Market Masters Demo Hot Seat at BDSS XI in Iceland

So market masters. So market masters 3 like I said it's November video. I am at one of the most amazing events that you will ever see in the Amazon ecosystem held by Kevin King. This is Market Masters, a BDSS event. Essentially, you have seven people's brain dedicated for 2 hours working and problem solving on your business. This is a collective trust of people that are here invited and curated. You cannot find this kind of opportunity really anywhere else in the space. I got to take advantage of I mean there was 40 50 millionaires for the hot seat to come in and get all of this knowledge in one sitting is just absolutely mind-blowing. And again not only it helps the hot seats and attendees but us the experts. We had a masseuse. Um we had um the personal trainer of Kevin who did a workout every morning. And we had a really fun um party Saturday night with some games. I I've met somebody that's doing over 300 million a year, someone doing 83 million year, and we're just having dinner and having chats. So, it's a lot of fun. you're going to get if not 10x 100x of what you put in in value just with side conversations that you're going to have with other experts or or the entrepreneurs that are in the hot seats helping like because everybody's here to help each other. I literally had one hour sessions with so many of these experts today where they just sat me down and gave me like okay do this do this do this and makes my life easier. So, highly recommend it and and your revenue bounced by five times from uh last seen month-on-month double digit growth, which is which is insane. And we did not expect that. When you leave, you're going to feel like family. Even the people that have maybe never been to an event and were a little bit worried about coming and and having conversations, talking about their business, they feel like they've gained 50 family members. We are kind of like a small incubator where we're able to share the knowledge. I highly encourage you to join next event because this is life-changing experience for every single one of you. Honestly, when I heard how much this costs, I thought that's too cheap. I came away with a business plan to take my company to 2x, 5x, 10x growth over the over the coming years. If you ever have the opportunity to join the next Market Masters event or one of uh Kevin's event, BDSS, you've got to join. Get to the next BDSS, Market Masters. Come have fun, but come fix your business and personalize it to exactly what you need. All right. So, that's what we're going to do right now. If you're interested in, we don't we're not I'm not selling tickets yet. But if you're interested in either participating or coming to it, scan that QR code. It's just a type form just so I have your email and as soon as we know the dates and the location and the final pricing and everything, I'll I'll email you. But that's to get on the basically the uh information list if you if you're interested in that. All right, cool. Well, let's do it. feel like we have we should have the music from like uh a game junk. We should that would be good. All right. So, welcome uh to this session of market masters. So, here in the hot seat we have Florian Warner from Germany. Um Florian, why don't you tell us a little bit about so tell the audience a little bit about yourself, your revenue, what you sell, and your background in the business and the experts as well. Hello. Okay. Yeah, I don't know why I'm so crazy to come out here and get my ass burned. That's why I put on my flame fire shirt and let's do it. Um, a little bit about me. So, I'm I'm Floren. I'm German. Um, I uh studied Chinese at university and um then I was working in a consultancy firm for like IP related things between China and uh Europe. Then I wanted to fulfill another dream which was to travel from my doorstep to Asia. Um that's what we did in 2017 to 18. We ended up in Chiang Mai. And on the way there I met all the travel vloggers and I was like I want to do an remote business um live anywhere and make money remotely. So in Chiang Mai there's these digital nomads and I I joined many masterminds and there um I thought the FBA business is interesting for me because the only background that I could show for any of the business models was uh to know how to speak Chinese. So I set myself a commitment and said like I'm going to the Canton fair and when I come back I have uh my first product which uh turned out to be this travel pillow and um I guess a little bit luck is always involved. This was part of a Kickstarter campaign in the US in um 201 17 in fall and 2018 that supplier said why don't you sell that in um or I mean this is another model we have and I looked at the Kickstarter campaign and there were a lot of negative reviews saying that it loses air and it was not as comfortable as people um expected. So, um I I bought it, got my feet wet, and I improved it and added some more um memory foam and kids and so forth. And then co uh came and was a perfect entrepreneurial experience. The business went down to zero. There was nothing left. Um I um I had sent in a lot of stuff u stock to Amazon. Everyone was freaking out that they cannot send in anything. And I was like, "Yeah, I have a lot of stock at Amazon." They were like, "Great, but nobody's going to nobody's buying it at the moment." So, I started selling cloth masks and tube scarves for um during CO and um survived and after COVID was gone was over, everyone else was kind of gone. We were prepared and then we scaled the business there um pretty fast. And last year in March we launched in the US. And we only launched um this product in two colors and this one. And in Europe we have uh this in two sizes. This in a little bit more colors and also one that uh is for people with longer neck. Really really quick uh intro about travel pillows. What many people don't know is that you want to have as much support as possible around your neck when you sit in an airplane when you when you're not yet a millionaire and you fly a business class. So you um want the backside to be very narrow so you're not sitting uh like this in the airplane like um pushed forward but you also want your chin to to be supported and you want um to have the right height you know so like there's people like like me I have a long neck so a pillow that is where wide fits good some people hardly have no neck literally um so they they shouldn't didn't have such a long one. Um and um what kind of sales are you doing to let's different market let's get some numbers. So just cross sales gross sales um in 200 um 23 it was like 34 million then in 200 no 203 was 23 then 67 in the past year and then in 2024 we reached 10 million in sales in gross revenue. Um but yeah and out of that is like 10 um nine is uh in Europe and one was in the US last year. So what are your why are you here? What are you hoping to gain? What are your pain points that you're hoping this group of experts can solve for you? Um so I was thinking about that question a lot. So basically I mean for myself one of the biggest problems is obviously to stay focused and focus on the right things. You know you have all these little things that you can do. You have more you can have more products. You can lower your cost of goods. You can uh do more on Shopify. You can run meta ads. You run Tik Tok ads. You do Tik Tok shop. Um you know like do influencer marketing. So this is I I would say now for me one of the biggest uh challenges to kind of like decide what to focus on and what uh what not what to do uh later. The other thing is obviously I'm in that situation that the team grew. I was hiring um only more recently maybe more professionally and there is a team of different experts. So one is doing video, the other doing is doing the Shopify, the next one is doing graphics, others are doing supply chain and they kind of like all report to myself which ends up in a lot of meetings per week and I can't kind of like just work on the on the focusing. Um there is um one thing that or two more specific things uh to make it not so complicated. So I invite everyone of the team of the panel obviously to tear the listing apart to say what could be uh done better. And one of the learnings from the last one was obviously that there's a lot potential in the branding because any other travel pillows is kind of like a generic one. And um I was working with somebody to kind of like find something that make that moves us away from just being comparable to other travel pillows. And we came up we try to align it a little bit with my personality. So I'm um you know like I try to do some meditation and some yoga and try to not sometimes turn off my brain from the chatter and um so the traveling experience is quite exhausting. I mean, we can we all agree that it's really really nice to go to other countries and go come to Iceland, but everyone hates the fact that we have to get on the airplane and then come here and have the jadlag and can't sleep and and all these things. So the idea is to say um we're providing during this hassle of traveling moments of relaxation where you can like relax um reconnect to yourself on that airplane like or when there's a delay or so. So so like the travel pillow is obviously the first step then only um where you can like sink in. I mean, we even have a hood here that you can cover up yourself and then you're like in your in your personal private uh space and obviously we can expand then from there our product portfolio meaning like blankets, eye masks, earplugs, um even some some other things that relate around people how they can calm down during all that exhausting uh travel times. So some that's a thought and kind of like would like to hear what other people think about that if that is to making it too small the niche or won't work at all I don't know some kind of feedback on that. So these are the things um that I'm trying to get out. All right really quick uh each of the experts if you can take about 20 seconds uh starting with Michelle explain why you're qualified to be here in Helmill. Hi. Yeah. So I'm Michelle Bernham Smith. I've been doing marketing for 25 years now and um and specifically a Tik Tok and Tik Tok shop for the last 5 years. So that is what I'm here to talk about. Melissa. Hi Floren. I'm Melissa. I know we talked in Texas but also great to have you here too. Um my background is in consumables. However, I have been selling on Amazon for eight nine years now. um have had two exits and continually uh always testing new things. Uh that's kind of what excites me, learning what is working now because obviously the landscape changes so much. So happy to dive in and see what we can do for you. Mr. Ferrar. All right. I I'm Norm Ferrar. I've been involved uh with ecom and a bunch of things um since the beginning of time but uh I've uh been involved with manufacturing, fulfillment, packaging, uh selling on Amazon and becoming a service provider for a variety of other services. So I think I can help you Dan. Awesome. I'm Dana, excuse me. I'm Dan Ashburg, co-founder of Titan. Been on Amazon 11 years. Own and operate 100 million, just over half of that fully owned and operated. Um, I'm a big believer in bottomup strategy, not top down advice. Um, so I'm going to be drilling you on financials and that sort of stuff and identifying the constraints and yeah, thanks for having me on the first time. Josh. Yep. Josh Hadley and uh, 8igure brand owner as well, Becca and myself and u, host of the Ecom Breakthrough Podcast where I really try to share actionable strategies to scale from seven to eight figures. So like Dan mentioned a lot on the financial aspect being able to create an organizational chart that allows you to be able to scale. Ru. Yeah. So I run an advertising agency and I focus on uh marketing uh as well as PPC. So I'm going to be looking at your brand. I already did an audit yesterday, but I'm I'm going to be looking at your brand from the perspective of missing uh opportunities and um you know, efficiencies in your advertising and your branding. Tim and I'm Tim Jordan. I've been in the space I guess 11 years or so and um I'm not really that smart. I just have been lucky enough to be in the right rooms with a lot of smart people and try to uh put some strategic pieces together. Awesome. So the way this is going to work is for the next uh 50 minutes or so. Uh we're going to keep this to questions only. There can be no solutions, no suggestions, no advice. Only you you're going for information and taking notes. So please do do we have your permission to actually ask you anything and everything about your business and will you tell us honestly the truth? Yes, I will. All right. So, we're going to start and uh each of the experts uh please try to keep your questions to two or three so we can make sure we have time for everybody to actually get their questions in. I'm just going to call on you um at random uh or I'll try to build it depending on how the questions go. Um so, we can start uh with Melissa. All right, perfect. So, I am curious to know more about your external traffic that you're currently doing if you are doing any or is it just mainly Amazon specific and Amazon PPC? um we're doing in um in Europe and until couple of weeks DSP um on Amazon which is partly external traffic right um we were doing um some uh Google ads with pixel me in the US but we also uh stopped it the reason why we stopped it we're we're not we're not profitable in the US in Europe as I said just DSP and no external traffic at all. Um wait um there is some comparison websites in in Germany. Um I don't know I've always been looking for them in the US. Not sure if they don't exist or I haven't found them. So like um somebody creates a website, compares different products and the way they work is um they as soon as somebody uh clicks, they track it and if there's a sale afterwards they um get a percentage like uh 8 n 10% of the sale. They even like refund you when when there is a refund of that. So um we have a couple of them in Germany. So there is some traffic coming from those websites. We also want a um a product test um in in Germany that uh is driving traffic to our listing. Fantastic. Are you posting I I did an audit of your social media, but you're not really posting anything. Is that something that you would like to do or um currently, you know, first of all, I just want to say you built an impressive business for only having three parents. the fact that you've built it to $10 million, like that's not something to take lightly. Like honestly, everyone give it up for Florian because that is