Mastering the Amazon Jungle: Kevin King’s Seller Success Story

Mastering the Amazon Jungle: Kevin King’s Seller Success Story SPEAKER_1 00:00:04 Welcome to the Fearless Sellers, the Women of Amazon podcast.I'm Joey Roberts. SPEAKER_0 00:00:11 I put together some of my money.I got another person's money.A partner brought on a silent partner for 15%.I put in about $200,000 or so, and we launched five brands: a fitness brand, a beauty brand, a home and kitchen brand.Electronics brand and uh what am I forgetting a pet brand and some of those three of those brands I did the traditional back then find something on Alibaba change it up a little bit stick my logo on it repurpose it and make it nice packaging two of those brands I did completely from scratch I like on a napkin design the stuff I found a person to do the CAD drawing. SPEAKER_1 00:00:52 Kevin King, welcome to the Fearless Sellers podcast.You are a famous face in the Amazon seller space as a seasoned seller who has sold millions.We will unravel your remarkable journey from founding the Billion Dollar Seller Summit to conquering international markets while creating products that people truly love.You know, I would call you the King of Amazon, but Jeff Bezos already holds that title.Yet your name, Kevin King, is one of the most well-known names to Amazon sellers.Welcome, Kevin. SPEAKER_0 00:01:27 Hey, I'm glad to be here.Joie, right? SPEAKER_1 00:01:30 Yes, you nailed it.Joie, that's right.You must be well-traveled, what, you're to over 90 countries at this point? SPEAKER_0 00:01:40 Yeah, I think I've been to, last count, it was 94, 94 different countries.Some of those many, many times, but yeah, 94 countries. SPEAKER_1 00:01:49 Wow. SPEAKER_0 00:01:49 All seven continents. SPEAKER_1 00:01:52 That's incredible.So your travels to over 90 countries, that must have provided you with unique insights into various cultures and markets.How has your passion for travel influenced the development of your Amazon products? SPEAKER_0 00:02:10 Yeah, I mean, travel is, I think, the best education you could get.I think it should be actually mandatory for all Americans, for that matter, anywhere.And they kind of do this some in Europe.They take like a gap year.You graduate from high school in Europe.And then you kind of a lot, not everybody, but a lot of people will then spend a year kind of backpacking across Europe or something.And then they'll go back to to to college, to university.But we don't do that in the United States.And I think it's a huge I think it's a huge issue.I mean, we have this most Americans idea of what other countries are like comes from movies.Or, from the news, and that's that's just not true; it's slanted and it's it's uh it's just not true.The way you've got to do that is get out there and experience it.And I don't mean just, you know, for most Americans don't even have a passport.I think like 80% of Americans don't even have a passport, which is just crazy-that's crazy!And one of the ones that do; half of those, their idea of an international trip is going on a cruise to Cancun or to the Caribbean or something like that.And that's not international travel.You've got to go somewhere where you don't speak the language.Hardly anybody speaks English.You don't know what the heck this stuff is you're eating.That's when you're traveling internationally.One of my favorite things is when I would travel is actually I did this for like seven years.And I wasn't backpacking or staying in hostels, but I was.I spent about half a million dollars from 2007 to 2014 actually just traveling.I'd done a bunch before that, but I just reached a point when I hit 40, I was like, I have a bucket list of places I want to go, and I want to go now.I don't want to wait until I'm retired.That's the typical thing is people work their ass off, and then they decide when they're 65, 70, 75, they're going to travel.A lot of times, you don't know what your health is going to be at that age.You don't know.Can you climb the Great Wall of China?Can you jump out of an airplane over the Serengeti?Can you do whatever it may be?You may not be able to do it.And so I was like, I want to do it now when it can still make an impact on my perception of the world, the perception of people, and get those experiences now.And then when I retire, if I ever retire, then I can go back to the ones that I really like.And I don't have to do some of the crazy experiences.The food, one of my favorite things when I go to a new country is to go to a supermarket and just walk through a supermarket because you can get so much of a local culture just by seeing their foods and what's organized.And I would oftentimes hire a guide or somebody to actually at each of these places because, you know, I didn't speak the language.And so I hire a guide and a driver.And this is not expensive.This is like maybe 75 bucks a day.But that way I can, I'm not on a tour bus, you know, with taking these package tours and I'm at the whim of everybody else.I can do what I want.And a lot of times by the end of the trip, if I was in Morocco or Cambodia or somewhere in the Philippines, by the end of the trip after day seven or eight, you become friends with these people in a way.And they're inviting you to their house.And you're going to their house in a local village and you're meeting their grandmother and their kids, and you're having a little meal that their wife or husband in some cases made for you.And it's just you don't get those experiences any other way.And it changes your perception.Of the world and so when I see news now or I see different cultures, I have a whole different respect for humankind, for how similar we are but how different we are, and back to your question of how does this affect what I, what I do in my products and stuff it has a huge effect because I understand, I have empathy for what our culture is different how or do different products fit into different markets and different people, and so that it it it's had a big impact and I would not give it back for the world.I spent like a half a million dollars doing this over those seven years.People were like, Kevin, that was stupid.You could have taken that half a million dollars, put it in the IRA, invested it in something.No way.You'd have two, three million dollars.I'm like, no, that's the best money I ever spent.I could go on for hours about the travel and experiences and stuff, but I think it's super important that people get out there and get out of their comfort zone. SPEAKER_1 00:06:18 I agree.And it is investing in yourself.I traveled in college.I had six months where I went to 12.Most of them, yeah, all 12 of them were actually third-world countries.I spent six months away from the United States.And I learned the best thing you can do for your country is leave for a long period of time. SPEAKER_0 00:06:37 It also makes you appreciate some, I mean, there's a lot of issues in the United States.We have our share of problems here, socially, economically, and politically.By going to other countries, you actually realize how good you actually have it here, especially as entrepreneurs.I mean, really, I mean, it comes down, most entrepreneurs in the United States don't realize how lucky they were to be born an American citizen or to live here and actually be able to do what we can do here.You can't do this.I mean, you talk to someone like Isabella Ritz.I know she's been on the podcast.You talked to her coming from Russia.Yeah.And we were just having this talk at a recent convention you and I