Speaker 1This is The Road to One Million, and I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. $50,000 in sales in one day from doing one thing without spending any money on ads on a brand new product that didn't even have reviews yet. Today, we're going to break down the strategy. You're going to learn exactly what he did. You're going to learn what went wrong and what went right, and you're going to see how you can use the exact same strategies to launch any product in any market and get sales quickly, even if you're launching a brand new product. Quick backstory. The person you're about to meet, Jake, read my book, 12 Months to 1 Million, and he used that formula to launch his brand and get to about $50,000 a month in sales. Then my investment fund put capital into his business to help him grow. And I told him, I said, you know, if you run this playbook, you're going to be a $5 million business over a couple of years. He believed me, he did the work, and now he's pacing about $5 million a year in just two years after we invested. And recently, he's been growing faster than ever. So I wanted to share the strategies that he's using right now with all of you who follow my content. As a result, you're going to see how to launch new products, how to get sales really quickly, even if you don't have any money to spend on advertising, and how a business grew from a six-figure company to a mid-seven-figure company. And I want to share this with you because I want to invest in more businesses like Jake's. Jake takes a good amount of his sales on Amazon, not all of them, but a good amount of them. And the game on Amazon is changing really quickly. The people who are following the playbook from 2013, 2014, they're really struggling right now. But there's a lot of people who are following the playbook from 2013, 2014, there's a new way to get a ton of exposure and sales on Amazon that I think is easier than how the game was played back a few years ago. And if you know how this works, then it's faster and easier to get sales on brand new products, even if you're starting from scratch. So now Jake and I are going to break apart his strategy so that you can use it in your business and to launch new products. So Jake, obviously, the community is somewhat familiar with you and your brand, and they know that you're a part of the Capitalism Fund. I was hoping that you could zoom back about six months and talk about what has happened a little bit over the last six months. We spoke yesterday and you said that you've sort of stabilized around $250,000 a month in sales, which is the envy of a lot of people in the room. But that's about a stable, sustainable place for you to be after all of the things that have happened over the last six months. So why don't you give us a quick update on what's been going on? Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2I think one of our biggest hurdles was just getting over the success of our initial products and just really branching out onto some new hero SKUs to really just diversify the business. And that's been the challenge this year is just creating things that our customers want that isn't something in a totally saturated market. So we've had a good bit of success with that with some car seat products that we released, and they released in about May. It's been a long time coming, and we had some success getting them off the ground with some virality and some big external traffic to really boost the numbers. And it's finally stabilized where we want with a lot of room left to push them. And when you say
Speaker 1stabilized, I mean, you're still fighting to keep in stock with a lot of these products, right? So your overall business numbers have stabilized, but still there's upside to go because you had a hard time keeping stock on some of these new products. Is that correct?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's absolutely correct. We really have no idea where we're actually going to stabilize that because we had the good problem of all of our inventory flying right out of stock, and we're in the process of getting them all back in right now. So let's talk about how you
Speaker 1got those secondary products to hit liftoff, because you said you were doing some off Amazon traffic, you had some virality hit, and you've done some things a little bit sneakier than other people. By sneaky, I mean, under the radar stuff than what most people would look at right away. So you had your one primary SKU that was driving a lot of the business for a good year and a half or so, started releasing these other products. What did you layer into the strategies that have been helping see them get liftoff?
Speaker 2Yeah, in all honesty, and I'm asked this question quite a bit too, is how relevant still is 12 months to 1 million? And in all honesty, like, I'm obviously a huge fan of the book, but it's not only more relevant now, it's more necessary than it's ever been taking those steps to essentially build your audience so that you can drive external traffic. Because what we're discovering is that it's almost more important than, say, PPC on Amazon itself. Like, the changes in the algorithm on Amazon, I'm not sure exactly what they are, but we're seeing massive, massive rewards from driving external traffic. Driving traffic outside of Amazon to Amazon. And the ranking is holding just after we get that initial boost from that traffic. So we didn't necessarily have specific strategies outside of anything normal, which is a lot of influencer work, a lot of social media work, keeping up with the customers.
Speaker 1But the underlying strategy was, let's drive outside traffic to Amazon, correct?
