From $50K to $465K/Month Amazon FBA Launch Strategy Revealed | ft. Colin Raja

If your Amazon back in data was not set up straight, it doesn't matter how big, how beautiful product what does that you have, you're not going to grow faster. So that's where when it comes to launch, EC components are most important things. Welcome to Built Online. I'm Cody McGuffey and this podcast is all about one thing, building the business of your dreams, selling arts, teaching classes, starting a blog, launching a brand, whatever your passion is, we show you how to turn it into real income. I created Everbee to help anyone with a dream. Start in scale business. Everbee, Everbee, Everbee, Everbee, Everbee, Everbee, Everbee, Everbee. We now serve over 800,000 creators all across the globe. On this show, we bring on real entrepreneurs who've done it. They share their secrets, they share their failures, the exact steps that you can take to get started. What if you can get one golden nugget out of today's episode and it's the breakthrough that takes you from just dreaming to actually living a life on your terms. At Everbee, we believe that every human is a creator and every creator should own a business. Colin, what's going on man? How are you? I'm going man. Thanks for having me. We shared it. I want to be there. I'm great man. I'm great man. Super happy to have you too. You'd be the first product launch expert that we would have on the podcast actually for Amazon. Really? That's amazing. Okay. All right. We got a lot to talk about it today. We do. We've talked about Amazon this year. We talked about Amazon getting live on Amazon. Why you should go from your site. Why you should consider Amazon as a strategy as a channel. But we haven't specifically talked about Amazon product launch. Not specifically about that. And I think it's a deep subject actually. It's not a lot of people encounter how in deep it is. Most of the places they talk on a very self-paced level because people get confused and also they don't want to go deeper. Nobody wants to. Yeah. Happy to dive in man. Let's go. Let's go to maybe maybe I'll use this as an example. Maybe today we can talk about Cody, me, myself. Maybe 10 years ago when I had a product and I had a product in Amazon. I sold on Amazon FBA. I did. It seems like everything wrong when it comes to my first product launch. I thought I knew what I was doing of course, but you don't. You quickly realize you don't know. And the second one went a little bit better, third one went a little bit better. Eventually tech kind of took my passions and I kind of ran with technology and software and stuff. But I used to own that Amazon FBA brand for until last year I think. So we owned it for a while. It was a great brand. It wasn't a big brand. But it was awesome. But I never launched more products after that. And mostly because I knew that it was going to be hard to launch it and I didn't know how to do it properly. And so personally, I would love to learn about the product launch strategies. One other person. I love that one, actually. But sure, I'm glad to invite. Open up a lot of those actually for you. Once you know that this is like you're the software guy, you're a SaaS based guy. Once you know that it's just a data to understand how how launch works. It's not about like hacks and tricks. Then you go, you're going to go crazy and then you want to launch more products. How about that? Cool. Well, let's let's jump in and what what tells a little bit about your background maybe like for 30 seconds about how you know, basically started the Amazon in 2014 and 2015. After reading the rich dad for that book and then I find like whatever I have done is so stupid, I have to change my life. And I read the book. The rich dad was introducing math, the amazing seller machine. And I was like, I'm not going to pay for that. But I can do this one. Spend 19 hours a day after my work, actually, after my intif i job and started it, build the two seven figure brands from the scratch. Last three years ago in the path, what is the purpose and searching for all the things and help one of my friend to bring back his struggle period at that point of time I found I started sharing everything what I have done for him. That gives the purpose of like so much joy of like sharing and then I'm being vocal about, I've been talking about this for everywhere, how to do launches and how to do whatever I know. I've been started sharing everywhere. Last year alone we did like close to 150 product launch completely straight, pretty successful. Finding a way to make the data speaks for your launch, not just a hacks and tricks or they mentioned before. Thank you for that. No, 150 product launches for goodness. That's a lot. And those are all for other brands like your clients. I guess you could say that's great. How many brands like, what was that like a total? You think it's going to be different. Maybe like maybe like the team to 20 brands. So 10, so 10, 10, 5 to 10 products each brand on average. Which is an Amazon world for anyone that hasn't sell on Amazon. It's listening today. That's actually a lot. That's a good amount of products for because a lot of people sell on Etsy that are listening to this calling. And there's a lot of people that sell on Amazon, of course too. But for the Etsy sellers that don't know Amazon yet, product launches, you kind of want to do them right because it's more expensive. It's usually about three to five thousand dollars