were at.I was having it with her.She was saying, look, guys, you have no clue.My cap in Russia was about $100,000 a year.Above that, I have to fear for my life or I can't put the money in the bank or it's going to get taken or this.She says, you have no idea how good you guys have it here.And it's true.Most Americans take it for granted of how entrepreneurship is so much more powerful and the opportunities here are so much more than they are anywhere else in the world.And that includes modern countries like England and Australia. SPEAKER_1 00:07:48 Yeah, that's a great point.Yeah, that's a really good conversation.Isabella Ritz has been on a few times and I love her perspective.And I do appreciate people who come to the United States for the American dream.And Amazon provides that where your income is not capped.And sometimes, honestly, Kevin, when I was in the corporate world, I felt like my corporate job was capping my potential and my income.So I'm blessed that I found Amazon in the U.S. SPEAKER_0 00:08:15 Well, that's a good point that you just made, too.There's a lot of your listeners and a lot of sellers on Amazon are not in the U.S.And they will take advantage because of this ecosystem that's popped up around selling on Amazon in the United States and in other places, but primarily in the United States.They're actually able to take advantage of some of those opportunities that without having to move here, without having to go the visa process, without having to leave their families and make a huge difference in their lives, in their country.And it's it's the best opportunity.The world has ever seen this whole ecosystem of being able to leverage a multibillion-dollar company to change your life and build your own brand. SPEAKER_1 00:08:51 Yes.And we both share that as you and I both help people learn to sell on Amazon.And I love helping people from other countries completely understand how Amazon works and how they can sell in the United States.So, speaking of beautiful places and travel.The Billion Dollar Seller Summit.I don't know how that came about for you.Was this something that this event you started because of your travels?The last one was in Puerto Rico.You have the next one coming up in Hawaii. SPEAKER_0 00:09:26 Yeah, the Billion Dollar.I've always loved creating experiences for people and creating learning environments.I did it when I was in college years ago.There was a class called BANA 217 that all sophomore business majors had to take it.I went to Texas A&M University, and they had to take it.Back then, it was the basic computing language.It's hardly ever used anymore, but it's more all these C++ and Python, all this stuff now.Back then, it was BASIC, and it was a Webdoc class.The professors, for whatever reason, they would all have a standardized test three times a semester.They would say, on this date, no matter who your professor was,You're going to have an exam, and the professors just weren't very good at teaching it, so I figured that out because I was tutoring one-on-one for like six bucks an hour or something like that.And I just grew into one person, then I was like, 'I got so many people; I just start doing group tutoring like five people and then ten people at a time.'Ran out a little room in the library, and then it got to the point where I was having 400 or 500 people actually come to me the night before a test.There'd be you know 800 people taking the class; I'm getting 60-70 of the people taking this class, and I'd have to rent out the Hyatt or the Hilton ballroom in College Station whoa!And to host these, and they'd be like two-and-a-half hours long, and I would just go through with them.I'd have my own little learning study guide; I had my own little uh deal uh way of teaching them how to remember certain uh certain patterns and certain things, and then they go, and they do the test take the test the next day.And It evidently worked because they kept coming back.So if I sucked, they probably would not have kept coming back.But three times a semester, I charged $15 a head.A couple of my college roommates would sit there and take the money.I make $5,000 to $7,000 in a night.And as an 18-19 year-old college student, that's a lot of freaking money, especially in the 80s.So that was a lot of money, and that just evolved.So I have a background in the teaching side of things.But then in 2016, 2017, actually, Benny Coates and Guillermo Puyol, who started Helium 10, they've now exited the company, exited in 2019.But they said, hey, we want to do this in Mo Mastermind.And it was a hot thing back then where Jason Flattland was doing it.The guys at Amazing were doing it.There's a few other people in Cumming.They were hosting like $10,000 and $15,000 masterminds.So you go for three days and they get these higher levels, more successful sellers at the time.And you'd sit around and just swap strategies and swap tactics that aren't for beginners.And they were charging $10,000 to $15,000 a head to come to one of these.But they were just like a conference.There wasn’t much else to it, a conference and some drinks.And so Manny and Guillermo said, hey, let's do something like that.And so we produced something called the Illuminati Mastermind.And the first one was in Cancun in 2017, in May of 2017.That’s where I met Norm Farrar.I met Steve.I met Janelle; Page was at that one.There's a list of people you'd recognize that were at that.We had like 60, 70 people.It wasn't huge.And then we did another one in Hawaii in early 2018.And then the name Illuminati is kind of a cool name, but it also got a little bit of pushback.It's kind of offensive to a few people.So they ended up changing the name and rolling it into the software called Helium 10 Elite.So now it's called Helium 10 Elite, which is a monthly.I still host that.And there's three speakers that come on and I do my little seven ninja hacks, but they stopped doing the events.And I said, 'Well, hey, if you're going to stop doing these events, can I just do them on my own?'And like, 'yeah, but you know, we might do our own events', you know, which was Sale and Scale ended up being weird.So we don't want you like going out there and using this audience that you've got and creating this master event and competing against us.So you can do a small event with 50 people.And so the first billion-dollar seller song was 2019 with 50 people.And then I renegotiated.I don't work for Helium 10, but I have an independent contract, just kind of like a consulting agreement.And renegotiating that, it went up to 120, 22, and starting next year, it's 150.So that's how the Billion Dollar Seller Summit came about.The first one was in May of 2019 in Austin.We did the first four in Austin just because it's easy and convenient.And a lot of people like to come to Austin. SPEAKER_1 00:13:41 Yeah, we're both in Austin.Yeah, I live here, you live here, and I've been to two of your events in Austin, and those were phenomenal. SPEAKER_0 00:13:50 And then we decided, hey, let's take it on the road and do a little world tour.Let's go Taylor Swift on this thing.And so we did Puerto Rico, and then now we're doing Hawaii, and I think the next year we're looking at Iceland for 2025.Yeah, we've got some cool ideas.So it's twice a year, once virtually and once in person.And then I also do one called the Billion Dollar Exit Summit.We're doing the first one of those in October here in Austin in conjunction with the Northbound Group.So this is a workshop-style.It's only about 25 to 30 people.So it's not the bigger.And