Ken: (00:00)
Choose something that you like, that you love to do. If you woke up every day and you sold tennis rackets, would it make you happy? If the answer is yes, that that’s probably a good product for you to get into.
David: (00:10)
How are you making sure that you’re not launching the same shit that everybody else is selling?
Ken: (00:15)
Maybe it’s an interest that you haven’t started yet that you’ve wanted to for a really long time. Now’s the time to do that.
David: (00:21)
A problem that’s been going on for you know since the beginning of time.
Intro: (00:26)
Welcome everyone to the firingtheman.com podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and to know you were capable of more than join us, this show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs, David Schomer and Ken Wilson.
David: (00:50)
On today’s episode, we are going to tackle the first step in starting an online brand and that is picking a product.
Ken: (00:58)
Make sure to stay tuned for the entire episode. We’ve recently discovered a strategy and I’ve implemented into my business and it allows you to identify high selling products for literally no inventory.
David: (01:13)
So Ken, one thing that I’ve noticed at a lot of meetups where a lot of people get hung up is they don’t know what to sell and they really get stuck in that step. I know I certainly did when I was getting started selling. For you, when you’re deciding to launch a new brand or a find a new product, can you kind of walk us through those steps?
Ken: (01:34)
Well, first off I start with a touch list and I write down everything that I do every day, all, all my hobbies, all my interests, you know, anything that I like to do and I enjoy, uh, write a list down, you know, 10, 20 things and then I’ll go through and start seeing, you know, it’s a multistep process, but, but at a high level, I write down, Hey, are there, are there products, you know, let’s just say, you know, you play tennis, right? I don’t know how many of our listeners play tennis, but my son has recently got me to play and it’s tough. Anyway. So are there products that you could sell in tennis? Yeah, right. You got rackets, tennis balls, tennis skirts, hats, gloves, uh, you know, if you’re, if you’re next level tennis, you’re, you’re using a glove man that you got to.
Ken: (02:25)
So, you know, you just kind of go through and each of your touch list, you know, are there products, you know, another step is check Google trends, you know, go, go to Google trends and look are, are, are there any, is there any interest in that? Right. And, and you want to prevent picking a product that\ has no interest, right? So if you go to Google trends, type it in. Okay. You know, if the trend shows that there’s a lot of interest or it’s, or it’s increasing, that’s, that’s great. Right? If it’s decreasing, uh, you might want to move on you want, you want to scratch that off your touch list? If it goes up and down, it’s seasonal. You know, we’ll, we’ll talk about that a little bit later. Uh, that’s one of the steps. Um, you know, the reason and then you know, you want to go to social media, you know, you want to go to that Instagram, that Facebook, YouTube, you want to see if there’s, if there’s a lot of content out there, if there’s interest, you know, go, go to ubersuggest type in your keyword, look, see if there’s a lot of other websites, a lot of other content out there.
Ken: (03:27)
And if there is, you know, there’s demand for that. You know, these are kind of the initial steps. And you know, once you, once you’ve narrowed your list down to two or three, you’ve got a pretty good list to sit on and, and, and, and choose, you know, uh, choose something that you like, that you love to do. If you woke up every day and you sold tennis rackets, would it make you happy? If the answer is yes, that that’s probably a good product for you to get into a good, good, a good brand to, you know, a good product to build a brand around. What about you, David?
David: (03:59)
You know, my first question in, when people ask me this at meetups, my first question to them is, you know, what specialized knowledge or skill do you have? And often they reply, I don’t have any, I don’t have any specialized skills. And I’d say that’s incorrect with just about everybody. If you have a dog, you have an edge over somebody that doesn’t have a dog. If you grow bonsai trees, you have an edge over somebody that doesn’t grow bonsai trees. Now if you love growing bonsai trees, I’d say you have an even better edge because it’s going to be a lot easier for you to create content. You know, I’m a beekeeper and that’s a super niche area, but I love beekeeping and I’m going to do it whether I’m selling a product online or not. I don’t have, for purposes of full disclosure, I don’t have a beekeeping brand yet.
