The Life Story of Kevin King - Founder of the Billion Dollar Seller Summit

The Life Story of Kevin King - Founder of the Billion Dollar Seller Summit Create your business around your life, not your life around your business. 00:00:09 Welcome to a new edition of the DevDevice podcast. And I am a very lucky boy because today I have Kevin King himself on my podcast. Welcome, Kevin. Hey, welcome. Welcome, man. Welcome to you too. It's nice to be talking to you here across the internets. Yeah, yeah. I think we are like a few thousand miles apart right now. A little bit more than that, more like 10,000 miles apart. Yeah, something like that. You are in Texas and I'm in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. So, yeah, from the time difference alone, we can tell; yes, we are on the opposite side of the planet. But even better than that, we have the internet and we can talk today. And yeah, I couldn't be more excited having you on this podcast because, I mean, I've been following you for years. 00:00:56 I've been an Amazon seller myself. And Kevin King was always the guru who did all these webinars and had all this amazing content and came up with all these amazing tricks and tactics and hacks for Amazon sellers to improve their sales and all that. So, you have been on my horizon for many, many years. And as I mentioned before, I'm super excited and humbled to have you here today. I'm glad to be here. Yeah. And, well, let's start with what's going on today in your business, Kevin. So you have, I mean, I won't read down the list. Just looking at your LinkedIn profile, there's so many things. But I will just let you pick, you know, what is the most important thing happening for you today? 00:01:42 Yeah, I'm involved in the Amazon world pretty heavily from a lot of different angles. I'm a seller. So I still have three different Amazon seller accounts that I sell on. I have a seasonal business that's around calendars that we pretty much runs from about September till February of every year. Do a pretty good business on that. Then it basically goes quiet. And then I have another company that does sports and fitness products, exercise equipment and dog products. And then I have another company that's another dog products that does dog products with sustainability. So you like life jackets, dog life jackets for body glove, little. waste poop bags that are totally biodegradable, stuff like that. And then I also do the training for Helium 10. 00:02:31 I don't work for Helium 10, but I have a contract with them to do their course called the Freedom Ticket, which is a course for new people. It's totally free if you have a Helium 10 membership to their software. And then I do their advanced training called Helium 10 Elite. I speak at a lot of different events all over the world. I run an event called the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, which happens twice a year, one time virtually in February and one time in person. Our next one's coming in May in Hawaii. We just did one in June in Puerto Rico. And that one, it's a small event. It's expensive to come. And the average seller there was doing about $13. 5 million per year. 00:03:12 It's a pretty exclusive group of the more successful sellers. And so we do a lot of high-level. Strategies and tactics that you don't really hear on podcasts or you don't really see in different summits and stuff like that. And then I have the AM PM podcast. I have my own podcast. It's not my own Helium Tens podcast, that that I took over a little over a year ago and started hosting. I have a billion dollars. You see the link up there, Billion Dollar Sellers. com is a new newsletter that I just recently launched for this space. You know, a lot of people, I was getting frustrated because a lot of people, I was probably getting sometimes 50 emails a day from different service providers and different people. 00:03:53 On the subject line would be like, 'Welcome to our newsletter.' Here's our June newsletter. And I'm like, I open it up and all it is, is 'Go read our blog', go check out our new feature of our new tool. Oh, did you know you could do this? We're going to be at this show. It's nothing but promotional. It's not a newsletter. A newsletter to me is more like a newspaper. Something that's information, so I decided to launch that-that's a big project that's happening right now, and I'll probably keep going; I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but keeping pretty busy. Oh yeah, yeah! I saw your newsletter and I received it in my inbox and I read through it, which I very rarely do, like read through the whole thing, and yeah, it was packed with information-it is what deserves the name newsletter because I learned something new, like the you know. 00:04:41 Like this thing where there's a new variation of a product available, you know, how we can promote it like this little thing on your listing where you have a new version of your product. I didn't know that. So there you go. So, this was definitely a newsletter that I will keep clean in my inbox and make sure it's not going into spam. Awesome. Awesome! I like to hear that. Yeah, I would love to join one of your summer events, man! I saw this the invitation for the last one and uh, Puerto Rico, it was right, yeah, yeah, it was slightly out of reach for me, but uh, I will do my best to accommodate to one of these, yeah, because that's why we always do one virtually as well, because a lot of people they can't travel, uh, it costs too much or like it's too far. 00:05:29 The virtual one, we don't, it's not like a Zoom call where a lot of people, they do a little summit and say, okay, everybody get on it. It's pre-recorded and you're listening to like three lectures a day that are some sort of summit or maybe getting on Zoom. No, we use a special conference software tool. So everything is live. You have interaction with the speakers. You have breakout rooms. You have a lot of cool stuff that makes it kind of feel like you're almost there in person. We really try to bring that to the virtual events that most people aren't doing. Yeah, you must be one of the best-connected people on the planet in this Amazon space. I mean, you must know so many sellers, service providers, and whatnot. 00:06:11 So, I guess you are simply the go-to guy for everything Amazon. Yeah, I do know a lot of people, but I think a lot more people know me, which is kind of embarrassing sometimes because sometimes I'll be. I'll be at dinner at an event, and, you know, I'm sitting next to across the table from somebody, and I'm like, 'Hey, how are you doing? My name is Kevin.' He's like, they're like, are you serious? My name is John. We met and we sat next to each other for four hours, you know, at dinner like four years ago. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I don't remember because I've met so many people and I'm bad with names. And it's, yeah, it's. Kind of bad sometimes, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:06:57 I can, I can partially understand because it also happens to me when you're heavily into networking and you meet like 20 people a week or 10. And then, as time goes by, then some guy shows up who you've talked to previously, but it just it doesn't show up on the radar. So it can be slightly embarrassing. But yeah, I guess that's just what happens. But yeah, it's still good to be in this position. I think networking is a huge thing in in our business and business in general. Well, yeah, I mean even in this business, I get recognized a lot of times even outside this business if I go to an Amazon conference. I'd expect people to know me; they've seen me on Helium 10 or they've seen a podcast or a webinar or something I did, that's to be expected. 00:07:38 But when you're standing in line at the grocery store or you're at Walmart and people recognize you which I've had happen, uh, Or you're on an airplane You're getting off the airplane in Seattle and a guy is waiting at the end of the jetway for you, and he's like, 'Excuse me, excuse me, are you Kevin?' Do you work for the IRS or who are you? What are you? I just wanted to say hello. I saw this-you know, I was like, I've had an Uber driver in New York City. I was picking up in January this year, getting an Uber after going to a hockey game. And I just went to an Uber and I was like, 'Show me on my phone, you know, my Uber's here.' So I'm looking for the plate and the guy pops out of another Uber and says, 'Hey, I thought it was my driver.' He's like, 'Kevin.' And I was like, 'Oh yeah, okay.' 00:08:27 And I was like, 'Wait a second, this is not the right car.' He's like, no, I just wanted to say hello. I recognized you. So yeah, it's kind of crazy sometimes. Yeah. So, you're a celebrity, man. You're a rock star. I mean, too bad. You gotta be careful, you know-you can't adjust. If you get a wedgie, you can't adjust it in public anymore, you know someone might be looking; yeah, I know, well no, I don't know, but the rock star life must be really tough, yeah, I'm just waiting for it, I'm just waiting for all the pretty girls, where are all my groupies? Yeah, well, I'd be surprised right that's the rock star life, yeah, yeah, yeah, that should be part of it; I guess um, Kevin, um, you're doing all these amazing things and when when I talk to a person like you, my first question on my mind is how did all this happen? 