Speaker 1all right everybody before we dive into today's episode we're brought to you by a few fantastic brands that sponsor this show the first one is routine now this one has been a sponsor for a long time if you haven't tried it yet i don't know what you're doing because i've been talking about them for years but ultimately what was routine designed to do well when we sleep we lose between a pound and a pound and a half of water mostly just from sweating something i learned when i first met these guys each packet of routine comes with half an organic lemon one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar himalayan sea salt all six essential electrolytes and no sugar i always like to say it's really just three ingredients it's lemons it's apple cider vinegar it's himalayan sea salt i dump that into a glass of water first thing in the morning rehydrate myself the days i have it versus the days i don't phenomenal on the days i do i genuinely it's one of those products where you feel it 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can find them in a lot of different places now they're doing a great job of getting distribution but i would say the two easiest places living haywell.com if you just google haywell you'll you'll find that pretty quickly and then also amazon all right everybody thank you for listening here's today's show all right everybody welcome to another episode of the shane white show i'm pumped this one it's been a little i've had a little bit of a break collins i didn't tell you this it's been it's just been a rough month so i haven't recorded one in a couple weeks which is very rare for me but i am pumped today we have collins paris on the podcast we got introduced through a mutual friend a few months ago and you are working on a company which i'll let you let you give a little insight but it's called rain sight and it was cool it's one of those meetings where i didn't know anything about it we hop on this call and uh we just start jamming and you were showing us how it works and what you're doing and i i immediately got off that call and emailed you and said we got to do a podcast so collins welcome to the show man thanks
Speaker 2dude appreciate the
Speaker 1time that's yeah man i
Speaker 2always like chopping it up with uh operators who get their hands dirty we were
Speaker 1joking about that before the call how that seems to not always be the norm and when you can kind of tell right away if someone is touching amazon day-to-day or they just have a team that does it so i'm pumped too man um would you mind for everyone listening who doesn't know anything about it i'm pumped too man i'm pumped too man who doesn't know who you are doesn't know who rain sight what rain sight is because obviously it's a new um could you just give a little bit of an intro a little like one-on-one elevator pitch
Speaker 2of you um i'm collins i uh right now i'm working for a national cpg brand selling coffee creamer nut pods if people heard about it but been building rain sight on the side for the last few years i've been selling on amazon since god i just like since before they even really had ads and we're rolling out their ad network and i've been selling on amazon for the last few years and i've been and now it's 20 billion dollars in free cash flow for them so back in 2011 i think it was the first time i was like in cell control i know it's it's wild uh so isn't it weird to think that was 15
Speaker 1years ago i said that to me the other day because i i i went off to college in the fall of 2010 and i was calling one of my roommates the other day and i said do you realize we we went off to purdue 16 years ago we're
Speaker 2so old i it was i graduated in chicago and uh did an you know what i wanted to do and moved out to seattle um and you know uh things have evolved over time and the uh yeah i mean like i look back i'm like geez like that it was like then it was such a nascency of like so many different ecosystems out there like google had kind of changed a lot of things and what they were doing and amazon was like kind of coming into their own but you know i i since then i've been selling since 2011 ish and built up my own cpg brand and i don't want to say crashed it but it ended um got a lot of good learnings from that and um then my wife and i started having a family in 2017 started working at nut pods uh had a lot of uh it's very hard to find jobs when you were a ex-owner of anything and you don't have a formal sheet of like you don't have a nice polished resume so i was out like five years ago and i ironed out stuff i'm like i don't know like i would be a good project manager i would i am a good operator like all these things and and and then um and then you know finally landed at nut pods because they needed someone to run their amazon as they grew and um out of that experience and previous amazon experience i just i always knew there was like i always felt like there was this tool that i didn't have that all these other companies had you know like i had the the rap sheet the helium tins the jungle scouts seller board so like everything and i was like yeah like this isn't like the way i want to do it and like i get my hand dirty and i was like it's just working so um god it's like the the original idea was in 22 it was this is crazy i was thinking about this earlier it was like it was before like gpt was public it was back when like wow was it really yeah it was like well the idea and like i started like mapping stuff out and this is like in like the fall of 2022 and like okay i think like jasper had started coming out you know the fighting thing that was like a rapper around like gpt and um
Speaker 1so i just yeah i
Speaker 2do yeah
Speaker 1and well when did when did chat gpt i can't remember when it launched when did that launch
Speaker 2i looked it up because it was the the public beta was in november and we were um we were in uh we were on my father-in-law's um he had retired and we we all went to europe together and like i you know i actually had some time to like sit with a lot of my thoughts of you know when you're you decompress a little bit and you're not it was one of the rare vacations where i didn't actually bring my computer and i told everyone i was like i can i'm not going to be working normally it's like good for you yeah that's a
Speaker 1move well yeah it's like not bring the laptop that's that's the
Speaker 2that's the move i mean as a as a one-man show it's like sometimes you're like i'm on vacation my laptop's still there because like there's all these weird edge like i could write a million sops but then just random stuff pops up and always like what do we do here and i'm like well i can't let this channel go down go dark lose x y and z but yeah it was like a good decompression period and i was just like i was really thinking around like the like pain points that i had had and then you know it just evolved from like my spreadsheets to eventually where we are now which is insane like i just very proud of
Speaker 1the tool yeah man well let's bet let's back up a little bit because i think for anyone who's listening i mean i would tell you just to give you a little background you know we have a wide variety of people listen to the podcast but kind of the the core group of people would be considered somewhat of cpg i would say cpg as a whole so people are going to recognize some of the things you're talking about um would you kind of take a step back so you play you played around with call it like early beta gpt but let's let's think about rain sight day one can you just explain like did it start like probably most things do if you're working on amazon like you're in a spreadsheet when you pull data from amazon you're looking at a spreadsheet you create some tool and then you're like wait could this be a software like how give me the like the day one of you know you probably don't even know it's called rain sight yet but you're like i'm gonna build something what was the problem like when do you remember that day
Speaker 2yeah well i originally wanted to call it canary because it was like the canary in the coal mine that would like alert somebody actually yeah i know i love like i still would love to call it but then i was like and that's gonna be really like that's gonna be an uphill battle trying to like get any name around canary i was like that's just yeah um and then so we put it in rain as in i live in seattle so and inside so you know uh i like it okay you didn't tell
Speaker 1me that first time Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2It would be one of those things that you'd have to actually explain. You know, it's not it's not obvious. But yeah, I mean, the problem is, Amazon has these like static periods in their reports, you can be like, Oh, I can pull out x, y, and z, like I can look at August, or I can look at July, or I can look at the last two weeks, and it gives you this snapshot, you can go through and pull out like day to day things. But what bothered me bothers me is, you know, like you look at an August versus July, or an August versus August of the previous year, it's like, well, that one had, you know, like, five Sundays in it, and Sundays are our biggest day, or this one had some sort of long tail, something that happened that we have to like feed context into like how we're looking at these spreadsheets. So I'm pulling all these spreadsheets down. And I would just be looking at like periods over periods, because this is the thing that I you get this sense, like if you're if you're in an Amazon dashboard, if you sell CPG, if you like, have like some modicum of interest in data, and like, I'm a huge finance and economics nerd, too.