huge. But considering you only have the three SKs, I'm curious, are you planning on introducing new products to your pipeline? Do you have a current set of products that are either currently in manufacturing or you're developing um or in maybe a different niche because I know you're more travel based, right? So, first question, the external or social media you were asking. So, I mean um to be 100% honest obviously we we did that a little bit and here and there I mean there were like people working on it. I think one one team member is kind of like posting on Amazon posts right now or so. Uh we have a Facebook page, we have the Instagram page and and everything but I mean there were ups and downs of like posting it. Um so currently nobody is um posting anything. I did my personal little test. I'm I'm posting myself on Tik Tok uh every day um a little video. I didn't tell that everyone. Um, so it's just to to be comfortable with the with the camera. Um, but no, so no social media uh or not nothing serious, nothing strategic. Um, regarding the new products, so we we evolved these products like they were they look different than from what they were at the beginning. They have new bags, new color box, um all kinds of um things. So um we're constantly doing that and we have as I said I forgot to bring one other version that is for different sized people. So we're trying to explain the customer that it actually depends on how they are which is always difficult because they can't judge if their neck is long or short or thick or narrow. Um but still and um we do have a product in pipeline which is just a regular rectangle travel pillow. So like imagine a normal pillow from home just very small um out of memory foam. It's currently being um on PFU and product opinion kind of like trying to to get the features. Uh so that is planned. We did have a a sleep mask for two years. Um it was quite innovative. It was costing a lot. So we were not able to make it profitable on Amazon. It was it turned out it was not a travel product. It was a sleep product. Uh so it was kind of like after co when everything was not going so well anymore, we were not able to convince the customer to pay a lot more. Um but I mentioned it at the beginning um if if we're more like somebody that is providing accessories um for relaxation while traveling then naturally all these ideas would come up and we would have more products on that. But other than the travel, the the rectangular pillow, nothing is planned right now. Perfect. Any other questions, Melissa? No, I I know quite a bit about your business already since we met in Texas, so I'll let other people ask questions. Awesome. Josh. All right, a couple questions um for you. If I removed you for from the business for three months, what starts to break first? I've been asked that question also a lot. Um it's I wouldn't say that um I'm I'm doing a lot like the business is already running you know it's not like that I have to tell um people like but he didn't ask that he asked what will break first right what will break that question what will break first what will break first sorry that I have to think for a moment said I I I can't tell you like seriously like um the supply chain knows I mean the reason why I wouldn't break is because I have a right hand like one person is feeling like a manager or has this yeah feeling basically so if I were if I was sick or or whatever she would be able to handle the business for sure. Um, could she pay the payroll? Can she do all that kind of stuff or do you have to sign that? What would break? Something would break. A break. Yeah. Okay. I didn't Does she Does she sign the checks? Does she send the wire transfers? Do you have to sign off that? What would something in there? What would break? Good point. But still, it wouldn't break because um my my wife is doing the accounting in that aspect. So she's paying the supplier the the the employees. Um I mean the reason why I don't do it yet is I would think it would not grow and there would maybe people being saying like where is he or so but um obviously we can't go to new market places. Wait, you just answered this question. You said I haven't done it yet because it wouldn't grow. So that right there that's something that would break. What is it that you're doing that helps it that makes it grow if you disappear? Right. Yeah. I mean I'm initiating new pro projects products like whatever like there is no setup there's no structure that growth happens without me. So so nothing new would happen like nobody has the responsibility the ownership of saying like okay you have to you know try to increase our sales. Yep. that. So the next So the next question is this. If I only give you two hours per day throughout the week to be able to work on your business to grow the business, what are you do doing during those two hours of the day? That's it. You can't do anything else but focus on growing the business. What would you do during those two hours? as of right now, as the beginning, I would um listen to, you know, like Brandon gave me like a strategic um planning thing. Um um I would do the EOS. I would read through that uh book. Um so so that I can learn those ways of how to implement the fact that I could be gone and the business would be growing and that there is ownership for each person. Um and I I mean literally like I would not grow it right now. I would try to make it make the system like um Michelle was was uh you know that that everyone has knows what he's doing, why he's doing it and then what would be the the next step so that they grow their part of the business. Um obviously I have it's it's actually um I would say a negative part of myself like um I want to do a Tik Tok shop and I want to do Shopify and I want to post on me social media. I have a million ideas of growing the business but it seems like that is a little bit the bottleneck you know that I I don't focus on one or I don't try to set up the system so that each person does that instead of me coming up with the ideas of like oh let's do this u another marketplace in Europe I mean you know all these new shiny objects basically right can you explain your team right now how many people and what are their roles right so around 15 people um there is um three people officially working in the supply chain. I said that in Austin they are also doing now other things um and it one is doing more in the sourcing one is doing it more in the marketing don't ask me why it came blah blah blah it was just like that then there's two people doing graphic design um they're doing also the boxes they're um we we have nine different marketplaces they need to upload images uh in in several different languages um then we have one for video, one for um accounting, one for customer service, one um for our Shopify shop, then um two for PPC, but no, three for PPC, but they're part-time. And then the the right hand, the somewhat manager. So, the graphics people and the video person, you have three SKs and you're not posting anything to social media except you said you're doing some playing around. What are they doing? Are they full-time in people and what are they doing? Um, the video is not 100% full-time, but the graphics are almost and um I already tried to give a little bit of explanation. Uh they um I mean right now for instance we wanted to be better in pigful and product opinion, right? So I was like who's going to do this you know like I need the team to also get an understanding for this how what what can be done right I mean obviously it always sounds so easy but when we were trying to do it it we realized that a lot of people don't understand the product they were just trying to give as quick as possible an answer and they didn't really answer our question um so like the graphic designers are also doing the Pikfu uh testing right now and there that's there's a lot of potential and a lot of things that you know first try to find out that's a couple days work that's not like full-time job so what are they doing the rest of the time drinking coffee drinking beer what what are they what are they doing what are you paying them for that that's the hot seat guy so um what no seriously what are they doing I mean because that's you have three SKs you said you're working on some others but that comes from you so they're not working on that because that comes from you Kevin this is the question session, not the advice session. No, I'm asking him. Um, we have a Clockify. They work. They don't um I don't think they're they're like scamming me. Um um I mean they're also doing other things. They were just u we were trying to do um an ebook that we can give out. They they were helping me on that. Um, as I said, they they're sometimes spending days to upload and change of our images on all markets. Um, okay, we'll go on. We'll continue on. Josh, you have another question. My fi my final question for you is this. So, your first answer to the first question was like, I don't know if anything breaks if I leave for three months other than we're not growing. Okay, good. Maybe you've got your operations solved. That's great. You said if I could if I only had to work two hours per day, I would focus on like growth initiatives, right? And to grow the business. My question to you then is why are you not doing 8, 10, 12 hours a day focused exclusively just on implementing those growth tactics in your business? assuming you don't need to spend any time on the graphic design, the POS, the accounting, payroll, anything like that because um I would say straight away probably some limiting beliefs in general but um the way that I lose a lot of time is in the communication with the team. So they're not independent enough and as I said like they don't have the framework where they are able to you know own the process and um grow it by them by themselves. Um many of them don't have any FBA or e-commerce background. So like when we hired them we're we're training them like I'm meeting with them. I'm giving them um ideas of what we can do next. I'm giving them feedback of you know what they should do to try to make the listings more converting and and all these things. So I do spend I would say the most of my time in meeting the people, discussing things with the people and giving uh advice, giving uh suggestions. So the the business would not break but um it would somehow run. I just to be straight away I don't have the guts enough I would say if if we're here to um to say you know or I'm I'm stuck in this right now so I don't have the time to make those processes so that they would be able to do that. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. All right, Tim. I had a lot of questions. I had to circle three or four. All right. So, you said what you do. All right. So, hey, I could You essentially told Josh, I could remove myself from the business and it'll be fine. I mean, it's not going to grow. So, so you're saying you're spending your time growing, but what are you actually good at? Because if we break down like a typical e-commerce Amazon sellers day-to-day functions, there's like 95 things every day that you have to look at, be aware of, or do. And usually we're only good at like four. So, not what you're doing out of necessity, but like what are you naturally really good at? What's your special sauce? If your business died tomorrow and you're like, crap, I got to make money for the family. I need to outsource my special ability to somebody else. Like, what is that that you're actually really good at? Yeah, very good question. uh still very difficult to answer for myself um because I feel like I'm still um a person that can do many things like oversee more things like I at least I enjoy it. Uh apparently it I'm not that bad at because there is some some um some success in the team and I can motivate them. I can um um motivate them, make them feel, you know, that they're in the right team, that they're doing the right thing, that they uh develop themselves. They're like we have a very good um team culture, I would say. Um I personally am not good in graphic design. I'm not good in PPC. I do I think I'm good in product sourcing in general like um you know trying to figure out what could be improved in a product um like thinking uh a step ahead um yeah so to sum it up some kind of like oversight you know like leading some way or the other um a team um product uh sourcing and Um, I forgot the third one, but anyway, something like that. That's part of the answer. That's perfect. She can't even remember the third one. That uh answers my question. All right. So, what's the um like I remember years ago when Manny Coats was selling neck pillows, it turned into like the joke. Like, find something good to sell on Amazon. Never sell a weighted blanket or a hooded baby towel or a neck pillow. But you've done pretty well. you're selling 10 million euros a year, you know, as as was said already. But like wh why? Because the way I perceived you said, "Yeah, I kind of don't understand how to do marketing." Uh you know, like you can't even explain your real secret sauce. So I'm assuming that it has kind of sold itself through a unique design, which I see. In fact, I looked at I was like, "God, I need this cuz I got a fat neck and I'm tired of the head forward thing, too." what's proprietary and how did you come up with that design which is I'm assuming what caused the growth of the sales I mean this pillow as I said it's quite special because of its design um for most people it looks really weird no no that's all we ask I understand the pillow how did you come up with the design and is it proprietary because I've noticed the word patent on some of your stuff but I can't find it in the USPTO like tell me what is special about the product and how did you know to do that special thing? So there is no IP involved. Um I was lucky and um I improved it. So you found it. So you started off by finding this at Canton Fair. That's how you started this whole thing. You said in your history, right? Was it very similar to that? Very similar. So, what did you do to improve the original commoditized neck pillow you found at Canton Fair? I mean, this is already not very like it it's still a general travel pillow, but it's not the regular one. I understand. So, what is unique about yours? And did you come up with that thing that's unique or did you find it already developed? I was starting to say what's unique which which is this design. It's uh from racing. So it has it comes up here on the sides. It's very thin on the back. We made that uh backside even thinner. Obviously it's inflatable which makes it much