David: (04:45)
However, say I was sourcing some new products and you know, I, I wanted to create some content around them, create a video, uh, create a YouTube channel, create a blog. I’m already doing that stuff and I enjoy it. And so I see a lot of people that go into Amazon and they’ll pick something like a rubber spatula and that’s fine. You know, there’s money to be made there. But unless you’re passionate about cooking and nonstick cookware, guys kind of boring, you know what I mean? And you know what? My, my legacy brand one that I started two or three years ago, it is shocking to me the amount of time that I’ve invested in that, the number of product photos I’ve taken, the number of blog articles I’ve written, and fortunately that happens to be a brand that I also enjoy. And that just makes things a lot easier.
David: (05:38)
You know, we talk about firing the man now that there’s a lot of different meanings to that, but it more or less, it’s kinda getting the bullshit that you don’t want to do out of your life if you’re, if you’re taking product photos and writing blog articles about a spatula, that’s probably shit that you don’t want to do anyway. Right? And so pick something that you’re passionate about, something that you like. If you have kids, that may be a good area to start. If you have pets, that might be a good area to start. If you have some specialized interest, that’d be a good place to start. But I think asking yourself those questions, you know what sets me apart from the pack? Maybe it’s your profession. I’m an accountant, so I have to say I know a hell of a lot about 10 key calculators, as embarrassing as that sounds. But you know, that’s an edge that I’d have over somebody that that’s not an accountant. And so those are some questions that you should ask yourself in the preliminary brainstorming stages.
Ken: (06:31)
Yeah, no, that’s golden. And David, I’d like to reiterate to our listeners that you and I both have a multiple, what we call legacy brands or projects that we work on. And these are what we’re discussing today are, you know, kind of tips and tricks of what we’ve learned over the years of, of you know, what not to do right now, not to go grab this. You know, if you see the, you know, the Lambo kids on YouTube saying, Oh, you know, go search this, you know, shoot, go find a product that fits in a shoe box. And if it’s this and this and this, you know, if you do that, you’re likely to be competing with thousands of other people that do that. Like David mentioned, I have a legacy brand that I work on that I used that method for. I followed the, the YouTubers and Hey, find a product that fits this dimension that fits this weight and size and fits in a shoe box and it’s selling really well and go do that.
Ken: (07:25)
Well, I did that and now I have a legacy brand that it’s a, it’s a grind for me. You know, I don’t enjoy it. I’m not passionate about it. It makes money, you know, so, so these are lessons learned and now when I start a new brand, I kind of go through the process that we’re talking about now. And you know, the other, a golden nugget that you mentioned was everybody. Like every, all of our listeners are, are experienced in many things, right? Whether it’s your hobby or your profession or, or, or maybe it’s an interest that you haven’t started yet that you’ve wanted to for a really long time. Now’s the time to do that. At the last meetup, somebody, somebody asked if they should start a product or if they should start a brand, what’s your answer to that David?
David: (08:12)
So I would argue that it doesn’t really matter. Uh, take something like bonsai tree. Say you really like bonsai trees. Well, in order to start a brand, you need to have one product. So go out there, research, bonsai tree seeds, pots, watering mechanisms, whatever, and launch one product and see how it goes. And if that starts to get traction, then you can add on other components, right? So you have your seeds, you have your, your watering pails, you have your specialized dirt, then you can kind of add on and upsell people. But if you launched that initial product in it, it does not do well. If you realize there’s not great demand online for bonsai trees, man, probably don’t want to launch a product. Number two, I’ve met Amazon sellers that sell in all different categories and they sell all different types of products and that’s fine, but when you look at how you make money online, one is your cash flow, right?
David: (09:09)
You, uh, you buy something for $5, you sell it for 15 and collect margin. The other is selling your company. And if you sell rubber spatulas and bonsai trees and baseball bats and books, that’s not a cohesive brand. No one’s going to want to buy that, right? But if you sell bonsai trees, Bonzai seeds, bonsai pots, right? That’s, that is a cohesive group of products that you can make money online. But then, you know, three, five years down the line, you can also sell that for a multiple. And we’ll have to do an entire podcast on selling a brand. But I would encourage our listeners to think about both, both aspects.