per launch considering inventory and the launch strategies probably. And so you don't do as many product launches as you were on Etsy where you launch sometimes 10 products in a day, 100 products in a day. So because there's no cost hardly. There's no cost on it. But the Amazon is like a huge cost of launches. Usually launch cost typically between 15 to 30 thousand dollars. Yeah, but you will get that money back in like three months back actually. And after that you just have to keep monitoring the product actually. That's what's the point. Beautiful. So let's maybe take us that back for a second and focus on let's say I sell on Amazon already Amazon FPA. I have two products already live on Amazon. They generate some revenue and it's a fitness brand. Yeah. And let's say we sell foam rollers. We sell, it's basically anything that you see in a gym. Essentially that's what we focus on. And we focus on that. And I want to launch more products. But I don't know how. I launched my other two products and they're successful moderately. But we never like really they're not like big, high volume products. But I really want to continue to expand my catalog and basically 10X my Amazon business over the next maybe two years. Yeah. Already already know how Amazon FPA works. I already know my for the most part like how SEO works and I understand Amazon ads and in PPC and all this stuff at a general level. But I don't know how to launch a product with intention and to make sure that I win. And I know there's a way there's a make sure that I win. But I don't know that way. So can we start there? Sure. Yeah. The first step for a product launches like a finding the amazing problem, amazing saw amazing product actually. First of all. So what do you mean by amazing? Right. So the first step. First thing if your product was like one among the 30 people and you don't even notice that that's your product. That's the biggest red red flag on your product. So you fail by selecting that product actually basically. So you better have some level of differentiation or some level of changes in your listing or images to making sure that your product launch would be successful. That's the 50% of launch would be done if you did that one. Right. The second thing basically let's divide it into break down into small pieces. So Amazon it's a very close system. It's not like you're running a traffic from everywhere. It's getting a traffic from here and there and you measuring the traffic you're running ads here and there actually not like that. It's a very close system. People come to Amazon to buy product. They look for product. They search product. They click product. They add to car product. They wish list on the share and then buy and then they go actually. Right. That's a whole ecosystem of Amazon. We can divide this part into three things. One front end. Other one is back in the middle where it's there actually completely. We need to identify why somebody is really buying it. Your competitor not yours. That's the first part. Right. How you can do it. There are a couple of tools available like a product opinion. Right. You take a look and put that in your pooling process completely and find out why somebody's buying your my product and why somebody's buying your competitor product and find out those information. Break it down into pieces. So max. Which tools are the best ones out there? I know. It's a product opinion on Intel. There are two tools available. I use product opinion a lot. So you break it down in the front end. Now you know exactly what it takes to identify why your competitors are really winning. Is it a crisis? It's a review. is it like because of the images, what's the reason? In the back, I'll send you the link actually. I have like a, I can get you like 100 credits actually where we signed up and then I can get you that one. So I know the founder very well. - Is it app, app, you know? Or is it, we're just looking at Google here. - It's basically like a product opinion. Let me say product. Yeah, it's opinion, a product, P, I, N, I, or N. - Okay, cool. Yeah, we'll link to everyone if you're listening to this. We'll link to the show in the show notes. Okay, keep going. - So first we'll find out that information. So the first one is gone actually. The second one is like a backend, which is back in this basically like all the keywords and every single aspect offered the keyword. Why many keywords are acquired? How many keywords like all the top 10 competitors are acquired and if somebody is like selling like a thousand units actually, how many keywords are acquired? If they're selling for 2000 units, how many keywords are acquired? If you're going for 5000 units, how many keywords are acquired? So Amazon is all about acquiring how many keywords are acquired for your listing completely. So if you find out like a 10 people, you can able to find out, okay, if you rank for these 20 keywords, you can able to make like a thousand sales, right? So now we have the front end data. We have the backend data completely and the middleware is basically your Amazon nitty gritty, which is like browse, nor product type and all the information actually, which is like basically attributes, refinements and every single thing in the middleware completely to making sure that I'll put this analogy like this, right? Let's say you have a Ferrari, right? It doesn't matter how fast you can, it's how fast the engine can drive. If the road is not straight, really