NFT's For Amazon Sellers with Kevin King

NFT's For Amazon Sellers with Kevin King 00:00:00 Hey guys, welcome back to Seller Sessions. Welcome back to the show. Kevin King, how are you doing? I'm doing good, Danny. How are you, man? Good, good. Very hot here at the moment, but I can imagine it's not going to be as hot as it will be next week when we get to Austin. Yeah, it's not hot in the UK right now compared to what it is in Austin. We're at about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and what's that in Celsius for you guys over there? About 39, 40, somewhere around that range. Yeah, that's hot, but not that hot. But you've got air con, right? We do have air conditioning. That is the difference here. You noticed that, right? When you come to the UK, very few places other than hotels, malls, and stuff like that have air con. 00:00:40 Generally, not across the board. Everyone in their home has air conditioning like they do in key areas like Florida and stuff in the state. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have air conditioning here. And we've got a couple of events happening outside. You know, one of them, you're going to be staying on a boat on the last day of doing this big boat party. It's going to be outside. We're ready. I mean, Mark, my event producer, he's got the extra bottles of water and the little things that go around your neck to keep you cool and everything. He's ready. Excellent. Cool. Let's chat NFTs. It's something that I mentioned off-call. I know Isabella's big on this herself, and I know that you guys chat a lot about it as well. 00:01:19 I know you covered some areas of NFTs at Seller Sessions, but it's an area I don't really know that well, and obviously I want to enlighten the audience as well in terms of benefits too. Uh, NFTs related to Amazon sellers, so is there is there stuff that we can start off with for those who don't know about NFTs? General breakdown, yeah, sure. Um, yeah, I think you know a lot of people hear the buzz about crypto and NFTs, and there's a lot of uh, negative buzz right now it's called a crypto winter where you know a lot of the cryptos have crashed, and uh, and so a lot of people are a little gun shy on it, especially the ones that don't understand it. But the people that understand it are really excited about the future. 00:02:02 And it's not so much the craziness of someone selling an NFT for $60 million, some piece of artwork or some crazy amount or a Bored Ape Yacht Club for $300,000. It's more the underlying technology that's really where this is going to go. And it's in its infancy. So there's a lot of crazy stuff going on right now. There's a lot of scams. There's a lot of just hype. But the underlying technology and the underlying principles are solid. And when you take those and apply those to normal business, and you get away from just some of the hype, there's an amazing opportunity here. So NFT stands for non-fungible token. And basically, it's on the blockchain. So it's on the crypto. It's out there on the blockchain in the crypto world. 00:02:44 And a lot of people know NFTs as JPEGs. They saw there's some cartoon character or something as a JPEG and someone paid some ridiculous price for it. And that's where it's at right now. It's almost like baseball cards or collector's cards or Pokémon cards or something like that, where there's a lot of people that have a collector mentality and are collecting these things. And then they create some sort of demand, or the producers create some sort of demand, and it goes up. But where the real value is in owning an NFT is in what's called utility. And utility is it's almost like thinking of an NFT almost as a membership card rather than thinking of it as a JPEG and some sort of photo of some stupid artwork or something. 00:03:24 Think of it more as a membership card. And it's a way to brag. You know, a lot of people on social media like to brag about what they're involved in. You know, they like to put their profile picture as a as something or something in their profile, so if they're part of some sort of NFT club. That's almost like bragging rights. And so if you take a look at the most successful project, which is the Bored Ape Yacht Club, those NFTs, there was 10,000 of them that were issued in April of 2021. They came out at a couple hundred dollars, the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars. And now, depending on where Ethereum sits, they've been worth as much as $300,000 plus. Some people have paid into the millions. 00:04:02 Madonna and Jimmy Fallon, some other celebrities have paid into the millions of dollars for some that they got. The people that buy those, buy those to basically get access to be part of an exclusive club because there's only 10,000 of them. Maybe the picture says something to them. They like that it's wearing sunglasses and it has pink hair or whatever. It says something about their personality. It represents them in some way. And then they get access to this group. So if you're in the Bordea Yacht Club group, for example, the utility is that you get access to everybody else that has a Bordea Yacht Club. So you could be a nobody and be rubbing shoulders at some event with Madonna and Snoop Dogg and Eminem or have access to a network of financial people or other entrepreneurs, or what have you. 00:04:47 And so that's where some of the true value is. And so from from an Amazon or e-commerce point of view, what we're doing and I'm going to be talking about this in detail at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and it's sale and scale. And showing specific concrete examples and walking you through it, I know we don't have time here to do that, but how to tie that into Amazon products so what we we have a sustainable goods company that we're doing where all the products are made out of sustainable materials, so we're taking plastics out of the ocean and actually taking those and turning and melting those down. You know, I don't do it, you know we have factors that do it, that melt that down and we turn those into dog life jackets, and so this life jacket is 80% recycled ocean waste, for example. 