#409 – Balancing Life & Biz: Surviving a Stroke & Scaling Amazon Brands with Adam Heist
Adam Heist, famously known as Adam Runquist, shares his extraordinary journey from the corporate energy sector to becoming a top-tier Amazon seller. Discover how Adam’s expertise in mergers and acquisitions led him to identify the untapped potential of physical products, eventually leading to the creation and a 7-figure exit of his own Amazon brand. We’ll also hear about his adventurous travels in Bali, insights into the transformative impact of branding and AI on Amazon sellers, and his continued ventures managing multiple brands and a thriving YouTube channel.
Join us as Adam opens up about the challenges of content creation, balancing a high-demand executive job while running multiple Amazon brands, and the strategic decision to transition from a corporate career to full-time entrepreneurship. He dives into the emotional and financial turbulence he faced, including a life-changing stroke recovery, and how these experiences have shaped his approach to business and life. From navigating divorce to leveraging affiliate marketing and online courses, Adam’s story is a testament to resilience and adaptability.
Finally, explore the intricate world of Amazon selling with a focus on AI-driven strategies, the necessity of building robust business teams, and the importance of personalized organic rankings. Adam provides practical advice on creating resilient operations, leveraging Filipino talent for scaling, and the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce. Get ready to be inspired by Adam’s invaluable lessons on staying ahead in the competitive market, the power of personal reinvention, and the future of Amazon selling.
In episode 409 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Adam discuss:
- 00:00 – Amazon-Seller Journey With Adam Heist
- 00:30 – Is It Adam Heist Or Adam Adam Runquist??
- 06:52 – Entrepreneurship, Life Change, and Reflection
- 16:30 – Van Life Experience in Australia
- 17:37 – Stroke Recovery and Unexpected Setback
- 22:36 – Building a Resilient Business Team
- 23:46 – Lesson on Business Operations Independence
- 26:55 – Business Operations Supply Chain Management
- 29:13 – Business Building and Content Creation
- 32:59 – Business Growth Through Investments and Learning
- 38:19 – Ethics in Amazon Agency Industry
- 38:35 – Expanding Perspectives for Amazon Sellers
- 45:51 – Future of Amazon Selling With AI
- 46:50 – Personal Growth and Business Success
- 49:39 – Future of Keyword Targeting on Amazon
- 53:36 – Future of Amazon Organic Ranking
- 55:32 – Preparing for E-Commerce Success
- 59:26 – Kevin King’s Words Of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 409 of the AM/PM podcast. This week, my guest is Adam Heist. Adam has been around this game for he’s an OG, been around doing it quite some time. Did it on the side working for another company, ended up selling one of his brands for seven figures during COVID and still has several brands that he’s running now he’s got a big YouTube channel. He’s also a Billion Dollar Dream 100 member. I think you’re gonna really like this episode. He talks about a pretty scary situation that happened when he was traveling the world when he’s over in Bali as well, and how that’s affected some things, as well as his thoughts on where we’re going with Branding, AI and everything that you’re gonna need to be changing as an Amazon seller. Very insightful episode that you can really enjoy it. Enjoy this episode with Mr Heist.
Kevin King:
Look who we have on the AM/PM podcast, Mr. Adam, is it Heist or Runquist or Smith or Jones? What is this Adam? What?
Adam:
Man, so I guess my public facing name is Adam Heist. That’s what I started my YouTube channel, as at the time I actually had an executive day job and it’s still kind of like this. But certainly back then, when I launched my channel, there was a lot of Facebook stuff in the community. I’m like you know what? I don’t want people DMing me, I don’t want people looking me up. So I’m like I’ll come up with a more off-the-tongue, friendly name for YouTube and I’ll keep my real identity behind the scenes. But at some point it just became a fool’s errand and they’re both so my name’s Adam Runquist, YouTube channel is Adam Heist, so some people know me as either or, but they’re interchangeable at this point.
Kevin King:
I was going to say it’s like damn. I mean because on the Billion Dollar Dream 100, we have it as Adam Heist and I’m like, shoot, do I have to go and change everything again to Runquist?
Adam:
If you want to look at my content, Heist. If you want me on LinkedIn, it’s Runquist and you can call me anything under the sun. I’ve heard it all, so it’s all good.
Kevin King:
So before you got into this game you said you worked, you were doing corporate. What were you doing before you got into this whole e-commerce Amazon game?
Adam:
Yeah, I kind of came in kind of e-com entrepreneurship kind of through the back door. So I spent the majority of my career, 10 years plus, in the energy industry actually. So I spent I was born and raised in Canada. I moved down to Houston and I was working for a large fortune 300 energy company called NRG, so basically deregulated electricity, but it’s popular in a lot of like 13 of the US states are deregulated. So I was in that world for a long time. Funny enough, I actually kind of did like a rollup of electricity companies. So one of my roles was basically M and A. I would go scout out, you know, other retail energy providers in Texas that were smaller. We’d buy them, we’d integrate them into our books. So I did that for a couple of years and then one of the acquisitions we did was actually a physical products brand out of Utah called Goal Zero. So we acquired them and I was going back and forth between Houston and there.
Kevin King:
Physical products. Brand for the energy company?
Adam:
Yeah, so they did. Well, the whole idea was no one gives a crap about their electricity bill, you just pay it. It’s like a water bill. People have pretty poor customer satisfaction. So we wanted we did a thing with nest thermostats when they came out, way back when. So the guy that was part of the iPod team and Apple started Nest. They’ve since been sold to Google for a whack load of money. But when that thermo smart thermostat came out, we basically bundled it with an electricity plan. So if you bought a two-year electricity contract you’d get a free Nest thermostat. And I wouldn’t say customers loved us, but they didn’t hate us. It was like kind of a coup. I think we sold like 70,000 of them, those plans, that first year. So in the exact, you’re like you know what. There’s something here with this physical, visceral product. Let’s go find a company to buy. So Go Zero did a lot of portable batteries, portable, solar, a lot of stuff for the outdoors. But the concept was that you could take the outlet with you, right, and so that kind of immersed me into the world that I ultimately found myself in with Amazon. My first three weeks on that job was in China. We had about 20 factories, started to understand the Amazon e-commerce side, which was a push for us with that brand at the time. And then I kind of had a philosophical moment one Friday where I’m like, why am I not doing this for myself? I understand China, I’ve got some money to put this. Let’s kind of see if we can make a go. And so, yeah, I started my first Amazon brand on my own and then ultimately, two years later, sold that and was able to say buy to corporate and a lot of stuff in between.
Kevin King:
So energy was actually getting products and then selling them on Amazon.
Adam:
Not the corporate entity, so basically what it was. Once we acquired Goal Zero, they were predominantly retail, so they were a lot of Costco, REI, Best Buy, you know they’re a retailer. It was a 1P Amazon business at the time. That was, I think it was doing like three or four million bucks on 1P. But basically we were looking at it and we’re like, look, if we put this to 3P, even if we don’t grow the thing, we’re going to make double the margin. But we ended up scaling that channel and it was probably $20 million by the time it was all said and done. So as the universe of physical retail changed, we obviously made a pretty big push in e-com and so I was kind of part of that project and that’s what really illuminated me to like, holy crap, this could be something here. This is really interesting. And I kind of got my Amazon obsession at that point.