smaller which people always are afraid that it loses air. So the valve is not losing air. Um, and if you if you don't in if you if you know how to really use it, that's half of the way, you know. So, like educating people on how to use this. This one has an extra button at the front. So, but I think he's he's asking those you're telling us about the product, but he's asking what is unique? What is what is different? Did you find this or did you modify this? Did you actually ask the factory to modify this and add these racing backs and these things or did you take this and found it at Kanton Fair and you're like, "Okay, I'm just going to put my name on it." And I'm not trying to tear apart the product. I'm trying to figure out like how what's the genesis of this thing that is selling pretty well and what is unique about it that causes it to sell. I didn't come up with it entirely, but I did improve it over time. That's it. Okay. That's it. I mean, um, you would like when you go into this space, you would think, um, duh, it's so easy to to just make the this this this backside more narrow because I mean, it's obvious that it just doesn't shouldn't be so so thick. But if you go into a retail store, you can't you hardly can get ones that are narrow on the backside. Um, and I mean you would think it's normal memory foam, but it's so easy to mess up that memory foam. It can be too hard, too soft. It can be arrived stinky. It can be arrived curled and and all these things. So, no, I mean, if I had entirely invented this thing, then it would be much bigger. But we're just doing very good travel pillows. um on your website when you're talking about your business, you said, "We look for new ideas and inspiration to expand our collection. Um you've also mentioned that you had some things like eye mask that didn't sell. What else have you tried that failed?" And maybe it's nothing, but like is eye mask the only thing that you tried and failed or have you tried other things too? Um, and maybe not even to full launch, just like things that you tried to get prototypes on or things that you tried to run through polling and see if people would like it. Like what other ideas were cancelled before they went all the way to fruition? Other than the there's was one more um after co we were like we shouldn't be so dependent on the travel niche and we had a neck stretching pillow. Uh we sourced it um like a traction pillow. traction pillow. You lay on it and it pulls your um discs slightly. Um I would call it a fail as well. Um but we yeah it wasn't selling quick. It wasn't hardly any profit and it to be honest I was then finally happy when it was over because like I want to be more like a travel brand and not like a home health support brand anyway. But but two products that failed. So you've basically got three three primary SKUs. How old are the listings on those in the different regions you're selling? They're new. They're getting updated. Uh maybe a few months. They're not brand new listings. You've got a couple thousand reviews on one. When did you f Like how old are the Okay. Okay. Got it. Not how updated are the listings? Okay. Um 2018. You good? All right, Norm. Okay. Um, let's see. This return rate, isn't there anything you can do to bring that 13% return? That's scary. Uh, why is it so high? We did an analysis of the return rate uh in the US and um uh a lot of people like the the biggest return reason was I don't need it anymore. Um so it was it was quite difficult um to really nail down. I mean for the inflatable there's always a slow percentage that loses air. Like it's just impossible, right? you know it from manufacturing there's like the Chinese they they they do a test afterwards blah blah blah. Um the second reason I think is like comfort right so comfort is very subjective. Um, now that listening to videos and product opinion or so, like people make their decision on whether the lady that was seen on the picture had a ponytail and that the person has ponytail themselves and then they buy it and then it turns out that it's not the right like they feel it not comfortable. That's what they basically say. Um, so that's why we're somewhat trying with different sizes and explanations. uh of what what to choose. It always has the downside of people getting confused. You know, they want one listing and one size fits all and then they're done. Good pricing. Um as I said, like in Europe, it is absolutely bearable our return rate. It's still between 8 to 10%. In the US, it's between 12 and 15. Um I uh was inspired by some of your comments. Um or was it was it you like proactively um addressing things on the listing? Uh I'm sure we can do more. Like one is um you should not inflate this 100%. Um which everyone thinks why not, you know, but then they're usually disappointed because then it's so stiff and hard and and bulky. Um yeah. Um that's that were our attempts if that's your question. Okay. Yep. That's good. Um another one is I was just listening to what you were talking up to Melissa about and about community. So you're trying to get people in the travel niche to to buy your product. Are you doing anything to build a community? We have a Shopify store and obviously we have there the uh email addresses and um we have an email flow that goes to them um you know recommending the products but just an email flow that's just an email flow there is no active you know there's no nothing right now that is like actively done to build that community okay and I got two quick questions. One is off of uh Tim's question. If you're going to grow this and you want to grow it fairly aggressively over the next little while, why aren't you protecting the IP on your product? Um I was talking with Rich like it's uh kind of stupid. Anyway, I knew that you can only um patent things if they're novel and I knew from the beginning that they were not novel. So, I would have just like registered it so that I have a little bit more peace of mind or if somebody comes and you know we're fighting about it, I would at least have this patent. Um, I don't have a perfect answer other than that that I knew it wouldn't be stable. Um, but I would say it does make sense to just patent it and no matter what. I mean, in like in the US, I'm not even sure if I can patent it because somebody would check it, right? In Europe, you can just register the design. nobody checks it and you have it until somebody comes and says, "Well, I mean, you brought this up in 2018. Um, and you patented it in 2025, you know, like this is not novel." Um, obviously I could, you know, patent the little adjustments like button here, button there. Um, the this the small logo could be patent. Yeah. Um, should be true. So the last thing and this goes back to your team. So you've got a whole bunch of you got 15 people on your team quite a bit um especially for three products. Uh but you just mentioned that you train them, right? So are you an expert in all of this because uh maybe you want to look at some fra or no. So you train them but all of these people are they experts? Are they smarter than you or are they just learning what you knew and you're not growing because of that? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I cannot uh video edit. I cannot use Photoshop. So they know that. The thing is that they don't have sometimes um kind of like in mind you know what we've learned you know like what should be presented on those images. how do we explain the product and so forth. So um there I'm giving advice and the supply chain. Yeah, I was training them. Um, you know, I was doing that literally. Obviously Mina had to um beforehand um in PPC my um my right hand that manager um she's training them um and the rest obviously yeah I you know like accounting blah um customer service obviously I I explain I explained it um right so they are better in this case but they don't have the big enough picture like so you said you said earlier you're not good at PPC so who who's doing your PPC you know how are you training them to do the PPC well the the lady that does that manages it right now she came on in 2021 like right when we're still in COVID selling face masks and um I mean I do know everything about the metrics and things like that I just hate doing that, you know, just adjusting bits all day or so, you know, it's just not my thing. So, but I I led her into it, you know, so I was like, "This is important. This is not important. These are the here are videos. Here are, you know, like we I held her hand learning it." Does that make sense? Anything else, Norm? Nope. That's it. Michelle? Oh, it's it's like so fun to have to like spend time on TikTok as part of your job. It's like so fun. Um, okay. If you were to Are you logged into your Tik Tok profile right now? Can you pull your mic a little bit closer, Michelle? Are you lo Are you logged in? Um, are you logged into your your brand Tik Tok profile right now? Um, just a disclaimer, there's two. One is the German one that I do my videos and there is a bigger one that my colleague is I guess posting. So if you're on the English page, do the bigger one, whichever one that is. Yeah, I am logged in. Okay. Go to your profile in the lower right. You guys can follow along if you want. Um in your own profiles, click on the top three uh lines on the upper right. Yep. And then go to settings and privacy. Yep. And go to account. and account information. Everyone's Tik Toks are playing now. So, does that does that say a country? Nope. Um, it might be is that is this a personal account or a business account? Personal. Okay. Um, all right. So, that was question number one. Um, what country are you do you live your life in day in and day out that you're resident of? Um, maybe that answers your question. That German one that I personally run, it shows Germany because I set it up and I upload the videos there. This was set up in Bulgaria. Normally, it shows Bulgaria there as a country. Um, and I'm based in Germany. Okay. Um, thank you for that. Do you have where where is your inventory primarily? Primarily um obviously it starts in China. We have good relationships with the supplier. So if for instance now with the US if we don't need it right away they store it for a little while. Then uh we ship it to German warehouses or in the US to AWD and um further on. So German 3PL warehouses is where the stock is before it gets sent to Amazon warehouses in in for for EU purposes. For EU purposes. Yeah. Sometimes we do also AGL for um for EU but mainly um Hamburg warehouses like that. They receive it at the port and then they obviously send the cartons to Amazon. Gotcha. Um, are you on Tik Tok shop in any of the country in any countries? No, I I do get the offer in Germany to start it. Um, but didn't want to start another shiny object. Why do you consider Tik Tok a shiny object? Um, I mean, not shiny object, but like not to distract myself, like I I I do feel like it doesn't make I mean, I don't have um from the people that I mentioned, there's nobody that officially has like was hired to do marketing or social media. So, it is kind of like pushing this to somebody else if I'm not doing it myself. And it feels like it would make sense to kind of like, you know, make a better structure and hire people and then uh do that. Do you enjoy content creation? Um I would not say a lot. I I would I would say I'm not too I mean how to say I'm not afraid of a camera and I um there's probably my some of my team members would do worse. Let's put it this way. Um but I don't like this pressure of like keeping the world informed about me and my business. It's just not a natural thing that I enjoy uh doing. if there is um if there was like a really really good person that has a really good script that I personally also like that he would give it to me every day and I already started you know like a little bit of a setup and some lights and stuff like that and I could just you know maybe a teleprompter read it out show it be funny be entertaining be myself I wouldn't mind this is kind of like a little bit my idea of um of of doing it in the future but Um I'm a person that is somewhat perfectionist. So it's difficult for me to do social media because you know I would spend too much time and there would be too little output. Yeah. Gotcha. Um can I ask one more question? One more. Yeah. Then we got to move on. Um now you started this because you had interest in the digital nomad world in space. Is that still an interest and a passion of yours or is do you feel like you've outgrown it? Um, it's a paradox. I don't know if you've seen that. Like, um, I I started it to travel the world and have get money while I'm sleeping or whatever all these things. Um, well, not really. I mean, I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to to because I think this is um for personal development, this is the best thing you can do. You run a business, you have to handle people, you have to grow yourself, you have to be able to handle more money and so forth. So, I do enjoy that. Um, I I would like to sometimes go to other places and live there, but my wife has now a job where we live in Germany and therefore it's not so easy for her to say, "Let's go for 3 months to Thailand and work from there." And then if I was there, um, she would be bored most of the time because I would still be working most of the day and then she has nothing to do kind of, you know. So, this is kind of like a little paradox that we're in. Um, so we can't really live that life that we could be doing that I could work from anywhere. Um, and it's okay for me. It's okay for me. Like I would uh we're trying to make it work that we have two bases per year. Maybe like in the winter we're leaving Germany and in the summer we're living there. So like we live in two places. That's enough. It's very exhausting as everyone knows to travel and work at the same time. Thank you. Dan, you have some questions for Yeah, thanks Kevin. Wow, I got a lot of questions. Um, what's driving this year-on-year growth rate? Forget the US. Not interested in that right now. Europe, what's driving the growth rate? 22, 23, 24, so 3 million, 7 million, 10 million. What activity has driven that? Increasing demand. So, is it market or product based? So is it your brand like actions you've taken or is it just the categories increased because of global travel? Both like the market increased significantly. Our market share increased significantly. Like to be honest like four years ago I didn't even think about being the best seller. And then I don't know at some point we're like why don't why don't we try to be the best seller. And then um when sometimes Amazon shows um some statistics we have 40 50% market share in Germany. What? So, if we get to the point on it, what actions did you take to generate that? Right. I bought more inventory, did more um PPC. We're we're spending like um um our tacos is like uh 15% or 20% of our revenue is being spent on uh I'll come to that in a sec. Is the Is the current growth trajectory still the same? So, we're past Q1. Are you still on that same growth trajectory? Is it or is it flattened out? Oh, it's flattened. No, we're not growing. Yeah. Okay. Um, in terms of margins, give me your margins. Landed cost margin after Amazon fee margin and then gross after advertising margin. So, I call that CM 1, two, and three. But tell me what your margins is after your landing cost. Then after your all of your Amazon and fulfillment fees, and then after your advertising roughly is fine, right? So, or give me the percentages that each one reverse calculate. As I said, like about 20% of the net revenue is for paying the CGS, for paying inventory. Yeah. So, you're an 81, you're an 80% CM1. Okay. Next one. Okay. Um then we spend um around 20% of our net revenue on Amazon ads. So, that's that brings us down to CM3. What's how much is uh how much is your kind of Amazon Filmman 3PL's that kind of block? So after you land the cost before your advertising. Okay. So what's your gross margin? Right. Right. Right. So like Amazon fulfillment fees and all Amazon fees is um around another way to ask it. What's your margin before advertising? No, I have that number. Uh it's it's 38%. That you're spending. That is the percentage of our net revenue that we pay for fulfillment of Amazon. 