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Be protected sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Now, Josh, I've been an Amazon member for about that time. But what turns you on to the FBA side of it?
So the FBA side of it, fulfillment by Amazon is what FBA is is one of the best ways that, in my personal opinion, you can sell on Amazon. So there's a few different types of ways to sell on Amazon. I'm glad you asked that question. Like I previously said,
I was hustling stuff. So when I was going online trying to find ways to make money, I found out about arbitrage, which is another way you can sell online, which is where you take brand name products that already exist, large brand name products, you buy them at a discounted price. So if they're on sale or they're at the thrift store or something like that, and they're below MSRP, which is manufactured suggested retail pricing, you buy it at that discount and you sell it at full price and you
keep the difference. So I was already doing that. I was taking my little bit of money and I was going to the Salvation Army and trying to find designer clothing, and I was reselling it on eBay for that full markup. And I was doing the same with Amazon. I was trying to find stuff online discounts coupons and buy it on sale and sell it at full price and keep the difference. So when he told me about Amazon, I
started researching and learning about Amazon. I learned about arbitrage and I knew that you could do it on Amazon, but that was like a hustle. I wanted a real business that was going to work for me because my mentor always told me that the true key to success is to have your money work for you without you
working for it. Like he told me, like, you got to eliminate the hustle mentality, Like, of course you got a hustle to get things started, but the end you should have the end in mind in the beginning, and the end is to have your business work for you without you working for it. He was always telling me about less touches and to work on your business, not for your business. So when I was looking at these different methods, I was like, I'm already doing this and
I'm still hustling stuff and it's not sustainable. Like at that time, I didn't know what sustainable was. But he would break things down to me, like, you need something that you can sell over and over and over again. What you're doing is making you some fast cash. But you can't find these clothes on sale. You can't find these products on sale all the time. So when looking at these different methods and stuff in business. I said, you know what, like the light really, the light bulb
really went off. I'm like these large brands like beat By dre or Apple, these large brands are finding products that have demand that people need, that they're buying every single day, irregardless of the day, the month, the age, the gender, and they're using Amazon to sell it. Right, they don't need a physical store. You don't. You don't need to do this. You don't need to make some special product. And there's products that people are gonna continuously need.
So that's when I learned the difference between the two, and I dove in to FBA, which is private label, so you can sell on Amazon arbitrage, private label, or wholesale. These are different business strategies, but the strategy that I actually sell right, the business model is called private labeling. So instead of selling other people's products, large brand name products, we find products that people want that have high demand, low competition, and we create our own brands and then
we sell them. So that's what I specifically do.
So can we get into it the basic basic ground level one one explanation of what is FBI Understand that you're selling and is fulfilled by Amazon. You sell of Amazon, but what does it actually entail? Can you give the one oh one on the situation?
Yeah? Yeah, So FBA is fulfillment by Amazon. And this is how to hold. Like a bird's eye view looking down. This is a hold how the whole business works. So we find these products. Once we find these products, we're gonna find a supplier. Rather in the US or overseas, doesn't matter where the supplier is at. The supplier is gonna make our product. Once that supplier makes our product, they're gonna ship it directly to Amazon. And this is
where the FBA kicks and the fulfillment by Amazon. Once Amazon receives that product in their warehouse, they're gonna facilitate it. But then they're gonna disperse it to other Amazon warehouses. And that's how we They can ship products. And it can be Prime eligible, which like eighty percent high eighty percent of everybody who shops on Amazon or Prime members, so over one hundred and fifty million Prime members in
the US. And basically that means whenever we go online on Amazon and shop, we get our product to our doorsteps in two days. So Amazon facilitates it disperses it to other Amazon locations, and then when consumers people like me and you, go buy products online, Amazon picks it, they pack it, they wrap it, use their own boxes, their own labels, their own workforce. You know, it's under their warehouse, and then they ship it directly to customers.
And if we get it and we're like, yo, this isn't what we wanted, or you know, it was warehouse damaged, or they just decided they don't want it anymore, Amazon even handles the customer service. So literally all we do is we find the products, we find the supplier, and we manage our inventory in our advertising, which is all done from the Seller Central portal, which Amazon created, And that's like the bird's eye view of how the whole system works.
So the products aren't like company products, that actually just random products and you're labeling it under your company. That's kind of what I'm understanding. So can you give us an example of like what kind of products that would entail for this?
Yeah? Absolutely, so I got I got like they're all around the house, this little lent roller like I've just used before the interview to get the lin off my shirt. We would find a product like this like, there's no label on this anywhere. And let's just say that there's a huge brand. Just because a huge brand sells this product doesn't mean that we can't sell this product. You just can't sell it as them if you're not a licensee.
So we would find a product that people have a demand for, that people are going to use every single day, irregardless of where they live, how old they are, gender, et cetera. And then we would create our own brand, so now it would be private labeled by our brand. We would put our brand on it, we would ship it directly to Amazon and they do the rest. See what like a lot of people don't know, Like when you think of like when you need to blow your nose,
you say, hey, can you pass me that Kleenex? Right? Kleenex is a brand. The name of the product is tissue, right, So that and that's like brand notoriety. That's what we do is we try to become APEX predators for these different categories, saying like when you get out the shower, use a Q tip, right, Well, it's actually a cotton swab. Q tip's the brand name. It's a private label brand name. We find these products that people need and we try
to become household names. We just find ways to differentiate them and prove them and to gain market share through differentiating the products. And that's what we do.