00:05:30 But I can say that to you and you just have to trust me, how do you know that's actually true? Well, and with NFTs, you can trace this entire process, so we can on the blockchain, we can actually say that this NFT, I mean this plastic, can there's companies that specialize in getting the invoices of these companies and and tagging it to an NFT, and we can say that this this this waste came from, uh, you know The Indian Ocean, uh, this date, and it was we went through this process, and we could prove it because, you know, there's a lot of companies out there that say, 'We give 10% of our proceeds, you know, to charity or 'we plant trees and make whales and uh, you know, in Cambodia, you know, and dig make villages in Africa or whatever.' How do you know they actually do that? 00:06:12 You don't know if they actually follow through. So with NFTs, it's fully traceable because it's on the blockchain. So the blockchain records every little transaction, and you can't erase it. You can't take it back. You can't undo it. It's there, so you can see this whole process. So by using that type of technology, that provides a proof of work, a proof of scope. Creating a club of people who are passionate about the environment, there's a lot of people out there that are passionate about the environment and they want to do good; you know, they want to buy products that are helping the environment or they want to, as a company, um, give back and help-you know, reduce carbon emissions or reduce waste or whatever. 00:06:50 And so if we create a company that does sustainable products, and we tie in the NFT, so we have the proof of work, and then we have the status symbol of the profile picture, like, 'Look, this is who I am; I'm Kevin King,' and you know, I, I... Through the profile picture, we can have it automatically update to show how much they actually care about the environment. So we can have them have it where they their PFP picture changes to show that, 'Look, I've donated X amount to to save the rainforest or I've done this.' And so it's almost like a status symbol, and they can almost kind of like brag. But then we're taking it a step further. And, you know, the big problem on Amazon right now-or Walmart or anywhere else-is launching products. 00:07:27 Amazon keeps changing the rules on how or what's OK and what's not OK; and just You know, the environment changes. You know we went from uh back in the day where you know, Zon Blast and all those guys just had to send out your stuff give away for free and have people write reviews and put a disclaimer in there it says that you know, you this, this product was given to me in exchange for review or that went away. And then other systems popped up we had the search find buy system that popped up where people are using that to rank some people still do that but you know Amazon pretty much frowns on that now. Um and then you can run heavy PPC. 00:08:00 There's all different kinds of ways to launch on Amazon, but it can be challenging, especially in competitive niches. And so with an NFT project, what you can do is we will build a community of people who are interested in sustainable goods and buying sustainable products. They will buy an NFT from us and it'll be cheap. It's not going to be one of these crazy kind of things. And we're not selling the NFT hoping that they pay $50 and a year from now it's worth a million bucks. That's not our. So that's what some people are doing in the get rich quick thing. But that's not our approach. They'll buy the NFT for somewhere around the equivalent of 50 bucks in Ethereum. And then they will hold this NFT and they'll be part of a club. 00:08:37 And then they will get to have to as we develop new products, they will get to have a say in the products, almost like our own little pick food in a way. And they'll say, hey, we we you know, we want a baby stroller made out of recycled stuff. And if we have 10 ,000 people that hold our NFT. You know not all of them have a baby or need a baby stroller, but maybe a couple hundred or 500, who knows what the number is, or like yeah I I needed one or I have a friend that needs one or I would love to to have this. They'll help us in design; we'll do all the validation on Amazon and make sure you know that this is a legitimate product to launch. 