Amazon FBA - What’s Really Happening in 2023?! | Kevin King

Amazon FBA - What’s Really Happening in 2023?! | Kevin King 00:00:00 Of raving fans and not only can the newsletter self-sustain itself through sponsorships and ad placements, and affiliate commissions, it will build a huge engaged audience way more than what Facebook or anything else could do. 00:00:22 Hey everyone, this is Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the e-commerce, almost said Amazon, the e-commerce and Amazon FBA podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about Amazon Essentials in 2023. What are some of the strategies? Where is AI heading? And what's on the horizon for Amazon in the future? All right, welcome to another lunch with Norm, the e-commerce and Amazon FBA podcast. Okay, uh, today we're going to be talking about the Amazon Essentials in 2023. Our guest is a buddy of mine, and we're going to be talking about all sorts of things, but what is it called? GA4? We're going to be talking about Amazon; we're going to be talking about Bed now. 00:01:11 You might know my buddy from Freedom Ticket or Helium 10 Masterminds or his own event called BDSS. So, we'll be talking a little bit about that as well. But you know him, he's been on here I think the most, six, seven, eight times. Anyways, it's Kevin King and we'll get to him shortly. This episode of Lunch with Norm is sponsored by SureGo Marketing. Ready to take your brand to the next level on TikTok and Instagram? SureGo Marketing specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build profitable brands on TikTok and Instagram and in less than 90 days. With SureGo Marketing, you can build your brand, create incredible video content, and increase leads without spending a single dime on ad spend. Visit suregomarketing. com today and elevate your brand. Now, let's get back to the show. 00:02:06 Welcome, Kevin King. What's up, Mr. Farrar? The two Farrars. What's up, guys? Long time no see. Yep. Two F-words. Two F-words, I know. How are you, sir? I'm alive and kicking. Just waking, getting up, recovering from a cool party last night and some cigars with you. Yeah, and that's why I can't talk right now, by the way. Thank you so much, sir. And that was just day one. That was just day one. We still have two more days of the event. So we're just getting warmed up. Another party tonight. Another one tomorrow night. So it's nonstop, isn't it? I'm an old guy. And you did this to me, by the way. I can't even talk right now because of these bloody cigars, which I'm not complaining about. 00:02:57 But yesterday that we went out, we had a lot of fun. You had a party. And it was it was a party of parties. Oh, here you go, Kelsey. Kelsey. OK, he's doing something. And oh, there's a Coke in the fridge, by the way. I can't believe usually he's like, you know, 100 miles away. But today he's right there. He's still not doing his job. He missed Connie. Connie can't bring you the coffee. Exactly. See, Connie would bring me my my coffee. Yeah, but anyway, so this was really cool. You had this concept, which was a carnival. It was really, you know, there was a what? How many? 40, 50 performers? Yeah, we had 36 performers and a live carnival band. Fortune tellers, tattoos, coins. It was really, it was something else. 00:04:00 So, yeah, I never really. Well, yeah, I said, oh, you know, that was pretty cool. But it was really cool. Yeah, I think it turned out well. We had about 380 people there, I think is what scanned in on the barcode thing. So it was a really good turnout. And like you said, you know, you go to a lot of these events. You and I go to a lot of these events. And sometimes the event hosts a party, like CellarCon's hosting a party tonight, which is always cool. And then sometimes, you know, Brandon Young and a few other people were kind of known for actually. Throwing something like a satellite party at Prosper or 00:04:34 at some other events, and so when this event uh popped up uh you know it's right in my backyard I live two blocks away from the hotel basically um I asked the organizers uh Matt and Mike I said hey can uh you guys it'd be okay if I threw a party one night uh they're like yeah sure be okay, and so I decided to do it then uh when I was talking with Mark who helps me produce like the billion-dollar seller summit and several of my other events uh I was like want to do this, you want to help organize it? It's like yeah sure and I said he's like what do you want to do? I said well something kind of cool we can come out think outside the box a little bit and not just have the normal networking. 00:05:10 Event where you go and you have some drinks and maybe a little bit of hors d'oeuvres, and so uh that's what we came up with. He came up, he's like 'I know this uh this uh couple ideas here in Austin, how about like a little carnival theme?' And so that's what we did. We had 36 entertainers that were like stations throughout the uh the club. We decorated this whole club up uh really really cool. When you walked in, you got a little bag of coins which could either get you drinks or you could go and uh gamble in a little gambling tent, or go and do different things to actually get more coins, like like you said there's a fortune teller and aerialist. And, uh, just slam throwers, jugglers, magicians-just a whole bunch of stuff. 00:05:48 We had tattoo stations, temporary tattoo stations, and hookah lounge, cigars of course. Uh, strong man-a whole bunch of, uh, bunch of stuff. And I think it, uh, I think people really for the most part really enjoyed it. Hey, you know? I know we're going down this rabbit hole, but this is the part of the events that I really like. Like there is education component to it right? But the, uh, getting together with people, learning about-like I met so many new people here, oh just over the last day, it's been incredible! But then bringing it to the Next level is going out to an event and sitting down with me, I like a cigar here and there or you know, sitting around eating but this is where you meet and you get to build up new strong relationships and you know what? 00:06:40 This is something I don't know if you noticed this last night because you were just, you know, walking. You ignored me completely but you were walking around to everybody talking to them not me, but talking to them. I see you all the time. I got to host a party. I got to be the social man. I know. I was just used to my buddy sitting down for a couple hours and having a cigar with me. But no, what was important, what I think sums everything up is being able to go sit down with somebody that you don't know or a bunch of people at the end of the day, you have a number or contact information to contact them and do something or just stay in touch and that's that's always been really important to me; that's that's our goal. 00:07:25 But then Kelsey's goal is to actually uh I think a little bit different, you know because yeah, our goal is to actually make business connections and make you know, and uh to build relationships and further bonds. But I think Kelsey, you know, he was the hit there. He wants other relations. Yeah, other types of relations. I know. Is he turning red yet? Yes, he is. Okay. He was the hit of a couple. I was backstage, you know, because I was all dressed up. I was in the dressing area, and a couple of the performers were, like, asking who that guy at the picnic table over there was. Well, they were asking about me. No, no. They said the younger guy. They said the younger guy with a little bit of muscle. 00:08:06 Oh, yeah. When I'm saw him hold the little white thing, the little contest or something. That's funny. Okay. So let's talk about a few things. If you do have, I know usually when Kevin's on, we get a bunch of questions. So we're going to go down a few paths today. Not just Amazon specific, but we're going to be talking about the Fed. G4, and we're going to be talking about Amazon. So very first thing, anything new that you see coming Amazon's way or what Amazon's doing? Well, I think one of the big news this week, you just saw is that Seller X and Elevate Brands, two of the big aggregators just merged. Yeah. And after they merged, it was announced that, well, I guess in the announcement that they actually got additional funding. 00:09:00 So, the original it wasn't just a merge, but the the original investors and sellers x actually put in another 60 some odd million dollars uh of funding so uh a lot of people are saying you know that this is aggregator space dead is it too late to sell your business and I think that may be an indication that um there's still a lot of opportunity out there um a lot of people have been saying that with all the aggregators having pulled back, you don't see them sponsoring as many events, you don't see them out there as much and some of them have put a pause on on hiring uh I'm sorry on on well yeah on hiring and on buying uh but I think uh you know I just talked to Scott Deets from Northbound Group a few days ago interviewed him for the AMPM podcast and and we were just talking about is it, is this a good off-time To sell, I guess multiples are down, you know nobody's buying. 