So you put your logo on it, you put your brand on it. But after that it comes to a manufacturing standpoint, like what's that process like?
So once we find a product, so first we want to verify and validate the product before we even order it. So a few things we do is make sure it's not a seasonal product. So I don't know if y'all got kids, but I got kids and we had these fidget spinner things all around the house. Right, that's a trending product. It went up like this and just as quick as it went up, it knows dives. So once we verify that it's not a trending product, we move forward and you can go to Google Trends. It's a
free tool. Type in the name of your product and you can look at a historical chart, so it'll show you like, for the last five years, ten years, has this product been selling every day? So once you identify it's going to sell every single day, because that's what we want. We don't want to hit or miss. We want something that's going to make money every single day. After we knock out the trending, then we look at the seasonality so we can go on Google Trends again.
If it's only selling tours October like pumpkin carving kit, or November and December like Christmas lights, then it's a seasonal product. We don't want that. We want January through December. So after we do these little things to verify and validate that product, we go to ali Baba, which is where we find the suppliers. It's free to use ali Baba. You don't need any type of special account, nothing like that. And we're gonna go and type in the name of
our product. So just we would type in lent roller into ali Baba, it's going to show all these manufacturers. We want to reach out to the manufacturer and we want to do our due diligence and make sure that they're one hundred. So how long have they been in business, how many employees do they have, what is their gross annual revenue, how many star ratings do they have? Look at them on Better Business Bureau and prevet them to make sure that they're legit. And then that's where you
do your negotiating. Once you come to a conclusion on the price, you guys agree on a price. You find a manufacturer, you're going to give them thirty percent down on the product, so that starts and initiates the manufacturing. Once the man manufacturing's done, you pay the rest. Once you pay the rest, they're gonna go ahead and ship the product directly to Amazon. So they're gonna handle getting it through customs. They're gonna find the freight forward or
everything for you. It's gonna be shipped directly overseas if you're using a China supplier and be checked in by Amazon. If you're using US supplier, then it's from the supplier's warehouse directly to Amazon. Then Amazon checks it in and you go back to that other process, right, They pick it, packet, ship it, handle returns.
So when you're in Google Trends, from what I read, you want to find products that have high demand and low competition. Is there a certain statistic or a metric that you use when you're trying to find that.
Yeah, so we use Google Trends for seasonality and to see if it's a trending product.
Can you explain what Google Trends are.
Yeah, So Google Trends is a website owned by Google. It's a free tool owned by Google, and it's a way to measure analytics on products. So if you go to Google Trends, it's products, celebrities, countries. You can go and type into anything and it's going to show you like historical charts and analytics on that thing. If you go to a movie, to'll show you when the movie was created, how long the movie's been out, how many sales.
If you go and put a product in it, it'll tell you the first time the product showed up, how long it's been around, how many people on Google are going to type for this product. And the reason why we use Google Trends is because Amazon is the search engine just like Google, and Google's the largest search engine. So even though it's not Amazon direct metrics, it's very similar and very close because Google is a huge search engine.
So we go and we find that data from Google Trends, and that's how we find out, Hey, this product selling you know, twelve months out the year. This product has depth of market, meaning it didn't just spike like the fidget spinner. Like if you go and type this product, and you're going to see for the last ten years, it's been selling every single day, it's been selling every single month. So we want to see a nice horizontal chart. When we look for products that have high demand low competition.
There's no exact metric that's going to say like, hey, this product has high demand low competition. What we want to look for is we want to go direct to Amazon and type in the name of the product, and when we're looking at all the different sellers, we want to see how many of those sellers have under one hundred reviews, have under two hundred reviews that are still selling you know, ten plus units a day. If you're selling ten plus units a day, that's three hundred units
a month. So that's like the bare minimum metric I look for. So that would equal low competition, and that's how we identify if it has high demand low competition. Right. Another way is there's something called BSRO, which stands for best seller Ranking. If you're on an Amazon listing and you scroll down, you'll actually see category and then subcategory. So category may be home products, subcategory may be lent roller, right, and then it'll have a number next to it that's
the BSR Bestseller ranking. So that's based out of a million out of let's just say there's a million sellers. It's based out of all million sellers. So we look at that listing and it's number ten. That's one of the top selling products. So we'll look at that competitor. We'll look at what they're selling, how many units they're selling, to make, you know, to make a statement as to does this product have high demand low competition.
So that's interesting. I just learned something. So I was wondering what actually that meant to be a private label, But that's really interesting. So the private label is you pick a nondescript item like a lint roller, which nobody really knows who makes lint rollers, right, So now you put your private label on that, which is x Y and Z lint rolling company. So you get the lint rollers from China, some warehouse in China, and now you actually branded with your company, your logo whatever, x Y
and Z lint rollers. You put it on Amazon and then they buy it from Amazon, so you never actually get receipt of the product. It goes to Amazon's website directly from the warehouse.
We never touched it. It could be US, it could be China where wherever, we never touch it.
