Greg and Brian are back to chat about what exactly goes on when they travel to China, how to source your own products, 2019 Amazon updates and other fun stuff. Towards the end, we chat about what income levels are possible with a new ecommerce business with 18 months of hard work. Their answer surprised me, mostly because these are not hyperbole type guys. We’ve chatted with them multiple times before so if you want more from these guys earlier episodes are available here and here. And if you want to learn directly from Greg and Brian you can check out what they’re doing now here: www.ecommvip.com . We wouldn’t share this stuff unless we believed in these guys!
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Transcript
00:00:00 Hey, it’s Tom and I’m back with Greg and Brian would wait to hear some of the stuff that they talk about with about Amazon and eCommerce businesses. It takes us a little while to get into this episode. The first maybe 10, 15 minutes. We’re talking about it before they really get into it and by the end kind of Greg and buying or really sharing some good stuff. So the reason that we want to bring these guys out is we really believe this kind of information. I mean Nick and I have paid a lot of money to, to figure some of this stuff out even though we are not selling actively on Amazon. Actually I shouldn’t say that other than our books, but we’re not selling other retail products on Amazon ourselves. We like to be kept abreast of what’s going on. And definitely the Amazon trend is a big one that we’re still just at the very beginning of and there’s a huge opportunity.
00:00:41 So if you want some information from people who are actually doing this, Greg and Brian are a great resource. They hand out some information about what they’re doing. At the end, I’m just great guys, really humble guys, just really blessed to have crossed paths and very grateful that they’ll come on and share this kind of information from us. And Look, if you’re listening to this and you’re not checking us out on youtube yet, go to youtube.com/rockstarinnercircle. That’s where we get all our videos that we release. So it’s youtube.com/rockstarinnercircle. This podcast isn’t a video podcast yet, but we’ve had enough people ask for that, that it’s in the works. Um, we, we’ve tested out a few times, a little while ago. We got some kinks to figure out. We will get there. Um, but in the meantime you can get the videos that we’re putting out at youtube.com/rockstarinnercircle that will get you to our youtube channel. If you hit the big fat subscribe button, then you won’t miss any of the videos that we put out. So that’s where to go for this stuff. We’re releasing on this chat with Greg and Brian and we go through Amazon eCommerce, get an update from their latest China trip. I’m good guys. Enjoy the show.
00:01:43 Are you ready to live life on your terms? Is it time to take charge business? Building the economy, health and nutrition and more. It’s the, your life, your term show with Tom and Nick Karadza. Are you ready? Let’s go.
00:02:10 So we are live. So it breaks your heart to listen to yourself because you’re soft-spoken. Remember, speak right into the mic here. Nine now. So Greg and Brian, Nick is going to join us in a second. Um, I think he’s going to join us. He may or may not join us. We think he’s gonna join us. But, uh, Greg speak right into the mic. Nice and loud there. You can move around the mic. These are flexible. They move around. You’re good to go. Um, but, uh, I cannot listen to myself either. So some people who come onto this podcast will say they go off and listen to. It
00:02:39 just drives me crazy. I can’t do it. Now we can really see how the old people in television and the radio. You just. How hard is this to do this? Yeah, it’s not, it’s not easy stuff. There’s nothing. Something to being a professional on TV and radio. There’s a lot more to it. We’ve definitely been political. I’ve got to teach both. You listen, you
00:03:00 guys are Amazon eCommerce guys and I can’t get you to figure out how to speak into the mic, so speak right into the mic. If you can’t hear yourself in the headphones, that means no one else can hear you either. You’re good. Okay. I think we’re good. There we go. Um, and I was Brian, I’ll just giving you a hard time about not being a Mac guy and because you instead, but because you’re Mr Linux and you use windows as well, but we were just saying you, you like duck duck go right now is a search engine.
00:03:24 Yeah. So it’s just a one way to keep some of my information out of Google, you know, unfortunately, uh, Google’s really good at what they do. So they keep drawing you back, especially with maps like duck duck goes no good for looking for using maps. But uh, you know what, I’m just browsing around searching for stuff for the most part. Yeah. Duck duck go. It looks like they’re keeping your information private. At least they say they are. So that’s something that Google’s not doing. And, and uh, it’s kind of nice nuts not seeing ads for something. I just searched for that. That’s still weirds me out a bit. You know, you’d go do a search on for like a book and then you go browse around the internet and suddenly there’s, you know, five ads on the screen,
00:04:05 this book. Because there’s guys. Yeah, exactly. There’s guys like us with our books and oh hey brian, you searched real estate investing. What do you want a copy of our book? Why didn’t you pick this up on a copy of her book turns?
00:04:16 That’s actually, I think pretty much how I got into selling on Amazon in the first place is I must have been searching for how to make money, how to make money online, make money from home. Trying to figure this stuff out and then had started popping up and it started clicking on them eventually. I usually don’t, just out of principle, I don’t usually click on ads, which is strange because we use ads ourselves. But uh, so yeah, I think that that’s basically how I ended up getting into this.
00:04:41 I, I buy into the concept that marketers do ruin everything. You know, as soon as there’s a good platform, marketers jump into it and just kind of ruined it. But there’s also, this is also to us over the years been a good lesson and opportunity. Like when pay per click first came out, it wasn’t Google AdWords, we were buying pay per click ads from, Oh, the name escapes me right now, but they were dirt cheap and then all the marketers poured into it. It got expensive. Google changed their model, kicked off a bunch of advertisers and said, Hey, you know what, we’re going to raise our prices and here’s what we want to deal with. Um, then the next platform that came out with that was pretty big would be facebook. Facebook came out and it was really cheap at the beginning. Youtube came out and started putting ads in front of their videos. It was really cheap at the beginning. So now we’re constantly on the lookout for the next great media that will be out there where we can get in some cheap ads because the market moves so slowly. If you’re a, if you’re a sharp marketer, you can get in there and get some really cheap attention and even attention right now. It’s still pretty cheap on a lot of these platforms.
00:05:36 I’ll give you one that, uh, we are actually using our product launching and many chat and to basically a messenger. Yeah. Oh, so we’re using messenger right now, but with many chats. Many chat. Yeah. Try this. It’s what’s many chat is basically a program separate program that allows
00:05:58 you to create flows and uh, an audience and keep. Keep your audiences each. Yes. For her. For audience management danger. When engineers turned into marketers, they talk like you’re talking, Greg, it allows you to create flows. Like, I don’t even know what you’re talking about at this point, but I know it’s some magical marketing campaign is running. Yes. So so many chats actually the software you use to launch out a marketing campaign. Yes, Auntie. It’s directly connected with your Facebook advertising, so you create a an art in in facebook, but it’s directly oldest flows. All the components of the, of the ad or a components of the communication between you and the customer is handled. It’s handled through many chat. Really visual. It’s automated to w. What do you mean automated? There’s some automated. You can set up automation, so if somebody comes back with a certain answer through one of your tasks.
00:06:54 So we’re using and I don’t know even know the name of the one that we’re currently using, but we’re using a chat based automation thing now. That’s probably. You’re shaking your head. No many chats better. I’m telling you this is shareholder and many. You are confident I’m not. It’s really, really powerful because I find it powerful as well that text messaging as a platform to communicate marketing messages out. Remember I said marketers ruin everything, so yeah, it’s totally being ruined text messages, the next thing to be ruined because all marketing campaigns are coming out now through text message. Um, but uh, I find it amazing at how much communication you can get with people through like through messenger, through text message, chatting software. It’s, it, it’s shocking to me. And the lead generation is just cost you a peanuts, you know, comparing to regular odds.