00:09:18 So this is why I call my podcast You know the life story podcast because I would be so excited to know how this person, this amazing Kevin King, and you know the second name does I think it's not by chance you called Kevin King; it kind of makes sense, it's like your title already, so how did you become this person? So what What was 10-year-old Kevin like? Oh, as Lady Gaga says, I was born this way. I've been an entrepreneur since I was three years old. Okay, so I have to dive even deeper into childhood. Yeah, just to put it in context, I've never worked for a corporation. I've never worked an office job, never worked for somebody else. I've worked two jobs, really three jobs in my life for somebody else. 00:10:08 I delivered pizzas in high school. I worked at a McDonald's as my first job when I was 16. And I briefly worked in a deli slicing cheese and meat for about two months. And that's it. Ever since then, I've been an entrepreneur in the ups and downs. But it all started when I was about three years old. And my mom would take me to the grocery store. And back then, you could buy a little bubble gum in like a single piece of bubble gum for like a penny. And I would buy this bubble gum for like a penny. And these are the ones that had the little wrapper and had like a little cartoon on them. I don't know if they do that or maybe in a special candy store or something. 00:10:43 But I would buy those for a penny and take them back and open up the garage door and set up a little store. I'd set up a little table or something in there, put about 10 pieces of gum out on the table. And my mom had some oatmeal containers or these cardboard oatmeal containers, that kind of spherical. And so I would make turn one of those and put the lid back on it and turn it into a drum. And I put a little sign on and say drum and have some stick that picked up from falling off a tree or something as a drumstick. Put that next to it for like five cents. And the neighborhood kids would come and give me a nickel or whatever for a few pieces of gum and stuff. 00:11:20 And so that's that's where it started. So how come a three year old boy starts selling bubble gums and. create drums i don't know because my parents are not entrepreneurial my dad works for the government he's the most conservative or he worked he's retired now but he worked for the government he's the most conservative frugal guy no risk taker at all my mom's a little bit more of a risk taker but she never really started her own business or did anything like that um i don't know where i don't have anybody in my family wasn't like an uncle or somebody i i don't know where i got it uh i just i i honestly don't know what was the uh What triggered that? 00:11:58 But it's I've always been enterprising, always been always been that way since I was I was little. I would be the guy that was organizing the little football games in the neighborhood or organizing the little things. I was an Eagle Scout. So I went through the Boy Scouts and became an Eagle. And I I was by the time you talk about 10, probably by the time I was 11 or 12, I was mowing lawns. So, you know. Different houses in the neighborhood, they would pay me, I think it was like five bucks, and I would go and cut their grass. So I had one of those lawnmowers, and I was pushing it all over the neighborhood, and some days I'd cut four or five different yards on a Saturday or Sunday, and a 12-year-old would make $30, $40, which back then, this was in the late 70s, early 80s, that's a lot of money, especially at that age. 00:12:48 So then I did that, and I would paint numbers on street curbs in the United States. A lot of people like to put their address on the street. So you have it maybe up on your house, but maybe you're getting a delivery. And so out past your driveway, they'll paint the number on the concrete, like where you draw on the concrete driveway on the edge. And I went and bought a stencil set with all these different numbers and a bucket of paint and a bucket to carry everything in. I go door to door, knocking it on the door saying, 'Do you want me to paint your numbers on yours?' your address like one 00:13:20 two three you know if they lived at one two three main street i put one two three and like you want in red or yellow or what color do you want and i'd for four dollars i would paint that on there and uh if they want both sides of the driveway you know it's six dollars or something i did i did that kind of stuff i picked up aluminum cans off the side of the road and took them and recycled them i big old black trash bags full of cans to make money i go to soccer fields where the kids were playing uh football and soccer and and and look through the trash cans 00:13:53 for all the beer bottles and everything had been thrown away that could re take to the recycle place uh i started a little mail order business probably 14 15 where i sold stamps and coins by mail oh so you could actually go into a it was a some magazine in the back they had a little classified section so i had i ran ads in that you know for different things. I didn't make a lot of money on any of that, but that's where a lot of it started. When I went to college, I went to Texas A&M University. I graduated with a degree in marketing, so I was studying business, but on the side, I was doing all kinds of stuff. I was teaching. 00:14:30 There was a class called BANA 217, which was a sophomore, second-year level class that all the business students had to take. It was to learn the basic computing language. It's not even used anymore, but think of JavaScript or or something-it was the language back then, and they figured this: since it was the 80s, they figured you need to learn it, know the logic of programming, if you're going to be a business person, not to be a programmer, just to know the basics and the logic of it. And there's a thousand or so students at M that would take this class from three or four different professors, and they would, for whatever reason, they did the test-all at the same time. 00:15:09 So, three times a semester, they would say: 'Okay, on Thursday, October 1st, Wednesday, November 6th, and I don't know, Wednesday, December 7th are going to be the three test days.' And everybody, no matter who your professor was, would take the test at that time. So I started out just tutoring these people, putting up flyers around the campus, and you tear off a number and call me, and I come one-on-one and help you understand the stuff. And that grew to where I could no longer do one-on-one. I had to scale it, so I was doing like five-on-one. Then I got to running a room in the library and 10 on one that'd be a blackboard like a little conference room, and then it got to the point where before these tests people come to me and say, 'Can you show us this? 00:15:52 We still don't quite understand it.' And it got to so big that I ended up renting a room at the uh the college station Hilton, big hotel, like a big huge conference room, and I would have 500 people come, but not before yeah I do it in two sections there'd be like a I forget the time. There'd be like a 6 o'clock session and an 8:30 session or something. And they all paid for it. It was a paid thing, right? Yes, paid. $15, $15 for 500 people. Holy cow! Yeah. So that was $708,000 in one night. How much? About $80,000 in one night. But I could only do that for three times a semester because there's only... 00:16:36 but you do that six times in a year, you know, that's $50,000. It's not bad for a college student still going through college. Exactly. It's your first seasonal business. Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, my buddies, my roommates would stand at, stay at the table at the door collecting the $15 and, you know, get on the pretty chicks, the pretty girls that would come through, get their number and stuff. So they loved it. But yeah, I did that for. For a while, I started a little software business called the You Shoes Bartender, where I had all this money. Our house was like, have you ever seen the TV show Animal House, the movie, old movie? That's what my house was like. It was four guys living in this apartment, and we partied. 