#605 - 8-Figure Amazon Seller To ZERO?!
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Today, we talked to a seller who just a couple of years ago was an eight-figure seller on Amazon, but then some things happened that caused he and his partner to lose millions of dollars and have their Amazon sales go to zero. He's going to tell us what we need to avoid so that doesn't happen to us. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. ♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted, and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

And we've got a guest that I don't know how long I've been doing this podcast, maybe five years, almost six years. I've been trying for just about that long to get on the show. And then we ran into each other at Amazon Accelerate and he says, you know what? I think I'm finally ready. Brian, welcome to the show after all this time. Thanks, Bradley. It has been a couple of years. I kept repulsing your invitations for many years. It

It's not how many times you were denied, but the one time that you said, yes, that's what matters. And I was like, let's schedule this before you change your mind again. Okay.

You are in Atlanta still? Yes, correct. Is that where you were born and raised? No, I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, South Central PA, York PA. And where did you go to university? Undergrad at Penn State, graduated at Gannon University. Nittany Lions. That's right. Yeah. And then I actually spent a year in England as a junior in college. So I was on the five-year program. What was your major? Electrical engineering. Electrical engineering. Did you get into that field upon graduation? Yeah, four years.

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

for wholesale in the air conditioning and refrigeration space. Okay. And then how did you get to the e-commerce world? I, in 2012, July of 2012, I was in a board of directors meeting with my former employer. And after a 10 minute discussion, I was told to...

kill the two businesses I had just spent 12 years growing. And I had to fire three people over the phone the week before Christmas. And I vowed that July that the next seven-figure business I build will be for myself. So I had...

12 plus years of seniority, five weeks of vacation. So I started traveling to entrepreneur conferences. And I went to this one thing in Cebu in the Philippines called Tropical Think Tank. There were only ever four instances. And it was 25 attendees, eight speakers kind of sequestered in a resort. And one of the other attendees was Ryan Daniel Moran. Ended up buying ASM3 off his affiliate link in April of 2014 and never looked back.

Wow. By the way, I just noticed, I don't know how I didn't notice, you've got the coffin shelf in the back there. I didn't know you had one of those. I love that. Product placement. I see it now. I love it. The truth be told, when I need to demo something about how to do something on Amazon, I use coffin shelf as an example. After you took the ASM course, what was your first launch? What kind of product? Men's hair care. Elfin Beauty. Yeah. Talk about a hard...

Hard category to enter, but I kind of stumbled into it. A friend of mine was a barber. He said, Brian, hey, you know stuff about starting businesses. Help me open a barber shop. So we... He never has. He doesn't have any money. But we met and we had coffee and...

And a dinner a couple of times. And we said, hey, barbers make money selling products. And I was still working in the corporate world at the time. And he said, let's make our own line of product. Think about a barbershop. You got American Crew in there. That was our avatar competitor. They were sold on Amazon at the time.

And so I launched my own four skew brand of shampoo, conditioner and two styling products. And by the end of 2014, I was making more profit off of that product line than my corporate salary, which was multiple six figures at the time.

Wasn't one of your core ingredients on your products like pine, pine something? Tea tree oil. Tea tree tea. It was something tree. Like tea tree oil because it had that like minty kind of fresh smell. I remember that. Yeah. When I went to your office. So gross sales, obviously you were making profit, but are we talking a million? You hit a million in your first year or? Not in the first year. It was about half a million if we annualized because I launched in the middle of the year. I launched in May or June, something like that.

But at its peak, that product category, that brand, at its peak did $1.6 million in revenue. Wow. Long ago were these days 42% gross margin. Yeah. It might be a little bit difficult in that category to do that nowadays. Yeah.

Now, I remember you were about to get into some kind of medical device or something, but then you got banned from Amazon for that. I just remember seeing your office. You've got a good memory. Hey, with you, I remember this random ice cream shop that we went to. But trust me, I have a bad memory. But for some reason, the way it works is just I just remember random things. But I remember asking you, like, hey, what's that? Because it didn't look like shampoo. You're like, oh, this is a product that Amazon didn't let me sell. Tell me the story about that one.

