Episode 33 – Insights On Amazon Business Opportunities From Amazing Seller Machine’s Co-Founder

If you were looking for expert insights on Amazon business opportunities and wanted to hear what e-commerce thought leader envisioned for the future of FBA selling, wouldn’t you love to be able to ask the co-founder of the Amazing Selling Machine what he thought? If that sounds like a super intriguing conversation to you, then you are in for another awesome podcast.

In episode 33 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Success, Bradley Sutton welcomes Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) Co-Founder, Matt Clark, to the microphone to share his cool e-commerce origin story and to give us his insights into the future of selling on Amazon.

In episode 33, Bradley and Matt discuss:

• 01:00 – Matt’s Cool Origin Story
• 04:20 – Matt’s Beginnings With E-Commerce
• 06:10 – Matt’s Beginnings With Selling On Amazon
• 10:15 – How ASM (Amazing Selling Machine) Was Created
• 15:10 – ASM’s Impact – 30,000 Students
• 16:15 – Sellers Who Have Failed – The Common Denominator
• 20:40 – A Cool Amazon Success Story
• 25:40 – Matt’s Insights Into The Future – Why Diversification Is Important
• 27:30 – The Proliferation Of Amazon Courses – What Makes ASM Different
• 31:05 – SellerCon – The Largest Amazon Seller Event: Who Will Be There

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: We’ve got Matt Clark, the co-founder of amazing.com and ASM, the training course that trained thousands and thousands of Amazon sellers. We’re going to hear about his amazing story as well as what he views as the future of selling on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton: How’s it going, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Serious Sellers Podcasts. It’s my privilege today to have as a guest Matt Clark from amazing.com. A lot of you guys know—I’m going to jump right into this. There’s a lot of these superhero movies, and in this genre, a lot of times, they go back and they show the superhero when they were young or how they started. Now, do you know what they call that genre of movie?

Matt Clark: I don’t think I know what that genre would be called now.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Have you ever heard that term origin story?

Matt Clark: Yes, yes.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, just a funny story. When Manny, who I noticed is one of your good friends, told me that he wanted you on the podcast, he said, “Hey make sure to ask Matt about his origin story.” Now, honestly, that really intrigued me. He said that you have a really cool origin story or superhero origin story. Now, I did not follow up at all with him, so this is going to be completely new for me. So Matt, tell us about your origin story.

Matt Clark: Yeah, funny. I don’t have any idea where you would expect me to start. I can start back probably when I was quite a bit younger, moved around schools quite a bit, and then, for whatever reason, was kind of self-destructive, I guess. And then I got with some bad kids and getting in trouble tons, and then kind of knew that I wanted to do something important or meaningful with my life, but just hanging out with people getting in trouble. I was getting in trouble, and this was when I was barely young, like 13, 14 years old. And, eventually, one summer, I just kind of need to get away from these people and just kind of disappeared. I was living in Houston at the time and then went to Austin to where my dad was, did some work for him over the summer and for a business that he was running. And that gave me a little bit of separation to start changing what I was doing and still was figuring out my ways, still partying a ton and stuff like that later through high school. But then, finally, once I got into college, once again, I think about just getting some separation and started reading stuff about self-development. I had never really read any of that kind of stuff. But then I ended up finding some book, who knows how, and a Success Principles by Jack Canfield, and then read that, and I couldn’t read more than five pages without having some epiphany about my life. I was like, “Oh, so this is how you actually do this stuff.” It’s not just hoping something magical happens, hoping that you become more successful or achieve some goal. There’s actually a process to do it. And so at that point, I really started putting things together, started doing very well in college—straight As or doing an internship—started building a network of mentors, and joined an entrepreneurship program. Then I eventually want to know I wanted to run my own business. And, so I started putting that stuff together. And then at the time, it was 2007 I think; it was right before the financial crash. And I was like, “You know what sounds like a great idea? Starting a hedge fund.” Some of those people are making $1 billion a year in income, which is insane. Even if you’re the owner of one of the biggest companies in the world, that kind of income is just unheard of except for in that world really. And so that was the idea at the time. I liked finance. I was fairly good at it. So I went to work for an investment bank, and the plan was to work there for three to five years and then start some sort of related business. But after a couple of months, I was, “Ah, screw this.” I was, “This sucks”. I was, “I don’t want to work here for the rest of my life.” I’m miserable. I’m not motivated, and this is not what I want to be doing. I was trying to do anything in that office other than actually do real work, and I was not liking it. And so, about seven months into that, I messed with banking job. I quit, and then I moved to Austin, and I was trying to figure out what business I wanted to start. And so I came back to Austin from Houston.

