Podcast appearances and mentions of andrew youderian

In this episode of the Ecommerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry welcomes Mickey Winter (CEO) and Carrie Weidenbach (COO) of Aysnd, a digital agency specializing in purpose-driven ecommerce brands. As industry veterans with decades of combined experience, they share invaluable insights on maintaining brand mission during economic uncertainty, particularly amid recent tariff challenges. This conversation delivers practical strategies for navigating market pressures while staying true to your brand's core values and purpose.—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters: (00:00) Introducing Carrie & Mickey(02:22) Navigating Tariff Chaos and Supply Chain Diversification(04:19) Defining Purpose-Driven Brands(06:29) Pricing & Profitability in Uncertain Times(12:25) Carrie & Mickey's Background(16:50) The Conscious Commerce Maturity Matrix & Level One, Awareness(22:29) Level Two, Scaling(27:06) Level Three, Optimizing(32:38) Level Four, Leading(36:15) Level Five, Pioneering(39:38) Staying Mission-Driven in Uncertain Times—Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ Relevant Links:AYSND: https://www.aysnd.com/Mickey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mickeywinterCarrie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrie-weidenbach-a5272aaBOOM! Beauty: https://boombeauty.com/Patagonia: https://www.patagonia.com/home/AB InBev: https://www.ab-inbev.com/__Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

In this episode of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry sits down with with award-winning entrepreneur Leah Garcia (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-garcia-592988/), founder of Nulastin (https://nulastin.com/).Leah has a remarkable journey building a beauty brand with shocking retention numbers—80% blended returning revenue and 65% subscription-based customers. From her bootstrapped beginnings (going from zero to $17.5M before hiring her first employee!) to developing bio-designed elastin products that deliver real results, Leah unpacks the strategies that have made her company a standout success even in uncertain economic times.—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters: (00:00) Introducing Leah Garcia (02:54) Nulastin's Mission and Core Products(07:19) How to Achieve High Retention Rates(12:59) Removing Friction in the Shopping Experience(19:33) Optimizing Subscription Models (25:50) Knowing Your Customers & Fostering Connections(30:50) Improvements to Reduce Churn (37:08) Direct Response Marketing Insights(41:42) Navigating Uncertainty in Business—Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ Relevant Links:Nulastin: https://nulastin.comLeah's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/leah-garcia-592988Leah's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leahgarciatv/Heart & Soil Beef Organics: https://heartandsoil.co/__Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

In this insightful episode of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry sits down with Tom Leonard (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasbleonard), a fractional marketing leader who specializes in operationalizing Media Mix Modeling and incrementality testing. They dive deep into the often confusing world of marketing measurement. Tom and Brett will debunk myths about attribution and we reveal what truly drives customer acquisition. For ecommerce brands struggling to understand where their marketing dollars are actually working, this conversation offers practical insights on how to move beyond misleading platform metrics.—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters: (00:00) Introducing Tom & Marketing Measurement(06:30) Understanding Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)(12:22) The Case for Incrementality Testing(22:20) Exploring Media Mix Modeling (MMM)(27:30) Navigating Budget Cuts and Marketing Spend(32:17) Understanding Incrementality Vs. Attribution(35:45) The Importance of Cost Per Incremental(40:16) How to Get Started with MMM(44:09) Final Thoughts—Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ Relevant Links:Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasbleonard__Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

In this insightful episode of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry sits down with Jhana Li (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhana-li), founder of Spyglass Ops, to tackle one of the biggest challenges holding back growing businesses: operational constraints. While many entrepreneurs excel at product development and marketing, they often hit a ceiling when it comes to building operational systems and processes. Jhana shares her expertise as a transformational operations consultant who has helped hundreds of seven and eight-figure businesses scale by creating systems that allow founders to work on their business rather than in it.—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters: (00:00) Introducing Jhana & SpyGlass Ops (04:21) Common Operational Problems Founders Face(07:52) Developing a Strategic Vision to Break Through Bottlenecks(14:39) Setting Yourself Apart From Competitors(17:52) Vision Alignment With Your Team(20:51) Hiring and Onboarding the Right People(32:31) Structuring An Effective Hiring Process(40:28) Coaching a High-Performing Team(46:04) When To Let Underperformers Go(50:43) Final Thoughts—Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

In this timely episode, Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry) sits down with Nick Flint (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-flint-b46063b3/), Director of Email Marketing, to tackle the pressing challenge facing e-commerce brands today: how to maintain profitability amid rising tariffs. As import costs surge, they share actionable strategies for protecting your bottom line without sacrificing growth. Whether you're considering price increases, optimizing marketing spend, or leveraging email to boost customer loyalty, this episode delivers practical solutions you can implement immediately.—Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!—Chapters: (00:00) Introduction(01:28) Increasing Profitability in the Current Landscape(04:30) Strategies for Princing and Bundling(06:32) Effective Cost-Cutting Measures(11:51) Maximizing Email Marketing Effectiveness(15:06) Final Thoughts—Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

Andrew Youderian launched eCommerceFuel in 2013 after stints in corporate finance and online selling. The vetted community consists of ecommerce owners whose businesses have $1 million or more in annual revenue.He says ecommerce in 2025 has matured. "Brands that adapt," he stated, "will survive in the next five to seven years."Host Eric Bandholz is a member of eCommerceFuel. In this episode, he queries Andrew about the community, the state of ecommerce, work-life balance, and change. For an edited and condensed transcript with embedded audio, see: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/adapt-to-survive-says-ecommercefuel-founderFor all condensed transcripts with audio, see: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/tag/podcasts******The mission of Practical Ecommerce is to help online merchants improve their businesses. We do this with expert articles, podcasts, and webinars. We are an independent publishing company founded in 2005 and unaffiliated with any ecommerce platform or provider. https://www.practicalecommerce.com 

Andrew Youderian is the Founder of eCommerceFuel, a vetted community of seven- and eight-figure sellers. Having launched and sold several e-commerce stores, he has experience in SEO, organic and content marketing, and community building. Andrew also hosts The eCommerceFuel Podcast, which features e-commerce thought leaders.  In this episode… Many entrepreneurs believe that achieving a nine-figure exit is the ultimate goal, but the pursuit often comes with significant trade-offs. The relentless focus on scaling at all costs can lead to burnout, strained personal relationships, and an imbalance between work and life. How can you build a winning e-commerce brand without sacrificing your time and energy? As an eCommerce business builder, Andrew Youderian argues that financial freedom should be about achieving a fulfilling and balanced life rather than simply accumulating wealth. Building a durable and resilient e-commerce brand requires focusing on high-quality products, exceptional customer service, and authentic brand connections. Entrepreneurs who prioritize these elements can create sustainable businesses that thrive, even in highly competitive markets. Andrew also highlights the importance of operational efficiency, recommending that business owners stay lean and avoid unnecessary overhead that can hinder long-term growth. In today's episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris hosts Andrew Youderian, the Founder of eCommerceFuel, to discuss building strong e-commerce stores to achieve financial freedom. Andrew explores AI's potential to enhance e-commerce websites, the importance of maintaining conviction in your efforts, and allocating efforts throughout various areas of your life.

Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/) talks to Jimmy Sansone (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmy-sansone-aa80b881/) about the founding story of The Normal Brand.__Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!__Chapters: (00:00) Introduction and Jimmy's Background(11:42) Early Days of The Normal Brand(15:51) Working with Family (22:09) Expansion Into Retail Stores(25:03) Benefits of Having Your Own Stores(32:25) Mistakes Made Along The Way(34:46) Culture and Core Values(39:34) Future Plans & Merchandising Strategy (42:28) Outro __Show Notes: Jimmy Sansone (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmy-sansone-aa80b881/ The Normal Brand (Website): https://thenormalbrand.com/ The Normal Brand (Instagram):https://www.instagram.com/thenormalbrand/ Patrick Lencioni (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-lencioni-orghealth/ Working Genius: https://www.workinggenius.com/ Hudson Hawk: https://www.hudsonhawk.com/ Ryan Holiday: https://ryanholiday.net/ Supplement Superstore: https://supplementsuperstores.com/ 1st Phorm: https://1stphorm.com/ __Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more. __Other episodes you might enjoy: Episode 266 with Cody Wittick - Influencer Marketing and How To Create a Creative Flywheel in 2024

Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/) talks to Jeremy Horowitz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyhorowitz1/) about the current state of eCommerce.__Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!__Chapters: (00:00) Intro(01:58) The State of eCommerce(12:39) Constructing a Healthy P&L(22:48) Would We Buy This Business? (38:38) The Importance of Focusing on Core Customers(43:29) LVMH: The Ultimate Luxury Company(48:44) Outro__Links: Jeremy Horowitz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyhorowitz1/ Let's Buy A Biz!: https://www.letsbuyabiz.xyz/ __Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more. __Other episodes you might enjoy: Episode 266 with Cody Wittick - Influencer Marketing and How To Create a Creative Flywheel in 2024Episode 263 with Anthony Mink - Cut Your CPA in Half by Asking Better QuestionsEpisode 260 with Preston Rutherford - Lessons From Chubbies with Co-Founder Preston RutherfordEpisode 243 with Jacques Spitzer - Achieving Exit Velocity with YouTube AdsEpisode 228 with Jeremy Horowitz - The State of eCommerce, The Economy, and What To Do Next

Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/) talks to Jeff Cohen from Amazon (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreycohen/) about amazon ads news and trends. __Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!__Show Notes: (00:00) Introduction (07:54) Vertical Video for Sponsored Brand Video(15:43) Amazon's Facebook Integration (19:27) Prime Video Ads and Sponsored TV(31:33) Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) (39:22) AI's Role In Amazon Advertising (42:15) The Importance of Your Feedback(43:46) Outro __Links: Jeff Cohen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreycohen/ __Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more. __Other episodes you might enjoy: Episode 266 with Cody Wittick - Influencer Marketing and How To Create a Creative Flywheel in 2024Episode 263 with Anthony Mink - Cut Your CPA in Half by Asking Better QuestionsEpisode 260 with Preston Rutherford - Lessons From Chubbies with Co-Founder Preston RutherfordEpisode 243 with Jacques Spitzer - Achieving Exit Velocity with YouTube AdsEpisode 228 with Jeremy Horowitz - The State of eCommerce, The Economy, and What To Do Next

Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/) talks to Brayn Porter (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbryanporter/) about how to build a brand on Amazon. __Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!__Show Notes: (00:00) Introduction(04:11) Simple Modern's Founding Story(17:42) Demand Capture and Paid Ads(24:40) Building A Brand On Amazon(40:40) Transitioning To a 1P Seller on Amazon(46:23) Outro__Links: Kyle Fraughton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbryanporter/ Simple Modern: https://www.simplemodern.com/ __Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, and more. __Other episodes you might enjoy: Episode 266 with Cody Wittick - Influencer Marketing and How To Create a Creative Flywheel in 2024Episode 263 with Anthony Mink - Cut Your CPA in Half by Asking Better QuestionsEpisode 260 with Preston Rutherford - Lessons From Chubbies with Co-Founder Preston RutherfordEpisode 243 with Jacques Spitzer - Achieving Exit Velocity with YouTube AdsEpisode 228 with Jeremy Horowitz - The State of eCommerce, The Economy, and What To Do Next

Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/) talks about the parallels between parenting and running a business. __Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!__Show Notes: (00:00) Introduction (03:12) Lesson 1 - Where All Making It Up As We Go(06:58) Lesson 2 - You're Never Really Ready(09:19) Lesson 3 - Listen and Communicate Clearly In Multiple Ways(12:17) Lesson 4 - Admit When You're Wrong(14:39) Lesson 5 - You Might Want A Coach(19:39) Lesson 6 - Be All In(22:52) Outro __Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, and more. __Other episodes you might enjoy: Episode 266 with Cody Wittick - Influencer Marketing and How To Create a Creative Flywheel in 2024Episode 263 with Anthony Mink - Cut Your CPA in Half by Asking Better QuestionsEpisode 260 with Preston Rutherford - Lessons From Chubbies with Co-Founder Preston RutherfordEpisode 243 with Jacques Spitzer - Achieving Exit Velocity with YouTube AdsEpisode 228 with Jeremy Horowitz - The State of eCommerce, The Economy, and What To Do Next

Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/) talks to Kyle Fraughton (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylefraughton/) about ambassador programs and the power of UGC. __Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!__Show Notes: (00:00) Introduction (02:40) Kyle's Background (03:53) Authentic - The Word of the Year(05:55) Is UGC Dead? (10:51) The Digital Age Version of Word of Mouth(13:32) Strategies To Facilitate Word of Mouth(15:26) What Does A Good Ambassador Program Do?(16:16) Influencer Program vs. Ambassador Program(26:08) How To Set Up An Ambassador Program(34:50) Ambassadors and Ads(38:41) More About Get Roster(43:06) Outro__Links: Kyle Fraughton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylefraughton/ Roster: https://www.getroster.com/__Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, and more. __Other episodes you might enjoy: Episode 266 with Cody Wittick - Influencer Marketing and How To Create a Creative Flywheel in 2024Episode 263 with Anthony Mink - Cut Your CPA in Half by Asking Better QuestionsEpisode 260 with Preston Rutherford - Lessons From Chubbies with Co-Founder Preston RutherfordEpisode 243 with Jacques Spitzer - Achieving Exit Velocity with YouTube AdsEpisode 228 with Jeremy Horowitz - The State of eCommerce, The Economy, and What To Do Next

Brett Curry (https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/) talks to Sean Frank (http://twitter.com/SeanEcom/) about what it takes to win as a DTC brand in 2024. __Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!__Show Notes: (00:00) Introduction (01:18) The Operators Podcast (06:30) Ridge's Background(09:38) What To Expect For DTC Brands In 2024(16:08) What Does It Take To Win In 2024(25:13) What Channels Is Sean Most Excited For In 2024(30:15) How To Grow Profitably (38:52) Expanding Your Product Line(43:44) Outro__Links: Sean Frank: http://twitter.com/SeanEcom/ Ridge: https://ridge.com/ The Operators Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/operators/id1684446059__Connect With Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ __Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, and more. __Other episodes you might enjoy: Episode 266 with Cody Wittick - Influencer Marketing and How To Create a Creative Flywheel in 2024Episode 263 with Anthony Mink - Cut Your CPA in Half by Asking Better QuestionsEpisode 260 with Preston Rutherford - Lessons From Chubbies with Co-Founder Preston RutherfordEpisode 243 with Jacques Spitzer - Achieving Exit Velocity with YouTube AdsEpisode 228 with Jeremy Horowitz - The State of eCommerce, The Economy, and What To Do Next

To understand the future, you must understand culture. That's the focus of today's syndicated episode with our friends from eCommerce Fuel. Andrew Youderian sits down with Phillip to discuss the Future Commerce perspective on how cultures adopt commerce as a means of belonging, and how those behaviors are shaping our vision of the future. Listen now! Real Brands Take Time to Build. We're in too much of a hurry.Branding is not just about aesthetics; it's about endurance and persistence.Physical media provides a grounding experience amidst the digital world.Nostalgia and nostalgic content serve as an antidote to our fast-paced, digital lives.The enduring brands are the ones that persist despite all odds.Attention spans are decreasing, highlighting the need for authentic, tangible experiences.{00:08:08} - “When you're looking at what differentiates a successful brand or a generational brand or what you might call a cultural brand from another is their awareness and insight of what is happening in the world and where they belong in it and what their voice or tone or tenor is when speaking to that element of culture.” - Phillip{00:13:49} - “You're never going to wrangle in your consumption, and we're never going to solve some of the problems in this world around sustainability, or climate change if we don't wrangle in some of the worst of us in our human nature. How can we come to a shared understanding of the challenges that we face both in business and in our personal lives?” - Phillip{00:16:17} - “Commerce entrepreneurship is one of the greatest, most powerful, most incredible ways to instigate change in the world because creating new ways of engaging with people that have to engage in commerce and doing so with a mindset from the get-go that you have a purpose and a place in this world and you're trying to will something into being, I think it's a very powerful force for change.” - Phillip{00:21:20} - “This renaissance and this nostalgia for physical media is also powering brand trends and design trends that harken back to the eras in which those pieces of media were created. These things help us to understand not just that the trend exists, but why the trend exists. And if we could think about those two things in tandem, maybe we can forecast where the next trend is going.” - Phillip{00:37:27} - “If you are not plugged into TikTok three hours a day and you're able to actually be able to keep that muscle of long-term concentration, it seems like that's going to be a huge competitive advantage for building entrepreneurship and for just life in general.” - Andrew{00:45:06} - “Real brands take time. We're in such a hurry. We're in an unbelievable hurry. If you want to have a brand that endures, you have to endure. And so you just have to keep surviving.” - PhillipAssociated Links:Learn more about eCommerceFuelGrab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereMeet us at eTail Boston 2023Check out The Edge Summit from BloomreachHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

With Seller Summit 2023 coming up in May, Mike and Steve Chou reflect on the value of events, revisit some of their favorite memories, and how its impacted their lives in more ways than one.    Masterminds are one of my favorite segments of a live event. Whether it be EcommerceFuel, Seller Summit, or whatever event that takes place, Masterminds give everyone an opportunity to voice out their problems and get actionable advice from a like-minded group of people.    Steve and I first met during Andrew Youderian's event, at a Mastermind where Steve asked the table for a critique of his website, and we've been friends ever since then.    This episode is more of a fun recap rather than an actionable advisory, but there's a few takeaways to learn from this episode. You'll learn about The costs of cranking up, and keeping your work burner as high as possible.  How opening up and trusting like-minded individuals can be more valuable than you think.  Why it's good to have a group of friends that can't relate to your entrepreneurial lifestyle.   Timestamps:  Intro - 00:00   An overview of what Seller Summit is, and how it's different - 2:42  How Mike and Steve Chou met for the first time - 5:06  TAKEAWAY #1: Masterminds give you the advice you need to hear, without the fluff - 7:33 How Steve Chou got into selling on Amazon - 9:58  How Steve Chou got marital advice at a Mastermind - 12:22  How Steve Chou saved Mike's marriage - 14:08 How Steve Chou made $60k in 90 minutes - 18:03 How Mike deals with old friends who aren't in eCommerce - 20:51 Why venture backed businesses are a different gamble - 23:40  Steve and Mike's experience investing on an eCommerce business together - 25:15  Why it's important to surround yourselves around those who trust you - 27:55 How events during the pandemic weren't the same - 33:55 Seller Summit 2023 details - 36:08   Lots of thanks to Steve for doing this episode with me. If you're thinking about going to Seller Summit, here's a link with a special discount code for Ecomcrew listeners. You can check out all of Steve's other awesome stuff over on mywifequitherjob.com.    If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes. Until the next one. Happy selling!

Today's interview is with one of my very favorite people in ecommerce, Andrew Youderian. Andrew is the founder of E-commerce Fuel, an online community of 7-figure & higher ecommerce store owners. Ecommerce Fuel is the best-run online community I've ever personally seen, so I started by asking Andrew what makes great online community. From there, the conversation shifted to his unique perspective (as the head of a community of over 1,000 ecom store owners) on the state of the ecommerce landscape, how hard or easy things are right now relative to the past, and ecom operators' current & ever-complicated relationship with Amazon. We close by giving Andrew a taste of his own medicine: we ask him some lightning round questions, just like he does with his guest on The Ecommerce Fuel Podcast. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS [03:31] What is E-commerceFuel? [05:30] Curating valuable content and fostering reciprocity in the EcommerceFuel Community  [08:10] Examining the success and DNA of the EcommerceFuel community  [10:17] The importance of time and trust in Building a successful online community [13:37] Impact from working in the community to building strong internal teams [15:51] Hiring strategies and the importance of test projects and feedback [22:53] Insights into the e-commerce landscape from a community survey [26:07] Discussing perspectives on Amazon and e-commerce with Bill D'Allesandro [28:00] E-commerce landscape and adoption of Amazon by small brands (pros and cons of selling on Amazon) [30:37] The nuances of selling on Amazon in the e-commerce landscape & navigating the challenges faced by entrepreneurs [34:23] The evolution and future of e-commerce [37:14] Lightning round with Andrew Youderian THIS WEEK'S SPONSOR: More Staffing Hire incredible virtual professionals from the Philippines at a fraction of the cost of domestic employees with help from More Staffing. Head to www.morenow.co to get started. FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW YOUDERIAN Join Ecommerce Fuel yourself. Listen to the E-commerce Fuel Podcast. Follow Youderian on Twitter: @youderian. FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW FARIS Follow Andrew on Twitter: @andrewjfaris. Work with Andrew: www.ajfgrowth.com. Email Andrew (including about advertising on The Andrew Faris Podcast): podcast@ajfgrowth.com. MUSIC Intro Music: "Tell Me Mama" by The Devious Means Outro Music: "Rusty Little Scissors" by The Devious Means

Ecommerce Fuel community leader Andrew Youderian joins us to discuss the results of his 2022 ecommerce trends report gathered directly from store owners like you.We'll give you a unique, detailed look at what trends are shaping the eCommerce landscape and, ultimately, your business.GUEST BIO: Andrew Youderian is the Founder of eCommerceFuel, a community for 7- and 8-figure brand owners. I'm a member, its a high quality community. Also a podcast host of Ecomm Fuel, and early inspiration for After a few years in the investment banking world, Andrew decided he'd had enough and decided to quit and start his first eCommerce business. He has since sold numerous eCommerce stores over the years and loves geeking out about eCommerce, investing, finance, marketing and community.Show Links2022 eCommerce Trends ReporteCommerceFuel.comeCommerceFuel PodcasterTw:@youderianSponsorsFree 30-day trial of Zipify OCU - To get an unadvertised gift, email help@zipify.com and ask for the "Tech Nasty Bonus".Back up your store with RewindTry Bold Product Upsell, free trialPrivy: The Fastest Way To Grow Sales With Email & SMSNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin Kurt's newsletterHelp the showAsk a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook GroupLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Kurt up to?See our recent work at EthercycleSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelApply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

Mike and eCommerceFuel founder Andrew Youderian break down the biggest takeaways from this year's eCommerce Trends Report and discuss what they mean to online sellers.   eCommerceFuel's eCommerce Trends Report is an annual survey of 7-8 figure store owners that provides a unique and detailed look into which trends are shaping the ecommerce landscape year over year.   Joining me for this episode is none other than eCommerceFuel founder Andrew Youderian. We'll be breaking down the four biggest takeaways from the 2022 edition of the eCommerce Trends Report to paint you a clear picture of the ecommerce ecosystem and how you can take advantage of these insights to grow your business.    Some of the awesome things we talk about include why ROAS is no longer a good success indicator, why raising prices is not as scary as you might think, and what the best ecommerce business model is today.    Timestamps: Introduction to the 2022 eCommerce Trends Report - 1:08 Takeaway #1: ROAS Is Wildly Overrated for Success - 4:06 Takeaway #2: We've Hit Peak Amazon - 8:28 Takeaway #3: You Need to Raise Your Prices (Again) - 13:13 Sidebar: What seller can learn from artists who constantly reinvent themselves - 22:29 Takeaway #4: Manufacturing + Storytelling Crushes All Other Models - 24:53 What the eCommerceFuel community is all about - 32:00   If you want to get into the nitty gritty details of the survey, be sure to check out the full report here. As always, I enjoyed having Andrew on the podcast, and I'm excited to have him back for more episodes soon. You can check out the eCommerceFuel community on their website or hit him up on LinkedIn.   If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes. Happy selling and I'll see you on the next one!

