How a Former Pro Gambler Built an 8-Figure Amazon Empire

How a Former Pro Gambler Built an 8-Figure Amazon Empire Speaker 2: Hey guys, welcome back to Seller Sessions. We welcome back to the show Sim. Obviously Sim does the main image monthly, what we do with the team. However, today we're going to bring him back to do part two of the in-depth. If you've not seen it, go back through the catalog seller sessions.com. He did it last time with his partner Jack, but there was a lot of stuff that we weren't able to cover obviously because Two of the guys on there and so we're gonna chart Sim's path. We're gonna do a little roundup of That part just quickly. So give you the highlights. You can obviously watch the full episode again on YouTube as well But Sim, welcome back to the show. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me back Danny. Speaker 2: Part 2. Part 2. Well, there is a lot to cover as you said there's there's stuff missing. So we'll just recap quickly Quick highlights. You started, what, took over from your dad in 15, 14, wasn't it? Speaker 1: Yeah, it was 17. So yeah, I'll give a quick synopsis. Yeah, went to uni, came out of there, was gambling for a living for a long time. So it was poker first and then sports betting. And then around 2017, sports betting was definitely Dwingling down like my edge was it was definitely evaporating and I either had to put a lot more work in or get better. I mean I had the same thing with poker but you know a few years previous and both times just decided to move on to something else. So this time it was to my dad's business. It was with good knowledge that it would be a long-term thing for me and I was sort of going to be all in on the project but I definitely started off slowly and My stripes I guess and then sort of more formally took over once Jack joined a year later and and then we pressed on anyone that wants to hear about the full business story. Obviously it was in the in the previous part where Jack and I both talk about it, but there was a lot of. You know, various things that we did with Amazon vendor exclusives was the biggest part of our journey, but also the biggest mistake, I think, that we made. And we're still sort of feeling the effects of that in the company now and now trying to get out of that and think bigger. Speaker 2: So let's, if you don't mind, can we dip into the gambling side of things? It's interesting because Ash Thompson, another Big UK Amazon seller, he's sold now, but he did a lot of, had a background in poker. But when you're talking about, you know, the sports betting, the poker and stuff, was it more like an addiction that was going the wrong way or you like excelled it and it wasn't that the house won all the time, you were good at what you were doing? Speaker 1: Yeah, so poker is obviously the unique casino game, if you like, where you're only playing against the players opposite you and the house just takes their cut, right? So online the speed of play is a lot faster and back in the heyday, like 2009, I want to say was probably the heyday for online poker, maybe a bit earlier. It was good money back then and anyone with an IQ and the drive to do it could probably have succeeded. And then it got progressively harder from there as a lot more training came out and there were multiple training sites that arguably ruined it. But that's how I really excelled and got better was being one of the first on those and really diving into what makes a winning player. And so I had a really good run. So I think at university, my last year I didn't go to a single lecture. I was playing poker the entire time. Still got a 2-2. I was pretty close to a 2-1, which shows how a degree, like is it actually worth anything if you can just blag it, I guess. So the second year of uni, I played every single day near enough. I wasn't really focused on the work at all. I think I made £180 in the entire time. I was playing such small stakes. And in the second year, I think I made, I don't know, maybe mid-thirties, about 30-odd grand or something like that. But back then when you're, what, 21, that is a lot of money. And then from then on, it was it was pushing six figures every year consistently. But I think looking back on all of this now, I was definitely thinking small, as crazy as that sounds. Ash Thompson, for example, I'm relatively good friends with him now. He obviously didn't think small and he played big stakes, big money. He really pushed his edges and then did exactly the same in his business life as well. So I think my recurring theme, looking back on my sort of journey in the last, say, what would it be? 18, 20 years, whatever, I've perhaps thought too small throughout and then as you meet better people, as you extend your network, you really realise what you could have done. So I've got a slight regret even though I'm sitting here with a business doing pretty well, but there is definitely regret along the way for me. Speaker 2: Yes, you had the correlation of like the gambling gave you the edge and and obviously the the the taste for for risk although calculated like like saying now but what where's the switch come because you said you We're playing small but then you're saying that the latter years were you doing six figures and I'm talking it from point of view is that most people won't get a career out of it and they lose their arse in their house a lot of the time. So you must be pretty good. Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. I was like if This is the case for any pro back then. If you knew what you knew now, even now where I've been out of the game for years, if I knew what I knew now back in 2007, you'd be the best player in the world. That's no exaggeration. That's literally the case of how far the game's come. Online poker is now solved, in my opinion. It's very hard to really make money there. It's basically been game-theoried out into Into the abyss really and it really is just live poker and that really where some money can be made even then I think it's tough. I think I saw the writing on the wall coming and I knew that my edge was going and the playing, the standard was getting higher and so I had to either make a decision to get better, really dig in, get coaching for the very best and I just didn't really feel like I had that fight left in me. I'd been To put it into context, so to make the amount of money that I did with relatively little risk, I was playing lower stakes for an insane amount of hours and a lot of tables. So online screen would have been eight tables of cash poker and then one table of say, I don't know what it had been back then, prison break or loss that would sit in the middle and I would just completely zone out. What do they call it when you zone out? Speaker 2: You go into the zone. Speaker 1: Yeah, what is it though? You know that deep focus mode. I forget it now. And I was in that for my entire 20s. That's what it felt like. I'm fully zoned out and fully into it. I ended up being pretty reclused. I think I made up for that in my 30s for sure. But there was definite work ethic there, whether that was a misplaced gambling addiction or work ethic. I haven't quite figured out just yet. It was a very smooth journey for me, really, the gambling, as well as the poker in particular. Because the way I played, the stakes I played, there was never really huge risk to what I was doing. It was a very, very steady line going. X equal Y graph basically going up to the top right. It was a pretty smooth journey for me. It was only towards the end where that say 100 grand a year started to drop down to 50, 40 and then my lifestyle back then was really extravagant in terms of holidays and my wife wouldn't have been working at that point either. Yeah, that's when the change to sports betting came and then it all started up again. So sports betting was a whole other thing where there was an edge. I had a palpable edge with cricket, especially test matches where it's a long, complicated game and got into the right groups where people sort of taught me the basics. You can trade a match much like a stock market. You can buy high, sell low, this kind of thing. But the variance in that was extremely high. I would have days of five-figure losses a couple of times. I'd never had that really in my poker days. So much swingier, much more Stress, I guess. It was a lot more outside of your control, so you could place a bet and then, you know, the player loses his rag or plays a bad shot or, you know, the quarterback goes down, whatever it might be, whatever sport it was, and think that there's a lot more outside of your control. And the edges were smaller, but Yeah, I just adapted over time in that time. I had a really good run and looking back it was good fun even if I was a bit shut off from the rest of the world, headphones on, staring at a screen for most of my 20s and I was pretty overweight at one point as well. Around 2016 is when I stopped properly and that was also the time when my wife was pregnant with our twins and that's when I had a feeling this is not sustainable. Either the edge might go or I'm going to struggle with this mentally and I don't want to be working through the night. Australian cricket is through the night. I can't be doing that. NFL can be through the night. Yeah, that's when I transitioned to the business and honestly, the best thing I did, I wish I did it five years sooner. If I did it five years sooner, I think this is a very different conversation where I'd be. Yeah, you know what? Speaker 2: It can all be extrapolated. You just said an edge. You need an edge on Amazon. You're talking about the moving parts of everything. Just think about what you do. You're an eight-figure seller. You've edged your bets. When you're scaling, you can break a lot of things on the way. There's, again, a lot of moving parts. There is some luck in there as well in some of the aspects of timing, yeah? If you look at ranking, how that's changed over time. So everything you spoke about there is like you extrapolated that from poker into Amazon. Does that make sense? Like it's fast moving, ranking changes, there's little that you can control in that sense. Yes, you can control your stock and your inventory, but there's so many things that are out of your hand and there's so many requirements that You have to overcome in terms of increasing fees and having the edge of going, yeah, I'm going to go and be competitive against these people. Yeah, I can do this. And all of that edge that you had from poker, you know, like you kept saying your edge is going down. Well, your edge is still up in Amazon because a lot of other people's edges are either going down or on the way up because it's a tough business to do. Listening to you is like you could extrapolate everything across to Amazon which probably explains where you are. I know that you got the business from your dad and it was an ongoing concern but it was you and Jack and the team that took it to this next level. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. We treat it as a game because it is like you're basically you are in competition with your competitors and There are various ways you have to compete. You have to have better products. You have to source it better than they do. You have to have better imagery than they do, whatever it might be, but it is a game. Like I said on the previous part as well, two of our most senior employees are former gamblers as well. Chris is our head of supply chain. He's the one that actually introduced me to sports betting. He just saw me tweeting about some random cricket bet I was doing and said, oh, you should talk to these guys. And then that whole snowball of us talking then led to him. Living nearby and then joining the company. And then I had a sales ad and he's also a former professional gambler and we all treat it the same way. We all just treat it as a game that we've got to beat. What's our edge? Is it big enough to push? Let's push and we do that every time. I think that's really kept the motivation of the business going. Jack's naturally motivated anyway, but the other three of us, I think that's how we kept it going. We treat it as a game. Speaker 2: Yeah, so what other stuff did we did not get to cover in the last pod? I know you mentioned some bits earlier on that we could go. Speaker 1: Yeah Well, it was a whole other sort of period as well. So there's a lot of Bitcoin stuff I used to