And then when somebody goes to Amazon and types in lint roller, your product shows up on the first page. If you can make it to the first page, we'll talk about that, and nobody ever cares, like what the company is that makes the lint roller. They usually just go for like the lowest priced item, I think, or product you know the best reviews or who has the
most star rating or whatever. And it's a variety of different products like that, like lint rollers, those things that you like stuff into your shoe to like form your shoe, nail clippers, like, there's all kinds of stuff that's just really nondescript. A couple of weeks ago, even toilet paper, when nobody could buy toilet paper. People's going on Amazon and buy toilet paper. You're not really tripping off of like it gotta be Sherman. It's like at this point,
you just get whatever you can get. So now that I'm thinking about it, the more and more I think about it, I just think of different nondescript products that doesn't really matter what the name of it is, because nobody ever even knows the name of these products. It's interesting. I never thought about that before, So this is crazy. So how much money and you actually make in this business? Because now I'm actually interested, this is extremely interesting. How
much money can you make on average? I know it probably varies, but on average, how much money can you make? I'm interested?
Yeah, So what we recommend. What we recommend is nothing less than thirty percent net profit margins. So net is going to be after everything's set and done, gross would be like the total number net is that keep that number that you get to keep. So we like to shoot for thirty as the minimum. Typically it's gonna be around forty to fifty percent, but it depends on the product,
depends on the time of the year. Towards the end of the year, you know, price is going to be a little bit higher, on logistics, on fulfillment fees, just everything. But typically we like to see between thirty and fifty percent profit margin. This is after we buy our product, after which is the cog or cost of goods, after we ship our product, which is logistics, after Amazon stores our product, because we're paying fees. After we sell a product,
they pick it, they use everything. After everything's set and done, we want to make thirty to fifty percent profit. So if we're selling a product for twenty bucks, we want to keep six dollars. And if you could be around thirty three percent, which is right around that bare minimum number, every three units you sell, you're doubling your money. So that's how you can really, you know, start to grow and scale.
Yeah, this is so crazy because for so long we've been taught like, having generic things is not the thing to do, right, and this is a prime example of yes, this could be a big business of having generic items. But my question is what's Amazon's cut? Like, I know they take a percentage, what's that cut in this deal?
Yeah, so it fluctuates. They're constantly changing like how much they're charging in a reference to the referral fee, but it's typically right around fifteen to twenty percent of the product costs. So if you're selling the product for twenty bucks, they're going to take you know, they're going to take four bucks. But that's everything storing the product, shipping the product,
facilitating the product. That's the referral fee and everything. And like I said, on top of their fee and the product costs and the shipping and the advertising, and everything else. We still want to make that thirty to fifty percent profit margin because we're going directly to the manufacturer. We're not going to a middleman. We're not going to someone who's wholesaling these products. We're not going and buying products at a discounted rate. We're going directly to the place
where they manufacture it, where the large brands go. We're going where Nike goes, We're going where beats By dra goes. We're going while all the top guys go, and we're getting it manufactured. So that's how we make our money, and that's how we get our margin where it needs to be.
That's interesting because I always kind of knew that the money was in the non descript items because if you think about it, like, let's take something like a refrigerator. The average person might buy three, maybe four refrigerators, like in their entire life, like life time, they might buy four refrigerators in the entire life. Maybe not even that much. But you pick something like a lint roller or you know, Q tips things like that.
That's reoccurrent.
Yeah, it's reocurrent thing. You might buy one hundred lint rollers gave you ho.
It's a secret sauce. This is the secret sauce right here. The reason why a perfect product. Let me just break this down. So I like products that are lightweight. So there's two different products. There's lightweight products, there's oversized products. So lightweight products would be something like this. Oversize would be the chair I'm sitting in. So lightweight products are cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to ship, ship, cheaper to facilitate number one. Number two. The reason why this is a
beautiful product is because this is a usable product. So I like consumable products, usable products in giftable products because people continuously use them. So if I buy, like, let's just say this desk that my computer's setting on, I only need that once and that's it said and done. This lent roller, once you run out of the tape, you might buy the lent roller set, but once you run out of the tape, you need the tape again. Or if we have a giftable product that can be
gifted for a man or a woman, guess what. There's birthday's, father's day, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, graduation. They're constantly being given. Another example is supplement and supplements are very small very cheap, to make, very small, very cheap, to ship, very cheap, to fulfill, and guess what, at the end of the thirty days, you need it again. So you can actually have a subscribe and save, meaning it's a continuity package. People order it and they get it every single month.
So some of the products I look like, I'm in the beauty really big and I'm in office in the office products very big because these are products that you constantly use that you need to re order. So I'm constantly thinking, like, we don't want a one night stand with our customers. We want the marriage. And so many people focus on that one night stand, like how can I make the most amount of money on the first touch, or what's the product that people were gonna buy a
lot of on that first touch. I'm thinking down the road, what's a product that you know, I may not crush it on the first touch, but they're gonna be locked in and we're gonna have a marriage. They're gonna need it every single month for the next year, the next two years, next three years. And that's something like amateurs they monetize the front, and experts in this business they monetize the back. They don't focus on the one night stand. It's that marriage dare you have it?
Ladies and gentlemen, whole lot of game. So we gave you the one on one. So in the next segment, we're gonna go over some steps to get you up and running so you can get started, all right. Yeah, so in this segment we're going to actually go over the steps actionable items. But you know, I was just thinking about it, and that just really makes a lot of sense. And sometimes the simplest things is just mind blowing and it's like I never really thought about it,
but it's like makes complete sense. Like nobody ever who looks at the brand name of a linp roller as it works?