00:17:18 We took Tuesdays off. It was a British guy with a strong British accent named Phil. It was a German guy named Wolf. I loved to drink his beer. It was me, a guy, a Polish guy named Zebo. And so it was the four of us. And, um, it was; we were party central. So we had someone over at the house every night, except two Tuesday nights, that was the day off. And, um, we drinking, having fun, watching movies, doing whatever, eating pizza, no, no drugs, uh, but just everything else, but, but that, and I was, I was, had all this money i was making so i had the nice stereo system i had the 00:17:58 nice couches you know so we had a good little good little pad and i was buying alcohol because i wanted to know i took a i wanted to know how to bartend i'm like i want to know how to make all these different drinks uh and so i went i wasn't 21 yet i was 20 and i went and took a little class and they're like well you you can't taste this stuff you're not of age you so you have to use just liquid in the bottles like you know water basically in the bottles and we'll show you how to do this stuff i was like the heck with this i want to want 00:18:26 the real thing so as soon as i turned 21 i went bought an entire bar of stuff i don't know a thousand dollars worth of liquor like every vodka not the top stuff but rum tequila gin everything and we started making drinks and became popular everybody's like hey let's go to this apartment because it's the party place it got to be i was like why am i paying for all this uh why the apple two I think it was Apple IIe computer. It's like one of the first laptops that come out at that time. And my mom had given me one. I don't know. It had like 128K memory or something ridiculous. You know, floppy drives you stick in. And I made a little program on that. 00:19:09 I wrote a little program in the basic computing language to basically be a bartending program. It had all the recipes. It would keep tabs. So I could put in all my friend's name. It's like. what they drank, what it would cost to them. So every week I was like, hey, Johnny, you owe me $3 . 50 or Bill, you owe me $10 or whatever. And then I took that and sold it. I created like a manual for it, and I put it in the back of a computer magazine, The Computer World. And actually, I didn't make a lot of money off of it, but I put it in there and sold some of those. Oh, my God. 00:19:46 fun times and then i did a student i did a coupon book if you see uh i don't know you said you signed up for my the billion dollar seller's newsletter i don't know if you saw there's a coupon book where you can download a pdf of a about 30 different coupons for different software companies and stuff in our space i used to do that in college i had something called student express and i would i would get a mailing list at the beginning of the semester of all the kids in the university because you could get that as a public information in Texas. You just go to the university. A lot of people didn't know this, but you just go there and you cite this specific law under the Sunshine Act, and they would have to give you the names and addresses of every student. 00:20:24 And so I would get those, have them printed out on mailing labels, stick a stamp on this coupon book, and send it out. And I would go door-to-door to all these in the summer before the fall semester started. I'd go door-to-door to all these different businesses, all the pizza shops, all the copying places, all that. All the kind of places that college kids would go and tell them to give me a coupon. Buy one hamburger, get one free, or $5 off a pizza, or whatever it was. I did that, and I'd mail those out. It's called Student Express. There's quite a few other things I was messing around with in college as well. That's the early days. This amount of creativity and innovation and entrepreneurial stuff that was going on with you, it's unbelievable. 00:21:11 I mean, your software thing reminds me a bit of this guy. I'm not sure if you read the book 'Surrender', the Surrender Experiment. I haven’t met Michael S. something. So he was like a. Yeah, I mean, it really reminds me of this. It’s a similar story where he just goes and he happens to write a software, which was for doctors, actually, to manage medical practices. And this software became like one of the leading softwares on the planet. I mean, I’m not sure about yours, but mine went nowhere. The only place mine went was almost getting suspended from the university because I was using that. I was using their computer lab to print out my manual. So I didn’t have a Mac. 00:21:57 Back then, the very first Macintosh had just come out, the little brown box one. And laser printers were like $3,000 or $4,000. So I couldn't afford a laser printer. I later could. So I was using the university's little computer lab to make my manuals and to print out all my stuff. And I got in trouble. They're like, 'You're creating a business. You're using all of our resources here for your business. You can't do that.' I got called into the dean's office. I said, 'Hey, if you continue this, you're going to be suspended. Okay, so I guess you'll discontinue this.' But what still baffles me is how an entrepreneur guy like you, how did you end up in university? 00:22:34 Because to me, after I finished my duty part of school, I'm not sure how you call this in English, I think it's college. I didn't want to sit in any classroom ever again. I said, 'I'm done.' I'm done listening to people talking to me, taking tests. I just want to go and work and do stuff. But you still decided to go to university? My dad, I'm the first child. I have one younger brother. My dad, education was super important. So I didn't miss a day of school for seven years. I had perfect attendance from like the fifth grade until the 12th grade of high school. I never missed a day of school. If I was sick, my dad's like, 'You better be like, you need to go to the hospital because you're sick.' If you don't, then you go to school. 00:23:18 So I'd never missed a day of school. So education was super important. And he wanted me to get back then. It was the thing. That's how you succeed, is you go get a degree from a good university. You go work at a good job at an accounting company or something big. And that was the route. And that's what my dad pushed me into. And it's not something I wanted to do at all. So I fought the system. So when I when I graduated, I've never I've never made a résumé. I've never made a CV, never made one. Maybe I had to do a class, you know, I was in college. I might have had to make one, you know, as a class assignment or something. But I've never had one. 00:23:59 And I, when I graduated, the first thing I did was. Move in uh with a buddy; a college station is about an hour and a half from Austin. It's a college town where I went to school and had some old friends in Austin, so I came over here to Austin and I've been here ever since, basically. And, and crashed on their couch-there's a house with like five guys; um, I literally crashed on the couch in the living room for a year and I had to wait till the last person went to bed till the TV got turned off so I could pull out a blanket and a pillow and sleep on the couch. Um, while we're my dad was so pissed off-he's like, 'You have this college degree; go get out, go get a job.' Um, I'm like, 'I don't want to do that; that's not what I want to do.' Um, I'm not going to do that; I'll figure something out. So we started selling t-shirts-the University of Texas American football team started doing really well this is 1990 and, and we decided we're going to make t-shirts and the song, uh, from uh, MC Hammer- 'You Can't Touch This.' 00:25:02 It's popular at that time. So the University of Texas, their initials are UT. So we made a shirt that said, 'You can't touch this.' And the U and the T were in the orange colors of the university; they can't touch this or just another. And we put like a little football helmet or something there. And one of my friends was still in college at University of Texas. He worked; he was in the engineering school. So he got permission, said if we did a fundraiser for the engineering school and gave 10% back of whatever we sold, we could get permission to sell these around the university. So we would pick, this is a university with 50,000 college students on a big campus. 00:25:39 So like five of us would pick strategic locations where most students are crossing, to cross to go between classes or something, like on different streets. And we'd set up a little table out there with our shirts displayed and sell them for, I don't remember, $10, $ 12 bucks a piece or something like that. Sit out there all day from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon and make a lot of money. Then we, on a football game day, like on a Saturday, there'd be a hundred thousand people coming to the stadium. And so we would sit out there on those days and sell these shirts. And it got to be when you have a big crowd of people walking and you're sitting on a table with your shirts, the only people that see that you have shirts are the people that walk right by your table. 