00:09:51 He said, 'No', this is actually a good if you're a solid business. This is a good time to sell if you're a one-shot wonder, you know they got a 6x uh last year, the year before, no, this is not a good time for you. But if you have a solid core business with a good brand, there's still lots of money out there and people wanting to buy. And he's like, 'Even in a downturn with interest rates higher right now, yeah it's a little bit more restricted, a little bit more challenging in some ways.' But but now it's the time to be preparing to actually exit, so if you're if you're thinking about exiting. Or, you're you're you, and you should be in most cases, that's where you're going to get a lot of your money not from running your business but from exiting it. 00:10:28 Now is the time to start preparing because usually it takes its not a lot of people think well they wake up one day and they think well I'm gonna sell my business uh and uh you know take me about 30 days or so and uh you know then I'll be in the clear uh but that's not the way it works. It usually like the guys at Helium 10, it took 18 months from the day they started the process until they actually got that check and a lot of times it takes a while and especially if you're going to maximize that exit, uh, and try to get the most bang for the buck there's a lot of things you've got to do, and working with someone like Northbound or a broker, whoever, whoever may be, can really help you take that and add hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to your exit by just doing some things right and taking that time to get all the ducks in a row and everything lined up. 00:11:13 It's called due diligence, yeah, and it's a pain; I know when I've been trying to sell or selling companies the very first time I had to do this and I thought, 'Oh, this is so easy right?' No, and in fact, it fell through, so I spent... You know what? This is a really Great topic because when you go and you sell your company, and so you get this offer and you know get this letter of intent, and everything's everything's cool, you're happy, you're doing the happy dance that's the beginning like that's white belt; now you got to reach black belt, and they want everything, and if you don't disclose certain things it can come back to bite you big time. Maybe you haven't been filing any sales tax. 00:12:03 And I'm not talking to Amazon, but let's say you're on Shopify, and you haven't been selling any sales tax or you don't have the proper records. I mean, the more you can do, and we've talked about this, about accounting, proper accounting, not receipts in a shoebox, you know, and just making sure all your ducks are in a row. Like you said, if you have it and you can just put it on a silver platter, you'll save a lot of time. I spent almost. Six months prepping and it didn't go through for this one uh company, but the other, the other thing that you're uh oh I just lost track, I'm old, what was I gonna say? Oh God, I forget. 00:12:46 Oh, I know what it is; here I see sometimes the thoughts come back, but uh I gotta, yeah, gotta stop eating kale, that's what we learned yesterday, we learned yesterday, you can't eat kale, but um it's taking your eye off the ball so that's six months. It's like sometimes you know if if you want to sue somebody and you're going to court and the one reason I don't go down that path is because you have you take your eye off the ball and you fill yourself with negative thoughts, if somebody's going to screw me over all right they screwed me over, I'm not doing business with them anymore. Same thing with this, if you have to prep for six months you're taking the eye off the ball of your business and that could actually be the reason why the business doesn't get uh purchased now. 00:13:40 This is something yeah it's like you said it's like a part-time job I mean a lot of people. don't realize when you sell you're running your business and you got to keep it going because if you take your eye off the ball like you said that's going to hurt your valuation you got to keep acting as normal and then on the side you're doing all this new challenges and and and coming up with all these documents and getting all your uh financials in order but it's more than just financials it's it goes down to like every single picture on your amazon listing you need to prove that you own the rights to that uh 00:14:10 you know there's there's a ton of things and you may not have that you're like i just had some dude on fiverr do it i don't Uh or whatever you're gonna have to go and either track that stuff down or get that because most most people in in due diligence are going to want to cover cya cover their ass really really good on every single little detail. And a lot of people, they get into this and they don't realize how much actual work it is to sell. Yeah, website compliance. Do you have your terms of service there? Do you have a refund policy? Do you have the currency set up? There's so many little things that they have to dig back on. 00:14:47 I think one of the major ones is tax, but was there ever a thought of a lawsuit? And if that lawsuit ever comes down the pipeline, you're dead. But as long as you acknowledge that, oh, yeah, there was somebody who said their pet swallowed this product because, well, it did happen. This pet swallowed their product. And they actually contacted me in Costa Rica. And I thought, okay, here comes a lawsuit. But if I didn't disclose that, oh, yeah, there was this guy who called me up, called Amazon to get my other number. This is a true story: they called Amazon because the number that I had went to voicemail, and then they said it wasn't working. How do I get them? Amazon actually gave them a secondary contact number for me; oh wow! 00:15:37 Which yeah, so something as simple as that if you don't disclose it... And that guy came back and sued guess what, yep? There goes your uh your earn out, yeah. But anyways, I think it's so important that we're starting to see this come back just over the last two weeks. Yeah. Three new, not new, but well, one is Brian Spank and new, but the other two were newer aggregators with different business models. That's what I like. Yeah, it's a good match. Yeah. It's a good match. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that happening. I see a lot more announcements about that in the coming weeks and months. Well, I don't know if it's going to happen this time around or next time around, but people are building brands and they're not just taking a brand and trying to have a one hit wonder. 00:16:37 They're actually building brands. So, a lot of companies are putting the money into the brand, building out the brand, going wide on the brand. And at the end of the day, you're not making a profit; it's the old you know. A lot of these tech companies they don't see the money up front or subscription companies; you don't see the money right up front, but over time, you build up that brand and it's ready to explode. And aggregators up until this point have never looked at that model where they're buying the brand for the like they see the brand kind of blooming and ready to explode they don't; they run from that model. And you're actually, that's a good point. People always like, 'When's the best time to sell?' And that you always want to sell when you're on the rise. 00:17:26 You never want to sell when you've flattened out or when you're on the downturn. And any prospective buyer is actually always going to want to look and see what is the upside here? What can I do to actually expand this? Where is this going? And they want to be able to ride that wave to recoup some of their investment. And that's something that a lot of people need to think about: is you can't let your foot off the gas. You've got to keep on it and have a plan, like have a vision, like this is what I'm envisioning it. We have these products in the pipeline. We have this is where the market's going or these new opportunities are coming up. Not when you're, no, man, I'm tired of this and things don't look too good. 00:18:07 I'm kind of scared about how AI or whatever is going to affect my business. Because they're going to be looking at those same things. Right. And I just, wow, Lokesh, it must be late. I just noticed that you piped in. You haven't snuck back to Toronto, have you? Anyways, yeah. It must be, what? It must be, what? About 10 o'clock at night over there. Is it about 10? That's not too bad, Lokesh. So anyways, that's, you know, that's something that's. I think we've got to definitely take a look at. But that kind of runs into my next topic. So we're seeing this evolution. And there's a lot of, yeah, chirping about it. But there's some really incredible stuff that's happening. And this is where you've got to weed through the crap. 00:18:59 And crap being the very, very, very basics is going to help do nothing for you. Except, you know. I'm talking about AI, and we talk about this a lot. And there's the right way, and there's the beta, and then there's the VHS, right? Now, both were pretty good. One had better marketing. You may have to explain what those are to some of the audience, Norm. We're old guys. We know what it is. We went to a bar the other night. What is a beta and what is a VHS? We went to a bar the other night, and it was all vinyl, right? So they were playing vinyl records. But I don't know the age range of anybody who's listening right now. But there were eight-track tapes. Remember? Yep. Yep. 00:19:49 So, you know, Kelsey, do you know what an eight-track tape is? And it was, oh, no, I, you know, I completely forgot that he wouldn't know what this was. And so, you know, that's that was so funny, looking at technology-how it's evolved. So we you know we had the the vinyl then we had the cassette or eight track tape and all the advantages and all the rave you said uh about and the reason look I'm not just going down another rabbit hole uh for the sake of going down another rabbit hole for another rabbit hole but this is about technology and by using it and being cutting edge and sometimes you pay to be the first out of the marketplace, you told me uh 00:20:34 that you uh were at um you you went to uh Texas A&M yeah Texas A&M and you needed a laser printer you spent 4, 000 bucks on a laser printer and I had to drive 90 miles to buy it, yeah and but you know what it was cutting edge technology and you were able to probably get your job done fairly quickly well um What was it? Two pages a minute or something like that. A little dot matrix going back and forth. Couldn't do really any kind of images or anything like that. It was the coolest