going to be there? Yeah, I'll be at Prosper. I'll see you at ASGTG. I'm doing the seller's cruise. I'm going to give that a shot and see what happens on that. okay february and then on march i'm doing a prosper and then i'm going to end of that month i'm going over to japan gary is doing his japan mastermind thing oh gary gary wong yeah yeah he's doing uh like a in tokyo like uh how to sell in japan type of mastermind thing it looks interesting and it's an excuse japan's been i've been to japan many times my wife's never been it's like i want to take you to japan so it's a good excuse to go and 00:44:19 yeah a little business and write the whole thing off right so yeah those are upcoming i'll be in australia i think in november for the southern seller fest and then billion dollar seller summon seller con i think is in austin yeah i think i think ryan moran is also doing capcom in april end of april you know in i think In Austin, is he doing it? Is he doing it, the big one like he's done at the hotel or is he doing it like he did last time when it was a very exclusive uh I think he's doing, I think he said he's keeping it smaller not as big as I think he did in the past from what I saw in his in his emails and he's he's another person that you know I was going to mention before, he's launched an NFT for community, yeah for his Mastermind Capitalist Pigs which he's 00:45:02 put through as these pigs pig NFTs which the utility is basically access to the mastermind, so also interesting and how he's bringing community and opportunities for investments in various companies. And deals that kind of he's bringing to that community, I was kind of considering I haven't I don't have it but something something I was looking at too just because again his network and maybe opportunities to invest in some e-commerce businesses and the network itself, obviously. Let's end off on one, two, a couple of predictions. 20,23, we're about to kick off the new year next week. What do you see maybe changing as far as selling on Amazon? Well, I think there's a lot. I just did a podcast with Danny today. I know you guys did 20,22 last week. 00:45:51 That was a good episode. I really liked it. You got you, Brandon, and everybody, and Steve on that. And we just did the, y'all did 2022. We did 2023 today. But yeah, there's, I think, you know, Amazon's becoming more harder and harder to actually sell on. There's still great opportunity. But to build a real company where you can really get that freedom, it's taken more money and more effort and more team now than ever before. That doesn't mean if you have five or $10,000, can you do something? But it's all relative, I mean, what's your goal? Is it to make a little bit extra cash to go out to dinner or do you live in Pakistan where 800 profit a month actually is life-changing, uh, you know it's but for me and you that's not even gonna, you know, pay your car payment or something so it's, it's all relative. 00:46:34 But I think that's happening. I think you're going to see Amazon's going to release a lot more data. I know you, you post regularly, like, look, look at this. They just did this. They just, I think you're going to see a lot more data come out from the horse's mouth. Some of it, you know, I think Mina was saying today, a lot of it's, some of it's not accurate and you got to be careful with some of it. He's noticing there's some inaccuracies. You also have, you have to understand what the data they're showing you as. So, for example, you have search query performance. One of the aspects of it, they, they show volume. But that's volume that includes multiple sessions from the same person in a day, which is different to how typically like Helium and other things calculate. 00:47:13 And even a search frequency, I think, is based on one session every 24 hours. So there's some differences and you have to understand what you're actually looking at and Amazon's definition of what that data set is to understand what it is. I think you're going to see AI be a bigger role in Amazon sellers, you know, like ChatGPT. You know, there's a lot of software tools out there now that say they're AI. There's like repricers and there's some PPC automation tool. It's not AI. It's algorithms. It's bullshit. They're not using AI. But I think you will see. But true AI, I think you're going to see more. Of that to build listings, to do testing with, to create bullet points, to analyze reviews, to look it up. Jasper is already doing that. 00:48:00 They have a specific module for bullets and description, Jasper . ai. And there's a software called Percy or something too that actually does it for specific Amazon sellers. So yeah, I think you're going to see more of that. Amazon, this inventory thing that's been a big bugaboo, I don't think that was a warehouse space issue on Amazon like it has been during COVID. I think it's a labor issue. They're not saying that, but I think they just don't have people that can check this stuff in. And I think they'll get some of that sorted out. I think you're going to see the fees go up. It's going to continue to get more expensive from PPC to fulfillment to whatever. The recession, a lot of people say, oh, it's a recession. 00:48:39 Nobody's buying anymore. For me, I'm up this year, year over year on the same product. And I know a lot of other people that-they're up. So maybe some people aren't buying, you know, some of the people that are not, you know, under 20, $30 ,000 annual income or something, maybe they're not buying as many spatulas anymore, but it's being made up elsewhere. And so I'm not too worried about that. Even The Motley Fool, I just, I think they just came out and said. Amazon stock should, you know, it's down 50%, but they're expecting a big recovery this year. I think there's so many things, but those are some of the key ones. Yeah, I think another area that's going to continue kind of bullish on is the whole buy with Prime space. 