Today we welcome none other than Andrew Youderian to the show. Andrew is the founder of eCommerceFuel, a private, vetted community of 7+ figure ecommerce store owners. On this episode, Rabah and Andrew dive into the future of ecommerce - take out your notebooks; this is a good one. Follow Andrew on Twitter: https://twitter.com/youderian Join 4200+ top marketers and operators, and sub to Whale Maile for in-depth ecom marketing insights guidance every week - https://www.getrevue.co/profile/triplewhale Checkout out Triple Whale - https://trytriplewhale.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/trytriplewhale/message

Andrew Youderian is the Founder of eCommerceFuel, a fantastic community of ecommerce entrepreneurs, operators, and experts helping each other scale and grow in businesses and build deeper relationships. After spending a few years in the investment banking world, Andrew left his job to start his first ecommerce business. Since then, he's sold numerous stores that have collectively generated millions of dollars. He has experience bootstrapping, exiting companies, and building unique communities along the way. Andrew also hosts the eCommerceFuel Podcast. In this episode… As we continue to embrace a cookieless world and as customers take back control of their data, paid ads are becoming less profitable for ecommerce brands. The question in the hearts of many ecommerce entrepreneurs is, what next? And with the high level of competition in the space, how should ecommerce brands approach marketing? One of the biggest mistakes made is investing in paid ads without finding ways to get zero-party data. The second mistake is to ignore old-fashioned referrals and the communities that drive them. What other moves should you avoid to grow your ecommerce brand? In this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin talks with the Founder of eCommerceFuel, Andrew Youderian. They discuss how marketing in the ecommerce space is evolving in a cookieless world, the value of building a community, growth channels to explore in the coming days, and lots more.

Today, I have my good friend Andrew Youderian back on show. Andrew runs the Ecommerce Fuel Podcast and an amazing community of 7 and 8 Figure eCommerce entrepreneurs. This episode is all about strategy. Specifically, Andrew and I discuss our post pandemic business strategies for 2022. What You’ll Learn What Andrew and I are going all in on for our businesses in 2022 Why you need to be on Twitter and TikTok Why live events are back Other Resources And Books Ecommerce Fuel Podcast Ecommerce Fuel Forum Sponsors Postscript.io – Postscript.io is the SMS marketing platform that I personally use […] The post 382: Post-Pandemic Business Strategies To Focus On In 2022 With Andrew Youderian appeared first on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

Andrew Youderian is the founder and CEO of eCommerceFuel, a leading online community of established store owners. He oversees a diverse team and manages a growing business with worldwide members. Surely, one would think, he works long hours with little downtime.

Today I’m thrilled to have Pat Haggerty on the show. Many years ago, Andrew Youderian sold his dropshipping business, Right Channel Radios to Pat. And since the sale, Pat has grown Right Channel Radios significantly. In this episode, Pat teaches us what he did to grow his sales and how he’s improved the business dramatically since Andrew owned it. What You’ll Learn Why Pat purchased Right Channel Radios How Pat turned Right Channel Radios into a 7 figure dropshipping business Pat’s primary strategy for growth Other Resources And Books Right Channel Radios Sponsors Postscript.io – Postscript.io is the SMS marketing […] The post 362: How To Grow A 7 Figure Dropshipping Business With Pat Haggerty appeared first on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

After a decade of fast-paced growth, are you wondering what's next in eCommerce? Today's guest is here to share his predictions. Three-time returning guest Andrew Youderian is back on today's show. Andrew is a well-known entrepreneur in the eCommerce space, host of the eCommerce Fuel Podcast and the owner of the eCommerce Fuel forum. In this episode, we do some big picture thinking on what's next in eCommerce, what we've seen coming and going, Facebook trends and the future of Amazon. We also touch on brand building, emerging channels to pay attention to and what we think is on the horizon. Episode Highlights: 5:39 Fast-paced growth and what's next in eCommerce 8:39 The state of Amazon for eCommerce sellers 13:00 Is Facebook advertising going to be a thing of the future or the past? 18:46 Why Andrew Youderian doesn't think Facebook is the path to sustainable growth 23:40 Strategies for owning your relationship with your community 28:10 Are you still experiencing asymmetric returns? 32:42 How to take advantage of emerging channels to grow your audience 35:49 Why Andrew closed the eCommerce Fuel job board 40:04 Exciting new tools and the future of Facebook groups 45:47 Why social trust is critical to the success of businesses Links and Resources: eCommerce Fuel eCommerce Fuel Podcast Andrew Youderian on Twitter eCommerce Fuel Podcast with Kevin Stecko: Shrinking a Business to Save It The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast with Steve Chou Reddit Circle Podcast 106: Building a Business with Andrew Youderian Podcast 006: From The Corporate World To Selling His First ECommerce Store And Much More – Andrew Youderian, ECommerce Fuel The Coalition @a_brawn on Twitter Review or subscribe on iTunes  

Today I have my buddy Andrew Youderian back on the show for the 5th time. Andrew is the founder of the Ecommerce Fuel community and he’s also the brainchild of ECF Capital where he invests in e-commerce companies as well. Andrew just completed a 6-month project where he launched Overlander.com and he grew it to nearly a 1 million dollar run rate within that time frame. Here’s how he did it. What You’ll Learn How Andrew got Overlander.com off its feet How to grow to a million dollar run rate as quickly as possible. The best strategies for scaling quickly […] The post 354: 0 To 1 Million In 6 Months Selling Overlanding Gear With Andrew Youderian appeared first on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

I’m back in the trenches! We sold one of our ecommerce brands back in 2019, and I’ve been itching to get involved in something again for quite some time.  Today, I’m excited to share with you my recent experience in buying a new ecommerce company. Joining me for this episode are my good friends and business partners, Andrew Youderian and Bill D'Alessandro, whose insights are valuable to ecommerce newbies and experienced business owners alike. Andrew is the Managing Partner of ECF Capital, which is tailored to helping small e-commerce businesses grow. He also hosts the awesome eCommerce Fuel Podcast. Bill is the Founder and CEO of Elements Brands, which invests in brands with long-term potential and currently boasts a rich portfolio of consumer products companies.  In this episode, we dive into how this opportunity came about and all the hurdles we overcame to finally seal the deal. We also share a bunch of funny stories that you’ll surely get a kick out of. Timestamps How the opportunity came about - 6:56 Why this particular business appealed to us - 9:50 How we structured the deal - 12:56 Why having an existing rapport with the seller helps more than you know - 19:30 A fateful Christmas eve call - 20:11 Why you should always leave some buffer in your closing dates - 27:59 Some key things I did before and after closing - 30:15 A heart-stopping Amazon account suspension - 35:37 I’m thrilled to be in business with Andrew and Bill, and I’d be happy to share more updates about this business with you guys in a year’s time. If you’re looking to grow your ecommerce business and get some long-term funding from experts in the industry, check out ECF Capital. Did you enjoy this episode? Don’t forget to help us out by leaving a review over on iTunes. Until the next one, happy selling!

Andrew Youderian is the Founder of eCommerceFuel, an amazing community where eCommerce store owners can help each other grow their stores and build deeper relationships. After a few years in the investment banking world, Andrew decided he'd had enough and decided to quit and start his first eCommerce business. He has sold numerous eCommerce stores over the years, which have collectively generated millions of dollars, and he has experience bootstrapping stores, seven-figure business exits, and SEO community building. In this episode… Imagine building the world's largest community of top business owners in your niche. Can you imagine how valuable and helpful that would be? This type of community gives members immediate access to actionable knowledge and helps them build trusting relationships. But there's only one problem: developing and running a community like this is almost unheard of, especially when you think about how to make it so effective and impactful to its members. The good news is Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel was able to do just this. And an even better news is that he’s more than excited to share how he built a community of ace eCommerce founders. He says that maintaining a substantial presence online, making connections, and networking will give you the boost you need to get you started. But as in all things, there are a lot more details that you need to be aware of if you want to create a community that will be worth everyone’s while. On this episode of Inspired Insider, Dr. Jeremy Weisz talks with eCommerceFuel Founder, Andrew Youderian, about what it takes to create a vibrant community for eComm business owners. Andrew also shares the story behind the founding of the eCommerceFuel community, the core values that drive it, and how the community has helped eCommerce brands. 

Andrew Youderian is a bit of a legend. Podcaster, investor, former eCommerce store operator, and now founder of the premier online community for 7 and 8 figure eCommerce store owners - Ecommerce Fuel. That's why I'm super pumped to have him on the show this week to talk predictions for the rest of 2021! In this episode, we put on our Nostradamus hats and try to predict what we might see more of this year. I focus a little more on the ad and marketing space as it relates to eCommerce. Andrew focuses his predictions more on eCommerce as a whole, plus a few macroeconomic predictions.   Hopefully, you find this fun and entertaining, and helpful. Even if we end up being dead wrong about our predictions, I think you'll find some interesting nuggets here.

Andrew Youderian is the founder of eCommerceFuel.comLinks MentionedTheBKShow.com — Find All Episode Notes HereFollow Andrew Youderian on TwittereCommerceFuel.comLearnWithEzra.com — Grab a ticket to Smart Traffic Live through my partner link Punchline Copy — My favorite copywriterJoin The BK Show's newsletter Follow Ben on TwitterFollow The BK Show on FacebookFollow The BK Show on InstagramSubscribe to The BK Show YouTube ChannelNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin The BK Show's newsletterHelp the showLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Ben up to?Follow Ben on InstagramFollow Ben on TwitterApply to work with Ben to grow your business.