Speaker 2Exactly. Yep. Yep. That was the number one goal and we were able to do that by fortunately working with some influencers and some creative content strategy to make something have crazy liftoff and go viral. And yeah, I wish we could clip in just like the clip because it's so funny. It's like not anything crazy. It's like just a mom saying like, oh, Amazon finds here's the product and just installs it. And it's like, oh, my kid loves it. It's like a 10 second clip. And because of the product itself, it had a lot of engagement on the video. And just that little clip, I think is that over 11 million views right now. And we're still seeing it's been a couple months now and we're still seeing just crazy rewards for that traffic held the rank. Amazon seemed to understand that that's what customers wanted just from that initial burst. And they've really rewarded us for that.
Speaker 1Did they even link to the listing in the video or did they have to find it in your bio? I remember it not being a very optimized process.
Speaker 2Yeah, because we didn't even know she was going to post like I had been talking to her and she made some content for us. She was nice to like asked if she could, but I didn't really pay a lot of attention to it. And she just took it upon herself to post because normally I would have probably driven the traffic to my website, depending on when the product launched and what it was. But she literally just linked in the comments, like not even anything in her bio, just like link the Amazon listing right in the comments. And just from that alone, it just took off.
Speaker 1So let me put this into a little bit of a digestible takeaway for those of you who are watching. So first of all, what Amazon rewards now the most from everything that we can test is outside traffic, outside traffic that converts to a sale. Now, from what we can tell, they may or may not be agnostic to where it's coming from. Google ads and email list, YouTube. But Amazon seems to be rewarding the lift that comes from people sending to the platform. And so we still have a lot of people who are competing for Amazon pay-per-click and for ranking of organic keywords, but you can write your own check. You can write your own path by creating your own outside traffic. And so I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of what we're going to talk about next. And spoiler alert, he did it with no ads. He did it with no big audience. All he did was create a partnership with a very small content creator that was perfectly targeted for his ideal audience. And as a result of that one post, things got out of hand and he sold a bunch of new products. Now, Jake has a lot of money. He has a lot of money. He has been doing a bunch of different things to drive outside traffic. One of those things really, really hit. And that thing was not the video that anyone on this call would have predicted was the one that would go insanely viral. Now let's break that apart a little bit, Jake. If I remember correctly, this, well, just this creator, I don't even want to say it's an influencer that I think 2,500 followers or something like this. Is that right?
Speaker 2Yeah, that was the craziest part. She was by no definition an influencer, maybe a micro influencer, but under 3,000 followers just on Instagram, I believe not much reach at all.
Speaker 1Yeah. And so let's break apart a little bit about why this did so well, because it wasn't necessarily the content. It wasn't necessarily the audience. We tend to think that it may have been what happened in the comments that made it so effective. So share a little bit about that story.
Speaker 2Yeah, it wasn't exactly intentional, but I knew this was going to happen and prepped my social media team to prepare for this because we were essentially disrupting a very stagnant market as in these are car seats uh obviously safety is the number one concern parents are just kind of set in these same ways where they just listen to the car seat manufacturers but don't necessarily understand that the car seat manufacturers have to follow regulations outside of what they would just like to do themselves so we kind of brought attention to this uh i had some car seat products that we have crash tested and proved by any definition to be safe and that was kind of what we centered this product around of like hey there is a safe way to make sure that your kids can be entertained in the car seat instead of just sitting there doing nothing the whole time and that sparked the debate of you know half the parents saying no we don't think so our car seat manufacturer wouldn't like this and the other half of the parents saying no we don't think so and the other half of the parents saying no we don't think so our car seat manufacturer wouldn't like this and the other half of the parents saying no we don't think so our car seat manufacturer wouldn't like this and the other half of the parents saying no we don't think so our car seat manufacturer wouldn't like this and the other half saying you know taking more of our side of like this seems very practical this is safer than just handing your kid anything randomly in the car anyway and it just the engagement just went nuts for this debate like it was just a total disruption
Speaker 1so it was the comments that kept it at the top of the feed that got people engaged got more people into the conversation and then this fire just kind of got stoked and blew up as it's funny we don't think about this as business owners often but this happens to us as consumers all the time we're brought into a conversation about whether something is right or wrong or left or right and we get sucked in and then we watch the video right and then we might take an action based on that video when that video hit what was the peak of sales i know they've come down and you've been out of stock for a little bit now you've been fighting that war but what was the initial burst in sales that happened when the video hit