38% which means you're at about what 40 you're at 42% CM2 and then you're spending 20 on advertising right which is your tacos. You're about 22% CM3 which is healthier. It's a lot healthier than I thought actually. Okay cool. Um what's driving your review rate? How are you getting reviews? I mean we do have um inserts um we have good customer service but no special action of like incentivizing people for reviewers. Okay, cool. And did I hear it right? You've got there's no order product order ready products yet in the pipeline currently you have zero products that are kind of in development or order ready. Yeah. No, there is a one. There's one. When was the last time you launched a product? Uh I think last year was that the diff like another one of this that is higher that is um so last year. Yeah last year. What's the um you're sourcing out China? Yeah. What's the relationship like with the supplier? What the payment terms? Um 20 up front. Yeah. And then uh the rest 30 days after arriving at the European uh harbor. Have you negotiated them in in recent history? Is that recent or um I think we did that in 2023. So beforehand it was like you know earlier the rest part and then we changed it to one month after arrival. Okay. Sorry I'm going to push three questions. So we didn't no we didn't renegotiate it. Okay. Um talk to me about PPC campaign structure. What placements are you currently targeting? all placements conversion rate against competitors are you benchmarked average or would you say above average or below in uh Europe um above average in US below average okay and final question I'll make it per who you say your primary avatar is like if you had to pick one person who is it you're selling to who's the ICP tell like describe it him But they um give me the give me the description of who you're selling to based on the d or to reverse that question based on the data who's buying this product and who's you who's using this product. Every time we try to look at this data it is between 25 and 55 male and female equal and it's just an equal split is it? Huh? It's an equal split. Equal split split. Absolutely. There's um well I would say that's more demographics. Can you tell me more about the avatar? Yeah, tell me about the avatar. So like if you were to kind of analyze reviews and stuff like they talk about use cases, why they bought it, like give me some give me some sort of kind of feedback on the customer. I mean if you talk about data then I would say it is a little bit older aged about our avatar. We don't have it because every time we tried it, it was not clear. But I would say it is a person that is um somewhere in his 40s. Um and I would do a male and a female avatar to be honest because that's still demographics. He's asking avatar. They're still helpful. But you're still you're still answering in demographics. What what is the avatar? Do you understand what that means? Give me an example. An avatar would be like this is a person who's a backpacker that travels uh is doing a trip around the world and is a digital nomad. That would be an avatar. An avatar would be this is a business person who takes uh two trips a week uh for business from UK to Dubai uh and has to take overnight flights. That's an avatar. So what Yeah. Is it a 40-year-old couple doing two holidays a year? Are they are they traveling frequently? Is this a I bought a travel pillow? It's okay if you don't know. You can say you don't. If you don't know, it's fine. It's just Right. Like Yeah. I don't know. Okay. Um, how final question, you talk about growth. Yeah. And I've got lots of thoughts on that. Um, how much capital have you got for growth? What's your budget? Like if you are you on those terms, you're probably just about cash positive. Yeah. In terms of you don't need to fund any networking capital. You can cash flow the inventory, right? Um, what's if you when you say you want to go 10 to 50, it's an aggressive target, right? It's going to take some serious investment into new product, product development, inventory, marketplace expansion, PPC. We'll talk about I'm sure everyone here will talk about content in a bit. Um, what's the Have you got capital in the bank for growth or not? Um, like there is no debt right now. Um, but there is since last year there is no buffer like there is no capital to grow. So you'd have to raise capital to do it. We would have to raise capital now. And have you got a strong supplier relationship? Yeah. Okay. That's it. Okay. Reu. Yeah. So, I have a follow-up question uh to what Tim was asking about your unique um Can you pull the microphone a little bit closer? Sure. Yeah. So, just a follow-up question on uh the uniqueness or the unique selling proposition of your product. So, I just took a brief look at your page and there's about 462 other competitors that look very similar and they serve the same need which is just next support. Um, and then I also found a couple of um H uh shaped ones like the one you have here that are selling at a third of your price. Uh, and then one more uh, you know, customer say um, section that's popped up on your page. Uh, it's an AI based section that's saying everything is checked. Comfort, yes, inflatability, compactness, travel, comfort. The only thing that's not checked is value for money. So that's kind of standing out as can you can you ask what's the question though not a solution? Yeah. I know the the question is yeah so my question is uh like how did you price the product uh given that it's not that unique uh even maybe in your eyes it's not so different and if you feel like there's something unique like the the hoodie why isn't that kind of the the leading feature of you know how you're marketing um the brand um I mean the be more specific. What is the final question? Yes. So the question is uh the value for money uh like how did you decide on this price point given that it is so similar to like 400 500 products in that same uh category. Um so I didn't think it that way like I mean I we developed it. we made it better that we had to use this price to make you know to be profitable. Um it turned out that many are much cheaper but uh that is not a problem in Europe like people still prefer ours over theirs. I mean better listing, better quality, better thought, whatever. Um, I do believe that there is also a difference between the one that is a third of the price than to ours. Even though it looks the same. Yeah, it looks right. I mean, just saying, you know, like it looks the same, but it might not be actually 100%, you know, the same product. Um, it it might fall apart, you know, like you can't close it. Um, and it might lose the air and it might be thicker and all this thing. Um, I I have like a embroidery logo on there which costs money and just is for branding. Um so um we can't go lower and so far it has been fine obviously in in in in the rest of the world in US it's it's difficult. Got it. Um do you have a deal strategy that you run regularly like lightning deals and things like that? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah in in Europe we we're doing this since the beginning of I don't know very early 2023. We are always running deals. We we're in part of the SAS and in um in Europe there you run you negotiate with them the top deals. So uh whenever we can and whenever they look great you know that there's a higher list price and a low uh deal price we do that it was it's a big chunk of our revenue like in 2023 and 24 a big percentage of all the sales were deals sales. Got it. Um so the next question is related to your advertising. Um so I took a look at all three of your markets and the uh PPC to organic ratio or the PPC to total ratio is the best in in um Germany it's 56%. Whereas in um US it's 72%. So 72% of your sales are coming from PPC which means there's not much kind of effort put into like um keyword ranking and things like that. uh can you speak a little bit about your strategies uh in the in the US market specifically because you're trying to figure out whether to stay there or not uh of what's been tried with keyword like what has been your approach to finding keywords finding audiences finding categories to go after um I mean I would say we are even though the numbers are not great we are quite um deep into PPC um we obviously did the best we could with data dive and and everything to for the keywords um for PPC for the images even though I know I would say there's um still room for improvement um so um the way it used to work in Europe was just uh the conversion rate was higher and um CPCs were lower. It worked out. Um in USA um we um have a higher return rate. The conversion rate is not so high. We also got them the frequently returned item badge for a while. Um I maybe for one pillow we still have it actually. Yeah. And um um I would I would say we're not I don't know. We're not bad in SEO, but um we just tried whatever um is best practice. Okay. All right. So, that concludes the questions time. So, what we're going to do now is go to some solutions. So remember what he said in the beginning is that uh some of the things that he's looking for and maybe you see that there's some other problems that's okay to address that but he said he's looking for how to improve his team how to grow on his team what he should actually be focusing on there's a lot of shiny objects out there and what should he be focusing on and also any suggestions norm any suggestions you have for his listing uh or his branding as Well, uh, so is there anybody that would like to go first? Tim. All right, Tim, you go ahead and go first. That was All right. So, every every one of these that I've done, I think I've done seven or eight now. I feel like there's the questions you asked, you know, hey, can you help me with this? And like I really feel like I know where Dan's thinking along the lines of some things and and like I I can kind of guess that some of the things that people want to share are not necessarily answers to the specific questions you ask, but they're super important. And I think that every one of these that I've done and every business owner I talked to, there's really three categories of of areas that you need to assess. The first one is like first off, stop identifying as an Amazon seller. I think all of us like if I said hey raise your hand if you're an Amazon seller and you raise your hand and say you're all idiots quit being an Amazon seller be a product that's seller that may also sell on Amazon right so your objective in selling neck pillows you need to think am I selling the right product to the right audience okay so that goes into avatars product development all that stuff then you say if I'm if I have the right product for the right audience am I using the correct sales channels to do so and you're identifying that hey it's easier to do it in Europe not so much here. Um, you know, is Tik Tok shop right for me? Is Shopify right? Should I be selling these retail? And then the third thing is if I have the right product, the right audience, and I've identified the right sales channels, then what are the correct tactical approaches that I should be taking to achieve that success? So, like Michelle's going to go deep into like, hey, if you're selling this neck pillow and you've identified the right, like here's how you can utilize Tik Tok shop. I'm gonna start really high first and I'm gonna say something that may be terrifying, but like my biggest fear is that it doesn't really matter what you do tactically. You can take the best advice from anybody in this room, you will never hit $50 million. You know why? 100%. Because you're just selling a polished turd. 100%. And that's not your fault. What I'm saying is like look at your growth. And I was going to ask like what were your sales before before co here's what I think has happened. I think that you out survived everybody. You out hustled and outworked everybody cuz even based on your answers you're like yeah I don't really know how we did that. Yeah I'm not really sure what our strength is. You know like so it's amazing like someone else said€10 million euros selling a neck pillow. Holy crap. It's literally the example of the worst product to sell and you did it. Congratulations. Round of applause. Like amazing. But but your objective, like your goal to get to $50 million and make an exit, I don't think you should care if it's a neck pillow. Like you want to create generational wealth for your family and you are working your butt off selling one of the most difficult products to sell and you got lucky because if you look at your sales trends, most of your competitors dropped off. I don't think that you have expanded your brand presence to more people necessarily, which is how you got that growth, which Dan asked the right question. It's actually flatlined. Like this year, your year-over-year growth is probably zero compared to last year. I think that postcoid, most people dropped off of this type of product and