If you want to keep up with what’s going on in the eCommerce industry, the best thing to do is to go straight to the source and ask. But where can you find a group of eCommerce business owners openly talking about their pain points, sharing tips about how they grow their businesses, and combining their knowledge to solve problems together?  Does such a mecca exist?  Andrew Youderian is here to tell you that it does. Andrew is the founder of eCommerce Fuel, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he discusses how he built a community of more than 1,000 seven-figure eCommerce business owners, plus he shares all of the insights he’s gathered along the way. From questions about Amazon, to a crash course in community-building, to the single metric he says should guide eCommerce businesses today… Andrew divulges some of the industry’s best-kept secrets and more in today’s interview.  Key Takeaways: The Value of Selective Community Building: A community is only as strong as the people in it. Together, a community can deliver ideas, content, and capital to other members who would not be able to find those things on their own. But to ensure that all members are receiving value, it is important to be selective about the acceptance process.  Finding Your Way Through The Amazon: “If I'm selling to wholesalers, should I let them sell on Amazon?” “How do I control my brand identity on Amazon?” These questions and more are plaguing the industry and at eCommerce Fuel, the community is gathering to come up with answers, including how to capitalize on the recent delays in shipping Amazon has seen. Meaty Metrics: While most owners will point to revenue as the main metric to judge success, it is widely believed that revenue is one of the least important metrics when judging the health and long-term viability of a business. There are other metrics that are more telling, including repeat purchase rate, and one other that gets very little fanfare but could change the course of your business: price per visitor. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is your host Stephanie Postles and today we're joined by Andrew Youderian, the founder of eCommerceFuel. Andrew, welcome. Andrew: Hey, thanks Stephanie. I appreciate you having me on. Stephanie: So, is a weird feeling a podcaster being interviewed by a podcaster? What are your thoughts right now? Andrew: I think it's great. You have to do all the work and I can just sit back and relax. Well, unless you send some really pointed questions my way, so maybe I shouldn't be relaxed, so we'll see. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. I don't know. Andrew: But, yeah- Stephanie: You might have to sit up straight and get ready, this might be intense. Andrew: This may be, I need to stop slouching here. But no, it's good. Good to be on, it's fun to be on the other side of the mic for a change. Stephanie: So, I want to dive into your company eCommerce Fuel. I looked at it and it seems awesome. It seems like you have gathered so many insights from this company that you've built all around eCommerce, but I want to hear in your words what is eCommerce Fuel? Andrew: At eCommerce Fuel we provide community content and capital to seven figure plus store owners, and so we do that through an online form which is really the heartbeat of our community. We've got over 1,000 vetted store owners, and the idea was really just get a lot of people together that are doing this day in and day out, that we're running seven... our average store owner is probably doing three or four million dollars a year with their business, so that's community aspect. We also do a big event every year for our community through content, like you said I'm a podcaster. I've been doing the eCommerce Fuel podcast for I think it's about seven years now, which is crazy. Stephanie: Wow. Andrew: And then we have a capital arm as well where we invest in promising eCommerce businesses. We have 20 investors that have a lot of similar experience or world class experts, everything from Facebook marketing to email marketing to product design and so we invest in companies that we think are interesting, so that's what we do at eCommerceFuel. Stephanie: That's such a cool model. So, for you podcast I think I saw you had over 300 episodes. Andrew: Yeah. I think, actually I think we're... yes, we do. I've been, like I said, been doing it since July 2013. Yeah, been going at it for awhile. It's been fun. Stephanie: Yeah, that was really cool to look at your backlog and the guests that you've had on. So, your business models' really interesting how you have a capital arm and community, I mean two things that I would say are very hot right now. Everyone is always thinking about of course being investors, I mean at least here in Silicon Valley that's everyone's dream it seems like. And then building up a community is something that we've heard a lot of guests mention on the show, like how to properly build a community. What was your idea behind starting this business and having those different arms of the business? Andrew: They came in stages, so in a nutshell, left the corporate world and got my teeth in eCommerce for starting in 2008 on a couple different eCommerce businesses and built those up. So, I had a sense of this space and nobody was talking about eCommerce unless it was like from a Home Depot or like a Lowe's, like a, you know, Fortune 500 style? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew: And so I started writing about what it's like to grow an eCommerce business for a small team or a single founder and developed a little bit of a following on the blog, started podcasting, and then from there that kind of just naturally led to me meeting all these great people and I thought what if we got a bunch of people in a community together that had some kind of vetting thresholds and just made sure everyone had some level of experience? And that launched the community and built that up over time and then the capital arm is fairly recent, really recent in fact, it's about five or six months old. That just came as a natural extension of seeing all these interesting entrepreneurs that hopefully we'd built some trust and report with, or that people knew about us from the time running the business. And then also just a really great group of investors who also had not just money, but a lot of in the trenches experience and advice to lend, so it kind of came in stages. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really cool. To start with the community aspect, what are the vetting procedures that people have to go through? How do you know who to bring in to keep it a high quality community? Because I think that's biggest problem when you're getting in all these Facebook groups or communities, you're like, "Oh my gosh, just everyone's in here and I'm actually not learning anything." So, what does it look like to get into your community? Andrew: Yeah, you're right. I mean, if I could only do one thing well in a community it would be bring the right people into it. So, our guidelines are a little nuanced but you need to be operating a seven figure business. If you have a very proprietary product that you've made from scratch or that is a little harder to make sometimes we'll take people in kind of the mid to high six figure range. If you're selling just on Amazon usually we require a little bit more than that, so that's on the revenue threshold sides. Andrew: So, we keep it no major SaaS vendors, and then for service providers we're really careful. I'd probably say only 10% of our applicants that we accept are service providers and they need to be recommended by an existing member because you can... An amazing email marketing expert that knows the space, that is respectful of people and isn't going to come in at a hard pitch and is going to build relationships the right way through adding value, is a huge asset. But we want to make sure those are the type of people we have and not people who are just trying to sign somebody up on the first day, so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really important. How many people are in your community now? Andrew: We have about 1,100 members in the community. Stephanie: Okay. How did you go about building that up? What is your method of bringing new people into the community? How do you get in front of people and even tell them about eCommerceFuel? Andrew: Community building's interesting. You've got this chicken and an egg problem, right? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew: And the way that I did it was when I was blogging and podcasting early on about eCommerce, just over that probably 12 month period really focus on not trying to monetize the business or anything, just trying to build authority, get a little bit of a reputation, and connect with people. Over the course of a year, just naturally, organically, met about 100 to 150 really interesting people. And any time I did, I'd just put a little tag on them in gmail and say, "Community seed member." Stephanie: Oh. Andrew: So, a year in a had this list of 150 people and I reached out to them and said, "Here's what I'm doing. I'm starting a community, are you interested?" And then over the course of about 30 to 45 days I dripped in, I added, about four or five people a day. I'd bring them in, I'd introduce them, I'd introduce them to other people, I'd ask them questions, kickstart discussions, and so it gradually grew. I didn't just drop everyone in at once, and it took about like 45 days but we had a bit of a community at that point. And then from there I had over the last year built up some traffic to the website, was able to put up a page that said, "Hey, here's the community. You can join," and that gave us kind of... because you need both things, right? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew: Like in community you have to have new people come in because you always have a drop off even in the most healthy. So, from it was able to kind of, with a lot of work, get to self sustaining within probably 18 to 24 months, so. Stephanie: Wow. Yeah, that's great. And it is a paid community? Andrew: It is, yes. It's a paid community, so it's... yeah, it is. It's $99 a month. Stephanie: That also helps... Okay, yeah. I'm sure that also helps with quality and bringing in people who are serious and really want to learn and contribute to get their monies worth. Andrew: Oh, it helps so much. I mean, for a couple reasons why. We have, just like you said, on the vetting side, yeah, it shows that people are actually serious about this. The other nice thing is it gives us the resources to do things like hire a real community manager. We have someone full time that their whole job is just to vet people to make sure that if people have questions that don't get answered they can move them to the right people. It let's us invest in technology, we've probably poured six figures plus into the custom tech for the community, so yeah, it makes it a lot easier. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really cool. When it comes to keeping the community engaged, because to me that's one of the biggest things to make sure people keep renewing their membership and they want to check in everyday and see what's new and see who's talking, how do you go about keeping them engaged? And maybe what have you seen works and what didn't work? Like any tests that you've done where you're like, "We've tried this and this failed," or, "We tried this and this really increased engagement a lot and helped keep it going?" Andrew: I think the best thing you can do, two things, the first thing is to actually have discussion and content that are highly relevant to what people are doing day in and day out. So, again, kind of going back, if you get the right people in the same room that's 80-90% of the battle. From that point, setting up custom notifications is really important. So, some of the custom tech that we've talked about, when people sign up we don't just blast them with every single discussion that pops up, that's crazy, right? They'd just drowned in a fire house because we have like 5,000 comments every months in there. But we do try to figure out like, hey, what are you an expert in and what are interested in learning about? And then when they join we tailor their notifications to try to create the highest level of a signal to noise ratio possible, and so that's another thing. The third thing is just maintaining a really respectful environment, like we have a pretty strict no jerks rule. I probably shouldn't say this, but I get a lot of pleasure out of throwing people who are just downright disrespectful and just, you know, kind of just generally unpleasant out of our community because they're horrible. Stephanie: Yeah, good. Boot them. Andrew: And also non-solicitation. We kind of have a one strike, one warning, and then if you do it again you're out. So, we don't put up with pitches, you know, if people are hard pitching stuff they're out. So, I think those are the big things that help with maintaining an active community where people keep coming back to. Stephanie: Yeah, those are such good points and it's not only applicable to your business but even thinking about any eCommerce business of how to build up... I mean, everyone talks about building these communities but how do you actually make it helpful and personalize it to people in a way that people want to engage on your social media post or they want to engage on your blog or tag themselves wherever they're in your clothing or with your mug or whatever. So, I think these lessons actually can apply across industries as well and not just upon building a community like you're doing. Andrew: Yeah. Community building, it's interesting, it's kind of like a brand. It is a brand. It's insanely hard to get up and running, like the amount of time and energy and love and relational just work that you need to put in, I don't say it in a bad way, but just building relationships takes a tremendous amount of work. It takes a ton of time, just like building a brand. But it's insanely defensible, I mean, if you're willing to put in that, you know, if you have a multi year approach. You can't steal people's friends, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: And that's what happens, whether you're building a community for your brand or kind of a micro niche community like this for eCommerceFuel, is people come in and they stay because they get value and they stick around for a couple months but then they come to an event, they connect with people via PM, and then build genuine friends. I don't know, you'd be hard pressed to tear me away from my good friends and it's really defensible in that department, so. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. I love that. So, you probably get a lot of really good insights into the world of eCommerce and where things are headed just by some of the questions that some of the members in your community are asking each other, and I wanted to know what kind of top questions do you see occurring right now where it's like quite a few people are asking the same type of question or these same things keep popping up? Andrew: Yeah. Let's start with the 500 pound gorilla in the eCommerce space, and that's Amazon. Some of the questions I think people are asking on there is how do I... I'll just go through a handful of them and then maybe we can talk about ones that are most interesting to you. If I'm selling to wholesalers, should I let them sell on Amazon? How do I control my brand identity on Amazon? There's some interesting popping up right now about how... I don't know if you've noticed this, but Amazon Prime used to be for awhile it was free shipping, then it was two day, and it was one day, and now it's like- Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: ... three to five days if you're lucky depending on where you live. Stephanie: Yeah, I did notice that and I was like, "What's happening here? Usually I can get my stuff for my son in like a day and now it's taking a week." Andrew: Yeah. It's kind of crazy, and of course because of just with COVID eCommerce is blowing up, the capacity is limited on the delivery networks. But it's interesting because it kind of levels the playing field at this moment in time for independent brands because the shipping factor is not so much of an issue, and in fact a lot of people are probably are almost in... If somebody gives you something and takes it away it's worse than if they just had never given you anything to begin with, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, yeah I feel way more sad right now than I ever would have before this. Andrew: Exactly, right, because the expectation's there. So, that's creating an interesting opportunity. One of the things that Amazon just recently came out with I think in the last couple days was re-introducing... Way back, I don't know, two, three, four, I don't know how many years ago, multiple years ago, you used to able to ship your products from Amazon's warehouses to customers. You could use them as a 3PL fulfillment center without Amazon branded boxes. They changed that for many years and just this week I think they changed back to saying, "Oh, actually you can use our fulfillment services with your own proprietary boxes," or at least with unbranded boxes. And I think potentially... Who knows why they did it, it was kind of perplexing to a lot of people, but perhaps because they realize that they're losing on the shipping game and other merchants maybe are starting to migrate other places and if independent merchants are able to deliver the same shipping without Amazon maybe more then we'll move off. And one thing that we've done, we've done a State of the Merchant Report for the last three years, and our one for this year should be hopefully coming out fairly soon. But a trend that is really noticeable is the number of people that are going to Amazon is really... it's not reversing but it's plateauing very significantly. Andrew: And even just chatting with merchants and seeing a lot of case studies, people are taking a lot harder look at is it worth going on Amazon for how much channel risk you take on, how much loss of control of the consumer that you give up, you don't have addresses, all these things. They're just taking a lot harder look at is this good for my business long term? Stephanie: Yeah. So, do you think 2020 will show that a lot of people are pulling back from Amazon? Andrew: That is a good question. I think not a lot of people, but I do think when we released the report I made this prediction in the report too, so very likely could just fall on my face in the mud here, but I think the percentage of people who sell on Amazon, it was about 55% of all stores that we surveyed last time, I think that will decrease a small amount. I don't think we're going to see a precipitous drop but I think it goes from 55% to maybe 54 or f... I think we start to see that inflection point. Stephanie: Yeah, that's really interesting. The one thing I also read in your 2019 report was about the different marketing channels that people were using and I saw that Amazon ads had the highest ROI but not many people are using it, so I'm wondering what are your thoughts around that aspect of using it as a marketing tool? Andrew: Yeah. No, it's... Wow, good prep work. If you're on Amazon, Amazon ads you have to have a... people reported them being the most effective sales channel that they use. So, if you're