Kevin King Amazon FBA LIVE Q&A | Lunch with Norm | Ep. 256

Kevin King Amazon FBA LIVE Q&A | Lunch with Norm | Ep. 256 00:00:00 Hey everyone, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the Amazon FBA and e-commerce podcast. Today, we're going to be just talking Amazon FBA, talking shop with Kevin King. So, we're going to go over some tips, updates, and just what's going on with Amazon right now. So Kelsey, hit the music. 00:00:35 Okay, as I mentioned, we're going to be talking about news updates and more from the Amazon world with Kevin King. As you know, Kevin's a repeat guest. He comes back usually monthly. He mentors sellers collectively and does over a half a billion US dollars per year on with his Freedom Ticket and Helium 10 Elite Mastermind group. He also organized, and this is coming up tomorrow, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And he has, and he is a regular on the podcast. So we all know, welcome. Is it Monday or Friday? I am screwing this up royally. We will be welcoming Kevin in a second, but first let's hear from our sponsor. As you know, at Lunch with Norm. Bigger is always better: bigger business, bigger profits, and yes, bigger lunches. 00:01:33 Z wants to make sure that your business and profits are bigger by taking you and your business international. They are a one-stop importer of record shop, including compliance and logistic services. They focus on all the elements involved in a smooth, first-time custom clearance so that you can focus on what you're good at, selling. Click on the screen now or follow the link in the description box below and get 50% off your first shipment today. There we go. Alright, Kels, where are you? Hello, hello. Look at that plant. There we go! This is my little Monstera here and uh, yeah, you're a little Monstera-watch yourself, okay! I can tell stories, but uh, welcome everyone, welcome. Rad DK Kim, Manny, it's great to see everyone. How is everyone's weekend? What did you guys get up to? 00:02:35 Let us know in the comment section. As you guys know, this is Lunch with Norm, and we start off by smashing those like buttons, giving us those thumbs up, and getting this thing started. So, one, Kevin and Norm kind of get into a whole bunch of different things usually. This is going on different rabbit holes. So, if you have any questions in particular that you need help with, with your Amazon or e-commerce business, let us know in the comment sections, and we'll do kind of a Q&A session for the second half of the show. So, yeah, let us know what's going on. If you had any issues, if things are going well, you can share your successes too in the comment sections. And I think that's it. 00:03:18 If you're new to the show, you can join our community over at Lunch with Norm, the Amazon FBA and e-commerce collective. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Very good. As Kelsey was saying. Kevin and I go on a bunch or through a bunch of different rabbit holes. So if you do have questions, comments, just throw them over in that comment section. We'd be happy to answer them. Get them in now because usually the questions fill up and we don't get to them all. And on that note, sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and welcome Kevin. What's up? How you doing, Norm? I am doing great. I guess you're excited about tomorrow. Yeah, I am. But you're all relaxed. Look at you. You're like all chilled and relaxed. 00:04:07 You just came off a cruise. You got the tan lines going. Kelsey's got the plants. I don't even know if they're legal. I don't think so. I don't think they're legal. It didn't have three little wings. It had six. I don't know. Maybe they're legal. Those are on steroids. Did you have some good cigars on that cruise? I did. You know, so those of you that know or follow me at all know that I love cigars. I did get a couple of cases of Cohibas and I went to a cigar factory with Connie. And we like I was in heaven that I got to test out all these different cigars; they were just handing them out, bought a couple more cases and now my humidors are back to full, so it's good, it's good. 00:04:59 And I found a couple of things I didn't know. This isn't the Lunch with Norms cigar podcast, but I found out a couple of really cool things about smoking a cigar that I didn't know from these guys. So when we get together again, I'll show you some of these tricks. But anyways, you're here. You're in Austin. Everything's good in the U. S. Everything's not so good up here. We're making do. But first of all, it's cold. Everything else political, I'm going to leave on the table. So how you been, Kevin? I've been busy, man. I've been keeping busy with everything. But it's always a good time. Money never sleeps, you know? Money never sleeps. Yeah, just like you. So Amazon, what's going on right now in the world of Kevin King and Amazon? 00:05:51 Anything exciting? There's always something exciting. I've talked about this before. I have a calendar of business. It's a seasonal thing; it has extra legs this year. It's still selling. Usually by this time, it sells at Peter, but we're still doing $400 a day. Are you talking about in February? Yeah, right now. Yesterday. Yeah, it's still going. I don't know. Normally, a lot of times I sold out and we are sold out a couple of titles. Yeah, we have one or two left and I've lowered the price. Just trying to get rid of them. And I don't know if people are still buying them. So it's making me think like, you know what, maybe I should sell these things year-round, even if, you know, it's a few hundred bucks a day versus, you know, thousands of dollars a day during the peak season. 00:06:39 Maybe we should do that. got my other company and it's you know talked about doing the uh one of my other companies that does the uh the licensing deal with Body Glove where yeah I finally got some issues resolved there, oh thank God! That shipped last May got held up in Chicago in the rail yard in Chicago we finally got it in late December uh so that really messed up some stuff and then as soon as we got it all up Amazon decided to suspend the account. Saying that, well, not the account, sorry, suspend the listing. Let's get like five, six variations, five variations on different sizes. So five ASINs went down. They said, 'We're not authorized to sell this because Body Glove is a protected brand.' You know, they're brand gated on Amazon. 00:07:25 Not just brand registered, but brand gated. They're like, 'No, no, we're fully authorized.' We've already gone through this with Brand Registry. We've already got the letters, the documents. So we had to get on the phone with Body Glove and say, 'Hey, we need a letter, another letter from you guys that shows that our UPCs are authorized, blah, blah, blah.' So they gave it to us within hours. You know, Body Glove did. It'd be an official letter. And then we sent that to Amazon. It took them close to a month to unlock it, even after having that. And finally they said, 'Oh, well, okay, I guess you're fine.' So that's been a mess. Luckily, it's not the season for people. It's a dog life jacket. It's one of our first products. 00:08:02 It’s not the season right now, but it’s about to be. We’re about to start the wrap-up to start doing some influencer stuff. That’s always fun dealing with Amazon. One of my other Amazon accounts, we did a case study at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit last year. I think you might have saw about GermShark, the sanitizer company that we lost over a billion dollars on. I’m still paying for that right now. We had a seller's funding loan as part of that. We closed that company down. Every two weeks, out of my pocket, I gotta pay $7, 500 cash, out of my personal pocket, every two weeks until that thing is taken care of. 00:08:39 This seller funding-you have to, you have to uh personally guarantee those loans, uh, so that's always a lot of fun just to write that check off and and send that away. But interesting story on that is to add, uh, of a fire to the misery. I'd go into my credit union last week to do some business at the credit union and I needed to make some withdrawals and cashier's checks and stuff like that, so I go inside. Uh, they said, you gotta come inside, you can't do this through the drive-thru, so I go inside, sitting there waiting for them to verify everything, and and I look on the counter right next to me, and there's some hand sanitizer, and I go, 'Cool, let me uh, you know just clean my hands I've been touching money, and whatever turns over, it's our product. 00:09:20 Oh no, and I'm like, 'Wait a second.' And I started looking around the bank, and I see like all the loan officers everywhere-it's everywhere in the bank, like every desk and stuff. I'm like, 'You've got to be kidding me!' So I don't know where it came from; you know how they got it? I don't know-maybe someone donated to them or they bought it, but we liquidated a million dollars of inventory. I basically gave it away, not even getting a dime for it just come take it-it's free because we couldn't get rid of it; we had to get rid of it out of our warehouse, so someone took a bunch of it and is now Selling it. So, I'm sitting here. It was painful because I'm sitting here writing a $7,500. 