#364 – The Power of AI in Transforming E-Commerce and Brands with Jon Derkits

Let’s navigate the intricate landscape of E-commerce with Jon Derkits. Our guest this week is a seasoned expert who’s worked with Amazon, consulted, and launched his own successful Amazon-selling ventures. Wouldn’t you love to hear about his love for globe-trotting experiences, or perhaps learn more about the art of creating raving fans and starting irresistible newsletters? This is your opportunity!

During the course of our chat with John, he breaks down how to find success in the Amazon marketplace, tackling challenges head-on, and provides valuable insights into the business of acquiring small to large Amazon brands. Kevin and Jon also highlight the enormous potential of combining journalism and product selling – a winning strategy for any E-commerce seller on any platform. Get ready to learn how to use newsletters as a powerful marketing tool.

As we wrap up, Jon and Kevin dive into the world of AI and software to craft tailored content for customers, using fascinating examples from building a passionate dog lover community to launching a TikTok brand. They also stressed out the importance of authenticity in branding and flexibility to changes like Amazon’s Project Nile. Our conversation concludes with a discussion about understanding the present in the context of the past and the future. Join us for this knowledge-packed episode and let’s exploring the world of E-commerce, Amazon-selling, and beyond!

In episode 364 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Jon discuss:

00:00 – Exploring E-Commerce and Travel Opportunities
10:44 – Jon’s Backstory
12:08 – Career Journey and Future Plans
21:46 – Build Brand Audience With Email Marketing
25:31 – Amazon Business Acquisitions and Email Marketing
27:00 – $300,000 Website Business With Display Advertising
30:23 – Apple’s Newsletter Performance and Open Rates
32:47 – Building a Passionate Dog Lover Community
37:56 – Building an E-Commerce Tribe and Movement
42:25 – The Importance of Authenticity in Branding
53:04 – Amazon Project Nile and Adapting to Changes
1:04:28 – How To Connect With Jon Dekrits
1:05:17 – Future Episodes And An Upcoming Webinar
1:06:15 – This Week’s Words Of Wisdom From Kevin King

Transcript

Kevin King:

Welcome to episode 364 of the AM/PM Podcast. This week, my guest is John Derkits. John worked for Amazon, he’s worked for an aggregator, he’s sold on his own, he consults and we have a pretty in-depth discussion about everything from travel to starting newsletters he’s got a newsletter of his own to what we think is happening in this space, to building brands and raving fans. It’s a really great discussion. I think you’re gonna get a lot of good value from this. Don’t forget to also sign up for my newsletter. It’s totally free. It’s like a $25,000 mastermind in an email. It’s totally free twice a week, billiondollarsellers.com and, like I discussed in this episode, I’m also doing a webinar on December 1st. Look for some information on that. It’s a free webinar about how to set up a newsletter for your physical products business and do it right. What are the tools, what’s the way to do it, where the mistakes not to make. That’s coming on December 1st, totally free webinar. Enjoy this episode. John Derkits, welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. I’m so excited to have you as a guest on the AM/PM Podcast. How are you doing, man?

Jon:

Kevin, I’m doing great and I’m pumped to be here, and I also can’t help but notice that we both have maps in our background. Yours is a little bigger than mine. I don’t know what the connection is there, but we’re both clearly world travelers and people that study cultures.

Kevin King:

I have a big wall mural that’s like 10 feet across on the wall of the world. You can’t see it. But I have another one on the side that has little pins in it, kind of like the one you have on the right to the right of you that has everywhere I’ve been. I’ve been to 94 countries, so I’ve done a lot of travel and I have another one sitting right up here facing me that’s similar to what you have there. It’s an old. I think I paid like four grand for it. It’s like 300 years old and it’s like the Caribbean and an old map from like 300 years ago and some book that sailors had and it’s all framed and everything. So yeah, I’m big into maps and travel, for sure.

Jon:

I’ll tell you what 94 countries is ridiculous. I have a lot of catching up to do, but that’s super cool and I’m sure we could talk about places that you visit all day. I got to say one of the things I really love about your newsletter before we kind of get into anything is your stories of your travels. It’s such a unique way of kind of injecting your personality and voice into your newsletter, so I just wanted to give you props for that before we meander here through a conversation.

Kevin King:

I appreciate that. For those of you that don’t know, what he’s talking about is the Billion Dollar Seller’s Newsletter, which I’ve told everybody on here to actually go sign up for. It’s like a mastermind a free mastermind. On Thursdays I do two a week. Mondays is more business oriented, thursdays is a mix of business and personal, so I do a personal story. I call it the six second story so it introduced it’s in. Some of them are a little edgy. Some of them, you know, I’ve had a few people unsubscribe because I talked about a naked girl on the balcony. I’ve had a few other, but other people they just love it. So I tried to inject some of my these. I talked about meeting Michael Jordan and basically blocking him from from getting laid and I talked about the whole all kinds of stuff in there. I got tons of more. And then I that Thursday one. I do it one, something called the dream 100, where I say this is someone in the business, that’s. I have a list of 100 people. It’s totally random out of a hat. I don’t not in any particular order, and these are people you should pay attention to because there’s so much I’m sure we might talk about this so many fake gurus and so much BS in the space Like who is legit, who’s just trying to market themselves and get some money from you. And so I. I do that. And then I put a travel because I’ve been in all these countries. When I was traveling, I was shooting video back and I traveled basically for seven years. I was gone two weeks of every month, sometimes by myself, sometimes with friend or family, and I meant to do it for a year, but I just turned in to so cool and I was like there’s more places in this world I want to see, there’s more stuff I’d hear about something else. I like I got to do it. So I. That’s where a lot of that travel happened not all 94, but a lot of it. So I would leave for two weeks, come back for two weeks, leave for two weeks and I could work remotely. I wasn’t staying, you know, in four seasons, or I wasn’t staying in hostels either. I was doing it right. But I was traveling around. I shot video. It wasn’t here’s Kevin eating a sandwich or, you know, having the fun in disco, it’s. I shot it more like documentary style. And so when I came back this is before Instagram existed and I sent out an email and like a newsletter, if you will. About 45 people my family, friends and I would do a trip reports. So I would. I would, I’ll write a little trip report. Here’s me and here’s Peru put some pictures, and I had a video production company at the time and we had three full-time editors and so sometimes we have a law where they weren’t doing something. So I say, edit my travel stuff. So they would edit like 20 minute travel shows and I would. I would write a script and have a professional voiceover person come in and voice it, voice it, and then you have this 20 minute video of you know me and Peru and it’s more national geographic style. It’s not here’s Kevin, you know it wasn’t a look, look how cool. I was more like a educational. And then I said some people don’t want to sit through a 20 minute video, but so I had them all create trailers for like like two minutes long and that’s what I put in the newsletter. Every, every Thursday, I put a two minute trailer that I personally shot, my team actually edited and it goes in. I put a little. I have all these trip reports from 1015 years ago mostly, and so I quit doing this in 2014 as it is as heavy. I still travel a lot, but that’s heavy and I go back and just summarize those. I use a I a little bit to take those are already written. I was like, just shorten this up. You know, here’s the, here’s the pasted into chat GBT. Just shorten this up and then I tweak it a little bit and those go in those Thursday news there’s and the reasons to inspire people. We love us, do this for the freedom or we’re doing this. You know, we don’t want to work for the man and there’s a big world out there that most people don’t understand. You know they’ve been to Mexico, maybe they’ve been to London or maybe they went to the Canton Fair, but they really haven’t seen what’s out there in this world and how many amazing things there are to get the understanding of other cultures and other people. Just it just makes you better person and so that’s kind of what I’m trying to do to influence in that with that. So that’s why that’s in there and it makes it a little bit personal no, I love it and it.

