#605 – 8-Figure Amazon Seller To ZERO?!

Join us for an insightful conversation as we welcome Brian Creager, a former eight-figure Amazon seller, who shares his rollercoaster journey through the world of Amazon FBA. Starting with a background in electrical engineering and transitioning into international sales, Brian eventually found his niche in the e-commerce space. Discover how a pivotal moment in his corporate career led him to build a successful seven-figure business in men’s hair care. He opens up about the highs and lows of launching a brand in a competitive market, the remarkable margins he achieved, and the unexpected challenges he faced, such as being banned from selling a medical device on Amazon. Brian’s story offers valuable lessons for aspiring and seasoned Amazon sellers alike.

Listen in as we explore the significance of building relationships through networking events and the lasting impact of face-to-face interactions. Bradley and Brian share their own experiences with the Zonblast community and the early days of private-label selling. They discuss the importance of real-time monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs), especially given the tighter margins and increased advertising costs today. Through anecdotes and personal experiences, we highlight the challenges faced during the pandemic, including product quality issues and tariffs, which led to significant changes in operations.

We also tackle the evolving landscape of selling on Amazon, emphasizing the need for unique products to maintain a competitive edge in the face of copycats. Strategies like failing quickly and strengthening supplier relationships are discussed as key tactics for handling product issues. As the Amazon marketplace evolves with new fees and AI integration, we touch on the growing importance of influencer marketing and niche product creation. Contemplate the future of product discovery and how AI might change consumer habits while considering how sellers can adapt to these shifts. This episode is packed with insights and strategies for navigating the ever-changing e-commerce landscape.

In episode 605 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Brian discuss:

• 00:00 – 8-Figure Amazon Seller’s Journey and Lessons
• 03:29 – Men’s Hair Care Launch Success
• 13:02 – Struggles and Lessons From Selling on Amazon
• 19:04 – Challenges in Paper Bag Production
• 22:44 – Losses, Inventory, and Chapter Seven
• 27:03 – Adapting to Changes in Amazon
• 30:02 – AI Impact on Product Discovery
• 33:47 – How To Reach Out To Brian Creager
• 36:12 – Competitor Analysis with Market Tracker 360

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we talked to a seller who, just a couple of years ago, was an eight-figure seller on Amazon, but then some things happened that caused he and his partner to lose millions of dollars and have their Amazon sales go to zero. He’s going to tell us what we need to avoid so that doesn’t happen to us. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we’ve got a guest that. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this podcast, maybe five years, almost six years. I’ve been trying for just about that long to get on the show, and then we ran into each other at Amazon Accelerate and he says you know what? I think I’m finally ready, Brian. Welcome to the show after all this time.

Brian:

Thanks, Bradley, it has been a couple of years. I kept repulsing your invitations for many years.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s not how many times you were denied, but the one time that you said yes, that’s what matters. And I was like, let’s schedule this before you change your mind again. You are in Atlanta still, yes, correct? Is that where you were born and raised?

Brian:

No, I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, south Central PA, York, PA.

Bradley Sutton:

And where did you go to university?

Brian:

Undergrad at Penn State, graduated at Gannon University.

Bradley Sutton:

Nittany Lions

Brian:

Yes, right, yeah. And then I actually spent a year in England as a junior in college, so I was on the five-year program.

Bradley Sutton:

What was your major?

Brian:

Electrical engineering.

Bradley Sutton:

Electrical engineering. Did you get into that field upon graduation?

Brian:

Yeah, four years. And then I had an epiphany which was basically there’s not many engineers running companies and if I wanted to eventually run a company I should make a transition into something other than engineering. So I moved into international sales and then moved to Atlanta in 2000 and sell into a marketing job a couple of years later and did basically what private label businesses, but I did it in a wholesale manufacturer for wholesale in the air conditioning, refrigeration space.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, and then how did you get to the e-commerce world?