you just outlasted them and out muscled them all and you're capturing a larger percentage of the market based on less competitors. That will not last. It won't last. the way you're going now. So, I think when you're asking questions like, "How can I advertise better on TikTok, like very valid questions, no matter what you do, that's all great advice. It's all stuff you need to hear, but like I think you need to figure out, is this something that you should be selling?" Because you and your family and your team has a finite amount of time and a finite amount of resources, right? If your objective is to make a big exit eventually, I think that you have done such an incredible job with such a difficult product that maybe instead of thinking about do I add a hood to this pillow, you take all of these amazing resources and energy and skills that you have and go what's next? Like I could keep trying to shine up this turd and sell a little bit more of it, but man, there's so many products and so many opportunities to make money that aren't 5% net profit margins that you're not killing yourself, but like you can't be emotionally attached to this. And like I've been here like deep in groth and going through like this market and this market is dying. Like the average global growth potential for travel uh accessories is less than 4%. And for neck pillows it's 1.5%. Successful e-commerce businesses have an average of 25%. So, no matter how hard you work on getting the valve right and getting the review rate and figuring out the perfect social media strategy, like I'm just going to challenge you and say, man, maybe those efforts like those those energy, you know, expenditures are best fit in thinking instead of throwing just a hood on this thing, like is there a way to utilize our skills and resources, which you have tremendous amounts of, and like should we pivot entirely to something new that's going to have a higher net profit? margin that's going to sell better that's not completely cannibalized because your business is already dying if you say that it's flat from last year like man use the money that you have right now use the resource you have right now and be thinking much bigger to what am I going to do with my life in selling a product based on knowledge I have then how do you know do I add a little bit of size differentiation here I I think like that's what I'm screaming in my head is like dude get off the ship while it's still afloat because I honestly believe that you could take every tactic that every expert in this room knows and even if you completely crushed every single one of them, which is going to be tough for any of us in here, I still think the ceiling of this is really, really low, just because the market is only going to bear so much and you don't have unique IP, right? Um, I don't want to occupy so much time. Now, I have two pages of like tactical stuff that that I can share with you. We can talk about that offline and I know some people are getting hit but like that's the first thing that I just I cannot get it out of my head is like holy crap dude you're awesome. You've done an amazing job with a crap a crap opportunity. No offense and like man the more time you spend trying to fix that valve I'm thinking this ship is filling full of water and you need to be thinking about a new ship instead of patching this one. If you were going to do one out of those two pages of tactical, if you're going to advise him on one thing, what would be one thing is he's like, "Okay, I hear you. I hear you, Tim, but I'm going to go forward anyway. I'm going to keep driving the ship." What should he do? So, I think that if if you handed this to me and said like, "Tim, life, like you hold a gun to my head and say like, get this going." I think that you go is Steve Simson in here. He just stepped out. He just stepped out. I'm I'm gonna steal something that he taught me. Go to the University of MSU and that stands for make up. You have no IP, but it doesn't matter. You have to raise your perceived value. And like Ritu hit on hit on something. You're priced in the middle. You're not the cheapest, but you're not the most expensive either. Like are you a premier brand or are you the budget brand? You're kind of priced in the middle. If I had to make one immediate change right now to increase your ability to sell this stuff, whether you raise the price or not, increase the perceived value and you can't IP protect it. But what you can do is create product and accessory names that mean nothing. Like anybody that has an iPad in here, what is the screen on it? It's called a retina display. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing. They just made it up. Like I can go into I've already done a chat GPT and Grock and like based on this neck pillow from Flow Zoom. What accessories or what functional you know functional accessories on here can I come up with a name that I could copyright and then I can put those in my listings to raise perceived value. Right? Retina display means nothing but people like the idea of it. I would go on and create perceived value on things that you can protect which is just MSU make made up like names and create create perceived value to start increasing your conversion rate and that also gives something for content creators to use because like pick this girl's brain up here sorry like she'll tell you that she's have you ever sold a neck pillow she's looked at hundreds of them and here's what she does as a content creator she looks at all these neck pillows which are basically the same and goes I can make money on that one because there's something unique that I can talk about without me having to come up with it myself. Like she wants to be able to sell something with limited amount of time. So if you come up with little creative names and functions and like all sorts of stuff, she's going to look at go, "Oh, I can sell that." Because this is the only neck pillow with the I don't know snot saver fabric that's easier to clean when you've drooled on this thing from sleeping on an airplane. Man, that's huge for content creators. And all you have to in in 10 minutes, the group here could come up with a hundred of those things. You could put five on your listing right now. And then people like her are selling to her audience and community without you even having to build a community. But you have to give them something to work with because right now you've got the same crap that everybody else has. You can make some small changes to perceived value without doing anything and give other people with communities incentive to sell your product as opposed to your competitors. Josh. Yeah. So, here's uh I've got three for you and I'll I'll contradict what what Tim said here. Um, how dare you? How dare um I don't I don't necessarily see it as a sinking ship that you're like, I got to bail out of this thing immediately. I do think like there's some massive brands within the space. Okay. But it goes back to Tim talked about this which was easily I had it written down. Get clear on who you are serving. Like who's your avatar? Like who is the audience that you're trying to serve and then go deep. Okay. Go deep trying to serve that person and create your brand and your mission that's meant to serve that person. So that's So one thing that I'm going to talk about is like are you aware of um the brand Ostri Ostrich Pillow? Yep. Okay. Turtle. Yep. Okay. Have you looked at their stuff? Their DTOC website? Do you know them and everything that they're doing? Yeah. Why are you not replicating what they're doing? They have the playbook that you want to get to 50 million. There's your playbook. Like like dead serious. Can I piggyback on one thing to what he said? You don't know your avatar. It took me three minutes to determine that since you have a size adjustable thing, the biggest opportunity you have is to advertise to women with small necks. And I already had it pulled up turtles homepage. The first 12 videos and pictures, 10 of them are women. And they had to create a unique frame inside their product. All you got to do is let air out of it. So like go and like see what other people have spent millions of dollars doing research on and piggy back on that. Sorry. Yeah. So they have your playbook. It's right there. Okay. So that's number one. You've got to identify ostrich pillow is very different than the turtle. Okay. So identify your unique position in the market. That's number one. You've got to get clear on that before you do any of the other strategies because everything else is just to be honest what what Tim said is polishing a turd in a way of like you're just like trying to keep you're just on the hamster wheel and it's never actually going to get anywhere. You know what I mean? So that's number one. Okay. Action item number two. You talked about, hey, I come to a conference like this and this applies to everybody else that's that's here listening as well. We come to these events and you're just filled with like pages filled with notes and you're like, what do I do next? Okay, what I use is called the icecoring framework. Okay, it's impact, confidence, and ease. Okay, so you take everything that you learn. I talked about Tik Tok shop, Michelle talked about it. heard lots of good stuff, but like what is Tik Tok shop? So, you're gonna you're gonna take all of the ideas, you're going to list them on a sheet of paper, and then rank each of them in three different areas: impact, confidence, and ease out of a scale of one to five. Okay? And then you're going to say, "How impactful will this be to my business?" Like, this can be gamechanging. Like, this is the new iPhone, right, for my brand like it was for Apple. Okay, that's impact confidence. What is your level of confidence of being able to like, oh, I'm amazing at this. I'm going to come in here. I'm gonna smash this. Like, I am super bullish on this strategy or it's a long shot. Like maybe a one. It's a Hail Mary, right? You're going to know that. And then ease. How quickly is this? Is it like, oh, I can turn this around. Like, give me eight hours. I can have this out the door in eight hours. or is this like this is a three-month haul and I'm going to have to hire a bunch of different, you know, VAS or whatever to actually pull this thing off, right? So, as you scale rank all of those, what you'll be able to do is like tally up the scores and it's going to give you kind of like a descending list of like here's your easiest lowhanging fruit opportunities that you can implement in your business quicker and faster to be able to scale. So, that's number two. The last one and again this applies to everybody as well is focusing on your leading actions in the business rather than the lagging indicators. Okay, a lagging indicator in your business is your revenue, your gross profit, your net profit. All of those are lagging metrics that is a result of all the work that you did 12 months ago, 18 months ago. Okay, what your whatever your P&L is, you already did that work. you planted those seeds 12 months ago. However, what are you doing today that are your leading actions that is going to produce future revenue and profit in your business? That's what you need to be focused on on a daily basis. What are the leading indicators? So, let me throw out a few for you. And here's what I think you did that you you haven't addressed it, but I think this is what your leading indicators has been that's allowed you to scale to 10 to eight figures. You've scaled out on various Amazon marketplaces, nine different countries, right? And in a way, just as you guys launch new products, like he's he's got three SKs. Him going into those different product markets was essentially launching brand new products for him. That's how he was able to scale his revenue. So for him, his leading actions were everything to do with how do I how do how am I compliant in the UK? How am I compliant in Poland or France or whatever it is, right? Those have been your leading indicators, right? Your leading actions for your brand. Sound it. You've basically hit the wall on that, right? And you're like, ah, I can go to Japan now, but what's the TAM there? Right? Like you're starting to hit that ceiling. So now you need to identify what are the next leading actions that you can implement in your business right and we talked about Tik Tok shop there's so many ideas right so then it goes back to the icecoring methodology right so take from the eyecoring here are my value levers here are the things that if I focus on only have three at a time these are my leading actions that if I do these every day these will produce significant growth in the future that would be my recommendation for Cool. Yeah. Awesome. Uh, okay. Overall position, I concur with Tim. You are riding a legacy review moat that's kept you where you are um in a market that's grown postco. Um, and I believe your revenue growth has come from European expansion. So, there have been there has been intentional action there as you've just talked about. Um, but you're like many legacy sellers that I meet and speak to where the last three years got their ass kicked because the I call them the new generation sellers that come with a more subjective product design, a proper brand. Um, kind of catch you up on your review moat and all of a sudden you're not the big I was about to say big dick in the room then, but you know what I mean, not the the big guy in the room and everyone's caught your sales. I I started out I started out with Tim's line of thinking believing this this guy's got no chance. And then as you started giving me your financials and where you are, um I believe you are in a moment in time where the next decision you make strategically will determine the success of your business and your income for your future. Um but you haven't got very long until that's at risk. So here's what I do. Um you've got strong you're riding review mode review rate strong. Review rate in this business is the gas pedal. It determines how quickly a product can grow in a category. Um, and it determines how much market share you've got above a competitor. Um, you are in a what I would call a non-subjective product, which is the meto bought and badged off Alibaba that we all started with six, seven years ago. Me too products have a very, very short shelf life on them, especially in this category. Differentiation has to be visual. I know the designer of Turtle, your competitor designer, the guy that designed it. Um, and just like turtle, just like the vampire garlic press in the garlic press category. Visual differentiation is what drives Tik