Jon:

It almost feels like Amazon is a side hustle to your life, which is the right way to do it. For the record, right where we’re, all of us were kind of in this e-commerce Amazon game to give ourselves the ability to live the life we want to live on the terms that we want to live, exactly.

Kevin King:

Travels clearly a big part of it for you, and you’re right and you’re right for Amazon for a while, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean you’re backstories that you actually work for Amazon, then you work for an aggregate. I mean, what is your story actually? I don’t know.

Jon:

I’ll give you the the two minute version here and I’ll fast forward through the first decade of my career, which was in kind of management, consulting, m&a. Turned out that that was really good foundational professional experience for jumping into an aggregator later. But my Amazon journey started at Amazon. I was kind of roped into leading the third party marketplace for consumer electronics on Amazon Canada. It was a role that when I looked at the job description, I thought to myself number one, I’m way unqualified for this and number two, is this the right path for my career? Because, again, I kind of came from that finance world, that that consulting world, very corporate, and although Amazon was a beast back in 2016, it was still a tech company, still, you know, a startup without being a startup. So I had some reservations about joining. But I knew that at that point my career, if I didn’t take a jump into something like that, I would never do it. The opportunity cost the switch and costs would be too high as as I advanced in my other career. So I jumped into Amazon and you know, it was a role that I grew to love and embrace. My role unlike, you know, I think, a lot of people who worked at Amazon was truly focused on the third party marketplace.

Kevin King:

My role was to go out and recruit third party sellers to join the Amazon Canada marketplace and then, when they were on the marketplace, to nurture them, to help them grow, to get them to adopt new Amazon features you’re like in business development, basically, and like you had, you’re the one that could say I can get you lightning deals or I can get you this, or we’ll give you X amount and PPC credit if you come over and we’ll hold your hand for that last. What? for a year, right, or it’s a calendar year yeah, it’s not even a year so if you sign up right in September, they’ll help you tell December and it’s resets or something like that right yep, I had a team under me that were doing that business development work and I was kind of crafting the overall strategy.

Jon:

What brands did I want them to go get? What selection, what assortment on the marketplace were we lacking that we needed to fill? And then I had a team of account managers who were hand holding some of the biggest consumer electronics brands on the marketplace the likes of anchor speaking, probably two dozen more Chinese brands that are no longer on the marketplace for reasons we won’t get into. But yeah, it was just. It was an intense role, but I learned a ton and I got to ride sidecar with a lot of brands as they grew on the marketplace in kind of the mid 20 teens when the marketplace was really hockey sticking. So it was a great role. At the same time, I got a front row seat to seeing how much money third party sellers were making and the opportunity for a third party seller on Amazon, and I said to myself well, I can do this myself. So I left in 2019 and really did two things. Number one was I started consulting for brands. The funny thing that happened on my way out the door was a lot of the brands that I had worked with while at Amazon said John, we want to keep working with you. So I started kind of a boutique consultancy as a vehicle to continue working with them. And the number two is I started my my first Amazon business and it’s a business I still run to this day. I won’t share too many of the details about it, but suffice it to say I kind of lucked into it because my partner in the business, old high school buddy, his family, had been running a B2B business for the better part of 25 years at that point but they had no kind of D2C side of the business. So my offer was let me start us up on Amazon and take a percentage of that business. So that’s what I did. That was how I got started on selling on Amazon.

Kevin King:

So they already had existing products and you just basically to start doing their marketplace stuff.

Jon:

That’s exactly right. And you know, I maybe went into it a little arrogant, thinking that seeing how the inner workings of the marketplace functioned with one another, how the sausage was made per se, I was kind of maybe under the impression that that would give me a leg up, and the truth was I had a lot of hard lessons in the beginning. You know, selling on Amazon is not easy, really no matter what background you come from, and you have to earn your stripes. So, as much as my Amazon, my background working there is interesting and, yes, I know certain things about how the teams work with one another, how different systems are set up. There’s a hack that you shared at one point. That is something that I used to use with clients, but it’s really the selling and the consulting for brands. Once I got out of Amazon that really leveled up what I’ve been able to do. But, fast forwarding a little bit, ended up joining an aggregator when that wave kind of really started to crest in 2020. I helped stand up that business, hired a ton of people, as it were, and an oversaw the acquisition of a lot of brands which, again kind of going back to my M&A background, I was well positioned to do. And then life happened wanted to have a family, have kids, take my foot off the gas a little, so did that and just kind of lean back into my Amazon agency, into my Amazon business for a little while. So this was around early 2022 took a break which I hadn’t done in 16 years of professional working right, and it was at that point where I kind of had a reset moment and looked inward and said, well, what do I want to do? And what I found was I really enjoyed continuing to run my Amazon business. I thought I maybe had an advantage in going out and acquiring Amazon businesses and growing them past the point that, you know, I kind of inherited them from the existing owners or the previous owners, and I continued to do consulting and advisory for brands. It’s all a little bit of a flywheel, maybe even an ecosystem of Amazon things that I love Consulting, operating, going out and acquiring interesting businesses and that’s kind of where I am today, you know. The only other thing that I’ll add is, like you, I’ve started a newsletter and it’s part of what I, I guess, enjoy doing. On the content side, I like sharing, I like sharpening my own thinking and skills by writing. That’s primarily how I do it, and the newsletter is my vehicle for that.

Kevin King:

And you do a really good job with that. I mean, I didn’t. I’d heard of you, but I didn’t really know you Just until, like two months ago, I got on LinkedIn. I think it’s in early August. I’d been ignoring LinkedIn. I was on Facebook and spending all my effort there and I had a something on Instagram, but I think I’ve made one or two posts ever on Instagram and nothing on Twitter. I was just a Facebook guy that always maxing out the 5,000 followers and having to delete people out. So someone else I wanted to follow me could come in and go through there and look for the dead people or their icon is no longer there or whatever counts clothes and delete them. So but now I was like you know what? I think I’m missing something here and someone’s telling me about LinkedIn. So I went over and said let me get on LinkedIn and you know what I was missing the boat there. That’s where the action is and this Amazon space with everybody that’s anybody is on LinkedIn. I know some big people in this space that still are not on LinkedIn. I’m like you got to get over there, because that’s where people are sharing the good stuff. And I saw you on there and I was like who is this guy? He’s saying some really good stuff. There’s a lot of garbage, you know, a lot of people just marketing themselves or putting up some BS, but you’re actually writing well thought out, actionable, good stuff. I’m like who is this guy? So I started, I started following you and then then you came out with that thing where you said here’s my favorite 10 podcast or something. And I’m like, and you put AM/PM up there as one of your favorites. I’m like, all right, this guy’s really cool. I got to get him on. And then you’re like I saw you post. I think you posted somewhere. I was like I’m very selective in where I speak or what I do or where I go, or something like that. And I’m like, all right, let’s see if he turns me down, let’s see, let me see. But no, it was great. And so your newsletter. I signed up. If you’re not, what’s the website for that?