great, if the road test like a bump in dumps and everywhere actually, it doesn't matter how powerful the engine you have, you're not going to drive fast. Amazon is like that. If your Amazon backend data was not set up straight, it doesn't matter how big, how beautiful product, what is that you have, you're not going to grow faster actually. So that's where when it comes to, when it comes to launch, these three components are most important thing. In the middleware component, you can able to copy just like what is your component match everything, whatever is required completely very easy, but the front end and backend, it's required a little bit of work. Once you have these three components, you're ready for a launch at that point. - Okay. - So that's where you start with the launch process first. - Okay, so you check these three things, the front end and the middleware and the backend. Now it's ready to go. Now first of all, is that something that you would help brands do or they expected to have this done before they even get to you? - No, we help brands to do that one. So we take through the whole holistic approach, or we don't like just go, I'm going to rank your keyword, that's now what we do. We take like a holistic approach of like, why this is happening, why your product are not selling really good. So one of the brands we recently launched, which is like one of the product, we recently launched, which is like, went from 50,000 to $465,000 a month actually, in a three, four months jump I'm talking about. - Wow. - Strategically placing everything in place, with like identifying, if you don't know, see here's what they say, right? If you don't know where you are, and then you're not going to know, even if you know that way you're going to travel, you're not going to be able to get there because there is no way that you can get there because you don't know where you are. You are in like a super desert, and you are like, wanna go for like a Las Vegas and then you wanna go for like a casino, and I'm like, how do you gonna create a road map? If you don't even know where you are. So the most important thing to know is like, where we are, and what is the problem, and then we fix the problem. So that's where they say like, the best way to solve the problem is like, identify that is a problem actually. - Maybe to clear on actually what the problem is. In that way. - Beautiful. Okay, so check, I come to call in, and I'm like, hey, I wanna launch this fitness towel. Okay, it's a fitness towel. And you're just like, okay, cool. And then you basically put it through the system, which is what we just talked about, front end middleware, back end, and now it's basically, okay, now we understand where you are, what the problem is, what people love about your product or what people should love about your product, and what people, or what they're not even seeing and they're looking at competitors. And then you basically all the information that you need. Now what's next? What's the next step? - What's the next step? - The next step is like making sure your front end is optimized really clear. So you take all the information, either go to like 99 design, or go higher like a bunch of any designer you know actually, give it to them, okay, this is my pooling, this is my competitor pooling, this is why my competitor is winning, this is why I'm now winning. Can you come up with like a front end image, like really crazy? So why I love about 99 design is basically, you get like a, if you put up like a $400 bet, and you get like a 200 entries actually, completely like crazy. So I take that information and run the pool again and ask them which one is you really like it actually. So I select like top 10, and then put it in the pooling process again, which one you like and why. So then we'll take this top one, and then we run it with again, a competitor is actually, then we will find out which one is the better one to go for. So then we know, okay, anybody seen my listing, my competitor listing, and the one who's gonna get clicks a lot actually, right. So that's the first there, what we do optimization process completely. - And that's the first main, basically the main image. That's what we're talking about. - And also we have, and also stack image we do it later, but the main image is the most important thing, why because when it comes to Amazon launch, on the first period, first week, two weeks of period, Amazon required a lot of searches actually. You don't care about the conversion, of course in the later point that comes to a conversion, the first two weeks, you can rank keyword just by getting a traffic in your listing completely. And if you don't have the conversion later, then you will gonna fall down completely. But to get there, you just need to mode clicks, you just need like a little bit of sales for the purchase intent keywords, and then go for it actually. - Because if you can't get the clicks, and you're certainly not gonna get the conversions, 'cause you need the searches first. - Yeah, okay. - Okay. - Just a twist. - Okay, so now you have that. Now we have this, the main image, it's designed, it's like, wow, this is a great Amazon main image, then what? - The next step was like identifying, what are the keywords you need to be focused on. So Amazon right now, the latest algorithm, it's called EQR model, basically. It's focused on purchase intent keyword completely. Right, Amazon don't want, this is based on our understanding, and