Bradley Sutton: You moved to Austin before it was cool to move to Austin like it is now—like what everybody’s doing.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. It was right at that time period. So, it was 10 years ago and still, a ton of people move in there, but it’s accelerated even more in the past few years. But yeah, so, I came to Austin, and then, my dad had some medical clinics at the time, and so I kind of like marketing stuff, and so I helped them with some marketing stuff while I figure out what I want to do and then come to find out there some kind of high-end health supplements that are more mainstream now. This is I guess 10 years ago or so; now they’re more mainstream like brands, thorn research, and Zymogen and stuff like that that a lot of health gurus talk about now because these are super high-end, super high-quality supplements. Well, back then, they were only sold through doctor’s offices. So if you’re a patient at one of these clinics, and you like the supplement because the doctor says you need this for whatever health issue, for you to go buy it, you have to go back up to their frequent clinic and then buy the product probably at a pretty insane markup. And that’s just a huge hassle. And so, I was one of the earlier people who started selling those online. And then, I had no idea what drop shipping was, but that’s what I ended up doing. I started off just selling a couple of products that I was keeping in stock, but then I had I found out that some of those people would actually drop ship, which most people in this I’m sure you’re probably familiar with, but basically, I could have a customer place an order on my store. I’ve seen that order through an email, for example, over the supplier. They ship it to the customer, and so I can basically have as many products as I want without having any inventory whatsoever. And so, yeah, it’s kind of how it got started with the eCommerce and then basically built that store up and then scaled it up to 11,000 products with a couple of million dollars in revenue. And that was all before I sort of started discovering the Amazon piece.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. 11,000 products. That’s crazy. So how did you then get pivot to Amazon from there?

Matt Clark: Yeah, so I guess my first expertise—if you will—in my marketing for eCommerce stuff was Google AdWords, search campaigns because I was selling these products, and I well I guess, at the time, Google AdWords was the best way to grow the kind of eCommerce business that I knew of. And so I went to all the little conferences, read all the books, and did all that. And so I was growing my business with Google AdWords. It was a complete disaster at 11,000 products because I have not done that, don’t have a technology background, had no clue how to track that stuff. And so it’s producing a lot of sales. The tracking results were a nightmare, but that’s a whole another story. But then at that time, I started learning a lot about SEO also. So that was kind of back in the wild west of SEO where you could run software and rank for stuff and buy exact match domain names and rank for stuff, and so I was ranking for all these different products. And so SEO became more of a source of sales than AdWords, which is what I built the business on. But with SEO, I started realizing a couple of years in running that business that Amazon was just popping up everywhere. This would have been, I don’t know, eight years ago, something like that. And so Amazon just kept popping up in all the search results, even ones where, at that time, exact match keyword domain names worked really well and was ranked number one very comfortably. And then all of a sudden, Amazon result would be popping up number 3, number 2, overtaking number 1. And it just kept happening again and again, and I was, “Well, if I’m making most of my sales with these rankings, but Amazon keeps beating me, then I need to figure out how this Amazon thing works.” And at the time, I had no idea you could sell on Amazon or anything like that. I was kind of learning all this stuff more or less on my own. And so, I ended up poking around Amazon. I found that out you could sell products on Amazon, and so, I lifted a few products and I was, “Okay, cool, this is awesome.” Unlike with AdWords and Pay Per Click, with Amazon, I could throw a product up there, and if it sells, I make money. If it doesn’t sell, then it doesn’t really cost me anything if it’s a drop-shipping product, especially because it’s literally just a listing on there; there’s no inventory or anything. And this was before Amazon gave so much preference to people using FBA. And so I had the bright idea. I thought at the time was, “Okay, if I can put a product on there, and it doesn’t cost me anything to have it there, but I can make money if it sells, and it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t sell, then why don’t I take all 11,000 of these products and list them all on Amazon?” I was like, “I’m going to make so much money if this is going to work fantastic. And so I had six outsourcers from the Philippines and spent basically six weeks adding all these 11,000 products to Amazon. And I thought it was the best idea ever. The problem was that not all the products we’re consistently in stock because I had a few direct relationships with some of the brands, but then I had a relationship with a couple of distributors who gave me access to 80, 90 brands that were in that same kind of high-end health supplement market. And so then I kept getting products that I would get a sale on Amazon, I’d send it over to the distributor, and they’re like, “Well, you know, I hate to say it, but that product’s not in stock, not going to be around for another six weeks.” So I got to have to refund orders and cancel orders and trying to swap stuff out on Amazon. And then the whole thing started crumbling very fast. I was teetering on the brink of getting that Amazon account suspended because of all those issues. And I was, “Well, this is a disaster.” And so then, I ended up basically stripping all those products away out of Amazon and boiled it down to just 10 to 20 that sold very well and we’re in stock a hundred percent of the time. This was before I started getting into private labeling, but that’s how I really narrowed it down and started achieving some consistent success on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton: That’s a great story. So guys, don’t start with 11,000 products that you don’t even know if they’re in stock or not in stock. Learn from Matt. So, you eventually got your own formula down, ventured into private label. And then actually, it wasn’t that long after that when you started, of course, the ASM course, right? Wasn’t that about seven years ago?