Jon:

Man, I need to get a proper domain. It’s called best at Amazon and I’ll give you a little origin story there behind that. But the best way to find it is to look me up on LinkedIn and it’s linked right there under my, my beautiful headshot.

Kevin King:

And the spelling of the name, if you’re listening to this, is J-O-N, so no, no H. And then Derkits, it’s D-E-R-K-I-T-S. Yes, if you’re listening to this, you’re not online, it’s that’s. That’s how you look him up on LinkedIn. But, yeah, your newsletter is really good. Well, you put it out once a week, right?

Jon:

Once a week and I go deep on a single topic. That’s kind of the model that I’ve kind of refined over time. That’s the voice that I wanted to have. I wanted to be known for deep dives for the 1% of Amazon sellers. It’s the top 1% of Amazon sellers and you know, in some ways I obviously monitor the newsletters in the space and billion dollar sellers is probably my favorite behind mine. But you know, people have asked me about that and I think about my newsletter, your newsletter, as totally complimentary because you know to give a really, maybe silly analogy.

Kevin King:

I’m at USA Today and you’re the Wall Street Journal. Well, you’re going deep and I’m going shorter nuggets, and that’s one way.

Jon:

Here’s the analogy I came up with after having dinner last weekend with my wife and a few others. We are at a Brazilian steakhouse, Fogo de Chao, and you go to a Brazilian steakhouse. For anyone that’s ever that hasn’t been there, you know they have a great buffet. They have, you know, all sorts of fruits, vegetables. It’s very quality food. But at the same time you go to a Brazilian steakhouse for the meat and most people again, if you haven’t been there. Brazilian steakhouses are notorious for maybe over serving you. They have a little red light, green light system where you basically will get food until you tell them to stop. And I think about our two newsletters kind of in that same context. I’m the guy who goes to the Brazilian steakhouse and I find one piece of meat and the bacon wrapped steak and I say keep bringing it, keep bringing it, keep bringing it. And I think your newsletter is the one for the people that love to sample the buffet, love to sample all the meats. They’re all getting great food all around but they like to kind of fill up with, you know, the panoply of food there and I’m just the weirdo that eats a bunch of bacon wrapped steak and that’s great, because you know, everyone in that scenario leaves the steakhouse very satisfied and, you know, maybe a little unhealthier than when they walked in, but still.

Kevin King:

Yeah, that’s a good analogy. I like that actually. Yeah, I don’t do heavy deep dives like you do. I save those more for, like, the billion dollar seller summit or something like that. So those are. I do have those in my arsenal, I guess you would say, but I don’t put those in the news. That it’s more one of the things that I’m. I’ve become just by default, I guess kind of famous for hacks, and you know, in this business, hacks are awesome, but you need to focus on the fundamentals. The fundamentals is what matters, and it’s not the quick hacks, but sometimes there’s cool tools or something that can solve a problem for you or something that people and people love that. So I started doing those, like as I think I started ASGTG like four or five years ago and did it, and people just went nuts and so now that’s basically when I speak publicly everybody wants me to do those, and so that’s, they love those little short, little things, and so that’s what I’m known for, and so I kind of take the news that it goes a little bit beyond a little hack. But that’s what I’m trying to do. But I think a lot of people have we’re sitting here saying newsletters and there’s. A lot of people will probably roll in their eyes. They’re listening to this like dude. I get so many emails and so many newsletters from every service provider in the space and everybody knew I think newsletter. Those are not newsletters to me. I mean maybe we should change the name to magazines or something else so to just to delineate the misperception. But most of those newsletters are just promotional emails you know, and some people trying to it’s email marketing and it’s just. Here’s our latest software tool, here’s the latest this or that, or they’re really basic. You know they made their blog posts and here’s how to set up an ace in on Amazon or something. They’re not in my mind, they’re not newsletters, they’re. They’re promotional emails and I think we’re doing it different. And there’s a couple of other people trying out there now that are doing stuff, but it’s difficult. I mean putting out a newsletter is difficult. I mean to write that, to come up with the content, to curate it, to edit it. It’s not easy and I know we were talking before we started. I was saying that this, this newsletter space, is hot right now. I mean outside of forget Amazon and Internet marketing world. This is super hot, it’s become, it’s gotten hot. It started with probably with my first million podcast, sam Parr talking about how he sold the hustle for 27 million bucks, how they sold Milk Road for over 10 million around 10 million bucks in eight months, which was a crypto newsletter. Others have sold for 75 million milk morning brew. Another one sold for 525. So a lot of people start paying up and there’s a whole sub industry out there of newsletters now and software tools and now, with AI, a lot of people are like, oh shoot, we don’t have to have journalists anymore, our writers, we can just have AI do all this and automate it. So a lot of people are getting into that and my opinion is that’s going to fail massively for most people. A few of them rise, but you’re going to start getting inundated with junk and but I think there’s a major opportunity here for product sellers whether it’s Amazon, walmart, shopify, tiktok, whatever to actually combine the journalism aspect and the power of a newsletter with product selling. And the problem is that all the Milk Road and all the ones that have sold, they’re very good on the journalism side, selling sponsorships and getting some eyeballs in there and retaining people, but they don’t know squad about how to leverage that into brands and products. But we do. I think if you mix those two, you have a one to punch that’s unstoppable, and so that’s what I’m doing. The billion dollars sellers. One is I started initially because I already have an audience and I’m like let me figure out what works, what are the best tools, how much work is this really to do it and how can we automate some of this and what’s it take? And then we’re expanding that into my brands. So I have a dog brand and it’s a sustainable dog products and it’s what we sell. We do life jackets for like body glove, and we have poop bags and we have some other stuff and we’re like how can we build an audience for this? And at one point we’re like you know the traditional methods go out to Facebook, do all that, but you don’t own that audience. On an email newsletter, you own the audience, you’re building trust, you’re building rapport, you’re building a brand, the personality, the way it’s written and everything. If you do that right, you can leverage that into product sales to launch a product immediately to the top on Amazon or Walmart or anywhere. Or there’s a lot of power. There’s a lot of cool things you can do with AI to customize that Not have it written, but even customize. So everybody has a different newsletter. It’s basically a news feed in an email and a lot of people say, well, email is dead. Kevin, this is, you know, nobody over under 40 reads email and it’s bullshit. Email is still the most powerful mechanism if it’s an email that they want to read and the email is the newsletters. Done right are the new magazines. There’s a new Cosmo, there’s a new Newsweek and there’s a massive opportunity right now. I believe, done right, 95% are going to fail, but done right and so that’s why I was just a FHL funnel hacking live a couple of weeks ago and Russell Brunson now. He had 5000 people in the room. He has this new ClickFunnels 2.0, which is a marketing system for internet marketers and the fundamental things, called the Linchpan. His fundamental thing is first step, start a newsletter to build an audience. Put relying on Facebook and everybody else social media. Use those to drive traffic, but you need to own those people, which I’ve been saying for decades and, as you can see, a lot of stuff come out. So I’m doing a webinar, actually on December 1st, to actually show people in this space how to actually do webinars right. Here’s the tools. I’m not not how to do it, but how to do newsletters right. Here’s the tools. Here’s everything you need to know. Here’s what nobody’s telling you. It’s kind of like the guys are selling courses on Amazon. They show you look at my screenshot of a million bucks in sales but they don’t tell you that 90% of that was a search, find, buy giveaways. Or they don’t tell you know that? Here’s my $20 product I source on all I buy for five bucks. I’ve got a 75% profit margin. They don’t tell you about all the shipping and fulfillment fees and the storage fees and advertising. That’s what everybody’s leaving out, making this sound glamorous and like amazing and it can be, but you got to do it right. So that’s why I’m going to be showing in this webinar. So and I think you understand that, because you’re in the weeds doing this now. Yeah, you know it’s funny.