00:09:58 Well, it's not check, but you know, $7,500 is coming out of our account every two weeks. And here, here's the product. So there's that knife. It's all Amazon's fault. I mean, that, that was a saturated market. I don't, that's, you know, It's like fidget spinners in the old days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you shouldn't do. There's one going on right now with transparent Post-it notes. That's becoming a big hot thing right now. But I would stay far away from that. I haven't heard of that one. Yeah, it just skyrocketed up. Some TikTok video just skyrocketed. We've been around forever. So there's people that were positioned that were doing. Couple grand a month on these things; they're all of a sudden doing 100 grand plus a month, um, you know. 00:10:43 If they have the inventory, yeah, yeah. But there's a lot of people coming into it, but um, I wouldn't touch that, but yeah, so it's all Amazon, you know. If Amazon wouldn't mess with this, uh, as bad as they did, even though we did everything right, you know. We could probably still be selling a lot of this stuff, but it's just a stab in the back. But that doesn't deter me, you know. I've lost a lot of money; people say is it? Is it time to move on and do something else?' No, the opportunities are still good. You win some, you lose some. It sucks to lose, you know, over a million dollars. It wasn't all my money, but I'm losing six figures personally. Right. But, you know, that's part of business. 00:11:22 You know, Kevin, when you're talking about this, we've talked about it a lot on the podcast with you, and it's knowing when to stop. went to That's It like it is; I know Germ Shark, we've talked about it even way before it was even launched, and it was great-you guys put everything into it; it was a perfect brand, but it wasn't the brand, it was Amazon. The algorithm that messed you guys up so you there's nothing you can do. You could have continued on with the brand, you could have continued and tried to weigh it out, but you had to cut bait, even though this bait was very expensive. But you had to quit and you had to cut it off fast because you knew, and I'm speaking on behalf of you, but you knew that if you continued to do this, it would just be ongoing issues with Amazon. 00:12:18 We had everything right; we weren't just dealing with seller support. We had a guy I could pick up by his cell phone that worked, you know, account rep at Amazon and call him, hey, Jeff. No one's Jeff, no, but it is a guy named Bondi. I just call up, his name's Bondi, B-O-N-D-I. I said, 'Bondi, listing just went down.' He's like, 'Gosh dang', he was on our side. He was like, 'God bless', you know, 'what the hell's going on here?' You guys are like the poster child of doing this right. I mean, you're doing the branding, you're doing this, you like know what you're doing. And so he would get, you know. 00:12:55 Escalated up the ladder and we would get things taken care of in a much faster way, but it was still just a constant and we'd get something fixed and then they'd take us down again for the exact same thing. You know, all the way up to Amazon legal; they had to look at our labels because at one point, they're saying you can't say this on the label. Like, yes, we can this is FDA, this is this, this is this. And Amazon legal signed off on it, like we have letters from Amazon legal that he was able to escalate it up and it would get suspended again, and then again, and then again. We'd be in the middle of a launch; that's a competitive place. 00:13:25 We're doing search find buys and spending $100,000 on a search find buy campaign to get launched, and halfway through that, boom, the listings are gone. That's just money just pissed away. I mean, you're just taking it down the toilet and flushing it. And that happened three times, and it was frustrating. And then we had issues with UPS. Where part of this was our growing pains. Some of our packaging wasn't, it was good, but it wasn't up to the rigors of UPS. And so UPS was delivering stuff in trash bags. You know, we had these big wipes, the big canister of industrial-size wipes and the bags that we put them in. We couldn't get anything-the supply chain was bad, this is you know, summer of 2020, supply chain, you couldn't get stuff. 00:14:14 So we found this guy who could put them in these bags and said they're completely waterproof, complete seal proof, nothing will break through these. Turns out that was not the case, and when we tested, we dropped them, you know, and it's still... But when they got into UPS and they're playing football with them and throwing them across the warehouse and doing whatever they do, some of them got damaged. And you know, the national parks uh in Arizona, they ordered 25 cases of these from us-you know, these were we were selling for 80 bucks, these were big, you know, big industrial size, uh, not little countertop. So they ordered 80 cases-I'm sorry, uh, 25 boxes of these from us at 80 bucks a piece, you know, it's a couple thousand dollar order. 00:14:49 ups shows up delivers them in trash bags literally in trash in that black big black trash bag say here you go here's your order and they send us like what is this What kind of joke are you guys? They sent us messages. What kind of joke are you guys trying to play? Oh, my gosh. We're like, what the hell happened here? We're freaked. We're like, it turns out that something leaked. You know, one of these bags that were supposed to be indestructible inside the box leaked somewhere along the way. And so the bag leaked. So Amazon, I mean, UPS, instead of just calling it damaged or whatever, went ahead and just someone in the line take it, threw it in a garbage bag, and delivered it. 00:15:26 stuck with labeling outside and delivered it to them so of course that causes a complaint to amazon it causes us to give refunds it causes them to not trust us um it was a nightmare and then ups still wants to build us for the whole thing and we'd argue with ups and saying uh we're not we're not paying for this uh and ups is saying yes you are so still to this point we refuse to pay at one of our ups bills and we said screw you uh up yours you know we had multiple cases like this uh from some fbm stuff so we told them we're not paying it and so ups turned it over to a collection agency and now that collections agency tried to collect it from us and we're not paying you you know and now they've turned it over to a lawyer and that lawyer is suing a company that no longer exists uh and uh good luck have fun go to town you're wasting your time 00:16:14 You're not going to get a dime. But it's a mess. I could go on. We could sit here for five hours, and I could tell stories about that. You'd be like, oh, my God. And we were having a lot of people that were buying hand sanitizer. We were having issues with grandmas. There was a lot of grandmas, and nothing against old people or grandmas, but they're just not as savvy as some of us. They haven't been on the computer. This is the first or second or third order from Amazon. So they're looking at our label. Show the label. We're one of the only ones that showed our label. on amazon all the people you 00:16:45 don't know what's in this stuff you know you're buying stuff from china you don't know what alcohol they're using you know we showed the label fully fda approved and the label we said you know we're using uh ethanol um that's it's one of the one of the oils i mean one of the uh the thing that the alcohols and they would get it messed messed messed up with methanol with an m so they put an m in front of it the e same spelling But they would think that we're using that. And a big story came out in the press about how this stuff came out of Mexico that had methanol in it and it's dangerous for you. And so they were freaking out. And they're like, you guys are selling stuff that's illegal. 00:17:24 Amazon should ban you. They're writing, you know, we're getting shut down again. And like, it was just, it was a nightmare, living nightmare. I mean, I could, there's more and more and more to this, but it was bad. But at the end of the day, you will, and you just said, that you'll still be selling on amazon amazon is still the way to go amazon is still the way to go i mean walmart uh i know your partner tim and stuff y'all talk about that walmart has a good opportunity but uh it's it's a drop in the bucket for most people depending on what you're selling right for most people it's a drop in the bucket compared to what amazon is amazon is still the way to go despite all these issues and i'm at it again you know we're doing 00:18:07 doing something with body glove it's officially licensed we're like as top tier license as you can get uh and we still have issues with amazon and still have to overcome those and fight it and it's but it's still at the end of the day it's still worth it okay so i i do have a question about this the product failed it was just a pain in the butt for you did you ever consider going out to other distributors like walmart but going out to small mom and pop stores or trying to do the bricks and mortar route because i've got all your product you sent me over you know a big sample pack everything you know uh we've got those big industrial uh containers you know we use them it's an awesome absolutely incredible product i thought you had a home run why wouldn't you have continued to do this with mom and pop shops like you know 300 000 of these little stores around the states right now You guys had a competitive price. 