do so he's to offer them right so he's to like buy them on I think the site was called bit stamp and sell them on local bitcoins and we were making This was actually with Chris as well. I think we're making a grand a day for about a I don't know, three months. It was crazy money back then, but I think at one point I might have owned 36 of them. And then I sold them. This is how long ago this was. I sold them at 500 pounds, all of them. And then the next, I think two weeks later, they were 300 pounds. Thought I was a genius. Didn't think much of it. And then, yeah, I actually found, went back and found that old transaction of me selling 36 Bitcoin the other day. Devastation. So, yeah. But definitely, I've definitely seen 18. I'm pretty sure there was another account with the other 18 in. But yeah, so some funny stories there. But yeah, the rest is now the business and how we, you know, I came in not knowing anything about I knew about dad's business. I helped put some stuff on Amazon and eBay in the early days. I didn't know, as I walked in, we were running a warehouse. There were staff. I had no idea about anything, the HR, why we even had this warehouse in the first place. It was only until about two years in that I realized that no one has a warehouse. They all just FBA everything and they got a lovely chilled business where we've got, you know, headcount of 10 people and trying to keep them busy and had no idea about trying to keep them efficient. It was just, it was honestly, Laughable have how. Poor I was in certain areas, and then Jack came in with a much more corporate background and took a lot of that stress and headache away. Obviously, he knew what a real business looks like. We just grew from there, really. I focused on all the Amazon stuff, the technical stuff. That's still probably my strength now. Myself and Adam run that side of the business. Yeah, pretty much self-taught from YouTube really and then a few courses later down the line. Speaker 2: So what was the point where, should we go back into like the business itself and talk about some of the key points of scaling. I know that you worked with Jonny for a period. You met him at Seller Sessions I think a couple of years ago. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. Speaker 2: What was that like because that opened your eyes in terms of building out the systems? Speaker 1: We just didn't know what we didn't know and we didn't know what even our small team would be capable of if we were to sort of systemize and do things differently. We're still far from perfect now. There's still loads of stuff we need to improve but there are things in place now that help us scale. Jonny and his team has got a massive part in helping us get things together and Yeah, honestly, that was a very intense process that, you know, by the end of it, we were sort of sat around looking at old clips of the first interviews that we did with the Scala. It was like a nine-month process. And we were looking back at the first clips and then where we were at now, and it was pretty emotional to go back and see it because it was such a transformative thing that we went through. And now, we just booked in a meeting today to discuss the org chart next week, so it's still imperfect, but there's a proper journey that we went on there that helped us get to a point where Jack and I were separated in the org chart and then we could then focus properly on what we had to and put the right people in the right spots. Speaker 2: Yeah, so look, when people talk about scales, it's like, OK, you're going to scale SOPs. It's not like that, though. It looks on the outside. Oh, yeah, just get some SOPs or just scale, right? We just put our processes in place. Speaker 1: SOPs are 0% of our business. We don't really run a business like that at all. We've just got people that have been in the role for a long time and know what they're doing and then trust them to do that. SOP has only come out to teach someone completely new, like a brand manager maybe. Here's how we do things. But again, that tends to be fairly unstructured because we want them to do it themselves, test it, learn it and figure it out. It's going to become very obvious soon if they don't understand. What it is has been asked of them, but the results won't be there and we'll see that. But yeah, we don't really have structured SOPs. We'd much rather have structured roles and responsibilities and then let people sink or swim, basically. And most of the time, luckily for us, they swim. Speaker 2: Yeah, and how do you break that down? Because obviously they came in you you didn't know what you didn't know. What was it that you didn't know that you now know today that helped you? Do you understand what I mean? It's like, well, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. So for me, I was heavily, heavily, heavily involved in in the day to day of everything. So logistics, sourcing, research, optimization, there was not one facet of the business that I wasn't involved in, even like the warehouse, stuff like that. And then It took a relatively junior person at Ascala to almost laugh at me and what I was doing. And so, oh, this is ridiculous. What on earth was I thinking? Why am I wasting my time with this? Why was I not focused more on this? And then that's when, you know, the penny dropped and I realized that there's a whole other way of doing this. And it's not just all reliant on me. It's not all reliant on Jack. It's not all reliant on, say, Adam and Chris. It's a full It's a full readjustment, you know, adjustment that we need to restructure this. And then that was the biggest thing, but not everyone, and that's going to be a similar story for most, okay, technically I'm not a founder, but for most founders, right? It's going to be, you're used to doing everything and then you have to start systemizing that and delegating. It goes through the stages of what a 0 to 1 looks like, a 1 to 5 looks like, and then upwards, and we were following that exact thing. Every single problem that they said in the book, we found, we had that problem, and we found, yeah, every single time it's almost laughable. So, yeah, but for us, to be honest, I'm still too much in the day-to-day, but I think that's partially because I'm a little bit Addicted to chaos. We had an assistant, Jack and I share an assistant, and a few months ago she asked me, do you think you're a bit addicted to chaos? I said, I really do think that is the case because as soon as it gets quiet we'll start another project or another brand up or something and try and push something. Speaker 2: So what do you do now that is limited that distraction so that you can be good at your role as well? Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is where Ascala really helped and there's more of a strategic change that we're making this year that I'll talk about. But Ascala basically went, right, you're not going to be doing this, this and this. We're going to split the org chart up. Like for now, I have no idea what happens in logistics. All I know is that the goods turn up and we check the ClickUp board and it comes on a certain date. Cool. Right. I have no idea what the container rates. I frankly don't care. It's not something I have to deal with. It's not something I need to know. And listing optimization, stuff like this. We have a lot of listings. The way the business was built throughout, we ended up with a very wide range of products that we're now trying to refine. And that was hard to manage. We couldn't just discontinue them all at the same time because you'd lose half the business. Now it's a bit different. So we brought in two Amazon listing specialists. They were trained up on how to essentially data dive the listings. Obviously, all this is changing now. And they would go away and do that. So I didn't have to do any listing optimizations. They were much better at flat files than I ever was. Didn't have to worry about that. If we saw variations, the colors have gone off on different, you know, Listings, you just message them, they sort it out. These little things started to matter, started to pick up and I started to get a bit more time back. Right now I'm still getting pulled around in too many things, but way, way, way fewer than before. And obviously we just hired more people, right? So we've got, I don't know, 30 people now, albeit we do run a warehouse, but that does inherently mean there's more people to delegate things to and more responsibilities to offload. Yeah, the strategic thing that we're now looking at, so obviously we've got to 10 million. Well, I don't know what we'll do this year, maybe 11 or 12, but what we're doing Now is trying to refine that the catalog that we've got so we have instead of going wider and trying to. Bitpart, a load of different products, it's just now a proper hone in what are the big opportunities, where can we really push our weight around and focusing on those so that we can do everything in an ultra-optimized way, fully focused, and properly dive deep on the bigger opportunities. It's the same amount of work, basically. You've still got to do an imagery set, you're still going to have to do all the same polling, you're still going to have to do The listing optimization, the sourcing, the research, everything's the same. It's just the scope of the project is the upside is so much higher. And we're pretty good now at mitigating failures. It's rare, really, that we're going to have a launch that completely misses or we lose money on. We can tend to get out of it in one piece, especially here in the UK. But the upside is so high. Speaker 2: Your focus is only UK or you do Europe as well? No, you don't do US? Speaker 1: Yeah, so part of trying to refine what we do was focus on what we do well, which is the UK. So the reason that is, is that because we run our own warehouse, we have Seller Fulfilled Prime and we've been told we're one of the biggest Seller Fulfilled Prime users. We send, I think it's 1,500, 2,000 parcels out a day from our warehouse. And then we've been relatively smart in then At three o'clock, when the customer stops getting shown a one-day delivery time, we then use an API repricer, get the FBA price down, and then FBA takes over during the evening. So the customer always gets shown one day, but we're able to optimize margin that way. But for a non-3PL, I think we must be one of the bigger SFP sellers in the country. And that does give us a huge edge. For example, I mean, someone ordered 20 products from us earlier. That's one fulfillment fee we've got to pay rather than 20. So just little things like that. And then, say, for example, in certain parcel rates in the UK, it could be 5.65 for an FBA fee and you've got to get it to FBA. Here we pay £3.15 for the same thing or £3.10. I forget what it is exactly. So huge edges there in terms of fulfillment. And that's why we sort of have said like UK is our biggest edge. Let's focus there. And then when it's right, we then push to Germany and the US. Speaker 2: But what is the end goal, right? So, you're at 11 million. You could go, what do you want? 100? 200? And why do you want it? Do you see what I mean? He's like, do you want it for the sake of it? Or is there something behind it? And will you cap out and go, do you know what? 15 mil UK, I've won. I've got the edge. All good. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so at this point with a warehouse our size, our overheads are massively significant. Most sellers aren't paying anywhere near what we are in overheads because they don't have a 31 man headcount. We know sellers that do More than us, I'm not joking, three people because the opportunities are enormous and they can run it with a small team and an agency of designers or whatever. To make big money, we have to hit the high numbers. We think we're pretty much the same team. We can go from 11 to 22 and probably I only had two or three people. I genuinely think that's realistic. Speaker 2: Yeah, so just to recap that, you got 31. Speaker 1: I was 31. We had to let a few go but it's high 20s. Speaker 2: So you've got high 20s and there's some people doing with three or four people but they don't have their warehouse. So is there enough of an edge in there? So your edge is because you've got the warehouse and then you're paying one thing. You've got Seller Fulfilled Prime. But then once you add the capital cost of staff. Speaker 1: We're