So that was in summer of 2016. So I had been at this about two years. I stumbled into this, you know, you're surfing around Amazon looking for product opportunities. Everybody does that. Single heart monitors, little battery powered thing, hold it on the baby belly, a little wired at that time, AirPods, earpods.

Listen to the baby's heartbeat. Pretty cool little thing selling for, I forget the price point, 60 bucks, 70 bucks, something like that cost out of China. FOB was 12 or something. I don't remember. I spent like $60,000 flying these things in because I wanted to get in before the holiday season, launch it in August, September, get ranked and sent the first shipment in.

I didn't get banned, but the, the, uh, the, the ASIN got shut down as a, uh, medical device. So, but here's the thing.

There were multiple other sellers selling, you know, it's the old round the track with Amazon. So and that I fought it for a year and a half and finally gave up and threw him in a dumpster. All $60,000 worth of that product. Wow. Okay. What was your gross sales yesterday? Last week? Last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all your cost of selling on Amazon?

Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool, Profits. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash profits. Now, at what point did you... I remember when I visited, you had this gigantic warehouse. At what point did that...

become a necessity to have a warehouse as opposed to maybe in the beginning, I imagine you were just shipping stuff directly to Amazon or something. The manufacturer was out close to you, Los Angeles area of California. Yeah.

Shampoo's heavy. I shipped it across the country, just an LTL with a lift gate, doing what most sellers do when they start out. I brought pallets. The truck driver brought pallets into the garage. I shipped small parcel in the FBA. Garage is in your house? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Two-car garage, cars parked out in the driveway for a couple months. We've all been there, right? Then I graduated to a storage unit that had a loading dock. I was in like Flynn, didn't have to pay the...

to the inside delivery charges. That was a 20 by 40 storage unit or something. And by late 2015, I was, I need more space. I rented 1500 square feet, which was about two miles from where you visited me, which was at that time then, that was in 2016, you came out with 15,000 square feet. So it's just kind of stair step up.

But honestly, if I had to do it over again and we were in today's day and age, I wouldn't get a warehouse. I'd figure out another way to do it. Use vendor warehouse, use AWD. They would change a lot of things. Yeah. You grew that brand out, but then you started adding other brands. Now, were these other private label brands or were you purchasing brands? Before, it was faddish to purchase brands? Yeah. Or how did you grow your Amazon brand?

So I did both. I brainstormed my own brands and other product categories. I was category ambivalent, except no supplements, no cell phone accessories, no food products. I had excluded things, but I didn't have like, this is my only list of categories I'm going to go into. And I did a couple acquisitions too. Not really large deal values. I think the biggest deal I did was about

Quarter million, something like that. And you remember Joe, I actually bought his brand from him. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so then what was your peak year? Like which year was your best year of gross sales and or profit? 2021, revenue, 10 million bucks. Hit the eight figure mark. I did, I did, yeah.

Which was your biggest brand that year? Can't have been the shampoo brand because you said the peak was only 1 million or so. Yeah.

So I had a brand called 1790, which is actually the year T3O was discovered in Australia. So there's a little bit of a brand thread there. And then the other brand was called Parker 8, and it's just a made-up name. The street that the office was on was called 9 North Drive. So I said, I need a number, and I came up with Parker 8. Okay. Yeah.

And it was available. Domain was available. Trademark registered everything. And I was selling, I like simple products, paper gift bags, gallon glass jars, simple products. You and I met around 2016. A lot of people have heard the story, not as it relates to you, but that my whole Amazon journey can be traced to me listening to a random podcast once and hearing about a Amazon conference called Zahn Squad Live in Chicago. And

And it was, I was in a transitionary period because I was working for a company that was selling phone cases, uh, coincidentally on, on Amazon, they were just making hand over fist, but then I didn't like the way things were going. So I'm like, I just want to go my own path. And I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do, but let me just see what this Amazon thing is because I, I was kind of like just the, the name, you know, it was, it was an international company, Korean.