Ken: (09:51)
Yeah, no, that, that’s really a next level strategy, David. So you had mentioned, you know, if someone had a rubber spatula and Bonsai’s and wooden tables, you know, random products and all selling them the same. That’s not a cohesive brand but it, but it makes money. Right. So, and then you mentioned if someone had a brand built around bonsai products and a higher multiple, you know, that is also something to, you know, when you’re thinking about product or brand, you know, the brand route is going to bring a higher multiple for an exit. Right. And like you said, David to our listeners, we’re going to do a, an upcoming episode on, on exits and we might even interview someone that’s recently exited and I kind of give you some, you know, some strategy on that, on, on, on building for your exit at the beginning in a, in a really, it’ll really help put some money in your pocket.
Ken: (10:52)
Um, but no that was a, that was a really brilliant, and I, and one of my legacy brands, I, I don’t enjoy at all in terms of the products, but what I do enjoy is building the business. I enjoy. Like you mentioned, buying a, a product for $5, selling it for 20, and figuring out how much of that 15 that’s left over that I can keep like that. To me, that’s a challenge. Whether I’m selling, you know, wooden blocks or whether I’m selling, you know, coolers, it doesn’t really matter of the product more or less the, the, the process, the learning process and the strategy on how much of that margin do I can I keep, can, you know, um, and, and that’s just a, that’s a process that I enjoy personally. Um, but I definitely agree with you that that brand, uh, you know, out of the gate brand is huge, but you can do either or, and you could make money at it. This really depends on, on what you choose.
David: (11:46)
So Ken, I think you’d agree with me that the best way to be successful online, is sell good stuff, sell quality products. You know, 10 years ago, five years ago maybe you could have gotten on Alibaba, you could have sourced sleeping masks for five or 10 cents a piece, turned around and sell them online for seven or eight bucks and made a margin. And you, you know, a sleeping mask is a sleeping mask. And uh, but now it’s different. You know, the marketplace has gotten more competitive and I see people needing to have a competitive advantage or a strategic advantage. And so how are you making sure that you’re not launching the same shit that everybody else is selling?
Ken: (12:35)
Yeah, one of the strategies that I like to do is, you know, it’s, it’s really easy. It takes a bit of time, but I really want to put myself in the, in the, in the customer’s shoes. I, so I, I go through and I find the top competitor selling that product and I extract all of the customer reviews, especially the one, two, three stars. I read all of those, I study them and I find out the customers are telling us why the products don’t work or why they’re not happy with them. Right. So it’s, it’s right there. So you extract the data from the customer reviews and figure out what you can do to improve that product. And you know, you go through and you find one or two or maybe three things that you can improve on that product and, and you know, do, you know, make the improvements, test it, test it for yourself, make the improvements, whatever.
Ken: (13:25)
It’s a mold, whether it’s better packaging, whether it’s a different color or different variety, a different size, shape, whatever it is, make those changes, test the product and you know, go to market and you’re going to have a better product. At the end of the day, if you can go to market with a really high level product like you mentioned, then it’s going to be a lot easier to sell that product. You know, you’re not going to get, you know, negative reviews, you know, your ranking is going to improve. Customers are going to like it. And so instead of negative reviews, you might get positive, more positive reviews.
David: (14:00)
Another thing I’d encourage people to do is look at things in your own life that are bothering you. And I’ll just throw out an example. In my own life, I live on a gravel road and we have a lot of dust and I always get dust. Okay on my garage door, the sensors that don’t allow it to close, those always get dust on them and we’ll be leaving and I’ll have to hit the garage door opener five or six times and it drives me fricking nuts cause I’m always in a hurry to go somewhere. And that’s something that drives me absolutely bonkers. That could be a product idea, right? A lens cloth or a dust cover or something for garage door sensor. Feel free to use that to any of our listeners. And if you do launch that product, please send me one cause it’s a current problem in my life that isn’t solved.