it's very focused on people who are looking to exit in the next year to year and a half, and hands-on with we're bringing in lawyers, investment bankers.The entire Northbound team is going to be coming in, and so that's the Billion Dollar Exit Summit.But we try to make, as you've been to a couple, and we try to make the Billion Dollar Seller Summits.It's expensive to go, and the average person in Hawaii was doing $13.5 million.So it's a big group of people, and we do experiences.So it's not just listen to some cool strategies and hacks.There's tons of networking beyond just sit around and have a drink at the bar built in.You know, we do the games and we do a ton of things to really help everybody bond and to really make it a memorable experience. SPEAKER_1 00:15:15 Yeah, I mean, this is the only event that I know where it really attracts the top, top sellers from around the world.And all of us cool kids call it BDSS.And I think you're right.I think it's the experiences and I bonded to several people.I got to do the scavenger hunt with that.Actually, Isabella Ritz and I were already like connected.I would say, you know, we're in the same industry, we're contacts, but the BDSS where we did the scavenger hunt and got to put on like the costumes that like solidified our friendship.It was now like, we did this, we're friends. SPEAKER_0 00:15:54 Yeah.So many people, when we did that, people were like, Some people, probably 20, 25 people didn't participate.Some of them had to actually legitimate.I got to go take some calls or I got to do some work.But someone like this is stupid.This is like I did this in high school.You're going to run around and find an egg or find do this or do that.I'm like, no, no.I used to do these in college that I organized that entire event.I put it together.It wasn't a company or anything.I actually did it.I used to do it in college.I was like, this is going to be cool.So the way for those of you listening.It worked; I was giving a clue sheet and it had two or three pages of clues like 13 or something clues on there of things you had to do and part of the goal of this was when you go to a conference, a lot of times you just get stuck in the conference building, you know, whatever that is, and maybe you go out to a restaurant for a mixer or something or you go out one night to a bar with some some other people from the event but you don't really get to see the place you're at so we wanted to like show people, you know, Austin is more than just 6th Street and Rainy Street and the convention center.So it was within a three-or four-mile radius of downtown, but you had these 13 clues, and you had to go find the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue.You had to go to a selfie museum.You had to go to Lucy in Disguise and get a contest.You had to go to the Yeti place.You had to do all this kind of cool stuff, and you'd earn points along the way by taking pictures or by doing certain things.And then each of these places, you didn't know where the final destination was.So each of these places, it would say, look at the last letter of the third line of this sign.What's that letter?It would be, I don't know, an S.So it's like, write down S.And then you had like a Scrabble game with all these letters, and you had extra letters.And you had to figure out, what do these spell?And that's where the final destination was.And there's one little clue that I think on there, just so you wouldn't get distracted on the destination, pick the wrong one by accident.And what happens is you've got to work together as a team.So you have four big sellers in a car, some that know each other, some that may barely know each other, like you said, or some that don't know each other at all.And you had to work together as a team.And everybody, I think we had one person say, yeah, that just wasn't for me at the end of it.But everybody else are still talking about it a year later.So we're doing that again.We're doing that again in Hawaii next year.You go to Kauai and you're like, 'It's a beautiful resort, it's a beautiful place and sometimes you're like, 'Man, I need to stay here like three or four extra days so I can see this place.'But I can't do that; I don't have the time.I gotta get back to my job.So we're building in a full day during a billion-dollar seller summit where you're going to see one side from one side of the island to the other and do a race like that, and do some really cool stuff.And Hawaii is one of those places as you're driving from one side of the island another it's not like this is a 30-minute drive.I'm going to take a nap back here in the back.But you're looking out the window at this going, 'Holy shit, this is beautiful.'You round another corner, freak.I mean, you've been to Kauai; you know.So it's a beautiful place. SPEAKER_1 00:18:53 It is beautiful.Yes, I was lucky.My parents had a place there when we were growing up.So I used to go, and then there was a point where they just stopped inviting me, and they wanted to enjoy it themselves. SPEAKER_0 00:19:08 No kids allowed. SPEAKER_1 00:19:10 Exactly.They're like, you're done.So when I'm listening to you talk, so you, we were going through, you did the, at Texas A&M, you kind of took risks, I would say.I would call it a risk to just start tutoring these big groups and then moving into huge groups.And then it seems like, you know, you took the risk doing the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and making these partnerships.As a top Amazon seller, and you've sold millions of dollars of products, this risk just seems like it's just built into you as an entrepreneur, knowing that you've had other businesses.So let's talk about that.How do you approach risk?How do you manage and mitigate it? SPEAKER_0 00:19:57 I mean, the number one is by saying no.I mean, I get so many opportunities brought to me, either because of my public persona or the speaking.Or, people who know me from different things like 'hey, let's partner up on this and that'and a lot of it's, I've passed up on great opportunities in the past but I have to just, I have to say no and I have to pick the things that where it's in my comfort zone or where I think I can contribute the most.I've got eight different sources of income in the Amazon space so if one of those goes down, uh, I'm not, I'm not screwed, uh, so I, I and that's on purpose.And people, I don't have any VAs, or I have one VA now on one of my things but for a long time, I had no VAs.I have no staff.I've been there.I had an office here in Austin with 16 employees, seven offices in there and a huge warehouse and all that stuff.And I just don't want to go back to that.So what I do now is I partner smart with people that already have that.I formed a partnership with Steve Simonson for the product Savants.He's already got a system of VAs and a system of sourcing people in China.So I don't have to do anything except contribute.what i'm best at and just get out of the way the same thing with helium 10 you know i do with helium 10 i don't own helium 10 i don't have any partnerships in there i don't i deal with three people that i don't even know the owners now never met met met uh the owners of helium 10.I deal with Bradley Carrie and uh a VA basically and occasionally one other person on something and that's it, I just keep my head down and do my thing, I don't know what to do software's coming out, I have no idea on any of this stuff until everybody else but when I do a podcast, for example, the AM PM podcast, I book my own guests.I don’t have