00:26:21 Because there's a massive amount of people. So one of my friends and I were doing this with, and happened to be that they're engineers like, 'Why don't we make a catapult?' So they made this folding-like piece out of wood, like these pieces of wood that would fold down so we could stick them back of a station wagon and we can haul them out. And like, they would come up like this, and then across the top would be a string where we could hang, like a clothesline, these shirts high up in the air. So everybody can see these shirts as they're walking by, no matter how big the crowd is. And we were selling them for $15. And on a game day, we'd make $30,000. Oh, my God. 00:26:55 And so every home game, we were out there doing this. And then I'm like, this is kind of cool. I'm 22 years old. Let's do this for spring break. 22 years old. Let's go where all the pretty girls are and go to all the spring breaks. So we loaded up a bunch of shirts and created like beach-type of shirts. Went door-to-door to all the spring break locations from Texas to Florida, trying all the little stores that are on the beach, trying to sell those. We were doing some illegal stuff with Simpsons. The Simpsons had just come out at that time. And they were popular. So we had a guy in New Jersey who was making illegal Simpsons T-shirts for us. So he's taking Homer and Bart, putting them on a shirt, and funny. 00:27:35 And we were selling them. And what we would do is we would add a buddy back in a college station that would. I got a 1-800 number. So it's a free call. And the number rang to our home phone. This is back before cell phones. So it rang to the phone on the wall in the kitchen. And I had a guy who would answer that. He would answer it. I don't know if it was a college lifestyle company. 'How can I help you?' And me and another guy, we had a station wagon full of shirts. And we drove from Texas all the way to Florida. That's a 20-hour drive if you drive it straight. But stopping along the way at all the universities. 00:28:11 And we would go into a town like Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and go to all the dorms, hang up flyers in the staircases, and look at these cool Simpson T-shirts. And there would be little numbers you'd tear off on the bottom with this 800 number. The students would go back and call my friend in Texas that's answering the phone in our kitchen and taking their credit card information. And then he would The next morning we would check in with him like 'where did we get delivered today and he said, 'okay, dorm room 26, you know, room 13.' And do these different you know? We'd go deliver a bunch of shirts and we'd stay there for a couple days and then go on to the next town. Um, yeah, we did uh all kinds of crazy stuff. 00:28:55 So your first big business was the t-shirt business and you didn't have to sleep on the couch anymore; running this after about a year, yeah, I was able to make some good money and I was able to get an apartment with a nice big big screen TV and I did. Yeah, I did. All right. Then, then what happened then along those lines, I'm a huge American football fan, especially college football, and my university. So in 2000, no wait, 1990, 1990 or 1991, I think it was 1991. They were playing the University of Hawaii in Hawaii. And my mom worked for American Airlines. And so I could fly as a perk as being her son until I was 25. I could get these little free passes where you just show up at the airport. 00:29:38 And if they had empty seats, you could basically fly for free. And so I had one to go to Hawaii. And I was like, I'll go. Our team is playing in Hawaii. It's a good excuse to go to Hawaii. I've never been. I'm 22 years old. So I went to Hawaii by myself using her free ticket, watched the game. And then after the game, my plane wasn't leaving until like 10 o'clock at night or something. So I had a whole afternoon to kill. I checked out of the hotel, and I was like, what am I going to do for the next 10 hours? So I was downtown in Honolulu, and I stopped. There's this place called The Dollhouse, and it's a strip club. And it was the middle of the day. 00:30:16 Nobody in there. I walk in. There's like two other customers. But it's nice. This place has like marble floors and crystal chandeliers. This wasn't some dingy little club, sleazy little place. This was like. A nice place and I was like, 'What the heck?' And I didn't have too much money on me, so I didn't have enough money to pay for like a lap dance or anything. But one of the girls sat down and talked to me, and she's like, 'Yeah, we have dental insurance.' We have this, you know? I was like, 'No way! This is a freaking strip club! I mean, strip clubs are not these kind of fancy little places; they're like they're sleazy houses of prostitution. 00:30:52 Um, but many of them still are.' But I was like, 'This is interesting.' The guy, when I left, there was a TV that was playing this video on loop when I was there. And it's this guy on a yacht off the coast of Miami cruising around shooting his calendar with like 40 hot half-naked chicks on this yacht. And I was like, 'That's cool. I want to do that.' So I came back, started researching. I was like, flabbergasted that this club was so nice. And so I started researching the industry, and I used my mom's pass to fly for free and I went to do research at about 25 different cities around the U. S. 00:31:34 over the course of about six months, so I would fly to Atlanta or fly to Boston or fly to Chicago or LA and just go to strip clubs, and i was when I was going to the clubs, I wasn't going and getting dances or going and drinking; I was going to do research, so I would go in there and sit and look around like make notes – okay, the stage is over here, the DJ is over there, this is the the type of promotions they're doing. You know, I'd sit and ask the girls, 'Do you have insurance?' 'Do you do this?' 'What's the dressing room like?' I'd get out my notebook and just make notes. And then I'd go to the library. This is before the internet. 00:32:05 And I would pull, I'd spend a day in Atlanta in the public library, pulling microfilms in the old micro; you could go on a computer and type in, you know, something like a keyword, like an old computer, and say, 'strip clubs of Atlanta' or something. And it would come up and say, 'These are the articles that the Atlanta Constitution has.' Whatever the name of the newspaper is, they've published and you could go and like pull out the microfilm-you know what microfilm is, it's like a little like a little plastic sheet like a picture like a negative, yeah, yeah! And pull that out, put a machine, you could see the article from 10 years ago about some mafia guy doing this or whatever. 00:32:41 So I was researching all that and then I came back and put together a whole business plan-a hundred-page business plan to open a nice strip club in Austin. It's going to be a $3 million investment because we were going to do marble floors, prime mignon lunches, have the best dressing room, have a personal trainer and beautician on site, all this kind of stuff. It's going to be like top-end. And I put together this massive business plan. I'm still, to this day, that business plan could probably win awards. It was really good. I didn't have any money to do this. I mean, I didn't have three million bucks. I was 23 years old. Like what? Who's going to give a 23-year-old that has no experience? I was selling T-shirts and whatever. 00:33:29 Three million bucks to open a club. So I was like, I need to do some more research. So I put an ad out in a local newspaper saying 'Brand new club opening' and now hiring dancers and waitstaff and managers. I had no club. It was total bullshit. put in the classified ads of the local newspaper, and I got all these people submitting stuff to me, faxing me their resumes, and I was like, 'This is cool.' And I could see you know what their experience was. I got ideas of what kind of pay they're looking for. One of those was a local manager of one of the current clubs; he's like, 'I'm not happy with my current situation. I'd love to come work for you. 00:34:01 This sounds good.' I met with him, and I told him, 'Hey, uh, sorry man, uh, I'm... I'm... uh, this was a joke. I was just researching.' He's But I have this business plan. Take a look.' And he looked at it. He's like, 'This is freaking amazing.' Let's partner up. I'll help you. I know all the rich guys, and I know everybody. I'll help you out. So we tried to raise the money, and we just couldn't raise it. We had some interest, but we just couldn't get over that hump. So I had all this data, all this information. It's like, what can I do here? I was an editor in my high school newspaper. I have a little bit of journalism background. Why don't I just start a magazine? 