David: (14:44)
But I mean it, you know, if you think about what gives you anxiety, what uh, what is, is causing trouble, you know, another product that I think really, uh, is an excellent product. As I’ve mentioned on previous episodes, my wife and I just had a baby and everybody knows when you have a baby, you don’t sleep at all. There’s this new product called a SNOO and this sucker’s expensive man you pay for it, but you put your baby in it. It’s like a cradle. And uh, it senses when they’re starting to wake up and it rocks them back to sleep at 60 to 90 minutes onto their sleep cycles. It is awesome man. Talk about solving a problem, man. You, uh, it’s, I think it was about 1500 bucks. God, it hurt when I went to the cash register, but that 60 to 90 minutes every night, uh, to, you know, give our baby pause in between feedings. Oh, that’s been great. And money well spent. And so, you know, look at your own life. What are some things that are bugging you? What are some problems that need solved? And uh, like you mentioned Ken, the products kind of sell themselves when, when you’re solving a problem.
Ken: (15:54)
I’m so upset that I did not that, that I did not find that product about 15 years ago.
David: (15:58)
You pay for it. But if, if it’s your first kid and you’re planning on having multiple, it’s a, when you break it down, dollar per extra hour of sleep, I mean it’s, it’s money well spent. I’m not endorsed by SNOO, they’re not a sponsor. I paid full price. But you know, I, that’s just one example out of my life where I just think, you know, it’s a problem that’s been going on for, you know, since the beginning of time. Now, Ken, when I am launching a new product, I’m always nervous. Is this going to sell? And you know, I write the check to the supplier for a couple thousand bucks and then it’s a giant question mark. Whether this is going to take off or it’s going to be sitting in my basement in five years. And you recently told me about a strategy that allows you to predict volume sales volume before you ever cut the check to the supplier. Tell the listeners what this new strategy is and how you’ve implemented it into your business.
Ken: (16:59)
This strategy, uh, it takes an audience. You have to have an audience, whether that’s a Facebook audience, whether that’s Instagram, you know, Pinterest. Uh, I’ve been implementing it with my own websites of a couple of content websites and you know, so for the longest time, like you mentioned, you know, for guessing a product or you want to pick a product and buy, uh, you know, spend thousands of dollars on a test order and hope everything works out. You know, the more research you can increase the odds, but this strategy pretty much eliminates that. So like I said, if you have an audience, whatever platform you use a, I’m using a website.
Ken: (17:37)
and you just insert a affiliate links, whether they’re Amazon affiliate links, whether they’re any affiliate links, you insert these links to products, uh, you know, you, you, you market the products you create content around the products and you, you know, you’re an influencer for other products. You market them and then you just sit back and watch. And you know, you do this consistently over three months, six months, create content, market products to affiliate links. And then you watch the back end data when the, when the data comes in, you know, Hey, you know, if you’re marketing flower pots for example, you know, you’ve got, you know, 20 flower, 20 different sizes and shapes and, and you know, flower pots for roses and flower pots for whatever. And you start noticing that, you know, these, these medium size, lightweight plastic, uh, petunia pots. I don’t know anything about flowers, but that sounded good at the time.
Ken: (18:36)
You know, you notice these, these, these medium size purple flower pots are selling. Like you’re, you’re selling 10, 15 a day from your affiliate links. And then the other nine you might struggle one or two. Well guess what? That’s a gold mine. You just landed on a gold mine because it’s going to tell you that that’s what your audience is buying purchasing. So all you’ll have to do is go out, find a supplier, source that product and replace that affiliate link with your own, you know, whether it’s a shopping cart or you know, however you want to, you know, however you want to do your sales. And then you know that that eliminates your, your guessing game for picking a product. You, you just use your, use your backend data and bonus along the way you make affiliate commissions. So, uh, yeah, that’s, that’s kind of a next level strategy to use with, you know, you can, you can, you can decrease your risk and, and save a ton of money up front.
David: (19:31)
So for our listeners that are unfamiliar with affiliate links, can you explain that?