a VA book them.I decide who I want to bring on.I do zero prep.So I don’t do any questions in advance.It’s just let's just have two people talking.Let's just wing it.If I don't know who they are, I figure them out in the conversation.So the audience is learning as I'm learning.And then I just turn it over to them.They edit it, do the transcripts, do the graphics, post it out.I'm completely out of it.And so I don't have to have a team.They have the team to do that.And the same thing with the Freedom Ticket, the same thing with Helium 10 Elite that I do with them, with the Billion Dollar Seller Summit.You've met Mark.Mark and I have been partners for over 30 years on a couple other businesses, and I know he's really good at producing.So just partner or hire good people and then get out of their way.That's my philosophy.And a lot of times at those events, like the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, I decide who's speaking.I sell the tickets.And help choose the venue.And I enjoy creating like the scavenger hunt.That's something I enjoy, that creative process of creating that experience.So I'm involved in that.But everything else, I'm not involved in negotiating contracts.I'm not involved in the day-to-day, what kind of food are we having or check-ins or any of that.That's how I'm able to do it.So I spread risk by hiring or partnering with smart people and carefully choosing what I'm going to do.I tried to minimize how much of my own personal money is going into it.I lost, during COVID, I personally lost $400,000 during COVID on Amazon.But between me and my partners, Steve, Simon, I had some other guys, we lost a total of about $2 million on Amazon in about an eight-month period.But that wasn't all my money.To spread the risk, there were other people putting in money.And my contribution was that I knew Amazon.I had the connections.So that was my value versus the money value and let someone else put up the money value. SPEAKER_1 00:23:34 Okay.So that's really interesting that the risk, we're talking about how you do really good partnerships.And then we moved into COVID.So now my brain is going back a little bit to e-comm summit when the Remember when somebody was presenting and they put up the hand sanitizer video?And I saw you kind of react.Is that what you sold hand sanitizer? SPEAKER_0 00:24:01 We did a case study on this at one of the virtual billion-dollar seller summits, I think in 2021.It's pretty interesting.Everybody in this industry, they always talk about the thump on their chest.Look at me.I did $5 million in six months.I exited my company for this or this is how easy it was to find something on Alibaba and look at these crazy problems.Nobody ever talks about their failures.Nobody.The people that fail usually go off and start software companies or training courses.But not always.I mean, there's a lot of good people like you guys and Brandon Young and there's several others out there that are successful sellers that are actually teaching.But a lot of the people that are teaching were failed sellers.When COVID happened, we had an opportunity to get into hand sanitizers.And I was like, no way.This is going to be another hoverboard.This is going to be another fad, another fidget spinner.Not going to do it.And then my partners out of Asia on one of my other companies, like, well, we have a good source on this stuff.FDA regulated.It's all this.Because at that time, people were just throwing stuff up on Amazon.All these weird brands out of China.Amazon became such a shortage that Amazon created what's called the COVID store.And so they took all the big hand sanitizers from the U.S., you know, the Pirelli, all the big-name hand sanitizers, and basically locked it behind these closed doors so medical people could get it.And so what was available was just this random stuff from China that would take a month to get to you.And so we're like, well, if we have an opportunity here, let's take a look at this.And then Steve Simonson had a factory, a chemical factory, a partner in another business that had a chemical factory in Wisconsin that had to close down because of COVID.They did like flooring chemicals for flooring and stuff for houses.And they had like 35 employees and like, what can we do?And like, let's convert that to actually make a hand sanitizer.And there's some special exceptions on the FDA.So we hired all those people.We made wipes at their factory.We had the hand sanitizers coming out of Asia.We said, well, let's brand this.If we're going to do this, we did research on like, It's trending up, but we think even after COVID kind of goes away, people are still going to be more conscious about washing their hands and stuff.So there's going to be a lag effect.It's not going to be the crazy numbers like it was, but it'll be above where it was before COVID, which is still true.So if we're going to do this, let's create a true brand.So we did real branding.We didn't just put a cross on a bottle and say it's hand sanitizer like everybody else.We actually did Germ Shark, and it was a true brand with like full-on jingles, full-on advertising.Here in Austin, we had people dress up in shark costumes and run down the trail by the lake, passing out stuff.And we filmed it.I remember that. SPEAKER_1 00:26:44 Okay.I totally know this brand.Yes. SPEAKER_0 00:26:47 Had to go into an H-E-B.We went into H-E-B and got kicked out.They're pushing carts all through the shop, which is a local grocery store.And the manager's like, what the hell is going on here?And someone in the office was filming it because it was like, and then it went viral on Instagram.And so we were doing everything right.We had FDA approvals, which most people didn't.We got into the COVID store, which was hard to get into, the official Amazon COVID store.So Amazon, you're putting up hand sanitizers at that time, and Amazon, they're just slapping them down.You last a day or two, and they take it down, take it down, take it down.We were actually 100% approved.And we had a business development guy at Amazon who was in charge of the whole COVID stuff.And I had his home cell phone number.Anytime we had a problem, he was helping us get approvals.There's some issue with our label.It went all the way up to Amazon Legal, and they signed off on it.We did everything right.We launched.We were doing on one SKU like $40,000 a day, just crushing it.But then we would do – back then there were search find buys, so we were – that was still common.It still happens today, but it was more common then.We were in the middle of a big launch, and it's hand-signed to us.You're going to have to spend $100,000, $200,000 on a launch to get it positioned on page one just because of the competitive nature.And we were doing that.And then halfway through that, the Amazon algorithm would shut us down.We get shut down for like some just you're not allowed to sell this on Amazon.We're like, what the hell?We're already approved.We like have the papers from Amazon.We're FDA.We're everything.But the algorithm doesn't think like a human.It thinks like an AI or whatever.Just it's black and white.And so we would have to go to our rep and say, we'll just shut down.He would get us back up, usually sometimes with an hour, sometimes within a day or two.But this constantly kept happening like 9, 10, 11 times.We started having issues with there being a scare out there with there's three different types of alcohol you can use in hand sanitizer, and one of them was a wood-based alcohol.And these companies were buying this