Man, Yeah, it's what all the big guys are doing. Beats by all. This is is a private label product. This is made in China. These are made for sixteen dollars and he's selling them for two hundred dollars. Why because of the brand name. So the whole goal, like I said, like Kleenex, Like everybody, like, yo, hand me a Kleenex. That's not the name of the product, that's the name of the brand. You see what I'm saying, Like the Q tip is not the name of the product,
it's the name of the brand. So you want to become a category king, like Apple's a category king, beats by Dres category king, right, So that's that's basically all they're doing. Like if you look on if you look on the bottom of an Apple product, it says made in China. You look on the back of these made in China. So they're basically finding products that people need. Everybody needs to listen to music, everybody needs to clean
their ears, and they're slapping their brand on it. Right now, Now that not everybody has a huge brand like Dre, but if you create a good product, good customer service, you can become a category king because you know, Beyonce is not going to go drop some Q tips, right, Like I sell a lot of office office products. I'm crushing it because there's no huge brand that's taking it on. Like you're not gonna see jay Z, you know, shooting or Kanye doing a line of binder clips, you know
what I mean, or three ring binders. So if you go in there and then you serve these people and you're making sure that you're reading the reviews of the competitors, and you're making it a better product, you're making it a more affordable product, and you're doing all these things. Now you become the category king and people are like, I want such and such, which is your brand? So that's what we do, and it's like it's the most sustainable business model. Like people ask me all the time, like, yo,
is Amazon dead? Like so many people are starting to sell on Amazon? Is Amazon dead? As it's saturated? Can you still sell? I'm like, let's forget about Amazon, which is the largest company in the world. The founder is the richest man alive. Let's set all that aside. What is selling on Amazon? What is private label products?
What is this?
Right? There's a demand. You need to hear your music, so there's a demand for headphones. I have the supply, supply and demand. If you go back to the Renaissance period when there was castles and horses and sword fighting, knights needed swords, so they went to a blacksmith. The blacksmith made the sword. They had the demand, there was a supply, and they exchanged rather be coins or they bothered. So it was just a direct exchange of supply and demand.
So now times have changed and now we have computers, smartphones, tablets, and when we need something, we go to the market, which is Amazon. Amazon facilitates everything. They have everything, any and every product you can think of, basically accept cars, which soon they're working on that, and we just go buy what we want and boom, it's to our house two days later. So when people ask me like, is it dead, I'm like, no, it's not dead. This supplying
demand has always existed. There's always been a need for items, and this is just the most relevant, most up to date, most user friendly, and effective way to purchase products. Like even during a pandemic, if you need something and you don't want to go to the store, you can't go to the store, you go online. Less than five minutes is bought, and then less than two days is to your doorstep.
You just said that was crazy. That's actually extremely, extremely important. That's a gym where it's like everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people are private label companies, and it's like you use the example of Beats by Dre so it's like, yeah, if you don't really necessarily have your warehouse where you're actually making products yourself, which almost nobody really does, you're getting it made somewhere else. And then getting it shipped and then putting your logo on it.
Essentially you're a private label company, right, And it's like the only difference is that like a beats By, Dre has celebrities that endorse the product, and they have doctor Dre's name on it, and you know, all of these different things. It's a billion dollar company now, but in the essence, the core business model, especially at the beginning stages, I'm sure, is kind of just the same thing. So that's that's really crazy, and that's interesting if you really
think about it. Everybody's a private label absolutely.
So peep game. There's three different ways. We talked about arbitrage, where you go to best Buy and you get something at a discount and then you sell it for the MSRP and keep the difference, right, that's arbitrage. You have wholesale where I go and find companies and I have them sell me the product at a discounted rate at a wholesale price, and I become a distributor and I sell it at an MAP, which is minimum advertised price.
So that's strategy number two. And then there's strategy number three. People call it private labeling, which is what I just explained right. But if you think about it, the distributor, the wholesaler who's whole selling you the prout so you can become a distributor, has a private labeled product that you're becoming a distributor of. And if we are vitrage products where we go buy private label products of large brands at a discounted price and resell it at that
MSRP and keep the difference, what are we doing. It's just a different form of private labeling. So what we're doing is we're cutting out the middleman. We're not going to a wholesaler and becoming a distributor. We're not hoping that we find products at a discounted price and sell it for that MSRP. We're just finding the products that the big guys need or big guys are selling. We're making our own sending it direct to consumer, and we're
making all the profits. Like so many people say, like I don't want to get started with headphones because beats by Dre are the best. Beats by Dre are not the best or the well known, they're the most well known. You can go directly to the same factory and make the same headset more affordable and actually improve it and still get sells, and still get sells. Like I'm competing with Amazon, I'm competing with some of the largest companies in the world, and people have this misconception I can't
compet with them. Why not? Adidas competes with Nike, same stuff, same supplier, made in the same country, made out of the same fabric, different brands, different uses. So what I do is I literally look at these products. What is the pros, what is the cons what people love? I don't change what people hate. I implement immediately. And because I'm such a small company and I'm so hands on as a private label seller, we can dive deep and become obsessed with making this product the best that it
can be. You know, once you have a product that's crushing it. Even though they have huge budgets, huge teams, they're on research and development for more products, they're not worried about making this the best of the best. So like when your hands on and you become obsessed, it's all your money. You can literally dive in and make this thing, you know, make this thing great.
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Like if you look at Peter tiel A, co founder of PayPal, right with Elon Musk, and they asked him, like, how did you revolutionize the payment processor industry? And he said, dominate the sector, control the space. So instead of going wide, I'm going small. I'm going narrow. I'm focusing on that one thing. Instead of hundreds of SKUs, I have only a dozen skews, but those dozen SKUs are household names.