00:07:43 He’s just very little thing. I’m always concerned when we look at some of these platforms, like we’re old enough that we did fax blasting when it was illegal in Canada. Ramon, you pissed off everybody sending out those facts. Plus when we measured response, sometimes the cheapest lead didn’t end up being the best lead. So what we found is that you can get a lot of leads cheaply through fax blasting, but a lot of the people that were coming, we were attracting through fax blasting in here anyway, weren’t turning into actual investors. And so the cheap leads really kind of weren’t that cheap because we need a 10 times those leads to produce someone. But I absolutely hear what you’re saying. It’s just, that’s what goes through my head every time I hear like cheap leads, let’s draw. Even right now, I was looking for her for a car and basically I sign up for a, a leasing company and to just basically to uh, uh, inquire some, some inflammation. And I left my phone number, cell phone number. Right now I’m just basically getting older messages out to our automated messages through a, through a cell phone. So people are using various industries. Not only selling a, you know, how far away are we from all throwing our cell phones, the garbage,
00:08:56 like I love my cell phone, especially when, you know, like when I want some information is handy and I find I’m very good now. If I need to get something done, I can actually get it done on my cell phone even if I’m on the road. Um, but at the other times I just feel like, you know what this is, this thing’s making me insane now because the addictive qualities of the cell phone have gotten so good. Like the marketers on the freaking cell phone have gotten so good with their apps. Um, it’s really tempting. Like for example, youtube on the phone now, the APP for Youtube on the phone, it’s brilliant. You know, I’m, I’m using still an old or a iPhone seven plus. The screen’s pretty big. I find I’m watching my leaf highlights, my, all my leaves, commentary, raptor stuff on the iPhone. It’s like another tv to me it’s brutal. Like I hate it.
00:09:44 I use like a google docs, like all the time I’m watching my kids do something and it will be sitting on the side and a couple of times have been doing work and send it back to Greg. Okay. I’m all done. I’m just watching the kids so I’ll finish off the last part at home, but we got to drive home. But I’ll be, I’ll be sitting there for 40 minutes. I can still watch my kids a little bit. And actually do some work, save it and get, get something.
00:10:05 It’s great. So it’s so powerful. But part of me is like, what’s this doing to our nervous system where we’re just always engaged. Like you’re constantly engaged. It’s just a little crazy.
00:10:14 I have actually removed facebook. Uh, I don’t have facebook or facebook messenger even though we run a couple of groups on facebook, only at home, at a, at a certain time, morning or night for a few minutes. A login, do it. I need to do. And then. And then that’s it. And then turn it off. Yeah. It’s not even on my phone. Same with like Instagram or Pinterest? Not Nothing.
00:10:33 It’s funny. This year, so far this year I’ve only gone onto Twitter if I specifically wanted to go to somebody’s feet directly. I’ve never, I haven’t gone to like the homepage and just kind browse it because it just always, I get kind of sucked into it. I’ve only gone onto Instagram like twice because I think one is like someone in my own family posted something that I felt like I had to go and contribute a little, like two, and that’s the only reason that I went on. So yeah, I’m just coming back. I remember when we got our blackberries, Nick and I, when we were actually starting Rockstar, we had so much to do. I told Nick I was going to delete the email functionality off my blackberry. That was at a time when the only reason you got a blackberry possible. Yeah. Yeah, it was. We could turn off from function a functionally from blackberry just so it wouldn’t get income and you just deleted the whatever the server information that you were putting in there. Um, and the email functionality would stop working and just used it as a phone. Right. So, uh, yeah, we went to that. That level is just driving me nuts.
00:11:28 Just think back, you know, those black periods changed everything. Getting email and you’re in your hand in your pocket.
00:11:32 You remember that little. Do you remember the one with the little scroll wheel aside? The Blue One? The blue? Yeah, the blue and the blue ones.
00:11:39 Black. When before that it was horizontal. It was a monochrome screen with three lines of text. It was. It was sideways. It wasn’t even a proper like cell is basically a super pager with some text on it. That’s where they started from.
00:11:51 Didn’t I have got was with all the drug dealers. Just
00:11:54 went crazy and said, I don’t need my regular page or look at this thing. And then from there. Yeah, they went and Pearl. Oh, pearl came a little later. That was later. That was a nice one. I had not had that model to you. The little little scroll thing in the middle and broke the actual Pearl Pardo is broken. Yeah. And then remember when. Remember when the iPhone came out? Oh my gosh. Yeah. When Steve Jobs went up there and said you can see your voicemail messages and everyone was like naked, properly browse the internet. That was something that the black peers weren’t so good at. Is browsing around. Yeah. Now you can touch the screen and browse, run pretty naturally. It was, it was pretty awesome. We were paying for a service because Roger’s didn’t have it at the time to transcribe our tech, our phone, uh, our voicemail messages way back then.
00:12:39 This would be around the year 2006 ish. Now if someone leaves you a voicemail, you’re just pissed off. And now the iPhone by by default mindset transcribes it anyway. When I get all those phone calls, either from the CRA that’s looking to issue a warrant for my arrest or somebody from China at Scotia Bank fraud alerts, fake fraud, fraudulent fraud alerts are awesome. Voicemail messages to get. And I keep getting stocked by somebody in China who was looking for something because I get some Chinese person, some automated Chinese services just keeps calling me at a. You guys were speaking of China, you guys just went to China? Oh, it hasn’t actually. When was it? A summer. August, August, Ohio. Yesterday. So what was the, uh, how, what, what did you learn from that trip?
00:13:24 I think the trip trip was awesome. We had 20 people does most mostly a rockstar members. Uh, I think it was a very valuable, uh, a trip for, for, uh, for them.
00:13:41 Well, what are they learning? They’re like, I mean, somebody described it like someone’s going there. What do you like? What are you hoping to learn? Like for me, if I’m going to sell something online, you take me to China. What am I doing? Am I looking for the finished product at these trade shows? And I’m looking for a piece of the product that then I take and look for another piece and I combine these two pieces and get a factory to make it. Yeah, we are actually going. Yeah. And we’re going to have the biggest
00:14:01 to a commodity market in the world. So basically this, this is like a five stories high and said five, five kilometers long, but 70,000 stores in there in one place. So we, we take all the people over there and show them how to start a ecommerce business. So we teach them how to communicate with the vendors, how to do it.
00:14:29 So Nick and I had this idea that we’ve done nothing with a, with a while ago. We thought, okay, if we’re going to start a product, we should start with a little free giveaway enticer thing. And we thought, why don’t we make, you know, inside those um, protein shake bottles. There’s that little wire ball. Yeah, the little wire kind of squeezable little ball thing that you can kind of put in there. And I’m like, why don’t we make, that’s not
00:14:52 like a little different, but you get different sizes so that we can get like one for a full size shaker bottle. But we can get one, see the water bottles that we have in front of us right now. You can get little one, maybe we can make little ones that you can put in. So if somebody puts in some, some power inside their drink, they just drop in this little shaker ball and they can turn any bought water bottle of any sort into a shaker bottle. And we’ll just kind of give that away as a lead generator almost. And then we’ll build a whole water bottle, a beautiful water bottle around it and all that kind of stuff. So if we did that, I went to China with you and I’m like, Hey Greg, Brian, I need to get someone to build me some kind of like wire ball that’s Kinda, I want five sizes. What are, what am I doing? I go to the trade show with you. And then we just start walking up and down the aisles looking for a vendor of like wire.