Kevin King:
So what year was this? When was this?
Adam:
That was probably about seven or eight years ago.
Kevin King:
So around 2015, 16, something like that?
Adam:
Yeah, maybe the back end of that and then. So I was doing that for about a year before I decided to push into my own Amazon stuff and then, once I discovered what I wanted to do, it was probably six months to launch. So I’ve personally been selling with my own brands on Amazon for about five years, but kind of been in the Amazon scene for about seven a couple of those, obviously, with that company that I was part of.
Kevin King:
Because I think I first met you I think I saw you speak at like a capitalism.com conference or something like that.
Adam:
My first conference was just at the end of COVID with Dima, one of his Rise conferences in Orlando.
Kevin King:
That’s where it was. Okay, I think that’s probably where I saw you speak then. It was in Austin, it was in Austin.
Adam:
Yeah, there was another one in Austin too. Yeah for sure.
Kevin King:
That’s where, I think, I first heard about you, and then you exploded with your YouTube channel. So when did you start the actual YouTube channel?
Adam:
That was basically when COVID kicked off. So I think I was probably about a year into building my brand and, like many of us, man, I learned a ton from YouTube on kind of honing, my Amazon craft. But I was sitting there, bored, you know, couldn’t go to dinner, couldn’t do a lot of things I did. I was kind of bored. I’m like you know what? Let’s just I feel like I’ve got a perspective on this and I kind of again come from a more professional background, so a little bit less flash and dash but a little bit more, I guess, professional pragmatic. So I’m like I’m going to do a video a week for a year and see if I like it and see where it goes, and so it was kind of a COVID boredom project. So it would have been that year that I did it, so probably about three years ago.
Kevin King:
Were you trying to build an audience there, or were you just throwing stuff out and some of it stuck and it just kind of grew? Or were you like, okay, I need to make sure I have my thumbnails like this, I need to make sure I have a catchy title? Were you doing research on that kind of stuff? Or were you just like I’m just going to pump out some stuff and see what happens? Or were you actually trying to, you do it with a strategy to grow an audience?
Adam:
Yeah, the thesis on that, and I’ve never really cared about analytics. I mean, like the best of us will see how many views stuff got and all the rest of it, and I’ll play the stupid thumbnail game where you do the weird face and stuff. But I’m not studying and analyzing all that stuff. It just doesn’t interest me, even if it results in less views, less audience. Honestly, it literally was, and whenever I’ve approached things this way in my life, it always tends to work out a lot better. I literally pursued it with very minimal expectations. I feel like if you start something with a definitive outcome, A, you may not get to that outcome and then you’re going to be bummed out, or you get to the outcome and it’s not what you thought it was going to be. So it really was just a let’s see if this is something that I thought it was interesting, I thought it would be fun. Let’s see if we can do something with it. My potential offshoot was because I came from M&A. Ironically enough, my original potential thought was is I would actually buy smaller Amazon brands and then in the midst of that, the aggregator scene went nuts. I’m like I’m not going to go raise $100 million. I got into this to simplify and deduct my life, not to make it more complicated. But my original thesis was, hey, I’ll put out how I build Amazon brands kind of what people would pay for in a course. If I ultimately decide to start buying a small portfolio of businesses, they’ll at least trust me and know me for my content and I’ve got like a lead edge. That was the one like potential. Hey, this could be one angle for it, but honestly I just kind of flicked go and decided to do a video a week and it kind of took on a life of its own, which was kind of a fun way to do it.
Kevin King:
So were you monetizing that at all with anything on the side, or just you’re playing the long game with that?
Adam:
Yeah, I didn’t really monetize. I came over so after I sold my business in June of 21, left my executive day job and I’ve never taken a dollar out of my actual Amazon brands that I built, I’ve just kind of put it all into inventory to grow them and so I’m like, okay, what do I do? I had a pretty good salary at that executive job so I ended up doing a course, probably about a year ish in. But up to that point and I’m kind of out of the course business now, to up to that point it’s basically just affiliate stuff. So if it’s a software I use or something I like, I’ll do a case study on it and, as you know, you’ll get kind of an affiliate commission on that. So that stuff, in terms of the hours that I put into it and the cost that goes into it, it’s probably not the best business model in the world. It’s just something. It’s kind of like my dear diary, right. It’s like my way to share my thoughts with the world and it helps me develop and grow as a person and met a lot of cool people out of it. So, yes, I monetize it, but it hasn’t really been the focus of content.
Kevin King:
So you kept your day job until 20. Did I just hear you correctly until 2021?
Adam:
The first two years of my first Amazon brand I was working a full-time executive day job. About a year into that I started a second brand. So I basically had two Amazon brands executive day job and then I was doing content. So I was a busy beaver there for a while, man. It was kind of no days off for a couple of years until I sold my company.
Kevin King:
You’re moonlighting, working weekends on the Amazon brand and then daytime for your actual, real job.
Adam:
Yeah, I mean, as you know, it’s like if you’re launching products and there’s I call it work in bursts with Amazon business, there’s times where you got to hunker down and put in some hard weeks and months, but for the most part the business is fairly self-sustainable and you can kind of pluck away at it as you need to, so it was never a huge time drain. And then Sundays I would shoot content, um. But yeah, it was definitely nice to leave the day job. I’ve it’s freed up a ton of time for me and uh, give me a little bit more perspective to uh to do what I want to do, which is good.
Kevin King:
What category were you in on those first products?
Adam:
Yeah, so the one that I exited was HomeGoods, so we did a lot of blankets.
Kevin King:
Did you give that to an aggregator or to just a private person?
Adam:
Yeah, probably about three months from the top of the market. I exited June 2021 to an aggregator, so that one’s HomeGoods and then the majority of my other businesses have been in kind of the sports and outdoors category for the most part.
Kevin King:
So I think I heard something that you so you exited close to the top, like you just said, but you ended up losing a significant portion of that because something else that happened, right. It’s like a double-edged sword. They’re like yay, oh wait.
Adam:
Yeah. The long and short of that is is that divorces can be expensive, Kevin. So, yes.
Kevin King:
Oh, yeah, it’s like all right, I did all this work and okay, well, at least you got you know you’re at the high end of the multiple. It could have been worse.
Adam:
A hundred percent man. Everything in life happens for a reason, the good and the bad, so you just got to roll with it. It’s part of life. I was yeah, it’s all good.
Kevin King:
Yep, I just went through a divorce myself, just got finalized a few months ago. So I know, I know, I know that feeling. Luckily knock. Well, I don’t have to knock on wood anymore. It’s done, it’s decreased now, but I got out in much better, much better than I think you did.
Adam:
Yeah, it is what it is.
Kevin King:
It didn’t cost me, uh. And then it cost me, uh, a whole, a whole lot, uh, fortunately, uh, so uh that that that it could have been a lot worse, for sure.
Adam:
Yeah.