And so I was like the, the guy who signed everything because I was the only American and, and I use my warehouse at my house. Uh, I moved out of my house, moved back in with my parents for a while because my house became the office for the company. And, and I, and I was just the, the warehouse manager kind of where I would tag everything to, you know, with FN SKUs to go to FBA and ship it out. And I was shipping like 500 orders a day, uh, FBM, uh,

with a little machine I had, but that was the extent of my Amazon knowledge. Like it was all Amazon, but I really, you know, I didn't know how to make a listing. I didn't know about ranking. I didn't know about anything. So I was like, let me, let me give this a try. And then I think that was probably where I met you in person, uh, uh, potentially first. And, and that just shows you like, you're not the only person we were just talking about the people that were at that conference and, and they have stayed in our networks for eight years, you know, now. And, and, and we'll,

Talk a little bit about that. You know, you were at Amazon Accelerate last time. You know, people sometimes poo-poo these conferences and say, oh, you know, you can learn more from being in masterminds and stuff like that, which is true. But what is the value of going to conferences like Zon Squad, like Amazon Accelerate? So the key is balance. You don't want to try to learn everything with one method.

I'm into mastermind groups. We get together twice a month, two-hour Zoom call each time. It's a very, very close-knit group, close friends. The level of confidentiality in that group is huge. Smaller conferences like Zon Squad Live was circa 2016 are good because you can really get to know somebody like you and I got to know each other. Mm-hmm.

Conferences like Amazon Accelerate are just on a different scale for the caliber of people that they draw. Pretty much anybody who is anybody with... Yeah, there's some exceptions. Not everybody can make it to Seattle. I know that. I spent a couple grand just doing it myself, but...

The Accelerate Pavilion, the networking, the just meeting people. Got to tell you a funny little story. So in early, I had to go back into my calendar and look it up. It was January of 2017. Okay. I did a fishbowl.

In Amelia, in the Amelia building in South Lake Union, okay, which is, I can't remember, it's like eight or 10 sellers were sitting on bar stools. There were a hundred Amazonians peppering us with questions for 60, 90 minutes, something like that. One of the Amazonians I made pre-pandemic had a great relationship with. I bumped into him at Accelerate. I knew he was going to be there, so I was looking for him. Another guy who was a friend of his walked up, remembered me from that fishbowl.

in January 2017. So, do the math. It's been a while ago. But the point is, whether it's that, whether it's a conference, in-person relationships are memorable. Virtual ones are good too because then we continued our networking, you know, through the Zahn squad, you know, like Facebook, you know, community and we had trainings and things like that. Now, we're,

Were you, you know, I know you were, you were a part of the leadership of that, but were you also like a founder of the, the Zonblast software? No. So Joe, that was Joe's business. I was an informal advisor as kind of all of us in that small group that came, we all came through ASN3. And, you know, Joe had a relationship with Ryan at one point with one of the ASN conferences talking about Zonblast. I think that's before you were, before it was, it was circa 2015 something. Yeah, definitely before my time.

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

It was actually the very first paid seller community. We launched in September of 2014. Wow. Yeah, definitely early. Before the Illuminati mastermind, for sure, that Manny had started. I think I was around end of 2015 or so. Okay.

Now, you know, interesting enough, you know, people know how I was a consultant for Amazon sellers before you were, I think my last client before I joined Helium 10, like it was probably just like a few weeks before I joined. It was at least max two weeks. We were talking about that. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I flew out there to your place and did some training. I just remember like you're set up there at your warehouse. Like you had like these flat screens around the office that had like KPIs like all over the place, like I guess tied to your Amazon account. So just in general, why did you do that? And then what nowadays, you know, things have changed a little bit, but like what...

kind of thing should sellers be monitoring? And should it be something that, you know, like, you know, I actually have a screen up that you're, you're not just, oh, let me sign into Helium 10, you know, once a day or something to look, but like, what kind of things should people be watching almost throughout the day? Like you were doing knowing your numbers. Okay. Is critically important.