Speaker 1Okay, yeah, we could jam all day.
Speaker 2You get this sense that you're like, something's going on, because like, let's say you sell $10,000 a day. It's always like 10, five, nine, three, 11, two, you know, it's just like, but what always bothered me was like, what is the composition of that $10,000? Let's say you got 20 ASINs. One may be surging, one may be declining. You got $10,000 could actually $12,000 a day, because you can look at a declining one and fix it, you can look at a surging one, take the learnings, move them over. And that's what really irked me. And then it was always to do that, pulling down massive data files from Amazon, burdening my computer, and then I pulled something down, and I'd be like, Oh, this is like a good time, compared to that time. And then I realized I was like, this one had like an extra Saturday, or this one's like, this isn't like a clean cut. And or I want to look forward. Three days on one. And then I have to do the whole process again. That's what that's what really like kind of got to me was, I have to start that process again. And that's where I was like, somebody like I'm like, am I insane? Like somebody's got this tools like I, I kind of explained it. I don't know, like, as a I mentioned this to a lot of people. And they're like, I don't know what that is. But I'm like, it's a Bloomberg terminal for your Amazon world. And people are like, I don't know. I'm like, I don't know what a Bloomberg terminal is. I'm like, Oh, well, nevermind. Nevermind. Like, you know, but the people who get it was like, I'm really looking at it. I'm looking at there's this composition of what's going on in your business at all times. And a lot of it depends, like you're an operator, you're an agency, or you're a brand owner. And I would always get the question, what's going on on Amazon? Yeah, what do you want me to drill into, like against forecast against budget against, like, was a certain like variety color, like how are size 11 shoes doing? Like, what do you want me to do here?
Speaker 1And there's so much like, there's so many things, right? And I don't know about you, but like my brain ever since I started on Amazon, like I have, if I think about like the simplest forecast I can come up with, which it's not simple, but it's as simple as my brain will let me do. It's like monthly sales, but then sales has to be broken down into organic and ad driven sales. So there's two buckets, ad driven sales, obviously have ad spend behind it. And then depending on all items, we're advertising feeds into that. And then there's ROAS, like there's all these metrics. And we started I was showing we use that ad badger software I've talked to you about. And I was in the I was showing them like, then you can go further. And then you can say like, well, for the last week, we were advertising on this ASIN, but this ASIN had inbound shipment. So across some zip codes, we were primed some other ones we weren't. So advertising performance came down on these campaigns that were kept. It's like, it's so deep into your point, like, like the tool that we're going to talk about that you're creating. I think people who even work in Amazon, who what I just ran through, you're like, Oh, yeah, we deal with this, like level of detail that's hard to explain to people and to forecast for. There's just no solutions for that. It's like, you're just you're trying your best to get ahead of the data. But there's so many components to it all the time. And it changes every day, that it's just complicated. And it's, it's probably the hardest part about running an Amazon business.
Speaker 2Yeah. And it's, you know, that, that context layer, both like, like you said, it's like on the agency side, you have to provide the context layer, the brand side has to give you a context layer of like, some things could be like a four alarm fire where they're like, our production line went down, or other things could be, yeah, we need to save some budget. And we're shifting things around. And it's like, those are the things that that are always part of that equation. And it's, it's hard, like, it's really hard to get to that. And, you know, it's like, you have to go in and almost like prime people like prime the pump up before you actually talk about and be like, here's all this context, and then we can talk about it. And I would say forecasting for Amazon, for a business that is not like is relatively stable is still hard forecasting for a business that is less than a few years old. Yeah, you're just like, I don't know, man, like, like, I can give you my best bet. And then you kind of just build a list of priorities. That's where I go back to. And I'm like, where are your bottlenecks? Are they in production or inbound? Or do you not have enough spin? Because like, we can kind of like get directionally close. But like, if you can't, if you can only do a production run once every, you know, nine months, then that's going to determine what the forecast is going to look. Sure. Oh, yeah. Good call. Yeah. Right. So I think that's a good point. I think a lot of brands like really have to step back. And it's kind of a filtering question of like, what do you want this to do? Like, when I talk to people, and they're like, Can you help me with Amazon? I'm like, what do you what do you see out of this channel? Is it? Is it a like, do you want it to print cash? Because you're going to be selling your company soon? And you want to have like really tight margin? Or are you just looking for exposure? And then you don't have a way to quantify that they bought it in Kroger or Walmart, but you know, 8 million impressions is valuable. And, and then a lot of them are like, I didn't really think about it like that. Like, yeah, it's like, you've got the biggest digital lane for shopping in the world. Like, what do you want to do with it?