Matt Clark: Yeah. That was back in about 2012. See, I have been running an e-Commerce business for a few years and then selling on Amazon for a little while. And, as I said, it kind of boiled down to this drop-shipping products and kind of a chance encounter. I had a product that was taking off in my online store. I have no idea what the product was. It’s taking off in my online store, just crushing everything else. And I ended up meeting a guy at the pool at the apartment I lived in. I was like, “Hey—we were talking business and I was telling him what was going on—I’m actually a manufacturer for this product because I can private label it for you, and instead of buying it for $10 from this other brand, I can get it for you for $2 or $3.” And I’m like “That sounds awesome.” I own the brand and control the brand. My margins are way higher. And so that’s kind of how I got into private labeling. And so then, I started telling that on my own store and selling it on Amazon. And so it was doing pretty well, doing that, and started seeing a ton of success on Amazon. And back then, the Amazon was also the wild west. You could do pretty much whatever you want, and you didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble. And so it allowed me to test a ton of different things—things that ended up kind of creating a lot of the training we did with ASM and also ended up kind of being a lot of the stuff that you had to get away from. And so I would have a product that I would promote and get it up to number one by trying a whole bunch of different stuff out for whatever target keyword I was going after. And then, Amazon would randomly remove it or something or, for some reason, kicked that product out because I was doing stuff that they probably didn’t want you to do. And so I’m, “Okay, well I don’t think you can do that, this and this, but I think you could still do this.” So I’d have another product. I get back up to number one for that keyword. And then went through the cycle probably ten times or something. It has allowed me to figure out a ton of how the Amazon algorithm works still true until today, but especially at the time, and so with all that, I was like “Well, running my own eCommerce business was cool, it’s interesting, it’s fun, and it’s allowed me to learn a ton about marketing.” But I wanted to go out there and I kind of think I always wanted to do this—reach more people, help other people build businesses—and so I started thinking about the idea about creating kind of a course on how I was doing what I was doing on Amazon, because I was still only selling 10 to 20 products. There are million-plus products on Amazon at that time. And, the same strategy is going to work for any of these products. And so, I think I could probably teach this to other people and help them kind of do what I’m doing here. And so then I started thinking about that, and I was a part of a mastermind group for people with businesses doing over $1 million a year called the Maverick’s run by an old-school Internet marketing guy, Yanik Silver. And I was going to do a free webinar for the group, just kind of teaching them what I was doing on Amazon. And then, I decided to get some feedback from my little round-table group within the bigger mastermind group. And that’s when I met Jason, the other co-founder of Amazing. He was like, “You know what?” And he’s like, “I’ve got an email list of a couple hundred thousand people that would be interested in hearing about this stuff because they’ve all been doing Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing is kind of dying. They’d probably love to learn about Amazon and eCommerce and that kind of thing.” He’s like, “Well you be interested in creating a course?” And I’m like, “Sure, yeah, that sounds great. It’s kind of what I’ve been interested in trying out.” And so, we got together and then, four months later or so, we rolled out the first version of what later became the Amazing Selling Machine, but at the time, it was called Amazon Money Machine, and it included three different models, including drop shipping which I have done, private labeling which I have done, and Kindle—funny enough—which was just super popular at the time, and I had found a little bit of easy success there. Nothing as big as the eCommerce stuff, but it was still an easy way to make money at the time. It’s all included, all three of those models. And then we sold it, did very well, and then kept iterating the product, and we started having some massive success from some of our students and realized that the biggest success—because I kind of taught Jason the business too—he had had, I had had, and our students had had was all in owning and creating your own brand or kind of private labeling. And so after that year, we ended up sort of revamping the whole thing and creating an Amazing Selling Machine, which was a hundred percent focused on creating, and building, and scaling your own brand on Amazon, and that’s when things kind of really took off for us.