on the platform they work really well, so definitely should be doing that if you're on the platform. I think it's just more of a... it's not a question so much of should we use Amazon ads if you're on the platform, you absolutely should. It's more of a question of do we want to be on Amazon in the first place? But, yeah, for people selling on Amazon they work really well. Stephanie: Yeah, okay. But then the other interesting thing I saw was that the average order value was way lower for... because if it's maybe a direct to consumer site or anywhere else people can maybe stack on additional things from your brand, where I think I saw on Amazon the average order value was much lower which makes me think you're not getting that, hey, you should maybe also try this from my brand and this from my brand as well and kind of increase the cart value. Andrew: I think that could definitely be part of it. I think a big part of it too is that if you have people on Prime there's no free shipping threshold, right? Have you ever ordered a... what's a good example here? Like a $3 koozie and it shows up and you're like, "How did they pay for the shipping for this? They lost money on this." Or even better, you order a $7 paperweight set that weight like 10 pounds and they ship it. There's no threshold so it's easy to impulse buy small stuff on Amazon. Stephanie: Yeah. Good point. Andrew: Whereas if you're buying from an independent merchant not always, but more often than not you're going to have some kind of free shipping threshold. So, either you're intentionally going to seek it out or you're buying multiple things so I think that probably also has a big part in why those order values are different. Stephanie: That's a good point. That's a good reason to look further into data and not just look really quickly like I did through the report. So, what other trends are you thinking are happening either right now, because a lot's been changing because of COVID and things are kind of just all over the place where some people are struggling, some people aren't. It seems like the market is changing quickly. What other trends or things happening do you see that people are surfacing in your community, or are you building into your next report coming out? Andrew: Yeah. So, eCommerce obviously no surprise here is just exploding, and we did a survey, this was in March when the world was falling apart and nobody knew what was happening and it was much more uncertainty than there even was now, and you saw early on in that you kind of saw a very big dip for the first probably week when COVID really started spiking and being taken seriously. And then you saw kind of half and half, half the businesses were doing okay or growing and half were failing, now I'd say you definitely have some businesses that are really struggling. If you're in the event space, if you sell items in the event space, any of the kind of in person things are having a hard time, but by large I'd say most of our stores are doing, you know, most of the industries are doing really well so that's fantastic. One thing that's tough, it's a downside, and anybody who's selling is probably going to be aware of is just the sales tax issue in the Unites States is just an absolute disaster, just on making- Stephanie: Tell me a bit about that because whether- Andrew: It's just a dumpster fire. Stephanie: I don't know if I... well, I actually probably have avoided anytime I see tax I'm like, "Oh, no thank you." So, I would love for you to dive in a bit and tell me why is the sales tax a disaster because [crosstalk 00:18:28]. Andrew: Yeah, so I'll try to be somewhat brief because you could probably talk about this for quite awhile, up until two or three years ago pretty much the case was if you... The only places you had to collect sales tax for was if you had Nexus in a state. So, if you had... I run a business out of Montana and Arizona, so Montana doesn't collect sales tax and so traditionally we've only had to collect sales tax in Arizona. There's a big Supreme Court case that came across in 2017 or 18. It was Wayfair versus South Dakota and pretty much the shakeout from that was that the Supreme Court said that states can require sellers that are outside of their state, they have no physical presence in their state, if they sell to a customer within their state they can collect sales tax on them if they reach a certain threshold. If they sell either a certain dollar volume in that state or if they have a minimum number transactions for that state. And it could be as low as 200 transactions and $50-100,000. So, the problem that causes is that now you have companies who create this economic Nexus and now all of a sudden they have to be responsible for collecting and submitting sales tax not just to 50 states but to potentially sometimes all these different municipalities and cites, and just creates a disaster of a compliance thing. Andrew: So, you've got companies that have sprung up to try to deal with that, and one top of that, if you sell on Amazon, technically if you have inventory... Normally, you send your inventory into Amazon and they a lot of times will split it up in three or four warehouses so it can be delivered quickly. Well, technically now if you have those inventory in those four states you have Nexus in those states and you have to also collect sales tax. So, it's just on the Amazon front, on the independent front, it's just created... We don't have any central governance for this. What I think would be best is if the federal government kind of took it over and said, "Hey, we'll create a national sales and redistribute." But at the moment you either have to deal with an insane amount of complexity, especially as you get larger, or you have to run the risks of being out of compliance and facing huge fines. It's a really rough place to be. Stephanie: Wow. How are you seeing eCommerce companies tackle this? That is not something that I've even thought about honestly, and it kind of scares me to ever start an eCommerce store now. Andrew: Yeah. There's a lot of different ways. Sometimes there's places... I have a company called The Tax Valet that helps out, they do a really good job. Kind of a personal hands on approach to doing this. Some merchants will use SaaS software like Taxify or TaxJar to be able to do that kind of stuff, Avalara as well. And some people just roll the dice and say, "Hey, this is a nightmare I'm not going to try to deal with this," so there's a lot of different... it depends on your risk tolerance, it depends how big you are, but people are taking a lot of different approaches to it. But to do it right it's really unfortunate. Stephanie: You'll have to hire someone. Andrew: Yeah, hire someone or really go deep on the SaaS side of things and dive in. Stephanie: Yeah, that sounds messy. Well, earlier you were talking about the howling out of eCommerce and I wanted you to talk a bit about that because we're talking still about the trends and what it's going to look like in the future, and I thought you had an interesting take on that so I'd love for you to go over that if you could. Andrew: Sure. And again, of course totally could be wrong here, but when I look forward into the future I feel like Amazon's going to be hallowed out in the sense that, or excuse me, eCommerce is going to be hollowed out in the sense that you have... On one side, you have brands on Amazon that sell either one or two things, they're either well known national brands, like the... well, I don't think Nike sells on them anymore so that's a bad example, but the... Why am I blanking on big national brands here? Tide for example could sell on there or Rubbermaid or Adidas, brands people... household names. They sell on there because it's just they know that brand, they go find it, and they want to buy it. You have people who are selling really small things, like we're talking about koozies or you needs stapler, or maybe you need a little backyard pool for the fact that your cousins are coming over and you really don't care if it breaks in three weeks and so you buy that. But then for anything in the middle that's like kind of not a huge national brand but also something that you want to have that's quality, I think a lot of those companies are going to start... people are going to buy much more from the companies themself, direct to consumer. Andrew: Because they can merchandise them better, the shopping and check out experiences are getting easier. I think brands are increasingly not going to sell on Amazon because there's, in addition to all the things we talked about, you also have huge IP issues and people ripping you off. So, I think that's going to be the hallowing out of eCommerce when Amazon's going to be a big donut and in the middle a lot of people are going to be selling directly on their own sites just because it makes more sense for all the reasons I mentioned, so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's interesting. We've also talked a bit about the conscious consumer that's kind of rising out of all this and how people are starting to care about what is the source of this product, is it actually sustainable? Is it a quality product? And less about can I have more and more focused on quality and sustainability. Have you heard that trend as well in your community? Andrew: Yeah, I would say I think that's something that's been kind of gradually increasing over the last five to 10 years. I think more than anything how it ties into our conversation is that Amazon over the last couple of years, and they've been fighting it and they've done some, to their credit, they've done some things to combat it, but they still have a... If you buy something on Amazon most people are not going to think it's... there's a little bit of a thought that it's probably not high quality, a little bit of a stigma for buying stuff on Amazon especially if it's not a name brand. Part of that- Stephanie: Even the name brands people wonder if it's it... is this a legit name brand, I've seen that a lot in comment and reviews. Andrew: Oh, totally. Partially because of review manipulation, partially because of counterfeiting, and partially because there's just a lot of... I mean, there's everything on Amazon so how do you filter through it, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: So, yeah, I think that's part of going back to that [inaudible] about the hallowing out of eCommerce unless it's a brand you absolutely have faith in or it's something that you don't care about the quality. Would you rather buy one of those borderline things from Amazon and roll the dice with an unproven brand, roll the dice with one of those mid-tier brands being counterfeited? Or, especially if you can get it just as quickly either because Amazon is shipping stuff really slowly or because increasingly independent merchants can deliver it more quickly with some of these other options via straight from the horse or straight from the source rather. So, yeah, I think for me that's how the quality issue ties in I think to the larger discussion. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think that is why the drop shipping model has kind of decreased? I saw on your report that that is not as big of a thing as it used it, and I just remember... maybe even like last year, over the last couple years that was a huge thing. Everyone just said, "Start a eCommerce company and just drop ship things and let other people take care of it for you." What are you seeing with the drop shipping trend? Andrew: Yeah. So, when we talk about drop shipping I think it's important to differentiate two different things that come into people's minds. One is drop shipping, you can build a great high quality business based around drop shipping. A couple of businesses I started were drop shipping based businesses, one of them's still, under a great new owner, is still doing well. Really at the end of the day it's less about the product quality and more about how it's delivered. So, like Home Depot for example, they drop ship a ton of their stuff, some of their even big name brands because they're can't afford to hold everything in stock and that can potentially work out reasonably well. I think where it got a really bad reputation with all AliExpress side of things and so where- Stephanie: Yes, that's the stuff I read. Andrew: Yeah, right. And that's a whole different ballgame, and for people who, you know, if you're not familiar with that the 30 second version is you go onto AliExpress which lets you pretty much ship pretty much ship products directly from the factory in China to consumers in the US very cheaply through some kind of loopholes in the postal service. You can set up a store really quickly but by and large the products are garbage. They're just crappy, so that I think is where... There was a big rise in that, people ran that for a while, tried to run with that, but the problems were you couldn't build a brand around it because the products were awful, and because it took weeks to get your product to your customer, and probably because most likely if you're launching one of those businesses you know nothing about the product, so. Stephanie: Yeah. Never seen it, you don't even know if it'll make it or not. Andrew: Yeah. But even on the other side I'd say, that all aside, even if you're selling really good quality products, Amazon in the last five years has completely solved distribution. When I started for awhile I sold trolley motors, I sold CB radios, and back in those days you really could get a business up and running purely by sourcing a relationship with a wholesaler, doing a decent amount of marketing, having reasonable customer service and you were in business. But like today if you know what you want to buy, you know the brand, and you want it at a fair price, at a reasonable quickly you're probably going to go to Amazon for something you discreetly know that you want. So, Amazon's solved, at least before COVID and probably still I'd say a large degree, they solved distribution. So, how do you add value? You got to add value through some other way, usually that's through a lot of education or a really curated product line if you're going to sell existing products and those can be harder to get right. So, I don't think drop shipping is completely dead but I think it's gotten significantly harder versus even just two or three years ago. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. So, one question I always try to ask on here is about metrics and data, and with access to your community I want to know what kind of metrics do people talk about as their success metrics or what do you hear people debating about when it comes to metrics behind if a business is doing well or not? Andrew: Yeah, I think the one everyone loves to talk about is revenue, right? But I think that's probably a pretty horrible metric to use. It's easy, and we're totally guilty of it, that's one of our thresholds for even membership. So, guilty as charged, I'm going to slay myself along with everyone that I slay here. We use it because it's easy, we use it because it's socially acceptable. It's way easier to say, "I do three million in revenue versus I made $600,000 last year. It's also way easier to say, "I did three million revenue," than, "Oh, I only made $20,000 last year and that was I didn't pay myself anything," right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: But metrics that I think are most important, one that... To be totally frank, in the community we don't talk a ton about... a lot of our conversations really don't revolve around what metrics should you track. Bottom line is a big one, of course. Conversion rate's a big one, average order size is a big one. Repeat purchase rate is a big one. And I'd say we don't have tons of conversations about them, but I think probably the most important ones to think about today are repeat purchase rates because advertising is doing nothing but getting more expensive. It's getting harder and harder to get in front of people without paying the big tech gatekeepers. So, the more likely a customer is to come back to you and needing that product the more likely you can actually build a viable long term business, that's a big one. I think profitability per visitor is a huge metric. It's harder to calculate but if I was going to run my business on one metric it would be profit per visitor to my website. And the reason I say that is because it encapsulates a lot of things, conversion rate, traffic, all these different things. Andrew: But it really makes you focus on pricing. If I would have to identify the one thing that I have done across multiple businesses in my life that has had the biggest impact and taken the least work, hands down it would be pricing. And so few people play with it. Some people can't, a lot of people can. And it's terrifying to change prices because we all fear that when you change the prices that your business is going to disappear, but that rarely happens especially if you do it in a really smart way. And what you should be maximizing is your profitability per visitor, at least for new customers at a minimum. So, yeah, those are some of my thoughts on metrics, and again we don't... total frank, we don't talk a ton about... those aren't the hot topics but I think those are some of the things to really think about. Stephanie: Yeah. So, now you've opened up, what are some of the hot topics? What are some of the heated debates that are going on behind the wall? Andrew: That's a good question. You know what, let me pull it up. Stephanie: Yeah, open it up. Let's see. Andrew: I'm going to pull it up here. Stephanie: Sounds good. Andrew: So, we have a cool little feature. Let's just surface all the top discussions from the last year. So, I can't... for confidentiality I got to be sensitive, but here's some of our top stories from the last let's say month. The story about how someone sold their brand, their business that they built over the years and just the emotional rollercoaster and what they learned, and how they were looking to hire multiple... How to use influencers on YouTube to build an eight figure business. Stephanie: Oh, that's a good one. Stephanie: Yeah, the influencer one is interesting to me because it kind of brings about the question of the social shopping experience and how the US is so based... right now, I mean, a lot of people are looking towards influencers. Whereas other markets, like China, are not really as much about that. It's more about the social shopping experience. What were your thoughts, or what was the debate when it came to the YouTube influencers and how they utilize that, and do you think that's a longterm trend? Andrew: Yeah. I think one of the big themes I've seen is that the really big influencers a lot of times are spendy and hard to track, but you could potentially get a better ROI if you focus on helping maybe working with smaller influencers either for less money or just for product. Because it's, I don't know, I don't know about you but when I'm on Instagram and I see someone using a product, and especially if they even mention it in any little way I'm immediately a little suspicious. I'm like, "Is this person really like this product or are they just getting it comped and they're having to fulfill their end of the agreement that they signed up for?" Stephanie: Yeah, especially the more popular they are, like as it goes up to the really popular famous people then I'm like, okay, do you actually use that whitening strip? How much are you getting paid for that? Andrew: Yeah, and so I don't think influencer market is going away. I mean, we've had famous people endorsing things for decades, maybe 100+ years, especially in the United States, but I do think, yeah, I just think you can also waste a lot of money on it if you're not doing it carefully. Stephanie: Yeah, I completely agree. So, on your podcast I'm thinking, this is like self serveant, so I'll go with it, but what are some of the best questions that you've asked your guests before where you continued to get the best answers or the best stories? Andrew: Oh, good question. One of my... A couple ones, I would say what's the biggest mistake, or what's... excuse me, what's the last thing you apologized for I think is an interesting one. Stephanie: That's a good one. Andrew: I think another one is what's your number? Like, what's your number to be happy, like if you had X in the bank and what's your number where you'd be happy without having anymore? It's interesting to get a sense. You get numbers from all over the place from a million to 100 million, sometimes bigger, so. Stephanie: Oh, gosh. Andrew: Yeah. A lot of the questions are very specific to the individual person and their story, but for two general ones I'd say I like those ones and get some really interesting ones those times. Stephanie: Yeah, that would be really interesting. A good kind of peak into who that person is or how they think too. I like that. Andrew: Yeah. Stephanie: So, I know we haven't gotten to talk about the capital arm of your business yet and I wanted to kind of go into what that was like starting it up and what kind of issues you were encountering when starting a capital arm? What does that look like and I want a little behind scenes for the new side of your business. Andrew: Sure. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, and I'll say in total transparency, like I said, very early into this. We're only about four or five months into this, so still pretty new. But you asked, and specifically were you hoping to know kind of some of the hard parts about starting that? Stephanie: Yeah, like what was the... not the thought process, because that seems pretty obvious like you have this great community and you maybe see some of the challenges that are going on, but what was it like starting a investment arm and what kind of challenges have you run into so far in the first four months? Andrew: Yeah. So, what it was like, it was terrifying. And I think- Stephanie: Sounds like it. Andrew: Yeah, traditionally you kind of have these two approaches where either you go out and raise a bunch of money and then you get all these commitments and you close on it and then you have to go out and put this money to work. It's kind of your life for the next often 10 years, and it's a traditional fund route. The other route is what's called syndicate where you pretty much do deals on a deal by deal basis, which gives you a lot more flexibility but the problem is every time you get a deal you got to go pass the hat and call a million and half the people are out, you know, of those half a quarter of them decide at the last minute that... like the funding process is a nightmare on that side. So, putting it together I kind of did something of a hybrid of those two where we have a group of about 20 investors that are tentatively in. I know them, they trust me, I trust them, and there's kind of a... they signed an informal thing that says, "Hey, I'm in for the next three years for this amount of money." So, hopefully it gives us the flexibility of not have to go out and deploy money just to deploy money, but we can also can be a little flexible, and we can also have the commitment from some people to go forward. Andrew: So, that's totally on the technical fund side, probably super boring to most people. But in terms of some of the challenges, I think that the challenging thing is just the number of deals you have to look at to try to find a good deal. I mean, I looked at over 100 deals so far at some level of depth and it's just finding, A, just good companies, B, where it's a good fit for both parties, and C, where you can see it working out well for everyone. It's really hard to find good deals, especially as a minority partner that comes in to invest, especially on the eCommerce side because our approach and what we're trying to do is buy, invest, in the long run with companies to build profitable businesses, like we're not trying to flip them. And I think in tech investing you can get away with a lot of sloppiness because you're kind of swinging for the fences. So, if you have a bunch that don't work out it's a big deal, most of them don't work out. Stephanie: They don't. Andrew: But with eCommerce, our model... we're looking to do singles and doubles and it's just hard to find really good businesses that you feel are going to be around for three to five years. So, the hardest part for us has just been finding great businesses that we feel check all our boxes, so. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Is there a common theme behind what these businesses are needing capital for? Andrew: Yeah, I would say... So, financing for eCommerce businesses is tricky. There are some options out there, there's things like Shopify Capital, there's ClearBank, there's PayPal Capital, Amazon Lending, all these things, but they're expensive. They also take a... often times you don't pay them back on a fixed rate, you pay them back on a percentage of revenue which can be good and bad. So, inventory financing is a big one but I'd say the people that we talk to it was probably half and half. Half of them want money for inventory financing to grow the business and half of them just really would love to have someone who has spent $15 million on Facebook ads in their career to be able to help them and give them some high level guidance on what to do and some thoughts there, or someone who's done a lot of importing to be able to tap into that knowledge based in that network, so. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. When were thinking about fundraising back in the day I was like, "I actually don't really care about people's money as much as are they going to help me?" Like, I really don't want the most famous investor because I highly doubt they will spend any time with me. I want the person who's ready to get their hands dirty and help me with the nitty gritty stuff that I'm looking for help with. Andrew: Oh, totally. Yeah, there has never been... There's so much money sloshing around right now, right? And so there's a lot of places that get money, which is good if you're raising money, but it's greed. I think the real value ad is the experience side and the money is just kind of a nice perk that comes along with it often. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. So, you've been looking at a lot of businesses and you have a lot of businesses in your community, what is one thing that you wish online sellers would either start or stop doing? Andrew: Start or stop doing... Stephanie: I like to throw out the hard balls. Andrew: Yeah, no this is good. I would say I wish people would start having more fun with the copy in their business. So, one thing I always... and I didn't, I can't claim- Stephanie: That's a good one. Andrew: I can't claim credit for this one, but I've always liked to try to make the copy and confirmation emails and things like that fun and interesting and a little bit different as opposed to like, "Thank you for your order. Your order is 49732. We appreciate your business." Such a great... Transactional receipts are one of the most opened emails across all emails, shipping ones absolutely, and if you're trying to build a brand there's no better point to be able to, you know, have some fun and be able to be different and differentiate yourself, right? So, I think that's a big one. You can extend that to the product packaging, your website, all that stuff. But I would say take a little more risks and have a little bit more fun. I would check out a site called mancrates.com, have you heard of them? Stephanie: No, tell me a bit about them. Andrew: They're so good. They're so good. They sell fun gifts for men, so for example, instead of ordering your dad a tie you can order him a 16 inch by 16 inch wooden crate of beef jerky and steak rub that he has to open with a crow bar when it shows up to his house, Like stuff like this that's different. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Andrew: And the copy is freaking just hilarious. So, check them out if- Stephanie: Oh, that's good. I'll have to check that out. Andrew: Yeah, they're really good. It's just you're buying an experience for the recipient and people pay up for it, so. Stephanie: Yeah, now more than ever with people not going out as much, not going in stores and stuff, you do have to figure out how to differentiate yourself. And I think that's a good point that, I mean, right now I'm even thinking I bought something and I'm getting the actual logistics email of DHL or whatever will be shipped at this time, and it's all this other text that I don't care about, so it's like, "Okay, I actually don't care about this email that's coming through." And if they would've made it unique and fun and exciting... like I don't even know what this is that I bought, that's how bad it is. There's no branding or anything, it's just coming apparently. Andrew: Yeah, if they were like, "The DHL guy had a wreck but your package was so important that he grabbed it from the fiery box and he crawled with one arm bleeding out and he handed it to the last person he saw and said, 'Deliver this, please. Deliver it to Stephanie,' and then he died." Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Andrew: That might be intense and maybe it doesn't work for all brands, but it sure as heck gets your attention and you're like, "Whoa, this is interesting." Stephanie: You need to write for our brand. I'm going to bring you on our team, Andrew, just for your copy. I need that. Oh man, that's good. All right. So, I want to do a higher level eCommerce question because I just think you're, one, you're willing to take a risk and you're willing to predict the future which I like. I appreciate that. So, I want to hear either what disruption is coming to eCommerce that's not already here, because a lot of people have said, "Oh, COVID's the biggest disruption." That answer's already been taken, so either the biggest disruption or you can tell me what the future of online commerce looks like in five years. Andrew: Biggest disruption coming, I'll try to tackle both of them. Biggest disruption is I think that... man, it's just coming from the guy. You talk about be willing to predict the future, I made a bet with somebody when Amazon was $200 a share that Alibaba was gonna out pace it. And now that Amazon is $3,000 a share, it was a humbling experience and it cost me a very experience steak dinner. That being said, here's my prediction... Stephanie: That's all right. I want your prediction still. Andrew: I would say the biggest disrupter, oh man... I'm going to throw a couple things out there, I think text is going to be a big one, SMS. But that's not like a big disrupter as much as just a new marketing channel that us marketers can leverage for awhile until we completely destroy texting for everybody which will probably take three or four years. Stephanie: That's a good one though. What are thinking around using that as new marketing channel? Andrew: Oh, I just think, I mean, if you look at the... I think email is just getting harder and harder unless you really want to hear somebody's email. So, I just signed up for the service HEY, are you familiar with that from Basecamp? Stephanie: I've heard about it and I seen a bunch of drama on Twitter about it, so. Andrew: Yeah. There has been... probably between them and the App store and all that kind of stuff? Stephanie: Yes, yes. Andrew: Yeah. So, one of the reasons I signed up for them is because they have this thing where you can screen your emails now, and the first time you get an email from a new sender you can say, "Hey, I want this person to pop in my inbox, or no, Johnny, from Michigan I don't care about your boat covers. Don't ever talk to me again. It's unsolicited." So, that kind of thing, I think email is going to be... there's going to be more and more tools and services that let you curate your email and really slice down who gets to hear from you and so email is going to get harder and harder. But if you look a just text message delivery versus email it's an order of magnitude higher engagement, readability, click through, et cetera, and I think that marketers are already, I mean, they're already starting to do that. People that I know that are on the leading edge have five, I haven't six figures, but definitely seen some good mid tier five figure SMS lists and they just do really well. So, the problem is you got to be really careful because when people text me about things that I'm not interested in... like texting for me is very personal. I text my wife, my family, my good friends. Andrew: I don't text with Bobby's Boat Shop in Michigan, and if he sends me a promotion via text I'm going to be pissed off. So, you got to be really careful about how you use that but I think that will be a big marketing channel going for, so. Not really sure if that's really a disrupter and it's already kind of here in some regards but I'll throw that one out there. Stephanie: Yeah, I like that. I think that's a good one though to think about how to be careful when you start using these new channels, because completely agree. I've had I think someone just texted me this morning who's like, "I'm the education blah, blah, blah person of your district." I'm like, "What are you texting me right now? Don't." Andrew: Oh, totally. You can really... and I think there's some pretty stiff penalties for not being careful about that in terms of if you just spam people via text, which is good. But yeah, nothing's worse than getting a text from someone you really don't want to hear about, so. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. All right. So, next we have a lightning round, if you're ready, Andrew. It's where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Andrew: Perfect. For each question? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: Awesome. Is there like a booing sound if I go over so I stop talking? Stephanie: No, it'll just be me, "Boo! Boo!" in the background. Andrew: Do it, do it. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Andrew: I don't really... Oh, actually I do have... what is it? They're in Arizona, there's a place called Biosphere 2 where they locked all these people into this kind of self contained environment as a training mission to go to Mars, and they isolated them from earth atmospherically for two years, and surprise surprise it was a huge trauma fest. Can't remember the name of the movie but that's what I'm watching next on Netflix. Stephanie: Oh my gosh, that sounds insane. Andrew: Spaceship Earth is the name of the documentary. Stephanie: Spaceship Earth, okay. I will have to check that out. Very interested in that, and I also pontificate about Mars sometimes on our other show Mission Daily, so it's perfect for me. Andrew: Oh, perfect. Watch it tonight. Stephanie: All right. Where are you going next for your travel destination when you can travel? Andrew: Probably down Tucson, Arizona where... I'm up in Montana right now, but probably Tucson, Arizona which is where we live, so. Stephanie: Cool. Andrew: That's kind of a cop out. I need a better one. Stephanie: Wait, you live in Montana and you live in Tucson? Andrew: We're up here, we spend some time in the summertime up in Montana just to see family, friends, like that. Stephanie: Oh, cool. Andrew: Yeah, so we're heading back there soon. Don't have any plans at the moment but the next big trip I would like to take would be to Mongolia. Stephanie: Oh, that would be very interesting. Do you have an Instagram? I'll have to follow along when you go there. Andrew: @capalisthippie, so. Stephanie: Okay, I'll follow you. If you were to create a Netflix original, what would it be about? Andrew: Oh, this is easy. It would be... I'm fascinated with the question of where is the balance between running a business and being ambitious and chasing entrepreneurial success and having a great life and traveling and seeing your family and nurturing other side of yourself, and I feel like so few people get that right. So, my documentary would be pick 12 entrepreneurs from varying levels of that spectrum, live with them and follow them for two months each and try to come to some conclusions about if you were going to try to design your life to be able to maximize both of those, where's the line? Stephanie: Yeah. That's a really good one. I need help with that right now. Andrew: I think a lot of us do. Stephanie: Yeah. What podcast guest are you trying to get on that you just can't get, like they're just not responding and you really want them? Andrew: Oh, that's a good one. I think awhile we were trying to get Tim Ferriss on the show, which is super cliché. It didn't work out. Stephanie: Ouch. Andrew: Yeah, I know. I'm still upset about that, Tim. What is the favorite piece of tech that makes you more efficient? Andrew: Good question. I would say text expander is a big one so you can do saved replies and bump those out. Yeah, I'd say that's probably one of my favorite. Asana is another great one. I love Asana for we manage all our SOP's and long term projects there, so I'd say those two. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I like them. All right, the last one, what new eCommerce tool are you hearing about that a lot of people in your community or outside of it are having success with right now? Andrew: I would say there's a tool called Bonjoro, and it's not necessarily just for eCommerce, but it allows you to send custom welcome videos to people really easily. If you think about sending a video to a customer it's probably not the filming that's the hard part, it's probably like the okay, I have to film it and then I have to send it, and then I have to edit and export, and it just lets you cue up these emails, send videos to people for kind of nicer customer service touch. So, yeah we use that for onboarding for a lot of our members and I've heard people have good luck with that, so. Stephanie: That's cool. Well, Andrew, this has been such a fun interview. Where can people learn more about you and eCommerceFuel? Andrew: Yeah, if you like podcasts, which at the end of listening to me talk for 45 minutes you prob are- Stephanie: Do you want more? Andrew: ... a glutton for punishment, yeah. I would love to have you as a podcast listener on the eCommerceFuel podcast, so you can get that anywhere you get podcasts, iTunes or elsewhere. But yeah the big home is just eCommerceFuel.com, so you can learn about the community there if you're a store owner and want to get plugged in or if you have an interesting business that are looking for either money or probably more importantly some expertise from a group of really experienced eCommerce investors. Yeah, I would love to have a discussion with you. So, eCommerceFuel.com is the best place for all that stuff. Stephanie: Well, it's been a blast, Andrew. Thanks so much and we will see you next time. Andrew: Yeah, this has been fun. Thanks for having me on.