00:19:05 You had a great brand. Why wouldn't you go down that road? We did. We actually had inroads. We had meetings with Walmart. We had meetings with Costco. We had meetings with Office Depot. We were on fair. com. We were everywhere. The problem was the market was saturated. So by the time we realized, hey, we need to pivot here, this was the fall of 2020. And we were already talking with Walmart and stuff. They just wanted to see some reviews on Amazon, see a little bit of history. And they actually said our price point was too high for their stores, but they were tested, tested online. And we just-you can buy this. The market was oversaturated. All the buyers are like, no, we have enough of this hand sanitizer to last us for the next 10 years. 00:19:49 They'd all overbought. So nobody wanted it. No matter what the price, we would go and say, 'We'll give it to you on consignment.' Just try it. We know ours is better. You know, the branding's better and everything's better. We'll give it to you for this. We couldn't get rid of it. And even when we went to liquidation, you know, we were selling stuff that our cost on it was $6, and we're saying, 'Take it for 25 cents' or '50 cents.' Very few people took it because the market was just so saturated. You go into any here in the States, at least you go into any supermarket or any convenience store. There's just bins of this stuff just sitting there. 00:20:20 You know, when the pandemic first came out in March, April, May, you couldn't find the stuff; but by summer, everybody and their brother was doing this. And every liquor manufacturer that switched to making this stuff, everybody was doing it. And it just became too saturated, so we couldn't get in there. We did have a few pallets left at our facility in Wisconsin where we were making stuff. And after about a year, that was able to go up on Walmart. com, and it sold out. So you could say, well, if we would have just sat on this stuff for six months or a year. maybe the market would have turned but we couldn't because it's 00:20:58 flammable so this stuff is flammable and and amazon and also we were moving 40 000 a day through amazon they actually cut us back on flammable storage on hazard good storage and like we can't that's why we had to switch to fbm because and then our guy bondi he got it raised back up but it wasn't high enough so we couldn't keep keep it in stock and because amazon had the same issue that everybody sent in stuff uh it's an hand sanitizer and wipes and it filled up all their dangerous goods warehouses and they're like we don't want this in our warehouse this could explode or catch on fire or whatever and then we 00:21:30 had a we had a warehouse in a 3pl and state of washington that was that was holding all this stuff for us there's a million dollars at our cost of inventory sitting in there and and the fire marshal was coming you know and he's like this we were overflowing the warehouse into a second warehouse and the first warehouse was fine the second warehouse was like please don't go look in there because the fines could be severe. So we had no choice, and it's a hazard. This huge warehouse has got this; I don't remember what the square feet was, but we have 480 pallets, whatever that square footage is of stuff stored, and all flammable. It's kind of freaking them out. So there's a lot of complexity to this. 00:22:16 I just want to, first, I want to thank you. Because when Kelsey and I bought three or four containers of your product basically at zero and sold it to a Texas bank; they paid us tons of money. So thank you, Kevin. I'm glad I can help you. All right. All right. I want to talk about this other thing, too, because, you know, we talk about resilience. You have to be resilient and resilient. there are going to be winners. There are going to be losers. There are going to be hangups, but once you can get past and get through some of this crap that you've gone through, there should be a good payday. And I want to talk about what you went through with this body glove thing. 00:23:01 So we don't have to get into real specifics, but from what I understand, from what I understand is that you ended up shipping the product to Chicago because you thought there was going to be problems getting it into port on Long Beach. Is that correct? Well, our 3PL for this is based in St. Louis. So they're in Missouri and it's pretty close to Chicago. So Chicago port was the best port to send it to. And because everything was backed up in LA. So we're like, well, we'll just send it inland into Chicago. So we sent it inland. So it arrived in, I don't know, Long Beach or wherever. It got put on a train, and it's supposed to clear customs in Chicago, which is normal. This happens a lot, a lot of stuff. 00:23:44 When it got to Chicago in late June of last year, there was some sort of issue with the Chicago rail yard. And I don't know the specifics exactly, but there were stories in, like, Logistics Magazine. Chicago rail yard having problems with Coven and people hiring people, and whatever backlog is 3, 000 containers; then it's the next week, 10, 000 can it get to like 80, 000 container backlog? And we're like calling, 'We're like getting our 3PL,' like saying, 'What the hell? We're like, do we need to hire a guido to go down there with a big bat and like stand at the door, uh, you know, go find our container?' It was bad, um, and all we could do was wait. 00:24:22 I mean, we contacted Unit Cargo, we kind of; they weren't just shippers that we used up for the company, we used on this... I used them for some other stuff, but he was kind enough to come in and help even though it wasn't his problem or his account, uh, and we tried everything, and all we could do was just sit and wait uh because it was just it was tied up in a big mess there and it finally cleared in in december um and it it was it was bad and to add insult to injury we had had 150 units um just which is about eight eight cases or so 160 years eight 00:24:57 there's 20 to a case eight eight cases sent over to us by air in advance back in the summer back in uh in june early june when it was finished so we could have samples to send to like influencers and stuff like that they they shipped it to us by air and when it came here i had it shipped here to my to my i don't have an office space you know i work from i work from home uh so i had it shipped to uh and i live in a condo building in downtown austin Which is no problem to receive this, but the shipper messed up on the delivery. Instead of coming to my address, let's call it 123 Main Street, they actually went to 132 Main Street. 00:25:37 Well, 132 Main Street is an Indian restaurant. And so they delivered to this Indian restaurant. And the Indian restaurant, when they got it, they didn't know what the heck this is. What is this? We didn't order a bunch of dog life jackets. So they stuck it in the back. Outside next to their grease pits where they dump their grease and the trucks come to pick the grease up and stuff. So it's sitting out next to the grease pit. It rained, a heavy rain, which came and rained on this pallet. This is a pallet just sitting there. It rained on the pallet. It was covered in shrink wrap, but it still rained on it. And so I'm trying to track this: it says it's delivered. I'm like, 'I didn't get anything.' We finally figured it out. 00:26:20 And so I go down the street, you know. It's like, two blocks down the street; I go down the street and like, 'Hey, did you get some dog life jackets here?' I'm like, 'Yeah, there's some stuff in the bag; I don't know what that is that's mine. I'll go, go get it; no problem.' It's yours, so I go back there and I see this big mess. I'm like, 'Oh my god, you've got to be kidding me!' So, I take them, you know, undo the pallet, load up in my car, bring it back here to my i have a garage downstairs, bring it back into the garage, start opening things up what we were using because it's a part of our our thing is that... 00:26:50 We use plastic from the ocean. So, the company that does this is one of our specialties; is everything that we make is 70 to 80 percent recycled ocean waste. So, we take bottles from the ocean, like water bottles and other things from the ocean, that get made into fabric. And that goes 70 to 80 percent of all the products that we make for this company have recycled plastic in them. And as part of that, the plastic that we put around the product, you know, the shrink wrap around each individual life jacket. we used a special type of plastic that's water soluble because it totally biodegrades uh that's part of its it's cash it's totally 00:27:26 biodegradable so you could throw this you know in the toilet it's going to just basically turn back to hydrogen and atoms it's not going to like clog up anything it just completely dissolves and so we use that as as the wrap you know for an environmentally friendly product well the rain made this stuff melt i mean the water you know it's made it so it was a sticky mess so we had to undo all this stuff to use from influencers And like, take that away. It was just a mess. But that's, you know, that's business. But one other thing that ended up happening, I think this ended up happening. And this has to do if you're getting into licensing, you have to understand that this is a reality. 