00:34:42 That's my end. Instead of going to clubs, I'll just start a magazine with no nudity, not a Playboy or anything like that, but just a glossy business magazine called The Gentleman's Club. In there, we would just talk about business. It's kind of like the newsletter now. It's the business of selling on Amazon. It's the business of operating these clubs. We would feature a girl in there, but no nudity. I had some ads and stuff. Decided to do that and I was like, I don't know how am I gonna getting subscribers for this? so the guy whose club owned the club in Hawaii that I went to turns out he's based in Miami. He had about 15 of these clubs around the country and I I went with what? 00:35:25 Went to him and said hey, what can I do say I got this fishbowl or people drop in their business cards And you know when they come in the club to win a free prize or something. I'll just give you the fishbowl I have a boxes of these things I'll just give them to you. I hired a company in Jamaica. Lead generation, man. Lead generation. I had a company in Jamaica that actually typed them all in for me. I don’t know, there’s 1,000 of them. And so then I sent out a flyer in the mail, you know, subscription offer, basically through direct mail, not through internet, but through traditional old mail, and got some subscribers that way. But it wasn’t quite enough. 00:35:59 This guy, he ended up giving me, like, my first advertiser. He’s like, ‘Here’s $10,000. Put me down for the first couple of ads. I’ll support you.’ It was really good. And then I still didn’t have enough information or subscribers to really make this profitable. I was like, 'How am I going to pay this $20,000 printing bill? I don't have enough money to even pay for the printing. I commenced a printer in Chicago to do this on terms, which they ended up getting screwed because I never ended up paying them. But they gave it to me on terms. And then I had all this information. I was literally sitting on the toilet one day like, 'What can I do? What can I do? 00:36:36 What can I do?' Oh, wait a second. I've got all this information. Why don't I make a list of the top 10 cities in the United States that have the most strip clubs and how much sales they do? How big is this business? And so I took all these calculations, all this research, like, okay, it's about a $3 billion business in the United States. Atlanta, I don't remember the exacts, but Atlanta has 42 strip clubs and they're doing, I'm just making numbers up here, $25 million a year. Dallas has 36 and they're doing. This amount of money and so here's the top 10 list: the best strip clubs, and the most money is made in Atlantis; number two is Dallas; number three is LA; number four is Chicago, whatever it was. 00:37:15 And I had a fax machine, I faxed that to a company called uh PR Press Wire, paid them 100 bucks or something. In fact, I know this company-they're just still around, yeah, they're still around. Um, a little press release, you know, Gentleman's Club magazine announcing this uh stuff: here's the top 10 in the country, blah, blah, blah. Well, every TV station, if you're in Atlanta or Dallas, you picked up on that. You're like, 'Dallas just got voted the number two place in the country for strip clubs, according to Gentleman's Club magazine.' And I got on Entertainment Tonight, which is a big entertainment show in the U. S. I got on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, even though I wasn't rich or famous, but I became the industry expert; I got on CNN. 00:38:03 They would take me into their; I was quoted in the New York Times, USA Today, even women's magazines like Red Book and Vogue. I was like the expert. So I was like everywhere. You became the strip club expert. I became a strip club guru. Yeah, I was 23 years old and never even owned a strip club and hadn’t really even paid for very many dances or anything. So that, but out of this, there was a guy who saw me on TV. He tracked me down. He was from Detroit, Michigan. He tracked me down and and said, ‘Hey, I’m trying to open up a I was struggling, you know. I didn’t have the money to do this. I was just struggling, and he’s tracking me down. 00:38:43 He said I want to bring you up to Detroit. You can be a consultant.” I'll pay you five grand. You'll come thinking about opening a club up here; I just want to pick your brain and just walk around, go show you some sites. So I went up there. And he drove me around, and turns out this guy he had a big cocaine problem. So he would disappear for half the day, and then come back. But I ended up leaving. And when I left, I went back to my town. The next day, he calls me up after his cocaine binge and says, 'Hey, I'm going to invest $10,000.' Where do I send the money? I'm like, what? He's like, 'I'm going to give you $10,000. 00:39:20 I'm going to invest in the magazine to help you out.' I needed that money badly; I was desperate. I was like, well, here's the bank account. Here's everything. And so he he sent me the money and I could breathe a sigh of relief. Now I could pay a few things and keep this business afloat. And then he decided, you know what, if if I'm going to spend this money, I'm going to own half of this thing. So I'm going to I'm going to move to your town. I was living in Phoenix at that time just for a year. I was in Phoenix, Arizona. He came to Phoenix and he's like, 'There's going to be if a girl wants to be on the cover of this magazine, there's going to.' There's going to be requirements. 00:40:00 You know, she's got to sleep with me. I'm like, 'I don't do business that way. I'm straight up.' I'm like, I'm not doing it. But it turns out this guy was Detroit mafia, carpet mafia. He has family. So we would, I would meet with him sometimes and he would, a buddy of his would fly in and they would, we're going out of the restaurant to get into the car. He's like, 'Hold on, wait, wait right here.' And he had one of those remote starters and from 50 feet away, it would start his car and make sure it didn't explode. Uh, that bad and then um, he would they would people, mafia people, would fly into The Phoenician resort in Phoenix, and they had helped bring in all these strippers. 00:40:35 And I was never allowed to go, but they'd be like, these weekend debaucheries of just crazy stuff. It got to the point where this guy was pretty bad; I was like, 'I don't want to do business this way, I don't want this partner, I don't want this; I want out.' He's like, 'You can't leave He accused me of embezzling some money or some bullshit. And so when I tried to leave and move back to Texas, he sent two guidos to break my legs. Literally, two guys came with big baseball bats to break my legs to keep me from moving. I had to call the police. I got a police escort with my U-Haul truck driving all the way to, I got 30 miles outside of Phoenix, Arizona, to make sure these guys didn't follow me. 00:41:15 And then we had to deal with him. There's more to the story. We had to deal with him later on some other stuff. So when I did that, on the way back, I was driving this U-Haul truck. It's about a 12-hour drive or something from Phoenix to Austin or Dallas or wherever I was going. And I get stopped in West Texas, middle of nowhere, like desert, middle of nowhere. And I was going 60 miles an hour and a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit in this U-Haul truck carrying all my stuff. And I had an outstanding ticket, speeding ticket from college. And that ticket I hadn't paid, it-I forgot about it or whatever, and so they they arrested me and took me in this little tiny jail in this like town population 100, and I was in there. 00:41:57 It was a holiday weekend, so I went in on like a Friday, couldn't get see the judge until Tuesday because Monday was a holiday, so they only had like two jail cells-me and another some other guy who got pulled over for drunk driving or something. So, when I got out, I needed $1,000 bail. I didn't have the money. I called my dad. He's like, 'Nope.' I'm not giving you the money unless you promise to come. You're going to come live at home. You're going to get a real job. I don't care if it's working at McDonald's initially, but you're not going to be doing this stuff anymore. I'm like, thanks, Dad. I don't need your money. I appreciate it. I called an uncle. 00:42:33 He bailed me out, put up the money, $1,000 or something to bail me out. What was happening at that time was: Since I couldn't make the magazine work, little baseball cards were hot. So there's about the time of the Beanie Babies trend, but also baseball cards were, they're still hot, but baseball cards with girls on them became a big thing. Like Playboy would put all their centerfolds on little baseball cards or these other places would put them on. It's like, wait a second, I know all these strip clubs. Why don't we put strippers on baseball cards and these clubs are promotions for the clubs. And so we created these whole series of baseball cards with strippers and different girls on them. Some of them we shoot, some of them we get pictures. 00:43:18 And we would sell those in the comic book stores. We had a distributor in this big business, like hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in business. So I built that up. And then as we did that, I started a mail order business because I'm like, okay, I'm making mine. I'm making money off of all mine, but I want to make money off of all yours too. So I went to all the other people who were doing it. I wasn't the only one doing this. Your other doing the same thing and I went to them and said, 'Hey, what are you putting a little insert in your packages? You know, people buy a pack of 10 cards and inside there's an insert like we do it today with Amazon-you know, register your warranty or sign up for a VIP club or whatever. 