thing, yeah, it cost me, this is like 1987, 88, something like that, yeah, it's $4,000 for a laser printer, I invested in a lot of technology, I've always been a geek when it comes to computing and stuff like that, but I remember going upstairs and going, Connie, you. 00:21:31 You've got to come downstairs. She runs down. And this is about, like, I'm downloading an image on this, like, I think it was a 12,000 modem or whatever it was. And you see this, like, you say, and it's about an eighth of a picture that's actually downloading on my screen. And we're sitting there looking. Do you believe this? Oh, yeah. But now. Going over to AI, it's the same thing but there's people that are talking about certain things that are so generic and and so not on topic, and there's going to be a lot of that. Well, there's a lot. It's a gold rush right now, so there's you know there's all these different websites out there, some of them aggregating tools, some of the AI tools, you know, and there's one called There's an AI for That dot com, I think it is, 00:22:25 and you go there and I don't know that it's thousands of tools, and so everybody is coming out with some some trying to jump on the bandwagon and and make a quick buck. And a lot of that will get weeded out and and some of it will rise to the top. But uh, there's tons of opportunity, and just like you're saying I, I'm equating it to the eight-track to where we are now with digital music and you know tens of thousands of songs in your pocket versus uh four or five on an eight-track uh tape uh cassette um I remember, you know, even on the internet. Back in the late 1990s or maybe 96-97, video became a thing on the internet where you could actually start to you couldn't stream really like you can now, but you could play videos. 00:23:05 I remember we had a website and the videos were like postage stamp size-little, little, little-and they would stutter a little bit, but it was the coolest thing! And so I got involved in that. Now look at where we're at with Netflix. Everything's coming across. What we're doing right now, it's live, and there's not a hiccup in it. It's just amazing where, in just 20 years, or it was actually less than that when YouTube came out, but in about a 10-year period, where it went from postage-sized, choppy little videos to streaming live, full-screen, 8K HD, that's what's going to happen with AI. If you're not right now with AI, there's a lot of buzz around it, especially in our community. 00:23:48 People are using it to to analyze reviews and maybe write better titles and write their listings and and that's great help them with their ppc that that's all awesome but that's just the tip of the iceberg and that's that's what a lot of people are pushing right now because that's what they know they're in the amazon space and that's what they think they can sell but it goes way way beyond that steve's our buddy steve simons is going to be speaking about it at the billion dollar seller summit a week after next where he's not talking about how to fix your listings or how to do that kind of stuff that with ai is like this is fundamentally 00:24:19 going to change the world i'm going to show you how it's going to change your business to where you can either hire a lot less people uh and fire a bunch of your staff or keep your current staff and forex your business using ai uh you know to get the core stuff uh not just not just these uh the the marketing you know frills that people have right now and like he says he he believes And I tend to believe this too, that AI is like the invention of fire, and some people say it's like the invention of the wheel-it's going to change society that much. And if you're not on the bandwagon right now, you're going to be left behind. You need to be playing. Just dabble. 00:24:55 You don't need to be an expert or anything, but just dabble with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Dabble with a couple of these tools just so that you get the basics down and you're in the game. And there's so much you can do with it. I mean, you're talking about earlier audience building and stuff and launching products on Amazon, how people are trying to build real brands and not just throw something on Amazon. And that's what I'm doing. Talking about this is the Billion Dollar Seller Summit too; I'm using newsletters and people start newsletters. Kevin says nobody reads email anymore, actually that's actually not true; one of the top newsletters in the world that just sold for 27 million dollars-the average age of their readers is 29 years old, uh it's not it's not the old folks in retirement homes that are reading email. 00:25:39 Email is still extremely effective. And if you do a newsletter right, and people think of newsletters typically as a promotional thing. I'll come by this, or we have this announcement, or here's who's on our podcast today, or this is our new software features. You can't do that. That's not what I'm talking about a newsletter. You've got to provide value. And you can build communities. A newsletter has to have a personality. It can't just be here's a bunch of facts or here's a bunch of sermon. There has to be a true personality in the writing style and in what you're delivering. It needs to be about 90% value and maybe 10% promotional. And if you do that, you can build massive audiences to help launch your products on Amazon to help build true brands and build a list. 00:26:18 You don't need 100,000 or a million subscribers on this. You get a few thousand loyal people, up to 2,000 to 5,000 loyal people, which is not that hard to do. And you're sending them out a newsletter once a week or two or three times a week or even daily if you're able to get to that point. With 40% to 60% open rates, that can make a huge difference in your business. And, by combining what we do in the product space with AI to help automate a lot of this stuff, where in the past you might have had to have a staff of uh reporters and writers and people to do all the images and all this stuff, now like you can do this with probably one person, uh, and create this this true branding around what your product is and what your niche is, and you're not really talking about what you're what you sell that much. 00:27:07 I mean, if I'm in the dog space, meaning we're doing this in the dog space, as you know, we've talked about this before, some of my products are in the dog space, the dog bowls and treats, and that kind of thing, so and then we're combining that with sustainability, so sustainability, you know, it's people that are into you know recycling plastics and saving the world, and that kind of stuff, so we're mixing those two together, so that niches it down, there's a lot of sustainability people. there's a lot of dog people but when you find them two that overlap that gets you a niche down and we're putting out a newsletter aimed at those 00:27:37 people and the newsletter is going to be stuff about you know featuring stuff about their dog and about the environment and there's a there's a gaming section there's a there's a lot of cool stuff in there and we're doing stuff with ai is going to help us find a lot of the content it'll it'll write some of it in a certain personality and then we have an editor that goes through and tweaks it so that takes a huge load off of it we're doing stuff with imagery where if you upload a picture of your dog to us we'll we're going to use some of the ai tools like the journey and dolly and stuff to actually create custom images of your dog where we can take your dog and put it in if it's july 4th in the u . 00:28:12 So, you know when you get your newsletter that day it's going to be your dog in some sort of July 4th uh background which and if you like that picture you're like that's cool I love it I want to save that I want to hit a button, a button, and you can print a print on demand t-shirt right there of that with your dog if you like that picture you can share it to social media which gets more people into the newsletter. Then we'll occasionally come in and we'll do some testing with affiliate links to see what people are liking. We'll announce some of our products. We'll build a true audience of raving fans. And not only can the newsletter self-sustain itself through sponsorships and ad placements and affiliate commissions, it will build a huge engaged audience, way more than what Facebook or anything else could do. 00:28:53 And you know, a lot of people think this is something new, some new idea, but that's why I always say: everything old is new again. So, a lot of the younger people, just like you're a great example of what you're talking about with Kelsey about the 8-track. And seeing that, it's the concept behind it. It's not the mechanism. It's not the mechanism of the 8-track that could hold four or five songs, and now you have tens of thousands of songs on your phone in your pocket. It's the concept of music on the go, of being able to take music on the go. What did that do to change society where you didn't have to sit in front of a record player plugged into the wall, you know, in your house? 