out of Mexico, and there was this scare in the news.And so we had people writing on our listings that this is using this wood-based alcohol.Alcohol, not ethanol, and don’t use this you know I’m 85 years old this place should be banned so we get two or three of those.Amazon would shut the listing down again, even though it’s tote.We had our label there here's the ingredients we had every single one it just became such a freaking mess that um we just finally said to hell with us and then we tried to look we had 800, about 890, 000 just call it 900, 000 worth of inventory at cost in a warehouse in Washington.Some of the stuff’s flammable, and we’re freaking out.The fire marshal is going to be coming by saying, you have too much of this here.So we tried to liquidate it.Steve's were very well connected with Walmart and Office Depot and Costco and all these.And they're like, we couldn’t even liquidate it for five cents on the dollar because they’re like, we're up to our eyeballs already in this stuff.We've overbought before.We have bins of this stuff we can't get rid of now.So we couldn’t liquidate it.So what we did is we put out an ad in early 2021.It was spring of 2021.Uh, to a church, to a local newspaper and said, 'Hey, come and get it.'And so we literally had, I think, some big Korean church at uh put it out to their huge audience.It was on the news right away; I wasn't that on the news like the free stuff might have been um, and then I don't remember uh if it was up there or not, but then they They would back up SUVs and just throw up, you know, people would load up their trunk with a bunch of hand sanitizer.We had 460 pallets or something like that.Wow.Hand sanitizer.And we wiped it out.But then here's the kicker.In 2022, last year, in February 2022, I'm hosting the Virtual Billion-Dollar Seller Summit.And as you know, I give cash prizes to the speakers, to the winners.Whoever's voted best speaker or best hack, they get a cash prize.So on the virtual summit, I wanted to, like, hold up my hand.You know, with a bunch of cash.And like, here's the cash the winner's going to get.Just, you know, one of those little stereotypical little things to show this is real.So I went to a local credit union here that I have to get the cash.And I'm in there getting the cash.And, you know, you're touching cash and cash can be dirty.So there's some hand sanitizer.And I just reach up to pop some, pop some on my fingers.I'm rubbing.I'm like looking up and the bottle is turned.And I'm like, wait a second.I turned the thing around.It's the freaking hand sanitizer we gave away for free in Washington State.It made it all the way down to this bank.And then I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.Or maybe it's just someone who bought one.They brought it in.Now I'm looking around.Every freaking teller, every freaking loan officer's desk has a bottle of our hand sanitizer.And it was the one that we had given away for free.So someone got all this stuff and resold it.So someone made some money on it, but it wasn't us.I had a seller's funding loan for like $300,000 on this to help do some of the inventory.I personally signed on it.I ended up paying about $200,000 of that out of my pocket, personally.Not from the business, not from my partners.That was my personal hit.One of the guys had luckily done well on some crypto.Crypto was doing well at that time.One of the big investors that lost about a million bucks.He'd done really well in crypto.So fortunately, you know, it was just kind of like he wasn't too pissed off about it.But yeah, it was crazy times.But regardless of that, Amazon is still the best place to sell.I mean, even though we had this, people were like, does that just turn you off to Amazon?No, it doesn't turn me off.It makes me, back to your question, mitigate my risk and do things that are going to mitigate the risk a little bit more because there's always, you're not planning, you're planning in their sandbox.And they're playground, and you have no control.And so the more control you can get, the better you are.And that's why I'm big on building your own brand, your own audience.All this you need to sell off of Amazon is important, but people overemphasize that a lot.You should get to that point, and that should be a goal.But if you're selling on Amazon and Shopify and Walmart, most likely 89% of your sales are still coming from Amazon.So if they shut you down, you're still, up a creek without a paddle but the more you can get that off of there and they're different business models and walmart's a little bit the same but shopify is a totally different business model to maximize that so you just gotta decide what are you gonna focus on or are you gonna go after them all and that's something a lot of people lose but the biggest thing is get that customer list so we have a list of uh you know customers from that i have a list of customers from all my businesses one of my businesses is a calendar business i have a list of customers They've been buying from me for 20-something years, 16 ,000 people.Some of these guys still send checks and money orders in the mail.We do six figures of sales of people sending a check and a money order.For those of you that don't know what a money order is, that's when you take $100 and you go to 7-Eleven and you say, I need a piece of paper that says this is worth $100.Here's my $100 and a dollar fee, and then they send that to the mail.The younger crowd doesn't know what money orders are.And a check is a piece of paper.You write a dollar amount on it, and you sign it.I'm just kidding.And it's kind of cool, though, that it's a seasonal product.We send out a mailer in the mail.We sell these on Amazon.We sell these through stores like calendars.com, which are big stores in the malls and stuff, and they have a retail.And then we send out a flyer through the mail, and these people send in checks and money.I have a P.O.box here in Austin where I go.A couple times a week and it's kind of like Christmas like today is the stack of letters going to be this high or it's or the stack of letters going to be this high and like every one of those letters has money in it, yeah you know it's kind of cool. SPEAKER_1 00:34:33 So the journey to selling on Amazon started with the calendars right? SPEAKER_0 00:34:41 So was it like um sports illustrated type calendars now that's us first sold on Amazon in 2001 I think it was.And I first started out because I was doing some stuff on eBay just selling stuff around the office.Like we'd upgrade the printer or upgrade you know a hard drive or something like that.And I'd sell the old one on eBay.And I saw something on Amazon where it was said, have one to sell, sell yours or something like that.It's a little button that would be under a listing for like a Hewlett Packard printer.I was like, oh, I can sell mine here and I don't gotta go through this whole.Back then eBay was still an auction.It didn't have the fixed purchase stuff.So I was like, oh, I can just sell without the hassle.And so I would sometimes hit that button.I wiped out when DVDs went to Blu-ray.I wiped out all my old DVDs, upgrading everything to Blu-ray.So I'd sell the original DVDs and then go buy the Blu-ray just to update the technology.And then that evolved into the calendars on Amazon.We were in a program called Advantage, which is kind of like a consignment or a 1P program, where it's only for books, media, and DVDs.And so we would send in; they would give us a purchase order.Back then, it was like for the whole season, maybe 