00:15:41 It’s actually a, uh, you have already the idea and what we always do, we, we talk with our sourcing agent and before we show up in China, basically they are a sourcing day potential companies that they can produce those type of products. So the sourcing agents, somebody you hire here from a online? No, we hire, we are working with a right now with one, a sourcing company in China, which has a directly in this city. They are working everyday on the market so they know the market, uh, uh, in and out, they know a lot of, of their, uh, uh, the companies. And a day just helping us a sole source, any product that we want. So that will be the same. Exactly the same inside.
00:16:32 Do I skip these trade shows that you guys do then? Because I can just get the sourcing agent to say, Hey look, this is what I need. Go find me though.
00:16:38 Yes, yes.
00:16:39 Yeah. You don’t know. You don’t have to show up there. If you know exactly what you want, you can get the agent to go look for it.
00:16:46 We’re and I want the agent because he knows the best factories to work with and where I’m not going to get ripped off.
00:16:51 That’s right. And some products while they’re 70,000 stores and millions of products, not everything is there in the same all in one place. Well, there’s millions of products there and you can find lots of things, but sometimes when you have an exact thing in mind, it needs to be sized and colored and whatever the specs are, you know exactly what you want already. So you can go out looking for factories that are already are doing this. That’s where I would start. We’re going to China really helps is if you want to say combine things together, you’ve got that ball and maybe you want the cup and you can go all in one place and say, okay, so this store, we’ll do the ballpark and the next guy right next to him, they do the cups, so let’s put that together. If you try to do that from here, oftentimes the wire guy over here is.
00:17:39 They only make wire stuff and then the lady over here that’s doing the cups, she only makes cup and plastic products, so putting together on your own from from here is a pain. It takes a long time. If you ever even managed to put together the real opportunity in this market is just bringing those, bringing the product together. You being the middleman who was just combining two, two to three items together and making a product of some sort. That’s really the missing link at this point that that’s a. that’s a huge part of it for sure, and then you’ve got the customization part since you already know what he wants to do, you don’t have to do that part, but for people that still want to customize, don’t have. They have a good idea of what they want, but it’s not nailed down. You need to be in front of a manufacturer that does this everyday. Doing this over email, using videos and pictures is it’s painful. It takes a long time and you often don’t get it right, like you probably won’t get it right the first one, two or three times. You attempt to do it for any given product and sometimes that takes days or weeks to go back and forth with
00:18:40 costly as well to do all these prototypes just to get the idea, okay,
00:18:44 when I go there, how much time do I have to spend there to do that? So let’s say I’ve said, yeah, I want these little wire balls and I also want a shaker bottle of some sort. I go to this trade show with you guys. I find somebody who can make some wire balls. I find somebody who has some shaker bottles already want them customized then am I doing this in real time with them? Like how long are they going to take to make a prototype? I’m just going to describe what I want and then leave. Correct.
00:19:06 It depends on the product. Sometimes if we know what we want and they actually the manufacturer, they can produce a within let’s say six days. So by the time we’re almost ready to go home, we can see the prototype in and you can touch it. You can, you can see in your hands.
00:19:28 Same to me. It’s okay. This is within a couple of days they’ll have the prototypes back to will have it in the store and you just go back to the store and have it look. So yeah, this is almost right. Can we use this for storage? Do you mean the. The booth at the trade show. So it’s a permanent trade show. So they actually have like a, it’s like a small store. Some of them are actually large. Oh, got it. Okay. So they’re kind of. They’re fairly permanently set up. It’s not just an open trade, surely we’ve actually, for the most part have walls and the front door locks the doors. Yeah. Which city is the ones that you go to? You will, you will. You’ve told me that before. Okay. You go to eat.
00:20:03 Oh, I feel. I feel like I want to say whenever I hear that. Right. Okay. Okay. Um, but okay. So you go there, you get that, and then the next step of getting my prototype is saying, okay, I want to order a whole whack of these things.
00:20:15 Correct. Yeah. You let them know how many do you want and that’s going to determine basically, or your price at that point. Right.
00:20:21 Got It. Okay. And then all the fun comes on from Amazon and stuff.
00:20:24 Yeah. The beauty of this going there direct because many times it’s not only you will be talking with the manufacturer, but for any manufacturer which is close by, you can visit the factory. You can go and see how they are doing, what offset you leave the trade show and you actually go to the factory within, within an hour of a bullet. Right. It’s, uh, it’s, you can go probably about a 400, 500 kilometers stuff you guys have done. Yeah, we’ve done that either before I’ve, I went to few factors before Brian also before the trade show and I was doing the translation for you. We have the agents, so basically they, uh, they speak fluent English, so when you go over, you’re going over for what, a week? Ten days. Yeah. But seven, we always go somewhere else as well. Like we go to Shanghai this time we’re going to be going to continuum in Guantanamo so it’s close to Hong Kong, but uh, we always go somewhere and the product,
00:21:28 once I have my product, how do I know what the Amazon minimum standards for product packaging or they’ve published that somewhere on their site clearly published. And then you can choose to go from super simple all the way through to really fancy sturdy boxes. You can choose to figure that out. You know, you can do whatever you want with them. Uh, we usually start really symbol. I’m like, all my stuff is actually really ugly packaged the way I look at it, as people already bought it, they’re not looking at it on a shelf. It’s bought online. They liked the product. Why would I have a facebook as part of the reason you’re making the box and stuff ugly because you don’t know if the product’s going to sell like, but you’re just testing it out. Basically. Your whole idea is still to get people off of [inaudible].
00:22:09 Are you still. Are you guys still proponents of using Amazon to launch off any commerce business? Yeah. It’s just because half the traffic online is there, at least in the Western world has missed. They’re like half of all Internet traffic. Half the of all purchases on behalf of all online purchases are going through Amazon effect more. It’s over right now. Half of everything’s going through Amazon. Jesus. Oh yeah, so then you’re do some ugly packaging, but if something polls, I want to build a bar. Is it. I know we’ve talked about this before, but has anything changed? You still want to build a brand off Amazon, so you’re going to start then building this brand and trying to pull them off of Amazon for the stuff that’s working, but before that we try not to waste the time or the effort. Once you see something starting to work. Okay. Now to fix up the packaging, put some inserts in place, create a wet, make sure you have a website where people can go to and register for your warranty or register for new products that we’re releasing people if they like your stuff, what they just bought, they’ll probably like other stuff that he created as well for that same or similar. Your insert is promoting other products that you have in your brand for that particular brand. I guess
00:23:17 also the website. So, uh, we have offline of Amazon and eCommerce store, so which, which we basically and advertised through the inserts as well because I would just be putting a massive discount coupons or
00:23:34 to say, Hey, do you want to buy the next item for me? Go to the website. Don’t go back to Amazon. Right? Because the only hope I have a purchase getting their contact information directly is if they buy direct from my own website and through Amazon. You can correct. Exactly. Okay. So that’s still the play that’s still build off of Amazon. Try to get people off. What is Amazon doing to try to crush that? They must like hate that people are doing that. No. Well they have lots in place so you can’t directly email customers unless it’s related to that order and they scan the emails. You can’t direct people off of Amazon in those emails. You can’t put links in there or outside email addresses. So they scanned filter and they’ll block and Benu from the platform very quickly. So I think it’s a three strikes you’re out kind of thing.
00:24:17 So yeah, you can’t, you can’t mess around with a female can only say, Hey, hope you enjoyed this. If you have any questions, let us know. Can you put an email address in there? No. Nothing. No. They’re going to see if they were given. If you put the email, it will be wiped out anyway. So the only way they can the customer can get back to you is through this because I’ve gotten those emails before. I generally ignore them, but used to reply back and that goes into the Amazon kind of inbox for your account where you can communicate to customers through.