Kevin King:
Uh, but yeah, that’s, that’s part of life. And so then I heard then, then you did a, you made a transition. Then I know you’re we’ll talk about the other brand you’re working on right now but you, when this big life moment had, you sold one brand, you were doing the content you went through a personal stage in your personal life and you’re like, okay, screw this stuff. And you sold, basically, gave or sold basically your entire life’s possessions or something, and said, I’m hitting the road, what led you to that decision? You’re like I’m just going to travel and what led you to that decision?
I know I think Vanessa was telling me the other day, like she’s got a was it a paddleboard or a snowboard? Or she’s got something that you gave to her or something. I was like she’s like, yeah, he was just giving stuff away and I remember you posting on uh, posting a shot, uh on social media of like a storage unit or something. It was like it was a small one. It’s like this is all I have left from a I’m exaggerating here from a 4,000 square foot house. This is it, this is my last little things, and so walk me through that.
Adam:
Yeah, it’s been a trip man. The last couple of years have been heavy in good ways and bad ways. So basically sold the company in June. And again, this is something that I’ve been working for for years and kind of wanted to have happen. Right, I wanted the liberation of being free, which is, I think, why a lot of us do this. I mean, money is not necessarily the end outcome of it, it’s the freedom that we’re looking for. So I sold the company and it felt amazing. Right, you get a seven-figure wire in your account, you look at it, it’s pretty freaking surreal and it feels amazing. But then it was like a day or two.
Kevin King:
You were scared at that moment. You were scared. No, I better go draw some of this out there. What if it disappears? What if I have to move some of this around? What if someone gets my password on my computer?
Adam:
It was scary until the wire came because it was like, is this thing going to happen? It’s like a 30-day window when anything could happen, right, and we had mirrors and the mirrors got pulled because of defect. Anyway, I was just happy to see the money count. I wasn’t calculating about risk at that point, but it felt amazing, right. It was like this life moment I’ve been envisioning and. But then, like two days later it was just kind of like oh, that’s kind of it okay, like it felt good and I’m proud of it. But it was like kind of uh, okay.
Kevin King:
What do you do now?
Adam:
Yeah, and then I’ve always found it like I’ve always wanted uh, there’s a 997.2 for people that are car guys. It’s a era of the Porsches, where it’s like the last famous German engine designer. So I went out and bought a Porsche GT3 my favorite year and it was the same kind of thing. It was amazing, looked at it in the garage for about a week, felt really cool when I drove it, and then after a while it was just like this thing in my garage and so that had happened. And then I had a really successful course, launch, made more money than I thought I’d ever make on that and still kind of empty right. And so I had these it was kind of this polar opposites of this amazing life experience that I’ve kind of wanted to unlock and achieve getting there and then realizing it wasn’t what I thought it was and having the opposite end and then had the personal life changes with divorce, etcetera. But basically I got to a point where I realized that it’s the moments, experiences, relationships with people I care about, like that’s really what. And building things is cool too. Like I love building businesses. It’s super fulfilling if you’re aligned with it. Like all those things are what it’s all about. The physical stuff and the possession stuff ended up just weighing me down and so I was like you know what? I lived in Park City for six years. Amazing ski, mountain bike town, had an amazing time there. I’m like you know, I’m just going to go see what the world has to offer. So, yeah, it took me about four months. The first wave was I just pinged my friends. I said, hey, you guys get first grabs on stuff. Uh, so I did like a layer of giving stuff away to friends. It was actually a stand-up paddleboard that Vanessa got. Then I sold the stuff that was of value, um, and then the rest of it I basically gave away. So I kind of whittled down my possessions down to a small storage unit and then went and toured Australia in a van for three months and they’ve technically been homeless ever since October. So just kind of heading out in the world and experiencing things and trying to redefine kind of what matters outside of physical possessions.
Kevin King:
So how was that? Living in a van, going from a house and going from having all the modern days of life to actually sleeping in a camper van and traveling around. Was it cool for a while and it’s like, okay, I need actually a good shower, I need a good bed or whatever. How did you mix that up or what was your strategy on that?
Adam:
Yeah. So I basically wanted to go. I was speaking at the event in Australia and then I’m like I’m all the way over here. It was funny when I graduated college I almost went there to be a bartender. I ended up going to Texas instead. But I’m like I’ve always wanted to experience Australia and I’ve got the freedom to be able to do this. So in some ways it was awesome because I had you have a very small footprint right and I was basically living in board shorts and flip flops. So simple wardrobe, small suitcase, the air it’s so small you can’t really make a mess. It’s like pretty tidy. So the simpleness of it was simplicity of it was amazing. But yeah, after about I spent six weeks total in the van. I would definitely say that’s more than enough for me to check that box. I definitely couldn’t live in a van. You know there’s sand everywhere, it’s warm laundry. Where are you going to park? So there’s some other things that are a pain in the butt too. I’m glad I did it, but I definitely couldn’t be a full-time van lifer. I think I’m more of a spend a week in advance probably enough.
Kevin King:
And you did Australia. Then you hopped over to New Zealand too, right?
Adam:
No, I did Australia. I was going to go to New Zealand, Um, so yeah. So this is maybe we can get into this curve ball. So I went mountain biking in Tasmania.
Kevin King:
Which is cool. That’s an island. For those of you who don’t know, that’s an island off the coast of Australia, off the Southeast coast, which is a really cool place. They have like the old Alcatraz is there and like they have a whole bunch of cool stuff there. People know it for the Tasmanian devil. Yeah, it’s a little animal but it’s a very mountainous, really cool place.
Adam:
Yeah, really cool, famous for wine. And then actually why I went there. There’s a town called Derby that used to be an old mining town. Mining went away and they basically converted it to effectively a mountain bike village. So I went mountain bike for a couple days, ended up kind of tweaking my neck build like I kind of couldn’t turn it. So I flew back to Melbourne, spent five days there, flew over to Perth and my battle plan was to go to Bali for a month and kind of do monk mode, do a hardcore month of work there. It’s going to go to the Philippines for a couple months, where my team is based and kind of strategize the year with them. But because my neck was still bugging me, I’ve in Perth, I basically got a..
Kevin King:
Tweak this on the bike, or?
Adam:
Yeah, I just think, or just I think it was on the bike. You know I just hadn’t been on a bike for a while. My first day I rode like three and a half hours. Second day was probably two and a half hours. Just a lot of time in the saddle on the bike and I think it just had a backpack on whatever rental bike. Ended up tweaking my neck. I’m like you know what I’m about to kind of head to second world Asia. I better get this looked at while I’m in Australia. So I ended up going to a chiropractor, got a neck adjustment.
Kevin King:
This was in Perth?
Adam:
This was in Perth. Yeah and then the next day I flew out to Bali. Uh, you know, from the airport it was about a 90 minute drive to the, to the villa I was staying at, kind of started feeling vertigo in the car, a little bit weird, got out of the cab and it basically felt like somebody shoved me left, like I couldn’t walk. Um. The long story, short of it is, I ended up having a stroke my first night in Bali and I spent eight days in the hospital there, a week recovering, and so all of my. You know my plan was to go all around Asia, come back to the US in the spring, so I kind of cut that plan short. I ended up having to fly back to Arizona and just now, maybe about like six to eight weeks ago, kind of have been back to normal a little bit, but I kind of had a couple of months where I was pretty much down and out recovering from my freak stroke that happened, so yeah.