One of the toughest niches to be in right now is the travel niche. Because of COVID-19, airline companies and ecommerce sellers have seen a huge drop in sales now that everything's closed. If you were in the travelling niche right now, what would you do to maximize your business potential?  That'll be the question that we're answering on this episode of the Ecomcrew podcast. We're joined by my dear friend Salo Mizrachi from Ezpacking to talk about how COVID-19 has affected his brand, affiliate sites, and whether it'd be wise to dive into a new, different niche. Together, we'll be weighing the pros and cons of each choice while also considering Salo's end goal for his business, and how much time he's willing to put into his business.  In this episode, we talk about:  Branching off from the travelling niche. Starting an affiliate website for Salo's current niche.  The Importance of Location Independence to Salo and his wife.  The New Normal for Salo after COVID-19. Having an Emergency Income Source in times like these.  Why Amazon slashed Affiliate Commissions. The Advantages of the Subscription Plan Model.  If you want to hear more about where I think we'll be after COVID-19, check out the episode I did with Andrew Youderian and Drew Sanocki here. If you wanna check out our Free Amazon Domination book, check it out here!  Stay safe, and happy selling! 

Joe Cochran had a rough start in life, but eventually came out on top. Through perseverance and a hard struggle, he finally has a success story. Tune in to hear our chat with Joe and learn about his process, his early struggles, and why he finally decided to sell his company. Topics: The emotional rollercoaster of being an entrepreneur. His early struggles. Launching his business with $5000 in credit. Sacrifices Joe had to make to keep his business afloat. Siphoning vs. reinvesting. How he ran his initial campaign. Which accounting resources he used on a tight budget. His competitive nature and how it drives him. Making the decision to sell. Transcription: Mark: Joe, we've had the opportunity to work with some pretty amazing entrepreneurs over the years and I never get tired of hearing about these success stories, especially for people that have gone through some of the dark periods of life that come out through the end. And often we get to be a part of the process when that reclamation, that coming back from some difficult times in their life comes to a head and comes to that real big victory point of an incredible exit. Joe Cochran is one of these stories. Joe: Yeah, he had his first child two days after his 17th birthday. I think that changes somebody's life forever. He didn't quit. He stayed in high school and he says his girlfriend at the time does his homework, helped him cheat to graduate. Mark: His girlfriend helped him cheat? Joe: Doing his homework, yeah, she did his homework. He helped in graduate high school. Mark: True love, I love it. Joe: Yeah, he worked full time. He just got out and hustled and went through some dark times after that in terms of business with his father, major debts, substance abuse, and came out the other end of just fighting and launched an Amazon business in 2016 when he had about $40,000 in debt. He thought through it and came out the other side in January of 2020 with a seven-figure exit. And as he said at the beginning the podcast interview, he said he felt like an incredible burden was lifted off his shoulders. So it's a great story; great success story. A lot of golden nuggets in there throughout the whole interview that I did with him and just one of these inspiring people that you just got to listen to the whole thing. Joe V.: Hey, folks. Joe Valley, here from Quiet Light Brokerage, and today we've got another episode of Incredible Exits. This one is with Joe Cochran. Joe and I've been working together for I think I want to say, a couple of years Joe, in the process of planning your eventual exit or as I like to call it, training. You came to me as a referral from our good friend Mike Jackness in EcomCrew and I think you were living in one state when we first chatted and eventually moved to another. And then I think we closed the transaction in January of 2020 is that right? Joe C.: That's correct. Joe V.: All right. Well, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. The first question I have for you; normally, by the way, I ask people to introduce themselves and give a little background but I want to actually just know how you felt when you finally closed this transaction. I shouldn't say finally because you weren't under LOI by the time we listed it to the time we sold it was 45, 60 days something like that. How did it feel? I don't want to know about the money and that kind of zeroes and this is a seven-figure exit but how did it feel when you finally had the money hit your account and you knew that this was real and the transaction was closing and assets were transferred? Joe C.: Yeah. So, I mean, that was kind of a roller coaster, to be honest. I think since I started the business all through the business to selling the business and even shortly after selling the business, emotional roller coaster. I just think as an entrepreneur, it's probably one of the hardest things to do is manage your own feelings and emotions around your business and what's going on. I would say the second that I signed the paperwork, it felt like the weight of the world kind of lifted off my shoulders because a big part of my why was always to be able to provide for my family and kind of have a security if you will. That was something that is always very important to my wife and I as far as something that we strive for. It's just having financial security and things like that so it was definitely that life-changing feeling. But shortly after, other fears and worries crept in. It was short-lived, but it did feel great. Joe V.: Yeah, life of an entrepreneur, it's not necessarily just because you sold the business and you've got some money in the bank that you don't stressing about other things. It is what it is. So your big why was to be able to provide for your family; we didn't talk about this. You haven't given me permission and cut if we have to but your story is interesting. You ended up becoming a dad while in high school if I recall correctly. Is that right? Joe C.: Yeah, I got my high school sweetheart pregnant when I was 16 and had my son a couple of days after my 17th birthday. Joe V.: Wow. And you finished high school, kept working, provided for your newborn family at the age of 17. You were working and going high school at the same time, right? Joe C.: Yeah. I basically cheated my way through high school at that point because I was working 30 to 40 hours a week going to school as little as possible. My girlfriend at the time was doing my homework for me, helping me through. And it was important to my family that I finished school and it wasn't as important to me that I do, but just felt like I needed to finish that. That was my junior year when my son was born. Joe V.: How many years ago was that, Joe? Joe C.: Well, I was 17 when he was born. I'm 41 now. Joe V.: Okay. Joe C.: I don't try to do math in public. Joe V.: When I do I usually get around but I would say 23, 24 years-ish. Joe C.: Yeah. Joe V.: So you went from… Joe C.: It's a bit easier this way, how old is my son? He's 24. Joe V.: I was hoping you were going to just go there. Yeah. We're doing math instead. So you've gone from a situation that is the worst fear of parents that you're becoming a dad a couple of days after your 17th birthday to 23, 24 years later, you're having a seven-figure exit of your own business. The weight of the world lifted off your shoulders. You're able to provide for your family, which is very, very important; a great success story. Let's talk about your path to it. I'm going to shorten it a little bit because we just talked about that and I know that you went to work into sales and eventually with your dad in the hot tub parts business, pool parts business, and eventually exited that. But then you started this brand that you built primarily as an Amazon business. Talk about how you came up with the idea of selling on Amazon and building your brand and what that path was like a little bit. Joe C.: So when I was working for my dad, we started to get into the Amazon business model in his business probably around 2009, 2010. Somewhere in there we dabbled, didn't really jump into it seriously until closer to the end of that business cycle. But we had kind of been playing with ideas. We started our own brand at one point in the fireplace and arts niche. And so I had some experience there, but I just wasn't ever passionate about any of the products my dad and I were selling. I was passionate about business. I was just a student of business. I studied all the time at marketing, sales, e-commerce in general and so when I realized that he was going to sell the business and I was essentially going to be out of work and need to define and figure out an income, I started really focusing on what kind of business would be right for me? If I was going to start my own thing what would be the best model? How can I get into it inexpensive, because I didn't have much money, matter of fact I have a pile of debt. And it just ticked all the boxes for being I want to work from home, start small and scale and potentially exit in a large exit. So I wanted kind of all those things; I needed all of those things and it just ticked all the boxes for me. Joe V.: And you're 41 now, how old were you when you started the business? I'm going to make you do math again. Joe C.: So I started a business in 2016 so it's been like four years ago. Joe V.: Four years ago. Okay, and how much money did you have when you launched the business in terms of cash? I know that you had a pile of debt at the time, but how much money did you pull together to make your first order? Joe C.: So I had about $5,000 on credit card that was available. Joe V.: You did it with $5,000, you had a pile of debt and you took $5,000 on a credit card to launch this business and four years later, you got a seven-figure exit. Am I doing this right? Joe C.: Yeah. Joe V.: Wow, incredible. Joe C.: I've had about $40,000 in debt personally. We have just started making progress with paying off credit cards and stuff because we started doing Air B&B and kind of renting out bedrooms in a house that we were renting. And so by doing that, we had started to make some progress in paying off our debt and like any good entrepreneur person as soon as I saw the light at the end of the tunnel I decided I'd took on more debt and started our business. Joe V.: Was it a success out of the gate; did you immediately start selling and say oh boy now I've got an inventory problem, I've got to buy more and keep up? Joe C.: Yeah, so I have the; I don't know what to call it, good luck also good sense that I did develop a product that really spoke to my target market. That was kind of easy for me at the time because I was my target market. And so I simply created the solution that I thought was amazing. When I showed it to my friends and family, they all kind of agreed that it was amazing. And so it was kind of like I knew the product was great and I knew how to create the offer because, again, I was the target market. So I literally was able to craft a story that really hit home with my ideal customer. And so when I launched, it was hockey stick growth. I mean, in the first six months we broke a million dollars in revenue. Joe V.: In the first six months, incredible. For those listening on audio, we decided not to mention the brand or the buyer and things of this nature just for confidentiality purposes. But if you want a hint, go to YouTube and watch the video or go to I think it's Quiet Light Academy on YouTube or go to the Quiet Light website ant take a look at our podcast. There's a hint in the background; a big giant silver one way back there somewhere in the video at Joe's home office there. Let's talk about the how; okay, you had hockey puck growth, you said in the first six months you did a million dollars in revenue by creating a product that solves your own problem in a niche that you knew very, very well. How did you get to know and learn about Amazon; what resources did you utilize to become that person that knew how to create the right photos or videos or ads and things of that nature? Joe C.: I basically do what I've always done, which is tried to cheat. And at first, I bought several courses, which kind of worked. Yeah, so the first course I really bought was the Amazing Selling Machine. And then for a short time, I decided I was going to create an information product and I started thinking about doing uninvolved course on e-commerce because of course, that's what I had experience in for the previous 12 years. I came across guys like Andrew Youderian from eComFuel. I came across as Ezra Firestone from Smart Marketer, and somewhere in there, I think in eComFuel I was put in a Mastermind with Mike Jackness and a couple of other guys. And so that was sort of my network and I bought all their products and I just