00:24:45 You always asked to, uh, to give us some feedback for the product and then you can just, can not manipulate. You just politely asked for further review. You always can ask for a review, but not really a positive review.
00:25:02 Yeah. Got It. Okay. Because even if you’re asking for positive reviews, Amazon against it, the temperature for service. So Amazon is basically helping everybody sell stuff through their platform. It’s a positive to them. I’m, they must constantly be just be worried about loot. This must be a constant threat to them. It’s weird. They have this open model, like it’s kind of brilliant. They have this open model where it’s a platform or everyone’s allowed to sell through it. Yeah. You know, they have their criteria obviously, but at the same time because it’s so open, it leaves these opportunities for other things, for people to pull, you know, pull people off of it is amazing because again, you know, more than half of their own revenue is actually from people like us. Yeah. So while they want credit, quadrupled from like from four years ago. So it’s a really strange situation that everybody’s in because Amazon needs us.
00:25:55 We’re over half the revenue on Amazon’s platform is people like us selling our stuff on Amazon. You refer to as resellers on Amazon, is that how they call you? Oh, you’re sorry. Sellers. Sellers, yeah. Okay. Yeah. If you’re selling directly on the Amazon platform. Yeah, yeah. At the same time, they need to protect their, their customer, and that’s what I think Amazon’s been really good at. They’re always on the, on the side of the customer, not the vendors, not the sellers. They’re not really on our side. It’s a nice platform for us to use amazing platform, but they’re not necessarily on our side. They’ve always been very public and clear that they’re on the side of the customer. So the opportunity that you think for people is still to use Amazon to build an ecommerce business. That’s what you’re helping people. You’re right. What’s the, the lead, what can you share?
00:26:44 I know some stuff you obviously don’t want to share a top-secret, we got to keep it behind the curtain kind of thing. But what kind of stuff go, like are your businesses still growing on Amazon? Where you guys at? What can you share?
00:26:54 Uh, mean we’re always launching products and new brands so I can tell you some of the things. Uh, so we always tell people start off with smaller products, lighter products within a certain price range, somewhere around 17 to $20. Start Start from there to about $70 Max. But at the same time there’s lots of opportunity for larger products, oversized products and overpriced products. So a lot of my own products in the past year and a half, I’ve been experimenting with products that were, that are over a meter tall. Some of them are over 40 pounds each. About 20, 22 ish kilograms, which about 50 pounds and price wise all the way up past $100. So experimenting in some of the different size and cost categories can be really good because a lot of people aren’t playing there. A lot of people
00:27:46 for the cheapest stuff that they can drop ship or ship over from China. Yeah.
00:27:50 Part of it has to do with the way people are being taught. So a lot of the courses out there like oh cool. The small and light cheap and fast, cheap and fast because they’re there, they’re typically easier to find and your mistakes tend to be cheaper when you, if you screw up shipping something that weighs, you know, a uh, a quarter of a kilogram to 250 grams or something and you ship a couple of hundred of them over, it doesn’t hurt that much. It’s not that expensive. If you screw up shipping something that weighs 50 pounds, you know, 22 kilos. If you ship a few hundred of them, if you mess up with your calculations, that could sink a business, especially a small early business really quick, so you got to figure that out. And then another part is a lot of times people just going air shipment, it’s super easy.
00:28:30 You at DHL and they’ll ship stuff over. I can call right now and say have good at shipping China and today’s Tuesday by Thursday afternoon it’ll be in North America sitting ready, uh, at a dock or at the front of your front door if you want, right from China. So people are, are they got used to that? I think I was spoiled with that, but really the way to do it as go by sea sea is a fraction of the cost, but you have to plan months in advance, two to four months even advance. So that’s something a lot of people don’t want to consider. Like it’s a real business. It’s not just to make a phone call and stuff shows up in two days. It’s possible. So what I’m hearing
00:29:09 this business is maturing quick. Like there’s an opportunity obviously to build business on Amazon, but there’s guys out there like you who are learning this business inside and out and changing where the opportunities are or changing what you see an opportunity land and you are going after those opportunities. A lot of people weren’t paying for the higher end items or weren’t selling higher end items and weren’t selling higher or sorry, a stuff that’s a heavier and you’re seeing opportunities there. It requires more planning, a little more risk obviously. Um, but that’s kinda where, where, where the opportunity is. Interesting.
00:29:40 Yeah. I think the moves I think said
00:29:42 was always a strange, a strange word. Um, I think it actually becomes a, I don’t want to be contradictory or almost less risky if there’s less people selling the product. So now instead of having 200 people selling the same wooden spoon that I was selling, now there might only be for people that are selling this, I don’t know, 200 pound desk. So my, you know, the amount of competition has dropped dramatically now. So my biggest risk isn’t really the shipping. It’s really the competition that, that’s, that’s what I’m worried about more than you think you can play this game and I mean game in a very respectful way, you know, you’re in there in this marketplace playing. I look at making money is a big game we call it. Yeah. It’s a game, a game. So, um, what is the long term game for you then? Are you trying to make one of your brain’s stick and then build off of that and ultimately sell that? Maybe we’re like, what, what, how are you looking at this for yourselves?
00:30:37 Yeah, that’s our idea is basically to uh, start a, been on Amazon platform and see what sells, what kind of products choose a certain niche. Just go narrow, not really wide but really deep. So find some associated products which really goes with this brand and build it to a certain level and then a salad to a, to a larger company that they would inquire, uh, the, the whole company and then they will grow it further.
00:31:16 So Tom, you mentioned about this industry maturing. This is another area that the whole industry is maturing. There’s some big money, institutional money, institutional investors that are coming in now and finding our little brands really interesting because we’ve now got under a huge thousands of people in some cases that are really raving fans of our little niche products and they can easily tack that on for, you know, a reasonable multiple and bring that into their portfolio of goods and add it to their other products. So that’s something that’s become a, I think a lot more mature that the everyday it becomes more mature. There’s more agents, more of these places that are doing.
00:31:56 Yeah, like anything. So the competition. So how many years have you guys been doing this now? For over four years. Um, how, how are you seeing the competition? I always evolves. It’s almost real estate, you know, when we buy real estate for years ago. And if, and if you’re in a period in real estate where prices continue to gradually increase. Yeah. You always think you got ripped off the day. You bought the property, right? That’s real estate works a day after. Well, the first day actually you were maybe a little bit happy. Then the next day you’re like, oh damn, but two years later you look back and you’re like, why didn’t I buy more products? Exactly. I’m sure that’s how this muscle look to you guys when you look back four years and you think, I thought it looked tough then, but compared to now, four years ago, so easy.
00:32:36 So this, you’re seeing more competition now. Ten years from now it’s like I’m just trying to figure out what we’re. Does Amazon go here? Like it’s just every bit. To me, the big retail landscape now is like, remember when I think Walmart thought it was going to be competing against like, well, they definitely didn’t think they were going to be competing in Canada against Amazon’s not in Canada, at least in the US. I’m sure they were going to compete against their other retailers. The big retailers target probably being one of them. Right? But here, um, I don’t think they saw Amazon Canada as their threat, but now they’re looking at Amazon as their threat for like, where does this, where does this go? I’m trying to see where does this go.