Speaker 1Right? Yeah, it's a it's a really good point. And it's so it's so hard, because most I would, you know, we have different, probably a little bit different experience with, with like, different types of brands, but obviously, crisscrossing the same industry. But it's interesting, like, I'll be on calls in one day and talk to a few different brands. And they're just completely different conversations. But it's the same data, right? And to your point, it's because there's not one goal, usually with Amazon. And I know, at least in my shoes, where I said, it's, I think most brands come to us, and then want us to really lay out what the strategy could or should be. And it's interesting to one of the things I wanted to pivot to with your tool. And again, let's, let's kind of take a step into it. And I want to get I want to get to the, I want to get back to the, like, here's the day one and first couple months of how you did it. Because I think this podcast is all about going zero to zero. To one and Collins for you, like, you've worked on Amazon, launching a software is a, I mean, yes, sure, you're using e commerce in both lanes. But even, even I've told you, like, even we've been, we've been trying to build some AI stuff, and just things that help us internally. And it's just hard. It's like, it's a hard thing to wrap your arms around. It's hard to build, it's hard to know where to start. So maybe just to get back, go back, take us one step back there. How did you start? Like, did you did you try to go as far as you could with like, I don't know, vibe coding and doing what you do? You can't on your own? Did you immediately go try to find a technical co founder or someone to help you on the tech side? Like, how did you as Collins zero day zero, like, and you're like, I think I have an idea. What was that first day look like? How did you map it out? What was your first couple priorities?
Speaker 2Day zero is a lot of stuff on paper of like, what is my dream scenario? Like when I log in in the morning, and just like, what do I need to know? Like, what do I need to go do? And then a lot of that was me working in Excel and building those visual dashboards in Excel. and going through that manual pipeline And then, as I, like I said earlier, I was like, I'm the only one who doesn't have this. And then I started showing it to some other people. They were like, this looks really cool. This is just an Excel file. Okay. I love that. MVP. Yeah, it was MVP. As MVP as things can get. On the technical side, it's hard. I'm in Seattle. There's a lot of tech people out here. There's a lot of good talent. Once I was like, I'm going to jump into this. It was, there was not really vibe coding that, like I said, it was like, there's no vibe coding. Right, right. Sorry, that's true. Yeah. No, I mean, it's cool. It's like, I'm a visual learner and like, I build dashboards all day, every day for like my, like, so I build them just for me. I'm like, I just need to see stuff visually.
Speaker 1I'm so you. Yeah, dude, me too. I'd like, I have to, even if I have the data, like I got to visualize it. Otherwise I don't get it.
Speaker 2Yeah. So like I took, I took a lot of, I would say nobody's real. Nobody's really studied, um, nobody's really studied as much as the finance industry. And like, you've got, you've got portfolio managers looking at moving averages, divergences, convergences. And like, I just started building a couple of these and like, I would do full, full bounds of our data and then I would run them through. And I would look, look at like, what's a seven day. What's a 30 day. When do things cross? When do they don't? And I also went to, so there's, there's a lot of publicly traded CPG companies out there. And since they. Post their quarterlies, I'd go find their quarterly and be like, I'd pull all their quarterlies in and then I'd just be like, okay, you know, X company has posted this and then this forward guidance for every quarter for the last two years. This is what, and they'll break it down. This is what we think DTC is going to do. And this is what percentage of our Amazon business is DTC. So I'd look at that. Yeah. And I'd go back.
Speaker 1Would you go and then see if they're right? Yeah, exactly. So what I will, I
Speaker 2would see what I would see if they're right. But I would also. See, because I know where they're going and then I know where they got to, but I wanted to like rewind like months to see if what my assumptions were on the signals that I had developed and all the, cause like there's a lot of data out there.
Speaker 1I see what you're saying. Oh yeah. You're trying to see if you're trying to see if your bets were actually hitting.
Speaker 2Exactly. I was just back testing my theories, my formulas and saying,
Speaker 1dude, that's awesome.
Speaker 2Can, can like, okay. So they got to like, let's call it like 2 million. In the last quarter, what were their hiccups? Like what, where would have the signals I would have found? Like, like, and I just, I just, dude, like I said, I was like, I can, I can spend hours in data and I have to pull myself away because otherwise it's like, then I'm pulled over to a meeting here and there and all these things happen. But that was, that was a lot of the genesis.
Speaker 1I feel like you have time. You need a podcast, dude. This is cool. You can have a whole thing. It'd be a whole thing. You're like, you're like calling it, calling it out, rewinding it. Explaining people. That'd be cool as shit. I would totally listen to that.
Speaker 2Dude. I love it. I love it. I'm like, I'm also a history guy. Like I love history. Like it's, I mean, we're humans.
Speaker 1You can break it down and have a whole, this is YouTube podcast. I'm talking more business ideas that you probably don't need. Oh yeah, please.