Kevin King:
For those that don’t understand what happens when you have a stroke, I mean they always say, if you feel the tingling in the fingers or you go numb in your you know extremities or something, what, what actually happens when you have a stroke?
Adam:
Yeah. So it kind of depends on where you have the stroke. So you know, if it hits the left or right hemisphere, it doesn’t matter. Is what you know? What blood cells get the, what brain cells get blood cut off from? I mean, it could shut off your motor functions, it could shut off your ability to speak. Mine was in the midbrain, which is basically the part of the brain at the, at the spine, that connects your spine, your brain, and it’s balanced. So for me I it just felt like like I couldn’t coordinate my left side. So that’s how it started. I ended up walking to the villa and I just thought it was a long day traveler. I thought I was carsick, it was a hot day, I was throwing up, um, ended up getting to the villa, jumped in the pool, had a shower and I laid down in bed. I’m like, okay, like it just a long day, a long travel day. And then what happened for me is my left eyelid started getting really heavy. So like I’m like, okay, that’s a little bit weird. And then my left lip started getting numb. So that’s when I’m like it’s either a sign of a heart attack or a stroke, both of which would be surprising for me, but I’m like that’s probably a stroke um.
Kevin King:
You’re fit, you work out, you’re in shape, you’re healthy, I mean. So this is not something you would.
Adam:
Yeah, that’s what was weird about it was it was really a big surprise and I didn’t find out until I came to the US. But apparently and they’ll never really know, I guess but the thesis is that it was the neck adjustment. I guess it happens all the time it cranked the vein and then 24 to 48 hours, clots form where that vein was hammered on the neck adjustment. So it seems like that was the cause. But yeah, in my case it was just balance walking and then the left side of my face and my lip went numb and then it took a bunch of tests to figure it out. I actually didn’t figure out that I actually had a stroke until about a day and a half later, but luckily they put me on blood thinners and all that stuff and all things considered, it could have been a lot worse in terms of outcome.
Kevin King:
So you end up coming back to the US getting checked out, and then you said there was a recovery time. I know you were doing the Seller Sessions podcast and you took some time off. Was it just you just weren’t quite feeling right, or was it just it just took a while to kind of regain all your functions and stuff, or what was the process like there?
Adam:
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that kind of prevented me from working, frankly, because so basically like the first couple days I could barely walk to the bathroom and then it like slowly, slowly gets better. By the time I left Bali a couple weeks after the stroke I was still able to like with my carry on, I was able to walk, I had like the wheelchair at the hospital or at the airport and stuff. So it was just a balancing. I could still move around, I was still mobile, it I was still mobile. It basically felt like I had five beers. It’s effectively being drunk, but you still have your mental faculties, your body feels out of sorts. Then it’s slowly gotten better. I’m probably 80% now. The biggest thing that prevented me from working is I was just so tired. Really, since the stroke I’ve had the best sleeps of my life. I’m getting minimal, maybe nine hours lights out. I’m forgetting that half when I wake up in the morning. So I’ve had amazing sleeps. But when I first got to Arizona I tried to work. I’d pull my laptop open and literally 30 minutes felt like 12 hours of work. It was just like I think the body just knows when it needs to shut down and needs to rebuild. So I would say the biggest part of recovery was just sleeping a lot. I ended up going to physio. So the brain’s actually super cool a thing called neuroplasticity but basically the brain can rebuild itself. So where there was a lack of blood flow, those cells died in my brain. That’s what kind of leaves you with the after physical effects that happen. So physio is all about like trying to make me dizzy, trying to force the signals to go to that dead part of the brain and then the cells that are near it wrap in and rebuild. So that’s how your, your brain and your body can kind of rebuild from that. So literally it was sleeping 12 to 18 hours a day, doing physio three times a week to basically cause myself to be dizzy so that my brain can rebuild. And yeah, just kind of chill, chill, basically had to unplug.
Kevin King:
So you said earlier that you’re planning on on this trip before this happened, planning on hitting the Philippines to visit with your team. So was your team running everything on your businesses and stuff in that meantime? And that kind of says, maybe there’s a big lesson here of the importance of, like you know, so many of us that are entrepreneurs in this Amazon space we are the business or we’re in the business, and instead of working on the business, as that saying goes, you don’t want to work on it, not in it. So had you set everything up in the proper way, based on your background and your experience, that this thing is can run without you, and so that, in a way, was a good thing and maybe a lesson that a lot of people need to learn, because you never know when you’re going to get hit by a bus or when something’s going to happen.
Adam:
The answer to that is yes. The last couple of years specifically, I’ve been really focused on primarily systems and people and getting myself out of it. I didn’t do it for this kind of an emergency situation. I did it because I didn’t want to work as hard, so it was kind of a selfless intention, but I definitely think that I avoid it for too long. I think it’s pretty common for most Amazon entrepreneurs to avoid handing the reins over on certain things or building processes, because, frankly, to hire somebody to build a process it’s a little bit more work at the start than just doing it yourself, and so it’s an easy can to kick down the road. But that was a saving grace for me. I basically, first of all, when I was in Australia traveling, I wasn’t able to be fully attuned to the business just because of the way that the lifestyle was, and then, obviously, in the physical recovery that I had to take after that, without my team I would have been screwed, so they definitely kept the train on the tracks. There’s things like growth right, like the new product stuff that I had in the hopper, some of the strategic growth initiatives, some of the heavier lifting stuff still falls onto me, but in terms of like can you run and maintain the business, can you keep the train on the tracks? Without my team, the Philippines, without the systems that have been built out the last couple years, it would have been a much different, much more stressful situation, for sure.
Kevin King:
And what is this team doing? I mean, you sold in 2021. And then you said you kind of focused on a course for a while that did really good. And then I know you talked about this at BDSS in Puerto Rico in 2023, about this bicycle thing that you’re doing. Is that the business that we’re referring to here, or is it something different?
Adam:
Yeah. So I’ve got a, basically the way that my business is structured now. So I’ve got the oldest, most mature, most successful businesses that sports and outdoors, one that I kind of started in the middle before I sold that other brand so that’s kind of the one that’s, I would say, the most consequential. I’ve got a partnership.
Kevin King:
Like a seven figure Amazon?
Adam:
Yeah, exactly yeah.
Kevin King:
All Amazon or Walmart and other places too.