00:09:09 Then we'll launch it, we'll develop the product, get their feedback, then launch the product to Amazon when we launch the product to Amazon, that they will they will go and buy it, and we don't have to give a heavy discount; you know they might be a 10 or some small little token. But there's going to be a gamification where they get some extra points and some extra things within our NFT system for buying the product so they'll go and buy the product. That basically launches it on Amazon, and so even in competitive niches if we have enough people holding our NFTs, and we think we will, that they they will instantly launch a product. Most in most cases to page one. Then other people find out about it that don't know about the NFTs. 00:09:46 You know, there'll be a big insert inside, not an insert, but like a special little package that almost looks like a separate product that introduces the new buyers to the NFTs and to our system and come join the sustainability movement and blah, blah, blah. They'll come and they'll come into the NFTs and give it a shot after they see what we're doing, hopefully. And that'll be it'll create this whole flywheel so that and then as a result of. The product being on anybody that holds an NFT is going to earn you know there's some rules with the SEC and you got to be careful here. It can't be like a a dividend or stop 00:10:19 but there's there's some ways that they can actually earn basically a type of profit sharing, it's not really profit sharing but uh it's it's it's uh I don't know how to explain it other than um for the volumes quickly I mean I can explain in 10 minutes but quickly it's think of it as every time someone bought that baby stroller on Amazon if you hold NFT now you get a buck or something, that buck you can then choose to do what you want to help some other other organization. You can say, oh OK, I've you know, I participated in this in this. Oh, this is we've earned this much money. Let's let's vote as a group to actually some go, you know, clean up a river in Zimbabwe or whatever. 00:11:01 So it's like a trading chip, if you like. This is yours. You accumulate something and you use that resource to plant elsewhere. You can distribute that resource. You're participating in the products. You're doing good for the world. You feel good. You can show this off. And it creates this whole flywheel effect. So that's what we're doing. And then we're going to make our own products. And then there's a lot of companies out there. One of our partners in this is involved. He sees all the deals for sustainability companies come through; he's on a board, it's all these new, uh, startups, you know, they're the Kickstarter-type of things or whatever that they're wanting to to create products but they don't know how to market it, they don't know how to take it to Amazon or Walmart or anything. 00:11:41 They just know they got a good idea, a good product, and they're going to set up a Shopify site, but we will partner with some of them and we will to supplement our, our, our product flow. So it's not just our products and our brand name, it'll be other people's too. So we'll become like the go-to place for sustainable products. If you want high-end quality, sustainable products, and you care about that kind of thing, uh, we're the place to go. Uh, and so that's what, that's what we're in a nutshell, what we're doing. And, um, we're in the process, what we, we're the process of finalizing right now. There's some gamification in there where we have, uh, uh, 00:12:15 you can do certain things to gamify and to earn points; we've got things where we're doing stuff with, uh, you know, some third-world countries where they can they can take recycling, you know, take say beer cans, you know, some, and cycle those and create artwork out of them, uh, you know, create like a little they can take these beer cans and mold them in such a way and make like a little motorcycle like a little kid thinks of like a little kid's toy, like a little kid's motorcycle or something, and it's like artwork, and they can they can create those and then those will be sold to the community so we're helping we're helping uh impoverished places make a little bit of cash by cleaning up the environment around them. 00:12:50 It's this whole system of stuff. That's how we're doing now. Our NFT might go up in value, and we have some stuff for corporations that want to get involved; it costs a little bit more, but we're not doing it. Like I said, it's not the same thing that you hear in the news where some crazy piece of artwork, some ape, you bought it for $200 and some guy sold it for $300,000. That's not what we're doing. There's a component of the collectability in it. There's a component of this mindset of community. There's a lot of community built in. And these are passionate people. In the past, people still say, go and set up a Facebook group. If you're going to launch your product, try to get to 5,000 or 10,000 followers on Facebook. 00:13:32 And then when you launch your product, just kind of know, hey, we've got this new product. But a lot of those people aren't buyers. But someone that spends $50. to get an nft is serious you know it's they're not just on some mailing list there's some cost there isn't it there's a contribution of some cost yeah so that and they're participating in the process so that's that's what in a nutshell i mean there's a lot more details and a lot it gets a lot more granular in the process and that's what i'm going to be sharing at the billion dollar seller summit is exactly what we're doing here some of the tools we're using the resources and i think it's going to open a lot of people's eyes to to what the possibilities are with this That's what I was going to ask you. 00:14:10 If people are out there going off to do their own research and stuff, like you said there, you've got to avoid the scams and stuff. Is there anywhere that people can go to get generalized information on NFTs to take a look at to get a greater understanding? Yeah, there are some good training. I don't have them off the top of my head right here, but there are some good training programs. Even the guys from Helium 10, from this space, from the Amazon space, Manny and Guillermo, they sold out in 2019. And kind of basically retired, and then they got bored, and so they decided, hey, uh, many got really involved in the NFT space, and they decided to actually do their own NFT project; they have one called 'The Bulls and Apes' project, bullsandapes. 