working on figuring out actually is this warehouse, if it was a standalone business, is it worth us owning? Yeah, and if not at what at what point will it be? So yeah, that's a calculation that Jackson working on and we should have soon but It's in my opinion. It's definitely above break-even now. You got a factor in All the hassle all the all the extenuating stuff. You've got to deal with rates rent Recharges the roofs leaking all this stuff all the HR nonsense that comes along with this and This is the point. If we double the size of the business, we don't double the efforts. We 1.1 times the effort, right? So there's a real scale now. So this is like where we're at. It all sounds great, but really we're not happy until it has to double already for us to really make good money and really push the envelope. We're very confident in the team and the fact that we think we can do this. Speaker 2: So there's two parts to it. It's the output that can be achieved on a 24-hour spectrum, right? Seven days a week. So it's not just the staff. It's what can pass through and then obviously the size of the warehouse will play a role. You want more volume out, that means more stock in, a speed of stock going out, not scaling up as many people that at some point it caps out unless you move to a larger building and get more. So that's what I'm saying. It's like there's a few elements in there as well, isn't it? Even if you can scale it, Do you have the capacity, i.e. the square footage, to do that as well, to get where you need to go? Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I would turn my camera around to show you opposite us here, but I'm sat in a warehouse here and we just bought one over the road, so that's part of the, you know, family pension sort of thing. That's going to work out fine as an investment asset anyway. So we're good from that regard, but we have to consider things like ROI obviously, but ROI per cubic meter as well for a product. You have to factor that in because there's a massive opportunity cost of things sat here lingering around, taking up space that we could use. And that's again why I want to really scale down the amount of products that we have. I did a very Very basic analysis of our, you know, top 100 parents. And I mean Pareto absolutely bang on. It was like 79% of the profit came from the top 21 products. So I'm unbelievably close. And then you realize that the amount of effort these little hangers on at the bottom take is just simply not worth it. So now all our focus is at the top. All the effort on the bottom ones now are going to be to discontinue them. We're going to clear them and then done. We're finished. We also worked out that the top one products covered the bottom 40. So if we just got rid of the bottom 40, put all that cash flow, all that effort, and just try to get another one back on top, which shouldn't be impossible, Or even two that make it up, then we've got a much simplified business. And that's our main focus. Speaker 2: And I suppose the products you're going to go after, because if you think, say U.S. is three and a half times the size of the U.K., like on a product basis, that sells X down, in the U.S. it sells three and X up, you know. There's the element of going for much more competition, higher competition products as well in the U.K. to get the volume and the velocity. True? So the way that you look at products, you can go instead of, you know, in the U.S. people are diving to the top 1,000, right? You do that, you're going into sharp water. But then you might go in the U.K., we'll go top 100, top 150, top 200, to kind of placate that difference in sales volume because the U.K.'s smaller. Is that? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's essentially why we have a wider catalogue because each opportunity isn't that big. But there is, there are a few that We've got a few tactics up our sleeve now to stay ranked on big keywords and stuff like this. Very aggressive deal strategy, stuff like that, where you still allow yourself a bit of margin. It's been working. Really well for us. We're able to fight in like 100, 200,000 search volume niches with very little PPC because we deal so aggressively and it does work out. So we think there's stuff that we can do that others aren't in terms of ranking and sticking basically once you do get up there. And then obviously all the other stuff, the main image optimization and stuff, obviously that's a bit of a baby of mine now. We're far from perfect, but when we do put the effort in, we tend to come out with something. Speaker 2: I've seen some of them. I mean, we're talking Sistine Chapel, some of the stuff that Dorian's done for you, which you showed me. Speaker 1: Incredible. Speaker 2: Like the depth of the image, everything that he does, how he creates depth in an image is incredible. It's an art form now. Speaker 1: Yeah, I just think we've got real big economies of scale, and this is not to decentralize smaller sellers, but when you When you do have, say, a large design team that can constantly iterate and try things out and you do have people solely focused on one thing and one thing only, it does give you potential edges going forward. As long as our team is focused on a few, you know, a few things rather than spread out like we have been the entire history of the business, then I think we're we can then scale without losing all our hair. Speaker 2: So where do you get your prey as law in terms of launching? There's going to be 20% of the work that you do in the launch outside of the product itself, because obviously that's copyright. Doesn't matter what you do after. If you got shit products, you're just going to prop up rank. But putting that aside, you've got a great product. On the back end, in terms of the launch, what brings you the best yield of your time? Because a lot of people say, oh, running ads or whatever, but I'm imagining for you it's almost all about image and deals. Speaker 1: Yeah, image deals, just creative pricing in general, especially in the early days. If we launch a new product now, the imagery is going to be absolutely bang on. Obviously, we've still got to tweak some of the older ones, but the main image in