Brian:

In 2012, July of 2012, I was in a board of directors meeting with my former employer and after a 10 minute discussion, I was told to kill the two businesses I had just spent 12 years growing and I had to fire three people over the phone the week before Christmas and I vowed that July that the next seven figure business I build will be for myself. So I had 12 plus years of seniority, five weeks of vacation, so I started traveling to entrepreneur conferences and I went to this one thing in Cebu in the Philippines called Tropical Think Tank. There were only ever four instances and it was 25 attendees, eight speakers kind of sequestered in a resort, and one of the other attendees was Ryan Daniel Moran ended up buying ASM3 off his affiliate link in April of 2014 and never looked back.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, by the way, I just noticed I don’t know how I didn’t notice you got the coffin shelf in the back there. I didn’t know you had one of those. I love that Product placement.

Brian:

I see it now. I love it. I love it. Actually, the truth be told, when I need to demo something about how to do something on Amazon, I use coffin shelf as an example.

Bradley Sutton:

After you took the ASM course, what was your first launch? What kind of product?

Brian:

Men’s hair care, elfin Beauty. Yeah, talk about a hard category to enter, but I kind of stumbled into it. A friend of mine was a barber. He said, Brian, hey, you know stuff about starting businesses, help me open a barber shop. So we, he never has, he doesn’t have any money. But we met and we had coffee and dinner a couple of times. And we said, hey, barbers make money selling products and I was still working in the corporate world at the time, and he said let’s make ours. And so I launched my own four SKU brand of shampoo, conditioner and two styling products and by the end of 2014, I was making more profit off of that product line than my corporate salary, which was multiple six figures at the time.

Bradley Sutton:

Wasn’t one of your core ingredients on your products like pine, pine something

Brian:

Tea tree oil.

Bradley Sutton:

Tea tree oil. It was something like a tea tree, because it had that like minty kind of fresh smell. I remember that when I went to your office, so gross sales obviously you were making profit. But are we talking a million? Uh, you hit million in your first year or – 

Brian:

Not in the first year, there’s about half a million if we annualize, because I launched in the middle of the year, I launched in May or June, something like that. But at its peak that product category, that brand, at its peak did 1.6 million in revenue. Long ago were these days. 42% gross margin.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, it might be a little bit difficult in that category to do that nowadays. Yeah, it might be a little bit difficult in that category to do that nowadays. Now I remember you were about to get into some kind of medical device or something, but then you got banned from Amazon for that, or I just remember seeing your office.

Brian:

You’ve got a good memory.

Bradley Sutton:

Hey with you. I remember this random ice cream shop that we went to. But, trust me, I have a bad memory. But for some reason the way it works is just. I, I just remember random things. But I remember asking you like hey, what’s that? Cause it didn’t look like shampoo. You’re like oh, this is a product that Amazon didn’t let me sell. Like, tell me the story about that one.

Brian:

So that was in summer of 2016. So I had been at this about two years. I stumbled into this. You know you’re. You’re surfing around Amazon looking for product opportunities. Everybody does that. Single heart monitors little battery powered thing hold it on the baby belly a little wired at that time. EarPods listen to baby’s heartbeat Pretty cool little thing selling for I forget the price point 60 bucks, 70 bucks, something like that. Cost Out of China. FOB was 12 or something, but I don’t remember. I spent like 60 000 flying these things in because I wanted to get in before the holiday season, launch it in August, September, get ranked and sent the first shipment in. I didn’t get banned, but the async got shut down as a medical device, so. But here’s the thing there were multiple other sellers selling. You know it’s the, it’s the old round the track with Amazon, so and that I’ve fought it for a year and a half and finally gave up and threw him in a dumpster.

Bradley Sutton:

All $60,000 worth of that, that product, wow, Okay. What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all your cost, of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool profits. For more information, go to h10.me/profits. Now at what point did you I remember when I visited you had this gigantic warehouse. At what point did that become a necessity to have a warehouse, as opposed to maybe in the beginning, I imagine you were just shipping stuff directly to Amazon, or something.