00:28:06 You have to guarantee certain sales with a license, don't you? Yeah, we have the way it works with this license is we have to guarantee half a million dollars of sales the first year. a million dollars the second year, and I think $2 million the third year. And so whether you hit that number or not, you have to pay a royalty, and the royalty is 6%. Plus there's some other little fees, but the actual straight-up royalty is 6%. So basically on half a million, you've got to pay $30,000, guaranteed minimum. And you pay half of that up front when you get the license as a good faith payment. The other half is due. You know, towards the end of the year or whatever, a month after, whatever it is, it's around at the end of the first year. 00:28:46 So despite us not selling anything last year, we had to pay $30,000 in licensing fees. And then, I mean, they understood. So we told them all the problems. And so they were, they loved the product. They're like, 'this' is the best, one of the best products in our line of everything that we do, because the quality is really top-notch. And they then said, 'Don't worry, uh, you know, we're gonna push everything back for you, so they're very cooperative, but we still had to come out of pocket 30 grand, uh, with zero sales, uh, you know. Another and so that's basically money um flushed down the toilet too, but but the benefit is, you know, now that we're about to launch, they have influencers and athletes that have you know million followers on Instagram; 00:29:31 they love the product, and so they're going to be taking the product down on their paddle boards or on their surfboards or to the beach, and these Instagram guys, these athletes will be saying, 'Hey, look at this cool new product! You can get it on Amazon,' so the launch is going to be very, very uh good, I think. And so that's that's part of it, hey Connie, how are you? Good to see you; I think I think it uh, it's that's just part of it, you know. And then they already Another advantage is they deal with Walmart, the stores. And they said, look, this product's really good. If you can re-engineer this to get the cost down, because we're selling it for a premium on Amazon. 00:30:11 If you can get the cost down, we think we can get this in Walmart. And they could do millions of dollars a year in sales on this product in the Walmart store. So, they just had a meeting with Walmart last week and showed it to their buyers during the course of their showing other stuff. there's interest there so that that's an advantage too so that thirty thousand dollars you're basically buying your way in you know to something that could right to millions of dollars so it's not like total waste uh but as a result of that we can't get the cost down enough uh in and we're making these in china right now and with with the duties 25 trump tax and the duties uh plus the the extended delay and shipping times and all that we're actually are now working with gemba uh to actually get these sourced and made in Latin America, either in Mexico or Colombia. 00:30:59 And so we're, we're reswitching the whole process to this one and our next two products that are coming out after it are also in development right now. And we're, but that's, that's delaying things because that process is about seven months, but from to do that whole process, it's not just like find a factory and have them make it next week. We've got to like redesign everything, you know, for their factory, get samples and get the process up and running and supply. So it's a very, lengthy process of switching it. But, in the end, it should save us a lot of money and shorten the lead times. Okay, before we get to the next question, we've got a Wheel of Kelsey today. #WheelOfKelsey. If you tag two people, you'll get an extra entry. 00:31:43 Basically, it's a swag bag. We've got a free month over at Centurion. We've got a mug. We've got a keychain. We've got a box of chocolates – it's an all-in-one swag bag if you want it #WillaKelsey. Also, I wanted to remind everybody that tomorrow's Billion Dollar Seller Summit is on; if you don't have a ticket, I think Kevin's got one or two left. It's not a scarcity thing. Once he hits 100, he cuts it off. I saw the emails coming from, 'Hey, I've got 20 left.' 'Hey, I've got eight left.' 'Hey, I've got four left.' So there are one or two left. If you're interested, hit Kevin up. And let me see. Yes, Kels. The swag bag is only for US and Canada too as well. 00:32:32 See, if it was up to me, it would be global. But Kelsey. Why you do that, I don't know. So if you're going to hate or be a hater, it's Kelsey. I would do it all over the world. But if it's Centurion League, by the way, if it is Centurion League, it's anywhere in the world. Okay, guys? Alright. The other item I wanted to talk about is that we do have, and it should be starting today or tomorrow, the pricing up for the Mexico trip. So just go to TheMexicoTrip. com, check it out. If you're interested, fill out the form. And that's happening in April. So let's get over to a sponsor, and then we'll come back with Kevin. Meet Sellerize, a highly efficient suite of tools to boost your sales on Amazon. 00:33:23 Get more customer reviews, rank higher, dominate the competition, just like the top sellers do. Sellerize is the perfect all-in-one solution to give your business the boost it needs. Get a free month's trial by signing up with coupon BEARDNATION. Just follow the link in this episode's description to get started now. You know, I just wanted to give another shout out to Tony Sagar, if he's listening. We really appreciate everything that you did last week with your own personal giveaways. Very seldom people share their product, but for you also to give it away, you're awesome, Tony. So, and I know I've got your product here and it is an awesome, well-branded product. So anyways, I just wanted to give you a quick shout out for that. All right, Kevin. 00:34:15 Let's talk about some things that are happening. I don't know if you want to go down the new sort of product launch, what should you do, or any other tips or things that you're seeing trend-wise in Amazon. What do you want to tackle? I don't know. I'm game for whatever. I don't know if we have any questions that we want to tackle that, or if you've got something we want to talk about, I'm game for whatever. I'll throw that out there. Any questions, comments for Kevin? Uh, we're going to get to them in about five minutes because I know that there's usually quite a few. So throw them in there and then we'll get right back to them. 00:34:51 I'm, I'm thinking, uh, like for my, I'm kind of curious, what are you doing right now for if you've got a product launch or a relaunch of a product? What are your steps that you're going through? What are you doing? What kind of traffic are you driving over? How do you create a successful launch in 2022? Well, it depends on if you have a list or not. Let's say no list. Let's say you're fresh, new to Amazon. We just finished Freedom Ticket. If you just finished Freedom Ticket and you're launching it, I'm going to launch. I'm going to do my homework on my keywords and my brand analytics and everything that I show there. That's a whole different stuff. 00:35:31 thing and once i've figured out what the keywords are i'm going to start by targeting the lower volume keywords or the higher sfr keywords i'm not going to go after the big ones i'm going to go after the stuff that has 300 500 less than a thousand searches per month but starting with about three or five hundred try to get ranked on those first i'm going to make sure that i have whatever the big keywords are they should be root keywords so there should be versions of the smaller ones but i'm going to make sure i have those if possible in the title and the bullets and stuff so i'm indexed but i'm going 00:36:03 to be targeting those lower ones where and i'm going to pick those based on the competition level so i'm going to use brand analytics and the heating 10 tools and some stuff to figure out i think i can ease my Way in onto these a little bit easier than these, I'm going to start there, then I'm going to lower my price. If my product's a $24. 