00:29:32 And that's what that's what this newsletter said. Newsletters have been around for 30 years, more than 30 years. And there were newsletters. I was doing one in the late 90s, early 2000s that had 250,000 people a day getting an email from us. And we were doing the same thing, but it was cumbersome because the technology wasn't there. And we had to have I had had two full-time people just. basically script what we would call scraping now looking for stories and putting them into a database now an ai tool can do that in minutes that was taking two guys all day long so you combine all this technology together you can do some amazing stuff that will help you in the product business help you in your building audiences help you when you exit all this stuff comes together and that's what you got to be thinking about it's not just not just how cool ai is but how does it 00:30:20 how can you truly uniquely use it beyond just you know what you hear out there with titles and product listings and stuff right now to actually grow your business and a lot of that is in the prompting i was just talking to someone at sellercon yesterday who's doing a lot of stuff with with images on on on mid journey he's like you know sometimes when you do i don't know if anybody here has played with mid journey but when you do a mid journey prompt you type in you know uh i want a scene of a horse running through a field and i wanted it to be kind of cloudy and a little bit 00:30:48 of lightning in the background a couple trees and whatever and but you can get more specific and say i want it with a nikon camera with this f-stop with you know this kind of thing um and that's all cool but then generates four images the way it works on mid journey it generates four different images and you can then click on one and say i like this expand on this or change it or make it high resolution whatever but he's like did you know there's a command that if you just put a dash repeat and then a number at the end of a prompt. And it's-repeat, 10, for example. Then go to bed. Wake up in the morning, and you have not to create just four, because it takes a few minutes to do that. 00:31:27 It created 10 of these. So 10 times four, it created 40 different images for you while you were sleeping. You don't have to sit there and wait a couple hours for it to finish at all. And then you can go through those and say, mix number three, combine this element number three with this element number seven. I can do this and add this. That little tip right there, I didn't know that that command existed. But that's prompt engineering. And so the better you can get at learning prompt engineering, that's where some big money is going to be made. The people that really know how to talk to the AI and talk in its language. And you can do magic stuff. And a lot of people are saying, oh, graphic artists and regular artists, photographers, graphic artists are screwed. 00:32:05 They're out of a job. This AI is going to take them over. I would disagree. The average. Some photographers might be because they don't know the technical side, but I know several artists that are stoked about this because they're holy cow. I know this is gonna make my life so much easier; I can my imagination can run wild now. I know the technical side of it. You know if you're a photographer like Mark or something. I know what a F stops are, I know what all these different technical things are that you and I may not know as much about, and then now they can create what their minds vision is instantly rather than having to do it manually, it's it's a powerful thing, and they're super excited about it. 00:32:43 So, that's just a couple little examples there of why you need to actually get on this bandwagon and don't get caught up in the hype, you know. A lot of the tools that come out that you see out there right now are not going to last, uh, you know something else will come along that's better, but you still need to be in the game, yeah. Okay, so we're just past about bottom of the hour, Kelce, do we? Have a giveaway? We don't have a giveaway today. Okay, let's figure out what we can do. Kevin, what can we do or I do to do a giveaway? We didn't even talk about it. Oh, my gosh. So we've probably done the Tariff Terminator to death this week or last week. 00:33:23 Oh, by the way, do you still have tickets available for BDSS? Yeah, for Puerto Rico? Yes. I mean, it's coming up pretty soon. It's a little over a week away. yeah there are tickets uh available if someone's last minute wants to come out to a billion dollar seller summit yeah i'll tell you what what i'll do i'll throw in you know we are recording the billion dollar seller summit so if you're not able to make it to puerto rico um there's there's recordings i'll throw in a it's 1500 for the recordings if you want to get that uh but uh well never mind the facebook user says we already gave a lot so no i'm just kidding What I'll do is I'll throw in a copy of the recording. 00:34:06 So we'll do a spin at Willa Kelsey to get a $1 ,500 value. I mean, you won't get this right away. You'll get this. It'll be in the June, early July before they're ready. But you'll get a copy of the actual recordings of the presentations from BDSS Puerto Rico. Man, we should do this with Kevin all the time when he comes on. Hey, we don't have a giveaway. We never talked about it. That's awesome. So I don't. a lot of listeners, have never gone to BDSS; a lot might be new or you might be an advanced seller but just have never gone at BDSS. Kevin has this knack of just getting the speakers to do things that they never talk about it, maybe some hacks, it might be everybody is trying to win a prize. 00:34:58 And I'm sorry, guys, I can't talk very well today. But anyways, Kevin gives away this crazy cash prize for the best presentation. So everybody brings their A game. And I can tell you from speaking all around the world or going on tons of podcasts that BDSS is, if not the best, one of the top two events out there. That you can go to and the speaker lineup that he has is fantastic. Uh, anyways, fifteen hundred dollar uh, like that it's unbelievable, that'll make somebody's day so thank you, sir, for that. And um, now Kelse, uh, can we go to a sponsor? We'll come right back this episode of Lunch with Norm. This episode of Lunch with Norm is sponsored by VAA Philippines. Looking for high-quality virtual assistants for your business? 00:35:49 With the rigorous screening, intensive Amazon and Walmart training, and ongoing professional development, get the peace of mind with skilled and motivated virtual assistants for a long-term working relationship. Hire through VAA today! And now let's get back to the show. I keep forgetting we've cut down the size of those. I thought, oh, we probably had another 15 seconds. I'm swigging back on my Coke. And anyways, we're back. Um, you were talking while you were talking about the newsletter and talking about value added, i'm thinking along the same way uh when you're and applying it to Amazon sellers so not with a newsletter But we always talk about this, is that if you just drive people over, like if you put an insert or if you, well, let's stick with the insert. 00:36:43 You have a QR code, you drive people over to a landing page and you give them a research study or you give them something that's just convenient for you, but not convenient for the person to give up their email address. It's called a lead magnet. It's called a lead magnet. Or a trip wire. Right. So if there's nothing there and some people wonder, wow, it didn't really work for me because the magnet didn't work. And I'll give you an example. So we have a company that we work with and they sell knives. And the guy came up with a brilliant idea. First, he went and he gave his knives away to all these chefs around the world. 00:37:29 They, in turn, and culinary students so they, in turn, gave him recipes and ongoing recipes and they tagged him on their, on their, Instagrams or whatever accounts they were and he used that for user-generated content but with that he was able to come up with two recipe books that he gives away; two cookbooks, and then he came up with a meal plan so you buy a knife from them, you register, you get a warranty, extended life warranty, and a meal plan-52 week meal plan where he even tells you like if you need a quarter onion this is your shopping list for the week and um and very well done aesthetically pleasing and uh the cookbooks now I don't know about you but if I buy this knife and I see that completely tos Compliant, 00:38:22 it's it's a deal, I'll give up my email address for that, why because it's value added if somebody's just going to give me a PDF file with some pretty pictures in it, for my, it depends on what it is, but for the most part, I'm very selective with where I put out my uh, email, yeah, it's got to be relative to what you're giving, you're doing too, and like a lot of people think about a warranty card or sign up for my VIP list, that's not going to motivate a lot of people. But if you give something a value that's related to the field that you're selling in, the genre, like, for example, on Amazon, you know, I have a newsletter. We're talking about newsletters. 00:39:01 I have a newsletter coming out in July called Billion Dollar Sellers. It's at BillionDollarSellers. com. It's free, totally free for anybody in the Amazon space. You can sign up right now to get on the early bird list to be in the beta on it. But it's going to be tips and tricks and strategies about selling on Amazon for beginners and experienced sellers. And it's going to be three times a week. But there's going to be a way in there to actually, if you want to get, you know, like I'm known for like my ninja hacks. And so I have a PDF. It's called '99', and I just recently updated it, '99 Ninja Hacks.' And it's like, short little tips or tricks and software tools and cool things that you can do, that you can probably find some gems in there that will help you in your business. 