Adam:
That one’s whatever. I think we do 20 grand on Shopify or something a year, so it’s basically all amazon. That one’s all amazon. I’ve got a bike light business that is all off of Amazon. Uh, I’m partners in an anti-personment business. I’ve got the the kids balance bike. Uh, kids bike accessories business. That is going to be kind of a hybrid. And then I’ve got a pretty meaty consulting thing that I’m with. That’s in the the betting space. That’s a you know mid figure large scale business. So the same team basically works across all of those and it’s very much functional. So probably the biggest part of our business is now is, honestly the operations supply chain piece. It’s not the fun stuff, it’s not the stuff that I like, it’s not why I got into Amazon but frankly it’s probably 70% of the job now is just staying in stock, making sure that we’re optimizing costs, making sure that the transportation logistics is sorted, that we know all the fees. So I’ve got a group that focuses exclusively on that, but it’s across all the businesses. I’ve got a group that provides basically all the daily financial metrics that I care about, like keeping a pulse on the business from a number standpoint. So I wake up every morning to an email and all the stuff that I want to see across all the brands. That’s the same for all the businesses. Paperclip team, that’s across all the businesses. And then everything else is basically contracted out. So we’re actually I’m just now bringing on full-time video graphics people, just because it’s a pretty big push for us in the business, and I think one of the futures of Amazon is a lot about optimizing images and then everything else we contract out man. So if it’s bookkeeping, one-off creative work, if I need any engineering stuff, 3d renderings, all that stuff’s outsourced. So it’s a pretty small but mighty team, but that’s the glory of the business. It’s different products, different logistics, different nuances, but it’s basically the same functions across all of them.
Kevin King:
Were you involved in the hiring of each person on that team? Or did you hire a team leader and then say you go find the people that you need and let them do that, or how involved were you in that setup process? Like you said, taking this step adds more work in the beginning, which a lot of people aren’t willing to do.
Adam:
Yeah, I was super lucky and this is one of the real gems of the YouTube experience. So my first hire was a fan of the YouTube channel from the Philippines and he basically called, email me, said hey, your channel, I’m studying to understand Amazon. Your channel has been a huge help. Are you hiring? And I thought you know what, like somebody that in their free time is interested enough in Amazon and like that had the guts to email, like I just basically had one interview with him and hired him and then he was connected to this, my second hire, and so a lot of it has been kind of organic, I would say, just now, the last six months. Uh, cause we’ve had to. You know, the roadmap of hiring is a little bit more significant and I don’t want to be looking through resumes and doing first round interviews and all the rest of it. Yanni Kosminski, who owns a company called Multiply Me I basically brought them on for most recent hires. So basically you pay them I think it’s $250 set up and then you pay them. I think it’s like a three-month salary once they find you somebody and if it doesn’t work out they’ll find you another one. But they basically go and look at 40, 50 people and whittle it down to four and then you just work on the four. So I’ve been using Multiplyme most recently. But initially it came through just kind of organic, just kind of grew naturally, which was nice. Because, yeah, it’s getting in. I mean, it’s an important part of the business, but it’s kind of like supply chain logistics. It’s not the funnest part, but we opted to use MultiplyMe to help scale.
Kevin King:
Yeah, Multiplyme is good. What about all Philippines? Or do you have people? India, Pakistan, south America or just pretty much all Philippines?
Adam:
Yeah, the majority Philippines. For a period of time I actually had a really strong seven-figure seller that was kind of our team lead on some of the businesses. So I had somebody that was North America for a while. We do have a team in India for the bedsheets business, a really substantial team, but that’s just because that business is based there. The manufacturing is there. But I would say, for the vast majority of sellers you’re going to be looking at, the Philippines is good. There’s some stuff in South America, even Ukraine, for some of the creative work that started to crop up, but we have the majority of our team in the Philippines. Just, language is good, attitude’s good, skill set’s good, English is good and it’s worked out well for us.
Kevin King:
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Kevin King:
So do you hope to sell one or all of these businesses down the road, or are you building them to sell, or are you just enjoying it and just building over lifestyle right now?
Adam:
Yeah, good question. I think first of all you’ve got to enjoy it because, especially the you know, the exit climate certainly shifted a little bit. If you don’t enjoy it and it’s not cash flowing, that you know, it’s probably a not a great sellable business if it’s not cash flowing well, but you do want to have that engine of cash just to make it worth it. But for me, I’m lucky at this point in my life where I can kind of do what I’m aligned with and what I want to do, and I definitely enjoy building these businesses. I definitely want to exit the most mature one. I’d like to see that in the next 18 to 24 months, but I’m not assuming that that’s going to happen. I’m not going to count on that event happening for me. I’m just building a business that I want to run, that has good financial mechanics, that is thriving and growing and that I enjoy building and I plan to sell it in a year or two, but we’ll see what happens. And then the other ones are, honestly, I think my game is kind of like build them and then like sell them every three, four years. I kind of enjoy that I’m not like this. Oh, I’m going to have this company for 20 years and like I’m not that guy that like is never selling I think it’s you make the most most of your money when you actually exit these. As an asset it’s not the best. There’s better ways to build a cash flowing business than physical products. So I do like the build and sell model. So my kind of thought is yeah, I’ll kind of start brands, exit them every three to five years and when it becomes not fun I’ll stop doing it.
Kevin King:
Did you take off that first exit? Did you take any of that money and, like, invested in these other brands to help them, kind of give them a kick in the butt, or did you keep everything separate?
Adam:
I guess, yeah, mainly separate. I think so the most mature business I have now I started before I exited the other business. Most of the businesses I’ve started has been like somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000, so not like a crazy amount of money and then they just over time are able to sustain themselves. So I kind of prefer that where you basically put a, you know I would say, an incremental upfront investment and then you let the growth of the SKUs that win and you let the growth of the business build it up over time. The main thing I did was some of that cash in terms of an investment. You know there’s cap gain stuff in the US you got to figure out. So I did some opportunity zone stuff in real estate. That was the bulk of investment where that money went. But yeah, most of them have been started. I guess ultimately there’s obviously cash in the bank to throw into new businesses. So I guess some of it maybe indirectly came off of that, but for the most part they’ve been started independently and scaled independently.
Kevin King:
So by doing the YouTube channel a lot of times, when you’re actually teaching or explaining things, you actually learn more than actually just being an officer or owner of the company, because you actually have to learn it to explain it and you do a good job. That’s one of the reasons your YouTube channel did well and one of the reasons Danny brought you on Seller Sessions and stuff, because you do a good job on the explaining and the setup and the background and the process and how you got to understand it. What did you learn the most? What do you think you took away the most from that? When you’re really going gung ho on that YouTube channel I know you’re still doing stuff periodically now and I think you’re about to ramp that back up I think you said but what did that teach you?
Adam:
So I think, like a lot of my growth in life and frankly, the last couple of years for sure in business is just like when you step into that discomfort zone, like there’s a point where it’s too uncomfortable, like if it’s stressful and then you’re in a space you’re not supposed to be in, right, but there’s also a space where it’s like I kind of I’m uncomfortable, but I know that I should do this because I know that there’s growth on the other side of this. So I think the biggest thing was just literally turning on the camera. It’s a weird experience, man, like when you hit record I’m sure you know this too when you first got into it it’s like you’re staring into the abyss. You’re like your ego is there where people are going to think you’re self-conscious. You’re like, I think, overcoming that hurdle of getting the own internal locus of confidence to basically step into the unknown and just go into it and not care what the outcome is. I think that was probably the foundational kind of thing. And then a lot of the incremental things that you mentioned, like when you know you’re going to have to If I’m launching a product and I’m already Content creators, think like this. You’re like, okay. Well, this is how I would actually frame this. If I already explained to somebody how I’m going to do this. But when you’re actually doing it and you know that you’re probably going to be sharing a case study on it, you’re going to do a content on it. You actually it’s almost like if your trainer at the gym was watching you do like a certain exercise, like you’re thinking about your form, you know what you should be doing. I should be doing this, I should like, versus if you’re just there on your own and you knew that you could kind of do what you wanted to do. There’s a little bit. You’re a little less thoughtful about what you should be doing. So I definitely think that that consciousness of creating content made me do the right things while I was doing them. That’s kind of change number one which is valuable.