also our test actually. Amazon don't want like anybody just comes, and then like browse the, put up like a browse keyword, there's two types of keywords, one is like a browse keyword, other one is like a purchase keyword. The browse keyword is basically, somebody's like coming in and then typing garlic press, and then looking for, they don't know what they want, literally. So they want specifically like, I want stainless steel, garlic press with the cover and everything, they want like a more purchased detail intent that what they want actually basically. Right, so they're going further. So we divided into, what are the keywords, what we need to be focused on right now, to get to a minimum sales on the first two weeks of period of time. So we take those keywords and divide it into two different groups, actually, one, a group by keyword, another one is like a semantically mapped keywords. So a group by keyword is for example, I would say, cell phone cover actually. So I'll go for like all the cover, cell phone cover, which is like a silicon based cell cover, highly protective cell concovers, and I grouped by a keyword actually. The next one is like basically like a semantic mapping. Semantic map, how does work like, when it comes to a material, the material has like a multiple elements of cotton and all the things, these are semantically mapped inside completely. Right, so right now, compared to 2017 and right now, you don't have the index for all the keywords, you index for one keyword and you get like a 30 keywords, you can automatically rank for it at this point. We divided into this space actually and then build the faces actually. So we say, face one, face two, face three, launches, which is like each and every faces will have like a seven to 10 keywords straight. When you have a seven to 10 keyword, so on that 10 days of period, we push a traffic to that 10 keywords to make sure that we rank that one in a seven to 10 days period of time actually. And tactically, what are you doing with these seven to 10 keywords? Are you putting them in the back end, right? We're in the back end of the metadata, I guess you could say, or then you're also putting them in the front end of the title, and then also kind of towards the top of the description. And then is that kind of where you're putting this? That's what you're putting your up to. We'll talk about it's a relevancy model. What we had 2000 up to 2021, a period of time. Right now we are something called dynamic re-ranking model in the Amazon search actually, which is basically you don't have to have all the keyword in your listing to rank. So what do we do is like basically we prepare that one into to listing with all the algorithm basically, like NLP model, which is semantically keyword and the EQR model, we prepare the listing basically, not to build a keyword, to build an experience, actually, on your listing. So Amazon goes into more towards the experience, what they wanna give it to the user, and they want each and every sellers to be focused on a specific buyer, actually. There are totally like seven types of buyers, I'm on top of my head, I would say four, right now, which is like a value buyers, and like a seasonal buyers, gift buyers, and professional buyers. Each and every people look for different things. For example, professional buyers, they don't care about the pricing, actually. They want what are they getting? Are they getting the quality that what they want? Are they are technical people? They want like a win more in detail. But when it comes to like a value buyer, they don't care about, they're like, what they want, like a maximum out of their buck, if they're buying the speaker, they're thinking about, can I get the cover out of it? Can I get like a travel elements out of it? It comes with the charger and everything, the combination of stuff, that's what they like, actually. Prepare your listing based on what audience you wanna serve it to, actually. - So like we're talking about like, using the language that a professional buyer would care about, right? And basically just, sorry. Not necessarily keyword stuffing, or anything like that. It's mostly just talking to that audience in a way that they would give it like that. - That is correct. You focus on in such a way that you're speaking to that audience in such a way that, oh, this is what I'm looking for. And they're going into your listing, you know about like a Google, or damn, the word is not coming out right now. So in the Google, one of the major problems that people, they won't be able to rank, which is when they click on the somewhere, somewhere in the links, actually, they click on it, they go into your listing, they go in your search page, and they go out immediately, bounce rate, right? - Absolutely. - The problem is that so high, actually. You're probably not able to rank the keyword in the Google, just like that in Amazon. If somebody click on your listing, they're not spending good amount of time on going through your EBC and the listing and all the things, they consider to be a bounce rate and then they put you down like crazy. So how can you build an experience for Amazon? So that's exactly the next step, building the listing in terms of like taking those keywords, building the listing for a proper audience, and build the experience for the audience, specifically you're saying for, right? So now your friend turned his down, based on the keyword, now you're going for a middle word, which