Speaker 2And, uh, and then, yeah, when, when it started and then rolled up, like I, I'm not a technical guy. I'm technical enough, but I don't know how to do it and build it. It was in the nascent days. I hired an agency who was like, uh, kind of one of the early. No code, low code agencies. And, um, as a lot of the tools developed, they just were, they were like, they got me to a beta, but I wasn't, I was like, this isn't good enough. This isn't interesting. Yeah. They just, they couldn't, they didn't understand the channel. They didn't understand. Like it just wasn't going to scale the right way. And it was, it's very hard to find. Dude, I'm turning 40 in two weeks, which is like.
Speaker 1Happy early birthday.
Speaker 2It's a big one. Yes. It's a big one. I'm like moderately terrified, but also just like, let's go.
Speaker 1I feel, I feel like I turned 35 in November. So I feel like I need to set a goal of, I need to launch a software by the time I turned 40 now. I mean, yeah. Good for you though. You launched it right before you turned five. It's a big, it's a big achievement.
Speaker 2Yes. Um, thank you. I'm really, I'm really excited for it. And, um, but it's, uh, it's hard to like, I can't go. I have three young kids. I have a three, five and seven year old daughter. It's just like, I can only go to so many nightly meetups with the. Odd shot that I happened to meet a technical co-founder who doesn't want to just go like hammer into like anthropic or some other like AI startup.
Speaker 1They probably all are just getting like, it's like gravity towards those guys right now. Isn't it? Cause the dollars I've heard, like the salaries they're offering are just absolutely insane.
Speaker 2Yeah. Those are the sun. And then I'm like, Hey, come over here. Like I have this like deterministic logic with there's a little AI, but it's like actually it has to do all of these things before it even AI even touches. It sure. Why would I do that? Oh, you offer no money. And so, but, uh, I, I found, um, yeah, I found, I found somebody who is, has been fantastic in the last six months, rebuilt everything. And, um, it was a front end and, you know, has, has way more technical experience than I do. Um, can I stop you and ask you this?
Speaker 1Cause this is something I'm just genuinely curious on, even as it's like, I start to learn more about software and, you know, I've been playing around with some stuff for us internally, even it's like. How did you think about, how did you think about that process? Because it's like, I could see a world where you're building this for you, which is I need, I want something better every day when I log on to help my, just my work every day. And like that thing is probably not worth a ton of money to you. If you thought about it just like that, cause you're like, well, I, I, my, my revenue doesn't change. I don't make more necessarily from the company I work at, but this tool will help my life easier. So like, but there's still a Delta there on like how much you're willing to pay someone to help you with that versus. Yeah. When you were at that point where you kind of had this beta that didn't work and they were trying to find a technical co-founder, I would think Collins 9.9 out of 10 people would be like, fuck it. Like this was a cool side project, but like, well, I'm not going to keep wasting my energy. I have family, I have all this other shit going on. What was it in you that did you, did you just at some point during this process think, Hey, this, this is way bigger than me. Like, as I'm talking to more people, more, everyone's got this problem. Did you just kind of like, it was a light bulbs going off? Like, Hey, this could actually be a thing on its own.
Speaker 2I'll say it really never even came. Into like my like mental lexicon of like, I was just like, well, okay, next, well, then I'll figure it out. And it, it, it, it wasn't like, um, there still wasn't the solution. It was like, I was just building for me. And I, I just, I was like, I'm going to shove this square into this circle because I, I want it. And I know other people want it. And it's like the, especially in the CPG world, but like CPG operators, CPG people, everyone kind of knows each other. Or it's like. One degree away from somebody else. Right. And it was, it was still just more, I mean, this was earlier this year, it's August 26 and, um, people were still having this problem. And I was like, well, it's still a problem. And like, I know there's a solution there and CPG is great, but I have other things I also want to explore in life. And I, I just, it's still a problem. So there, there wasn't really a, eh, fuck it. Like it was a good run. It was like, no, I have to. Scratch that itch. I like, I can't not scratch that itch. That's my personality.
Speaker 1Well, and I also think it seems like in my, at least in my history, you know, whatever you want to call it, just all the companies I get obsessed over almost every single one of them that I truly remember the story and it, it was impactful to my trajectory. They were always, it was always that same story. It was, it was a founder who either found a problem that they just could not let go of. And they were like, I have to solve this or better yet. It was something that. They wanted to solve for themselves. And it was more about obsessing over what would make this product or service the best it can be for me. And then you start to realize like, oh, I'm not, I'm, I'm overly analyzing this problem, but if I'm overanalyzing it and I'm in this industry, that means everyone could use it.
Speaker 2Yeah. Or a lot of people. We publicly traded companies that I talked to like their heads of Amazon and I was like, what are you guys like? What like, just show me your workflow.
Speaker 1And
Speaker 2they're like, yeah, I'm smart when
Speaker 1you, when I met you the first time, it's exactly what you asked us. And I remember.
Speaker 2So the spreadsheet down and then we do all this and then we do that. And I was like, okay, so you like that, the spread, like it's not like some robust, complex thing. It's just like, that's your workflow. Those are your SOPs. So, um, yeah.