Brian:

The manufacturer was close to you, Los Angeles area of California. Shampoo’s heavy. I shipped it across the country, just an LTL with a lift gate, doing what most sellers do when they start out. I brought pallets. The truck driver brought pallets into the garage. I shipped small parcel in the FBA.

Bradley Sutton:

Garage is in your house. 

Brian:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Two-car garage cars parked out in the driveway. For a couple months. We’ve all been there right. Then I graduated to a storage unit that had a loading dock. I was in like Flynn, didn’t have to pay the inside delivery charges. That was I don’t know 20 by 40 storage unit or something. And then by late 2015, I need more space. I rented 1500 square feet, which was about two miles from where you visited me, which was at that time. Then that was in 2016. You came out with 15,000 square feet, so it’s just kind of stair set up. But honestly, if I had to do it over again and we were into day’s day and age, I wouldn’t get a warehouse. I’d figure out another way to do it. Use vendor warehouse, use AWD. Things have changed a lot in fingers.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, you grew that brand out, but then you started adding other brands. Now, were these other private label brands or were you purchasing brands. Before it was faddish to purchase brands? Or how did you grow your Amazon activities?

Brian:

I did both. Amazon so I did both. I brainstormed my own brands and other product categories. I was category ambivalent, except no supplements, no cell phone accessories, no food products that you know. I had excluded things but I didn’t have. Like, this is my only list of categories I’m going to go into. So, and I did a couple acquisitions too, not really large deal values. I think the biggest deal I did was about quarter million, something like that. And you remember Joe, I actually bought his brand from him.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay, and so then, what was your peak year? Which year was your best year of gross sales and or profit?

Brian:

2021, revenue 10 million bucks.

Bradley Sutton:

Hit the eight-figure mark and which was your biggest brand that year? Can’t have been the shampoo brand because you know, like you said, the peak was only 1 million or so.

Brian:

 Yeah, so I had two brands and I was looking for when I was brainstorming brand names. I was looking for brands that could be used across categories. So I had a brand called 1790, which is actually the year T3O was discovered in Australia, so there’s a little bit of a brand thread there. And then the other brand was called Parker 8, and it’s just a made up name. The street that the office was on was called 9 North Drive, so I said I need a number and came up with Parker 8. And it was available. Domain was on. It was called Nine North Drive, so I said I need a number and came up with Parker 8. And it was available. Domain was available, trademark registered everything and I was selling. I like simple products paper gift bags, gallon glass jars, simple products.

Bradley Sutton:

You and I met around 2016. A lot of people have heard the story, not as it relates to you, but that my whole Amazon journey can be traced to me listening to a random podcast once and hearing about an Amazon conference called Zon Squad Live in Chicago. And I was in a transitionary period because I was working for a company that was selling phone cases, coincidentally on Amazon. They were just making hand over fist, but then I didn’t like the way things were going, so I’m like I just want to go my own path, and I was like I don’t know what I’m going to do but let me just see what this Amazon thing is. Because I was kind of like just the name you know it was an international company, Korean, and so I was my house moved back in with my parents for a while because my house became the office for the company and I was just the warehouse manager kind of, where I would tag everything with FN SKUs to go to FBA and ship it out and I was shipping like 500 orders a day, FBM with a little machine I had. But that was the extent of my Amazon knowledge. Like it was all Amazon, but I really, I didn’t know how to make a listing. I didn’t know how to make a listing, I didn’t know about ranking, I didn’t know about anything. So I was like, let me give this a try. And then I think that was probably where I met you in person. Potentially first and that just shows you like you’re not the only person. We were just talking about the people that were at that conference, and they have stayed in our networks for eight years. You know now and we’ll talk a little bit about that you know you were at Amazon Accelerate last time. You know people sometimes poo-poo these conferences and say, oh, you know, you can learn more from being in masterminds and stuff like that, which is true, but what is the value of going to conferences like Zon Squad, like Amazon Accelerate?