300 calendars, 400 calendars.And we would send them in to them, and then they would basically take them on consignment and then pay us for them as they sold.Every month they would make a deposit based on a prefixed amount.And I remember, we do more than 400 calendars a day now on some days.But back then the entire season was 400 calendars.We did that for a while, but we didn't have control of the listing.I made the listing, but I couldn't control the keywords too easily.I couldn't control the title.I couldn't control a lot of things.We switched that to FBA.Another reason we switched it to FBA is to get the customer data.Amazon's taken away the customer data, but one of the deals that we do with our calendars is we print these in Korea.Our landing costs about $1.60.We sell them for $20.So it's a really good margin.And we also have a direct-to-consumer list that we, like I was just telling you, the checks and money orders.So people pay them, they pay us $19.95 plus shipping.So they're paying $9.95 or $12.95 shipping on top of that.And so we make a little bit of money on the shipping.But we also became like a warehouse where we would find, we'd sell about 140 other calendars.So not just the ones that we made.But we would extend the brand.And, yeah, they're like Sports Illustrated bikini-type of calendars.And so we would find, you know, some girls fishing.Some guy would make a girl's fishing in Wyoming calendar.And so many girls with fishing rods, you know, standing in bikinis in waist-deep water fishing.And fishermen buy that stuff.Or there'd be pretty girls next to Harley-Davidson motorcycles or motorbikes.Or it'd be some Australian, the Australian.Beach Club, you know or whatever, so we would we would bring in all these different calendars to leverage the audience like if they like ours, they probably like these others and our audience are collectors, so it's not just guys who want to, you know, pretty girl calendar sitting in the garage but they're they're collectors, right?So someone buys two and they open one and keep one in the in the shrink wrap as a collectible and so they want all this stuff and the stuff that they couldn't get is the it's the long tail kind of stuff, so we would carry all of those.So I wanted the names, people that bought their leads on Amazon, the people that would buy on Amazon would be a lead for those.And so we would, back then Amazon gave you that data.Now they've closed it down pretty much.There's still ways to get it, but unless you're doing FBM, they pretty much closed down being able to export your customer list.But we do things where calendars are like selling milk.They go bad.If you make a book, if you come up with a great book on how to sell on Amazon and you make a thousand copies and you only sell 600 of them right now.Those other 400, you can sell them next year, most likely in the next year.And maybe at some point they go out of date, but you have a longer runway with calendars.You don't, they go, they spoil at the end of the year.And so we have always have, we have to get a guessing game every year.How many of this one do we need?How many of that one do we need?So we usually have, we usually screw up.We usually under order on one.We sell out really quick and another one we're stuck with extra thousand of them.So what do we do is on our Amazon orders now, we put in a little 4x6 card.It's not just Amazon, everywhere.4x6 card says, congratulations, you've won a free calendar.Just pay $10 shipping and handling, and we'll send you a random calendar.You don't get to choose it.We even say on there, it may be one you already have.If so, it makes a great gift for a buddy.If not, you'll get the calendar.And we have a lot of people send in a check, a $10 check or money, or they go to a website and do it with a credit card.And that way we liquidate our extra inventory.It's totally random.They don't get to pick it.So the crap that it's the shitty calendars that didn't sell or whatever they get, or that we just messed up on, they get one free and we get a name and a lead that we can then turn around and say in the next year, look at all these cool stuff we have.And we do really good off of that and build a list. SPEAKER_1 00:39:52 That's awesome. SPEAKER_0 00:39:52 And it's profitable because at 10 bucks, our costs are mostly is it a couple, you know, anywhere from a dollar 60 for ours to.four or five bucks if it's somebody else's that we bought.And then the shipping is on, it’s about four or five bucks.So it’s either break even or make a, you know, make 50 cents or a dollar.So it’s a self-liquidating.It liquidates our inventory and it builds a list of prospects.All basically it liquidates; it washes out. SPEAKER_1 00:40:18 That is free.Yeah, that's super cool.I love that's a way to liquidate, but also people love the element of surprise.Like what kind of random calendar am I going to get?Like that’s really cool. SPEAKER_2 00:40:29 I like that. SPEAKER_1 00:40:30 So it’s like you’ve pivoted so many times in your Amazon career, but in one, you’ve stuck it out in selling, let's just say products and building on Amazon.What I'm hearing is from you, it's like, okay, then you went hardcore with the hand sanitizer and you went all in with the calendar.So you're from, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I see this as you've looked at e-commerce, any venture you've done more as like a serious venture versus any type of side hustle? SPEAKER_0 00:41:06 Yeah, it's never been a side hustle for me.I mean, when I started doing FBA, I got into FBA in 2015 because Amazon .com was doing some courses and they were doing a four-part webinar series before they actually did the big webinar to sell you.They would do a four part informational where they just the first webinar would be here's kind of what.Amazon, the opportunity is.The second one, here's how you can find a product.Here's how you can source it.And then the fourth one would be, here's about us.And then nothing would be sold in that.Then the last one would be, come join us on the webinar that Jason Flatland is going to hold on this particular date.And that's where they would sell you a $5 ,000 course to come, let us help you do the whole thing.I watched the little four-part series in 2015.I was like, I don't need to pay five grand for this.I've been doing this.I've been sourcing stuff out of Asia.I've been building products on another thing that I've been doing for a long time.So, I put together some of my money.I got another person's money.A partner brought on a silent partner for 15%.I'm putting in about $200,000 or so.And we launched five brands, a fitness brand, a beauty brand, a home and kitchen brands, electronics brand.What am I forgetting?A pet brand.And some of those, three of those brands, I did the traditional back then, find something on Alibaba, change it up a little bit, stick my logo on it, repackage it, and make it nice packaging.Two of those brands, I did completely from scratch.I, like, on a napkin, designed the stuff, found a person to do the CAD drawings, to make the 3D printing, did 3D printing and prototyping, all completely original stuff.One of those was a dog bowl, a slow feed dog bowl that's my dog, still he just she just ate out of it this morning.Um, another one was uh, right in 2015, the Apple Watch was just coming out, and people were selling little docks on online for this Apple Watch, and they're, they're crap, there's they're bamboo like little 10 15 little stands to sit on your desk to hold the watch, I was like, if I'm paying 