Speaker 1How do you feel about, so you, you get to that part. Um, this is, you know, it's funny. I, I will be the first one. I hope I tried my absolute best. That's why I have this book. I don't even see the book behind me. I have ego. Ego is the enemy by Ryan holiday. Ryan holiday. It's the best, but I think I'm always, I'm always trying to be humble and call out what I fuck up or totally missed, but you'll get the, why I'm asking this. I remember vividly in January, me and Kyle, my co-founder having conversation. I was like, dude, I'm calling it right now. Like if we don't figure out AI for the business by July, like the whole industry is going to be just in a different place by July. And I couldn't have called that wrong. Like, it just seems like it's moving so much slower than I called, uh, you know, even at the beginning of the year. Um, I say that to say during this process, anyone who works with Amazon, this would be something I, I just have heard so many people say. I honestly think about it every time I think about trying to do anything like what you're doing, which is, is like, Oh, isn't Amazon just going to do this? Like, isn't Amazon just going to figure this out? And it's funny. It's, it's probably a, it's maybe a bad mentality, but I'd be curious to know how you thought about it. Like, yeah. Like, does it ever worry you? Like, could Amazon just roll out something similar tomorrow within seller? I mean, you and I both know they don't move at lightning speed when it comes to.
Speaker 2It's a, it's a, it's a fantastic, I think about it constantly. I think about it less now that I've like kind of put myself in the framework of like the Amazon goals versus the company or seller on Amazon goals so number one is what are Amazon's incentives Amazon does not have an incentive to tell you that you're incinerating ad spend they literally they will
Speaker 1literally never tell you that no no no they never never that is yeah that is one of their largest
Speaker 2pillars of free cash flow if you actually
Speaker 1speaking of quarterly earnings if you look at that that blows your mind when you see how much they get
Speaker 2in ad revenue point billy I mean yeah crazy they I they're never gonna and I mean they're they do have insights and they push them out and they're like this is doing this this is doing that they never give you the why um so I just that I think is a very hard line of like we're not going to ever recommend you cut ad spend in your racing ad spend I mean they're at the point where like they're monetizing they're like well we can do like a second price auction so you can bid on extra inventory space you think they're going to cut out like 20 billion in free cash flow absolutely um can AI do a lot of this so it's a it's we've uh I'm in the private beta for their MCP it's okay okay okay yeah it's um it's kind of what you would expect from an Amazon uh you know it gives you some stuff at the end of the day though I just I always go back to the operator encoding like the us the the agency the person who's looking at supply the person who's in the brand like that's where the mode is um and there's also a lot of like I guess in Rainside's case it's like push versus pull like somebody still would have to go in and pull and query and say hey Claude what's going on with x y and z and sure you could schedule it out and like yeah but and then things break and it's like you know like Betsy and accounting isn't going to go spin up some vibe coded software that is going to be that everyone's going to adopt and use and maintains like that's that's you know not not where it's going to go in my opinion right now and um like I I'm trying to build the mode of like regardless like who knows I don't know what Amazon's going to do on their tools the only thing I really know is I don't think they're going to tell you you could make more money if you stop spending money with them I know like I almost know there's
Speaker 1no way I think I think I get in my head a they're getting they're investing in open AI and in Anthropic it's just like when you stop and think about how much money they're putting in I'm like is it because there's some crazy ad engine coming out of this and like what is the ROI on maybe I mean
Speaker 2like you got there's a lot of I mean like they there's just that announcement of like the deep Salesforce integration um with Anthropic that's happening and why did
Speaker 1you hear about this okay
Speaker 2yeah like Salesforce popped like 10 or 11 but but even then like I would still say is like the operator and coding is the moat that you build and I mention this to people all the time like who are like starting their AI journey I'm like you know you can go you can go get completely AI pilled and then it just becomes this thing that encapsulates your life and it's like I don't know if you do when Google Maps came out as navigation this is like people it cracks me up people were literally like driving they were people would drive into like a lake like they would drive off because they just they just followed because they're just blindly following it and like and I kind of think you know it's like AI is like it's not going to be as good or as bad as people kind of assume and it's like dude you can give me the keys to a Ferrari I don't need to know how the head gasket's gonna fire I don't really care about the timing chain timing belt but I need to know how to like put the keys in and turn the car on and actually you know what I mean it's like yeah and also like dude okay so that's a good point that's actually a good point the da Vinci machine have you heard of like um it was it's like a it's like a surgeon's extra I don't know it's like a yeah they can go in and like do all these movements that a surgeon can't do I was talking to my
Speaker 1brother-in-law about this because he's uh he just became like a fully practicing plastic surgeon and I said are you worried about this because to me this this is like interesting guess when it came
Speaker 2out guess when that got approved oh I don't know when the 90s the late 90s oh oh so it's like okay oh so we're just yeah so what I'm saying is like people aren't people weren't in like med school I'm like well fuck it I guess I can't be a surgeon now but the da Vinci machine's like no the surgeon's still like the one driving the machine the surgeon has the context layer I'm just making an analogy well no
Speaker 1but that's true that's that's where my head's really changed is like I think it's it's gonna be the people that like you and I are talking where the people that grab onto it and treat it like a tool are gonna be the winners in this in the short to medium term it's the people who think of it the same way people were like email it's not gonna be a thing I'm not doing this shit I'm not getting an email account that was those are the people I think are gonna be a little bit trouble because then it's like if you're I mean I'll be honest even at Noble like we're when we're looking at talent right now to hire anybody like it's one of my very first questions like do you least use these tools like I want to just make sure you you are playing with them and you know when to use them when not to use them how to not waste your time and them like I asked all these questions and we had somebody not long ago we interviewed and like they had just never even talked about it I was like I don't know how long ago we interviewed and like they had just never even used them and they're our age and I was like what are you doing right there yeah you know it's like how is that possible I don't know have you not like opened it up and tried it yet it seems