Brian:

So the key is balance. You don’t want to try to learn everything with one method. I’m into mastermind groups. We get together twice a month, two-hour Zoom call. Each time it’s a very, very close-knit group, close friends. The level of confidentiality in that group is huge. Okay, smaller conferences like Zone Squad Live was circa 2016 are good because you can really get to know somebody like you and I got to know each other. Conferences like Amazon Accelerate are just on a different scale. For the caliber of people that they draw pretty much anybody who is anybody with. Yeah, there’s some exceptions. Not everybody can make it to Seattle. I know that I spent a couple grand just doing it myself, but the Accelerate Pavilion, the networking, the just meeting people. Got to tell you a funny little story. So in early, I had to go back into my calendar and look it up. It was January of 2017. I did a fish bowl in Amelia. In the Amelia building in South Lake Union, which is, I can’t remember. It’s like eight or 10 sellers were sitting on bar stools. There were a hundred Amazonians peppering us with questions for 60, 90 minutes, something like that. One of the Amazonians I made pre-pandemic had a great relationship with. I bumped into him at Accelerate. I knew he was going to be there, so I was looking for him. Another guy who was a friend of his walked up, remembered me from that fishbowl. In January 2017, so let’s do the math, it’s been a while ago. But the point is, whether it’s that, whether it’s that, whether it’s a conference in person, relationships are memorable.

Bradley Sutton:

Virtual ones are good too, because then we continued our networking, you know, through the Zon Squad like Facebook community and we had trainings and things like that. Now you were a part of the leadership of that, but were you also like a founder of the Zonblast software?

Brian:

No, that was Joe’s business. I was an informal advisor as kind of all of us in that small group that came. We all came through ASM 3. And you know, Joe had a relationship with Ryan at one point with one of the ASM conferences, talking about Zonblast. I think that’s before you were, before it was. It was circa 2015 something like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Definitely before my time.

Brian:

That was completely separate, and you know we were focused on community. But the three of us kind of took three different levels of sellers. Kevin took kind of the entry level folks, Joe took the greater than a hundred grand a month. Cause at that time a hundred grand a month was like big money. It was the very early days of private label. And then I took the guys right in the middle. So we had regular Q and A’s. It was fun. It was actually the very first paid seller community we launched in September of 2014.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, yeah, definitely early before the Illuminati mastermind, for sure that Manny had started. I think that was around end of 2015 or so. Okay, now you know, interesting enough. You know, people know how I was a consultant for Amazon sellers before you were, I think, my last client before I joined Helium 10. Like, it was probably just like a few weeks before I joined or something.

Brian:

It was at least max two weeks. We were talking about that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, and so that, yeah, yeah, and so I flew out there to your place, and did some training. I just remember, like your set up there at your warehouse, like you had like these screen, these flat screens around the office that had like KPI’s like all over the place, like I guess tied to your Amazon account. So, just in general, why did you do that? And then what not? Nowadays, you know things have changed a little bit, but like, what kind of thing should sellers be monitoring? And it should it be something that you know? Like you know, I actually have a screen up that you’re not just, let me sign into Helium 10, you know, once a day or something to look, but like, what kind of things should people be watching almost throughout the day, like you were doing?

Brian:

Knowing your numbers, okay, is critically important. Even more so now, because when you’re making 40% margins, you can afford to be sloppy. When you’re making mid-teens margins if you’re lucky. You can’t be sloppy. You need to know your numbers and advertising is such a significant component of cost today. It was part of it back then, but less so you can look at profit more real time. Now you need to do it kind of the next day after you can retrieve the ad spend data and attributed sales et cetera. But whatever software it is, the key is you got to know your numbers and the old profit is what’s important and I like looking at profit not just at the ASIN level but at the sub-niche and then the niche level.