00:39:43 But, to get that, that's something my audience wants, so that's something that they desire and so they would be willing to give up their email address for that. It's not come sign up for Kevin's uh uh newsletter you know or whatever, but if they if they refer a few friends to the newsletter, they'll be able to get this 99 hacks. You know it's not live right now but I'm just this is coming uh and that'll motivate people, yeah I'll give up uh my email address uh or get on your list in exchange for that, it's true value. So whenever you're creating value, don't just do something that's easy. Think of something that, like you said, that your audience will desire. I've already got these hacks. I've been doing them. 00:40:22 I do them on the Helium 10 Elite. So it doesn't take me a lot of time to prepare this. It doesn't really take an hour to put a bunch of them together. But the value to the audience is immense because most people have never seen these or heard of them. And so that's what you have to think about when you're trying to build a list, whether it's through your product inserts, like you said. Or on a Facebook ad or anywhere is what is the true value that it needs to be instant gratification, not something, you know, you got to wait two months to get, or it's going to take a while or it takes a lot of effort on your behalf to get. 00:40:54 So that's, that's, that's what you've got to think about when you're trying to get people on, on these lists. So, and we were doing it for our dog training, just to give you one, a quick example out of the space that on the dog newsletter. We have a lot of people want to know they just got a new puppy like seven seven cool tips to treat your new to teach your new puppy and then we're having a We're gonna try to get some celebrity dog trainers to come on and actually, you know do do that That's something a lot of people will want or maybe you like I don't have a puppy My dog is you know older here's seven new tricks. You can teach an old dog. 00:41:27 There's like three different options there that you can choose from that will depend on where you're at in the life cycle of your pet. It's applicable to you, and you're gonna want to know what are these cool little things? And it's you got to take it further. Seven tips you can treat your dog in in five minutes or less per day. Or something like that. Then people are like, 'Ah, this is this is something easy. This must be a cool little hack. I want it.' Here's my email address or I'll refer to friends. That's what you've got to be thinking of to how actually grow your communities and get people to opt in. The most valuable thing for any business is their customer list. 00:41:59 If you have, and that's the problem with selling on Amazon's in most cases, unless you're doing some FBM. You don't know, you don't have the true data of the customer. You don't know their address. You don't know their email. You don't know their phone number in most cases, unless you're doing FBM. And that's only good for 30 days. If you're doing FBM, you have to download that every 30 days. Otherwise, any of the software tools that have API access to Amazon will delete it because Amazon doesn't want it sitting out there. But an email address and a phone number and a physical address are the three most valuable things in your business. Because if you know what hits the fan, and Amazon shuts down your account and something really bad happens, you're basically screwed. 00:42:41 But if you have a list of 10,000 people who have bought your product, you can much more easily pivot and go launch a Shopify site or sell something different in that genre to them. Maybe you're selling automotive parts on Amazon and your business got shut down for some violation or whatever that you didn't realize was happening. Well, now you know these people like auto parts. You have a running start to either go on another platform like Walmart. Or to go on a shopifier to start your own something around auto parts because you already have a an audience of people who know you and you know they're interested in something. And that's the problem with Facebook groups, you know? 00:43:15 A lot of people, the old way used to be build an audience on a Facebook group and there's nothing wrong with having a community on a Facebook group but you don't own squat of that at any moment Facebook could shut that down and you've just spent 10 years of your life building an audience of tens of thousands of people maybe in your Facebook group and it's gone, literally overnight. Look what happened to Wilfred and me, yeah? It's literally-Three million, five million people. Yep, it's gone. All that money you spent and it's totally gone. But if you have their email, if you have their address or their phone number, then that should be your number one goal post-purchase of anybody buying your product on Amazon is how can I get this person on my list? 00:43:57 And that doesn't mean you got to spam them. And some people are reluctant to give things up. The party we just threw, uh, you know I've uh, that the Carnival of Dreams we talked about the beginning there was a free party I got sponsors to pay this expensive party, uh, cost tens of thousands of dollars to throw this three-hour party and I got sponsors to help pay for it, and then we said it's free for the uh people attendees to come. But one of our goals is that of that was to build a list; there's a thousand people at this seller con event conference right now, and you know we're in the marketing business of some of the sponsors are ppc, one of them's ppc, uh, pp, uh Post-Purchase Pro is a sponsor of the show here. 00:44:36 They're in the business of helping other Amazon sellers, and they want to reach new people and be able to get their message out. So one of the deals of them sponsoring is they get a list of the people who register. So the people who are registering are giving up their email address in exchange for a free ticket to a badass party to come and drink for free and have a great time for several hours. That's the exchange, and they're willing to do that. But when some people went to the Eventbrite page and they entered their email address, some of them gave a bogus email address. They're like, ah, screw it. You know, I know Eventbrite will show me the barcode and I'll be good. If they did that, we actually deleted them from the list. 00:45:14 So their ticket was invalidated because they're not giving the value back to us. And they could always unsubscribe if they get something. But you got to give that value. And that's because I told a couple of sponsors I'm doing that. And they're like, man, we love you. That's awesome that you're enforcing that because they know that that's true, true value. And that's what everybody here needs to be focused on is what can I do to get something in exchange for getting my buyers onto my list so I know their address and their phone number, and hopefully their email. And there are software tools that will do that out there. Maybe you don't have. Their address or their email or you don't have their phone number. There's tools that like Melissa Data and there's tons of them. 00:46:00 You can give a list of addresses and they will match it to public databases and append the phone number or the email address to it, that's publicly available. But there's also tools where if I get their address, what if they move? You know it's worthless to me, uh no, it's not. There's services like Melissa Data again, that will go back 40 in the United States and Canada too, will go back 48 months. So if I move and I fill out one of those forms with the post office that says, 'Here's my new address, please forward all my mail', they get that data. And so, like every year before I send out my calendar brochure, I clean my list. 00:46:37 I send them, you know, 16,000 to 17,000 customer names that buy these from me and say, run this through, it's called NCOA, National Change of Address, run this through this database and they will match and usually about five to ten percent of them they've moved, moved to another apartment across town, they've moved to another city or even some of them have died, you know, it comes back and says deceased and I get a list back and it has another field added, address updated with their new address or you know say deceased, it'll say apartment empty, so I clean the list and keep it current and I can follow them pretty much wherever they go, that's a valuable, valuable asset and most people under underestimate the value of that and owning that's crucial versus Facebook or having a following on TikTok, it's great to have followers don't get me wrong but do whatever you can to get them inside your database on your computer not on someone else's computer not stored in the cloud. 00:47:32 But on your local computer, yeah, most of the time it's just vanity, you know, get put them to put them to work so uh, anyways while you were talking I was thinking uh about that added value. What can you do with added value? How do you find that added value? What can you possibly give away? Oh, we have the 52-week meal plan and the recipe book. If you go and you find your audience or add your audience into ChatGPT and you define your product and you define your business, ask. Ask it to ask it to work as a marketing or a brand manager and see what it spits out. I haven't done it. I'm just listening to what you're saying, Kevin, and saying, all right, so I have got that dog bowl. 00:48:26 What can I give away? What added value can I do with a lead magnet? See what actually I'm going to do that and maybe the next podcast. I'll come back and say, oh, here's some ideas that I got from ChatGPT. But like anything, you have to know your audience. You have to know your product. You have to know your brand voice or your tone. And we'll see what comes back. Yeah, ChatGPT is a great brainstorming tool right now. ChatGPT hallucinates. So you have to be careful. There's a lot of misinformation. I remember I was at an AI conference in early April. They gave an example up on the stage that there had just been a tragic shooting at a school in Nashville. And, you know, ChatGPT, at that time, there wasn't a way to actually get the current data. 00:49:16 It was only going through September 20,21. So they asked it, you know, what happened at the shooting. And I think they actually gave it a link. They said, here's a link of a recent story, what you could do. And please summarize this story. So they gave them the link to the news story on the news site. And then ChatGPT summarized the story, but it made up about half of the story. It actually used information from Columbine shooting, which was 20 years earlier. And someone in the audience, the guy up on stage that was showing it, he didn't know. He was not from Nashville. He just assumed it was correct. And he said, look, here's what it can do. It's pretty cool, right? And some guy in the audience raised his hand. 00:49:54 He's like, hey, I'm from Nashville. That's not what happened. It's saying this school, that's not the school. That's not what happened. It was not a. Whatever it was, seven; it wasn't a 17-year-old that did it was what hallucinated. That's the problem right now with so many people relying on ChatGPT even to write your listings. Uh, you've got it; it's great for brainstorming, great to get you going, but you cannot 100% rely on it. You've got to babysit it right now. It's not at the point where it's 100% reliable so just want to make that point out there. It's not a cure-all, but your brainstorming idea around the is an excellent example of how you could use it to get get some ideas and then uh, trust but verify. 