00:43:53 And people were filling those out and mailing them in to them, this is before the internet, and they just had a shoebox full of these things, they didn't know what to do with them; they were just doing it because everybody else did so I went to all the other people and said, 'Hey, you have these shoeboxes full of these leads. Send them to me. I'll get them all typed in for you, and I'll send you back the list, and I'll share some of mine with you too.' Knowing that they're probably never even going to use it. Then I go, 'Sure. I got all these people, built a list of-15,000 people that buy these things.' Then I turned around to them and said, 'Sell me your cards at a discount.' I bought their stuff at wholesale and sold it back to their customers. 00:44:34 Plus everybody else. I had a full catalog of all this stuff. We made a big business out of that, and we won all kinds of awards in the industry, and did really well off of that. That evolved into calendars. It evolved into another magazine. We finally did do coffee table books. We did a whole series of DVDs and TV shows. We were killing it on pay-per-view television. Not pornography. It was pretty girls, but it wasn't porn. I always have to clarify that. Like Sports Illustrated, you see one of these the making of a Sports Illustrated calendar where this is popular or it was Girls Gone Wild was popular back then and uh, what their infomercial is: you just go to tropical islands in the Caribbean and you shoot a bunch of girls in bikinis and you document it behind the scenes – you know, you're filming it, showing the girl showing the guy carrying the camera stuff setting it up and all this. 00:45:27 We created TV shows out of that and and put them on television and made a lot of money. We did model searches; we did a whole thing uh after that. I could sit here and tell you – I could spend two hours talking about that, dude. Never would I have guessed that you were in this trip and pretty girls business and and all that. I mean, this is so unbelievable! Yeah, and so that evolved into the calendars which which I still do today. That evolved into selling on Amazon, that's what got me into Amazon because Amazon, around that time, you know, early late 90s, early 2000 was becoming a thing, and so I would... Signed up for Amazon. Someone said, 'Hey, you should sell these on Amazon. Like Amazon.' What's that? 00:46:08 Oh, they sell the books and magazines. And so we signed up for their, what they call it. This was before FBA. They call it the Associates program. So they would basically, we were like a, it's like a vendor. We're like an OP, but they bought from us on consignment. So they would, it had to be media books or DVDs. I can, I didn't control the listing. I didn't control the title. I just would, they would give me a PO. and i would ship to them and then whatever they sold they pay me for it wasn't like every two weeks you got paid or anything it's like whatever they sold at the end of the 00:46:36 year they paid me for i think the first year we sold like 300 calendars and the whole season on on amazon today we sell that in a of one calendar in a day and we have multiple calendars so it's yeah so we just kind of rode that for a while then once i got into the fba side of things i was like why am i letting amazon control this i should control this so we switched it all to fba so we can control the listing we can control the pictures and and marketing and keywords and all that and we just blew that threw that up uh when did fba come up actually what do you remember it was in the i Know this: the model right now that most people are doing is around 2011. 00:47:13 Um, that's when Amazing. com before his amazing selling machine it was uh, uh what was their name um, uh shoot um, amazing cash cash machine or something like that. They kind of started this whole thing of everybody FBA is a great opportunity to sell and find something on Amazon and and sell it. But before that it was it existed I don't remember the exact year it was a few years before that when they kind of opened it up, but it was pretty tightly controlled. You had to kind of get special approvals and they would work with you; it wasn't as free-wheeling as it is now, as in self-service as it is now. That's what got me into it, got me experienced with it, and then in 2010 I kind of rode this business out. 00:47:57 But that business, we had a membership site. We were getting on the Howard Stern show in the US before he was on a satellite radio. So we would get girls on there to promote our stuff, and it'd blow up our servers. And we got; we did a daily talk about the newsletter. One of the ways that we built an audience around when the internet came out, we're like, this is great. We don't have to send stuff with a stamp on it in the mail anymore. We could just do it through the computer cheaply. So we started in 1998, I think it was, or '99. We started a news uh an online newsletter that we would send out every day, every day seven days a week, with summary and it would be like here's the top five stories of anything to do with pretty girls. 00:48:37 It could be something about Hugh Hefner from Playboy, it could be about Vanna White from Wheel of Fortune, it could be about a cheerleader from some football team; it'd be about anything to do with pretty girls, not porn – anything! Just we would link to it and then we had a game on there where you'd answer trivia questions and you can earn prizes. We had a featured model of the day, we had a joke section; we had all this like entertainment for men kind of stuff, um, all clean. That was an email newsletter, so we would send out a summary and it would drive them back to the site so they would get like the summary of what's on the site today and there'll be a link, 'Click here' to go back to the site to actually see the details, and we had 250, 000 people on that list getting emails every single day. 00:49:22 And so I know the power of an email list; I learned right there the power of owning your customer, of owning – being able to do what you want, sell them anything you want. I figured out that Thursdays were the best day to email them if I'm going to try to sell them a calendar or some trading cards or a DVD or whatever it was. I figured out all the things, you know, all the science behind that. Before, there was really a science to it. And we did that and we had big companies like USA Today come to us. I got an email from a guy named Mark Cuban at one point saying he's starting an HD channel. 00:49:56 I don't know if you ever heard of Mark Cuban, but I'm joking there-most people have, but he was starting an HD channel called HDNet and he was looking for content. I had an email from one of the co-founders of PayPal, not Elon, but one of the other guys, who was interested in investing or doing something with us. And I didn't know who the hell that was at the time. I had another, another one was, Before Facebook, if you're old enough, you might remember it was MySpace. Yeah, I remember MySpace. I am old enough. Right when MySpace started, one of the founders, co-founders, like the original guys, emailed me saying, 'We want to feature your photo of the day, your pictures on our MySpace.' I ignored it. 00:50:36 I was like, what the hell is this MySpace? I haven't heard of it. So I just ignored it. About a year later, after MySpace kind of blew up on the scene and became popular, I found that email on my. One of my folders on my computer as I was cleaning stuff up. I was like, 'Holy shit,' what an opportunity I just missed. One of the others that we dealt with to drive traffic, we'd get on the Howard Stern show. This is before Google when we first started doing this. We had to get creative. Yahoo was just a directory. It's like the phone book. It wasn't a search engine like it is now. You want to see electronics? Go to the electronics section and just look at the links down. 00:51:14 It wasn't a search engine like it is now. In traffic, we found this company called BOMIS, B-O-M-I-S. And they had what's called a ring site. And so ring sites back then were you would they would have a pretty girl like wearing a tight T-shirt, like a wet T-shirt, kind of tight T-shirt or something. And then you would you would see her. And then at the bottom is have a next and previous button. And so you could go, it's called a ring, so you hit next and take you to the next HTML page of somebody else's site; it might be a joke or whatever. You hit next and it might be something for a TV, a camera, or something that guys would like, and you hit next, it's another pretty girl, all right. 