Bradley Sutton:

2021 was your best year, you said, but then here at Amazon Accelerate, you kind of inferred that everything sometime in the last few years just kind of came crashing down, and so this part I don’t know too much detail about. So let me know and let the audience know what happened.

Brian:

Yeah, it was pandemic related. Remember I said my big categories gallon glass jars, white paper bags. I had been making them in China when the 25% tariffs came in place. Whenever that was 2017, 2018, something like that I actually moved production of those bags to Columbia, South America, not South Carolina. At the peak I was moving 540 high cubes a month from Columbia into the US. I was running it through my warehouse first and then a 3PL.

This is way before AWD or anything. I could run containers directly in because you got one inbound location. That doesn’t happen anymore. But what we started seeing in February of 21. So it was my best year, and it ended up being my worst year too. January and March were both million dollar sales months for me, and then I kind of finished the year at 10 million. But we started getting some customer complaints in February. Hey, these bags are sticking together. And we said, yeah, they, you know, there’s a little bit of glue, but you pull it apart, it’s fine. And we had some customers send us some pictures and they were kind of stuck together like a big wad of bags. Too much glue. And I’m sharing this as an example of how you have to pay attention to quality and have systems underpinning what you’re doing in your company, because if you’re just dancing and zigging and zagging, even with a simple product like a paper bag, it can kill you like it killed me.

Bradley Sutton:

So was this the first order at the new factory?

Brian:

No, no, no.

Bradley Sutton:

Or had they already done some and did it right.

Brian:

Yeah, they had been making the product for at least three years, so I’ll cut to the chase. What we found later in 2021 was the paper bag production line. Because of pandemic restrictions, you could only have a certain number of people in the workspace. The factory owner decided to leave the production workers and pull the quality folks off the line. The glue machine went out of whack and put too much glue on, so we’d have a lot of. We were selling 100 count boxes, have a lot of 10 bags that just stuck together. You couldn’t separate them without tearing the paper.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow.

Brian:

So, as February wore on into March and April, finally May things blew up and I was like cause, you know, we started getting a bunch of one stars and I was like we need to cause, we were doing, uh well, march of 2021, we did $600,000 just in paperbacks. I was like we need to protect this listing. So I did a stop sale inventory removal, brought them all back to my warehouse and the 3PL was out of stock for 10 weeks. Came back into stock. Sold through that was out of stock for another couple of weeks. Came back into stock. Everybody’s been through that. This is now into August, September, long and short. We were never able to regain sales rank. We had 75% market share of this size bag in the 100 count in white and the monthly market was around. Don’t quote me on my math here, but it was like three quarters of a million dollars a month in this one type of product. We had 600 grand in which so.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, were you able to get money back from the factory at all, because they could clearly see it was their fault? 

Brian:

Yeah, not really. I lost probably about quarter million 300,000 in direct expenses. I got 50 grand back from them. But here’s the problem, and this is kind of the other underpinning as lessons learned I was highly over leveraged Amazon lending. Thank you very much. My rule of thumb now is if you need more than half of the offer from Amazon lending if they’re even still doing it, I think they’re a little bit If you need more than half the offer, you shouldn’t take the money because you’ve got other financial problems. Yeah, and that’s what I got into. I was over leveraged.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, because they’re taking once a month, they’re taking money from your you know like what you should have been selling, right, and then so what, like what happens then when it’s time to get a debit and you haven’t gotten any sales in that month, do they just pull it from your bank, or what?

Brian:

Yes, they do, and at that time, the Amazon note was not that large. But because for essentially three to four months, I didn’t have significant revenue coming in generating cash, I had bills to pay, I had inventory to pay for, I started increasing my borrowing, borrowing more from Amazon lending, and it just became a self-fulfilling flywheel. Some flywheels are good Rank begets sales begets rank. Debt begets cash to pay suppliers begets more Debt is not a good flywheel and it just kept spiraling for the next 18 months and the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2022, I filed Chapter 7.