95 item, I'm going to lower it to $4. 95. Okay, just a sec. Are you doing that directly under sale 2497, or are you doing it through a digital coupon? No coupon. I don't want to put any barrier up to where they've got to enter a coupon. Some of them forget to enter it. Some of them will type it wrong. It doesn't work. 00:36:39 I, I don't even need a coupon, not even a digital coupon, no, not even a little clip in the little click here, no. No coupon, okay. Um, now something you could do that if you want to, but uh, I haven't actually tested that; maybe I should test that, but no. I just lowered it just so it's like just an incredible deal, so people... I have no reviews at this point either. I have sent out the product to to uh the Vine review program and hopefully I'm getting some nibbles there. It depends on your product; sometimes I'll take all 30. That you max you can give a maximum of thirty; sometimes they'll take them all, but if you're a product, they don't really define people don't care about it; they've seen 100 of these already come through. 00:37:13 You might not get hardly any taken and that kind of slots, but um, if you hopefully you're getting some taken there so starting that process. But right now, you have zero reviews, and so when someone-I'm going to do top-of-search placement on PPC for whatever these these secondary or keywords are; not the main big keywords, but secondary to you. I'm going to bid on the main keywords. It's going to be a fairly low bid, but I'm going to go balls-to-the-wall on these lower-end keywords with high bids and a low price, so that I know that if I'm on the top of the page search and people see it, and they see, 'Oh, here's Kevin's new product' and it has no reviews. 00:37:50 I don't know about this, but look at the price; everybody else is selling for $25, but this guy's $3? What the hell? I'll risk $3. I'll give this guy a shot for $3. So hopefully they click the ad, and the app, therefore, they buy so therefore the ads are actually getting good conversions so that's giving them Amazon a good signal like hey this ad is actually converting, uh, we need to actually show it more but then Amazon's gonna look at well it's only selling for uh three bucks so we're only making $0. 45 cents on our commission on that, so that plays into it a little bit versus if they show some other guy somebody else's that's $24. 00:38:25 95 and They're making 15% on that, plus their conversion rate's a little bit lower. Amazon's going to do the math and say, this guy's still better to show. So, you've got to play with that a little bit, but hopefully you get some momentum going and you start to raise your price over a buck here, a buck there. Maybe for the first week, it's still at $2. 95. And I'm going in the hole big time. I mean, you're losing money on this. But you would with rebates anyway, right? If you're paying somebody. 10 or 15 dollars you know, I think the lowest I ever saw rebates go is like for four or five bucks, and you bought a huge amount in bulk, but most of them were charging in the range of 10 to 15 bucks. 00:39:01 Plus, you're paying that money out, plus you're losing the cost of the the goods and everything, so you're still losing money at the end of the day. It's similar amount of money that you're losing, but that will actually then hopefully get the momentum going while the reviews are coming in, uh, and then you can slowly raise your price up as the reviews start to come in. Then, slowly raise your price up. And that's how I'm doing it right now. And then I'm going after the bigger keywords. It might be three months or six months. Now, if you have a huge budget, if I was launching hand sanitizer, like we talked about earlier, I can't do it. If it wasn't suspended. 00:39:39 If it wasn’t suspended, I would have to go and do this balls to the wall on everything from the get-go. But that takes a serious amount of money. um but i'm talking about someone with a much more restricted budget but you're still you could easily go in the hole three four five thousand dollars to try to launch this thing maybe more and it may not work you may you know start getting bad reviews uh if your product's not good you may start it may not fully work and you may have to like you said earlier cut and move on to something else it's a risk and it's becoming more that way on amazon but you're and then if i have If I have the ability to create in advance, if I've got time, if it's going to take me six months to launch my product, and I'm working on design, working on the factory, getting everything going, I'm going to try to start building a social media website. 00:40:28 And so if I'm selling dog leashes, I'm not going to go create a dog leash Facebook group. I'm going to create a Facebook group about dogs and people that walk dogs or something like that and try to build something there. that's a lot of work though and you hear people talk about this all the time if you it doesn't work for most people i mean if you know what you're doing you can make this work you might have to have hire an agency or somebody to help you do that but the average guy that has no experience in this is going to have a difficult time building an audience and you might build an audience of several hundred people or followers on your facebook group but even then That doesn't mean they're going to buy anything. 00:41:05 As soon as you come out with your dog leash, say, hey, everybody, I got 1 ,000 people in my Facebook group of dog lovers. Come support us. We have this new dog leash we just launched on Amazon. You might get five or 10 of them to go buy it. If you're lucky, you'll get 50 or 100 of them. But that's all in you, and how you run a Facebook group and stuff. And a lot of people, I think, miss that, that it's not that easy to do that. People always, you see them doing presentations and saying, 'Oh, you just got to build an audience.' You got to do this. It's not easy to do that. Not an audience that converts. Anybody can get followers. Anybody can pay for followers. 00:41:43 Anybody can buy followers. You see a lot of these Instagram people that have 10, 20,000 followers. Look at the engagement. It's next to nothing. It's all about the engagement and the interactivity and how well do they identify with you and with your message and whatever your theme is. And if you're very good at that, it's like a people person. You know, if I'm going, there are some people that can go to a party and they're a people person. They're going to know everybody there by the end of that party. And there are other people that go to the same party and they stand in the corner and hardly talk to anybody, just talking to their buddy that they came with and having some drinks. You need a people person, you know, to drive social media. 00:42:17 And if you're not that person or don't know how to do that, you've got to part where someone is or you're going to have a hard time. So it's difficult. The easiest way to launch is if you have your own list. If you've been selling for a while and you've been doing this right, doing inserts, creating lists of buyers, not of just people. There's a difference between the people: full-price buyers, not discount buyers where you have something from three years ago where everybody bought it at 80% off. That list is worthless. It may be good for launching initially at a discount, but those discount ways don't work anymore. But you need a list of people that are passionate about your subject and your product and are willing to buy it pretty close to full price, if not at full price. 00:42:56 And that's how we do the calendar business that I do. You know, we have a list. I have 13,000 people on that list. These are buyers. These are not people that signed up and registered a warranty. They have actually given me personally, well, not me personally, but my company personally has sent a check or a credit card; they've actually bought. And so I can take that list and say: and what I do is I segment. I don't send all 13,000 and say, 'Go buy it on Amazon.' I take about 1,000 of them to launch and just randomly select 1,000 and say, 'Hey, if you've got this product, you can buy it from us, and you can pay $19. 95 for your calendar plus $9. 00:43:33 95 shipping.' Or, I'll tell you what, for the next three days, go buy it on Amazon. We've lowered the price from $19. 95 to $14. 95 for you. Uh, go buy it there, and if you have a Prime account, it's free shipping. And what they do is, they go and buy it; and we have multiple counters that buy them all; they buy a lot of them all, and so they get in the frequently bought together the customers are viewed at this view that we have. We can launch that in three days with no PPC; we never do PPC on it; there's no PPC whatsoever on it, nor any other launch, nor search run by, nor nothing. 