is basically like Amazon Attribution, Amazon refinements, and Amazon browse nodes, product app and item type, all these data, are mapped very clear, actually, at that point. - Do you recommend like give away challenges, but give away to boost ranking at first, or is that not really a thing, and is it as much anymore in Amazon? - No, see, okay, there is a level of keywords there. So we called a keyword from complexity one to complexity five. Some keywords, you just put it in your listing and you can able to rank. Some keyword, you need to run external traffic to rank. Some keyword, you need to do an external traffic, you need to do like a PPC to rank. Some keywords, you need to do the give away, plus external traffic, plus all the things to rank. Some keywords, you need to build the relevancy to rank. So there is a level of it actually. So you need to bracket your listing or your keywords, how, which level you need to take it to rank your keyword. And some saying, it's not a product launch anymore in Amazon, it's basically like a keyword launch at this point. - Interesting. Do you, with those 150 products that you launched last year, how much of those were, like did you do any giveaways for those specific products? - Like for certain keywords. - We did like a couple of, couple of external traffic, and we do like a couple of their own audience giveaways process actually, we've done giveaways in terms of like, it's not the main strategy for you, doesn't sound like. - It's not the one least strategy, it's not the, sometimes we do like a Facebook ads, run the ads and then do the discounted, discounted up audience things actually. But the whole process is like, bracket it once you bracket, so for example, recently we launched the product, we've been doing the PPC launches like crazy, right? We seeing the keywords are now moving really well. Once the face one is completed, the keywords are now moving. We did the external traffic, we moved a little bit, and we did like the external giveaways actually, in terms of like, run the audience traffic, actually give them a discount to purchase a product, actually the deep discount for purchase of the product. And then we started moving to like, 35 position to fifth position actually at that point. - Mm-hmm. - Right, so, not making a decision out of your head, make a decision out of your data, that's where you can turn left and right, actually very easy. Not like, okay, there is no one way to free off going and launching the product yet actually. - Yeah, that's, that's, I opened it for me, just because I haven't sold an Amazon for many, many years, actively at least. And so the thing when I was, when I was building our Amazon brand, it was, when I was young, I didn't know much about, about doing it. - Yeah. But I was under the impression that pretty much giveaways, like product launch giveaways, were like, was the only strategy. Really the most effective only strategy. And that's when like, Manichat, and like, you would have to get so creative with like, Zapier, and like, to do all these things, which I'm sure still exists, but I was under the impression that I was the only way to do things. - No, you do all this, before 2016, 2017, you just do like, this called, they have like a basic matching algorithm, actually at that point. They have a machine learning building in 2016, 2017, actually at that point. So basically you take one keyword, do like a blast, like a hundred giveaways, 200 giveaways for the next seven days, it automatically ranks, not anymore, actually. - Yeah, that makes sense. - Yeah, and you don't wanna spend that much money as well. You don't, we don't, we don't do that one. It's, you have like a brand analytics data, you have a search query performance data, you have a, other tools data, like a data dive and helium-10 data, and you have like a PVC data, more clear, very well-directional keywords data, and you know exactly how much each keyword can make sales. Yeah, so basically you have all the data to make a proper decision in terms of like, okay, how many keywords, how many sales each keyword brings, so if you want to make like a 20 sales, you know what are the keywords you need to make. That's how, that's how bread and butter are basically like, we can be able to tell, okay, if you wanna make a 40 sales, how many keywords you need to rank for, are there is a room for 40 sales. How many keywords, how much you're going to spend for this launch basically to build up 40 sales at this point? So it's a data, it's all about data, and you know about what I'm talking about, it's like when you do like every day, like basically like you know that the criteria of like it needs to match, and if you match the right criteria and you launch the product, it always cool gonna work actually. - Absolutely, it makes us, it gives us a lot of confidence to move into a category to a new product to do anything. I think it's a good transition time, it's already flying by so quick to move into rapid fire questions, you ready? - How do I press it? Yeah, let's do it. - What's your favorite business book? - I'm more towards, I'm more towards something, when your mindset is taking care and your business will be taking care for yourself, I like the book called "Something Called an Untettered Soul". - Oh, great, great. - Yeah, "Untettered Soul" is why because it's let me to control my emotion, taking care of my, I'm not dealing with my inner, my mind, I'm dealing with my, all my professional ability