I'm trying to dominate the sector and control the space, like I explained, like tissue paper with Kleenex or Q tips with cotton swabs, they dominate that sector. And then zig Zigler, one of the best marketers alive. He said, when the market zigs, use zag So I'm doing the complete opposite. People are racing down to the bottom trying to be competitive with their pricing. My pricing is higher
and I'm selling more and making more money. Why well, why is Apple one of the most commonly purchased consumer electronics products and it's sixty to eighty percent higher than HP, Dell and all the other competitors. Why Because the consumer product experience is that much better. The quality and the product is that much better, The customer buying experience is that much better, the customer support is that much better,
the packaging is that much better. So I always tell my students and people who I'm helping, when you're thinking about products, when you're thinking about product packaging, when you're thinking about customer experience, what would Apple do? You know? Like the WWJD, what would Jesus do? What would Apple do? And if you follow their entire model, you can't.
Lose that albatroge process And correct me if I'm wrong, But it reminds me of the kid who goes to Walmart, buys water, right, goes outside and sells it at a discount of price and keeps the profit from what he.
Originally bought it. Right, Am I getting that correct?
Pat? You're basically a middle man. You go into the plug, you get in at a discount because you're buying bulk, and then you're trying to sell it's the same. So arbitrage and wholesale is the same exact thing. The only difference between wholesale and arbitrage is arbitrage. You're buying, like, I'm gonna go, let's just say Black Friday beats by Dreas fifty percent off. I'm just throwing something out there.
I'm gonna go buy ten of these, wait till Black Friday's done, and sell them at MSRP, which is manufacturer suggested retail pricing, and I'm gonna keep the difference. Wholesale is where I go to a private label company, like let's say that I got this brand and I'm crushing it, and you wholesale and you want to add to your catalog. You come to me like, yo, I want to buy ten thousand of them units and be able to sell it under your brand. You're not creating your own brand.
You're just asking for a licensee agreement. So now you have the rights to resell my product. And I'm giving you a little bit of love. And that cushion in the middle is what you make. So now you're the middle man. Private label, you're the plug. You're going right, just like Frank Lucas did you going right to the jungle. You're getting the stuff there, You're stamping it with your logo, and you sitting there right the Amazon you.
Blue Magic the stamp eyl is our stamp. That's the best product on the block for sure. So let me ask you this, because you know, my whole thing has always been one hundred thousand. Like, if I'm looking at a business, or if I'm interested in the business, I want to know does it have the ability to make
one hundred thousand dollars a month? Not to say it's gonna make a hundred thousand dollars a month like as soon as you get in, but I just want to know that I could potentially make one hundred thousand dollars a month. If not, feel like I'm wasting my time. It's just my own personal take on it. So that's how I gauge anything. It's like, is it able for me to make a one hundred thousand dollars a month in it? So being a seller on Amazon one hundred
thousand dollars a month, it is that reachable? And if so, like, what does it take to make one hundred thousand dollars a month selling products on it?
Amazon? Absolutely man like. Success is math. So you just got to break it down, Like, if you want to make one hundred thousand a month, how many products do you got to make?
Right?
So, thirty units a day at ten dollars profit is how much three hundred dollars a day? Right? If you time is that by thirty days in a month, that's around nine thousand dollars. That's with one product. You want to make a hundred g's profit a month, you need nine more of those products. Or you break it down, how many units do I have to sell per day of one product? And when you go and do the research inside the software, there's tons of different softwares where
you can find these products. You just go and you input that data. It's hard to do it without showing you guys. But if you need to sell one hundred units a day at ten dollars profit to make one thousand dollars a day, that's thirty thousand a month. You go and say, hey, I want to find a product that is selling x amount per day, X amount of units x amount of profit, and then you just reverse engineering. Right, success is math. You just break it down. It's that simple, all.
Right, So let me ask you this because I actually googled it and I got a list of like some steps that beginners can take to get up and running, and it was a list of like seven different steps. So they said, the first step is to create an Amazon seller account. The second step is to pick a niche. The third step is to research products. The fourth step is to establish product sourcing, and then you have to establish a brand. Then you have to create product listing,
and then you have to market your products. So those are the seven commandments according to Google. Does that sound about right? How do you feel about that?
So let me intervene. Step number two says pick your niche. That's the opposite of what I teach. I always teach my students that you want to lead by data, not by emotion. If you're picking something, you're picking it because you think it's going to do well, and you're not going off of the data. So many of the mistakes I see my members and new Amazon sellers make is
they try to lead with emotion not with data. Perfect example, men that are into fitness, they always want to launch the next supplement, the next workout gear, so on and so forth. Women that are into beauty they want to be the next Kylie Jenner, and even though they're passionate about it and they love it, that's not the smartest,
most advantageous product to launch. So I always tell people just start with an open slate, do the product research, because some of the most profitable products that you're going to make a killing off of are products like this that you would have never in a million years thought about launching, or you're not passionate about, but they're making all the money. So I always tell people lead by data, not by emotion. So, yeah, you want to get create
your Amazon Seller account. You want to start with an individual account. It's absolutely free. We don't change that by clicking a button to professional account until we have our products actually being checked in because if you have a professional account, it's thirty nine ninety nine a month. We don't want to pay that money until we have products live. Number two is we want to get right into product research.