00:14:53 com. Now this is not really tied into physical products like we're doing-I mean they are doing a card game, theirs is more of the traditional but it's it's almost like a game, and um, Their project is done pretty well in the NFT space, but it's gamified. So it's a collector mentality. It's the baseball collector, the Pokémon collector mentality, plus the fact that you can make some money off of it; the price has doubled. I got involved in it back in May when they launched it, and the investment's doubled so far. That's one way to do things, but we're doing it a little bit different. So a lot of people, they just have this notion that NFTs are, like I said, just a bunch of JPEGs and people paying crazy amounts for a picture. 00:15:38 There's a lot more to it than that once you get under the hood. And the technology is pretty amazing at what you can do. And some of the big brands are starting to get into it now. Budweiser is doing it. A lot of them don't understand it. It's so new. This is like the Internet in 1990 or something. You know, that's where we're at right now. And so it's the wild, wild west. It's there's going to be a shakeout. There’s going to be, you know, like this crypto winter that's happening now. There's going to be companies laying off people. And and but out of that, out of those out of those, it's not really ashes, but out of those downtimes is when the strongest companies emerge. You know, you look at 2000. 00:16:13 That's when Google, you know, the big crisis happened back in 1992. Google came out of that and many other companies came out of that. So that's what's going to happen here. And I'm excited about how we can tie these two. It’s called Web 3. 0. I get to what Amazon and, you know, the current is called Web 2.0. So we're tying, we're marrying those two worlds together. And it's exciting times. I think it's going to do really well in e-commerce. Cool. Next week then, Billion Dollar Seller Summit. What number is this? I know you do the online ones. Is this the third physical event? No, this is the fourth physical. Yeah. This is our number six. So I've done, first one was in May. May of 2019 and then November of 2019, 2020. 00:16:56 We didn't do one because of the pandemic. And then in 2021, we did a virtual one and an in-person one. And then we did a virtual one back in February this year. And now this is the fourth. It's the sixth event, but the fourth in-person event here in Austin. It'll be the last one here in Austin. We're switching the location up next year. But it's. It's your first time. You're coming out. You're speaking, actually. Yeah, it's the first time. I've been, you know, back in the day, I DJed in Houston, Texas. There's been a couple of places, but I've never been to Austin because I wanted to go. Now, I wanted to do South by Southwest when I was in the music industry because that would become really more popular towards the end. 00:17:39 Mixing that and the tech industry is kind of blended. So I never got over that. But this is the first time for me in Austin. We have ACL here too, which is about 400, the ACL Music Fest, which is like 400,000 people. That's usually in October. So yeah, this is a huge music town, a huge high-tech town. And I think Austin, you've been to Houston or Dallas or whatever, Austin, something like those. This is a liberal city and a conservative state. It's a, it's a, it's a cool place. I wish so many people would quit moving here. I've been here about 30 years and I think that the population then was about 600,000. The Metro was about 600,000. Now it's two and a half million. 00:18:16 Uh, and it keeps growing, but it's a, I think you're going to really enjoy other than the heat. Uh, I think you're going to really, really have a good time here and really, uh, enjoy it. Cool. So who's on the lineup? Oh, we've got 30 talks going on over four days. I mean, yeah, we, I mean, there, there's, you know, you're, you're speaking Leo Scovio speaking. We have Isabella Hamilton, you know, uh, so yeah. From your podcast, she's speaking on NFTs and what she's doing on that platform. We have Brandon Young is speaking. I'm drawing blanks right now. Vanessa is speaking. Yeah, we have another. Isabella Ritz is speaking. That's right. I'm drawing a blank on the names. I'll put it on the spot there. Let me get the website up. Let's do that quickly. Let's be really, really organized. One second. 00:19:20 You can tell I type very, very slowly. Yeah, let's have a look. Ah, just faces. So Anthony, I always mess up his surname. Confrancesco. There you go. Casey Goss as well. Casey's actually not speaking. Casey has moved on to some other things. Vanessa Hung is speaking. She's always really good. I'm speaking, of course. It's a really strong lineup and everybody brings their A game. We do a contest for $5 ,000 cash for the audience votes on who's the best speaker. Everybody's And I publish a list at the end. You know, here's the here's the order. You know, you don't I don't publish the bottom four, but we do one through 10. So, you know, if you're not on that top 10 list, you are good enough. You're talking over too well. 00:20:18 But we have several Travis Ziegler's speaking. You know, we have several people that have won in the past, like four or five speakers that have won at one of the other events. And then there's a lot of new people. So it's a it's a really, really good group. And then some of the sponsors speak and some of them. They only give like a 15-minute session, but some of them deliver some amazing stuff. There's some really good talks and some really good tactics. The guys at ClearAds will come on. He'll show you some really cool DSP stuff. And so it's not like a pitch fest or something. Yeah, it's heavily vetted. Yeah, it's really good. And then we do the event differently, as you'll see. It's really high-end. The hotel is a really nice hotel. 