Tok. It what drives Shopify because it's demonstrable and it's what attracts the click. Stop thinking about pushing in the US. Forget Shopify. Forget Tik Tok. Forget all of that for now because you don't have the foundation for it. If you wanted a quick win, I'd be getting Lin Works and I'd be extending into all the non-Amazon European marketplaces. There's dozens of them. Lyn Works with one button will put you in all of them. you can fulfill it from Amazon and your margins will support profit in those markets. I reckon you could add another two or three million dollars just by doing that with your current brand and current position. Um, with us, I wouldn't pull out by pull back. Pull back to maintenance. Cut down all of the placements that are broad um placements that aren't driving rank and just maintain profitability while you fix the brand and fix the the alignment with the avatar. um because you want to slowly continue to gather those reviews so that when you do fix the product, the brand and understanding who you're targeting, you've got that base of which to really push in the US, but you're nowhere near strong enough to compete in the US right now. So, I'd stop trying to push there. It's like burning fire. It's like burning money and just just pull back and maintain. Cut back the ad spend. Get rid of all the wasted clicks and stick to more of those longtail exact placements where the leading indicator is your PPC conversions higher than you than your unit session percentage. So on the on the PPC keywords that are higher converting than the listing organically, spend on those keywords, kill everything else and target the placements that got the highest conversion. That's how you're going to pull back in the US. Um, sack half the team, cut half the team. Um this the this business is one brand manager, one supply chain manager. Um you over product and then working with a strong PPC person. It's three people. One of them could be outsourced for PPC. There's plenty of good PPC people in this room. Um don't let them dictate your strategy, you dictate your PPC strategy, and they hit your metrics. That's the number one mistake agencies make. Um your brand manager is going to focus on catalog and content. So use LinkedIn recruiter. cost you about two grand to set it up. Go headhunt someone that's creatively strong, ideally from the DTOC world, from the Shopify world. They've worked in a Shopify agency or worked for a Shopify business and bring them in. Put them through one of the trainings in the room at mine and anyone else's to learn all the catalog stuff, the indexing, and have them own the content. Your biggest weakness in the business right now is the content and brand story doesn't align with the avatar. I think the reason you've got a 40-year-old avatar is because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of crap content and janky me like just homemade content. I think that I think that avatar they're probably going on holiday once a year. They think, "Crap, I've been on holiday for three years. I need a I need a net pillow." I think they're buying the product because the content attracts that person. It's not attracting Melissa. It's not attracting me. It's not attracting Josh. It's attracting that kind of late middle-aged coming into later middle age person that's traveling once a year. If that's the customer, that's great. But as all the content people in the room will tell you, this there's amazing opportunity for you here to if you're already converting above average and you're doing the sales you're doing investing in Danielle's agency or investing someone in the room that's really good with content, um to really upgrade it and focus on the quality of the product, which is the number one thing you've got going for you. Um you could literally 2x where you are now just doing that and spending 10 15 grand really understanding the avatar, really developing the brand story. you can't be the face of this brand. Like that that 2014 kind of hero story of I started this product in my bedroom, it doesn't work anymore. Um it's got to be high production, high value. So that would be a big action. Um re ret organic sales ratio. You're spending too broadly on PPC. Pull back to those placements that have got the highest conversion. It's at this point I don't like these categories. I know this category well because there's very few keywords to compete on. It's a very narrow c. It's a very shallow category as I call it. The best categories are where there's lots of long longtail keywords to compete on because then there's there's less demand for the keywords. Um and at the same time there's more um buying opportunity. But given you're here, um pull back to the placements that are converting best and to those keywords that currently have a higher conversion rate than organic. Uh that's that'll bring your tacos down from 20 to about probably about 13 14. create more profitability even though you I'll talk about profitability in a minute and you're doing well. Um, and yeah, and that should then start to drive your organic rank and you should be at about 70% organic sales, 30 PPC. You're too heavy on the PPC right now. Um, the number one thing you need to focus on if you want to get to 50 million, so you've sacked your team, you need a brand manager, a supply chain, a PPC agency, and you you're going to focus on product and PPC, but you can outsource the execution of PPC providing you drive the strategy. So, you've got a threeperson team. get rid of the rest. Um, you keep your wife, obviously. Um, when it when it comes to products, there's three types of products on Amazon. There's a non-subjective, a semi-ubjective, and a subjective. A non-subjective is the meto feature base that you're in. Semi-ubjective is like a baby swaddle blanket where everyone knows what they're looking for, but there's color, design, pattern, material. There's a subjective nature to the purchase. And then subjective is stuff like home decor where it's like every single product is different. You need to start innovating if you want to get to 50 million and you need to be launching five, six parents a year. I can talk to you about financing on that separately. You could raise it through your supplier. I wouldn't recommend raising in the US right now. It's very expensive, but there's there's ways of getting the capital you need to to fund that. Um, and I just did a I say I in real time in the background. My team have been kind of looking at this and sending me some talking points. Um, but I mean there's to Tim's point, I think there's lots of ways in which you could innovate on this product. Um, the hoodie hybrid is an obvious one. self-inflating built-in sensors that monitor the neck angle. We're starting to get a bit more technical. Aroma therapy infused pillow. You need to come up with some stuff, but you need to make them visually different. That's then going to set you up combined with the content and brand story to go into TikTok to go into Shopify and actually compete in the market. But right now, you just you're competing on reviews and time in market and expansion in EU. Uh, and that's not going to set you up. Um, I've got loads, but Oh, sorry. You're at 4.3 right now. average is 4.5, you you're a couple of one stars away from a 4.2 and this business will drop off a cliff because you'll drop down to a four star and you'll lose the clicks and you'll start to lose market share. I've just run a bunch of your one stars through an internal tool that we've got. Five out of six of them are non-compliant. You can get them removed because they're against Amazon's terms of service. Um, so I'll give you the I'll give you the access to it and then all you do is it'll generate a case description for you. Submit that case. If they say no, submit it again. but they are categorically against their review terms of service. So, if we can get rid of those four reviews, you'll probably jump back up to a 4.5 and it'll it should give you some more time while you fix the rest of the business. Um, yeah, and I've got five more pages, but I don't want to take any more time. You can be with him privately. Yeah, Michelle, thank you very much. All right, so um Tim, thank you for telling him that his baby is ugly. Um, however, the you said it worse than I did though. So, um, no, your baby is not ugly. There is there is opportunity here. However, I am one to focus on the riches are in the niches and I know and in this case, the riches are in the country niches, right? So, just like Dan mentioned, you know, like going deep and expanding into the in into countries, Tik Tok has recently opened um Tik Tok shop um in the EU. So, the UK has been open since 2021. Spain and Ireland were available as of December of last year. Germany, Italy, and France just opened last month, like last week, right? So, you're based in Germany. This is a huge opportunity. Anybody who's international seller, you should know that it's very difficult to be able to sell in a country that you are not located in. You are located in Germany. Germany is going to absolutely be the second biggest market um in the EU. Actually, the number one because UK is not in the EU, right? So, did I get that right? Yeah, we voted Brexit. Um okay, it will be the number one uh marketplace in the EU. So, your Germany, I feel like this is a match made in heaven. So, as one of the one of the really awesome things about Tik Tok and Tik Tok shops specifically is that it doesn't cost you anything to try and because it is top offunnel from a marketing perspective. It is the cheapest marketing that you can absolutely do. Like you can absolutely do zerocost marketing um on Tik Tok. I'm not talking about affiliates. I'm talking about content. And a lot of times when people start on Tik Tok, they immediately think affiliates when what they need to be thinking about is content. Content is king on Tik Tok. Why people like affiliates is because they don't like to create content. And so that's why they think about working with affiliates or content creators. You I think have a significant opportunity to create content. And before you start into the the you know the fear of creating content, travel search content is one of the number one of the top content uh that is searched for on Tik Tok. How many of you before you came here searched on Tik Tok about things to do in Iceland? Right. Did you Florian? Um on YouTube. Yeah. Once a generation long form long form I do too if I want to watch a movie about us. But right like we want those quick those quick s sound bites and I just did um some quick research and both in country as well as international hashtags. you have a significant opportunity to focus on content that's um I'm going to butcher this but hash Deutselandry um and uh and number two that's the number one hashtag for German based travel and the number two is an international search term called Germany travel and it's massive I did a a brief let's just use that HDMI cord that we have since it's fun to demonstrate who wants a demonstration of how to do this research okay don't knock over any microphone I You're going to need um Okay. Hold the mic. You might have to take the adapter off if it doesn't Okay. Um is there AB help in the in the booth? Can you put to the HDM? HDMI. Can whoever's phone keeps going off over here please turn that off. Thank you. Um pull out Michelle pull out of the white thing. A in the booth. Pull it out of the white thing and put it straight into your laptop. You've put a connector into a connector. Oh, that is true. That's why you sit in the other chair. Dan, you want to come over here and do this? Yes. Okay. Allow. Yeah. If you click it now, then getting a signal. You're not getting a signal. Is it plugged in? Um, it said allow. Tell them now because it was plugged into a connector. Try now. I blame this on uh Titan because I was literally doing one of these kind of like 101 at a pool in Cancun and some water might have gotten into one of my power ports. So the Titan that is the Titan way is networking at the pool. So if I have to pull out my laptop Well, let me talk you through it. So, if you go to your search on Tik Tok um and type in creator search insights and on creator search insights, are you do you want to do this live, Floren? Yeah. Okay. So, if you type in creator search insights Oh, you want me to do it? You might as well. This is your business, not mine. So, please turn that So if you type if you type that in and select that um I actually have been there. Okay, cool. So now search for travel Germany or Germany travel. Let's do the main hashtag. If you're going to follow along with me, just turn down your your phone so Kevin doesn't kill you. Um yeah. Um, this is the HDMI connection. Yeah. So, go to in Tik Tok, go to the search and type in creator search insights. There we go. Oh, sweet. Okay. All right. So, let's just start this over. There's no sound on this. So, all I'm doing is going to search, typing in creator search insights, and then I go to view. Now, this is like the homepage. I'm going to search inside of creator search insights, and I'm searching based on a topic. Obviously, I cannot spell in this example. Okay, there we go. So, I'm just doing Germany just as a whole. So, if I am going to Germany or in Germany and I want Now, look at these. Look at Did you see that one that I just selected? Let's go back to that page. Look at this up there where it says trip to Germany searches are are up by a thousand%. For that that keyword. So from an opportunity standpoint, I know what people are interested in from a content creation standpoint. Now I can go into here and I can research more about what is relevant. I've got creator tips, the associated hashtags, um different uh the different things to put into my post. It even wrote a post for me or how to do a voice over for like some magic in Munich. Um and then it shows me some example posts that I literally could copy. So, you see that one with 130,000 uh views? We've got 45,000 views, 72,000 views. You know, I can just steal some of these from a content perspective. Now, Florian, look. Is your face anywhere on this? Nope. No. So, you could have a shoppable post. You could you could have one of your your your neck pillows talking about you want to make it to Germany like use our like have flash your product there at the end because you know that that person's going to be on a train, plane or automobile trying to get to those beautiful sites, right? And then that becomes a shoppable post, right? And you can do that over and over again for any number of relevant searches um or hashtags. And you know if this is a German a shoppable German post, we're targeting both people coming to Germany as well as people who are already in Germany. So that's that's just one kind of idea there. Um all right, I'll unplug now. is where's uh can I can I do a little bit more? Okay. Um and then researching via that creator search insights there's lots of other hashtags but looking at that content from a trending perspective. Um on there there's a red button next to the hashtag that's the video button you want to create via that video button. Let me show you guys again because when you are posting that content and you want to make sure that you're posting from a um because Tik Tok is geolocked, if you're if you're posting via your your Bulgarian account, guess who's going to see that content? Bulgarians, right? So, you need to congratulations. you're the one person that's going to see the content, but you're not going to be able to po you're not going to be able to shop any of that content uh because it's not going to show up as shoppable for you because you're outside of the country. Like I'm here in Iceland looking at American content and none of it's shoppable for me, right? Um so you're going to want to make sure that anybody who's posting content for you that your your uh Tik Tok account gets geolocked to the right location. whatever wherever your Tik Tok shop is going to be based, right? So, once again, here you guys see this big red button. We want to actually upload and create content via that button because that button tells Tik Tok, I did the work to research what your algorithm and what your audience is actively searching for, right? And it gives Tik Tok that that signal. Yes. Thank you, darling. Thank you. Sorry, what? Yeah, you can use VPN. Mhm. Yep. But when you are creating that account, you need to make sure that it's actually created for the country that your Tik Tok shop is located in. And that's that has to be at the beginning. Like, can we bring that Bulgarian? It's not worth it. Like, how many followers How many followers do you have at this point? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's not that important. We can create a new one. That's I was just asking like that's the easier way. You could literally lo use your account that you've created in Germany right now to create your Tik Tok shop account. D. Now, if your content is mostly business focused, then your audience, if you have any, are going to be expecting more business related content. But if you start po posting travel content, then Tik Tok's going to pick up what you're putting down and they're going to say, "This dude's for the travel niche." and you're going to start creating shoppable posts featuring a flash of your pillow. Now, another thing is as I was scrolling through here, this very last chick that I saw is on a train. I was like, "Oh, yeah, duh." Because Americans, we don't use, you know, most Americans don't use trains to get around. Um, and obviously, anybody traveled via train in Europe just like long distance? Anybody tried to sleep on a train in Europe, right? Awful. Awful. So like the planes, trains, and automobiles is such a strong opportunity from a content creation standpoint. You could create content just for all the dumb Americans that don't know how to travel on trains in Europe and are going to like come away with like a broken neck and need a chiropractor appointment when they get home to the States. So, like there's there's so much from a content perspective that you could create that literally requires like all of this could create be created with AI without being creepy, right? Leo, are you in here? You beautiful man. Where are you? Okay, so using splice, you know, obviously he he did that in the in the AI contest. Y'all did um you know, a whole bunch of content via AI. So once again, Tik Tok because it's top offunnel is the most effective marketing solution for the least amount of money. Now is it a distraction only if you're trying to like sell where number one you can't get into, which is the United States, right? And like I said, Germany is wide open. UK, there's only two travel pillow companies that have even made a dent in the market from like a market a marketplace reach standpoint. These are the top two. Everything else are just they're not they're doing peanuts and these are the only two, the turtle and and this other one, number one and number two. And they're not even working with that many that many content creators. So, I think if you lean into travel, instead of leaning into pillows, lean into travel and be found when people are searching for that inspiration, you're meeting them where they're at, right? You're going up the funnel as opposed to down the funnel from uh you're they're in that in that mode of thinking about travel. And so, you want to hit them with you're going to want to sleep while you're traveling, right? Here's the pillow that's going to get you there. I feel like you should I feel like you should trademark that. the pillow that will get you there. There you go. Thank you, Melissa. All right. So, I wanna actually tackle your your high return rate problem. Um because that something that is probably quite simple for you to do and something that is something that's actionable right now. Now, looking at the root problem, which you from your findings, we've determined that it's from a lack of immediate travel or people abused it and then they don't want to use it anymore. Uh maybe they don't have any immediate plans to go travel again. So, one way that you can kind of tackle this is find other practical ways of being able to use the pillow at home or um for example, like I'm looking at the one that's I think it's full of air. Is it the air one? It almost looks like it could help with posture, right? Like you can use it maybe if you're a gamer, right? Like highlight other use cases for that product where people can use it at home so they don't have to return it after they travel. They can still use it maybe while reading a book. They can use it while on the couch watching a movie. All you have to do is literally create one image and you can have like four or six different use cases and then people can see kind of the bigger picture of okay maybe I don't need to return this. I can actually use it for other things and then you know that way they'll actually keep it. Um the other thing is the one pillow. I think it's the memory foam one. It has like a case that covers it and I saw that there's like a clip. It kind of reminds me like of a fanny pack. So, I'm wondering if you can maybe actually turn it into a fanny pack. So, it's sort of like an accessory that comes with it, but it's a multi-use tool. So, when it's not carrying your your pillow, you could actually use it while you're traveling to actually put things in it and like put it around your waist, right? So, it could be just another way to give someone a reason to keep the product. So, I think that's like the biggest um hurdle that you're you're trying to tackle. Um if that makes sense. And then from there, I also want to talk about possibly increasing like average order size for your products. So creating like a two pack. Um, you know, that's the easiest way to create a new skew without actually creating a new product. So doing like a couple's pack, you know, like a his and hers because a lot of times when people travel, they don't travel alone. They travel with their partner. So, this will basically um make them want to purchase two whether they get a better deal or um like maybe you have like two different colors. So, that way you kind of get like one dark and one light mode type. Uh I know you have two colors already. So, literally all you have to do is like maybe even just bundle those two products and just call it like a his and hers. And then that way, not only are you increasing your average order value, but you're now, you know, basically selling two units instead of one. um kind of going down that same rabbit hole for maybe even pets. I know I talked to you about this last time, but when my dog was in surgery, he usually dogs will wear like a really plastic ugly cone. Um and I found that he just did not like that. So, I went to Amazon, searched for a different alternative, and now you see those ones that look like literally it looks like a travel pillow but for a dog. and they use it as a cone to help prevent scratching and itching. So maybe you could do like a like a pet and pet owner bundle. I don't know if that makes sense, but uh it just something that came on my mind. And then thinking about accessories for your products, too. Um I tried out your memory foam one. The one thing that did kind of bug me was like my hair. It just got a little bit frizzy when I was using it. So it almost felt like staticky. So maybe providing like a silk cover uh it can be an option that you either sell or maybe you add it as a bonus. Especially in the US people like like Dan was talking about it's about perceived value. How can you increase that perceived value? Um having even just like a silk cover or turning the I guess there might be a way to engineer it, but anyway. So um you're German, you'll figure it out. You're very good at engineering. So, something like an anti-static cover or something or a spray like a cleaner spray that is also anti-static. Um, just some ideas kind of off the top of my head. Um, and then I also pulled up your keyword rankings in the US because I know that obviously you have a strong position in the UK market and one of the things that you kind of wanted a resolution for or wanted to figure out is how do you get more market share in the US because I think that's where there's a little bit more opportunity to grow because you've almost hit like a ceiling in the European market at this point um with the market share that you currently have. So, I don't know if I should Have you did you use data dive or did Brandon pull it up last time for you on data dive to show your current keyword rankings? Yeah. Okay, cool. So, I don't have to demonstrate it. Basically, I'm looking at your keywords here and some of them like some of the main keywords and keywords that you should be ranking for, you're not really indexed for in the US or you're ranked like 101, 107. Um, that's for the air pillow. Your memory foam is ranked better. So there are, you know, some that you are on page one for, but still I think you're mainly sitting on like page two, three, and beyond. Um, for re-ranking, well, first before you start ranking or doing any sort of velocity campaigns or re-ranking campaigns, like Dan mentioned, you will need to do some sort of listing overhaul. I don't know the last time. When's the last time you created new images for your your listing? It depends on the product. Um I don't know if you what do you suggest? How often or Yeah. Well, I mean Daniela had a really great presentation, right? They they're constantly testing. Um you said yourself that you your strong suit is not design. So you're not going to have the eye of a designer either. So when you are approving the end result, you might not be, you know, you might you might be like an avatar, but you're not your main avatar. So you saying, "Oh, this looks good." it might not actually look good. So, you might want to get another set of eyes or if you have an internal team that's focused on the design work. I know it said somewhere on the dossier that you have family that works on uh the design work. That might be a little bit too close to home. Like obviously it's someone that's close to you. So, maybe you don't want to give them like, oh, this looks like you know? Uh maybe you're going to be a little bit softer on them. But it might be worth bringing someone with a fresh set of eyes like Danielle to come in, overhaul, and literally use data to back up what is what is good or at least update it. And then once you do that, um, I created a pixel me link for both of your SKs. I'll send them to you. It's a rotator URL to help you rank for I just picked out your top four keywords that you might need a little bit of a boost for. Um, and then you're going to run that through Brand Expand. Just create a velocity campaign through Brand Expand. Um, I'll send you an SOP on how to do that. You're going to set it up as a linear campaign and then run that and then it'll help you at least try to boost some of your keyword ranking. Hope that helps. Thank you. Awesome. Reu. Yeah. I'm just going to borrow the um, do you want to call it if that's okay? Are we allowed to add on to this stuff or are we add? We're not going to have you can after. We got to go to Norm and then we got a wrap. Um, we're running out of time. Okay. So, but you can add on privately to Yeah, I got and and you should if we were at actually in Austin or market masters, you'd have a whole weekend to add on to it, which is part of the value and the power is he can go deep on which I can say we did and it was awesome to talk afterwards with the people and if you have time I would love to. Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Um, okay. So, um I'm going to try and give you um ideas for um the maintenance mode that um that I was talking about. Um because obviously there's, you know, long-term things that you could be doing with your brand and so on. But um, you know, given that you don't want to invest too much in the shiny objects and you want to stick with what you know and your area of comfort, I'm just going to give you some ideas with uh advertising uh on Amazon because there's a lot of scope uh because I did get a chance to look at your uh bulk file uh ad bulk file uh prior to this. So uh one thing I want to say is that uh your unique feature in my eyes is the hood. So it's almost like a twoin- one product. It's a neck pillow and it's a mask. Uh I mean I am the perfect avatar for your product because I'm always wanting to, you know, have an eye mask, but if if it's two things, it's two things, right? A twoin one product is a great way to to kind of market it. Um second thing I would say is that your video, this the one that's showing this scene where the guy actually puts the uh the hood on his head should be your starting point. like a lot of mist like a mistake that a lot of people make with their video uh creatives is they start building a story. Amazon is not a place to build a story because you don't have time. You just have like one second to catch their attention. So start with the most standout feature which is that hood that goes on the eye. So I would literally uh clip this very video um that you have as said and just start with the hood covering uh thing and that would be the hook to bring people into your funnel. The second thing I would say is that you can also use the vertical format of your video asset for sponsored brand ads which show up much better in the mobile view. So I think you probably have like statistics say that about 60 to 70% of people um shop um on on mobile devices. So if that's the case, then uh optimizing your ads also for mobile would be great. And I'm sure you have like UGC content that you could repurpose. So use those because you can have two separate types of videos. You could have this for desktop and and when it's a vertical format, it naturally shows on on mobile devices. So that's kind of the second. Um then I would say one more thing that since 60 to 70% of buying decisions are made by women, I would encourage you to try women in your um in your creatives uh rather than men. I mean for a lot of reasons women faces sell a little bit better. So try try that. I'm sorry. It it's it's just uh how the how how marketing works. Um, I'm sorry. That is why my only fans didn't monetize twice actually. Um other uh little tips um you know are you looking at your SQ report for uh keywords that you are actually ranking for are in Amazon's eyes are relevant for because it looks like you have a very small set of keywords that you're actually um uh getting any sales for. Uh so if you could look for the the right set of keywords from your own SQ that would be great. Um final uh tip is um basically I'm using the the thing that I shared uh yesterday in my presentation the uh five levels of awareness. Uh trying to create um an elevated perception of your brand by using uh the right um kind of messaging for different types of audiences starting from unaware to most aware. So for example, I created this with the GPD that I shared out yesterday where the message is actually like if your travel below folds like a taco, then we need to talk kind of thing. So make it uh appealing to an audience that is unaware of the the benefits of your products, flipping it around using the example that or Tim's uh reference to MSU. uh or this one this this next one is basically for people who are uh problem aware or they they know that neck cramps happen. So this it you can relate and then this one is for this third one is for people who are um uh actually product aware where they know that there's different products and you're just providing uh a comparison between yours and and someone else's product, right? So just just play with the messaging a lot more, throw a lot more content out there and and you can use all the the the ideas that have been shared here. Uh but I think you need to do a lot of uh like testing of your product uh messaging uh because um you know there's 462 products showing up on your page that are way cheaper than yours. So you have to differentiate somehow either through content or showing up on top of the page with sponsored brand ads because that's the only placement that gets you right up at the top. You get instant visibility through sponsored brand ads. So use those as much as you can. I would say use them even more than your sponsored products because you really don't have uh any leverage with sponsored products right now given that uh 80% of your sales are coming from uh sponsored and and you're really not uh building any keyword ranking at this point. So uh just using some of these tricks. Uh let's see anything else. Um yeah, I think that's about it from my side. Awesome. Norm wrap us up. All right. So, one of the things I was wondering about or one of the things you've got to do when you get back is uh change up your listing optimization. It's not properly optimized right now just to the new toos. And uh I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time and I don't know what you want to do with this if you're trying to sell the business, if you're going to try to just kind of keep it for your family, but uh having something that doesn't have any IP protection that's flatlined and that's making a net profit of 5% is not appealing. So, it's it's something that we've got to take a look at. Now, you have three products to use. Does that mean it's dead? Does it mean that you can't improve? Does it mean you can't have any more growth? You can absolutely have more growth. You can have the perceived value people are talking about. That's something that you can improve on, but you got to go wide. And there could be some complimentary products or some collaborations you could use. One of them I just came up. Boom. Boom. If you haven't seen it, it's an uh um aroma therapy uh for travel. So, you could just, you know, slide it in or just provide it, do a collaborative uh email campaign with them. But it's something that could actually generate a lot more sales for you than them. Um but there's all sorts of different things that you can do. And I think what's really important right now is you've got to figure out what that complimentary product or that what you're going to do next. Dan's absolutely right. It's critical right now. Um if you don't change things and I'll save what you were telling me like you forgot about. Yeah. But um there's some certain things that are going to definitely help your cash flow and you need cash flow right now. Um I'm going to go on on a different tangent than most people here. Uh, one of the things is, uh, your insert or some you've got to get your returns. Something's got to happen there. So, either it's on your insert that you have a big red stop sign, you know, contact us or whatever it is, you know, to not have them returned over to Amazon. Give them a new bloody product. Give them whatever it takes, but don't get them returning it to Amazon. 13% or even 10% is way too just way too high. Um, I love communities and I think you'll learn your avatar by working with your email list. How many email I'm How many emails do you have? I'm just curious. I think it's a few thousands. Few thousands. Perfect. Cold, I would say. You know, well, you can warm them up. So, if they've bought your product, they like your product. There's certain things that you can do. You can either create a survey, you know, and people love like travel products. They want to be comfortable traveling. Everybody, well, lots of people, especially old guys, hate, you know, discomfort when they're traveling. So, surveys are one thing. Profile questions in the email. But something you could do immediately to understand your avatar is get uh call call your customers and give them, you know, a few questions. And if they stay on the phone with you, give them a gift card or something like that. But the other thing that's going to help you out because you have so many orders, you can capture the email very easily and there's a variety of different ways. We can talk about that afterwards. You can create that newsletter. You can become if you want to become the authority, you've got to look the authority. So if that's perceived value, that's one thing. or simply on Google. Melissa talked about it earlier. It's Google knowledge panel and then there's three levels of Google knowledge panel. There's your profile as the owner. There's the brand profile and company profile. If you can get all three of those, you're going to nail tons of keywords that are going to help bring you up the ranking not only in Google, but in Amazon. you're going to have shoppable videos or shoppable um uh images that will drive any platform that you're on, either your own uh Shopify or over to Amazon or over to Walmart, wherever you want to drive them. So, this is something that um if nobody's doing it, you this is something you got to look at because anything or anybody including the creator and their followers, if they're associated with you, you get that ranking views. So, it's it's crazy what you could do with this many people buying your product. The other thing that you could do, and and I'm just talking about community, right? Travel niche is great. Uh you were talking about uh a train just simple travel tips for trains. You could go out, you can create a simple video, you can go to Google notebook, you can create a podcast, just tips on train and it will take whatever it is. It'll gather the information or you can find it anywhere. It will make a podcast for you. It will give you a study guide. It will give you the frequently asked questions and you can publish that anywhere on your website or you could just take that create a blog, get some content out there. Now you're building a community. So there's all sorts of these things that you can do and I can't do it in two minutes. But you know these are some things that I I saw. The other one that I would spend a little bit of time on that won't cost a lot of money that will help with your perceived value. You're right in the middle. Your pricing is right in the middle. and I looked at the guys that were above you and below you and you can definitely come up a couple dollars with perceived value. So, starts with simple packaging. It could be the anti-static. It could be a simple seal when they open it up. It could be the um like a a more rigid plastic or a rigid cardboard uh container. Bunch of different things. Uh the other the other thing I was going to talk about, this might be a stretch. I'd have to do some research on it, but those types of products, companies like when you go to trade shows and stuff like this or companies that are traveling, they give out incentives. This might be a product that could be for the uh the um incentive business, you know, the um promo u promo industry. So you can contact like ASI, American Specialty Institute, and this could be something that could be selling a trade or giving away at trade shows, higherend trade shows. Last thing I'm going to say is the team 100% get rid of most of these people. I don't think you you need these people. I can't see like Yeah, I can't see where two full-time designers on three product SKUs is there. Like I can't see it. It boggles my mind. Um, but the other what you what you might want to do is SOPs. Okay. You you said you read a book on EOS. That's great to read the book, but implementing might be tough and that's a bigger system for a company your size. Why that? You might want to just take a look at doing something as simple as uh the E-Myth and just getting the understanding of a policy and procedure uh training your team to train the team. And that team might be four pe three people, but it might be nine people, but if they all know how to do uh um standard operating procedures or policies and procedures, guess what? You can take a month off at one point. So, that's about it. And if you do want to know more about communities, uh, just let me know and I can help you out with that. Thank you very much. They have SOPs, but I'll catch you up on the community. Thank you very much. So, how has this uh been, Florian? Oh, uh, wonderful. Um, you were gonna, um, I mean, um, beat Tim up first. So, what did you take away from this? What are a couple things that you have on your list over there that that that you some of your biggest takeaways? Um it's interesting how it went kind of you know like from um stop it get out of it which was uh in the last panel quite similar actually. Um wait wait wait just to be clear what I said is for your time there may be other options that are better. Absolutely. Absolutely. But it I mean it for me I mean for you maybe there is a whole world for me there is not it's not so evident like where to go where are the other opportunities like where to how to search for it or whatever. Um I um anyway but it's interesting I I would love to talk more about it. Um and I um I mean I see that what was repeated was that the overhead is too large which I understand which makes a little bit of the problem you know like that I'm busy with all these people you know and and and they're not you know helping me I'm helping them. It's I can't I can't uh focus then on um on certain things. Um the perceived value those MSU it was also mentioned uh last time. Uh I love it. Um and I will implement that. Um and also the strategic part like what like making a list um and and and deci deciding what can be implemented easy or or what would take much more effort just to have an overview and keep keep that list like um it's not that I never didn't done any list like that you know but it's kind of like the the practice of looking at it on a regular base and checking back on it. Um, and thanks everyone for the really really good Dan's got a a pretty important point. Have I? Oh, right. All I was Yeah, you pointed out already you sent you're spending 17 I forgot to say you're spending 17% of your margin on overhead which is ridiculous with the three you could be wildly profitable. Um, and I just wanted to overarch that you've got a real asset here if you if you execute correctly. And the summarization here is content pullback on PPC and product. That's all it is. And sack your team. Um um and hire a proper brand manager. Can I add something crazy to this? You said that a lot of what your team is doing, the graphic designers, cuz everybody said like you've got two full-time graphic designers. You said they're doing a ton of research. So, they're creating all these variations and then they're testing all those variations. Can I tell you the data? This is going to freak you out. You you mentioned product pinion and pigfoo, right? In the last three months, you've spent $3,000 with Pikfu. You ran 18 polls last month and 10 the month before. That's it. 18 polls. And every one of those 18 polls only had two images. Now, I don't know the details, but I messaged these guys and I said, "Can you tell me what this brand is doing?" I said, "Tim, we're not going to give you any information." I said, "Of course not, but help me out here." So you said basically basically what you said is they're spending the majority of their time doing research only 18 polls in three months and it cost you $3,000 in buying poll credits that you're not even using because your team is only using the five question mini polls which are free. So just want to throw that out. All right, we got to wrap it. We got to wrap it up. So let's give Florida a hand for doing this. Let's give the experts a hand too for contributing. Thank you. So you can so you can see the value and at a normal market masters we they could go on for the rest of the weekend and he could go deeper with with Dan. Dan said he had two pages of notes. He could go deeper with with Michelle and with Norm. And so that's the value of a market masters and that's why it's become going to become the top level event at uh for in my BDSS ecosystem.