00:44:05 And we sell tens of thousands of dollars, uh, a month – actually, a lot more than that; we sell well into a very high, very good six figures of sales on that. I had no idea that the private label legion Tim and Norm calendar sold that many; yeah, it did! I had a lot of returns though, and the return rate was through the roof, man some of them were coming back with like Sharpie markers, like scratched out on Tim; they scratched out Tim. Yeah, it was; it was; I couldn't believe it. I couldn't even resell those on eBay or anything. Oh my gosh! All right. Next question, okay. Kelsey, I think we have probably one or two questions, yeah. Yeah, just – we got a couple of here. 00:44:57 Alright, so I don't even know where to start; we've got so many, but alright. From Manny, she was first in. How often can you combine two ASINs' purpose piggyback? Or piggyback until the fresh essence gets a few reviews and separate them without anything going wrong for example losing all the reviews, thank you, yeah, you can, you can put variations together sometimes if if they're related, I mean, you see, sometimes people will do this on unrelated products and Amazon doesn't like that, it can get you actually in trouble, you may get away with it but they don't like it, customers don't like it either. But if if you're launching a new color or new size 00:45:40 or something, there's there's nothing wrong with uh combining them under a parent-child relationship so they can kind of share their reviews and you can separate them later and when you separate them the reviews will go with which they will separate properly in most cases I've never had a problem I'm not going to say it doesn't have if it happened but I've never had a problem doing that, so that could be that could be an option if they're related unless you don't want to play by the rules and you're going to put your spatula with your garbage disposal on the same listing, that's up to you. Right. Okay. Okay, next one. What variables are you considering when launching a new product as a variation of existing listings versus a standalone ASIN? 00:46:28 Well, like we just talked about, it's usually better to put them together because the new one that way it can share the reviews. I mean, the advantage of doing standalone is it's more real estate, but you're going to have to get the new one launched and get it validated with Amazon's algorithm that it actually should belong there. So it's usually easier to come in as a variation, in my experience. And I think this is also what the question is about, I think. If you want to go out and find other variables like what to consider, you can take a look at your competitors and see what the frequently bought together is or what's it called? Opportunity Explorer. 00:47:09 And it'll show you some options that you can have to add if you were trying to expand that ASIN or the next product you want to launch. I think that's answering the question. Okay, great. Next one. How would you test a secondary image order in an Amazon listing? Would you use PicFu or something else? Yeah, I would probably use a PicFu or a Helium 10 audience tool, which is the same as PicFu. That's probably how I would test that. And sometimes the secondary image might be, you know, if I was testing my main image. And they're slightly, they're different images. It's not just I'm turning it 10 degrees or something, but they're actually one has the packaging, one doesn't, or one has a person in it, one doesn't. 00:48:01 I'm not actually and they come in close, one is close, you know, one of them has got 40%, one of them's got 38% or something of the vote. They're really close neck and neck. I would consider using the second placement as my secondary image. So what about Amazon's A-B, like the split experiment. You can't do that with images. You can't do it with images? You can do it with the main image. Yeah. And you can do it with A-plus content, which is images. But not that I'm aware of. I'm not aware of how you can do it with positions one through seven, switching them around in there. I'm not aware of that. Maybe I'm mistaken. I might be. I know that you can do it 100% with the primary. 00:48:44 Yeah, 100% with the primary for sure. yeah but i don't know that you can with the order of the others i'll have to check that out but um yeah that's a that's i thought you could but i'm probably wrong i always am that's not true all right the next question is from jessica rabbit in hindsight were there any steps or actions you could have taken to avoid the germ shark debacle any suggestions for us neophytes on things to alert ourselves to do with amazon to avoid disaster yeah i mean we did everything right on that i mean we got the covet store we did everything right um probably the number one thing if i 00:49:25 had to say is we overbought inventory we got over i mean we did our projections based on what we were doing and we're doing forty thousand dollars a day in july of 2020 so we're like okay we need to order uh we're coming out with a new product we fixed some of the problems that people are complaining about let's order uh you know whatever the number was of this um we should have probably cut that in half but we so we should have put in a factor in there of uh what if this goes upside down um but at the time we decided to roll the dice like well if it goes upside down we'll just sell it to walmart or we'll sell it somewhere else we'll be able to like what normal scenario we'll be able to dump it somewhere else and we didn't we didn't think about the over saturation that's going to occur we didn't 00:50:12 at that point just nobody could get it we're like let's just get it um so that's probably the number one mistake we made is over buying inventory if we hadn't wouldn't have over by i mean there's a point where we're like no let's cut this second shipment of this one and we'll save This 300 grand that we would not have to give away, um, right, and in retrospect, we wish we did that, but uh, what if we didn't do that and this stuff still sold gangbusters and we left money on the table so it's it's a it's a it's a balancing act and it's. We took the risk. We could afford to take the risk. So it wasn't going to change our life. We didn't mortgage our house. 00:50:50 We didn't go into personal debt on credit cards or something like that to make this happen. Yeah, it sucks. I'm having to pay $7,500 every two weeks to get a few more months of that before that's paid off. That sucks. It's not changing my lifestyle. Changing up some money that I can save, you know, to put for retirement or something like that, but it's not changing anything in my lifestyle. So that's where I would be very cautious-don't do something that's going to, don't take a risk that could be, if it goes wrong, it could be so drastic that it puts you on the street or screws up your 401k or something like that. Yeah. The other thing is risk evaluation. If you're going after Kevin and his partners, they're experts. 00:51:37 And they could go after a really competitive field; they did the analysis, some of these things came up, and just, you know, you couldn't be prepared for some of the things. But for me, if I was looking at launching a product and I was newer or intermediate cash flow, it just depends on you know what your risk is going into some of these competitive fields, supplements, what you were looking at, fidget spinners. If you were coming in at the height of fidget spinners, you knew even before they got banned that they were going to be a problem because everybody was coming into the market with them. So those are sort of the things I would have avoided. On this, and I might be completely wrong, you guys were looking at it; you saw an opportunity. 00:52:27 You saw an opportunity that you could brand it differently. You can get a better price, higher perceived value, and you could just kill it. And you started off doing that, $40,000 a day when you launched it. But some of these things, some of these items that came up with Amazon, nobody could have thought could happen. And there was there's stuff that we never dealt with. We never dealt with mixing alcohol and having hazardous goods just to get. I've seen you mix alcohol. We never had the hazardous goods from China. So we didn't know. Oh, there's only certain ships that have taken certain regulations. And then we didn't know, like on wipes, you know, wipes are regulated by two different government bodies in the US. 00:53:11 If the wipe goes on your skin, if you wipe in your hands, it's regulated by the FDA. But if it goes on the surface to wipe a counter or something, it's regulated by the EPA. The EPA requires about a $250,000 license and several months of process and testing to get that, versus the FDA basically doesn't. You can just sell it. We registered and stuff with the FDA and did all the proper documents and everything there, but it's not as regulated. So what you say in your listing, if you say that's antibacterial, you get a pesticide warning. And you're like, this is not a pesticide. We're not killing plants here. We're trying to kill coronavirus or whatever. And that goes under the EPA. So you couldn't say certain words. 