Speaker 2crazy no I agree and it's um I think the companies that are especially in CPG right now the ones that I've talked to that are spinning up right now that have a good track record they're building new processes that they're adopting it early they're gonna be the ones to really watch out for because they're gonna crush like yeah it's really hard to move AI into a legacy company where people probably still have fax machines and those fax machines are on not like sure like they're they're actually usable um and it's hard to it's hard to wedge that in um yeah I would agree and the ones that are coming up where they're like we can run the CPG company with you know seven people right now and we can rapidly iterate new dashboards that are specific to our particular need and they're internal it's it's it's it's uh it's it's a really good tool but like I mean you can have a scalpel or a hammer but like you gotta know how to use both and when to use both you know you can be a hammer looking for nails or you can be a scalpel looking for tumors or whatever it is that's a really good point
Speaker 1yeah I totally agree that's a really good analogy don't
Speaker 2worry about it man like I I just like people show me they're like oh this new thing came up AI is going to eat this I could vibe code this on the side and I'm like you could it's like do you do you want to pay like $1,500 a quarter for Amazon's API fee and will it be cheaper just to use you and I'm like yeah dude it's like those are the things like I think through and it's like and then you want to maintain these things like you don't know like I said Betsy an accountant doesn't want to spin this stuff up no yeah it doesn't work that way
Speaker 1it's like yeah but what I do think is interesting and I was talking to a really young guy that we got introduced to he just wanted to pick our brain um a guy that's just about to graduate from college like that age group is I don't know how many folks you've met that are like seniors in college right now it's a dangerous group in a good way like I actually give them a lot of credit this guy is he doesn't know a lot about CPG but he's very interested and I don't want to call him out by name but I'll send him this he he talked to us and like long story short he's creating some like operations based AI software tools and he's trying to approach companies and brands and explain what it does and like he gave us one example he said he went to a company that does a lot of freight shipments there's a CPG company and he's like so they're just scheduling freight whether it's Amazon or or retail and he said instead of having these have four people in trucks negotiating rates and he's he created this really powerful agent that was doing it all or like at least doing the I think it was like 90 percent of the back and forth to get the deal done and then someone would step in and like actually sign the thing but he was explaining how it worked and I was like wait dude did you get someone to buy this from you and he's like well yeah I got one guy but I'm trying to think I'm like stop right there like just keep trying to sell this because like if one company thought that was valuable and they integrated it like that's where I think people could you could start a whole company with a couple people that solves a very specific issue like I try to think back to even our export like when we had like 10 people on a function doing something that those are the little areas even within CPG today I'm like that probably could be some agentic type stuff like maybe it's like you have an agent plus half the people type of thing that to me it seems like a huge business opportunity for the next couple years or like I met someone the other day who's doing this this part can get scammy but I met someone the other day that is doing like I wouldn't call it consulting for businesses as much as like he's trying to be like if you're a business you have no idea where to start I would come in and just show you like hey here's what I how I would build some things with Claude and so he's you like scrappy with it but I'm like that's probably an area right now or if you're young enough and you know enough about AI you probably get all kinds of small mom-and-pop places to pay you a nice little amount of money to come in for a couple days teach him how to use the tools dude it's a goldmine right now it's a
Speaker 2goldmine but it's also I mean you have to like you have to keep in mind because I've tried some of this and there's got to be buy-in from the team like the team has to be ready for it if they're not ready for it or if they're like I mean you're you're you're like well I've always used Power BI and I always go here and I always pull that down and then I mean that's why I say like the new companies coming now like those that are like native to that but also have the road like they're like I'm not going to drive into the water because I'm blindly following this and they they still like you still have to put your hat on your head and say I'm going like I tell people all the time like I'm just going to look at your Amazon listings as a consumer there's so many people that don't even do that they just which they're like i saw this tranche of data i'm like dude just go go be a consumer search for your keyword follow that as if you know you're like randy in south dakota or yeah oh yeah
Speaker 1it's funny you say that man that that is something even as you know i'm on it all the time i i even tend to be like i should probably do this more often i do it enough but like i'm like you find so many insights by doing that um and it's it's something it's easy to forget when you're in seller central or vendor central all the time right
Speaker 2you're yeah you're overwhelmed and it's like i mean it's similar to old school old school sales guys in cpg though yeah i just go fucking walk the eye like that's what i do yeah so walk the
Speaker 1digital 100 100 so i want to i want to be cognizant of time i know we don't have a ton of time left i want to make sure i get to talk to you about so what if you had to kind of exactly this is the one thing with anything software whether it's amazon or outside that anyone listening who maybe has no idea why they would want to understand this or learn more collins can you kind of give the macro macro outside of like you wanted this to be what you wake up in the morning to look at what is the tool what's your goal with someone who wants to use the tool on like the even if it's three to five core things or maybe it's one to three things whatever you think right away what are like the core things you're hoping it solves that you were struggling to to have in something you know easily repeatable