Bradley Sutton: Well, yeah. I think, honestly, last year, I didn’t know about you guys actually. I wish I did. When I first started getting into the game three or four years ago, I was doing lots of different courses and things, but for some reason, I don’t think you guys targeted me in ads or anything because I never saw it.

Matt Clark: We missed you.

Bradley Sutton: So yeah, it missed me. But when I started hearing as I would get out there and go to conferences, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I learned Amazon from ASM 1, ASM 2.” And I was like, “What does this ASM that everybody is talking about?” So, in my mind or I’m pretty sure that you guys have trained more Amazon students than any other company. Have you any idea approximately how many people have gone through your courses?

Matt Clark: Our big main program, Amazing Selling Machine, we’ve had over 30,000 go through that.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. That’s crazy.

Matt Clark: Back in the day, the first couple of years, maybe first three years or so, when we first started offering it, it was easy to tell on Amazon who was a member versus who wasn’t. because we were the ones showing them how to do the longer titles of more keywords, the bullet points with more details in there, the better format of description, and nobody was doing that stuff at the time. And so we could literally look at search results and see eight out of 10 for different keywords and stuff for our members. But now, everyone does that stuff and teaches that stuff, and there are a million people talking about this stuff. So it’s hard to tell now. But yeah, early on, it was pretty easy to see the impact we are having on there, which is pretty crazy considering the size of Amazon.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. So now, 30,000 students, you’ve seen it all. What have you seen when you look at the numbers or look at the trends of, number one, the ones who failed? Is there a common denominator? And then the flip side, the ones who have been successful? What has been one of the common denominators would you say?