Jon:

I think we’re both motivated in a way by doing it right and showing people that path. I forget the name. There’s a kind of eponymous law about along the lines of if you want to spot in an act or you want to get a right answer on the Internet, post the right answer and then you’ll have 50 people correct.

Kevin King:

That’s a good one. I like that.

Jon:

But I understand that as a deep level because, to your point, you know, you see someone, you know a guru posting a screenshot, or you know someone kind of promoting AI as the unlock for scaling out a newsletter, and I look at that and I say, well, you know, you’re you’re omitting key facts, but also it’s not that easy and I think the right way is often the hard way, but you don’t have a lot of people that are predisposed toward doing things the hard way and taking the time to build. But that’s ultimately what creates enterprise value. It is. But I want to go back to what you said about newsletters and creating an audience for product brands and that being the opportunity. So I mentioned briefly that one of the things I do now is I buy and build Amazon businesses. I’m generally looking at micro acquisitions sub one million dollars, and a lot of this is informed by my experience at an aggregator understanding. You know how to go, source businesses, how to, you know, construct a deal that’s balanced and favorable to both parties, and then how to integrate the business and grow it. But you know, I’ve acquired a few businesses with a partner so far and in the beginning they were pure product businesses, ones that were just under optimized, and there was a lot of. You know, call it low hanging fruit. I hate that phrase, but the reality was they were missing a plus content. They weren’t running ads, you know. They didn’t even have five images or video on the PDPs.

Kevin King:

So just easy fixes with someone that knows the basics of what to do, right, exactly.

Jon:

So those were attractive candidates. As I was kind of getting my sea legs under me in the acquisition world when I’m playing with my own money and not other people’s money. But as I’ve kind of refined my, my, my acquisition criteria as I built my, my pattern recognition muscles, one of the things that I’ve discovered is that there’s better businesses out there in the Amazon space and they tend to be the ones that have both kind of product and audience built in. So I’ll give you an example. This is a real deal I’m looking at and I’ll kind of more adjust the details a little bit so as to not give anything away. But there’s a $300,000 business out there. It’s cash flowing, about $9K a month.

Kevin King:

It’s for sale for $300,000 or it’s $300,000 top line For sale for $300,000.

Jon:

Okay, that’s under Cash flowing, I think about $9K a month, but over half of that is from display advertising. So the business is a website related to kind of the lifestyle of the products. The brand is a. The product brand is a personal care brand. So there’s a website that has a lot of content around kind of the personal care products within the brand and the business itself has display advertising revenue and then sells products on Amazon. And it also has an email list that isn’t being used at all. So I’m looking at this business and thinking well, number one, continue to invest in content on the website to ensure that the display ad dollars continue to flow, because it’s very high margin, as you can imagine. But this email list, which I think was about 12,000 strong, let’s start to nurture it. Let’s start to seed them with information and promotions and drive some of that traffic over to Amazon. And then there’s some other things on the product side that I would do. But this is a $300,000 business that’s cash flowing, close to 100K a year. It’s a great business. But it had it was purely a product brand. I wouldn’t be interested at all because it’s kind of a me too, product in a very saturated category with relatively low ASP. There’s a lot of things that make the product unattractive, but what makes the business overall attractive is the website with display ads, the large email list that I feel like I can capitalize on and grow, and I think that’s something for Amazon owners to think about deeply if they have a plan to exit in the next 12, 24 months.

Kevin King:

That’s an important point too. On that email list you said some people may say, well, john, 12,000, that’s not very big. 12,000 is awesome if it’s a good list, it’s not about how big the list is. I hear people say I got 100,000 people on my list or I got 200,000 on my list. I have on my personal list over 100,000 Amazon sellers. That’s on my list. But I know a lot of them either quit selling, they’re junk, they’re not, they don’t like me or whatever it may be. So I don’t just blast this out. There’s other people in our space that a couple of weeks we talked about before I’m on AOM here but that have a big list and they just send out what they call a newsletter to their entire list. They just blast it out every week and that’s foolish. That’s absolutely foolish in my opinion. Do that occasionally for a marketing promotion or to get them onto a. You want to do that to get them onto a good list. And so I have my list of 100,000. I will send them out an email saying hey, I got a new newsletter. It’s on a totally different domain, totally different IP, totally different everything, so that I don’t get start getting blocked and spam or start getting bad reputations and email. There’s a whole science to that. Most people would understand in this business, a whole science to that. And then I have my newsletter, which right now is a little over 5,000 people, but they’re all double opted in, which means you sign up and then you got to hit another email to confirm to get actually get activated. So it’s a two step process and you go through a capture and you go through answering. So that’s a highly qualified list. Those 5,000, most, a lot of them, came from my 100,000, but there’s 95,000 that 100,000 that either don’t care Maybe they’re not getting the email, they haven’t, they don’t even know about it, they’re just not paying attention. But these are the 5,000 that are paying attention that I’m getting 60% open rates, close to 20% click rates on every news that are consistently my worst performing newsletter right now is 52% open rate worst performing. And so that’s with Apple, a lot of the open rates don’t track. Now A lot of people don’t realize this. With Apple, apple has a new privacy. It’s really cooked into OS 17, the new OS, but a lot of people haven’t upgraded that yet. But it’s partially cooked into their past too, where a lot of open rates don’t show up. So that open rate’s probably higher. And one of the reasons I absolutely know this is I sent out. I had about 1,000 people that had not opened the email and the last eight emails. I sent them and I’m like I sent them a message saying hey, I’m sorry but I’m taking you off the list, I’m unsubscribing you from my newsletter, unless you go and click something, go open one of the emails or go click it. I got hundreds of people emailing back saying Kevin, I’ve opened every single one of them. Please don’t take me off the list. Please don’t take me off the list. I’ve opened every single one of them. I’ve got them or Apple users. Some of them are Microsoft users because the opens are not tracking and opens as a metric are becoming. There’s a hot topic, there’s a webinar some email marketers just did last week from validity, talking about how opens are not going to be a good metric to track your success anymore because of all these changes going on and UTM changes with Apple. But my point of that is those 5,000 people. If I knock 1,000 of them off because they never open it, I’ll do it. Those 4,000, with that open rate, they’re super passionate, they’re your loyal fans, they’re your raving fans. If I go to sell them something, if I say hey, we got the new billion dollar seller summit coming out, or whatever, they’re going to pay attention or if I’m a product brand and I’m a dog, I’m selling dog products. I have a newsletter for dog lovers. This newsletter is not. Hey, our dog company is great, we just announced a new dog bowl and Charlie’s our new mascot and whatever. This is a newsletter all about dogs dog training tips, some dog that’s a fire rescue dog and his story and we customize it with your end of poodles. Every single newsletter you get has a poodle story. We know that we can see. There’s all things you can do with AI and some software out there where you can basically make it a feed. So it’s custom to them. We can have them upload a picture of their dog and I can actually use AI with some tools that we’re doing, to actually take your dog’s picture and put it into a background. So if today is the first day of fall, here’s Fido in a picture with the fall leaves on the ground behind him and it’s in your newsletter with Fido and you’re like, oh, that’s really cute, that’s really cool. There’s a share button there. Hit share. They share it on social media. Look at Fido, you know this is so cool. And people are like, where’d you get that? Oh, this newsletter creates this flywheel. And then or they can there’s another button that says print on demand Take some over to merch on Amazon or one of the other tools, get it on a t-shirt or coffee mug or whatever. And it’s sitting on your desk, it’s branding. And then when I come out with like hey, all we know, we’re launching a new sustainable anxiety jacket for dogs. What should we do? What would you like in it? And they participate almost like our own little pick-foo, and they’re making suggestions and they feel part of it. Then we say when it’s launched on Amazon hey, this is launched on Amazon, go and get it. We’re giving everybody 20% off. Or if you buy it, we’re going to give you a free gift. Send us your receipt and we’ll send you a free bonus gift from the newsletter or whatever. Whatever it may be a free dog chain, a collar or something. And instantly you’re launched with legitimate sales of legitimate people who are passionate, most likely leave good reviews because they got into it. And it starts this flywheel. Other people buy it on Amazon that just randomly found it. And then there’s an insert in there hey, join the newsletter, get a free gift when you join the newsletter. Not go to some stupid warranty or whatever, but get something of value and I’ll send that out to them. It might cost me five bucks, 10 bucks to send that out to them, but I know I mean the average right now for a valid, a good newsletter subscriber, if you talk to the big media companies, is about 30 bucks. So someone like if you look at Milk Road or Morning Brew or Daily Hustle, these vary but the actual value just on the advertising side, just on selling sponsorships and ads in the newsletter, maybe some affiliate link stuff, is 30 bucks. On the meat that’s the average in this industry, if I don’t know what it is yet on an Amazon. But it has to be more than that because I can sell ads in that newsletter to Purina. If I got a decent newsletter with good open rates and they’ll want to, I can sell support that. And then I’ll make even crazier money off the product side and creating this whole ecosystem and it gets people into it. And then we were hoping to tie. It’s kind of crashed now but I think we’re still going to be able to do it NFTs into it. So we’re going to tie, not NFT JPEGs where you you’re trying to get rich by buying a bunch of pictures of apes or something. But you’re, you’re, we’re using the technology, so we’d have a digital element to the newsletter which like here’s Fido, your dog, uploaded his picture, we created NFT out of his picture. And then there’s almost like this little metaverse and when you buy the product on Amazon, there’s an NFT, not in I’m sorry, NFC, not NFT, but in a C tag and on the product box you scan that that’s proof of purchase on your phone. That automatically triggers an accessory in the, in the blockchain, to go to Fido and he gets a cool, you know, gold, uh caller or whatever it may be, and you can display that and stuff. So we’re doing this whole gamification. Not everybody will participate in that, but enough of them will and those people are going to be rabid about it by everything that you do. It’s look at what Taylor Swift’s doing. I mean look at the. I was looking at Taylor Swift back in the end, like I’ve seen stuff of hers in August and, I’m sorry, April and May on TikTok and what people are doing. I was like Holy shit, this is freaking brilliantly amazing the passion that she’s created from these pans. And I was like this is this needs to be textbook. Harvard freaking MBA case study. This needs to be. Everybody needs a reverse engineer. What’s like her, or hater, reverse engineer what’s happening? Maybe some of that thing is calculated, some of it may be by chance, but look what’s just happened just recently with her showing up at games. I don’t know if you’re a football fan or not but showing up and all the stuff that’s online now where all these memes of? She put Kelsey on the map. He was a famous football player already, but it’s just that branding. She’s got a movie coming out in theaters in two weeks of her tour, the show of her tour. It’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant to a T marketing by who was behind this. And that’s what you can do. If you do this whole product stuff right and nobody is willing to put that time in. They’re just looking for the latest hack, the latest trick. How can I get rich quick? That’s what the guru told me. I can quit my job and sell my business for $5 million in three years. Some people have done that. They’ve been right place, right time, but that’s not the way to do it. And, like you said, buying a brand, which one do you want to buy? You want to buy an Amazon brand that’s a product that may be dead in two years and has a life cycle, or do you want to buy something that, if that product dies, no problem? We got a massive audience behind it that’s raving. That’ll buy whatever we do.

Jon:

I think it’s a clear answer and I almost am kicking myself now for using the term audience, because it’s really about building a tribe. It is.

Kevin King:

It’s community. Some people call it movements. Some of the marketers are saying don’t build an audience, build a movement. That’s the big catch word. That’s kind of like a tribe, but build a movement and then people are passionate about it. And if you can do that and that’s what I think a lot of people now on this we know the e-commerce side. A lot of people listen to this are good e-commerce sellers. You know that side. Now, that’s one of the reasons I like going to funnel hacking live and some of these other outside. I go to driven masterminds. Few others outside this Amazon space is because there’s brilliant people that are doing other things in the same e-commerce or marketing world, that you can take pieces of what they do and combine it with what we do. You could put everything that we do on steroids instead of just focusing on going to one Amazon conference after another. You’ve got to, and that’s what I’m kind of trying to do in the newsletter. A little bit, you’ll see. It’s not all about Amazon. There’s stuff about TikTok and there’s stuff about psychology. Do you put a person in the picture on your product photo or not? And I’m trying to mix some of that in to actually show people look, you need to be well-rounded. You really want to do this right.