00:53:57 You couldn't have them on your packaging. So you get flagged. And so there's certain things that we didn't know. We went through all the steps when we got the state of Texas Agricultural Commission to actually send us a letter and say, no, you're not classified as a pesticide. You're this and this. I had to send that to Amazon each time we had a you know I had it in a little folder on my desktop, Amazon shut down documents, so I just forward those right off right away uh to whenever it happened um there's a learning curve there too of things that um you know we were learning on the fly and very fastly. Okay, next question. It's a two-parter from Elchin. Hi all, thank you for the session. 00:54:43 I have a new product, which is an issue about indexing. It's not indexed 90% of keywords, which I used in listing as phrase, title, search term, and bullets. I changed the category also, changed the title, search term, et cetera. Amazon case said it's searchable, but not shown when you check manually and each to an index checker. Do you have any suggestions? So, you're probably missing if you said this is usually a category-related issue where you're in a category where Amazon doesn't recognize those keywords as relevant. And they want to make sure that Amazon has a master list of keywords that are relevant for different categories that are human input and updated over time. And so they don't want you if you're selling a Christmas item. 00:55:28 They don’t want you to show up during Easter, for example something so they have certain keywords uh that that are regulated or controlled that way, so but you said you changed the category and you updated the category so it sounds like this is a technical issue with a note what’s called a node n-o-d-e-i-d there’s something probably amiss than just some sort of technical issue some some sort of bug in your listing that needs to be cleared out that’s causing that node ID to not associate with your listing. Even though it shows you’re in a category, there’s something that’s causing it. I would try using a flat file if you’re comfortable with that and rewriting your listing using a flat file upload and see if that doesn’t overwrite everything. 00:56:11 That could fix the problem. If that doesn't fix the problem, you'll need to open a ticket with seller support say hey i think i have a note issue i'm just not indexing at all i should index other people in this category indexing for this can you please check my note ids and refresh them and refresh my category it should be this category and that should fix the problem in a worst case you might have to delete the listing and start and bring it back you'll use the same skew so you have inventory and amazon it's okay you can delete the listing and then add it back as a brand new listing. But when you add it back, be sure you use the exact same SKU and that'll tie your inventory back together. 00:56:50 And that might refresh it. But don't do that until you try the reaching out to seller support with the notice you think. Yeah, Vanessa Hung was on and she was talking about flat files. If you have any, if you want to get a kind of a refresher course on it, just listen to that podcast and that should be able to help you out. Yeah, Vanessa knows what she deals with that stuff day in, day out. She's really good at flat files. If you're coming to the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, you might want a thing or two about flat files and some magic there, too. Is Vanessa going to be there? I don't know. We'll see. Oh, yeah. You're not selling this. I don't have speakers. 00:57:35 From all the norm you're speaking, you just don't know it yet. Oh, all right. Yeah. That's usually what you do. You give me 24 hours' notice, but. All right. I announced topics that nobody knows. I mean, unless someone's personally told you, nobody knows who's speaking. I think I have an in over there. I do it. I do that for the in-person one. I announced them in the past, but this next year I may not also. Really? Yeah. See, a lot of people, they do virtual sessions or virtual summits or whatever, and they're depending on the speakers to drive their traffic. So you get all these graphics. You get, 'Hey, I'm doing a whatever, sourcing with Johnny today.' Come see me. 00:58:28 And they send you a nice picture, graphic, and they want you to link back, and they give you an affiliate link. I don't like doing that. I want the content to be the king. Not you know the speakers are awesome people, uh, but when you're doing a virtual event, it's about the content, uh. We do networking and stuff too when it's an in-person event; it's also it's a lot about the networking. So, it's two different audiences, uh, and so I like, and then I don't publish a schedule. I don't say, 'Johnny is speaking at 10: 15 and 'Susan's speaking at 12 and 'Karen is speaking at three.' Uh, you don't know who's speaking when; the only person knows who's when they're speaking as the speaker. So that way people can't cherry pick. 00:59:06 They're like, 'I don't want to listen to Johnny. I've heard him before,' but you don't know what he's going to say. So that way, you're on the edge of seeing, 'All right, what's coming next? What's coming next?' And it increases the participation, networking, and everything. And it increases retention from a learning point of view too. The website, Billion Dollar Seller Summit, is a 1990s HTML page; you go there, it's like everybody creates these fancy websites with graphics and everything; it looks like something from the 1990s. And that's on purpose too. It's all about the content. But when you get into the event, it's a whole different world. And that's where we spend the money. I don't get anything for pitching BDSS. I've never had an affiliate link. 00:59:59 We pitch it because it's a great event each time, virtual or live. I do know that you put me through hell every time I speak because you always tell me I've got to. Bring a game that I've got to change; you know I've got to come with a new topic I've never talked about but, and that's that's what it's all about. Like when you go to your event, there's a couple of events out there, but when I think of higher-end events, I think of the BDSS. I think of being able to walk away with a ton of new networks. And by the way, I haven't told you this, but because of BDSS, when I was on the cruise, I just cut a I think it's going to be a huge deal with somebody that I met at your event for a new product that we're bringing out, a new manufacturer. 01:00:47 You know her. I'll talk to you more about it later. But it's all because I met her at the BDSS event. So these are the things that not only do you learn new, really great, high-level content; this isn't beginners. This is higher-level content. But the networking, even within the virtual summit, you get to network. And it's so great. I met at your summit. I also met the virtual one last year. I met somebody that was in the audience that we've become very good friends. And she's helping me out with my cigar podcast. Awesome. So, you know, it's it's; I highly recommend these events. You didn't know I was going to be talking about this. It just kind of went down this rabbit hole. 01:01:35 But guys, if you get a chance, go to events wherever you're comfortable; you know, beginner, intermediate, get into masterminds. And if you do get a chance to go out to the higher-end events, it's worth usually it's worth every penny. These higher-end events, people deliver. And like you said, if you're a beginner, you can go to shows like the Prosper Show. Too late for you to make it to that. You know, Hedium 10 is doing an event in September called SELL, S-E-L-L, and Scale. They're expecting it to be the biggest one in the space. They're spending millions of dollars on the budget to put this thing on. It's expecting hopefully about 2,500 people. And they're going to have tracks. They're going to have, there's like 50 speakers going to be speaking at it. 01:02:24 They're going to have a beginner's track, so if you're brand new, they're going to have an intermediate track and an advanced track. So you'll be able to go through and get the help that you need. It's going to be at the Virgin Hotel, what used to be the Hard Rock in Vegas. They're also bringing in not just Amazon people, but they're bringing in, they'll announce this in a few weeks, but some pretty big wig people that you're going to know the name of that are going to be speaking here that aren't Amazon sellers. Pretty impressive keynotes. A lot of people want to be there. I'll let them announce who it is. I know who a few of them are, and it's pretty cool. But those types of events would be great to get out to. 01:03:09 Big names out of the space. Yeah, big, big, really big. Okay, so let's get back to some of these questions. We are past our mark. Oh, Kevin, how much time do you have? I've got a couple more minutes. Yeah, sure. All right. Let's get to a couple more questions then. Okay. From Ionitz. As a beginner, can FBA work without a trademark? Shall we get TM and VR right away before launching, or is it still okay to get it after idea validation? I recommend you do it right away, even if your product fails. You don't have to go and spend the thousands of dollars with an attorney. You can, and that's the best way if you have the budget, but you can file a trademark for $325 in the U.S. 01:03:59 And Legal Sherpa, I think they charge like $89 or something. They have some different packages. They have like an $89 package that they'll kind of handhold you a little bit. If you have the $400, $500, let's call it $500, and you have that in your budget, I would recommend you do it, even if the product fails. And you're like, well, I just wasted $500 on a trademark. The reason I recommend you do that is because it opens up Brand Registry. And Brand Registry gives you a lot of additional research tools on Amazon, giving you a lot of additional ways to make your product, give your product a better chance with A-plus content, with video advertising, with a lot of stuff. 