00:49:16 I had a meeting with a guy who used to be chief of staff for Andy Jassy, who's now responsible for it. He came to New York. I had a meeting with him and they're investing a lot into buying with Prime. And you'll be able to drive. I mean, we're about to test with a client using Amazon data and audiences like DSP to drive traffic to the website. Well, I think Shopify; they've been teasing it for a while, but if they're able to launch in 2023, Shopify marketplaces combine with Buy with Prime and check out with Amazon, I think that could become number two behind Amazon as far as where you need to be. Amazon sellers who are looking to Walmart or to look into something else. 00:49:58 I think you need to pay attention to what Shopify is doing. And if they actually launch this marketplace that they're talking about, I think that could be huge combined with what you just said. I think they have to pivot to marketplace, even though for years they said we're not launching a marketplace. I agree. I think the signs are there now based on the app that they will. And I also think that they will eventually form a deal with Amazon on buy with Prime because, you know, they're losing a lot with buy with Prime. They're losing the merchant processing fee. They're losing the fulfillment fee, which they bought deliver, you know, like a billion-dollar company. Yeah, and now Amazon's, they're delivering. Amazon's taking the merchant processing. 00:50:36 And when it came out, they said, you know, Shopify came and said, oh, don't use this. It's got some bad code or something. And then Amazon went in and they modified one line of the code to make Shopify happy or to, to spell whatever they were saying. And now it's, yeah. I think eventually Amazon will tell them, okay, we're charging 3%. You know, we'll give you a quarter or something on every sale and kind of, you know, let's make a deal type thing, and maybe Shopify will get behind it, you know. But yeah, I mean, Amazon, it's a big blow, I think, to Shopify, what Amazon did. And I think it's brilliant. Like you said, on the data side, my understanding in talking to this guy, Doug, who used to work directly, he was his technical advisor and chief of staff with Andy Jassy, is he said, I said to him, look, Amazon's been releasing a lot more data in the last year or two. 00:51:25 He said, yeah, Andy Jassy's philosophy is different than Bezos. He's more open, which means open in terms of sharing the data and open into not just right. And Andy, Jesse, he was in charge of AWS, which was like the underlying cloud storage of the internet. And BioWare Prime is kind of that same thing. Right. It's now the underlying, you know, checkout cart of e-commerce across the Internet. And Amazon has a ton to gain, you know, three percent of all those DTC orders, plus fulfillment, plus merchant processing is huge, an opportunity for them. And they're putting, they're putting a lot of money behind it, you know, they bought Amazon bought in 2019, I think, or 2020, they bought an e-commerce platform in Australia. It was something with a Z was the name. 00:52:14 It's kind of like a small Shopify-type player based in Australia. I think I remember. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. And then they shut it down. But all those people they took in for the buy with Prime team, for the e-commerce team. And I think that was the reason they bought it, for those people to work on the D2C side. So I think that's going to get interesting too. And I agree with you on the AI. Like, I think it's going to kind of help democratize better image creation and, you know, better image creation. Sellers will be able to submit a raw photo and it'll create, you know, I've already seen stuff like this. Like, you put a ring, it puts the ring on somebody's finger. It creates all different backgrounds. 00:52:53 There's a tool right now just connected with this company called Genius . ai, G-U-N-U-S, that does this for Facebook. They allow you to upload images and images that will create more images from it with different backgrounds, lifestyle stuff, AI, as well as video from it. And then they connect to your Facebook ads data. And they have a lot of data from clients. And also based on your audience. And you're targeting, you can post like all the different images you want to post for a creative and they'll rank it in order of what they think will get the best CTR based on the image and the audience it's tied to and the data that they have on click-through rates and images and all this stuff. 00:53:33 So I'm going to actually took on like an advisorship with them and try to help them bring that to Amazon essentially. That's cool. Custom image, beta for sponsored brand, videos, all the creative, right? Sponsored display, creative DSP, creative, all these things where you can plug into the same thing. You can see CTR rates on PPC, and then you can kind of have this predictive analysis and image creation. I mean, think of all the sellers now that haven't even implemented sponsored brand custom image because they haven't taken the time or created the images or sized it or whatever. You post, you know, white background photo, it'll create Amazon posts for you. It'll do, you know, all these things, which is, I think that's where things are going, right? 