Even more so now, because when you're making 40% margins, you can afford to be sloppy. When you're making mid-teens margins, if you're lucky, you can't be sloppy. You need to know your numbers. And advertising...

is such a significant component of cost today. It was part of it back then, but less so. So you can look at profit more real time. Now you need to do it kind of the next day after you can retrieve the ad spend data and attributed sales, et cetera. But whatever software it is, the key is you got to know your numbers and...

you know, the old, you know, profit is what's important. And I like, I like looking at profit, not just at the ASIN level, but at the sub niche and then the niche level. 2021 was your best year, you said, but then here at Amazon Accelerate, you kind of inferred that everything sometime in the last few years just kind of came crashing down. And so this part, I don't know too much detail about. So, so let, let me know and let the audience know what happened. Yeah, it was pandemic related. Remember I said my big categories, gallon glass jars, white paper bags, you know,

I had been making them in China when the 25% tariffs came in place, whenever that was, 2017, 2018, something like that. I actually moved production of those bags to Colombia.

South America, not South Carolina. And at the peak, I was moving 540 high cubes a month from Columbia into the U.S. I was running it through my warehouse first and then a 3PL. This is way before AWD or anything. You know, I could run containers directly in because you got one inbound location. That doesn't happen anymore.

Um, but what we started seeing in February of 21, so it was my best year and it ended up being my worst year to January and March were both million dollar sales months for me. And then I kind of finished the year at 10 million. Um, but we started getting some customer complaints in February. Hey, these bags are sticking together. Um, and we said, yeah, they, you know, there's a little bit of glue, but you pull it apart. It's fine. Um,

And we had some customers send us some pictures and they were kind of stuck together like a big wad of bags, too much glue. And, uh,

I'm sharing this as an example of how you have to pay attention to quality and have systems underpinning what you're doing in your company. Because if you're just dancing and zigging and zagging, even with a simple product like a paper bag, it can kill you like it killed me. So was this the first order at the new factory? No, no, no. Or had they already done some and did it right? Yeah, yeah. This...

They had been making the product for at least three years. So I'll cut to the chase. What we found later in 2021 was the paper bag production line, because of pandemic restrictions, you could only have a certain number of people in the workspace. The factory owner decided to leave the production workers and pulled the quality folks off the line. Oh, wow.

The glue machine went out of whack and put too much glue on. So we'd have a lot of, we were selling a hundred, a hundred count boxes, have a lot of 10 bags that just stuck together. You couldn't separate them without tearing the paper. Wow. So as February wore on into March and April, finally May things blew up. And I was like, cause you know, we started getting a bunch of one stars and, and I was like, we need to, cause we were doing,

Well, March of 2021, we did $600,000 just in paperbacks. I was like, we need to protect this listing. So I did a stop sale, inventory removal, brought them all back to my warehouse and the 3PL, was out of stock for 10 weeks, came back into stock, sold through that, was out of stock for another couple of weeks, came back into stock. Everybody's been through that. This is now into August, September. Long and short, we were never able to regain sales rank.

We had 75% market share of this size bag in the 100 count in white. And the monthly market was around... Don't quote me on my math here, but it was like three quarters of a million dollars a month in this one type of product. We had 600 grand in March. Yeah. So... Were you able to get money back from the factory at all? Because they could clearly see it was their fault. Yeah, not really. I lost...

probably about quarter million, 300,000 in direct expenses. I got 50 grand back from them. But here's the problem. And this is kind of the other underpinning as lessons learned.