00:33:16 I think it’s from a number of angles too. It’s not just hard goods, it’s also like groceries, everything and then they just keep adding onto stuff and inquired a whole a whole foods store. So basically, uh, you know, so
00:33:34 here in Oakville they’re asking for your Amazon prime memberships. I didn’t give him my yet because I walked out thinking I could have got, I think I could have got 10 percent discount if I just gave my Amazon prime. So like, have you guys done that yet? Like are you just giving your email address? Like I didn’t even know how they’re giving your Amazon. No, I don’t like when I do it next time I’ll do it and we will, we’ll chat about it. But yeah, I think the Amazon Prime membership, you’re now giving over at whole foods. I think when you’re ordering groceries,
00:33:59 so you’re talking about what are the next big things is that Amazon is coming out of the virtual world and it’s coming physical and so they’ve taken these huge steps like buying whole foods and they will be buying more stores for sure. Not only North America, they will go a national, not national. International. Why do you guys think that? Because everyone does this. Look at the biggest in the world. Alibaba, they went a Dick to India to uh, uh, to Europe. So that’s the next step. And I think they are. He’s speaking about that, talking about it.
00:34:35 I’m fascinated to see what happens with Amazon. Do you guys remember your, you guys are. I don’t know if you’re, I’m, I’m turning 46 right now. Are you guys were all the same age? Roughly? 40. Young. Little younger. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, you might not remember this, but Greg, I don’t know if you remember this either, but do remember consumers distributing? Yeah, to the cattle. You would go to the retail store and because the Internet didn’t exist. This is how I tell my kids the Internet art. I tell my son this all the time. I explained this to my daughter as well. I tell my son, I said, you know, the, the, uh, sports illustrated magazine that you have in your hands right now, that’s like the Internet printed off. And he goes, Yeah Dad, it’s a little dated, you know, I’d rather just get my sports news on like in his Instagram feeds or whatever.
00:35:13 He’s getting into sports and use right now. And I’m like, yeah, that’s how we read sports before it was the printed off Internet and it reminds me of consumers distributing, because you would go to the retail store, you would look through the catalog, which was what basically printed off Amazon.com page and you would pick what you want on a little order form. They would put it in the little tube, remember the little tube that they put, the thing that would get sucked up by some kind of vacuum mechanism that always baffled my brain and then down little conveyor belt would come your product and I was always amazed. That was the most awesome feeling. My thing, it’s right there and that’s essentially what’s happened is just there’s really nothing new going on here other than the media in which we are ordering products is no longer the catalog printed out in the order form. We can sit at home on the screen or on our telephone and order an Amazon’s just put the best infrastructure together. They’ve basically done what can consumers distributing was Kinda, sorta doing and they’ve done it on a global scale.
00:36:06 I think it’s the vacuum tube and the conveyor belt is now become, you know, point and click and robots and right now it’s FedEx and ups to USPS and Canada Post. But that’s another thing that’s, that’s definitely coming is Amazon’s going to come to your door directly. They’re already starting to do that.
00:36:25 Yeah. I have some guy pulled up in a Honda civic with boxes jacked up.
00:36:29 It will be, uh, you know, going into Amazon struck. No. And then they will be delivering and you think you’re going to replace the private carriers with their own trucks coming?
00:36:41 They, they, they have, they got shipping licenses for their own boats a couple of years ago. Shipping boats, not a little speedboat. It’s like shipping lines. So that was a couple of years back. So they got approval for this. So that between the boats, between airplanes. I don’t know if those are photoshop, but I saw planes of like Amazon errors or Amazon error, something like that. So I don’t know if that was a real one, but I could see that. That’s definitely. That’s good.
00:37:06 I heard that they purchased I think 20,000 a minivan. So basic afford Dave, uh, for delivery of a dedicated. Yeah,
00:37:16 see it happen. I remember visiting my buddy in San Francisco there and I was at his house. I think it was like Google was delivering from three stores for $5 flat fee. This is like five years ago. They were testing some of this stuff out and next to his, some of his items he had a little button that you pressed. I think we have that in Canada. Don’t even have that name for a product. I think it was a tide and I think he had two or three other ones where when you run out you just press the button and it automatically delivers the next shipment to you. It’s like a little doorbell kinda thing that you would just press. But, uh, it really hit me how far reach Amazon has. When this past summer we were in at the mouthy coast in Italy and on the little freaking scooter with a huge thing on the back of the scooter full of just Amazon boxes. I’m a little guy ripping up and down the coast, wrote like the little tiny road that’s like treacherous to even walk on. He’s going up and down with a little scooter delivering off Amazon boxes and I’m like, these guys are all around the world. That’s your global reach
00:38:10 and it’s just going to keep going further. There’s going to be physical stores. I could see them continue down this path. There’ll be physical stores all over the world with the top products. There’s already one in a, in a few downtown locations,
00:38:21 right? New York and I think San Francisco. Yeah. So like the top products and Amazon are in the stores right now. Those are the stores where you don’t even have to. There’s no cash register. You just think these are fairly normal that in stores, if, if the product
00:38:36 is four and a more stars, uh, they will be putting them into this physical store. Yeah. Got It. Yeah. So the landscape of retail just being devastated by Amazon. So the opportunity for anyone who is not in this or hasn’t started a business yet through selling a product, it’s still wide open. We’re at the infancy stages still. So big opportunity is even for the small retail stores, you know, we always, I always look at where we’ll live in Knoxville. So how many stores are basically closing down after it’s open opening date? Many of them it’s not even surviving three months. If they would go a little bit different, the road and open a store plus the ecommerce site, it will be a completely different story. Agreed. It’s just tough to get this information like who’s teaching this stuff? Like you guys are willing to do the research to figure out how you sell this stuff.
00:39:34 The guy or girl who’s starting a store understands getting a lease. They have a product id or a little inventory. No one’s teaching these skills and definitely they’re not teaching these types of skills in our colleges or universities, you know, like even somebody taking, I mean, you’re, I’m not sure of the specifics, Greg, of your son’s course, but he’s taking I think a digital marketing type degree. Yeah, I’m sure they’re not teaching him the specifics of doing research on long tail buying keywords on Amazon and then how to get an agent in China to source product and how to, how to plan out Brian to your point, three or four months, the opportunity in bigger price products. And, and I guess that’s maybe too. So I guess the argument against me would be that’s too specific to teach it. Just to me, those are actual skills thing is that apply in today’s world.
00:40:20 I think all these skills are transferable. So you asked earlier about, uh, what’s the opportunity even in China? Well, the thing is, it’s not just China, it’s just happens to be. We’re going right now, but like Rick said, like we went, like, I went to Shenzen into Shanghai. Where’s Shenzen? Uh, it’s a couple hours flight. We’re still in China, in China, it’s just over the border from Hong Kong. Okay. So Shenzen is called a silicone valley of. Got It. It’s crazy for all kinds of different reasons. Just the amount of growth and technology. There’s such A. There’s markets where you can buy basically every part of your iPhone go in there and said, can you put this together for me? And they basically will. You have a broken screen. They’ve got the, they’re not just using hand tools. They’ve got like vacuum tools and stuff to do it like the factory would. It’s a different world. So I went to Shenzen on our last trip in Hong Kong before that we went to South Korea. Like you can use this same concepts everywhere. You’re working with people, building relationships, figuring out the specifications for a product and matching that with a target market. That stuff is for every business everywhere, for forever. I can’t see that ever changing, but also he started called data. What it’s telling everyone, and I think
00:41:34 everyone should shoot understand this. Like, uh, not even 10 years ago, ecommerce was only four percent of the, uh, a total retail regular retail. Right now it’s over 10 percent and it’s going to double in a, in a few years up to 10 years. And uh, it, it’s huge everywhere you, you look and see, even going, like I learned today that Dollarama is going online, so everyone, everyone is just a, we’re going to Dollarama just to buy, you know, a, a, a, a car for $1. Ever going to leave our hoses again. Yeah, he’s just, it’s, it’s crazy. You know, you have to, you have to go and go extra mile just to learn a little thing and uh, uh, and, and implement.