00:54:10 Which means everyone, which means people's creative are kind of going to get better, right? You want to make sure you have really great creative and video and like you step up. You know what would be cool? If it got to this point with the AI, maybe your genius guys could do this. What if you could put a picture as your main image on Amazon? It could be instead of a static file, it could be like some . ai or some . gif or whatever it is. But it ties into some sort of database and it does exactly what you just said with genius, where it changes out the backgrounds, where it changes out the model based on the profile of the customer. 00:54:43 So if I'm a mom that has a baby and I'm shopping for something, the picture is going to be of a mom similar to my age that has a baby in the background or whatever of the toaster that I'm selling or whatever. Or if it's me and they know I like sports and football, it's going to be like there's a TV with football on the background or whatever, where you can totally customize the image on the fly that actually displays to really target that customer. And I can see that happening first, like on Facebook or Shopify, where, you know, if you know, if the, if the user is logged in or whatever, if you know the user, then you can display different products or whatever to them, you know, based on shopping behavior. 00:55:28 But yeah. And I also think, I just think Amazon will probably let you do zip code targeting and PPC as well. Something they haven't, they haven't done. And also maybe share where outside traffic is coming from, right? Today you get organic sales. You don't know the source of it, you know, on like where all this traffic is coming from. I don’t know why Amazon, you know, doesn’t necessarily share unless you have an attribution link that actually works. You know, you don’t know the source of, I was talking to a guy who does, who has like content sites, you know, and they feature products there and they get affiliate and all this stuff. And I was talking to him and he’s like, well, he’s like, sellers would know, right? 00:56:03 They would see like where the traffic's coming from, you know? I’m like, no, no, no. Amazon doesn’t share any of this information with you. Like where your outside traffic is. You know, this is this coming from right, which like maybe some blog just featured me and then you want to go reach out to them but you don't even know that the traffic came from them and all this stuff. So I think I think you'll see zip code targeting, I think you'll you'll see more data, more understanding where traffic is coming from, so I think it's gonna i think it's gonna get interesting to people who kind of implement and you know take advantage of like AI, you know, AI image creation and all the things that are gonna come come out over the next year. 00:56:37 I think it's gonna be pretty, pretty, pretty exciting. You know, just seeing ChatGPT is like crazy. It's crazy what you do. You said you was talking about outside traffic. I heard you recently on a podcast say that you're not huge on influencers right now. That's the hot thing is go find influencers. And you said you're cutting, actually cutting back and I'm in your camp. I mean, it's a hot thing. Everybody's saying, go do it. There's software tools to help you find them. But I think it's hit or miss. And if you, if you find one that works, it can be freaking awesome. But the vast majority don't work and they don't move the needle. They might sell a couple of units here or there, but for the effort, it's really difficult. 00:57:12 And I know I'd like to hear what you did, elaborate a little bit on that. One of our clients has a product that's like top 200 in beauty. And he has a couple of influencers, like million followers or whatever, he has a relationship with. When they post, he gets sales, like significant sales. And he was using them a lot in Q4. And we've done influencer marketing for people, but our challenges here with it have been twofold. One, tracking. Very, very challenging. Because when you have an organic post on TikTok, for example, the only link on TikTok is in the bio. So when people see something, if they do go to Amazon, they're going to search the brand name or the type of product. And then they may or may not buy your product. 00:57:55 They may buy something else, but you don't really know, right? You have to really measure. You know, did branded searches increase? Do you have enough branded searches and search query performance for that to even show up and increase? So you have to measure that. You have to measure, did sales increase? But meanwhile, sellers are making changes to price. They run lightning deals. You know, there's other factors that come into account, whether or not, you know, what is the attribution of the sales? Attribution doesn't work. Like Amazon themselves told me in-app to in-app, like TikTok to the Amazon mobile app. Like it just, it doesn't work. The tech's not there and they need to work closer with the actual social media companies in order to get that to work, to get the tracking. 00:58:37 And we have also run some ads from-You're saying that attribution from a TikTok doesn't work if they go to the Amazon app to order? If you go, if you're on TikTok and you click on attribution and then- You click on attribution link. Attribution link and it opens the Amazon app. It does not track or work well. And we saw cases because we ran ads on TikTok with attribution link where people click because on an ad, it's right there, right? People click. We would see anywhere between. So on the TikTok ad platform, we would see like a thousand clicks. And then on attribution, we would see anywhere between 40 and 70% of those clicks actually registering. So we'd see, you know, 400, 600. 