I was highly over leveraged Amazon lending. Thank you very much. My rule of thumb now is if you need more than half of the offer from Amazon lending, if they're even still doing it, I think they're a little bit. If you need more than half the offer, you shouldn't take them on because you need, you've got other financial problems. Yeah. And that's what I got into. I,

I was over leveraged. So then they, because they, they're taking once a month, they're, they're taking money from your, you know, like what you should have been selling. Right. Uh, and then, so what, like you were, there was no, like what happens then when it's time to get a debit and you haven't gotten any sales in that month, they just pull it from your bank or what? Uh, yes, they do. Yep. And, um,

At that time, the Amazon note was not that large, but because for essentially three to four months, I didn't have significant revenue coming in generating cash. I had bills to pay. I had inventory to pay for. I started increasing my borrowing, borrowing more from Amazon lending, and it just became a self-fulfilling flywheel. Some flywheels are good. Rank begets sales begets rank. Yeah.

Debt begets cash to pay suppliers begets more. Debt is not a good flywheel. And it just kept spiraling for the next 18 months. And the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2022, I filed Chapter 7. All of your brands? Was that all in one corporation? Yeah, it was all in one LLC. Okay.

So then what happened to your brands? Like the shampoo and then this one, did somebody buy it or did it just disappear from the face of the earth? So I learned a lot about Chapter 7. So for those of you that don't know, bankruptcy, Chapter 11 is when you can restructure. Chapter 7 is you throw the keys to the trustee and walk away. So I lost $1.2 million. My investor partner lost $2.5 million. We threw...

$2.5 million worth of inventory into the dumpster, literally. What was it, Amazon? What was that FBA Amazon took? They continued to sell. They kept the money, all the money. But because of the way we- Well, why did you throw the other stuff? Did you have to throw it away? Or why would you throw it away if it was good inventory? So once the owners of the company, the members, once the company files Chapter 7, we lose title to the assets of the company. Okay? So we didn't own the inventory anymore.

The three PLs owned it. What was in our warehouse, there's a warehouse lien on it, et cetera. So I learned all about this stuff a couple of years ago. But back to the trademarks and the brands, because of the way my investor partner, very well experienced, I worked for him for 15 years in the corporate world. He's my second mentor in the career. He's very clever. The way we structured our financing for the company,

was through a debt. We had another entity that debt funded the operating company. And that entity was able to foreclose on the intangible assets, which is the intellectual property, which is the only asset that's Amazon Lendings, UCC1, doesn't include the intangible assets. So we foreclosed, captured the trademarks, and now I'm actually licensing the ASINs.

Oh, so some of those ASINs still are on Amazon? Yeah, not the shampoos, but some of the other products are. They're still out there. It's a fraction of what it was because essentially it was out of stock for six to nine months. In a nutshell, your personal Amazon sales went to zero because of this. Yeah. And I haven't logged into the seller account in a year and a half. Yeah.

So how does the licensing work then? So we convey the trademarks to my new company, my single member LLC that I have, and I license them to friends that I know. And on brand registry, my company is the rights owner. I'm sorry, the rights owner and the administrator. And then I can license other rights. I just add their seller account on as rights owners. So it's pretty straightforward, actually. So now what happens?

Is that your only income or are you doing other endeavors these days? So if I ever write a book, which maybe I will someday, I think AI might help now eventually because AI can help with a lot of stuff. If I ever write a book, it's going to be called Million Dollar Mistakes or something along those lines. Mission in life is a little too grandiose, but...

I'm on a path to help other people avoid simple mistakes that I made, not knowing your numbers, not having the right people in place, not having the right tech in place. And I, I, I implement a net suite, spend a hundred grand in implementation, 12 grand a month. I need to suffer. No, you don't. So, you know, kind of my, what I'm doing is helping friends, uh,

You know, I'm not a big influencer like you. I don't have an audience and a network and a guy working for me in Lahore who can go take selfies with you. But I worked, you know, help them out that aggregator part time right away. And now I'm working with a very small handful of people.