Matt Clark: Yeah, I would say for the ones who had failed, I guess there’s a general thing and then kind of more specific. In general, people who quit versus ones who keep going. We talk about this all the time. We talk and I can guarantee you the answer’s going to be yes. If I ask for any big success that came from our group or from anywhere else, have you had any major problems in your business? And pretty much all of them are going to laugh and say yes. They’ve had supplier issues, trademark issues, patent issues, issues of Amazon, and all that stuff. It just kind of nature of the beast whenever you’re scaling any business on Amazon or not. And a lot of the people I think that have been successful kind of solve those challenges, and they’re like, “Okay, you know what, I’m going to make this happen no matter what. I’m going to keep pushing through it.” People who failed, they kind of ran into one of those things. They get scared and they throw in the towel or they really lose motivation. And whereas before they were just driving forward and moving forward, they hit that challenge, and they just kind of really lose steam. There’s still kind of trying some stuff, but not at any level like they were before. So that’s one thing. Another thing, too, is that I think the people that have failed, what I’ve seen a lot of the times, is they’re just kind of—I don’t really know why it happens. Maybe they’re not getting feedback from other people, but a lot of times, we used to have tracked a lot of stuff in our system and I would literally see somebody in the comments inside of our private community that was, “This thing doesn’t work.” I’ve tried everything there are business models. Yeah, sorry. So whatever. And I was able to do this a little bit better than we can now, but I could go look inside of their account. I can pull up their seller account. I can pull up software tools that we had in our own platform, which made this easier. I could literally see the stuff that they had done or hadn’t done. And almost inevitably, they hadn’t done a fraction of what they should’ve done. They try maybe two things, and they said, “This doesn’t work, I’m out.” And so, that was another big thing is, people just not really being relentless enough with trying stuff out. And trying to make it work versus just hoping you do a couple of things and expecting magic to happen. Another thing too is that we’ve seen a ton is that people who are struggling to produce sales almost probably nine times out of 10, they have pretty terrible product listings. Their images aren’t great, their bullet points and description have grammatical errors, or they’re just kind of insufficient. We see that stuff all the time, and that I think hurts people a ton because then they sit there and they do a half hours job on that piece, and they start trying to run ads and stuff, and say “My ads aren’t working” or “my sales aren’t picking up.” And a lot of times, it’s because of that, I think. And then people that have succeeded, on the other hand, they tick all the boxes; they do all that stuff right. They have a good listing; they have all the pieces of your listing in place. They’re trying lots of stuff. And one of the things that I started seeing—we never really told people this as much as we should early on, but we do know—they were coming out of our membership, they were just crushing it and really gone above and beyond with their products, which if you’ve talked to people, in other spaces may be, they’re like, “Yeah, you sell a really good high-quality product.” But at first, we were just capitalizing or teaching people to capitalize on opportunities on Amazon. If there was a product, say, for example, a yoga mat. If at the time, if everyone whose selling yoga mats had horribly under optimized listing, they weren’t using keywords and titles and all that sort of stuff, you could go in there with the same yoga mat, and maybe even something not as good, and still beat all of those people. And so a lot of people were just kind of throwing up products that were pretty mediocre, and then eventually it started getting more competitive and that really wasn’t good enough. But some of the people we started seeing that were crushing it, for example, probably not going to say his name, one of our members, he decided for whatever reason that he was going to sell a vegetable spiralizer, but then he ordered all the ones on Amazon, and he was like, “These are all junk.” He’s like, “I don’t want to sell any of these things.” And so he ends up and he was kind of almost telling us this. He was guilty of something bad because this is not what we advised at the time. You spent six months creating a completely new, unique, better one. And then, not much longer, a couple of years later he’s doing $1 million a month selling that product. And I’m like, “That wasn’t our advice,” but I was, “That probably should be our advice—maybe not always going out there and completely custom manufacturing something amazing, making sure you have the best product in your market.” And I’ve seen that now many times, and so much so that we started really pushing people more to make sure they have the best product possible without probably going and spending $50- $60,000 custom manufacturing something but making sure you get the best supplier, the best quality, the best details that you can get your hands on a node just settled for kind of good enough.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I liked that story. Do you have another cool story? One of my favorite ASM stories is that I have a good friend, Paul Miller, who I know you know, and he’s actually going to come on the podcast in a few episodes so I don’t want to spoil his story, but it’s really almost like a Hollywood movie the way that he came to become a seven-figure seller. But, we could probably go on for 10, 15 minutes about this, but in one or two minutes or less, do you have another cool story other than Paul and other than the vegetable spiralizer that really sticks out in your mind?

Matt Clark: Yeah, I got another guy who—it’s probably not a good idea to tell the specific part of it; it doesn’t really matter. It could apply to any product. He’s the guy who I actually met recently. I didn’t know, but he’s been a member of ours for since the very beginning, and I met him at another high-level event. It’s funny because these high-level events used to be for people that have done pretty well. And so I was used to seeing all the same kind of people there. Now it’s our members that are sitting right next to us that have built, $10, $20 million businesses, which is pretty awesome. And so this guy comes up to me at the gym, he’s like, “Hey man.”  Yeah, I just want to thank you, blah blah blah. You helped me so much.” And he was telling me he had basically gone through our training, and he was doing all kinds of crazy stuff. He was a professional salsa dancer and stuff. It was just a guy living in a hospital in New York trying to make it work. And so he joined our training, and these definitely got a ton of drive. And so he ended up building a beauty brand on Amazon that got up to about $30 million a year in sales and a very much built on Amazon tactics and stuff. And when a lot of that stuff started changing, he stopped, he started losing motivation. All this stuff to get reviews and everything isn’t really working anymore. And so he got kind of discouraged, and he ended up kind of selling that business at the bottom. But for a $30 million business, he still made a ton of money. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing you’d probably still walked away with maybe $10 million or something like that. But he wanted out of that business. He was, “I’m just done with this.” Then from what he said, that business ended up getting back up to $20, $30 million in revenue after he had sold it. But he decided at the time to know what’s really working and what’s winning now on Amazon. He’s having the best product. And so he ended up going and taking a kitchen product, another kitchen product, just coincidentally. But took a kitchen product out there that was a fairly complicated product. And he made a ton of money selling his business. And so he ended up spending about four million dollars of the kind of new-found money that he had and developed a brand-new product to compete with some very big-name brands on Amazon, and included building out a super high-quality mobile app that was kind of are in the process. And so he created this product and now he’s the number two for that very well selling products. The high competitors are sold in Target, in Walmart, and everywhere else. And he’s going out there and his goal is to build $100 million brands. So that to me is super awesome to hear. He’s a guy that just keeps kind of swinging for the fences, which I think there’s a lesson in that kind of for all of us, and it’s kind of cool that he came from our membership because a lot of times you knew or you achieve a level of success. And the natural response is to kind of play defense rather than, and keep kind of playing off the fence. But he just keeps swinging for it. And that’s how I think people end up building a hundred million dollar businesses. And it’s kind of cool that we were able to have a bit of a part in his success.