particular, we're pretty confident with things going forward. Especially on new projects. That's where I think the time... I mean, it's sourcing, quality control, and we have had some major issues with that recently where a supplier has really stiffed us, but sourcing a good price, good quality products, imagery. Those three can run this show. If you're doing that, it's quite hard to fail, genuinely. So that's where our focus is right now because we found the hard way that if we don't source right, the margin is not there. We found the hard way that the quality control is wrong. They're literally dealing with a shipment outside now where a supplier we know shipped a bad shipment because we had to forego the inspections, get it out before a certain time and that will hurt us. We now know, say, sourcing, QC and imagery. Get those three right, you're off. But then the new thing now obviously is how are you going to then drive traffic to the listing. So that's where deals is probably the easiest way. But obviously we've now systemized it so it's like we're hitting it at the right times. We're gaming the price basically as much as we can. I'm taking no credit for this by the way. This is all, this is all the team. This is nothing to do with me. Um, and, um, yeah, obviously TikTok, um, has been pretty good for us and a few brands. Um, just relatively free traffic, albeit we've, we've sent out about 2000 samples, I think for one of our brands, but all that affiliate traffic makes a, makes a big difference over time. Speaker 2: Yeah. What do you mind saying who you're using? Do you use for a party? For your affiliate traffic, is there anyone specific that you're using? Speaker 1: Well, we used to use, so I don't know what the latest, the best tactic is right now, but for one brand we used an outreach bot that, I forget the name even, but we, it just contacted everyone and then basically everyone started using these bots and now the creators are just getting flooded. But where we did it in the UK, there probably wasn't That much spamming going on. So we were getting through and then basically we just said to everyone, anyone that had a credit account basically could get a sample from us. We weren't picky. We just wanted to completely flood the market and see what was going to happen. It went pretty well for us. I think we got quite lucky and a few what I would describe as bizarrely poor videos just went nuts. One had a million views, half a million on another, drove a load of traffic. Obviously, then you get the whole velocity of sales on TikTok Shop. They start promoting it around and stuff like that. We've got a few niche influencers now that have big followings that help us out. So I think just putting yourself out there in TikTok shop is just a no-brainer. But again, having our own warehouse, we were able to send those samples out so cheaply. It was costing us like £4 a video. It just didn't matter. We just wanted to scale this thing. Speaker 2: What about optimizing, say, like main images, right? Let's say you're top performing products, right? Because there's one argument you'd leave them alone to a certain degree. But there's a reverse trick because normally you optimize to get better. But if you're already top marketing winning, but you've got people chomping away at the heels, how do you tackle that? Are you constantly doing the main image of the best selling product to see if you can squeeze a bit more juice from it? Speaker 1: We used to be very careful. So we have we had a product that we have. It's 16,000 reviews, something like that. And it's basically always done well. It's number one ranked for every every keyword it's got. And I didn't really want to touch the main image. I just thought whatever this is, it's working. And then actually, this is one that Dorian's worked on. If you look at his portfolio, you might even see it on LinkedIn. But he then got a 20% increase in Might have been conversions. I don't think it's clear. I think it might be conversion. And that's it. Speaker 2: That's one of these promises, isn't it? If he does, he promises you a 20% increase on the current conversion rate. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. But yeah, so that was one I didn't want to do. And when I first saw his design, I was very unsure, by the way. But he basically did a lot of polling, came up with a hypothesis, and then nailed it first time. But that was a very nervy test for me because on the other way, that's a significant hit in sales. But obviously, again, it's a gamble, right? Now that it's Improved it for sure that we're just going to benefit from that going forward. So we still rank number one on everything, obviously, but we're just I think we're selling another 60, 70 units a day, maybe of that. Which is nice. And then there are some other ones that we're again, we're quite scared to touch, but we're now starting to do it. We tend to, we're polling them to some extent, but we tend to just go straight to manager experiments now. Like we're quite experienced in knowing what probably is going to work. So we tend to go straight to the, to the experiment now. And we've got a few that come back in a few days, actually, that are quite, really quite interesting to see. Speaker 2: I was going to say with the experiments, because it's a piece of shit, Amazon experiments, right? In the real terms of split testing on your own website and the available tools. It's a black box, right? My biggest thing with that I've found is, let's say that you're You are running an experiment. Obviously, he's got signals weak, strong and stuff like that, but you're waiting for statistical significance. So an argument could be, and I see this a lot of the agency as well, clients will go, I'm going to stop it, going to stop it because they're watching the sales, right? Which is, of course, you keep an eye on it. But then sometimes you forget the upturn, the shape of the market, how long it takes to get to reach statistical significance. How are you measuring in between when you're looking at it and when you pull back? I mean, I sent a bot to the group because I kind of solved the first part of the problem. I really think it's click-through rate is probably the best