Adam:
And then change number two is when you actually have to think about why did you do something? Why did it work? Why did it not work? When you’re having to explain to somebody and deduce an effort down to, say, a 15 minute video, it makes you better because you have to actually be thinking about why did you? A lot of times we’re unconscious. We’re just out there doing the thing that we do every day in our business. We’re not thinking about why we do it. But if you had to explain to somebody why did you do what you did today, or why did you launch this product, or why did you do this to fix your business, that consciousness and that reverse engineering and evaluation actually makes you a better business operator in my opinion. So I think all of those things probably have certainly made me a better person and human being in terms of growth, and they definitely made me a better operator of Amazon businesses Plus. And you just want to keep a pulse on things. You want to stay sharp. If you’re going to be talking about the stuff, you want to know what you’re talking about. So it’s probably created a pressure and a discipline that I wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Kevin King:
Because you’re one of the few that’s out there, that’s on YouTube and has that presence that’s actually still selling. Most people in my experience and what I see are failed sellers or people. Maybe they exited a business, got lucky, right place, right time, but most people that are teaching Amazon stuff are not actually making any money on Amazon. And so how important do you think? You just kind of said it, but what do you think of this industry that’s popped up around? You know people selling the pickaxes that don’t even know how to dig gold and the people that follow them, and you think that the audiences can see through that, and that’s one of the reasons that your channel did well, because there’s authenticity and there’s like this guy’s actually doing it. Like you just said, you can explain it the reason, not just said I had a gut feeling, this is a good product or whatever. What do you think makes the difference? And so people listening to this, if they’re going to go out there, like you said, you learned a lot off of YouTube, and this other fellow that you hired was learning off of YouTube. How do you know who to listen to and who not to?
Adam:
Yeah, it’s really tricky and it’s, frankly, probably one of the more sad commentaries in our industry. I think it’s a really beautiful industry and I’ve got a lot of my, frankly, lifelong friendships that stem from it and a lot of my friends in life. Like that’s, these are my people, so there’s a lot of you that’s coming out. I think one of the negatives that has come out of it for me is that there is some lack of transparency and some disingenuous elements for sure that are part of it, taking aside the straight up people that are just lying and doing the Lambo thing and all that. I think that that’s actually rarer than people think and it’s a little bit easier to spot. I think where it gets a little tricky is, say, somebody that was selling on Amazon for four years. They never could quite get to the level where they could exit or where they could scale and they’re looking at this like, look, I know a lot about Amazon because I’ve been in my own business, but it’s kind of putter along. It makes more sense for me to start an agency and I can make 700 grand a year at the agency, have a fleet of clients and I know enough of the button pushing to kind of what you need to do. I think that’s much more common, so I don’t think that it’s like deliberate people trying to do nefarious things. I think it’s much more people that, yes, have a level of experience and knowledge with Amazon that exceeds the average person. Yes, they have the capability of applying that skill set into a good DNA brand that could actually help them scale. So I don’t think that it’s actually them doing something wrong.
Adam:
No, that said, I think my litmus test is I like to know that someone’s been through the trenches and is actively in the trenches. In some regard, you can get that in an agency because you’re still in, say, 30 plus accounts and you are actively selling on Amazon. But there’s a big difference between somebody like us that’s thrown down 200 grand on a PO and like, oh, that’s going to really hurt if that doesn’t work out. There’s a big difference between somebody running a launch strategy, pay-per-click, doing product research on that, versus somebody that’s doing with other people’s money. That doesn’t mean that that person A can’t teach people can’t run an Amazon business. You can’t learn from them. But ultimately, if you’re getting in this game as an Amazon seller, you’re stepping into the ring and it’s you stepping into the ring, and so I have found, personally, the best way to grow and scale as an Amazon seller is to take that information from a number of different sources. Trust your gut on which ones you think are factual. The more people that back it up with actual numbers instead of philosophy, I think is really important, and not just the outlier performance accounts that did well in this one circumstance, but ones that have consistently done well over time. But my biggest gems honestly, as much as I’ve learned from stuff in the space is experimenting on my own. A lot of my honestly strategy is I look at what D2C companies do or companies that are off of Amazon do, and I try to test and implement those strategies on Amazon and measure stuff as much as possible and always try to be doing something new and it’s fun, right? It’s like, hey, I have a thesis that this might work, let’s give it a crack, let’s test it for six weeks and see what happens. I think the average seller is going to get way more value personally in terms of growth as well as success on Amazon doing that, than they are consuming information that may or may not come from the context of a situation that’s going to help them, and something that worked for a business a month ago or in a different category may not apply to you anyway. So you really do have to be independent in this game and be thoughtful about pursuing your own strategies and your own ideas, because it’s dangerous for a lot of the things that you mentioned and otherwise to not do it.
Kevin King:
I agree 100% with you. I mean one of the things I think happens to a lot of Amazon sellers they get in this fishbowl and everything is Amazon. They start following the same people and everything. They’re going to only Amazon shows or listening only Amazon webinars, and you got to get out of that. I mean Vanessa and I Vanessa is a good friend of you and I and she and I have gone to a couple of AI conferences that are not Amazon focused or e-commerce focused at all. There’s, no, nobody in this conference talked about a tool to scrape reviews or write your listing. It wasn’t, didn’t exist in this conference. And getting out of that and you see, you know, wait a second this AI that everybody in this Amazon world thinks AI is all about ChatGPT, writing listings and scraping reviews. No, there’s a way bigger thing to it than that. And I go to ClickFunnels. You know Funnel Hacking Live their events. I go, I think, here coming up. This is, you know, airing in late August, early September, in October in Dallas is, I think it’s around the 20th of October. Vanessa and I are going to it and you’re welcome to come too, or anybody else listening is welcome to come. Go High Level. Go. High Level is a competitor of ClickFunnels, which some people say they like it better. But they bring in all these speakers from the Facebook and the internet marketing and all these funnel worlds and I get more. I take more notes and I get more out of those events from actually listening to the speakers. When I go to an Amazon event, listening to the speakers 90% of the time is a waste of my time because I already know that stuff. But there are some good speakers and some good stuff, but most of it’s the networking or that’s where I get the value. But on these it’s the flip. The networking is good, but I actually sit in these things and listen and I take that stuff and like how can I apply that to our industry? And that’s exactly how my newsletter started.