close friends and people I bump into at Accelerate. I was at another conference in Orlando a week and a half ago. I like small networking conferences. I took away two, or there's two takeaways that you would do differently, obviously, is hey, you got to have checks for the checks. Maybe you did set up a QA, but you got to watch your factory a little bit more to make sure that they're keeping up their end of the bargain is one. Then you also mentioned about not

uh you know not trying to take on more uh debt than you really need to what other are those pretty much that the main things that that led to the demise of of your yeah there's conglomeration there or is there some more takeaways there's probably another takeaway there um other people have said this fail quickly so in the context of a product if there's something wrong with it

Get out of it. And if I had hindsight, I should have done two things. You know, I'll never know the right answer. I should have just tried to sell through it. But that's not who I am. I was trying to protect the consumer, getting bad product, et cetera. I wouldn't have wanted to sell through it. But what I should have done was take a much harder line with the supplier and said, I'm not paying you another penny until you come pick up this inventory and fix it. Fail quickly.

Even if it's a product, it's your number one product. You've been now in the Amazon space for 10 years or a little bit more. Obviously, there's new fees and Seller Central is different and new AI things. But out of all the things that have changed over the last few years, what are the biggest differences where if you still were...

you know, running your own accounts where you take a look and like, man, I would have to completely redo the way I launched. I would have to redo the way, I mean, you mentioned how you might not have done your own warehouse, you know, might do AWD or something now, but what are some of those big changes over the last 10 years? What are the biggest ones for you? The biggest is what pretty much everybody else is saying, which is you need a moat around your product. The challenge is moats are, the drawbridge goes down pretty quickly to go across the moat now.

There's a lot of copycats quickly, even, even on coffin shelf, you know, it's a minuscule market and there's 25 competitors on coffin shelf. Um, I would also figure out, you know, what I was trying to do. And I even use this in that fishbowl, this example, I wanted to be the Procter and Gamble of the online world. In other words, category ambivalent, multiple brands selling the same thing, essentially, um,

That's very, very, very difficult to do. And I think it's going to get even more difficult to do. Having something unique. And one of the guys in our, in a mastermind group, one of the ones I was talking about, he actually exited in 2019. I don't know what the number is. It was very comfortable to one of the aggregators. And his shtick is,

Finding unique products that go along with market leaders. So he had accessories for grills and coolers, stuff like that. So find a niche product, find something. And that's getting really, really hard to do. Now, the other thing is you can create your own niche now with influencers.

I'm not an expert on that. There are some that are, but I think it needs to be real and genuine. You just can't game the TikTok algorithm because it's going to get smarter and smarter and smarter. So you need an honest to goodness good pro.

And somebody was asking me, what was my big takeaway from Accelerate? And for me, it was, holy crap, look at all this AI stuff they're doing. Of course, not too much of it has shipped yet. That which has shipped isn't in its prime yet. But that's obviously the trajectory of

You know, take Rufus, for example. Product discovery is going to be totally different five years from now than, you know, oh, remember those old days when you had to rank for search terms? Yeah.

Maybe it's not five years, maybe it's seven, but it's, yeah, it's changing. Yeah.

If I'm just thinking as a buyer, like to me, there is nothing that can or will replace the traditional way to search for product. But like if I'm searching for a coffin shelf,

I do not want to have a conversation with the AI. I'm going to search the search term coffin shelf. And I'm going to look now. So to me, the new AI stuff is more like two things. It's the before shopping and the, after you find a product face, like, like the before shopping as in, I feel like Amazon is kind of like trying to be Google, you know, like usually you Google stuff before,

Like, hey, what's the best spooky gift to give to, you know, gothic loved ones, right? And then that's where you get the coffin. Now, I like, oh, it's a coffin shelf. Now, let me type in coffin shelf to Amazon. But now, I almost feel that it's like, no, maybe you can do the discovery phase where you're just browsing and trying to figure stuff out on Amazon and skip the whole Google thing. And then after you do find a product...

then to me the benefit of AI is, okay, well, if they ever fix it and have it stop hallucinating, where I could just, instead of having to read all the reviews as a consumer, I could just get some summaries and things. But it's going to be fascinating because I just can't imagine a world, though, where...