00:42:27 Yeah. I think if anyone has any doubt where things are going, it’s like we’re only at 10 percent of retail sales being online. So for everything we just said, and there’s all kinds of movements and Amazon’s doing crazy things and there’s been so much growth and there’s a lot of competition coming in. So you have to change kind of what you’re doing. It’s still only 10 percent of all retail sales that are online that that’s 90 percent of all sales that aren’t there yet. Most of them will be eventually, but right now it’s only 10 percent. Imagine that. So if right now it’s normal to you to buy stuff online, consider you’re in the vast minority.
00:43:01 Yeah, and we still, I still feel like we’re in that stage of this where I discovered google as a search engine and I think like 1998 one, one of the engineers at Oracle walked up to me and kind of whispered over my shoulder, I think I was using Alta Vista back then and he was like, hey, check out this thing. Google and I started the and I remember being confused by the search engine [inaudible]. It was all just a white screen with just that one text box in the. Remember the old portal? Search engines were like text everywhere and they had the little search box at the top, but it was like basically a directory as well. Yeah, he was known for that. So basically a directory and then you with Google was just that one box and you typed it in in the search results were so accurate.
00:43:36 I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I feel like we’re just at that. This is before Gmail came out this before google docs came out of Google maps that we were talking about. I feel like we’re at that stage with Amazon, like it’s, we’re still at the stage that it’s just that, just this little text box and nothing else and all this other stuff’s going to be built around it and spin-offs. I do you guys know much about wish.com wish.com is a huge online platform. Um, that I guess some engineers I believe from Google or Amazon and it’s taking off. So next time I’ll, I’ll, I’ll look at the actual data, but apparently wish.com has a massive year. They’re selling a massive quantity of goods through this service. I don’t, I’ve never used it. I haven’t even logged into the server there anyhow an account.
00:44:22 But someone was just telling me about it the other day and how they are selling. It’s x Amazon or ex-Google engineers who went over and built this thing and the revenue target, the revenue numbers he was telling me were just blowing my mind. So there next time you guys come on and we can all talk about wave shoe that. But yeah, I heard about them and uh, I’m just thinking like, Amazon’s obviously the big gorilla, but just like, you know, g mail had, you know, the risk Hotmail and all these other services. There’s going to be other services just around that as well. So, um,
00:44:54 so for sure for sure it would this, but look at the, uh, idea of email. So when we had the regular mail, you know, you had to ride the, ride the letter and then send us a, put the pulse stamp and send it over to uh, you know, to somebody when you have email, you could do this much more easily when you have a ecommerce right now. So at the time when you, uh, becoming a retailer, you’re just going global. So it’s just the doors are open everywhere so you can sell not only here at home but also in us in Europe. It’s just some other of your imagination.
00:45:40 It’s basically at a moment in time, which I don’t know if this is gonna sound crazy where all the brains up until this point are going through this upheaval and many of them that can’t keep up like sears for example, big brand, big department store brand, just kinda getting torn up and almost being thrown basically just in the garbage. We’re in this massive time of rebirth where all these brands that can’t keep up, we’re just going to die off and there’s gonna be some multimillion billion dollar new brains that rise from this whole new era. So it’s just a fascinating time because I mean, Greg, you were. What were you doing before doing ecommerce business stuff? You.
00:46:11 What is your. You’re an engineer, a mechanical engineer. Did you ever think when you were taking your mechanical engineering degree can taking trips to China and selling stuff on Amazon? No. At that that was selling, he was just an evil thing because where were you? Where were you? Where were you? Did you go to school? Country now? I was going to school first in Poland, but then I finished university and college. And you’re in an area of Europe or you’re trained to hate sales? Yes, I tell you. I know because I own my own relatives over in Europe and just salespeople were just like evil, evil empire, you know, it was all about math and logic and you know, if there was any emotion involved in any sort of conversation or decision making, you are looked at as weak here. When I,
00:46:56 when I was in the corporate world, so I was basically a in engineering department. So I was the creator. So these guys were sellers, you know, so they uh, so they don’t know anything about that
00:47:09 product. I was trained the same way. Here’s the, here’s the wish.com look. Wish grew a over $1,000,000,000 in revenue. That’s July 2018. So that’s something else is that these companies that are coming out of nowhere, they’re building up from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions in a couple of years. Look, it’s valued at eight point 5 billion with more, a bit more than a billion in revenue in 2017. And when. I bet when did they start? I bet it wasn’t that long ago. It doesn’t look like I’m trying to find that now. Yeah. Two thousand 10 by former Google and Yahoo developer. So eight years.
00:47:43 Yeah. And that’s, that also creates different opportunities to create a selling platforms, but also supporting sellers like, uh, how many sas products, uh, you know, basically your software’s that uh, uh, when we started we had to do everything by excel spreadsheets. Basic. Right now there are big, uh, like a small software companies which grew to a, to a very substantial a level and then being sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:48:19 Yeah. My only concern with some of this stuff is I don’t know where it’s headed towards jobs like I, we can make the argument that like as technology increases, there’s always new tech jobs that are going to come out and you know, as robotics, uh, developed, there’s always new and some of them are higher payer gym, pe jobs. I just feel that there’s a base of the middle class that is going to disappear in front of our eyes and as, as much as the opportunity exists for all of us who know about this. That’s why I like sharing this stuff through a podcast like this and we can kind of get the message out to anyone who wants to take advantage of it. I feel like there’s going to be a segment of the population that just kind of misses out on this over the next 10 years because things, you know, day to day things look like they’re moving slowly.
00:48:57 But over a 10 year period you look back going, what the heck just happened? And I feel like 10 years from today, a lot of people are going to look back and they’re not going to have the skills that they really need to make of any kind of valuable impact in the economy and just kind of scared for that type of environment. It’s not the world that I personally want to live in. And it just interesting to me to see how this all plays out. It hurt to look forward. It’s like even us looking back, you know, for over 40 years back now, what would you do different, you know, what, what we would we have done knowing now.
00:49:28 I was just thinking now I remember 2012 when, when I came back from Germany to Canada and uh, uh, Amazon is just a in Canada. It was always kind of small, but I was buying some, some stuff on Amazon and then he said, oh, how the heck are they doing money, you know, selling, you know, a phone, a phone cases for $10, how much money you can make. $10 item. And this is right now is just a mindblower. It just, uh, I say to myself, why didn’t I do this like eight years ago?
00:50:07 Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. And, and I just feel like I wish more people knew about this. That’s why I just, it’s cool that you guys are so willing because many people in your space are not willing. So for those of you listening who think, you know, maybe you’ve not heard about this stuff before, Greg and Brian are doing a very generous thing by just talking about what you’re talking about now because most who are making money in this space do not want to talk about it. But it’s true. And I think of things sometimes like GM and Joshua, there’s obviously gonna be a lot of people looking to do something new in their lives because of the plant shutting down over in Oshawa. And I think, Geez, who is talking to this amount of people, because not everyone’s going to be interested in doing this, but there’s going to be a certain percentage of people out of jobs that could probably make a killing for themselves or a good life if they had some of this kind of knowledge. But who’s sharing this stuff? Like you can’t go to your. There’s not one call Aj I know of that you’re gonna walk in and kind of get this information.