500 bucks or whatever the price was for an Apple Watch, I don't want a piece of little wooden bamboo thing to hold my watch.I want something that looks like an Apple product.I created this $89 stand that would charge an iPad, and iPhone had a Bluetooth speaker built in, it would hide all the cables, it was really cool.It's called Basecamp.I launched that in fall of 2015.I was selling $16,000 to $20,000 a day of these.It did really, really well.I mean, that leads to other stories on cash flow issues and all kinds of stuff.But yeah, so I did a bunch of that.I still have the dog and the pet brand.The other ones, I still own them, but they're not active.The pet brand is still active.So it's not just the calendars and stuff.I still do other stuff as well.But I'm not big.I'm not one of these people with a thousand SKUs.I have about 15 SKUs.I keep it small and lean.And even I eliminate profitable products sometimes if they're not.Not worth my time anymore if they're only making a few thousand bucks a month profit, I'm like you're out of here, let me replace it with something else.Yeah, I follow the 80/ 20 rule; it's like if you know 20 of my products are making 80 of my profits and I need to like see what's what to cut at the bottom, yeah it's a lot, it's a problem for a lot of people is they they have one or two, they call them hero products And then everything else is just filling in the gaps.And that's risky.I don't like that.That's back on risk.That's risky.It's nice.You're like, yes, I like this money coming in.But if one of those goes down, you're scrambling. SPEAKER_1 00:44:50 Yeah, that's true.That is true.I mean, you've had a remarkable Amazon journey.It's not over.And I want to ask you, have you faced burnout or how do you avoid it? SPEAKER_0 00:45:04 Well, one of the ways I avoid it, no, I haven't totally failed.I haven't had a total burnout, but probably because I'm involved in different things.You know, because I'm part of the time, my head is 90% focused on doing a billion-dollar sale or something, the creativity of that.And then it's like, okay, now let me come up with what's the next dog product going to be.Or now let me, you know, I'm.Speaking at an event or something, so I rotated around so that I'm not I don't have that burnout when I'm doing the same thing every day in and out.And like, okay, I've had enough of this; I'm tired of looking at P&Ls every day.I'm tired of every Friday being the meeting; I'm tired of, uh, um, every every month, you know, doing whatever it is.I'm talking to the 3PL and figuring, I'll i switch it up enough, uh, to keep it keep it interesting.So no, I haven't had a burnout and like right now, I'm launching super excited about this newsletter that I'm launching called The Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter and it's it's uh it's a funnel.I mean, you're a marketer; you understand funnels and stuff.It's a funnel, uh, but it's gonna i think it's gonna i i hope I'm right, I might be wrong, but I think it's gonna revolutionize the way people are marketing to other Amazon sellers, and I think it'll get copied when I say newsletter, everybody's got a newsletter out there.You get them from Jungle Scout; you get them from Helium 10; you get them from all these people.Nobody has a newsletter.I was just talking to Tomer at the event we were just at together.And he was like, 'Yeah, nobody has a newsletter in this space.'I said, 'Yeah, people don't get that.They think they do.They have promotional emails.They don't have newsletters.'And so it's coming out here shortly.And it's going to be in beta for the first few weeks.So a small group gets it just to get the kinks out of the way.I'm doing it.And then it's exploded.That's a whole industry that people don't even understand.I mean, you're from a journalism background.You probably get it.The power of media and the power of an audience is huge.And it's got to be done right.And you own the audience.I'm not depending on building a Facebook group or Twitter following or LinkedIn following that.I do not own.And I cannot market to any time.Those are great.Don't get me wrong.But you don't own it.You can't market to it.I can post something on Facebook to people who are subscribing to and follow me.And 20% of them see it, maybe, if I'm lucky.But if I send an email out and it's something that people want, and it's not spam, it's something that people want and are looking forward to, I get a 60% to 80% open rate.And I'm controlling when the message is going out, who it's going out to specifically.I can segment.And that's a whole industry out there outside of this world, and we're bringing that to products too.So I'm doing it for Amazon sellers initially because that's where I have an audience and a list.And I have a friend doing it in tandem with me on a business he works on.It's in the, um, eco space.And then we're going to start doing it for products to launch products. SPEAKER_1 00:48:01 That's fun.I love it. SPEAKER_0 00:48:03 Yeah.So it's going to be, uh, it's going to be good. SPEAKER_1 00:48:06 Yeah.I've, I've been working on my fearless sellers newsletter for about like four or five months.And so I converted fearless sellers .com to the newsletter sign up. Uh, but.I am a perfectionist when it comes to anything to do with journalism, so I am spending a lot of time crafting it and putting it together.And I put one together.I have sent a couple out, but I put one together.And it was around Prime Day.And then it didn't make it out at the exact hour I wanted it to go out.So I scrapped the whole thing.I was like, well, now it's like four hours into Prime Day.I don't feel that it's relevant.So I didn't send it out.What's your newsletter called?We'll promote it.What's it called?Let's all sign up. SPEAKER_0 00:48:52 Billion Dollar Sellers. BillionDollarSellers.com.Not Summit, not BillionDollarSellersSummit, but BillionDollarSellers.com. SPEAKER_1 00:49:01 We got Fearless Sellers. SPEAKER_0 00:49:04 Educate and entertain.So you'll see when it comes out.I think as a journalism person, you might appreciate the way it's done.And I studied the ones outside of it.I think that's something important, actually.Is we get so caught up in this Amazon space and we're all going to Amazon conferences and learning the latest tips and tricks.And most of us don't get outside of this world into other places.Like I go to AI conventions.I go to like the Driven Mastermind.I go to Funnel Hacking Live, which is ClickFunnels because it brings in all these other disciplines from marketing and selling.A lot of times, someone's doing something really good in another marketplace, but they're not doing it necessarily in the Amazon or physical products marketplace.A lot of the opportunities are blending things together.It's not doing the same thing everybody else is doing.It's like blending different modalities and different things.Blending journalism properly with e-com sales or with education is something no one is really doing in this space.And it's because the journalism people, they know journalism.They don't know e-commerce.The e-commerce people know e-commerce.They don't know journalism.I was the editor of my high school newspaper for two years.I produced television shows for pay-per-view and for network television for 15 or 20 years.So, I have that background.I mean, before I was doing a lot on the side of doing the Amazon stuff, we were doing a lot of programming for DirecTV and stuff.I've produced reality TV shows.Um, you know I've done a lot of that so I have that background so I'm