It's the most important aspect of the entire business. We want to find these products that are going to sell twenty four to seven three sixty five. We want to find these products that are not seasonal products, meaning they're going to sell twenty four to seven three sixty five that are not trending, meaning that it has depth of market. If there's volatility or there's no sustainable track record of sales, that's risky. We don't want risk. We want to make
a lot of money. And again we go to Google Trends for both of those, a free resource. Once we identify all those things, we go to the supplier. We find the supplier. We want to make sure that we're going to be able to make that margin. So we're going to use a free tool called the FBA calculator. It's a free tool that Amazon owns fbacalculator dot com.
We're going to put in how much is the product selling for, how much are we going to get it from the supplier, and all the other fees associated with that, and it's going to spit out the profit margin after Amazon takes their piece of the pie. So if it's below thirty percent, we need to increase the price or decrease the purchase cost. Right, So by doing that we can manipulate and get that profit margin to where we want to be. The goal is thirty percent bare minimum,
thirty three percent. Every three products you sell you double your money. So if you put ten thousand into product and you're at thirty three percent every three per products. You're flipping that money, right. So that's the whole goal is to really just scale this thing. And then the way that you scale this thing is by adding more products to your SKU. You rinse and repeat. Once you get the first product, it's all downhill from there, because what I teach is the actual brand approach, not the
generic approach. So the generic approach is where you have tons of different private label products. You might sell this phone mount, and then you might sell a calculator, then the lin roller, and have all these different products. That's one strategy. The more sustainable strategy that I recommend is the private label. So we do a catalog. So if we launch this product and it's in a specific category, we want to launch other relevant products to this catalog
and create our own catalog. And the reason why I say that first product is it's downhill from there is because we already have the plug, we already have the supplier. So after that thing's up and rolling and it's making us money twenty four to seven, three sixty five, we go to the supplier and say, hey, send me your catalog of products and what other Amazon sellers are selling, and we go through it and we do our research
and they already shaved time off the hourglass. So then we find another product and we just rent and repeat, and you keep stacking products and that's how you scale this thing.
All right.
So, once we got our product and we got our logo, all that put together, what are some of the upfront fees that we're going to need to get this product really out there and be a successful company.
Now, Yeah, so the fees associated with starting the businesses number one, The main fee is going to be your product, right because we're not drop shipping where people buy our product and then we pay the supplier afterwards, where actually we own the brand, we own the product. So the number one fee associated with the whole business is going to be your COG or cost of goods. Now, it depends, because your product could costs a dollar, it could cost
twelve dollars. But what I usually tell people when they're starting out is to start with no less than one thousand dollars. Have a thousand dollars that you can allocate directly to your inventory. Now, some people may say, like, hey, I was watching on YouTube and reading blogs and stuff, and they're saying like three to ten thousand to start your first product. How can I start with only one thousand? What I do with the AMC formula, what I teach
people is how to micro launch products. So logically, what you would do is find out how many units you're going to sell per month. If you anticipate that you're going to sell one thousand units a month and your unit costs three dollars, that's a three thousand dollars launch
because you don't want to run out of inventory. But what I've learned through trial and error with my own brand and through helping you know, thousands of people around the world, is that there's no software that's one hundred percent accurate, and there's nothing like actual factual buyer data directly from Amazon. So we don't put all of our eggs in one basket and launch three thousand units or
one thousand units. We'll actually order twenty to thirty percent of the inventory that we anticipate on selling for that month. We'll get it to Amazon as quickly as possible because success loves speed, and we'll test actual buying data from consumers, and if it sees that we're getting consecutive days, like three to five days consecutive sales of what we anticipated on selling, then we make that back order. But if it's not then we liquidated and move to the next product.
And this is like my proprietary system, and this is how you profit off of failing product. So many people put all their eggs in one basket, but if you drop the basket, all the eggs are gone. So instead of putting all my money in one product, will micro launch three products at once, or will micro launch that one product that way? If we get it to the marketplace and it doesn't perform the way we anticipated, we can liquidate that product, add a profit, and move to
the next one. Because you got to remember, like so many people ask me, like, what's the worst that can happen with their product, like a failing product or losing Amazon product? What does it look like? How much am
I going to lose? What's the worst case scenario? And if you do this properly and you cross your t's, you dot your eyes, and you do that product verification and validation that we discussed, the worst thing that's going to happen is you're not going to sell enough units daily to reach that ten thousand profit a month or three thousand profit a month or whatever you're anticipated on
its selling. It may be one here or two there, it may be inconsistent, but you have to remember you're still at that thirty percent of fe fifty percent profit margin. So even though it's a loser because it's not making us what we wanted to make, it's still profiting and
we only have a specific amount. We don't have an abundance of units that we can't get rid of or that's going to take a long time to get rid of, that's going to lock up our capital, So we can liquidate it profit on the liquidation of that product, put all the proceeds into another product, and just keep testing until you find that one that's going to have consistency.
So you mentioned something earlier where you said, you know, there's different software that you can use to actually find out if a product is going to be an actual good seller or not. So I know that's something that you know is probably my biggest question, and I'm sure a lot of other people's question as well. So how do you determine if it's going to be a good product? Like what are some of those software or websites that you were referring to.
So there's a combination of a few things, using Amazon's direct website, using the free resources that we talked about, like Google Trends, free FBA calculator to determine the seasonality, the trend the profit margin. But there's many of different softwares, like I personally use jungle Scout. There's dozens of different softwares that are relatively inexpensive, like between thirty to fifty buck.