00:51:52 So you're it's in a ring and so you're just linking sites together in a ring, and we got a lot of traffic off of that; uh, for our newsletter and for our membership, we were able to convert 2,500 people into 2,000 customers paying $30 a month to access a special library of pictures and some extra jokes and stuff. We were able to leverage that into a lot of product sales, into a ton of stuff, into selling DVDs and television programming. It worked really, really well, but we were always marketing with one hand tied behind our back because we were classified technically as adult. So I couldn't advertise in certain places. I couldn't do certain things. It makes you get more creative and more resourceful because you're fighting against society in a way. 00:52:41 So you have to really pull out all the marketing chops, and that's what really sharpened my knife and sharpened my sword is having to do all that with one hand tied behind my back. And it turns out, I'm talking to this Bomas, the two guys that run this Bomas. And one of the co-founders, he calls me up one day and says, hey, Jimmy is leaving. You're going to have to deal with me now. And it's all cool, but I just want to make sure you have all my contact stuff. I said, what's happening to Jimmy? He's like, well, he's going to start some other website. I was like, oh, what kind of websites? I don't know, some sort of encyclopedia or something. It was Jimmy Wales that started Wikipedia. 00:53:18 That's the guy I was dealing with before there was Wikipedia. He was running this wiki site. I was calling him on the phone, you know, organizing different stuff, and I had no clue. Never heard from him after that, and he went to start Wikipedia, and, you know, history is history. Yeah, I was there in a lot of the early days in the position where I'd known what I had, what I was dealing with, with Jimmy Wales and with MySpace, PayPal, and HDNet. Who knows what I could have done, but I just kind of was in my own little world and didn't take advantage of any of those opportunities. But you did take advantage of quite a few opportunities, though. And I mean, just the things that you have mentioned so far is mind-blowing. 00:53:59 You understood like email marketing. You understood building your list like in the early 2000s already. I mean, I don't I think at that time I was not even aware of this such a thing as email. Yeah. Today, I mean, it's kind of funny. The younger I mean, you and I are a little bit older than some of these people in the space. Some of the younger kids, they think this is cool and new. And I'm like, this new marketing thing to do, whatever it may be, whatever the new cool little thing is, build a list or build a file. It's like, no, we've been doing this forever. What is old is new again now. It's just a different medium. It's a different, the tools are better, the methods are different and better, but it's the same psychology. 00:54:37 If you understand the core psychology behind marketing, and you get a little bit of knowledge and then keep up with the latest things, whether it be, When the Internet came, learn how to freaking use the Internet. When AI is here, learn a little. You don't need to be a master, but learn a little bit about AI. When crypto was here, learn a little bit about crypto. Some of them aren't going to work. Some of them are going to work. But then you can apply these same marketing principles in these different mediums as things evolve and change. And it works. What killed us in our business is people used to be willing to pay. We would use the newsletter. We'd sell little ads and stuff in there, and we'd use it as a lead gen. 00:55:17 But people paying us 30 bucks a month, you know, at some point when YouTube came out in 2007, I think it was. Then a lot of the porn sites started copying YouTube like, oh, we can now stream videos online. And so they started streaming stuff for free to actually, you know, as a promotion, they liked, you know, show you 30 seconds of a video or something and hoped that you would click and buy. You know, the full video to watch streaming online, you have to go to the, the Sticky Floor porn store anymore to watch a video or get something in the house or in the mail, and so it became a big business. But as a result of that, there was so much free content out there that it was hard for us to sell stuff anymore, so um, it kind of killed over over a period of time, it kind of killed us, and we just we rode that wave as long as we could, and by about 2012, 00:56:15 I was like, okay, I don't i think this is done, so we kind of quit. By 2014, 2014, I was able to coast; I made some money, and was able to I was doing a lot of travel, I spent seven years from from in there traveling, uh, from 2007 to 2014, I visited went to all seven continents; I've been to 94 countries. So I was doing a lot of travel just kind of coasting off the money and stuff that we made, and then it got to where points like actually my dad was joking like you're like semi-retired and you're like 40 years old or whatever; I'm like, yeah. But then it got to the point where I was like, okay, running out of money; I need to actually do something again, so that's when the Amazon thing I saw, uh, Amazon. 00:56:57 com did a four in 2015. oh they've done this before then but in 2015 i saw them do a four-part webinar series to as a pre-sale to a big webinar to get you to buy their five thousand dollar course i watched that four-part series for free it's like i don't need to pay them five grand i know how to do this i've been sourcing out of china i've been sourcing making baseball cars and calendars and all stuff i've been selling internet and direct mail i understand all this i don't need their course i just need to know what are the i've already messed around with amazon a little bit with the calendars i just need to figure out how to do this freaking fba thing so to figure it out i've spent in april of 2015, I did retail arbitrage. 00:57:36 So for a month, I went to local dollar stores and found stuff or you have a little app and scan it and figure out how does this system work? How do you ship stuff in? How do you print labels? How do you do all this? And as soon as I figured that out, I was like, 'I don't, I'm good.' Let me start making my own products. So in 2015, I've created five brands, spent about $200,000 and launched five different brands on Amazon. Two of those still exist, three of them I've discontinued. And then the way I got into the teaching and all this other side of it, I was just keeping my head down. I was just building my brands. 00:58:17 Three of these were brands where I'd find something on Alibaba, change it a little bit, make nicer packaging, put my name on it. Two of the brands, I developed them from scratch. So I actually had the idea, sketched it out on a napkin, hired a designer on Upwork. Back then it was called something else, Freelancer or something. Yeah, yeah, Freelancer. I hired some. hired someone on there to do all the the cad drawings and 3d drawings and all that and made 3d prototypes i did a dog bowl and i did uh that slows your dog down from eating fast my dog still eats out of it to this day the apple watch was just coming out the very first apple watch was 2015. 00:58:55 so i've made a little stand you can see this on my link oh come on are you kidding My first product was an Apple Watch stand. I started selling on Amazon in 2014, and my first product was an Apple Watch stand. So we were competitors those days. Well, the problem was, if you were, most of the Apple Watch stands were piece of shit bamboo stands, like $18. They're like a little stand that's cheap. I was like, if I'm spending, I don't remember what the Apple Watch cost, but it came out $500, let's call it. If I'm spending $500 for a watch, I don't want a little stupid-looking bamboo wooden little stand. I want something that looks like my Apple Watch. So, I developed an Apple Watch stand and spent $35,000 in molding costs. 00:59:37 And it had, you can see it on my LinkedIn. When we're done here, go on my LinkedIn; we posted about a week ago, showing this product. And it had a 10-night light, had a built-in Bluetooth speaker. It would charge your phone and hide the cables. It would charge your phone, your iPad, and another device, and hide all the cables. So, you'd have a lot of cables like stretched out over your nightstand or over your desk or whatever. And we sold it for $89. And Christmas of 2015, I was printing money, like $20,000 a day off of this one SKU. And it just exploded. So those were some of my early products. But then in 2016, Helium 10 kind of started. 01:00:21 And I became friends just through the internet with the guys that started Helium 10, Manny and Guillermo. And before they had a Helium 10, they had a Scribbles tool and another tool that they were just building, using internally for their own Amazon businesses. They said, 'Hey, we're thinking about making this like a software.' What do you think? And they showed it to me. And then Manny said, 'Hey, I have this podcast, the AM/ PM podcast, which coincidentally now I host.' It was just documenting his story, his journey of selling on Amazon. And he was using it as branding and lead gen and stuff. He said, 'Would you come on the podcast?' I was like, 'No, no, no.' I'm just a seller. I have no interest in going on a podcast. 