Bradley Sutton:

All of your brands Was that all in one corporation?

Brian:

Yeah. It was all in one LLC.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, what happened to your brands, you know, like the shampoo and then this one? Did somebody buy it or did it just disappear from the face of the earth?

Brian:

So I learned a lot about Chapter 7. So for those of you that don’t know, bankruptcy, Chapter 11 is when you can restructure. Chapter 7 is you throw the keys to the trustee and walk away. So I lost $1.2 million. My investor partner lost $2.5 million. We threw $2.5 million worth of inventory into the dumpster. Literally what was at Amazon, what was at FBA, Amazon took. They continued to sell. They kept the money, all the money. But because of the way we did,

Bradley Sutton:

Why did you throw the other stuff? Did you have to throw it away? Or why would you throw it away if it was good inventory?

Brian:

So once the owners of the company, the members, once the company files chapter 7, we lose title to the assets of the company. Ah, okay, so we didn’t own the inventory, the 3PLs owned it. that was in our warehouse, There’s a warehouse lien on it, et cetera. So I learned all about this stuff a couple of years ago. But back to the trademarks and the brands. Because of the way my investor partner very well experienced I worked for him for 15 years in the corporate world. He’s my second mentor in the career. He’s very clever. The way we structured our financing for the company was through a debt. We had another entity. That debt funded the operating company and that entity was able to foreclose on the intangible assets, which is the intellectual property, which is the only asset. That’s Amazon Lendings. UCC1 doesn’t include intangible assets. So we foreclosed, captured the trademarks and now I’m actually licensing the ASINs.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, so some of those ASINs still are on Amazon.

Brian:

Yeah, not the shampoos, but some of the other products are. They’re still out there. It’s a fraction of what it was, because essentially it was out of stock for six to nine months.

Bradley Sutton:

In a nutshell, your personal Amazon sales went to zero because of this.

Brian:

Yeah, and I haven’t logged into the seller account in a year and a half.

Bradley Sutton:

So how does the licensing work then?

Brian:

So we conveyed the trademarks to my new company, my single member LLC that I have, and I licensed them to friends that I know and on brand registry my company is the rights owner I’m sorry the rights owner and the administrator, and then I can license other rights. I just add their seller account on as rights owners. So it’s pretty straightforward actually.

Bradley Sutton:

So now is that your only income, or are you doing other endeavors these days?

Brian:

So if I ever write a book which maybe I will someday I think AI might help now, eventually, because AI can help with a lot of stuff. If I ever write a book, it’s going to be called Million Dollar Mistakes or something along those lines. Mission in life is a little too grandiose, but I’m on a path to help other people avoid simple mistakes that I made not knowing your numbers, not having the right people in place, not having the right tech in place. I implemented NetSuite, spent $100,000 in implementation. $12,000 a month. I need this software. So you know kind of my what I’m doing is helping friends. You know I’m not a big influencer like you. I don’t have an audience and a network and a guy working for me in Lahore who can go take selfies with you. So it’s, I saw it. Anyway. I worked, you know, help them out that aggregator part-time right away. And now I’m working with a very small handful of close friends and people I bump into it accelerate. I was at another conference in Orlando a week and a half ago, so I like small networking conferences.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, you know I took away two or there’s two takeaways from that you would do differently, obviously is hey, you got to have checks for the checks, and maybe you did set up a QA, but you got to watch your factory a little bit more to make sure that they’re keeping up. Their end of the bargain is one. And then you also mentioned about not trying to take on more debt than you really need to. What other? Are those pretty much the main things that led to the demise of your conglomeration there, or is there some more takeaways?

Brian:

There’s probably another takeaway there. Other people have said this fail quickly. So in the context of a product, if there’s something wrong with it, get out of it. And if I had hindsight, I should have done two things. I’ll never know the right answer. I should have just tried to sell through it. But that’s not who I am. I was trying to protect the consumer, getting bad product, etc. I wouldn’t have wanted to sell through it. But what I should have done was take a much harder line with the supplier and said I’m not paying you another penny until you come pick up this inventory and fix it. Fail quickly, Even if it’s a product that’s your number one product.