Ken: (19:36)
An affiliate link, a, you know, really popular, you know, recently, at least in certain spaces that are like Amazon affiliate links. So any product on Amazon, you can sign up for an Amazon affiliate account. And what that does is if you have a website or if you have a social media, anything you, you promote Amazon’s products and they pay you a percentage of commission for that product. So you sell a flower pot for, you know, you know, $50 and you know, the commission rates are, are, you know, I think they’re between three. And you know, I, I don’t know if they go 15% it all depends on what, what you’re selling. But you would just get a commission of that, you know? So if you sold a $50, you know, flower pot and it was a 5% commission, you know, you’re going to make $2 and 50 cents off that sale. You know, if you do 10 of those a day, you make 25 bucks. So that’s an affiliate affiliate link. Super easy to set up.
Ken: (20:28)
So David, along along the lines of affiliate, you know, sales and commissions, now you’ve applied this to a real world situation. Will you share this with our audience so they can kind of, you know, make the connection there and see how he, and see how easy this is.
David: (20:41)
Yeah. So as I mentioned, I’m a beekeeper and a couple of years ago I decided I wanted to start a, uh, beekeeping, a YouTube channel. And I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was having fun and I’d bring my camera along and, and I point out, Hey, here’s the, here’s the beehive that I’m using. Here’s the smoker that I’m using. Here are all the tools that I’m using. Um, and then I put affiliate links in there, you know, that spits off a couple hundred bucks a month, which is nice. But now I’ve got that data and I can go back and see that Hey, I’ve mentioned beehives and no one has purchased those. So that’s not a good product that I want to launch. However, I’ve mentioned smokers and people always click on that affiliate link. Uh, so maybe that’s the product that I want to launch. So what I would do is I’d go out and I would source a really good smoker. I would launch it on Amazon and then instead of having an affiliate link, I just have a link straight to my product.
David: (21:41)
That’s a way to create content. I know there’s traffic there cause I can see on my Amazon associates account 25 or 30 people are buying these every month. So long as I source a really good smoker and I replace that link, I know I’m going to get 25 or 30 sales every month. Instead of getting a 5% commission, you know, I’m going to be able to make you know, quite a bit on every sale. And that’s not PPC, that’s not any advertising. That’s a video that’s already made. All I’m doing is swapping out the link. And so as an accountant, I’m a huge fan of data-driven strategies and that’s a great data-driven strategy. And that’s on that nobody’s talking about right now. I mean you people are talking about affiliate links, people are talking about selling physical products online. But you know, before you mentioned that to me, I hadn’t heard of anybody, you know, marrying up those two to create a data driven strategy to launch physical products online.
Ken: (22:40)
So David, you know, our discussion today is on picking a product to sell online. You know, there’s a lot of tools out there. Uh, you know what, let’s share with our audience your favorite tool.
David: (22:50)
I’m a big fan of the jungle scout Chrome extension. And what this does is you go to Amazon, you type in flowerpot and then you just click the Chrome extension button and it will bring up data for the top 10 sellers. It’ll bring up daily sales volume, a monthly sales volume. It’ll show the number of reviews that the top 10 sellers have and it gives you some indication of how often is this being searched and how competitive is this market. And so I can go into some specifics there, but I would say that I do use tools, but I’d like to answer all the questions that we discussed at the beginning of our podcast.
David: (23:35)
What do I have specialized knowledge about? What am I passionate about? If people are wondering specifically what I’m looking for for a particular product, here’s some certain criteria that that I, that I like to look for. I like to look at reviews. If I’m looking at the top 10 sellers and you know, five or six of them have over a thousand reviews, that’s going to be a tough market to break into, right? You know, most money on Amazon is made on the first page. And so if you have five or six products that have over a thousand reviews, it’s going to be tough to play catch up there. Now, if the average review was say two and a half stars, maybe there’s an opportunity to improve the product. But generally when I’m looking at market saturation, I’m looking at reviews. Um, I also like to see diversification amongst the top 10.