00:51:01 They have one year right now to prepare. So that’s enough time to start. And it was great. It’s a beautiful year. It’s a beautiful year. Laughter. When they closed, they still gonna get a, you know, a nice package. So it’s just A. I don’t know, there’s just a huge opportunity.
00:51:19 Yeah. Where did you guys were like, I know when I go into the website world, I had to do all my own research, figure out search engine optimization, figuring out how to build websites. Each did. Back then it was HTML code in javascript and buying books on all this stuff. For the Amazon stuff, where, where were you guys going to piece together information or are you buying those expensive courses? And we’ve gone through between us, we’ve bought most courses out there. Everything we could get our hands on and at first like write something about the courses that are like $5,000, $10,000 and three thousand one thousand. All the add-ons and extra two, three, five, $7,000.
00:51:54 Yeah. My first, my first course was uh, I think 4,000 US dollars, which uh, I, I didn’t buy it for the first release, so I was sleeping on my decision, uh, for four months. And then they decided then to, you know, since that time we attended many different masterminds. I remember, remember
00:52:14 when this, when, when, when Nick and I first realized, okay, holy smokes, the landscape’s changing. We’re not even in this space selling retail products, but we want to keep abreast of this information. It was one of the guys that we knew that was hosting a $5,000 kind of just two day introduction. Okay. We paid the $5,000 plane tickets, hotel just to go sit for two days, just so that we could understand this information. Should that, you know, we’re always looking for everyone always has your plan b always. We’re always. We always just want to know what’s going on. Should we ever want to go head first into this world, what information exists out there, but that involve traveling down to Texas spending $5,000 because you just couldn’t get the information elsewhere and that’s, that’s what we found is that most of the people teaching this stuff, we’re in the US, they’re American and so while some of the information was very good and got us going, a lot of it didn’t apply to Canadians at all. Just like, you know, looking back in the real estate world, a lot of the stuff when people came up to Canada to teach about real estate, you don’t mind your things no money down like that just didn’t apply here at all. Looking for information. People who are behind on their payments, but privacy rules are different banking system, these complete system and that’s been a big thing for us is the banking systems are completely different. I remember feeling ripped off
00:53:26 and I shouldn’t have, but when I discovered in Ontario that banks through, you know, we don’t have foreclosures, foreclosures here, we have power of sales and a power of sealant Ontario. The banks legally have to list the property at fair market value. So if there’s a million dollar property and the banks are only owed $100,000, they can’t list it for sale for $110,000 or whatever. They have to list it for sale at fair market value. And I had. It was reading all these books were in the states. They don’t have to do that and a whole bunch of places and if they’re a million dollar property is only owed 100,000 in the bank and let it go for like 100,000 bucks. It just. And I just thought why can’t I do that and can rip off what are rip off that the banks are. There are no the laws here so different, but obviously it keeps a very stable level real estate market when the banks are forced to sell things at fair market value.
00:54:13 So I understand now the value of that, but if there was a part of me that was like feeling like, oh my gosh, I’m just getting ripped off up here in Canada, you know, but uh, for um, for anyone who wants to learn a bit about this kind of stuff, what are some of the income potential? Is that like if, if, if you were to tell somebody they go down this path, they figure out like Amazon obviously have some resources even on their own website. I’m sure that teachers are good. Yeah. Okay. So that teaches you how to like, what would you tell somebody? What would you tell someone like me who’s like, okay, Greg, you know what, this whole Rockstar Gig, I’m going in a different direction. I’m going to sell my little protein shake bottles. Like what, what is the income potential of somebody going down this path? Um, that really gives it a full time effort in, within. Like, I don’t know, 18 months can you make, can you start making a little bit of cash in 18 months and I know it will be different on the product and whether you’re good at finding an opportunity, that kind of thing, but like what is the income level of someone can make or, or from people that you have seen go down this. What can people do? What can you accomplish?
00:55:15 Just ballpark. I would say start small. Start with one or two products. I know, but you know what? Just screw small. Just tell me what I can do. What you can do. Yeah.
00:55:25 Like what, what is it like 18 months of hard work and I’m going to focus on this. I know who to talk to. I know, you know, I, I know websites, I know technology. I kind of have done search engine optimization stuff before so I understand searching for like arbitraging little opportunities like seeing if there’s a lot of sellers selling one thing and not a lot of buyers and vice versa. So I kind of am walking in with a little bit of knowledge. What can I do in 18 months?
00:55:48 I think 18, 18 months, uh, with, with this kind of knowledge, what you have, you know, easily $1,000,000. Gross. Gross. Yeah. In 18 months and then we don’t want to sound too spammy but don’t know pretty easily if you already have all this bank because if anyone’s listening to this and just hears that and thinks you can go and kind of do that as a guarantee, that’s not what these guys are seeing. Oh definitely not. But you think it’s possible for somebody if they really put their mind to it, what we, what we see from our experience and what we see from other groups? Yes. If
00:56:24 you put your mind to it,
00:56:25 do you feel. What are the margins you think on? Um, I know it’s going to be different product by product and stuff, but can you give me some guidelines? Like what would be my margins? What do I mean by that? Is what profit am I going to be making off my million bucks? If you’re looking at 20 to 30 percent. Okay. So the margins are. I’m like 20 to 30 percent, that’s almost like software is bigger than that, but I mean almost only software from what I’ve seen, would it be bigger than those margins?
00:56:50 But this is after you pay a everything, so advertising and a day expenses, right?
00:56:58 Um, okay. Uh, and then how much money am I going to need to get started because to do that I’m going to need inventory. I’m going to have to hire these guys. Probably the fastest way to get started is for me to actually go over to China with some guys and stuff. Like how much money am I going to need to bankroll myself? Well, each product right now, if you go directly to China, it’s somewhere between about 900 to $1,800 per product to get a rolling per product for your first purchase and then however many products you want. But of course there’s lots of variables there. Yeah, it’s going to obviously be more. The biggest risk factors in discussing this is that I miscalculate or just choose bad product that use the bat opportunity. Like the biggest mistakes would probably be product selection. I would assume, yeah, I think.
00:57:51 I think it’s just to the product. I feel like you can kind of get through, right? Like some factory might screw you on some bad quality product. I feel like you can manage that. The biggest mistake is going to be spending a lot of time and miscalculating where to focus, what product to start with. Correct. Most of it’s going to be on you deciding what product is right for the market you’re targeting. It’s like the most basic business thing. What target are you, what market are you going to target and what is it they want to buy from you. So the first time you guys chose that, you were like, okay, I’m going to choose the market where you just freaking out. Well we were because you don’t know if it’s gonna work and you’re going to spend a lot of money and time getting the product put together. Thing is you never know for sure. Never know because now I’m sure you guys are at the point where you’re just like, let’s do six at a time. One of these is going to work and let’s roll. Well when that’s because I know that’s where everyone kind of gets to you, but at the beginning you’re freaking out. You don’t have that much money. You’re choosing one product, crossing your fingers, hoping it works,
00:58:50 but then after, after the one product, I still wasn’t sure if that’s going to go, so I even though I decided to go with another one and the third one, so meantime when I launched the third one that basically the second one is sunk and I had.
00:59:08 Okay. That’s what I remember. The first one you started with. Do you remember? I think I bought one for me. Yeah. Are you still selling that? We sell it. I’m not saying that you want me to say the name of it, but yeah, you’re still selling it at. Cool. Okay. I think that might be part of it too,
00:59:22 is that our early products did really did quite well so that that also obviously helps.