Jon:

I preach that and I think one of the patterns I’ve seen among successful Amazon sellers is they come from different realms, from different sectors and they’re really good at synthesis. Idea cross pollination it’s about taking little kernels from different places and saying, oh, I can apply that here, or I can take this piece of psychological marketing and apply it to my Amazon business. It’s so cool to see it happen, but I love that you actively venture out into those realms. I tried to do the same thing because it’s so easy to get caught up and find a nice home in your own little echo chamber. You get on a really cool topic as it relates to tribes and communities, and a natural question is how do I know when? I built that and I saw this is very recent. I don’t know if you follow you were talking about LinkedIn before. I don’t know if you follow Brian Porter. He’s one of the co-founders of Simple Modern. I don’t know the only person to follow on Twitter or LinkedIn. Both him and Mike Beckham, the other founder, post a lot, but Brian posted a video a user-generated video from TikTok of a Simple Modern fan, creating this real viral at least I think it was viral, but she was literally railing against all these people that pronounced the brand wrong, because the Simple Modern logo is just an SM, but you could look at it and read it as slim just because of the font and the typography, and so, in a kind of joking way, this girl is railing against all these people that are calling it slim and saying, no, it’s SM, it’s Simple Modern, and I think, if I had to draw a line as to when your brand has created a tribe, it’s when you have people on TikTok organically advocating, evangelizing for your brand. And the cool thing is, though, you know when that happens organically is different in every brand’s journey, but I think you can compress time and accelerate that by putting a product in front of a lot of influencers, in front of a lot of customers, and encouraging them to share their own experiences with it, to instill in them a sense of ownership of the brand, because that’s ultimately what tribalism is you feel like you have a piece of the community, a piece of the tribe, and I’m working very hard to do that with my brands. I’m trying to put my product in front of as many TikTok micro influencers as possible. I have a baby brand and I think I sent out a case of 30 units to 30 different influencers last week and I’m waiting for the videos on TikTok to get posted. But you know, it all comes back to what you said there’s you can have an audience, you can have a tribe, you can have a community of a hundred thousand or you can have one of five thousand who are just rabid and passionate and fervent.

Kevin King:

There’s a saying that you need a thousand. A thousand raving fans and you can make millions of dollars. That’s all. It takes A thousand. You need a thousand raving fans and you’re set. You’re set for life If you have a thousand raving fans. Taylor Swift has a lot more than that. She’s set for life. But one of the things that I look at too I mean there’s a couple of things that you touched on there is like in my newsletter. So one of my deliberate goals in the beginning is like I’m not going to be another corporate newsletter. I’m not just going to summarize news, I’m going to add humor to it. I’m going to be. I’m going to cuss. If I need to cuss. I’m going to say this is bullshit. I’m going to call some people out. You know one of my headlines, one of my subject lines, was naked girl on balcony. You know people getting that subject line. They’re like what the heck is this? A lot of people would never do that. They would like not open that up. They’re like what is this? Some smuts or what? You know? What the hell? How, how, how dare you send that to my email? Those and I had like three people out of thousands that got that particular one about a month ago say unsubscribe me. They messaged me. I like 12 people total out of four or $5,000. Whatever that number I had at that point was a subscriber’s unsubscribe. Off of that one email 12, 12 people. Nobody reported a spam. But three people email me back and say take me off of this list immediately. I don’t want this garbage in my, my house. I’m like, yes, I was so fired up when that came in. I’m like, yes, get the F out of here. I don’t want you. You’re not my tribe, you’re not my community. But then I had 30, 40, 50 people reply back saying I can’t believe you did that. But that’s freaking awesome. I can’t wait to see what you’re going to say next, what’s going to be in the next one. And that’s part of. That’s very, very deliberate. My stories are true, I’ve done a lot of stories. I mean they’re not. I mean I’ve got 82 of them that are in the hopper. They’re not all written, but that’s, you know what I can write about. And new ones come up, like the naked girl on the balcony just happened. But that that is part of it and I try to tie that in to a lesson around selling on whatever I’m talking about that week. I try to somehow tie that in so it’s not just some random story, that’s straight into the point, it’s not long and rambling. There’s people out there right now putting blog posts out and social media stuff. That’s. They’re telling their stories and that’s that’s an important thing to do as a brand or as a. If you’re listening to this and you’re a brand, you need to tell your story. Or if you’re an individual influencer, you’re teaching people or consulting people, you need to get your story out there and be authentic with that story. And here’s the problem. This was just. There was a really good speaker I’m looking for her name right now on my phone that just spoke at a funnel hack at her McCall Jones, m-c-c-l-l Jones. I want this girl speaking at my level up event in Hawaii because after BDSS we’re doing a level up event, which is next level stuff, and I want her speaking at it. But hopefully I can get her. She came on, said look, there’s something called the attractive character and this is goes, for you can apply this to a person. Whether you’re a consultant or you’re a brand, you need to find your attractive character. And she said there’s 54 types of attractive characters and there’s three fundamental buckets, those 50 of characteristics that make up those 54 characters, and she went through them. I’m looking here on my phone. She says too many people are two faced. They get it wrong. They look at like Gary Vee and then like, look how Gary Vee is doing this, I want to be like Gary Vee. Or like, look how Nike is doing this, let’s be like Nike if they’re a brand and like you’re missing it. You got to be authentic to yourself and you got to know which of these where you fall into these categories. She gave about 50 examples of celebrities. She’s like look, this is the rock, he’s these three. This is this guy, he’s these three. This is Jennifer Lopez, she’s these three. If you’re trying to mimic, as a brand or as a person, the wrong one, you’re going to fail. It’s not going to resonate. If you know you dial in. This is the of these three categories. These are the, the one characteristic of each of the three categories that I am and you double down on that. You’re going to blow it out of the water from a brand point of a personal brand or a physical products brand point of view. And it was an excellent talk and I think it went over some people’s heads that were in that audience. But if you those kinds of things, you go back to what you’re talking about when you know you’ve made it or how to make it, those are important things and you’re not going to hear that from some Amazon guru you know, trying to tell you the latest hack or how you made 20 million bucks on Amazon or something.

Jon:

I mean, you hit it on the head, Kevin. Authenticity is so key, especially as you’re trying. You know whether you’re talking about a product brand or a personal brand. You know you can exaggerate certain characteristics of yourself or of your product, you can invoke hyperbole, but at some level, the only thing that is sustainable over the long term whether it’s for a person or a product is if it’s rooted in truth and authenticity, and I think a lot of people forget that. They try to become someone that they aren’t because they see something trending in a tangent space. You know.

Kevin King:

That goes for products or Amazon sellers too, or individual people trying to be a celebrity or an influencer or whatever. It goes both ways.

Jon:

That’s exactly right and it’s the best brands that have a firm grasp of who they are, kind of a deep sense of that identity and purpose. They do the best marketing right, like liquid debt is a great example. They know who they are and of course they’ve positioned themselves as kind of the anti-villain or maybe the villain, depending on how you would look at it against regular water and they do some great us versus them creative, but they know who they are and that comes out deeply in everything they do. Same thing with a local Chicago brand like Dude Wipes right, and even that deep sense of identity goes all the way up to the founder, sean Riley, who doesn’t call himself the chief executive officer, he’s the chief dude. So I think it’s really special when you found that as a person, as an influencer, as a product brand. But it’s hard and so many people rush through that phase of understanding like what is my North Star, who am I and what is my authentic voice?