Speaker 2yeah uh unfortunately we didn't get to see exactly what it would have done because it just completely ran us out of stock in the first day and a half uh i think i had like just shy of 1500 units or so in stock and they were gone in a day and a half so it was like i had some other skews that were also similar so then they started buying those so it it worked out well all around and i think it was like 50 grand in like a day and a half or something just for the the one video
Speaker 1yeah and that sounds great on paper right and of course jake and i were both excited when this is happening but there are also very legitimate problems that this causes too like how fast can we get back in stock how big of an inventory order do we need to place in order to maintain this momentum and then there's just the very natural reaction to a bunch of people are shitting on my product in the comments when the first time that happens that don't feel good that is that is tough so tell me a little bit about where your mind was going when all of this was was happening yeah i've never
Speaker 2really experienced anything like that too much so there were definitely some mental health breaks involved where it was just like i'm gonna quit reading these for a minute but yeah talking to you guys really smooth things over it's just like this is good if anything just keep the debate going like you said to reassert yourself that you're not doing anything wrong and as long as you're sure of that there's you know that's what people do on the internet they're gonna talk shit about your stuff so yeah no matter what it is that's just it's gonna happen so prepare yourself for it it's not gonna explode at levels like we experienced right off the bat but you'll need some thick skin and just don't let it bother you and you'll be
Speaker 1all right haters leave comments but buyers take action they buy your stuff if you follow this strategy or put anything out online you will get people who give you crap ask me how i know or just read the comments in any of my videos it's a necessary part of the process and it can feel uncomfortable especially the first time it happens but as jake observed the haters actually fueled the fire and helped him make even more sales so jake obviously this is sort of lightning in a bottle it's not something that you can necessarily plan for but it's certainly nice we're not going to say no to a video going viral and giving us tens of thousands in sales over the course of a couple of days we're not complaining but we also don't know how we can predict that so what is the strategy as you get back in stock and your revenues have smoothed out we now have a little bit more predictability what's your approach for continuing to build on the success of this product without breaking the business
Speaker 2yeah so the approach began when we went out of stock and things were still going viral because you still want to collect that traffic obviously so we were able to set up swap the landing page over to the website instead of amazon start collecting emails keeping them up to date on when it's going to be back in stock so we can obviously monetize that traffic a bit so i think once we do go back in stock we'll see it's a pretty active list saying like they're going to buy we'll kick them a discount so that we can really have that initial sales boost again and then obviously she's going to do some more posts maybe comment on the old one to bring it back to life just keep coddling that relationship with that influencer so it can be hopefully a repeat traffic source yeah and of
Speaker 1course we're going to turn that into an ad and we're going to run traffic to that ad and continue that conversation going for a long time if i've got any questions about that i'll be happy to answer them in the comments so we'll see you in a couple of weeks so we'll see you in a couple of weeks so we'll see you in a couple of weeks so when you came into this year you set out the goal for hitting 5 million in 2023 where are you in your trajectory for getting there yeah i'd
Speaker 2say we're right on track right now it'll be a little closer but it's kind of tough to predict with mine because i have insane q4s i think compared to a lot of businesses like uh we'll do almost our entire year's worth of revenue from like i don't know like i don't know like i don't know like i don't know like october to december or historically we have uh so yeah they're they're like good price point giftable items solve clear issues things like that so it's uh very good giftable stuff so if uh basically based on past trajectory we should be right at where we need to be
Speaker 1practically here's how this plays out at the beginning of your business you have a few products that are getting sales and jake is still getting about 50 percent of his total sales from old products products that have reviews they have organic listings they have repeat customers but then he launches a new product that has no reviews that has no sales but the exposure that he got gave that new product a lift and now he can go build the reviews build the rankings and what we call stick the landing where that product will become an evergreen product that continually gets new customers and it builds the overall revenue and value of that business you are a very stoic man jake so how are you actually feeling about all of this no it's