Nich Hunter is that one.
Nich Hunter's one. There's tons of them, Viral Launch, Viral Launch, Helium ten, Jungle Scouts is the one I personally use. There's tons of different softwares out there. And what this does is basically take all the data that's on Amazon and compiles it in front of a user fase right an interface. So after you do all that manual stuff to see is the product trending, is the project seasonal?
Is the profit margin there? Then you can use this software to actually pull up, Hey, this is all the sellers, this is the average reviews, this is the average amount of sales. So you basically want to compare the amount of sellers the amount of revenue to the amount of reviews. So one of the like the telltale ways of seeing if a product has high demand low competition is comparing
the reviews to revenue. So our bare minimum is we want to see a majority of the sellers selling a product at three hundred units per month, that's ten units per day, and we want that profit margin to be around you know, thirty percent, like we mentioned, and we want a majority of the sellers to have less than
two hundred reviews. So if you see a bunch of sellers who are selling a crapload of products per month, you know, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, one thousand units per month, but they all have two three thousand reviews, that means that there's a lot of ogs in that industry. There's a lot of people that's been selling that product, they have established track record with that With that industry,
people prefer that brand, just like Colgate. Like if you go onto toothpaste, it doesn't matter if you're cheaper or you're better. People love Colgate. They're not going to try the new guy, right, So that's how we establish does that product have high demand low competition? Is a lot of sales a little bit of reviews.
Yeah, so now that you have the product and you're registered on Amazon dot Com, what's the process of getting it to the front page because that's what everybody sees, right or even in the first two pages.
Is it like an SEO strategy that you can use.
Yeah, So SEO is search engine optimization, And that's a good question. So a lot of the money, Like I said, Amazon is the search engine, just like Google. So the main goal as a seller is to get your product is hied to the first page as you can. And the way Amazon their whole algorithm works, it's very simple. If you're the number one guy in the world and you're selling one hundred units a day, I just need to sell one more unit than you for a few days in a row. So all we have to do
is run. We can do giveaways, and there's so many different tools. We can run giveaways, we can do influencer marketing, we can do PPC, which is pay per click, and a majority of this is all within Amazon Seller Central. We can do this all within Amazon. The only one that I use that's very effective that's outside of Amazon, which we were talking about, is influencer marketing, and this stuff,
super super simple. In twenty eighteen, Jeff Bezos had a letter to shareholders that said that sales like third party sellers are kicking first party sellers butts. So people like me are kicking Amazon's actual brands butts and other huge conglomerates brands butts because of the powerful resources that they're dumping millions of dollars into. So, like, I don't know if you guys ever try to run Facebook or YouTube
or Google ads. They're complex, they're difficult, The whole user interface is difficult, and you got to know what you're doing. With Seller Central, like, you can set these ads up in a like in in a minute or less. There's a few buttons and you click start. It's not as complex as Facebook or Google. And they're very effective. And we're able to literally take our product that no one knows about, that barely has any reviews and push it to the top of search results by this pai paid advertising.
And then my secret weapon is the influencer marketing. So this is the only thing that's done outside of Amazon, and basically it works like this. I use Instagram because a lot of people know me on Instagram. You go into the search bar let's say we're launching a yoga mat. You type in hashtag yoga, and it's going to show all the hashtags, and next to it's going to show the number, which is the amount of actual searches and posts.
You want to find that keyword that has the most search search volume or post volume, which means it's the largest and most impression based keyword, meaning people were basically searching for that keyword, So it's gonna be hashtag yoga. We click on hashtag yoga, and we scroll through all the feed and we just start clicking on different posts to find influencers. So influencer is someone who has a special following in a specific category. So we want to
find someone that has over ten thousand followers. And the reason why ten thousand is the magic number is because on Instagram, if you have over ten thousand, you can do a swipe up story, meaning on their story you can swipe up and send them directly to a website. So we want to reach out to them by hitting the message button, which is the DM. Right, Yogati made that famous. They want to slide into their DM and just say, hey, my name is Josh, I'm getting ready
to launch this yoga mat on Amazon. I love your page, I love what you're doing. I'd love to give your audience a discount on my product, which is an amazing product, and I'd love to work with you. And they're gonna be like, yeah, sure, awesome. Send me thirty bucks via cash app or via PayPal, send me your link and send me your content. So you send them a picture, you see them the link to your Amazon store. They
post it. Now, people who love yoga, who want to buy a yoga mat are going directly to your Amazon store to buy your product. And remember, all we got to do is sell more than the other guy a few days in a row to kick his butt and move up in the search results. And that's what we do. Man, that's the whole strategy.
Yeah, yoga MAT's another good one. Yoga MAT's a huge one, another product where nobody cares. Who makes a yoga mat. I haven't ever seen anybody that's tripping off of the designer. They're not looking for Gucci yoga mats. So let me ask you this. I think you might have access already, but I like to ask questions twice sometimes to really double down for people that are slow learnings like myself. This is this is the big this is the big
one that everybody probably wondering. What's the budget that you actually need to get started in this business.