mixing those together with this newsletter and we're doing some pretty cool stuff with it um and we're gonna make when we do the consumer version we're mixing it with with NFTs and NCS stuff um so it's gonna be uh um it's gonna be cool, I'm looking forward to this. SPEAKER_1 00:50:47 Billion Dollar Sellers.com to sign up for Kevin's newsletter and I hope in your newsletter you're going to have some travel tips because there is, you'll see, uh, there, there is a travel hack thing in there. SPEAKER_0 00:51:02 There there's Amazon stuff, but it's not just the same old Amazon stuff you see everywhere.It's like, here's the five steps to launching a product on Amazon or here it's, it's the, you've seen me present some of the like ninja hacks.So there'll be some of that.There will be a little bit of new stuff, but it's going to be the off-the-beaten-path, not the 'I'm pretty good at –'I used to do a newsletter.I had 250,000 people on it from 1999 to 2012.We would get on – no, I'm sorry, 2002.We would get on Howard Stern back when he was on terrestrial radio, and he'd blow up our servers.We were doing a daily newsletter with news, games, pictures of the cute girls, with all kinds of stuff, and it was highly successful.We quit doing it in 2002.Mark and I did it.Because of uh, right around then, Can-SPAM came out, so back then there was no spam filters or spam folders or anything, and Spam came out, and we started complaining, like, 'I'm not getting it; I'm like, where's my newsletter for today?I didn't get it and it'd be in either blocked completely or some ISPs had a spam folder, and so we just kind of veered off of it.Um, and it wasn't the technology wasn't sophisticated like it is now.Now there's ways to you know control to work that to work with getting into the inbox, and it's a totally different animal now, but we just kind of veered away from it and went down another rabbit hole.But it's kind of coming full circle back now.I'm like, shoot, I know exactly what to do on this.And using some AI.AI is not writing it.I don't think AI can.Anybody that's trying to do a newsletter and have AI write it is making a mistake.There's personality in it.So as you're reading it, it's like you're talking.It's a three to five minute per day conversation with a friend.And it's got to have that personality and that slant.So I went out and studied like the Milk Road, which is one for the crypto space.I don't know if you ever got in the Milk Road newsletter.These are free, by the way.Mine's free too.But the way it's written with a tongue in cheek and the way they write certain things and the way they summarize things, you said you're a perfectionist.It's in the designs.A lot of people don't even know what a widow is.Do you know what a widow is? SPEAKER_1 00:53:05 I don't. SPEAKER_0 00:53:06 In writing, in journalism, what a widow is?Well, you're TV, so mostly.But a widow is like a word on a line by itself.so people you know you write a paragraph of the text and the last line just has one word on it because that's it wouldn't fit you know that's a widow you never want widows it breaks the eye flow it breaks the flow of someone's scanning okay there's lots of little spacing matters there's lots of little things like that that matter in a newsletter when someone gets it that's a pleasing to the eye people eat with their eyes first not what they don't read first they eat with they the eyes analyze it and so it's all about formatting and skimmability.This doesn't look too bad to read this.It's a big block of text.Nobody's going to skip over that.So many newsletters out there, they're more like, we just wrote a blog about the five ways to do your product better for Amazon.Click here to come read it.That gave me nothing.I then got to take another step.I got to click it.I got to go read this big ass long thing.I'm like, I don't have time for this shit.Just tell me the things I freaking need to know.In the newsletter, you'll see If you've never clicked anything, I just learned something.And if you want to learn more, you want to dive deep, then you click and you go read it.But without even doing that, you're like, okay, I got the gist of this.I know something.So there's a lot of that kind of thing.There's entertainment in there.There's listing wars.You'll see there's two listings competing against each other and listing wars.I can't believe someone's selling this section.Some products, I can't believe someone.So it's entertaining, it's fun, and it's educational. SPEAKER_1 00:54:42 That's awesome. SPEAKER_0 00:54:42 Twice a week. SPEAKER_1 00:54:43 Well, I'm looking forward to that.I'm really looking forward to that.All right, let's leave us with one of your best travel hacks before we say goodbye. SPEAKER_0 00:54:52 One of the best travel hacks.Oh, that's a good one.Probably is, you know, I earn a lot of miles because I'm using my PPP credit cards.So anything over a flight over three and a half hours, I don't like to fly coach, so I like to fly business, but I won't pay crazy amounts for business.I won't pay $16,000 for a business class seat.I might pay four or five in the right situation for an international long 16-hour flight, but I won't pay that amount of money.So if you can't use that many miles, what I'll often do is this just happened: I went to the World Cup finals in Qatar last year in December with my wife at the time.And I was looking at first-class tickets on Qatar Airways, and I went to Qatar Airways, $16,000 from Austin to Doha.I ain't paying that.And I went on American Airlines, who's their partner, and British, they're in the One World Alliance, and it's crazy prices.But I was like, wait a second.JetBlue, I think, actually has a partnership with America.And let me go actually pull this up on JetBlue's site.And JetBlue's actually, that partnership's dissolving now.2022 that was still there I went on JetBlue site I found the exact same flights for uh 4, 800 bucks so it says 16, 000 exact same plane exact same everything just labeled as JetBlue so I booked that uh and those are things that I do is look on other sites um there's a one hotels a lot of times you think you're getting the best deal in a hotel and it's even like a conference hotel we just had this happen in Puerto Rico we had this is our rates you know click here to Sign up.But if you go to Super.travel, I think it is, a lot of times they have the lowest rates over booking .com or over a lot of other places.I don't know what they're doing, but sometimes it's just $10 less.Sometimes it's hundreds of dollars less.And that's a great one to use.I mean, there's so many.We're actually at the Next Billion Dollar Seller Summit.We're doing a travel hack contest for cash in Hawaii.So everybody in the audience is going to be throwing out the travel hacks.And I think that's going to be free, free, amazing.Cause these are people that do a lot of travel and that's awesome. SPEAKER_1 00:56:59 Oh, that's such a good hack idea.Well, thank you for that tip.I hope I'm sure that's valuable for all of the listeners and Kevin, it has been an absolute pleasure to hope to host you today.I always want to say thank you for paving the way for sellers of all levels.And until next time, stay fearless.If you're already selling on Amazon, or you're looking to get started and you want my help, go to amzfearless.com to book a free strategy selling session.We can see if we can help you out.That's amzfearless.com.Talk to you soon.Thank you for listening to the Fearless Sellers, the Women of Amazon podcast.Until next time, stay fearless.