00:50:37 That's what Ronald Reagan, the ex-US president, used to say: trust but verify. Right uh, and that's what you gotta do with uh, with AI right now too. Okay, let's uh, let me see; we've got a couple minutes before the top of the hour. Just want to talk about one quick Thing and then we'll get into some questions and that's FedNow now any thoughts? Yeah, I guess probably some of the audience here doesn't know what even FedNow is, but it's a new system coming in July in the U. S. that the Federal Reserve of the U. S. is encouraging most banks to participate in. It's optional. They don't have to, but they're basically going to have to. It's totally optional, but we'll twist your arm a little bit to make sure that you get into it. 00:51:24 you know now if you do it as all of us know you might send an ach to your supplier send a payment to your employees or something and it you know it takes a takes a while i remember the old days of writing checks people still write some checks from time to time and but i remember you know 20 years ago i cash flow my business off of the float on checks so i was able to actually i knew that if i wrote a nine thousand dollar check for some inventory on a wednesday it wouldn't clear my bank until monday because it had to you know the physical check had to be sent to 00:51:53 a to the bank go to a processing center in some central location then get sent you know by mail or by truck or armored truck or however they did it to the other bank and it take three days so in those three days i was like i don't have the money but it's called the float so i are kiting or kiting a check and i was able to do that because i knew that somebody else was going to pay me on friday and so i actually cash flowed my business by doing that for a while i even had a a check cashing place uh that a buddy of mine owned one of these you 00:52:23 know where a lot of the uh immigrant workers and stuff go to cash their checks because they're unbanked they don't have a bank and they charge them like a one percent fee he would if i needed cash to pay something cod this is 20 years ago uh and i didn't have the money i could go write him a check and he would hold it an extra day and then deposit so i would get like Four days of float to actually cover my ass, and that's how I grew my business when i um those days are pretty much over now. Most checks clear within a day or two. But when you sit in ACH, it's not instant. It takes a day or a wire. 00:52:53 They sometimes tell you, 'Please allow 10 days.' I mean, it usually gets there much quicker. But with the new Fed now, everything is going to be instant, including weekends. So it's basically like Venmo or something, but at massive scale. And everything is instant. So if it's a Saturday at 10 p. m. at night and I need to send Norm some money for the product I'm buying from him, I can go online. To the banking hit, use the FedNow system or how are they going to integrate it? Say send $9,000; he has it in his bank account a minute later without me having to go to Venmo or PayPal or any of the other Zelle or any of the other services that are out there. 00:53:30 And that it's going to be it's going to create a massive change in the way people do things. Plus it also one of the main underlying reasons that is the US government wants to know where you're sending your money and so they're one to encourage all the banks to do it because they have access to this system and they can see exactly where you're sending money to, who when, and they can track things. Better, and you know, come after it's gonna make it harder for people to to beat the system like I did with floating a check for example or hiding some money because everything's going to be on this system, and so it's going to be, it's kind of an advanced version of that. 00:54:10 Some of you might know it with Amazon where you can, you know, hit the button to get your money quicker, that's kind of a scaled-back version of it. Um, or if you go into, you know, if you have a Chase Bank account right now, you can wire, you can see if you want to do an ACH there's two options one of them says uh standard ACH and which means it's going to go overnight to The next business day, and the money will go. Or you can pay a fee of like one percent or something like that, and it will be instant transfer, that's basically Fed now uh, but without the one percent, so it's gonna be uh game changing, it will be. Did I ever tell you that I had a business that did exactly what you said? 00:54:49 No, you haven't, yeah, I, I, it was another division of the company, but I ended up talking to a Fortune 500 company and anyways they were having real problems with their non-contracted suppliers and they were paying their contracted suppliers 240 days, and I said well let me, this is over a lunch, I said, let me be your purchasing. department for non-contracted suppliers globally and they in two weeks they said yes i'll do it and all it was the whole business model was them paying me im allowed to hold on to the check for 90 days before i paid the supplier. And it was crazy you know what was being like the cash that was going back and forth at that time but anyways that was the whole business model was just playing and having the funds in the bank for those 90 days and making interest on it 00:55:51 yeah I see someone a Facebook user just said paypals had instant transfer for years Yeah, within the same system, like PayPal or within the same bank, instant transfer has been around for a while. It's like if I have a Chase account and Norm has a Chase account, I can transfer the money if I want to pretty much instantly. PayPal has that and some others. But now it's going to be between anybody, anybody connected to the systems, regardless of the bank or processing thing. And that's the big change. Yeah, compliance and monitoring. Yep. Kind of scary. All right. All right. So let's see. Why don't we get into some of these questions? Kelsey? Huh? Okay. You want to pull up the question and I'll talk? Okay. So it says, let me see. 00:56:40 I'll make it really big because I'm an old guy. Okay. So the cue is, okay, the question is. I'm coming to BDSS from London, uh, do you want anything, something, uh, British? Definitely cigar but tea, oh there we go, uh. He's always good, anything sure, I mean yeah, I was just in London a few weeks ago, but yeah, anything you wanted to bring, I'm sure there should be some people that, uh, would it would, uh, enjoy that. I'm glad to hear that you're gonna be joining us in, uh, Puerto Rico, it's gonna be an awesome time not only just a next level learning but, uh, some great networking and a lot of fun too. We make these events, uh, not your normal boring conference event, I mean as Norm knows he's been to a few, we do some really cool, fun things, okay then the next one, Kevin, any updates on Product Savants? 00:57:36 Yes, Product Savants is a company that Steve Simonson and I do together, um, we we take a couple of the pain points out of finding new products so we find new product opportunities, we source it And then we basically turn it over to you. It's not a done-for-you service. We don't get involved in the marketing or the branding or any of that. It's just we take a couple of the pain points out. We are focused right now on bigger sellers, mostly on the aggregators on that, not on the smaller sellers. And a lot of the aggregators right now, as we talked about earlier, have put a pause on a lot of things. So Product Savants is still doing it, but there's a slowdown there. We're not doing individual people anymore. 00:58:16 It just became too much of a; it wasn't profitable for us. So we're doing more of what's called brand genesis, which is a brand in a box. So we come up with five products to run an avatar. And it could be to extend the product line that you have with new products, or it could be a brand new thing. But that's where it's at right now. All right. Next. Have you had any issues re-verifying your Amazon accounts? I've done it twice and the third is coming up. I have not. I mean, it’s popped up. It hasn’t popped up on all my accounts. It’s popped up on two of them. But it was pretty painless in just a few minutes to update a phone number or to update something. 