to make the decisions. So that's one of my favorite book, and also I like the Nike, the Moop. - Should dogg. - Yeah, should dogg, it's a very amazing book. Those two books I would always recommend, really jumped into as one of the book called "A Super", becoming a supernatural by Joe D'Spencer. - Mm-hmm, I think book actually, I would say. Yeah. - Awesome. And by the way, the first book was, for anyone that didn't catch it, was the untethered soul, the journey to yourself. - Untethered. - That does grow, I guess. - Beautiful. What's one thing that you wish that you knew before starting your business? - I mean, now, I talking going back to the life actually, it's a business and personal life experience actually. You're gonna have a hard time, but you're gonna survive out of that, and you're gonna grow much bigger. So they say, your comeback will be much bigger than your setbacks actually. So when it's comebacks comes, when your setback comes, be ready and be joyful, not being sad and depressed, because most of the time, we always look for bad things not to happen, and when it comes to it, we hit hard. But when we look back, every bad things happen, we step up 20% higher than in a regular time actually. So I look for a times that, where things are getting hard, then I know that when I'm growing at that point. So what's the worst advice that you've ever received about business? The worst advice I've received on the business. No, it's just a, it's, I mean, the worst advice is like listening to my mind, actually, like listening to your guts. Of course, you can, but I'm talking about like, it's more fun when you have the data in place, actually. It's like, what would you guts do what you're supposed to do, actually? But I'm talking about like sometimes we don't know how to differentiate between the guts and mind, actually. So if you know it, it's good, but I'm talking about like, I don't know how to differentiate it. Like some, I had a very hard time to differentiate what is my gut feeling and also what's my mind feeling. Sure. Right. So not then I moved to what's the data, like I'm not making decision out of this. I'm making a decision out of the data. So then I don't have to be there. My team can be able to take out the completely. Well, how would you define a creator? Who is a creator to you? Creator, created in a way that in talking about the universe or like anything. Yeah, who was a creator? Is it is that a content creator or is it everyone, every single person as a creator or is it like, hey, we're all creators. No, like we're all in a group. For me, it's like, I'm a very big problem solver. I'm a very big and so I believe in entrepreneurship. It's it's the only place that it's going to solve the problems in the world. Anybody would try to solve any problems and come up with a better solutions. It doesn't matter how big a house mall it is. They are the creators of this world, actually. I completely agree with that. And I think I already know the answer to this question because you just kind of said it. But who do you think should be a business owner? One of the strong belief, I'm not a very book student. I'm very dumb in my class. I fail my test. The one thing I learn out of that is basically, it's like, okay, I go prepared for my exam, but I still fail and I know that one I'm going to fail and I prepare for my next exam, actually. The rest of the, I'm talking about like the, what do you have is like, basically, I build it like I never give up attitude, actually. It does not going to, nothing is going to stop me that who I am. Nothing is going to stop me where I'm going to go. It doesn't matter what comes actually in my way. If it's a wall or whatever it is, I'm going to break through. I'm not going to pass through. I'm going to break through and then thrive and thrive, actually. When you have somebody asked like any kid, anybody as an attitude of like, no, I'm not giving up on this, actually. And they are like a best fit for like what because they are the best people who's going to be like, go, go against a tradition. I never like, never like going to be, I'm when I was a kid, I'm just like, if I took something, I, I disband with my cycle and then put it back by myself. I don't even know how that works actually, but I sit and then night by night and try to figure out how to do it and then I clean and I put it back. So I've seen any kids, anybody who has like, never give up such an attitude, they're going to go far beyond their ability. I think they are more powerful and they are more dangerous. They're going to be like, go further in their life, actually. I love that. Calm, where can people find you and work with you, follow along your journey, learn more about you? Sure. Yeah. You can follow me in my YouTube channel, Colin.Raja. You can connect me with me in the Facebook, Colin.Raja. So I'm super active about like talking about the latest algorithm. I have done multiple case studies. If you guys want one of your case rates and hit me up and I'm happy to share. For sure. By the way, for anyone listening to this or watching this, we'll link to Colin's all those links that we talked about today on the show notes in the description below. Colin, appreciate it, man. Thank you for coming on and sharing your knowledge and set the connection to connect soon. Hi, I'm Pissom and thanks for having me and thanks for having me using questions. It's a rapid fail. It's really great. Awesome. Talk to you soon. Yeah. Thanks. Take it.