Bradley Sutton:

You’ve been now in the Amazon space for 10 years or a little bit more. Obviously there’s new fees and Seller Central is different and new AI things. But out of all the things that have changed over the last few years, what are the biggest differences where, if you still were running your own accounts, where you take a look and like man, I would have to completely redo the way I launched. I’d have to redo the way I mean? You mentioned how you might not have done your own warehouse. You know might do AWD or something now, but what are some of those big changes over the last 10 years? What are the biggest ones for you?

Brian:

The biggest is what pretty much everybody else is saying, which is you need a moat around your product. The challenge is moats are the drawbridge goes down pretty quickly to go across the moat. Now there’s a lot of copycats quickly, even on Coffin Shelf. You know it’s a miniscule market and there’s 25 competitors on Coffin Shelf. I would also figure out. You know what I was trying to do and I even use this in that fishbowl, this example I wanted to be the Procter and Gamble of the online world. In other words, category ambivalent, multiple brands selling the same thing. Essentially, that’s very, very, very difficult to do and I think it’s going to get even more difficult to do. Having something unique and one of the guys in our mastermind group, one of the ones I was talking about he actually exited in 2019. I don’t know what the number was. It was very comfortable to one of the aggregators and his shtick is finding unique products that go along with market leaders. So he had accessories for grills and coolers, stuff like that. So, find a niche product, find something, and that’s getting really, really hard to do. Now the other thing is you can create your own niche now with influencers. I’m not an expert on that there are some that are, but I think it needs to be real and genuine. You just can’t game the TikTok algorithm because it’s going to get smarter and smarter and smarter. So you need an honest to goodness, good product. And somebody was asking me what was my big takeaway from Accelerate, and for me it was oh crap, look at all this AI stuff they’ve been doing. Of course, not too much of it has shipped yet. That which has shipped isn’t in its prime yet, but that’s obviously the trajectory. Take Rufus, for example. Product discovery is going to be totally different five years from now. Then, you know, oh you remember those old days when you had to rank for search terms? Maybe it’s not five years, maybe it’s yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. It’s changing. I’m very fascinated by that because it’s like to me, I’m about to do another podcast with one of our data science guy who leads our AI lab here at Helium 10. We’re gonna talk about, we haven’t recorded this yet, so I don’t know what we’re going to talk about but I wanted to ask him about that because it’s like when I think not as a seller or not as a software, you know, in the software space, if I’m just thinking as a buyer, like to me there is nothing that can or will replace the traditional way to search for product. But like if I’m searching for a coffin shelf, I do not want to have a conversation with the AI, I’m going to search the search term coffin shelf and I’m gonna look now. So to me the new AI stuff is more like two things it’s the before shopping and the after you find a product phase. Like like the before shopping, as in I feel like Amazon is kind of like trying to be Google. You know, like usually you Google stuff like, hey, what’s the best spooky gift to give to? You know gothic loved ones, right, right. And then that’s where you get the coffin. Now I like, oh, it’s a coffin shelf. Now let me type in coffin shelf to Amazon. But now I almost feel that it’s like no, maybe you can do the discovery phase, where you’re just browsing and trying to figure stuff out on Amazon and skip the whole Google thing, and then after you do find a product, then to me the benefit of AI is OK. Well, if they ever fix it and have it, stop hallucinating. You know where I could just, instead of having to read all the reviews as a consumer, I could just, you know, get some summaries and things, get some summaries and things. So. But it’s going to be fascinating. Because I just can’t imagine a world, though, where, if I already know I want a coffin shelf, where I’m not going to go and type in coffin shelf to you know, to a searcher, like that’s two words, two you know, or two little things with my thumb I’m doing, as opposed to having to try and have a whole conversation with an AI. But yeah, it’s years ago. You probably never would have thought the things that are going on Amazon now would be the case.