Kevin King:
I went to an AI conference and people were talking about how AI can do all these newsletters now and I was like wait a second. 25 years ago I was doing newsletters for another industry. I have this background. I have a journalism background in high school. Why am I not doing this? I’m not going to use AI. I think AI I’ve been proven right now that software that they’re pitching there to do all this is now defunct because it doesn’t work. You can’t AI cannot do newsletters. It can do some of the homework, but it’s not. You can do them for a while but they’re not going to last. But anyway, that’s what led me down the brainstorming. It’s just the brainstorming. It’s like knock on the head. It’s like, hey, remember this. There’s this get out of this little world that you’re just thinking of and I think that’s super important and so like with BDSS. I know you weren’t able to make the one in Hawaii that we did in May, but next year in Iceland, in April, I’m doing a second event now. So I have BDSS, which is all Amazon focused, which you were in Puerto Rico, so you kind of know how that goes. But I’m adding a second optional event which not everybody can afford to stay for or has the time to, but it’s called Level Up and we just did it in Hawaii and we had people like Perry Belcher speak there, Molly Monahan, Colin Campbell, McCall Jones on attractive character. So it’s all this stuff that’s outside of it’s. There’s no Amazon talks or Amazon century and it’s still like, and people didn’t know what this was. They’re like, Kevin, what’s this level up? I don’t understand it. You’re charging extra three grand to come to this. I don’t know, but enough people trust me that I got it, Kevin, I’ll just go to support you, I’ll just go and after it. They’re all too almost to a tee saying that was the best thing I ever did.
Kevin King:
And if you haven’t yet, make sure you’ve checked out my newsletter, billion-dollar sellers dot com. Every Monday and Thursday a brand new issue comes out, totally free and as well as coming up, I’ve got a couple events coming up in September and October. In October, during Amazon unboxed here in Austin on October. In October, doing Amazon Unboxed here in Austin on October 14th, got a big Halloween party going on. So if you’re in town for Unboxed, make sure you check that out. It’s going to be really, really cool that we’re doing the first night of Unboxed in Amazon Unboxed in Austin. And then in September I have my Market Masters event going on at the mansion here in Austin as well. You can go to BillionDollarSellerSummitcom and check that out.
Adam:
I think, honestly, the way I think about it is is that and this is, I think, much more true I think the average Amazon median seller or whatever I think that the I would say the niche opportunities of having a strategic advantage are kind of gone. You know early, you know four years ago, if you knew enough about SEO keywords, yes, you could actually have a pretty big gap. If, two and a half, three years ago, you’re really good at pay-per-click, yeah, you could be pretty good. I think the reality is that Amazon-centric content, while you still need to know how to work catalog issues, you still need to know the new features that are running out, you got to be aware of what’s happening in the space, but I don’t think that you’re going to get a competitive advantage from Amazon information. I just don’t. I think that the average seller you’re competing against is going to be more sophisticated, more successful. I think everybody’s going to be at that level. The ante is you’ve got to do that stuff, I think, to have an actual competitive advantage. I think that’s where you go outside of Amazon in terms of your knowledge base and you nailed it. I think that’s huge what you did. Most of my growth the last couple of years has had nothing to do with business. It’s been between my ears and in my heart. It’s like I have never successfully scaled a business when I haven’t been right as a human being. And I think that. And the other thing is, even if you do run a successful business, you sell for millions and make millions, whatever else, you’re not going to enjoy it because you’re not going to be right. So I think it starts with getting yourself right, understanding those core themes of what really make you happy as a human being. What’s the human experience? The cool thing is, building a business is a really exciting human experience Knowing enough about Amazon to keep you current and know that you’re not making stupid mistakes, and then experimenting with information outside of it to grow and scale your business, and doing it in an aligned way, because as soon as you’re not aligned, it’s not fun.
Kevin King:
I know you’ve talked about this a lot and the importance now of building brands and not just, like you just said, not looking for these holes in PPC or keywords or whatever, but building a true brand and true something for a true an avatar, a true person, a less style like what you’re doing with the, with the bikes, the bike business and stuff. And then, beyond that, um, all these changes with AI and the way with that, we’ve been gaming the system, so to speak, on on Amazon and manipulating the algorithm in different ways and finding those holes. A lot of that stuff is going to be disappearing, so it’s going to become. Where do you see this going, with both the importance of branding and the impact that AI is going to have on everything we do as an Amazon seller, as an e-commerce seller, everything that we do? Period in this business?
Adam:
Yeah, I think I’ll probably start with AI because, I mean, my thought is I mean again, Amazon’s a search engine, right, it really. It’s always going to be search engines. I don’t want to say that keywords aren’t going to matter, but I don’t think that you selecting the keywords or you putting the keywords in your listing or you doing any of that stuff is going to help you more than it does any other seller. So I think that what AI does, in my opinion, is it genericizes keyword strategy number one. I think a change that’s probably going to be more present is that I don’t think that you’re going to have much of a pay-per-click strategy anymore. I think that in my experience, specifically the last six months, the non-single keyword campaigns which aren’t even single keyword campaigns anymore because Amazon throws more keywords but say your broad campaigns and some of the more algorithmic based campaigns outperform what I do and what our team does, and I think that that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, the ads business makes as much as the retail business now and I think it’s going to flip the other way in the next couple years. So they make so much money from ads, they’re putting so much engineering resources into this. They’re focused so much on Rufus and some of the other backend ways on how they can improve the per dollar spend on people that are searching on Amazon.
Adam:
I think we’re getting to a point in the not too distant future where you got to understand at least what your category is. You got to understand maybe the 8 to 10 keywords that matter, but Amazon’s going to identify those with their systems behind the scenes. Running pay-per-click is basically going to be very much driven by their algorithms, and you know Facebook. Now. You know you go back four or five years ago. You could pick interests. I’m going to target these people in this. Now the Facebook algorithm is so good it’s going to outperform anything you can do manually. I think that’s where we’re going with Amazon. So what that leads me to believe is okay, the ante, the baseline, is everybody’s starting from the same point, which is Amazon’s going to find the keywords, index the keywords and show the organic rankings to the customer types that they think your product is relevant for. You can nudge it in the right direction, but I think it’s kind of a fool’s errand. Pay-per-click is going to kind of run its own. I think it comes down to product development and how you visually represent your product, to understand the psychology of who’s typing in those keywords, and ruthlessly testing what works and what doesn’t from an A-B testing standpoint on creative. So I think that the amount of time that, say, say, we spend on pay-per-click now or launch strategies, all the rest of it, I think that that time is going to be allocated towards product development, understanding the customer and then listing images and listing content. Frankly, I think that’s the game. That’s definitely where our team’s focus has shifted. Supply chain is always going to be a huge part of it. That’s a huge part of the business. But in terms of my mental energy and where I see the puck going, I’m all about listing images and thinking about who am I selling to? How can I develop a product in a way with the cash structure that enables my cash engine to run as a physical products brand? That’s where it’s all at for me. So I see Let me put it this way If you don’t have a full-time 3D render on your team now, you probably will in a year.