Kevin King:

I mean, we did it for our dog brand. We sat down and I’m partners with two other guys in that and one of the guys I forget what the name was some brand development thing he found and we went through a process for like three weeks of like mapping out all these little categories of like what do we stand for, what’s this? Ask these really interesting questions and you’d answer those like what do you feel about this or how do we want to be portrayed as this? And then you put them all together and it really funnels it down to like this is who you are and this is what you’re trying to be, and then you create all your messaging and everything around that and that it was a brilliant exercise. I mean, it was a kind of a pain to go through that and most people don’t want to sit through and go through that or think that creative process. But if you do that, that’s not making money to pay your rent next week, like a lot of people are trying to do, or to quit their job. So that’s not attractive to a lot of people. They’re looking for the quick fix. But if you want to do something that you’re not going to sell to some Amazon aggregator that you’re going to sell to Procter and Gamble or you sell to a big. Look at native deodorant sold out for a hundred million bucks. It created a real brand off of that and that’s where I think everybody needs to be trying to focus. You might need to do a few things in the beginning just to hustle and keep a roof over your head, but if you need to be trying to make that switch at some point or just do it from the beginning to where you’re building a group of raving fans and a true brand and Amazon is a great place to start, there is no place better in the world than the start on Amazon. But that’s a marketplace, a shopping cart of choice, and so that’s just one. So you need to expand off of that at the TikTok shop, which I think is going to blow up, and Walmart I think it’s going to blow up, and you need to be willing to adapt. You know, I remember when the panic, the COVID, happened, everybody was using this app called Clubhouse. I don’t know if you were on Clubhouse or not, but everybody was using this app called Clubhouse and just hanging out on there and it got really popular. Now it’s basically I don’t know anybody that goes on there anymore a few people, but I haven’t been on a couple. I think I even deleted it off my phone, but everybody was going on there building massive audiences and that I remember the aggregators at the time. That was a hot time you know in.

Thrasio and Casey Gauss was on there with the guys from Thrasio and Casey’s a brilliant guy. But the guys from Thrasio or I got on one of their things and I was like you guys aren’t going to be around in a couple of years and they’re like there’s not enough businesses to buy their decent number one. Like oh yeah, there’s plenty to buy that. Like, no, there’s not. You might wait till you get into operating these that look good, they’re not good. And I got an argument with these guys Like you’re going to be, most of you are going to be gone, there’s going to be like five of you left. And they just like no, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Kevin, I think I know a lot more than you. I don’t have $3 billion. I know a lot more than you and we’ll look what’s happened. The same thing, I believe, is going to about to happen with Amazon search and I don’t know if you just saw this. It’s going to be in my newsletter. Oh, it’s. This is coming out after, but it’s in one of my, the newsletter from last week On Thursday, and actually Joe from she does a newsletter called. What’s the name of this? Ai for Amazon sellers or AI for Ecom sellers, it’s, it’s. She just started. She came to my billion dollar seller summit, saw me talk about newsletters, said I’m going to start my own newsletter. How could? What niche can I do? And she’s doing AI for Ecom or sellers or something like that. And she just broke the story today in hers If you. If you haven’t, Joe, I have to look up her last name. She’s also going to be a guest on the MPM podcast in about a month or so, but it’s called Nile Amazon.

Jon:

Nile, you can look it up Project Nile.

Kevin King:

Yep, Project Nile, yeah, and it just came. It started from some sort of leaked documents Microsoft or somewhere and it’s basically a saying how Amazon’s going to radically change. Search on and I’ve been saying this since last late last year when AI came out said all these tools they’re going to go the way of the dinosaurs if they don’t adapt. I mean they’re, they’re keyword tools. I mean they have other tools, but finding these individual little keywords that other people are missing in capitalism, that’s going to be history pretty soon. But now, with this Nile, what they’re saying they’re going to do, it’s basically some of my predictions are basically what they’re going to do. Yeah, and it’s going to change everything. And so that’s one of the how do you see from you going from Amazon to having your own brand, to working with the agrarian, to now consulting in, what do you see is the biggest thing that’s changing and what’s hard for sellers to give their heads around like to actually make this thing work?

Jon:

Yeah, so the project Nile news is is quite fresh and I think business insider just leaked a story on it as well. One of the things that you have to confront when you’re working at Amazon, or any tech company for that matter, is what I’ll call coastal bias Right, all these very cool innovative features or tech. They’re developed kind of in these weird worlds of Silicon Valley, of Seattle or you know, maybe they’re done over in New York, but for the most part they’re built kind of in a vacuum. And as hard as you might try to get user or customer input on these features in advance, it’s hard to kind of get out of your bubble and really understand how something is going to travel through the rest of the country. And I say that because chat GPT, I think, has been top of mind for people like you and me and the Amazon seller community for the better part of a year now, you know, since call it October, November, when you know it was first launched. But there’s a lot of people in the country who don’t use it, let alone know what it is, and it’s meaningless to their everyday life. And I say that as context to my main thought here around Project Nile, which is Project Nile. For it to be successful needs to almost be a seamless alteration of the search experience for customers, a very customer friendly and intuitive search experience that is almost indistinguishable from the way it is today. I don’t think the average Amazon customer, who you and I both know they don’t know that they’re buying from three piece sellers most of the 60% of the time. Right, the average customer is going to need to continue to search using their previous search behavior, and that’s the engineering challenge for Amazon as they build AI and kind of semantic search into the backend, if you will. So I think about that on the customer side a lot. How can you launch something like this that’s so revolutionary and make the everyday customer in small town Ohio still want to shop on Amazon? Still like the experience in fact, love the experience even more than before. Now, on the seller side, the truth is I don’t know when it’s going to impact us, how it’s going to impact us. I probably fall in your camp that the impact is going to come swifter and harder than the people that are in the keyword camp think.

Kevin King:

I think it’s going to be as brutal as when Google updated their algorithm from Penguin to Warris, or whatever the hell it was, and like all these affiliate guys overnight were out of business, all these SEO guys and affiliate people overnight out of business. I think that level of something and, like you say, I don’t know what it is or how it’s going to work, and there’s some things to be worked out. I think they’ll figure it out, though, and I think it’s coming.

Jon:

And that’s the beauty of the Amazon seller community. I said at the top of this podcast, I took a lot of licks early on and I thought I was super smart coming out of Amazon, having seen the backend. But you got to get punched in the face a ton. And I think the Amazon seller community, if nothing else, is like Rocky Balboa takes a lot of punches but adapts quickly and comes out on top. And I think that’ll be the way it works when Project Nile kind of manifests itself.

Kevin King:

Because a lot of the bigger sellers right now I mean, unless you’re a pre-existing brand coming onto Amazon and people already know you. If you’re a no-name brand and you’re coming on, you know Chinese sellers or a lot of American Western sellers you’re having to game the system in a way.

Jon:

I’m not saying cheat.

Kevin King:

I’m not saying cheat, I’m not saying do black hat, but you having to game the system with figuring out which keywords are people are missing, or who doesn’t have A plus and who does and who, whatever it’s. You know how, what the algorithm looks like and what makes better conversions and you’re fixing holes where other people are missing opportunities. Ai, I think, is gonna completely change that and it’s gonna reverse that when Amazon’s gonna know, based on your past history, they have a massive database of what you bought. I mean, I go back to the 1999 or 1998 when I first bought something on Amazon maybe 95, whatever it was. They know everything I’ve bought. They know everything I’ve done, everything I’ve looked at. You can request these reports from Amazon, by the way, and it’s like a dossier of like 100 something pages of everything you’ve ever done. They know that and they’re gonna be to somehow figure out how the AI is gonna show you, instead of me looking at I’m typing in umbrellas or yeah, maybe that’s not a good example, yeah, whatever, umbrellas. Instead of me showing me the people that I type in some long-tail keyword umbrellas for the beach or something crazy long-tail keyword. People have game the system to make sure they rank for that. Amazon’s no longer not gonna be able to do that. They’re gonna know these are the beach, these are the ones that the people that have gone to the beach before Because they also bought books on going to the Bahamas and to Panama City Beach or whatever, and they also bought umbrellas they’re gonna know all this stuff and you’re just gonna have to be able to do be good at branding. That’s why I’m creating these audiences and everything. You have to be good at branding and good at the whole experience and good at creating actually decent products that people want instead of gaming the system, and I think that’s gonna be a big shift that’s coming for a lot of people and a lot of people are gonna have trouble with this.