Bradley Sutton: Love it, love it. So, that’s a great success story about Amazon. But, now that we’re in 2019, going forward 2020, 2021, how do you view the possibilities of expanding product sales beyond just Amazon? Do you see a growing need to kind of diversify your sources of income instead of just Amazon?

Matt Clark: I hate to say it, but maybe it depends on your goals. A lot of times we were concerned about this ourselves. We’ve built up this company Amazing that’s almost entirely dependent on teaching people stuff related Amazon. And, so there’s that component, but also the businesses that we’ve had and our members have had are almost entirely dependent on Amazon. Still, we see time and time again businesses from our members and which other people have built that are producing 90% of their sales on Amazon are being sold for multiple millions of dollars are almost entirely only producing sales on Amazon. So there’s still a high value there. I think in general it’s a fairly risky thing even though the market is saying that it’s still perfectly okay right now. But, even the more stuff Amazon changes and some of the people start getting some horror stories, maybe they buy a brand for a couple of million dollars, and all of a sudden thanks and that kind of travels through the world because maybe they were doing something they shouldn’t have done. I think in general, yeah, diversification is great. The problem that we’ve seen is a lot of people tried to diversify too early. Until you really have an established business on Amazon, your highest leverage activity is probably going to be to produce more sales on Amazon. However, you’re probably going to have a more valuable, more stable business if you have at least another couple of sales channels. For example, myself, ended up kind of partnering with a guy on this sort of high end organic, healthy coffee business, and it was already running on Shopify and I’ve got a bit of a background, and kind of direct marketing stuff. And so we’re growing it through that channel. Well, we absolutely plan probably in six months or so to also be selling on Amazon. It just kind of increases diversification both ways around, increases valuation a little bit because it’s a little bit more stable for somebody looking to buy the thing. So I would say, yeah, I think the obvious answer is “Sure, diversify sales outside of Amazon, but also make sure that you’re really established, and consistent, and probably doing at least a few million dollars a year on Amazon first. Otherwise, you’re just going to be maybe sort of trying to split your focus too many different areas and you’re probably not going to do well in either one.”

Bradley Sutton: All right, cool. So the last question of the day, we’ve talked about Amazing being the OGs in the core space, but now, if anybody has Facebook and gets hit with ads or gets emails, they could see that everybody, and their brother, mother, sister, and best friend have a course out there. What are your thoughts on this? I’m sure you’ll definitely be wanting to say that there’s a lot of garbage out there. So, how can people know what’s beneficial for them and what’s not with such an influx of everybody wanting to teach you how to sell on Amazon?