01:04:36 If you're on a super tight budget and $500 is just going to break you, then, yeah, go ahead and try without it. Um, you may have to change it later anyway, maybe the name that you're choosing if you haven't done at least research to see if it's even available and you get listing on Amazon, you start taking off and you got your product made with that name on it, your Amazon seller account is set up with that name then you're going to want to go back and change it later right and it's going to create some potential problems, uh so I would I would I would highly advise you do it from the get-go and if you're concerned wrong if this product is going to really this idea validation is going to really work. 01:05:16 Do a generic trademark. If you're selling ice cream scoops, don't call it Roman's ice cream scoops as your trademark. Call it something Romanesque or something. I don't know. Something that could be applied to different categories. Now, when you follow your trademark, you're going to have to choose a category. So you might choose ice cream. Kitchen tools or whatever and later on you're going to sell auto parts you're going to go back and add a classification to your trademark for I think it's 100 bucks or something like that if it's available you can add another classification, uh, you might have to do that later but that's a way if you're if to hedge your bets if you're really worried about is do a little bit more generic trademark choose the category that you're going to go into and if it doesn't work and you switch categories later hopefully that's available in that other category and just add that category onto it. 01:06:14 Okay, next question. Okay, this one's from Jerry. Wow, another great show. Can you give me a checklist or SOP for a successful operation? Is there anything? He has SOPs for how to get coffee and everything. Yep, everything. And also, hey, I do have to give a shout-out to him. Hey, Jerry, how's it going? My old army buddy. So, line, bubble, bubble, line, buddy. All right. Here's where you go: You go to Flowster. And Flowster, if you want to check, they do have a full set of Amazon SOPs set up. And you can contact them. I think, Kelsey, I think we have some sort of discount with Flowster. I'm not 100% sure. But if you contact them and say you're with Lunch with Norm, you might get a discount. 01:07:10 I think there's a discount associated with any premium SOPs over there. And they're all laid out for you. They're all pretty good; we do them as we go. Like Kevin said, anything we repeat, like making a cup of coffee, we have an SOP for. There you go. Alright. There we go. And I think that's it for today. Is that right, Kels? I mean, yeah, we can cut it off here. There's a ton of questions. So it is getting-we're 10 past now. So, yeah, it's up to you guys. Yeah, I do have to run to something else here shortly. Yep. So why don't we cut it off for the day? There's a bunch of questions we can post into the group. And, yeah. 01:07:59 First, let's have a final word from our sponsor, and then we'll head over to the Wheel of Kelsey. Alright. A big thank you to our sponsor, Startup Club, the largest club on Clubhouse with over 790,000 members and growing. They're one of the world's largest communities supporting the startup ecosystem from founders to those wishing to work for a startup and everything in between. You can find them at www. startup. club for blogs, recordings, and a calendar of upcoming shows and on the Clubhouse app. Just search Startup Club for daily shows 24/7. You can also now listen to their show, the Serial Entrepreneur Club podcast, on Apple and Spotify too. Stop by to connect, learn, and grow together. You know what? So during the cruise, they hit over 800,000. 800,000 people in this startup room. So that's pretty cool. Alright. Is it that time? It's the time. The Wheel of Kelsey. Here we go. It's time for the Wheel of Kelsey. 01:09:27 Alright, everyone. We're here at the Wheel of Kelsey. I just want to double-check and make sure I got everyone's names. Sarah just squeaked in. And alright, let me see. Oh, Andy, too. You gotta get Andy in there. OK, so let me shuffle these up. This is for the free month of Centurion and Lunch with Norm goodie bag. So if you are the winner, please email me at lunchwithnorm. com. And it looks like the winner is. Oh, Manny just squeaked in. Oh, congrats, Manny. Alright. So, Manny, I have your info. Now, I think Manny's in Germany. That's right. So we'll have to spin again because that's the Centurion League. Okay. You want to do this again? I'm just saying, you know, I know Kevin's got to go, and he was supposed to be on a call five minutes ago, but we always like to make Kevin wait. 01:10:31 All right. Kevin, while we're waiting, we are going to have to go for a cigar, you know, when we hit Vegas. That's true. Or two or three. Yeah. I actually have something for you. You'll see when I see you in Vegas, I have a little surprise for you. Uh-oh. It's not a cigar. Is it? Okay, I hope it's not booby-trapped. No, it's not a cigar. But it's something I think you might like. Alright, super. Okay, so here we go. So, Manny, we'll still get the Centurion League, of course. Absolutely. For the giveaway, for the Lunch with Norm giveaway. See, we know our community. Who got? Kevin G. Kevin G. Alright, Kevin. So that is Kevin from YouTube. So I think this is a new user. So please email me, k at lunchwithnorm. 01:11:26 com, and we'll connect you with your prize. And congratulations, Manny, as well. And we'll get you that Centurion League. There we go. All right. So that's it for today's show. Kevin, thank you, sir. Of course. Always a pleasure. Always fun to come on here. The time passes really fast. I look up and it's like an hour. I'm like, what? We just started. I know. I know. I can't wait till next month. But no, once again, I really do. I know that you're busy, busy, busy. And for you to take an hour out of your time each month, it's a lot. It means a lot to us. So thank you, sir. All right. I'll talk to you soon. All right. Okay, everybody. So I hope you enjoyed the show today. 01:12:10 We have a really great show coming up. Is this? Correct. I have it on my calendar as Tuesday. Oh, Wednesday. I should say Wednesday. Cheap help. Cheap, cheap, cheap help. Okay. So on Wednesday, our regular time. Tim Jordan and Amy Weiss are going to be joining us about how and why we should be sourcing in Mexico. Coincidentally, we have a Mexico trade show and mastermind coming up. But anyways, Tim Jordan, Amy Weiss is going to be on Wednesday. Kels, do you have anything to add to this? No, I don't think so. I know we had tons of questions today. Unfortunately, we missed quite a few, but if you head over to our Facebook group, Lynch with Norm, Amazon FBA and e-commerce collective, you can post your questions there. 01:13:01 We've got a great community where our group is always helping each other out. So, you can post over there and yeah, thank you everyone. Tons of new people joining us today. So hopefully you learned something new and valuable. And yeah, make sure you come back the next episode. We have another Wheel of Kelsey prize for you. We go live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So you can always hang out with us on those days when you're free. And Andy, 4 a. m. in Brisbane. Thank you for watching. And yeah, I think that's it. Alright. So join us every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for being part of the community. We absolutely could not do this without you and enjoy the rest of your day. We'll see you on Tuesday, Kels? No, Wednesday, right? Wednesday. That's the day you're supposed to be there. Wednesday. We will see you then. All right. I'm just going to hold my silence just for a little longer. Okay. As long as you hold the silence, your pay is going down. Alright. And we're gone. Alright. Bye, everyone. Lunch with me.