Brian:

I want to unpack something you said there. The key is, you know you want a coffin shelf. That’s where Rufus, or the future embodiment of whatever it becomes discoverability. You don’t know. That’s what you want. This is my need. I want spooky decorations for whatever and, oh, coffin shell. That makes sense, yeah. But here’s the other big thing that we’re all kind of. You know we’re serious sellers, right. We lose sight that the masses are not nearly as advanced as we both in Amazon and also product discovery and everything we’re talking about here. One of my friend’s companies. They’ve got an Amazon business but they have a second business which is actually really cool. It’s old school, selling to bricks and mortar resellers and they’re growing by leaps and bounds and we get phone calls at least weekly. Can I just mail you a check? So the disparity in skill sets across the population in the United States is pretty huge. You’ve got people discovering products with Rufus on the app and you’ve got people mailing paper checks.

Bradley Sutton:

And yeah, who knows, I don’t think it’s ever going to be completely breached. There’s always going to be gaps in the market. All right Now before I get into my last question of the day, real quick, if people want to reach out to you, find out more about your story, and or maybe a publisher out there wants to publish your memoir, your book you talked about Million-Dollar Mistakes. How can they find you on the interwebs out there?

Brian:

So if I get, if I get a book deal, do you often this? Do I have to give you an affiliate commission? I think so. I think so. Okay, your audience heard it. So, um, I actually have a very simple URL, easy to remember, CALLBRIANVIP, and it goes right into a page on my website specifically for hey, I’m not sure what I want, but this Brian guy sounds interesting. He told me how he lost $1.2 million. He’s not trying to hide it and he wants to help people not do the same thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I love it. All right. I’m not sure how much you’re using Helium 10 anymore, but from your memory, your favorite Helium 10 tool.

Brian:

Right now my favorite Helium 10 tool is Market Tracker 360. Okay, I have a history with market tracking and keyword based and what you’ve built out that’s the first market tracker thing Market Tracker 360s on is that on steroids? Um, you know we’re spending. I talked to my friends with the Amazon business. We’re spending a crap ton of money tracking, I think, seven or eight markets. So it’s not a lot of money, but it’s what we need. It’s to a certain degree, Amazon is a zero-sum game, not in everything, but on some things it is when the only way you’re going to grow your revenue and profit is if you grow market share. One of the significant contributors to growing market share is knowing what your market share is. And if sales went down, yeah, you can track it a little bit with BSR. Say, sales went down, but BSR didn’t. So we probably maintain market share. Market Tracker 360 lets you dial that in, as long as you got the filters and everything set right.

Bradley Sutton:

And something that Helium 10 can make for you to make your life or your client’s life easier.

Brian:

So one thing I just touched on a little bit brainstorm the filters and how they’re used into the niche, sub-niche or category sub-category, pick your words, because we’re using the market as the category and then we have saved filters for the sub-categories. Some of it works. Sometimes it’s a little clunky sometimes, but here’s the idea which flows out of Market Tracker 360. Weighted average selling price. In other words, buy units sold, weight the average selling price. Don’t take a pure linear average. There’s another component to that, though, that needs to be connected together somehow, and that is this is my competitor, but are they a direct competitor or are they a functional equivalent? And what’s the unit count. So there’s some brainstorming with some smarter people than you and I to figure out how to do that. But I started building this out two years ago in NetSuite and I was able to detect within hours major competitors but also non-major competitors and say we’re going to wait and watch this for a little bit. So we were tracking market average selling price. Weighted average selling price. That would be a pretty cool feature.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well, I’ll look into that, all right, well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us after six years. Better late than never. I’d love to reach out to you, maybe now that you’re a Serious Sellers podcast veteran, maybe in a year or two, and see what you’ve been up to and catch up. Sounds good.

Brian:

Awesome.

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