Jon:

I think so too, but the fact remains that and this is one of the things I try to lean on, knowing how dynamic and challenging Amazon is Like, what are the durable truths? You talked before about mastering the basics. You know you’re known for hacks, but you always counsel sellers to master the basics first, and for me, I kind of do the same thing. I talk about retail math, traffic, conversion times, order value, right, but what are the basics of building an enduring, valuable enterprise and I think it’s a high quality product, a raving tribe, and then really just meeting your customers where they are, and if you can do that, all wrapped in some really great branding, you’re gonna win, kind of regardless of how the goalposts shift. I mean, frankly, that’s the way I advise people to compete in categories that are heavy with Chinese brands. Right, just out-compete them on your branding, on your understanding of the customer, on your messaging. These are all things that you can do, even if you can’t win on price, and more often than not they tend to be enough to succeed.

Kevin King:

So how do you find time to do all this stuff? You’re writing a newsletter, you’re writing on LinkedIn, you’re buying businesses, you’re running a business with a part, you’re a high school buddy, you’re consuming a lot of stuff that’s out there and you have a family. You said.

Jon:

Yeah, yeah, I have two little girls who they’re my true bosses. Five o’clock rolls around and they pop in my office and everything shuts down. But you know what, Kevin, the truth is it’s super hard and task management focus. I struggle with it, just like many other sellers. What I try to do, what I’ve maybe learned over time, is to try to orient myself toward the things where they’re most likely to have the biggest impact. I kind of do an effort versus impact two by two matrix and try to live in that corner where I’m low effort, high impact. That’s a. You’re not always gifted with opportunities like that, so I’m often in the high effort, high impact category. But that’s where I try to live, that’s how I try to prioritize and outside of that, I stick to things that I’m passionate about because, even if they aren’t high impact and remunerative, at least I can do something that I enjoy in my heart. So, yeah, the truth is, don’t have it figured out Jumping around to different things like everyone else, but the hope is I can continue to live, deliver value to the Amazon community with my newsletter. The hope is that I can continue to go out and find some good businesses, to acquire and build up a little portfolio. The hope is that I can get in front of more people in live events in the future. You mentioned ASG TG. I don’t know if it’s come out yet, so apologies, ed, if I’m leaking this, but I know you’re speaking there.

Kevin King:

You’re speaking to them.

Jon:

Yeah, so it’ll be fun.

Kevin King:

That’s January 10th in Brooklyn. That’s a really cool event. It’s an intense crowd. They’re like in your face, like they’re eager to learn, they like lots of questions, they’re sponges, but that’s one of my favorite events. To speak at the buffet is amazing that he puts on. But then yeah, and then you’re speaking at billion dollar sell or something virtual event in February as well.

Jon:

Yeah, that’s right. Thank you for the invite.

Kevin King:

Yeah, you’re speaking at that, so that’s going to be really really good too.

Jon:

Yeah. So I’m finding time for some of these little events and speaking engagements where I really respect the audience or I really respect the organizers. So of course, it’s always an easy yes for you. It was an easy yes for ASGTG, but outside of that I usually just say no and put my head down and keep working.

Kevin King:

I got learned to say no a little bit better.

Jon:

It’s hard, it’s hard.

Kevin King:

I enjoy. You know I like going to some of these events because it’s my tribe, it’s my people. You know sit around with Norm and I’ll see you in Orlando you know I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I’m not speaking at the event in Orlando, but I spoke with his last one. But I’m going to New Jersey to speak on the 18th at an event over there that GETIDA and some of the guys from the Ecom Corruptor were putting together. But I’m going to Orlando for one day just because I’m like you know what. There’s some people there Like I’ve never. I want to meet you in person. So I haven’t met you in person. So you and a couple other people that are on his list, I’m like all right, I’m going to head over there for a day and then I’ll pop over to New Jersey. But that that, that reenergizes me and that gives me time away from just working and getting ideas and making connections, and I think that’s an important part of what we do.

Jon:

Yeah, it really is, and it all goes back. I’m going to bring this full circle, since we’re probably getting close to time here. Kevin, we started this out talking about travel. You’re a world traveler, hitting 94 countries, but you’re also kind of a people traveler Like. You genuinely want to meet and connect with people. I’m the same way. I can’t do it as much these days with two young kids, but you get so much energy and you get better because of it. Hearing people’s views, hearing people’s hacks. You learn so much from just sitting in the room with someone that has been in different places or is ahead of you a couple steps, and I love that. You do that, I try to do it, or I’m trying to do it more, but it’s tough.

Kevin King:

It is. It is Well. If people want to reach out to you again, the best thing is what LinkedIn.

Jon:

you said, yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to connect with me. I also am pretty active on Twitter. I have kind of a fun handle. It’s called Bearded Egg FBA. There’s a story behind that, involving a bet that I made with a guy named Mulson Hart, who is the founder of a toy brand called Brain Flakes. But yeah, twitter, LinkedIn, those are two great places to reach me and always happy to talk shop with Amazon sellers.

Kevin King:

Can you spell that again?

Jon:

for the people. That just in case. Yeah, so Bearded Egg B-E-A-R-D-E-D-E-G-G.

Kevin King:

FBA. Awesome, that’s it Twitter, and then on LinkedIn it’s John Derkits, right.

Jon:

Yeah, that’s right.

Kevin King:

J-O-N-D-E-R-K-I-T-S. Yeah, that’s right. Awesome, John. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today. Man, this has been awesome. I’m sure we could sit here and do this for about four more hours.

Jon:

Yeah, I know I appreciate it. Next time we’ll do it in person over some drinks and cigars.

Kevin King:

There we go, man. Awesome man. Well, thanks again for coming on.

Jon:

Yeah, thank you, Kevin.

Kevin King:

Really enjoyed this episode with John. Some great stuff we talked about there. We kind of bounced it all around, but I think you got some good takeaways from that and hopefully got you thinking. We’ll be back again next week with another great episode with Perry Belcher. Perry is one of the most famous internet marketers out there. He’s not an Amazon seller per se. He sells on Amazon, but he does a lot of other stuff. He’s exited multiple businesses, generated like a billion dollars in sales, so that’s going to be a really fascinating and interesting episode, so be sure to tune in for that next week. Also, make sure you sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter, billiondollarssellers.com, and look for an announcement soon on my free webinar on December 1st on how to set up a newsletter for your physical products business. Before I leave you today, I want to leave you some words of wisdom. The present always determines the past, but the future determines your mastery of the present. The present always determines the past, but your future determines your mastery of the present. Have a great week and we’ll see you next Thursday.

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#364 – The Power of AI in Transforming E-Commerce and Brands with Jon Derkits

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