If I already know I want a coffin shelf where I'm not going to go and type in coffin shelf to, you know, to, to a searcher, like that's two words, two or two little things with my thumb I'm doing as opposed to having to try and have a whole conversation with an AI. But yeah, it's definitely interesting, you know, to, to, to imagine where we're going to be in five years. I mean, 10 years ago, you probably never would have thought the things that are going on Amazon now where would be the case. I want to unpack something you said there. The key is, you know, you want a coffin shelf.

That's where Rufus or the future embodiment of whatever it becomes discoverability. You don't know that's what you want. This is my need. I want to feel spooky decorations for whatever. And Oh, coffin shell. That makes sense. Yeah. But here's the other big thing that we're all kind of, you know, we're serious sellers, right? Oh, there you go.

We lose sight that the masses are not nearly as advanced as we are, both in Amazon and also product discovery and everything we're talking about here. One of my friend's companies, they've got an Amazon business, but they have a second business, which is actually really cool. It's old school selling to bricks and mortar resellers. And they're growing by leaps and bounds. And we get phone calls at least weekly. Can I just mail you a check?

So the disparity in skill sets across the population of the United States is pretty huge.

You've got people discovering products with Rufus on the app and you got people mailing paper checks. And yeah, who knows? I don't think it's ever going to be completely breached. There's always going to be gaps in the market. All right. Now, before I get into my last question today, real quick, if people want to reach out to you, find out more about your story or maybe a publisher out there wants to publish your memoir, your book you talked about, Million Dollar Mistakes, how can they find you on the interwebs out there? So if I get a book deal off of this, do I have to give you an affiliate commission?

I think so. I think so. Okay. Your audience heard it. So I actually have a very simple URL, easy to remember, callbrian.vip. And it goes right into a page on my website specifically for, hey, I'm not sure what I want, but this Brian guy sounds interesting. He told me how he lost $1.2 million. He's not trying to hide it. And he wants to help people not do the same thing.

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

Right now, my favorite Helium 10 tool is Market Tracker 360. I have a history with market tracking and keyword based and what you've built out. That's the first market tracker thing. Market Tracker 360 is that on steroids. I talked to my friends with the Amazon business. We're spending a crap ton of money tracking, I think, seven or eight markets. So it's not a lot of money, but it's what we need.

It's to a certain degree, Amazon is a zero-sum game. Not in everything, but on some things it is. Where the only way you're going to grow your revenue and profit is if you grow market share. One of the significant contributors to growing market share is knowing what your market share is. And if sales went down, yeah, you can track it a little bit with BSR. Say sales went down, but BSR didn't, so we probably maintain market share. Market Tracker 360 lets you dial that in.

As long as you got the filters and everything set right. And something that Helium 10 can make for you to make your life or your client's life easier? So one thing I just touched on a little bit, brainstorm the filters and how they're used into the niche, sub-niche or category, sub-category, pick your words. Because we're using the market as the category and then we have saved filters for the sub-categories. Okay.

Some of it works sometimes. It's a little clunky sometimes. But here's the idea, which flows out of Market Tracker 360. Weighted average selling price.

In other words, buy units sold, weight the average selling price. Don't take a pure linear average. There's another component to that, though, that needs to be connected together somehow. And that is, this is my competitor, but are they a direct competitor or are they a functional equivalent? And what's the unit count? So there's some brainstorming with some smarter people than you and I to figure out how to do that. Yep.

I started building this out two years ago in NetSuite, and I was able to detect within hours major competitors, but also non-major competitors and say, we're going to wait and watch this for a little bit. So we were tracking market growth.

average selling price, weighted average selling price. That would be a pretty cool feature. All right. Well, I'll look into that. All right. Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us after six years. Better late than never. I'd love to reach out to you maybe now that you're a Serious Sellers podcast veteran, maybe in a year or two and see what you've been up to and catch up. Sounds good. Awesome.