Speaker 2yeah it's um i think the biggest thing is i always um like go back to this like you don't autopsy what did well you kind of autopsy like what didn't do well um this has happened with companies i've worked and advised for you go back and you're like oh well you know this was this this was that and you don't even die you're not even diving into like conversion rates you're just like kind of looking at it like on the brand catalog level placement or timing and all these things and um the the composition of your business is in amazon and i would also say broader in cpg the best thing i love is amazon is an unbelievably real-time feedback loop for any cpg founder out there they can go out your speed to market to amazon to get actual reviews to like have national distribution out of the gate through their services um that that that data is invaluable you can take that to a retailer and sell that or you can go into that retailer by saying hey like we over index versus the category in the southeast or we would be accretive to the category in the northwest whatever that is and a lot of those things like trying to trying to find those find that alpha whenever possible um the thing that is insanely like insanely simple to me but amazon doesn't let you do and i've realized every operator does is uh you can't create a group of products so like let's say you sell shoes you're like well i sell purple shoes and i sell size 12 shoes or you sell shirts or you sell something just like these are these groups of things i have a seasonal drop i have a whatever um i that always bothered me i would always be like well how like how's our seasonal doing well well i gotta rip that apart it's like no no i want to see these asins versus these asins year over year or these asins versus our core i want to see these asins or these asins i want to see these asins or these asins or these asins or these asins or these asins or these asins or these asins or these asins or these asins or these asins in the last 30 days to see what's cannibalizing what so those are the things like that early like operator like i want to jump in and just see where my problem is really i mean it still irks me that's why like i built the tool and i've been training a lot of people they're like hey you're like inventory and in that like q4 is a great example we're in august everyone's like thinking about q4 high frequency events and i'm like you can send your ops team in to go look at you can send your ops team in to go look at you can send your ops team in to go look at like your conversion rate is trending up significantly for x y and z like go save you some cash on um all your storage fees like these are the things that if you're just looking at the trailing 21 day sale but you're actually this is surging in a way that you didn't expect or decline in a way you did so it's like a really good use case for operators and i mean there's there's always so much to do inside the amazon like there's everything is dynamic i just want to know where to start like that was yeah okay it's good you know it's like you you get into the you know you pull down data and then you start clunking around you're like you go down these rabbit holes like oh what about this what about that and then all of a sudden you're like oh i gotta jump into this meeting then you lost your place you're trying to get back into it later and it's like i've told people i'm like i don't want you to spend a lot of time in rain site i want you to spend five minutes but i want you to be in there every morning like i want you just like i'm not i don't want you to be in there every morning i want you to be in there every morning like any project it's kind of like like
Speaker 1like uh the president's daily briefing kind of thing like it's where you start your day you get the you get the macro executive summary and then go to work
Speaker 2yeah it's like i mean because i've noticed a lot i mean the agency world the operator world i would say they're always kind of starved for hands-on keyboards and i mean i've been running amazon at a large cpg company by myself for a while i mean i just i need to know like is there a fire right now like do i need to go like deal with something big or can i go focus on longer term projects and that's so
Speaker 1true it's so different than retail where like even when i was back at rx where i remember like the big retail reach retail accounts you know they have like these resets coming up these big meetings are playing but outside of that they
Speaker 2can kind of yeah and like you get a monthly data drop and you're like oh well i'll go check that or it's like i was like you have the best feedback loop ever here on amazon it's like i look at things i'm like if let's say a product's like five stars and then in the last week it's consistently gotten the review velocity has been one star one star one star i'm a brand dude i don't want to find out six months later shit like amazon was mislabeling something or they didn't do bin checks it's like no that's a problem i need to know that now like that frequency means we need to talk about it as a company internally and figure out why are we getting all these one stars audit those reviews and it's that's just one instance where it's like when i say it's like you don't autopsy the winners like those are the things that are always happening it's like the conversion rate's going up but it never is just like skyrocketing so the conversion rate's going down or you've been in and out of your buy box but it's trending down those are the things that i just want to go in and be like what do i need to do right now and they're
Speaker 1hard to they're hard to see it a lot like they're hard to see without doing a one-off analysis i think that's that's the thing that i would tell anyone listening uh who's is very interested in learning more from collins uh i think that's the thing that um just to give everyone is like collins was kind enough to have a meeting a few weeks ago and we got to see see some examples of it and i said the one key takeaway i had and this is something that i've always been on the i've been on the rooftops talking about with all the software out there today there's just not a good way to get flagged of all of the major things as someone who's operating an amazon account of the things you'd want to know immediately to your point right i always i always joke it's like if amazon wants you to know about the inform act and that you haven't refreshed your account you're not going to be able to do that right so i think that's the thing that you'll know about it when you log into seller central we'll tell you you're about to be like
Speaker 2you're going to be deleted tomorrow forever yeah you'll
Speaker 1know that it's all red and it's highlighted but like god forbid if you know something went you lost the buy box it's just it's just not there's places you go look but unfortunately again that's hands to keyboard like it just takes time for you there's so many i think you and i joked about this if you counted how many clicks it takes in the morning to just go through seller central on one account to make sure you're seeing all the flags it's i don't need it's probably 100 plus clicks easy easy and so it's just like it's at scale trying to run more than one account and and you know obviously as they get bigger and there's just more things that could happen and more aces it's just it just gets ever so complicated so i i know anything any podcast like this where we're talking about a tool where you know kind of get your hands in and see it i what i want to make sure we do collins um i thought it was awesome i know i know we're gonna have another conversation off the podcast about it and i think for anyone who's working with amazon or who is running an account working at a company like we'll obviously put all your your contact info and the website in here it's definitely something to investigate i'm i told you this i think we chatted the first time too i had tried all of the big advertising the ones that we all know of i don't i don't have to name them i've said on here before didn't think any of them were great and i just think there's too many holes they're too expensive and i didn't think they worked very well and then
Speaker 2they're way too much way