00:59:00 One of my older accounts, I’m pretty sure they don’t even have my driver’s license photo or whatever utility bill or whatever they want on it. But they haven’t asked me for anything on that. But a couple of the other newer accounts, a few fields that were missing, I just had to update them. Good to go. I haven’t had any issues. Have you, Norm? I haven’t had any. No, that’s been fine. Okay, another one. Question for Kevin. Will there be any ad space available in the Billion Dollar Seller newsletter? Yes, there will be. There's sponsorship. There is a sponsorship option on there. There'll be a media kit that'll be available, I'm not putting ads in the initial ones during the beta run, but once it goes live, there will be. 00:59:48 I'm expecting um, there's well into the thousands of people that I haven't even advertised this much at all right now. There's already over a thousand people signed up on it. Um, I think the numbers within a few months will get to about 15 to 20, 000 people a day receiving this and that's one of the points I want to make: I could have 15 to 20, 000 people in a Facebook group, And I could post in there, but it doesn't reach anybody. I mean, Facebook; some of you may see me posting all the time for like Billion Dollar Seller Summit or something, if you follow me. Like, why is Kevin like, Jesus Christ, man, it's like a post every other day. It's because most people don't see most of it. 01:00:26 And I have the Billion Dollar Sellers group, summit group. So you have to have come to either an in-person event or done the virtual event to get in the group. So there's about 500 or so people in that group. That's my group. That's not some public group. That's my group. These are people who said, 'Hey, Kevin, I want to know. I want to be part of this group. I want to know what's going on. I can post something in there. And you know, it tells me since I'm the group owner, how many people have viewed it. And they'll say, you know, a lot of times 56 people, 56 out of 500. It's like 10%. I mean, on a best case scenario, like a post that just gets a lot of comments and a lot of engagement, I might have 186 people. 01:01:04 That doesn't mean that they saw it; it just said it's views, which means it went through their scroll and they might not even stopped on it, just means it was displayed to them in their feed um at some point, that that's pathetic, that's absolutely pathetic, and you can't count on that. It's not a waste of time; it's still 50 or 180 people saw it. But if I have 500 people on an email list and I'm sending them out a newsletter with value, I should be getting between a 40 and 60 percent open rate on that. So, that right off the gate, my baseline minimum is 200 people are at least going to scan, open it and scan it. They might not read everything, but they're going to scan the headlines. 01:01:41 If you do the newsletter right, they will read some stuff. That's where most people in the space don't do it right. That's way more engagement than anything else out there, period, right now. And that's the power of it. So there will be ad space in it. That's part of it. Look for a media kit on that in July. You'll be at BillionDollarSellers. com. Okay. Next, gals. Okay. Hey, Kev, can you give an additional solid tip for a new Amazon product launch for sellers on all levels? For sellers on all levels? I think he just means one solid tip. Yeah, a solid tip on a product launch. The what would be a good tip that 01:02:35 I haven’t said before on a product on launching a brand new product, I mean there’s a lot around that so um it depends on what you’re what you’re trying to launch or what if you have a list or if you don’t have a list um or where you’re at so can you be more specific on that like if you do you have a is your first is it a first product do you already have existing product do you um have a list of outside people do you have yeah I need more information to actually give you a solid tip yeah I I don’t know there’s one 01:03:09 that I’m doing now and it’s not it’s not for it’s not for sales velocity but it’s for people to you know take a look at the Q&A’s and that’s simply just answering with a video, a lot of people aren’t doing that oh yeah that’s a good point that’s a good tip I mean I i just uh helped I just helped my trainer. Actually, he has a journal. It's like a journal that you write in. It's like a 90-day journal to help you get motivation and to log what you're doing and stuff. It's a really good little journal he put together. He's super proud of it. He made like 2,500 copies. He wants to get it up on Amazon. 01:03:46 He didn't know anything about Amazon. I've been helping him a little bit with that. I told him the first thing we need to do is we need to do product testing. We did some pick-food testing where he he had his designer, they got off of fiber, I think I actually designed like four or five different main images and we tested those against each other head to head so image A against image B, image C against image D, so let's say D1 and B1 then we did B against D and we just kind of like had a little play-off to narrow it down came up with the best image he's like that's awesome when you get all the feedback that you can read and everything in there and then I was like it's like let's run with that, say no, no, we're not done yet now we need to go find your top four or five competitors 01:04:26 and let's let's download their their image, their main image and let's upload it into a new poll you know this, this all costs like 500 bucks to do all this all these polls it wasn't cheap but let's put their four images. And, uh, it was actually we took the top three competitors, no, it's four, uh, the top four competitors. Their main image and his image; we just randomized it, and they said, 'Then we did another poll that we asked people which one of these would you buy, uh, you know if you saw this there's no other information, no pricing, no nothing like which one would you buy? He finished dead last with like five percent or six percent of the voting, and it was a gut check to him. 01:05:04 He was so proud of this thing, and like, so fired up, and he's like, 'Holy cow, man! It was like, you could see the sales come out of his... out the wind come off his sails!' Yeah, when he had That said, well let's let's look at what they said and you know they all write little comments there, I think we did 50 people and we took those comments and he went back and had the designer make a incorporate those comments and we ran this test again to different people but the same three images and his new image and it went up to 21 still wasn't the winner but it went up to 21 so that refining process is crucial and it costs like 500 bucks between all the tests that we did so that's a lot of money for some people but that's a lot better than putting it up on Amazon and having no sales. 01:05:48 Second guessing. And this is not your friends or family or people that are close to you because all of his buddies were telling him, this is a freaking awesome journal. This looks great. He sent the pictures to his wife, to his mom. Oh, it looks awesome. But when you get it out to the anonymous people who don't know you from Adam, they're like, they will be much more critical. So that's one thing. Then we went through that process. Then he uploaded the video up. uploaded his listing and then what i had him do immediately is i said go fill up all those video spots at the bottom go out to all your your clients 01:06:22 and have them that you've given that bought a book or you've given one of these books to and have them create a video and go to this button you know it says upload your own video or whatever you don't have to be an influencer but upload as a customer upload video so all those little video spots at the bottom are are full of people with his product because if you don't do that when you launch you're going to have all these other products that are related to you So Amazon's gonna fill those pots with your competitors. And so he's doing that now. So that's another important thing. Plus you can also, your video then might show up on your competitors. So, the reverse of that's true too, where you can get that benefit. 01:06:57 So those are, would be two, I guess, tips there that you triggered my mind on what to talk about. I'd add something slightly to the videos and that's to create custom thumbnails. So it looks like it's a series. And that way, when people come down and they take a look at it, they can see out of these, you know, 10 or 15 videos or whatever you're doing. Each one is customized and it looks like it's a series of videos that you've produced and it just looks that much better. So anyways, that's that. Let's have one last question and then we're going to head over to the wheel. By the way, what did I do here? I did something, something about my settings. Did I mess this up? 01:07:44 Nope, okay, so uh #WheelOfKelsey, take two! You'll get a second entry. We have and by the way, if this is the first time you're watching the podcast, we do this every podcast, it's called The Wheel of Kelsey, and we're giving away a great product today; Cal uh, Kelsey Kevin, tell us what the uh giveaway is today? Yeah, so the giveaway today to one lucky winner is going to be worth $1,497, and that's not some imaginary number. You can go to BillionDollarSellerSummit. com forward slash replay eight, and you'll see that's what the price people are paying. It's $1,497 for the replay of the upcoming Billion Dollar Seller Summit in Puerto Rico. So it's a live event, but we do videotape the presentation. 