barometer when you're unsure about the experiments in the direction it's going because that's going to give a clearer indicator or would you say there's more? Speaker 1: Yeah, no, click-through rate. I think you're bang on there. We have an internal tool that we run. That will track it over time for us. Again, I'm not taking any credit for this. This is just smart members of the team. But yeah, so we see it move over time. The problem is, obviously, it's only been shown half the time. So it's not going to move as much as it perhaps is only going to move by half, right? So, yeah, honestly, we just try and get very confident in the hypothesis and the final design and so that we're confident we can let the experiment run. If you put something up you're very unsure about, you're going to be wanting to take it down. Speaker 2: You've already put the markers on it, haven't you? Yeah. It's like if you're unsure and you're running it, you're going to cancel it anyway because you're already unsure. So you're better off waiting, you know, because we discussed this before. There gets to a point when you do a shit ton of testing, You know instinctively when it's time to test, whereas if you've just started out, you're always going to question. And if you have got that vibe like, no, this is not going to do anything. As soon as you see anything within the data that looks slightly negative, you're just going to put it anyway. So it's always best to wait until, you know, you're sure you're ready to go and you're confident with it or it's just another week that's wasted. Speaker 1: Yeah, honestly, I don't know why they don't just provide daily data. Some products, some people that I know have ASINs that sell so many units, so much traffic, you could get significant data in a day. You could get definitely within a week, genuinely, because the sample sizes are so big. Why have we got to wait a week? Sometimes, obviously, it's longer than that. It doesn't make much sense to me. So they should give it to you day by day. And more people would test them and that's ultimately better for Amazon, right? Speaker 2: Absolutely. So as we start kind of wrapping towards the end, what are some of the things that for 2025, the things you're 80-20, what are you going for in terms of the Amazon business? What are the two things you're focusing on and betting on for the future? Speaker 1: Well, we're praying that AI doesn't come along and mess this game up. I think that's the number one thing. But we are focusing on fewer projects and going bigger with them. We're now, we've got a few very smart people helping us with some big, big launches in the US. And we're very excited about what could be possible there. You know, Hormozy talks a lot about What was he saying? I'm trying to find the right quote here, but it's something like, it's costing you 10 million a year to not know how to make 10 million a year. So we just got people in that have been there, done it, recently exited for bajillions and can hold our hand essentially through a US launch because for whatever reason, we've had pretty poor luck in the US. We've had pesticide issues and A few compliance things and just things that unexpected things go wrong. So we just wanted every I dotted, cross T, T crossed. Get this thing done properly. So that's a huge, huge project for us. We're aiming for millions on that this year. And then for the UK, there's one niche in particular where we're already quite dominant. And now we want the whole thing. So we want every single segment of this thing and become the only brand associated with this product. So that's where essentially all the focus is right now. We have a few other side projects going on, a couple of smaller brands starting up, but They have their own brand managers that have come in fresh, that know what they're doing and are experienced and really excited about those two. But yeah, for us, those are the opportunities for us. And then really just imagery is now the big thing. So we've had to let go, sadly, four of our Filipino designers. We still have two in the Philippines and we've now hired a 3D artist that sits next to me at work. And that has been an absolute game changer to have someone that So quick, so on it, you can just make changes or let's move that, move this. Trying to do the same thing as that over, say, click up thread is an absolute nightmare. So already a real game changer. And we think that this, well, I'm positive that this one person has replaced the output of four because it's, do you know where that is? He's just sat there with me. Speaker 2: Not just that, raw talent. If you look at developers, you can have a good developer, but a great one could be a hundred times better. It compounds. It's like designers. Ask anyone in this community the nightmares they have to find a good designer. And then if they've got one, they love it. And then if they lose it, they're very depressed. We've had this discussion. It's like you must put them under lock and key. You hide them away. You don't let anyone know they are. They go in their bunker. It's true, though, isn't it? It's like it's so hard. And a lot of it is just that raw talent. Like you can't train someone. To be a great designer just through effort alone. It's not like this straight line where you go, if you put in the hours, you'd be a great designer. It's innate. Do you know what I mean? There's something about it. Speaker 1: I think having an eye for what's going to work as well is just something like an underrated talent. A few of the team really do understand what would look good. The hypothesis of what's going to look good in a main image and how to test around that. We're very lucky to have a few good people like that in the team. And then, yeah, my last point is just trying to keep this team together. We're very lucky to have very high retention rates in the business. No one's really left off their own, you know, because they were dissatisfied or unhappy or anything like that. So you're very, very lucky in that regard. But we've got a very positive sort of atmosphere of the business now. And I think everyone's sort of bought into the vision, which is great to see. But obviously, that's the main focus. Speaker 2: Yeah, let's move on to Seller Sessions, your headline in this year. You've been, how many have you been to, I mean you've done Christmas parties, you've probably done most of them, 21 on? Speaker 1: 2019 maybe I came to. 21 was the I think that was the one where, I think a lot of people were talking about NSTs and stuff like that, right? Speaker 2: I think that was 2011. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely the one before that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was talking about that with a friend the other day, yeah. But the, yeah, 2019 would have been the first year. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And it's crazy to think that, you know, I'd be on the stages here. That is genuinely nuts. And the speed of how quickly this has come around is quite mad. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look, the thing is you're good at what you do and people want to see sellers on stage. Yeah. We're in a world now where, and I say this respectfully, you know, I have to counter this balance and I have to explain this to sponsors and service providers like that stage has to be reserved. You know, all right, we've got one that does, you know, runs the growth on a 30 million brand and she works brand side. So while she's not the seller, She drives growth at Brownside so you could kind of split it off but we have a lot of situations where and there's some amazing service providers that do speak on stage. I think we've got to a point where the markets got flooded with that and a lot of sellers would prefer to see sellers on stage. So there's a ways of kind of getting that balance and This is going to be interesting because we've obviously changed all of the format radically, you know, so it's going to be full on hands on. And for you, I think this is the first kind of workshop format you've done. You've done speaking and stuff and you've been on the pod. But I think it's going to be really interesting in the way that everything plays out and we've got a lot of work that we're all going to do. But I think it's time for a change. Do you see what I mean? You know, being at a conference is amazing. You get the networking in, but then it's the retention. You know, you're there and you write notes. If you don't go back to them notes, it's a bit of a struggle. And that's why I think it's important being tactile, hands-on. Everyone's working towards something. So, you know, you've got the VARC system, so visual, auditory, kinesthetic, you're reading. So it kind of covers and touches all those touch points and then you'll be able just to leave. And implement with the team, you know. Speaker 1: So, obviously, you sold this event out, you know, year after year. And, you know, now we're changing it up. I probably see you've taken a risk. Let's hope it pays off and people find value. I'm sure they will. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look, since 2019, and this is unicorn stuff, it's not normal. You know, I've sold out 11 events in a row and five Seller Sessions. I always have the attitude is like, When you do events, it's a zero-sum game. So you have to have the mindset of the challenger because if you don't sell out, the sponsors don't come back and nor do the sellers. It's like in any events business. So you're only as good as your last event and there isn't a safety net. You know if you have a product that fails, as long as you've got money in the bank, you can go again. Stuff like this, you can't. So I think it's important as well, you've always got to change things up, move with the times and find ways that are going to be more interesting and invigorating for people. To attend so yeah, these ones have been a big shakedown, but Ticket sales are going well, so got no complaints there, but we will see what happens in May You know I'm not going to sit there and go do a big sale our our history says itself right so the track record the receipts are there But then you know I always think of it. It's like when I get into doing the vent mode it's like oh Here we go again. Do you know what I mean? And so it is. It kind of is stressful in a different way because it's over that long. And the irony is what happens is there will be times that people go, Dan, Dan, I've got I've got to get my tickets, got to get it sorted. And then when you sell out, they go, Yeah, well, you know, can you sort me out? It's like, well, it's sold out now. Do you know what I mean? So you get into these sets of conversations because the, you know, the lack of urgency people go, Yeah, I'll get a ticket soon. So yeah, you will go through all those different cycles, but I'm really looking forward to it. And because we all know each other, It works differently. We're building the education from the ground up and it's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it. What have you got planned over the next few months now? What's the short term that you're working on at the moment? Speaker 1: Well I have a few events which are quite nice. So I've got an event in Morocco at the end of the month and then we're off to Philippines to see the staff at the end of March and we're sort of hotel shopping at the moment and it's glorious. I absolutely love it when the new hotel recommendation comes through for Boracay. It's incredible. So absolutely buzzing for that trip. So around that Yeah, I'm just trying to get this USA project off the ground. I'm working with another former speaker at one of your events about a project that we're going to try and do in the US too. So there's a lot going on. I've never been bored in this business. I've never allowed myself to be bored. So we just press on with something new. Exciting times ahead, I guess. Speaker 2: Cool. What's the best way that people can reach you if they want to reach out? Speaker 1: LinkedIn is by far the best. So, yeah, just send my own on LinkedIn. Speaker 2: Excellent. Guys, thank you for joining us today. Don't forget SellerSessions.com. Go grab a ticket. May 10th. There's no booking fees. You can do split payments as well. Tickets, same price as 2019. There's been no increases there. Love to see you all. Take care of yourself and your family. And I'll be back here next week.