Matt Clark: Yeah. It’s hard to tell, especially with marketing and all that kind of stuff. Cause any element I could pull out there, they could probably go out there and either fake the examples, or pull out some micro examples from their community, and you’ll be able to point to the levels of success and stuff. And I talk with some of these people. Some of them are perfectly good people. I’ve talked with some of the other ones too. And they don’t really put a lot of time, a ton of focus in there. They want to be experts in other areas and as opposed to us, this is kind of all will do. The differentiator is why we still charge more than almost all of those people is that they’re selling a course which is valuable. Having good information that kind of goes beyond for YouTube videos and stuff. But then there is kind of selling a result I guess. And so for us, I don’t know how these other people handle supporting these communities without having a team as we have. My purpose in saying all this, my business just to like sell our value or anything. It’s just kind of how we think about it is that when somebody joins Amazing Selling Machine, for example, we have a full team of 20 mentors and all these people are pretty much all sold millions of dollars on Amazon. We’ve got our lead guy who kind of runs that group. The training is constantly updated, never out of date. And a big thing too that I think, just kind of thinking about this right now is that we see a lot of these people that are teaching stuff. We’re perfectly fine living in a little bit of a gray area here on Amazon. You did everything a hundred percent Amazon complaint. You pretty much wouldn’t be able to do anything. But, we kind of is very cognizant of where that line is. Whereas some of these people, they haven’t been through kind of what we’ve been through and seen people get accounts suspended and all that sort of stuff. And, they may be teaching stuff that can absolutely get you in trouble. We see people offering, consulting stuff to people that it’s just completely wrong and you shouldn’t be doing. And so we’re very much in here not to teach some 23-year-old who’s got nothing to lose how to build a business. We’re here to teach somebody with a family that’s putting real money on the line and is using this business to build kind of a legacy for their family. And so we have to be very careful where that line is of stuff that’ll get you trouble versus not get you in trouble. And so we’ll look at all that stuff and also, I don’t know what these other people offer in terms of guarantees and stuff. Well, that’s why we always offer a 30-day guarantee, which there is a level of trust. You have to trust that the company’s actually going to give you your money back. But if you trust that, then you can always jump inside poking side, see what everyone has to say. See the quality of the training. By all means, ask questions, ask for help and see if you actually get help. Some of those are the ones that I don’t even know, but I’ve just heard of it. But I’ve kind of gotten in trouble with the law actually for overpromising and that kind of thing. Some of the people just like, we promise the moon, they jump in there and then the member would have real legitimate questions that need help, and those people were just kind of nowhere to be found, which is terrible. That’s no way to offer that kind of stuff. That’s real people on the other end trying to build a business that really changes their life. And so I would look at all that stuff, I mean, look at their guarantees, look at their success stories, look at their track record. How long have they been around? Are they teaching stuff that you don’t really feel comfortable with that you think is going to get you in trouble? Are they easy to get hold off? And so I would look at all that stuff, by all means, we are the only people out there. There are lots of potentially good options. But yeah, that’s all the stuff that I would look at it again.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. All right. That’s been very helpful. Now, in 30 seconds or less, the last thing, tell us a little bit about Seller Con and why people should go to Seller Con.

Matt Clark: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, we’ve got Seller Con coming up June 21st to 23rd in Las Vegas, and so this is our big event. They’ll have thousands of Amazon sellers there. A lot of them will be our members, but it’s open to anybody who wants to come. And so we’ve kind of curated a list of almost exclusively people who are involved in eCommerce, especially selling on Amazon to come to teach everything they basically know about what latest and greatest when it comes to selling on Amazon. We’ve got a few bigger keynotes speakers, as well, such as Dave Asprey who owns Bulletproof, they break $68 million. Today we’ve got Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx. So we’ve got a ton of other people coming and yeah, if you want to learn anything about selling on Amazon, how to scale, how to grow, I don’t think that anybody has a better lineup than this event. And we’ve got basically content for every level, whether you’re just getting started or you’re selling over a million dollars a year on Amazon, and it’s not a big pitch fest or any of that kind of stuff. It’s almost entirely, pure content, and a great time. We put a lot of work into these events. We’ve been doing them for years, and we could see more people out there.

Bradley Sutton: You forgot the number one reason to go is Bradley Sutton speaking at Seller Con. You mentioned Robert Kiyosaki, but no Bradley, come on guys. If you guys want to come and throw tomatoes at me, I’ll be speaking there, and there’s going to be a lot more amazing speakers. And I went to last year Seller Con before I even worked at Helium 10 in Orlando. It was amazing. So I suggest, guys, if you want more information on that, check out sellercon.com, or for more information on the Amazing Selling Machine, you can go to amazingsellingmachine.com. Matt, I thank you very much, I know your time is very valuable. I appreciate you coming on and helping us out with your cool superhero origin story, and all the things that you’ve seen along the way. And I’ll be seeing you at Seller Con.