Yeah, so I highly recommend obviously the more that you have access to, the better, but I recommend nothing less than one thousand dollars to micro launch and test your first product. Also, here's another thing. I'm an avid practitioner
of OPM, which is other people's money. So even if you have cash burning a hole in your pocket or your banking account, but you have a zero percent interest a credit card, or you can go sign up for a zero percent interest credit card, use that because it's free money for the twelve months plus you're gonna get the bonuses and the benefits, so on and so forth. So, like I said, one thousand dollars to get started bare minimum, Definitely use lines of credit, business business lines of credit,
or just credit cards. That's what I do. I'd never use my debit card. I personally use the gold Amax card because we get four X points on two different categories. So the two biggest categories that the money is going to be spent with your business is number one. Sourcing products and number two advertising. So with that gold Amax business card, you get four x the points on two categories, which is products right sourcing products, manufacturing products, and then
you're advertising. So I'm using that and I'm like, people see me traveling around the world like them. Flights free, the hotels are free, and I'm doing it all off my Amax points.
Yeah.
So I know you mentioned Ali Baba as a potential manufacturer and partner. Are there any other ones that you would recommend or you know that's out there that are pretty good.
Yeah. So Ali Baba is a website. It's like a broker and then it's like a It's almost like Amazon. So Amazon is not the seller, but they have sellers underneath their platform. Ali Baba is not a direct manufacturer, but people who are manufacturers go on lists underneath Ali Baba. There's a few others like Dhgate and Ali Express, which is a subsidiary Ali Baba, but Ali Baba is the largest and it's going to have the best prices direct B to B business to business dope.
So that was a lot of information, But I just got one last question before we go into our last segment, Virtual Assistant. I saw you mentioned that on your YouTube channel. Can you just give some information on virtual assistance and how you're actually utilizing that.
Yeah. Yeah, so VA's or virtual assistants are like another secret weapon in my business because the whole the thing is I follow this strategy is called the ASAP right. So ASAP is an acronym stands for autonomous, sustainable action, and perpetuity. So I'm always trying to find these four things and actions in there because faith without works is dead. You got to take action and you're not gonna get any results, right, So I'm always trying to find out
ways to automate and delegate and not participate. And that's what if you go back to the beginning of the story, like my first mentor is always talking about touching.
Wait wait, wait, hold up, hold on, say that again. You said automate, delegate and not participate.
Hey, I'm trying to find ways to automate and delegate and not participate. I'm always asking myself, is this the highest and best use of my time and energy? Like, you want to become a millionaire, you got to think like a millionaire. You want to become a billionaire, you got to think like a billionaire and they're always they value their time more than anything, and they will trade
money for time ten times out of ten. So I'm always thinking of ways to scale the business and scale the velocity and the volume in our business without scaling the amount of energy and time it needs for me. So the way I'm able to scale my company is by taking the reputitious duties that need to be done and by outsourcing it for pennies on the dollar for employees. So many people think that they got to do everything, they got to wear every hat because they can't afford
to hire an employee. But there's VAS and all the top companies Fortune five hundred companies like Ge, like Apple, all these large companies, they use virtual assistance. And a lot of you guys who hear this right now, you're gonna be like like man, I was on the phone on customer support with this large company and it was someone who barely spoke English. And that's how they're able to do this is by using these vas, which are
employees in other countries. So the best country that I have found that's not only very very affordable, but they are very loyal and very hard workers is workers out of the Philippines so you can go to online jobs dot pH and you can hire virtual assistants to do daily tasks to help you with your business anywhere between a dollar fifty per hour and five dollars per hour, depending on what they're doing. A majority of my virtual assistants are at two dollars and fifty cents per hour USD.
They work forty hours. And the beautiful thing on top of being able to hire people in your company who are loyal and hard working is if you're in America and like right now, it's twelve o'clock in the afternoon, well in the Philippines it's like twelve o'clock at night or eight o'clock at night. So while I'm sleeping, our other employees in other countries are actually up working. So now our company is operating twenty four seven, three sixty five instead of twelve hours out the day or eight
hours out the day. So that's two key components to scaling. Is Number one, you're able to automate and delegate instead of you actually participating doing reputitious stuff. Because if you're doing reputaious stuff, that's that you can easily delegate. You're working for your company and not on your company. So and this took me years. Like I've made millions of dollars across my three companies, I've made millions of dollars. And it was a combination is as entrepreneurs, we're control freaks.
It's like our baby, it's like our child, Like we built this thing up and we want control of everything. So it's hard to give it to some someone else knowing they're not going to care for it the way that you would. They're going to treat it, you know what I mean. They're not going to treat it the way that you would. So it's difficult. But on the odverse side of that, you have to understand in order to scale that you have to be able to delegate.
And that's like a key thing, Like you guys got to focus on working on your business instead of for your business. So now, like I'm an avid believer in the eighty twenty row. I tell people this all the time. Eighty percent of the profits, eighty percent of the momentum, eighty percent of the results comes from twenty percent of
the effort. And now I can get more done in less time now than before when I was following the Gary Vee Like I was working sixteen hours a day, twenty hours a day, hustling, and I would literally get depressed if I didn't fall asleep at my computer because I thought I wasn't doing everything I could, you know, to accomplish my why which was helping my family out. Like I told you guys. But now you can work smart, not hard, and by being productive. There's a huge difference
between being productive and being busy. See, I thought being busy was being productive. Now by through time management and virtual assistance and you know, just keeping track everything and using software as like Slack and TrailO. With your management tools, I'm able to be productive and accomplished way much more and less time, which means I can spend that time with my kids, with my wife, or working on other things.
Not I was powerful, man. That was a lot of information, a whole lot of game.
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