01:01:00 He's like, 'No, just do it. It'll be fun.' I went on his podcast. I think it was March of 2016. It became his number one podcast of all time, I think. Maybe it's number two now. I maybe wanted to hire him. It was because I went on there and I just said it like it is because there's so many people. I call it talking out the side of your ass in the business. They weren't really telling you the way it is. They just tell you, I call it corporate speak. Let's not say anything to incriminate ourselves or to upset somebody, and I just said it the way it is. Like, yeah, these people on this Facebook group are full of shit. It's not how this works. 01:01:35 This landing page here, like this, and this is stupid. It's stupid. But everybody's, one guy posted and says, 'this is the way you've got to do it.' And everybody thinks that's the way. I'm like, 'this is stupid.' Don't just parent everybody on; these people have no clue what they're doing and it just resonated-nobody ever said it like it was and just resonated from there. Everybody's like, 'You got to come speak with my van you got to get on my podcast, you got to do this' so that that's what started the ball rolling of this whole um, you know being known as a teacher guru holy cow! So that's how your whole speaker career started by being but it all goes back to my early days where I was teaching those college kids how to program. 01:02:16 So it's all, as my mom says, all that past stuff was my training for what I'm doing now. You train for 20 years to do what you're doing now, which is develop products, develop a newsletter, and host a podcast and teach. It's been 160,000 people have gone through the Freedom Ticket course. I mean, there's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Holy cow. Oh, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. We could talk for a long time. I know I told you before we started, you might have part one, part two. Yeah, we are already an hour in and it feels still like we're only halfway. Yeah, I mean, we can always do another show if you like. But for this one, I would really love to hear from you. 01:03:07 I call it the nuggets of wisdom. I mean, a guy like you should have like a whole bucket load of those. But just for our valued listeners and for those who are still watching, by the way, I really appreciate you. And I would love to give them something like, 'What would you share with someone who starts the entrepreneur journey today or starts selling on Amazon for that matter? Create your business around your life, not your life around your business. Too many people make the business the focus of their life. And sometimes you have to do that for a short period of time when you're first getting going. You're all consumed and it takes a lot of time. But you've got to get out of that as quick as you can. 01:03:52 So I value my freedom. And so that's what enabled me to travel for seven years to do what I want now. I haven't worked for anybody. So everything I do is like, 'I don't want my business running in my life.' I don't want my phone. You know, I've got to answer this call. I've got to answer this call, go to this meeting. So I set everything up. I partner smart. People are like, 'Kevin, how do you do all this?' Do you have a whole team? Like, no, I have one guy that's helping with the newsletter, a little VA in Pakistan. Smart guy, but that's it. I partner smart. I partner with companies like Helium 10 that already have that whole infrastructure, and I just get to show up and do my thing. 01:04:27 I partner with other people in my other businesses, so I'm not having to do everything. I have people that help me run the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. I mean, I pick the speakers and decide where we're going, but someone else runs the whole thing. I don't have to worry about did the catering show up or did the coffee hot or anything like that. I've got people that handle all that and keep me out of that loop. So that's number one. Number two is my philosophy in life is life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet, and that's all that matters. It doesn't matter how much. It's not about how big your business comes to too much in Western, especially in American society and Western society. 01:05:05 Too many people get caught up in. I need a bigger house. I need a bigger car. I need more money. I've made my 10 million, I know that's not good enough. I need to make 50 million. And you get caught up in this vicious cycle. It's not about that. You want to make enough money to where you can live comfortably the way that's what's important to you. And maybe that is driving a Rolls-Royce and having a butler. And you know, three maids so you need a different ceremony or maybe that's just having the freedom to read a book on a Monday afternoon when you want to and not have to get on Zoom calls or whatever, whatever it may be. You gotta figure that out, figure out your why and then build build around that, create your business around that. 01:05:42 And experiences, I mean travel, I've done is the best education I've ever gotten. A lot of people always say, 'Well, I can't, I don't have time to travel or I can't afford to travel or I gotta work my job and save for my my retirement.' I'm like, 'Fuck that! Yes, you should save something, you should do that, but go and experience the world while you're here. You never know if you're gonna get hit by a bus, die in a plane crash, um, get cancer, um, you know whatever... getting a car wreck. You don't work until you're 70 years old and then retire and then okay, I now want to go see the Great Wall of China and you can't even get out of The out of the taxi to walk up there. 01:06:21 And then it's the people you meet off of these travels. It changes you. It educates you. It's better than any college education. It's better than anything. And I'm not talking about being a tourist. I'm talking about being a traveler. Tourists go and they go to, I remember my parents went to China before China was really open. That's like 2015 or 2014 before it really opened up. No, sorry, 2004, 2005 before it really opened up. And they went and all their food was; they ate in the hotel. And they ate simple chicken and simple rice, whatever was simple for them. I went in 2008 when they had the Olympics, right before they had the Olympics. And when I got back, my mom was like, 'Well, how did you think of the food?' I was like, 'It's excellent.' She's like, 'Really? 01:07:02 I thought the food was pretty horrible.' I was like, 'What did you eat?' Oh, we had rice and chicken pretty much at every hotel. I said, 'You didn't go out to the restaurants, go out to the places?' She's like, 'No, it wasn't safe.' I was like, 'Yeah, it is. That's the culture. That's the experience. You've got to get out and experience it.' A lot of times I would hire a private guide. Take me around, and by the end of five days six days of him showing me around, we're buddies, and he's like, 'Hey, it's your last night here. Come, come to my house.' Happened in Malaysia, you know. Come to, come to my house, and my wife is um; she's going to cook dinner for us, and you meet my daughter. 01:07:35 We've been talking about the last five days, and you get to see that culture, that side of things. One of the first things I like to do when I go to a new place is go into a supermarket, whether it be Europe or Malaysia or I remember walking to a supermarket; you can get a sense of a place by just walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket. And those are important. And you can, I can always go back if I ever want to retire one day, I can go back to my favorite places. But that's not the time to start traveling because it changed my outlook on people, changed my outlook on the world, changed me, changed me in so many ways. 01:08:09 And so it's; I think that's something that more people need to get a grasp on: live your life. Don't let your life live you. Amen. Amen to that, Kevin. Amen. I think that was a wonderful closing statement for today's episode. I can relate to this traveling part so much. I've been traveling a lot and I agree that there's a difference between being a tourist sitting in a hotel and being a traveler who actually engages with the culture. Oh boy, um, so for people who would like to get in touch, I mean everybody knows where you live, your website, and all that, I guess. I don't have to include any specific details under the video, but we will still provide something like, for example, like the one is in your title right there, yeah, billion dollars, yeah. So anything else you would like me to include, of course, let me know, I will do that. And I would like to say thank you so much for spending this time with me, sharing all your your wisdom, your insights, it's been an amazing time, and again, hope you can stay in touch and do something more of this, yeah, it's been great, I appreciate you. Inviting me on and uh, we'll have to do it again. Appreciate it, man. Oh, yeah, we do.