David: (24:29)
So if there’s one dominant product, you know, take an ab roller, for example, if there’s one that that has 90% of all sales volume and the number two seller through the number 10 seller have, you know, five or 10% of the market, that’s also going to be tough. That top seller might have some sort of brand recognition, maybe a superior product, they may have a patent. Uh, but I like to see diversification amongst the top 10 sellers. Personally, I like to see at least four listings with under a hundred reviews, uh, that, over hurdle to entry into this category. This is something that I don’t pay a lot of attention to on the top end. Uh, but I certainly do on the bottom end. You know, one rule of thumb you’d see in a lot of trainings is don’t sell products under 20 bucks. You know, that is the reason they say that is it doesn’t leave a ton of margin leftover for advertising.
David: (25:28)
And for PPC, if you have a product you buy for five bucks, you’re selling it for 15 you know, five bucks is going to get eaten up by Amazon fees generally leaving you with $5 of margin. And if you’re running PPC or advertising costs, you can get to selling at break even pretty quickly. And so I do think there’s opportunities in higher price point items, higher price point, lower volume. And so I, I don’t pay a ton of attention to the price point. And I like to look at is the product size people will, and you alluded to this earlier, people will say, you know, you want it to fit in a shoe box and be under 18 inches. And the reason they’re saying that is because smaller items have smaller fulfillment fees. And I think because there have been a lot of new sellers hear that advice, there’s this rush to small products which leaves them being very competitive.
David: (26:26)
You know, I would not be afraid to sell a 1000 pound table saw, but I would really want to understand my fulfillment fees before I sourced that. Right. And so I think, you know, as small products get more competitive, you’re going to see opportunities for larger products and, and so, you know, I, I like to look at the size of the product and then I like to understand my fulfillment fees and that’s what I’m looking at there to for the price point, I like it to be four to five times your landed cost. So if you’re buying it for five bucks, you want to sell it for between 20 & 25 bucks. And that, that seems like huge markup. But by the time you pay for your overhead, pay for the product, pay for advertising, that gets eaten up pretty quickly. And so I like to leave some margin in there to play with on advertising because you don’t always get it right on.
David: (27:20)
The first time I like to look at is sales volume. Uh, for the top 10 listings I like to see at least 3000 sales. And if possible, I like to see seven out of 10 sellers doing over 300 sales per month. That just tells me that, that there’s, there’s decent sales volume here and in that this is something that people are searching for. And so various, I really like to find products with a BSR between 5,000 and 10,000 BSR of between one in 5,000 that typically is a very competitive market and you really tee yourself up for uh, people hijacking your listings for people copying your product. But you know, in that 5,000 to 10,000 BSR rating that is, that’s kind of my sweet spot. It’s not super competitive, but there’s enough volume there that you can make some money. I just mentioned BSR for some of our newer listeners, can you explain what that is
Ken: (28:22)
on Amazon? They have categories, you know, lawn and garden, jewelry, books, and for each category there’s a BSR, a best seller rating, and the lower the number, the more sales that is. So, uh, in terms of researching products, you know, you, you did mention, you know, you, you kind of shy away from, you know, that zero to 2000 range or zero to 5,000 range because that’s really competitive. You know, if you have a BSR, if there’s a product with a BSR, you know, you have a, you know, top rated, you know, uh, I was going to say Nike shoes, but they don’t sell on Amazon anymore. Um, if, if you have, if you go to the category that’s, you know, top 10 best selling products for that category and you look and their BSR is like five, while they’re probably selling, you know, 500 to a thousand units a day, right? If you have a BSR of, you know, say 7,512, well, they might be selling six a day, six items per day. So really low BSR is a high sales volume and a high BSR is a low sales volume. That’s how it goes. And Amazon has them broken down into categories.
David: (29:31)
Can I just talked about using the jungle scout Chrome extension, you’ve recently had an experience that has made you kind of shy away from using those online tools. Can you explain your current situation and and why you’re feeling that way? Sure.