00:20:57 The food is – we take care of everybody. Really good food, good activities. There's parties each night, you know. The first night, there's a welcome cocktail party with hors d'oeuvres. The second night, on Monday, I think Brandon Young is actually throwing a little event for everybody. Uh, in that on Tuesday, we do some sessions for part of the day and then the rest of the day, we have an activity in the afternoon that's a kind of like an amazing race uh type of activity. We break up into teams and there's a cash prize, and it's going to be a lot of fun. I think you're going to really enjoy that. It's really good networking. And you'll probably see a lot of stuff on social media from that day from people. 00:21:37 And then that night, I think Elevate Brands is throwing a party for everybody. And on Wednesday, we're back for more presentations. And then that night, we have a VIP dinner. And then on Thursday, we're heading out to the lake. We've got a big party boat. Where you're going to be DJing and Leo's going to be DJing. We've got some really good barbecue being catered out there. We've got lots of water toys. And then that night, I think Howard Tye is throwing a party. So it's going to be a – So hold on to your liver. That's right. It's not just – but we've got healthy stuff built in too. Yeah, you've got a trainer as well, haven't you? Yeah, last year I went on stage at the live event in September, and I put on a little bit of weight. 00:22:24 And people, you know, I got a couple of comments like, hey, you need to take care of your health. Yeah, I am. I'm aware of it. But so I said, you know what? The next time you see me at the live event, I'm going to drop at least 10% to 15% of my body weight. Well, I've actually dropped a little bit more than that. Since then, I started working out with a private trainer and a nutritionist and stuff. And so I've dropped about 40 pounds. I'm doing it slow. I'm not trying to do it some radical thing slowly, but surely it might take me a few years. But so my trainer said, 'Hey, I'd love to come in.' Anybody wants to come over two mornings, I'll do a session. 00:23:00 You know, I said, 'I don't know, maybe one or two people show up over there.' You know, you might have 10 or 15, 20 people say it doesn't matter. So, yeah, so we've got some healthy stuff involved in there as well. Sounds good. Great. Any last words or also what's the best way for people to reach you? Well, yeah, if you're interested in the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, you know, it is limited. We have about 125 total people at the event. It's not a huge event, but it's high, high level. You know, most of the sellers there, you'll have your occasional guy that's a little bit smaller, but the average is about $10 million in the room. So it's a really high-level networking event. 00:23:42 And so if you're able to make it out, we have, I think, about six or seven tickets left right now on it. So if you're able to make it to Austin, it starts this Sunday, the 14th, goes the 14th to the 18th. If you're not able to make it out, but you're interested in seeing the content, there's a replay. A replay will be available a couple of weeks afterwards, but you can sign up for that now. If you just go to BillionDollarSellerSummit. com, like you see. Next to my name there, BillionDollarSellerSummit. com. All the information is there. Now, that page is not something fancy. You did a podcast on this. I've done it in conversion optimization, and I said you can't get away with this unless you're established in your world, which is because you make a point of not doing beautiful landing pages, right? 00:24:27 Yeah, it's like a 1990s website. You go there, and you're like, 'What the hell?' This isn't something. Flashy website. It's because it's all about the content. I'd rather spend the money delivering an awesome event and making it really special and an experience that people will remember, not just another conference. And that's where I spend it. But yeah, BillionDollarSellerSummit. com if you want to join us or if you want to catch the replay, if you're interested in seeing this amazing content, check that out. Cool. Kevin, thank you for joining us today. I look forward to seeing you next week, guys. Thank you for joining us. Sharon will be back in the chair tomorrow. I'll be back next week. It'll be probably from Austin. 00:25:06 I was going to ask you, Kevin, if I can borrow your podcast set up at the event so I can do stuff. I know that you're doing stuff on your podcast as well, right? So I was wondering, have a microphone and we'll travel, you know? Yeah, I have a mic for you and a Rovecaster if you need it. Yeah, that'd be great. It'd be nice, yeah. complimentary of your content that you you're creating for your own podcast i'll run it by you but it's always nice to get on the road and capture some of the atmosphere yeah for sure for sure uh and actually you know uh we'll talk i have an idea for you on that okay sounds good all right guys thanks for joining us today as i said sharon's back again tomorrow isabella be back in the chair monday i covered for yesterday if you want to check out the show and you'll see me again here next week take care of yourself and your family much