00:59:28 Yeah. It gives you the confidence you guys got in super early. So for somebody starting now, so you feel even someone starting now can make that number. You were just sharing.
00:59:38 Yes, no problem. Yes.
00:59:40 So if there’s all kinds of variables we can never promise to say, how much money can somebody make that real estate? My answer would be like, are we talking one year, 10 years? What are the variables? What are we talking about? Are the markets the interest rates? Where are you buying type of property? It depends.
00:59:55 Depends on how much time you’re going to spend because you know, some people they, they, they think that this is a, this is just a one hour a day and a fun.
01:00:05 You’re answering to be fair. You were answering the question as a full time effort. All in. Yeah.
01:00:09 Full commitment, full time. You can start, you can start this, you know, basically from 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM, 2:00 AM and uh, you, you can still put some hours, you know,
01:00:18 volunteer full time job. And that’s how you start it. Yeah, that’s what I literally started looking at and now like I’m a co two trips back from going to China. I came away with 22 new products, we launched 18 of them by the time you’re, everything’s said and done, um, between manufacturers and everything else. So the 18 new products in one trip. So like you said, going from like one product, not sure if it’s gonna work and it took something like four months for my first product to come together. Yeah, it was four months and a few thousand dollars. So the first product I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was really slow. It was lots of back and forth, um, launch it and it’s still selling today, now over four years. Uh, so that one worked out pretty good. But since then I’ve kind of grown from there and now we launched all kinds of products and just see what’s going to work because the risk of any one product failing is lower than me.
01:01:10 Missing an opportunity of launching many products and having one of them stick. Are you guys, how big are your team? Who’s working with you guys right now? You guys are independent. You guys are here together, but your businesses are independent? Correct. We have independent businesses, but we’ve now started over some stuff together, especially as you do with how many people are trips and working, like how many people have to handle these Amazon businesses. Do you have like a team for myself? Basically partnering went my daughter Patricia, so she’s still traveling around the world now. She’s, she’s working the Amazon business out of New Zealand. Yes.
01:01:47 To. I hire basically a virtual assistance. Uh, so they mostly, they are a in Philippines, so currently we hire about four, five years
01:01:59 people. Got It. Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve hired and let go and hired a handful of people’s.
01:02:05 Your real business hired and let go. Yeah, that sounds like a real business. Um. Okay. So, and then what are you guys up to now? Like I know. So thank you. First of all, for the last, I guess it had been one year or two years or you’ve been doing Amazon and eCommerce business building classes for rockstar inner circle members. I just want to thank you guys for that because we’re obviously a real estate brokerage focused on real estate, but you guys are part of the community. And offer it to give classes back as part of, of the whole membership here. So we really want to thank you for that. We’ll thank you. And I know a bunch of Rockstar members have gone to China. We get all the feedback. We still haven’t been to China with you. I feel like Nick and I just need to go April. My son had been asking me more and more so I think we’re going to at some point we’re going to. We’re going to come over and I know you’ve launched something. What are you calling? It is an econ. Your ECOMM elite? No, ECOM. VIP membership.
01:02:55 Yeah. And I know this was born because I know some Rock Star members were asking you guys for more and more and more and more. I’m sure it’s coming. We’re going to figure it out. And I think I was wondering you guys like guys, I don’t know man, just focus on your own businesses too much, but you have. This is basically an education program that you guys are launching now. So describe it.
01:03:16 Yeah. We launched this in last December. So we offer first for uh, uh, for the group that went with us to China, they were your Guinea pigs. Uh, yeah, more or less. So we are building this as we are going, but this is a, it consists of a private label courses. We have there a, a, a website with a, with the content, with some information that basically vendors that we are using any information that, uh, requires, uh, to start this business and uh, procedures and how to do the stuff videos. So we actually had to do our own videos and we, uh, we have many references for additional courses. So let’s say how to do a Facebook advertising, how to do many chat advertising.
01:04:13 Got It. So you’re sharing how to do the advertisement and beyond on Amazon? Yeah. Right. Got It. And it’s both of you doing this stuff?
01:04:20 We’re both doing it. Yep. We’re doing a every couple of weeks we’re doing a live, so we’re doing the live sessions, I’m doing webinars basically going on video online and answering questions. I think that’s something that people really wanted. Um, and it seems like the feedback on that’s been good, we were doing a lot of people ask us for a support for some consulting for this kind of. We don’t really have time rate.
01:04:49 It’s we are so busy, so it’s better to create something like that that we can offer our,
01:04:56 uh, help to, uh, to a wider range of people. It will be meeting up live to every quarter. We’ll sit down, live with people in the group and walk through any questions, issues, and hopefully help build people’s businesses this way. Cool. If
01:05:12 someone listening to this wants more of this program or wants to learn more, do you guys have it outlined on a website? We do.
01:05:18 This is because the last time you heard, do you remember the URL you handed out? I’ll never forget that URL the longest that we’ve ever handed out. So would you have to some nights shorter URL of something much nicer www.ecommvip.com. Why not just duck? Um, uh, this is, uh, yeah, it’s okay. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you’re saying slash registered wants to go and sign up it, but you can go and find out some information. Seven guys, thank you for sharing this information. I know you don’t have to be sharing this kind of information to understand how much time it takes and stuff. So thank you for coming on and sharing this kind of stuff and uh, letting people hear this who haven’t heard it because maybe someone has like a son or daughter and university that doesn’t know what they want to do.
01:06:12 This could be information that’s valuable to all of us. That’s what I feel. So I really appreciate you guys sharing know also, thank you for allowing us to do the even the free classes. I think this is a really good opportunity for people that are interested in, in ecommerce, just to drop by and see what, what we are up and puts you on the hot seat when you teach a class too, right? Like you’ve learned the subject matter so well when you’re teaching that class because you get questions thrown at you and someone’s staring you down. Really also appreciate everyone in the classes and the groups that have really pushed us has actually really helped us to help those. Girl. Yeah. Awesome.
01:06:53 I guys, I want to keep having you as you guys kind of build your businesses and leak out little bits and pieces of what you’re doing. I want to have you back regularly sharing this stuff so we can all kind of experience this journey together. Thank you guys. Good.
01:07:03 Wrap it up. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, so hopefully enjoyed that chat. Look,
01:07:09 very many people are going to get on here and share anything about Amazon or ecommerce businesses and the reason for that is when a new industry starts to evolve, most people go very quiet while they’re off. They’re building their businesses because there’s a lot of opportunity in there they don’t want to share, so we’re very. I feel really grateful both nick and I do that. Greg and Brian are willing to share what they are sharing here and they obviously are really good guys, humble guys, and when you hear them talk about some of the numbers that you can make in this, um, opportunity, they’re throwing a ballpark numbers. There’s no way to guarantee anything in any business. They’re just trying to paint the picture of what is possible, but they are doing this business themselves. So they are talking from experience. But if you’re listening to this and you’re hearing some of the revenue opportunities that you can make with this business, remember there is no guarantees and they themselves know that you can’t guarantee that, but it is possible.
01:08:04 So when I was asking the questions of how much money you can make, they’re just throwing out possibilities. So just know that it’s not a guarantee, but that opportunity does exist. They are doing it themselves. So if you’re going to get into this, make sure you get yourself some training. There’s going to be a lot of work involved. There’s not a like an easy color by numbers, step by step process for it. You are going to have to make mistakes and learn as you go, as, as everything, as is with everything. Um, I think that’s it for now. Until next time, your life, your terms.