01:08:31 So it's about 16 or so presentations, actually 25 with some of the other stuff. So after the event, we edit that down and we send that out. It takes a couple of weeks. So in the June, first part of July, whoever the winner is, you will get a copy of that. So instead of paying fifteen hundred bucks, you'll get a copy of some of the latest, coolest and greatest strategies out there in the space. Cutting edge stuff, not not the same stuff you see on podcasts or, you know, there's there's seems like there's a free, free, free summit every day on Zoom somewhere. Someone's doing something, not that same stuff. This is like cutting edge from some of the smartest people in the business. So that's going to be yours to use and hopefully learn from. 01:09:11 All right. And let's clarify, not this podcast. This is always cutting edge. Well, no, it goes. That's true. That's true. Except for lunch with Norm. Norm, maybe you don't need to replace because you already know everything. Well, no, I don't. Know about that, but anyways, it's an awesome prize. #WillaKelsey Take two people, you'll get a second entry. I know there's a ton of people who already entered um all right so let's have one last question today, Kelsey, and then we'll go uh we'll go to a sponsor, then over to the wheel. How to be successful in private label on Amazon with a low budget for example less than a thousand dollars? Extremely extremely difficult today um that could have been done In the past, it depends on what your definition of success is. 01:10:00 So if for me to start with $1,000, could I make a business out of that? Yes, I have a lot of experience, but it's not going to be, most likely it's not going to be a big business. If you're in the West, in Europe or the U.S. or in the Western society, starting with $1,000 to try to grow that into something that you can quit your job on or live on, your chances are very slim. I'm not going to say it can't happen, but they're probably about 2% that it can happen. That's the thing you can make enough money where you could quit your job after a year or two if you're living in Pakistan uh and you know where three or four hundred dollars a month is the average wage or some countries in Latin America uh and if you can make an extra couple hundred dollars a month it could be you know could really help your family and then, yes, you can do that. 01:10:46 But to do that, you're going to have to niche down; you're not going to spend any money on advertising. You're gonna have to find some sort of product that you get into for 50 cents or a dollar at your cost landed, and be able to sell that for five to fifteen dollars uh, ideally closer to 15. And and grow it small, and find a niche where there's two or three sales a day that you can grab without having to do any launches or advertising uh, and there's just a demand; there's some sort of like hidden demand that everybody else is ignoring because like me, I'm not gonna do something that can make one or 01:11:22 two sales a day or even You know, four sales a month, a week or something, if you have the right product, that let's say you can sell one sale a day and it's it's niche down so far and you really refine the keywords you have to go to really long tail keywords that don't have a lot of search and you can grab a few sales there and kind of start a little momentum, you might be able to grow that where you can in six months to a year, you might be able to take uh you know an extra three or four hundred dollars a month profit or something out of it, and so if that's that's would that if that's what would be good for you then yeah you could do it for less than that but it's gonna Be hard all right, okay! 01:11:59 So let's go over to uh sponsor then we'll come right back, this episode of Lunch with Norm is sponsored by Jeff Schick Legal: Amazon suspensions are very real, but how do sellers like us protect ourselves against these costly suspensions without spending thousands of dollars? For a very low monthly retainer of just $89, get full access to Amazon attorney Jeff Schick. Mention Lunch with Norm and receive 50% off the first two months. Visit jeffschick. com today. That's J-E-F-F-S-C-H-ick. Come on, let's get back to the show! Hey, Kevin, where can people sign up for that newsletter? It should be is on my screen there, does it have my the website right there on the in the orange Billion Dollar Sellers dot com okay all right very good billion dollar sellers with an s dot com all right okay Kelz, let's go over to the wheel. 01:13:12 All right, let's see. Okay, we'll just do a spin. And if you're the winner, contact Kelsey at katlunchwithnorm. com. And anytime, there we go. It's spinning. 01:13:38 Gabriel. All right. Congrats, Gabriel. You got a great prize today. What's that? I just said that. Yeah. So Kelsey's bugging me in the background. All right. Email Kelsey at katlunchwithnorm. com. Congratulations, Gabriel. There we go. All right. So Kevin, I guess you'll be heading over to the hotel. Yep. I'm going to head over to the event for the afternoon. So I guess I'll see you over there here shortly. Maybe I have to do another lunch with Norm. There we go. We could do that. All right, Kev. Well, thanks for coming on today. And I'm not sure. Is there anything or contact information you want to provide or anything else? What's your personal phone number? Oh, what is that Austin phone number? You especially like the late night calls, right? 01:14:42 I love the late night calls, yeah. No, I'm good. Go to BillionDollarSellers . com if you want to sign up for the newsletter. It's coming out in July, but you can get on the early bird list and make sure you get in the beta in the first round because I won't be able to start pushing it really hard until July. Get in and help me refine it; see what you like and don't like – but it's totally free – BillionDollarSellers. Come, you know what we should? We've got something that's happening that really nobody knows about and we're not a hundred percent solid right now but you-anybody who's here right now probably heard about like if you've been listening for a while our collective mind society and we're planning 01:15:29 number two right now and you want to just talk a little bit about that before we we take off, uh yeah sure so uh collective mind society is a little it's not it's kind of a it's a group of entrepreneurs that Norm and I've put together, it's 12 to 20 people that get together to do something fun, and so it's not about listening to a bunch of present powerpoint presentations or that kind of thing, it's more of the idea came from sitting around a campfire and an event in Paris where Norm and I, a small group of other people, maybe eight or 10 other people, were sat around this campfire at this castle. Literally, it's like an Airbnb castle that had a fire pit outside. 01:16:08 And we sat there one night, from like, I don't know, seven or eight o'clock at night to like four in the morning, just throwing logs on this fire, drinking a little bit of wine, smoking cigars, and just talking. And it was everything from life to business. And I just remember like so many people had their phone out taking notes. Someone would say something about launching a product or this cool tool or this cool podcast you got to listen to or whatever or this book you should everybody should read and people are like taking notes, and you're taking more notes than you would in a presentation. We're like, 'We need to do this' or just things just free flow other people and get people from different walks of life together where things just free flow and let's have a good time while we're doing it so we call it an experiential mastermind. 01:16:51 And so we did one last year in October around the F1 race in Austin. And it was expensive to come. So, you know, it's not for everybody, but we did it first class. So it's not just show up at the race with our lawn chairs and let's watch the race. We got an expensive, you know, $70,000 cabana on the side of the track that has food and has everything, has, you know, a little covered area. We did events where we went to like a marshmallow concert that was here during the time. We went to a really nice dinner and all this cool stuff around the event. And you're just hanging out. But that's when the cool stuff comes out. That's when a lot of the best nuggets and the best information and relationships are formed. 01:17:29 One of the guys at that event is now a sponsor of the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. He probably wouldn't have been if he hadn't come to that event. We wouldn't have made the relationship. So we're doing it again this year. We don't have the exact dates, but we're looking at a couple different options. One is a train ride through the Rocky Mountains of Western Canada, so starting probably in Vancouver and going to Calgary. And it's a four or five day trip where we'll stop along the way at some cool hotels like Lake Louise. If you've never been there, it's one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, except in Canada. This train goes to the Rocky Mountains of Western Canada, and it's got like a clear top. The roof is like glass. 01:18:07 And so it's just stunning views of all these snow-peaked mountains and all this cool scenery. And then at night, you know we'd be sitting around the campfire, kind of stuff and hanging out, so that's one we're looking at. We're looking at doing another one in Scotland where it will be castles, cigars, maybe some golf and uh, and whiskey type of thing. And then next year, uh, we're hoping to uh, get enough people together to do an African safari where we'll go into Tanzania and do an African safari. So um, that's something look for information on that coming soon. We don't have the specifics yet but if that's something that's up your and you know in your wheelhouse or something, you might be interested in doing hanging out with me and Norm and a bunch of other really smart entrepreneurs uh, that that may be something that you might be interested in, so look for some more. 01:18:54 Details coming up soon, right? Oh yeah, look at uh and the Palace of Wheels that is actually on the list that's on the list location actually the the Palace of Wheels um is on our list that we have a we brainstormed a list of things that we can do and that's one of them that's on there. Got that from ChatGPT, by the way. All right. So, Kevin, we'll see you shortly. But thanks again for coming on today. It was awesome. No problem. Always my pleasure to be on with you and Kelsey. You're some of the best guys in the business. All right. Thank you, sir. Want more great information? Don't forget to subscribe by clicking here. Also, if you want to check out our latest podcast, click over here. Thank you.