00:59:19 We would not see all thousand clicks that we're seeing on TikTok ad platform for clicks register. for whatever reason sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't work but it doesn't work well they gotta do deep linking or whatever that's called deep to actually get that to work that's what pixel find me or whatever that yes yeah or tool used to do to bypass some of those problems yes but but we just saw consistently we never saw 100 of the traffic be be attributed so that's another issue and then and then you know i i agree that you know Sometimes it's hit or miss. We were able to try to do multiple things with that content. So we always got the content from the influencer that is owned now by the brand. 01:00:03 We got them to sign something. We took it and we repurposed it. So we had something vertical. We edited it and added like on the side, different texts and other aspects to it so that we can use it on sponsored brand video ads. You can't do what's called, I think it's called like pilling or whatever, where Amazon will not approve on a sponsored brand ad video ad center video with like black on the side. So you have to edit it. We would take texts, we'd add other things. So we try to leverage it in other ways. And I still think getting that content is good because you can take it, put it on your storefronts. You can put it on your listing. You can, you know, you can add it to sponsor brand video ad. 01:00:39 You can use that stuff somewhere. You can even have, you know, add a page to your storefront that just says, you know. customers call a testimonial page they just have 10 videos there of people you know using the product but at the same time you could do that with you know using a billio or using in sales has a has a join brands . com you know using something like that which which doesn't you know is not necessarily relying on the influencer posting it you know so i think tracking is hard and it gets difficult and you don't really know how much value you're getting with with driving it to Amazon. And you cannot form deals with the influencers where you say, if they use your coupon code, I'll pay you a percentage because a lot of times people just don't use the code on Amazon and you're just going to end up not paying the influencer enough what they drove if they really did drive stuff and people don't use the coupon. 01:01:31 So I think it's tricky. I think if I were to use influencers, I would use it for the content and then I would maybe leverage that for, you know, running ads on social media to my website or, you know, in other ways. And I think the best way to kind of grow your Amazon business is focusing on the levers you have, you know, on Amazon and then maybe building your own audience on social media that, you know, you can kind of control and investing in putting content on your page. You know, you can maybe get influencer content or hire, you know, hire, you know, hire a guy or gown their 20s. Pay them a couple hundred bucks a month to just kind of create videos for you with your products and kind of be a face on your social media and help you grow your social media. 01:02:18 And I think that maybe it may be a better route, but I don't think you're going to drive tons and tons of sales with it at the moment. If you are, it's challenging to track. Yeah, that's kind of what we've seen. I'm also not bullish on Google to Amazon. You know, we do a little bit of it for people who want to have very high ACOS, like pet supplements, where you can get kind of a similar ACOS, let's say, with Google. But we don't see the ranking effects anymore that we saw originally when, you know, two years ago when it was on BDSS, right? Like on that virtual, like talking to it properly and how to leverage it. I think Amazon has changed the algorithm and we just see kind of low conversion rates, you know. 01:02:59 1%, 2% at best conversion rates from Google. And the ACoS is just high. So, you know, I think investing in your creative, launching more products, innovating there, going and spending your money with like a Gemba to develop something really different, patentable, whatever, I think is a better, you know, go create an awesome product that's different. I think it's a better use case for your funds, you know, than spending, you know, if you had to spend five to 10 grand with Gemba to develop something versus 5,000 influence in marketing, I'd say go spend it with Gemba and, you know, develop like real differentiation. Because that's what you're going to have to have is, you know, if, if we say that creative is going to be easier with AI, you know, it's going to be about the product. 01:03:42 I think Amazon will make a change with reviews. We've already seen them testing right now. Now you see like the ratings now they're showing like in big and they're showing the actual things and the reviews next to it, smaller. Right. So I think they realize there's a problem where You know, certain niches just have everyone has 10,000 reviews. Nobody new can come in. I think that's going to change too. So it's going to be more about the product along with the right marketing for it on Amazon. But I really think that differentiation aspect has to be really strong in a lot of your focus. And then, like you said, Shopify and building your own audience and, you know, NFTs, NFTs. Yeah, and utilize NFTs. Create a. Create a community. 01:04:24 So it was really nice to catch up. Look forward to seeing you in less than a couple of weeks. That's going to be good, that's ASGTG. If you want to check out that event, there's a seller's dinner after. If you want to DM me on social media, perhaps there's still tickets. I can get you a ticket. I know I'll see you at that dinner. And yeah, I look forward to seeing you in New York. And thanks so much for coming on. It's been great, man. Anytime. We'll have to do this again. Sounds good. Thank you. Thanks.