Ken: (29:45)
As we alluded to on a previous episode, you know, David, you and I are going to share some real world experiences from our own businesses and to try to help our audience, you know, not make the mistakes. Uh, you know, that we’ve made, um, you know, all mistakes are lessons learned, right? So an issue that I’m dealing with right now and I’m dealing with this issue because I used tools to, to find a product and I didn’t verify. So I, I currently had a product that I was selling for well over a year and it was based off of another product that I found on one of these tools. Not going to name any names cause I like all the tools, tools a tool? That sounded pretty bad as a tool, as a tool. So I found it. I found a product that was selling really well, like dynamite and launched it.
Ken: (30:34)
And this product was making, you know, several thousand dollars a month in profit. Really, really good product. I didn’t, you know, I was air shipping it. I, there wasn’t, it was uh, you know, took me maybe an hour a month to manage this product. And after about 16 months of selling this product, I got a patent infringement from Amazon. Complete listing went down and I come to find out the, the product that I was, you know, that I, that I’ve found with one of these tools, uh, they applied for a patent on the shape. So I found this product and launched it. And then, you know, a little over a year later, I, they’ve, my competitor filed for the patent. The same competitor that I found using a tool had filed for a patent. And I did not know that. Right? So, uh, I’m now, I’m dealing with the, you know, this is, uh, tens of thousands of dollars worth of a headache from using, from using a tool to find a product that was selling well versus the other strategies that we talked about. Now, I don’t think the tools are bad. I think these tools should be used for verification and not, not from the beginning. Yeah. So David, you know, along these lines, you’ve ran into a similar situation when you first got started, can you share with our audience?
David: (31:49)
So when I first got started with the jungle scout Chrome extension, I watched the training and they had a bunch of suggested criteria that would be a criteria for search volume, for number of reviews, price point for a number of criteria. And they made all these suggestions. So I typed in the criteria that they were using in the training and came up with about 75 products that were suggested. And at the top of that list was candlestick holders. Now if you can imagine a candlestick and free Catholic listeners, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. A, you’re holding the candle stick, you light it and the wax starts to drip down and it’s going to get on your hand, right? Well, there are these cardboard circles that you can slide over the candlestick that prevents that wax from getting on your hand. Now this, and I didn’t realize this at the, but it was a week before Easter and it all Catholic Easter masses, there’s a candlelight vigil.
David: (32:44)
And so in the last week, this product sales volume had spiked. It was not a popular product. And I thought, this is it. This fits all the criteria. I’m going to source candlestick holders. I’m going to be a candlestick Baron and I’m going to make millions. So I sourced these candlesticks and I launched them and they did not sell at all. And I went back and I checked the jungle scout Chrome extension and all that volume that we were doing a week before Easter had just disappeared. And I also noticed that I had launched candlestick holders along with about 50 other people. And so I would caution our audience, we talk about these, these certain criteria, you want sales volume of this, you want reviews of this. Well if you’re typing that into a tool, it’s going to spit out the same results for you as it is for everybody else using it.
David: (33:42)
And so if you’re only relying on these tools, you really tee yourself up for entering into a competitive market. And if you think it’s just based on data, if you think it’s a good idea, so are a lot of other people. And another problem with that product, I didn’t differentiate it at all. It was just the standard candlestick holder that everybody else was sourcing. And so I still have about 5,000 of those in my basement. And uh, I think in total I might have sold five. I mean that was a major loss, but a good lesson learned and a lesson that I wanted to pass along to our audience so you don’t make that same same mistake.
Ken: (34:19)
And uh, David, if I ever needed any candle holders, can I get a couple?
David: (34:22)
Absolutely, man. I, I pay somebody to take these off my hands.
Ken: (34:28)
Hey David, as we wrap up the show, can you leave the audience with a final bit of advice?
David: (34:33)
So as it relates to product research, we just laid out our strategies and how we go about doing product research. And I would encourage you to, to listen to that, think about what we talked about, maybe implement some of these data-driven strategies. However, don’t get hung up in this stage. I see so many people getting hung up on product research and they intend on selling online and six months later they haven’t thought of the perfect product. And so I would, I would encourage you to circle a day on the calendar in a month or two, start your product research, start determining what strategic advantages you have and pick a product. And it might not be a million dollar product, but don’t get stuck here. Take action. Thank you everybody for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please smash that subscribe button. We’ll see you next time.