Speaker 2cool i love this stuff like i know i don't show it but it's uh fun for me i mean my whole side of everything is like more of the product creation side but tied into that is like the fun marketing strategies too because when you create new unique things like for say yourself or people that you know really well you start to understand what's going on and you start to understand the benefits of those products as you create them so it's fun to really just outline those benefits into the marketing strategy so it kind of just becomes one wrapped up into each other and that's been really pivotal pivotal for a lot of our success i love to tell this story
Speaker 1where you you said i i really would like to take this to about a five million dollar business and i and i said to you i was like i'm one something effective i'm 100 certain this is a if you follow this plan and i'm curious like i think it's happened faster than either of us thought that it would but i'm i'm curious what if you knew that this was going to be a five million dollar business two years after that conversation what would you have thought and what would you have told yourself the
Speaker 2initial thought would have just been shock and probably a lot of self-doubt because as we said i borrowed a lot of confidence from you so that was very helpful to uh be in those rooms at the time i don't i don't know if i would have fully believed it i think i'm more of a i need to see the data type of person to believe it but yeah outlining the strategy and just really breaking down the numbers to see how many skews do we need to release to actually do this makes it a lot more realistic than just the thought of like this big huge number in your head like yeah really break it down and then it starts to become real
Speaker 1i hope that you feel inspired after hearing this because it was only two years ago that i met jake and he had just been grinding his way to this business and it was starting to become something and then two years later he's got a business that's going to do about five million dollars this year that's how fast things can happen when you follow the playbook the playbook that i've shared with you over and over if you haven't seen that playbook and you're still grinding your way to the first million go to capitalism.com playbook and you can get it for free the biggest fear that people have have when they're at the beginning of the journey is saying, what if my product doesn't sell? And I like to remind entrepreneurs that if you follow the playbook, your challenge will not be taking sales. It will be, can I keep in stock because I'm getting so many sales? That's hard to believe until you've experienced it. But as soon as you launch and you start doing the things that you've learned from me or you've learned inside my book, you will experience this because the snowball builds really quickly when you launch a few products, get reviews, and are good to your customers. That's ultimately why I teach this stuff, because I want to invest in people like Jake. And to get there, you first have to follow the playbook of building a million dollar business, which is four products at 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. And if you still need the playbook for how we do that in about 12 months, go to capitalism.com slash playbook, and you can get it for free. I'm Ryan Dandy Moran with capitalism.com. I help entrepreneurs build million dollar businesses. You just saw a really good case study of the type of businesses that we like to invest in and the ones that when they follow the playbook, some really cool things happen. Hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next time. And now a quick word from Tristina Tim, one of our members from the capitalism.com community.
Speaker 3We joined the incubator because we knew the things that we didn't know. So we didn't know e-commerce at all. And we needed that. We needed somebody to tell us where to go and what to do. Right now, we are on track to hit the 3 million mark this year. However, I think next year is just going to double that. We have so many plans for the future and just executing the plan that the incubator brought us. It was fantastic. It was step-by-step what to do, how to execute it. And then if we did fumble the ball, we had somebody there to help us through it and walk us through. So we're going to be doing a lot of work. We're going to be doing a lot of work. Our plans for the future, of course, this year we have 3 million. And then next year, 6. And we're hoping to get to 10 million within the next three to four years. Freedom is everything to our family. I homeschool. And I love that our family can wake up together every morning. Nobody's running off to school. Nobody's running off to work. If I had to work at like a nine to five job, there's no way that I could also homeschool. I get to set my own hours. And they're not as many hours as a normal job would be. So that's really fantastic. But again, freedom is everything for our family. And it's strange that our kids don't know any other way. Mom and dad are home every day. I would describe the capitalism community as family. You get so many tips from people. We give tips. And I think that we're going to start to work with a lot of our fellow community members. And everyone really is rooting for everybody else. Nobody is in competition at all. Everyone is everyone's biggest cheerleaders.
Speaker 1If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book, 12 Months to 1 Million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven-figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in at capitalism.com slash one. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven-figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism Incubator. And you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com slash inc. That's capitalism.com slash inc.
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