Speaker 1too much and like automate too much it's like i don't need you to automate everything i just need you to same thing i need you to like show me where there's gap and then i i'll give i want to give you and michael from ad badger the same flowers like michael was the first person that i came across and got to meet him personally and realized like oh you're an operator who is obsessed with advertising to the point where he's got he's had the longest running he i believe him but he claims he has the longest running weekly advertising ppc podcast on the internet it's been like years and years and years he's been he talks about he's had the longest running weekly advertising ppc podcast on the internet it's just ppc every week and the same thing it's like he's just he's like you you actually i'll introduce you because you two should know each other there's you same same human it's like you meet people who they've been dealing with this problem in their day-to-day life for so many years and they're finally like fuck it i'm gonna work on something and i'm gonna build it those are the people that i'm like oh yeah i'm gonna use that tool because you've been an operator in it forever there's there's no way someone at perpetua for example is gonna be able to like at this level now that they're gonna like have the day-to-day insight to be i want to be
Speaker 2i want to be in seller central and have the ability to be in seller central in perpetuity and like i i love talking to other dsc brands like i i'm like that's like them opening the kimono to their like pnl and they're and just like that that stuff is invaluable learnings like all these slack groups i mean i like it's it's invaluable like i take calls with people left and right i tell people i'm like dude sign up for the tool it's free i'm like i'll go in there build your groups let's jump on a call and i'll spend two hours with you because i just like to chop it up around it it's like i just it's like this and i
Speaker 1know i know i'll say it on live on the podcast i know i owe you the same thing you've asked us and we're we yeah i've had a crazy month but i i need to take you up on
Speaker 2that too yeah man it's uh i love it no congratulations on
Speaker 1what you've built man i know we're out of time but i it's really cool i know you're at the beginning so i wanted to schedule this just everyone knows you just went live with uh what are you calling it again is it it's like well i call it general like it was like we got
Speaker 2past like does everything work we got yeah so two weeks two weeks ago to the day actually so so like you can like just for
Speaker 1everyone listening you right you can you can start paying for it using it like it's available right yeah you can go to
Speaker 2rainside.io sign up i will if you want i will jump in your account if and i will set up time with you and i'll set up groups for you and i will find you things that uh if i can't find you at least something with my eye plus rain site like i will fly to your office and i will buy you lunch for your team and i will no bring it on bring it on like i love this this is great
Speaker 1this is great this is great this is how i learned like yeah like if i'm like i missed
Speaker 2this like that's a that's a huge blind spot for the way where we take our product roadmap going forward so it's like if if you're like oh we knew that we knew that we knew that yeah then i'm like cool
Speaker 1i actually do i'm thinking of i'm thinking of one of my favorites right now that i'm well i'll talk to you offline that i would love i just i'm so curious because it's an account it's got like a lot of asins and it's a they're awesome they'd be i would just be so curious to see what you find but again to show you that it's like it's like and you know what it's funny everyone listening to you i i think it's funny when um i love that you threw that out there and you've said that to me off air too because it's so true it's like i we me and kyle say this all the time to clients like the one thing we always promise to be is transparent and to the point and tell you the good and the bad because like the one thing with amazon's crazy it's like there's just a never-ending circle of optimizations you can do right it's like there's never it's never like okay we're good we're done it's that's it it never ends so anyone can always find something there's always a way to improve um colin so first of all congrats i'll put everything about rain site in here i want to make sure i ask one last question this is my favorite question to ask anyone that starts anything on the podcast because ultimately you went from zero to one you went from this concept to launching a product um what tools do you put around yourself to not only decide what's the stuff that you got to get done today but like big goals like what's your annual goals all yeah really it's what how do what tools do you put around you collins to map out long-term annual goals all the way down to the end of the year what tools do you put around you to map out long-term goals all the way down to the shoot you're doing today is it pen and paper are you an apps person hell yeah i love it i knew that was coming i knew
Speaker 2that was coming i mean for anyone who's listening yeah dude i mean like i've got my yeah i think i've got my it's just so funny it's like we're
Speaker 1launching you're launching a software and of course we're on pen and paper it's everyone's answer it's i just
Speaker 2that's how like i gotta you gotta understand how you digest information and like when i'm in front of my computer i might take these notes make a dashboard but dude i'm a i'm a pen and paper guy or if i have a pen and paper i'm like i'm a pen and paper guy i'm a pen and paper guy random notes i throw them on my phone but it eventually ends up in here and oh wow this is like if and is it just a plain
Speaker 1notebook or using like a planner or
Speaker 2what do you it varies it's usually just but like i'll just throw stuff in google key and then i come back to it and then it eventually makes its way into i also have like a digital command center which is like well it's it's not that cool it's just a visual like that's where my visual chart is like that i prefer to have it but dude i'm a pen and paper guy man like i
Speaker 1okay i love that i honestly was kind i was kind of thinking you might throw it off because usually that's what everyone's answer is and i was like he might have some crazy thing he's built who knows
Speaker 2i have i do have like a digital command center where i take all the notes they eventually live there and then it's like prioritized by like what i need to i mean you know i've got you can't see it i got a whiteboard back here that's like all this super dorky stuff because i'm gonna go back and see like did i talk to these people for any follow-up like what are you guys thinking just feedback so okay there's something about the medium maybe this is me turning 40 in two weeks saying you know no i think
Speaker 1there's something to it i i do think there's something about writing it down it was weird i had this thought the other day and i know where this is an aside i i thought about i've had i've had these notebooks i've been using forever and it's like i can remember like being on a plane and taking a note and what i wrote and i like remember what i was doing but i can't ever do that with anything like slack like i good luck it's in there but i will never remember it's weird yeah
Speaker 2and you're not even gonna remember how to search it too you're really i remember you kind of talked about this one thing i don't know what channel it was in that's always the
Speaker 1flaw you put it digitally and you're like i'll be able to find it and then half time you can't find it and you're like well then now what that's cool man awesome well collins thank you for the time man i'm i uh i know i was this was hard to dial in to get me on this podcast so i apologize for the back and forth and obviously we we got it done so it was fun congratulations on the launch i'm stoked for you man and appreciate it we'll point everyone there and then uh yeah man we'll have another conversation i know offline and excited to learn more about the tool myself sweet appreciate the talk you said man thanks for coming on the show buddy
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