Kevin King:
I agree, I agree a hundred percent. I think images are going to be a huge differentiating factor. The people that can nail that, either through the testing or the creative, are going to have a huge, huge, huge advantage, and I think that’s going to be a weakness for a lot of sellers. I think there’s going to be some sellers that maybe are doing $5 million a year right now I’m exaggerating here but almost overnight are going to go to half a million bucks because they’re going to get caught with their pants down on all these changes that are happening and they’re going to be wondering what the hell is going on. Because I agree with you that keywords are still going to be important, what you put in your listing still matters but the whole big picture of reviews and what other people are saying, and the big data that Amazon has for how similar is yours to someone else’s? Then how does that match to this profile of these customers? And then the imagery I mean, the example I always give is something like a beach umbrella. I don’t know, this is a fact, but I think this is where it’s going. If, right now, if I want to rank for a beach umbrella or something that sells on a beach umbrella. I just put a picture of someone with an umbrella walking down the sidewalk is even fine. Here’s the umbrellas in a 3D render and I put in beach umbrella in my title and a few other things and I can probably. With a little bit of magic I can probably rank and sell a bunch on beach umbrella. But in the future I think that if other people are not seeing a picture of someone sitting on the beach in the sand with an umbrella over them blocking out the sun, and that’s not one of your lifestyle pictures, even though beach umbrella is in your title, you may not show up in the first 50 results for beach umbrella.
Kevin King:
You may be buried down. Or the algorithm is not going to think it’s relevant those kinds of little things or just the position of something in a photo, just the positioning of a prop or something I think could be a big sway as well, or the angle of something, and I think that’s something that a lot of people aren’t quite understanding. It sounds like you get it, but a lot of people need to start paying a lot more attention to that creative and that imagery and that avatar, truly knowing your customer and writing to that customer and not necessarily writing to keywords.
Adam:
Yeah, and I think the second layer of that that I suspect is going to happen, and this is probably where I think the light switch moment may happen, when they really push. They’re going to test on 5% of searches but at some point, they’re going to be like, hey, we’re going to make $6 billion more based on what we think is going to happen, based on the test, and they’re going to flip the switch. I think the opportunity, and probably the scary moment, is that somebody searching in Florida, or Kevin who has never bought anything about beach before, I think that the ranking of that umbrella is going to show up differently geographically. Who’s buying it the moment in time they bought it, based on what they’ve looked at the last 10 days, based on what they’ve looked at the last six months, based on where they’ve gone off of Amazon, based on what prime show they’ve watched. All of that is going to basically customize organic rank down to the buyer level. And so if you’ve got an umbrella that has 12,000 reviews and has been around since 2016 and is the cheapest on whatever and you’ve been able to make hay on that at some moment in time, when that slight switch flips and they discover that Kevin usually buys products that are 22% above the lowest price on the page he’s showing my umbrella instead of yours, with 15,000 reviews. That’s going to be a scary moment for a lot of, I would say, incumbents. But where the opportunity lie, and it’s going to create a ton of complexity because you’re not even going to know what your organic rank is, because it’s going to be down to the buyer level, and I think that becomes tricky for a lot of reasons. Where it becomes exciting, though, is if you are thoughtful about who’s buying your product, how it’s being used, how you represent it in the images. Have you actually designed a product for that and you’ve got the margin structure that maybe commands a slight premium on that and lets you pay all the Amazon fees because you know that and you’ve got your logistics tied down, that kind of a seller could be pretty exciting here in a couple of years. So, like anything in Amazon, there’s a scary part. I think there’s an opportunity. It’s going to happen anyway, so you might as well figure out how to get aligned with where things are going, and I think that’s where it’s going as far as I’m concerned.
Kevin King:
What are just a couple of quick words of advice you would give to someone to get prepared for this, what we believe is going to be the shift? What are a couple of things they should start doing now to prepare for this specifically, what would you say?
Adam:
I think the I mean let’s start with existing listings because you know you’ve already given birth to those babies. You may want to make some tweaks in terms of iterations on future products based on feedback, to improve it. I think it starts with getting your house right. I think that you’ve got to really understand the end-to-end fee structure of what your product economics are and it’s probably going to be off of what it has been historically. I think that you’ve got to really sharpen the pencil with your factories and really get payment terms and cost structures and understanding how you’re shipping products, how you’re storing them all the way from China down into getting into an Amazon warehouse. I think that you should spend time studying that for six to eight weeks and really understanding it and right-sizing the elements that are off, and you may need to change some things. I think it starts there, because you got to make sure that the margin structure is right. I think, beyond that, what everybody should be doing is running A-B tests on their images all the time for every single product, and I realized, oh, that sounds scary, I don’t have the time to do that. I’m talking about literally. You can tweak the most minor stuff, run a test for 10 to 14 days and you do incremental gains, maybe you get a 2% improvement on conversion. But if you do that for 52 weeks a year across every single product, I guarantee you you probably have 20% to 30% improvement in your conversion rate alone, which could be worth more money than any pay-per-click strategy any other new product wants you could ever run. So if you’ve got an existing catalog, you’ve got to get the house right with the structure and understanding, logistics and margins, and then you basically just should be running creative tests.
Adam:
I think, in terms of future state stuff, you’ve got to be a lot more aware of who’s buying your product, and this is where it goes back to studying non-Amazon sellers, non-Amazon sellers, non-Amazon sellers. I think this is where you look at. Okay, if I was going to go spend 500 grand launching a product and I was going to be doing it on Instagram and Facebook, I’m going to probably talk to some people. I’m probably going to spend six months developing the product. I’m probably going to get it in people’s hands. I’m probably going to be thoughtful about my photo shoot. I’m probably going to talk to influencers. Take that, it’s not rocket science and do it on Amazon. So I think you just got to put in a little bit more footwork in terms of what a traditional professional business would do on the DDC side and apply that to Amazon for your future efforts.
Kevin King:
Good advice, good advice. Well, Adam, we could sit here and probably talk for forever. We’re already going for an hour here and I think I feel like we’re just getting started, but this has been great. So if people want to learn more or follow you or check out your YouTube or see what you’re up to, what’s the best way for them to follow the Adam?
Adam:
Yeah, just Adam Heist on YouTube is probably the easiest bet, and then that rabbit hole will lead you where it leads you, but that’s a good starting point.
Kevin King:
That’s H-E-I-S-T. So Adam A-D-A-M, then H-E-I-S-T. Awesome, well, I appreciate you coming on today. It’s been great and I’m sure I’ll be seeing you here. You’re coming to where the cool kids live.
Adam:
Yeah, I’m giving Austin a crack this winter, man, so looking forward to connecting there and always a pleasure chatting with you, man, and I appreciate all that you do for the community too. It’s cool to jump on your podcast.
Kevin King:
I appreciate it, man. Thanks again for coming on.
Adam:
Yeah, cheers!
Kevin King:
Oh man, we were just getting rocking there at the end with the good stuff. I hope you really enjoyed this episode with Adam. Lots of really interesting and great actionable stuff that we talked about. Adam’s going to be probably in Iceland at the BDSS event next April. You might see him at some other events around as well, but good stuff. Thanks, Adam, for coming on. We’ll be back again next week with another awesome episode of the AM/PM Podcast. And before I leave you today, here’s a little quote for you, a little inspiration Inspired by Mr. Adam, Whenever you hug somebody, always be the last one to let go. Whenever you hug somebody, always be the last one to let go. See you again next week.
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