dug in and followed and studied everything I could. Joe V.: So for those listening a lot of times from the thousands of entrepreneurs I've talked to that sell physical products in e-commerce, they're part of a Mastermind group. And I think it's critically important that you connect with peers either on the free Facebook groups to start off with and understand that free means free and the quality of information that's shared there is not going to be as deep as a Mastermind group like eCommerceFuel or Ecom Crew or Smart Marketer or Ezra's Blue Ribbon Mastermind group but there's a lot of podcasts that you can listen to as well. Mike, at the time, did he have Ecom Crew podcast, or is that something new since you met him in 2016 and connected with him in ECF, which is eComFuel? Joe C.: Yeah, so that was new for him. He was starting to work on the project but didn't have the podcast yet and it was just kind of an idea in the background that they're working on. Mike was still very involved in his e-commerce business or businesses at the time. Joe V.: Okay, cash flow; what I see is when you've got a hockey puck growth, there's always a cash flow problem. How did you manage to keep up with the inventory needs, which is a cash flow drain on the business? Joe C.: Yeah. So my first order I think was $1,500. I placed that order. Well, when I received that order and launched the product, I did a really dumb thing and went on vacation to my parent's house here in Florida, which I now own and in right now. But so I came here and within the first couple of days of launch, I could see that I was going to run out of inventory very quickly. So I placed my second order for $1,500 now the vacation was five days and that happened on day one when I got here. So like I literally launched the product day two or day three after launch I came here. I stayed here for five days and by the end of that week I had to place a second; a third order. So like I was here on day one when I realized I was going to have to place another order and by day five I realized that wasn't going to cover it and I'm going to have to place another order and I didn't have any money. The first call to my wife for that first follow up order was like hey dear I know we just opened this new credit card for this business and we just spent 1,500 bucks but I think it's going to work. We need to place another order, send me another 1,500 bucks. And she was like yeah do whatever you think. Joe V.: Awesome. Joe C.: And I'm behind you, so cool. So then by Friday when it was time to come home and I realized this isn't going to be enough, I had to make that call again. And I said, hey, you know… Joe V.: Wait a minute; hold on, for all those people listening in the audience I want to just ask a question that they're asking. You're on vacation in Florida without your wife. Joe C.: Yeah. Joe V.: Why? Joe C.: Well, it was just to see my family. My mom and dad were here and we were both working and we've had this kind of Air B&B business at the house. We have two dogs and it's just difficult for us to both leave at the same time. She couldn't get the time off work. I wasn't working at the time. Essentially I have my own business so it was just yeah say hi to Mom and Dad, hangout for a few days, go fishing the whole time. Joe V.: Fair enough. Joe C.: She wasn't that into it anyway. Joe V.: All right so that third order, what did you do? Joe C.: That third order I was like, hey, the last order is not going to be enough. We've got to place another order and we're going to have to like triple down. We're going to need to spend like five grand on this next order and we don't have it. So can you call the credit card company and see if you can get our limit raised? And she did. And she got it raised to like 10,000 and so I was able to place that third order; so really having no money coming back in yet. I mean, we're starting to make sales. I don't think I ever got my first payout at this point, though because it's bi-weekly from Amazon. So I went from 1,500 to 7,000, $8,000 in and now I'm thinking, well, I don't know how I'm going to place the next order. And so by this point, I had been communicating a lot with my manufacturer. I placed three orders now and they could see that my orders were growing and so I just called them and I said, look I need to place bigger orders but I'm going to need some sort of terms. I can't operate without terms. You told me that I had to place a few orders before we could talk about that and I will say I planted that seed from day one. So I planned on the product being successful. I didn't just hold and not do anything. So from the very first interaction with the supplier, I asked for terms and they said no. And I said, okay, that's fair but what do I have to do to get terms? And they said, well, you need to place a few more orders, we need to be comfortable with each other and I said, perfect, fine, no problem. So it was a natural process at that point. I placed three orders. Yeah, it was a short period but I placed three orders. I showed that I was serious and so I said, look, I'm going to need new terms or I'm going to have to find another supplier and it really was kind of that. I don't want to be threatening but it was kind of like hey if you're not going to give me terms, I'm going to go somewhere else. And so they came back and gave me 30-day terms. Joe V.: So you were able to actually… Joe C.: Yeah, so it was kind of ridiculous, actually. What they are giving me was 30-day terms and I was able to renegotiate and say, yes, 30 days from the day I received the product. Joe V.: That solves a big cash flow problem right there. Joe C.: Huge. Because most places will give you 30-day terms, but it's from when they shipped the product. Joe V.: Right. Joe C.: So I wanted it from when I received it. And I wanted it from when I received the product in full. And I say that because I was doing air shipping so I would receive shipments in bunches. So I might place one big order and I might receive 10 shipments over two weeks before I get the complete order. So I kind of knew that I was working the system a little bit, but they were happy. I was paying on time and so we were able to kind of grow using that structure. But it was only about a month later before we got into another big cash crunch because the size of the orders were growing, the volume was growing, all the money was going back and inventory as you know and it was to a point where 30 days wasn't enough. I needed to buy more than 30 days' supply to cover everything and it was like round two of the next challenge as the business grew… Joe V.: How did you solve that? Was it just living off your wife's paycheck, doing Air B&B, and scraping dollars together and living a conservative financial life at home? How did you do it? Joe C.: Yeah so I have reached out to friends and family. I asked for money. Everybody told me no. I start reaching out to other investors, people that I knew that would maybe do hard money loans. All of them that agreed, which was I think, one or two said they'd do it but they wanted 50% of the business which I wasn't willing to give up any percentage of the business. And so I just kind of scrambled. I think at one point I sold my car and we just continued to scrounge and scrape. Joe V.: I love that. I love that you sold your car; that you got to do whatever you got to do to feed the business and feed that cash flow problem. That is brilliant. How long was it, Joe, before you were able to take any money out of the business for yourself or did you in that three or four year period? Joe C.: I did and probably looking back, it was one of the biggest mistakes I made. It was siphoning money from this company versus reinvesting. I think we could have been talking about a much larger exit had I reinvested versus taking the money but the bottom line is I needed the money. And my goal still was the hardest thing. So hindsight in 2020 that's fine but at the time my goal was financial security and not to get too far into the story but when my dad sold his business and when we had to basically move on from there, we sort of lost everything. We built our dream home. We had all the toys. Of course like good Americans we had overextended ourselves as well and gone into a bunch of debt to have all of that stuff. But when he said he was selling his business, there were no job opportunities in that area that we lived. We lived at a small northern Michigan town, there were no jobs, and I knew we were going to have to move. So we sold the house. We sold everything we had essentially. We packed up what was left into a moving van and we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, without having any clue what was in Raleigh other than my wife had lined up a job with one of those suppliers that we had bought from the last business. So we were sort of starting over, but we had sort of lost everything and to be completely honest it wasn't the first time I lost everything. It was the second time that I completely lost everything and went into pretty significant debt so it was a big driver for me; it was to get financially free. And to me at that point, I was also following a guy named Dave Ramsey, I was following his debt snowball and so my number one focus was get out of debt. And so I was pulling money out of the business to pay off cars. I didn't buy myself another car until I could pay cash for one. I didn't buy a house until I could a big down payment down because we were renting at the time. When we bought a house, we bought a five-bedroom house for me and my wife and we rented out three bedrooms. And so we just kind of continued that path of doing whatever we have to do and it was super uncomfortable living with people really sucks and it's really tough on a marriage. And running a business is tough but you just keep working and finding your way through it. Joe V.: Now I understand why the feeling; and this is why I ask about how it felt when you sold the business when it's finally done and you said the weight of the world was lifted off your shoulder because you've gone into debt, the wrong way two times and you've got Air B&B to strangers coming to your house and taking up three bedrooms while trying to run a business and survive a marriage as well. So congratulations on fighting through it all and doing whatever it takes to succeed because that's the bottom line. You know I'm mentoring a couple of entrepreneurs from a local college now and they're 21 and 22 years old. And one of the conversations I had recently was that they need to file for a business and incorporate and one said it's $300 and they don't actually have the money for that and I'm like suck it up. Look around your run and sell something. You can scrape together $300. You're not going to ever become an entrepreneur if you can't do what you did, which is anything you have to do to survive and sell your car and credit card loans and whatever it takes to do it. And you did smart; you had a business that was already taking off so that's good. I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about the first few days of how you put together a launch and how you learned to do that and launched the business but I also want to talk about your goal. So let's talk about the launch first. What marketing techniques did you use or put together and what would you recommend to others in order to put that initial campaign together? Did you spend money on advertising, did you just do organic traffic, did you do outside traffic; what did you do? Joe C.: Yeah. So it wasn't what I would consider very sophisticated. I was, again, kind of fortunate that the market that I went into was not highly competitive. The listings that I was competing against were very poorly created in Amazon so my listing from day one just crushed everybody. And it was just before this particular market got a lot of competition. As a matter of fact, my product is what launched the competition in this category and now there are thousands of competitors that are highly optimized and it's very challenging to get in to. But when I first started it was very easy to beat all of the competitors in that space. And so all I really did was run ads. I ran some Facebook ads, but mostly it was just Amazon ads. Joe V.: Facebook ads to the Amazon store or to a specific keyword or something like that? Joe C.: Yeah, mostly Facebook ads went to my own website. I did have a Shopify store and I had some Google ads that were going directly to my Amazon page and I had the Amazon ad platform and Amazon ad platform was the big driver. The Google ads did a little bit. Number one, what they really did, though, is they helped the page get a ranking for the keywords that I was targeting. Joe V.: Get ranked on Amazon or in Google? Joe C.: In Google. So after we launched that product, it was maybe two months until our Amazon listing was the number one listing for our target keyword. Joe V.: I got you. Joe C.: So there were strategies like that that I learned so that was conscious. I didn't do anything super sophisticated with the launch, though. I didn't have an audience. I didn't build an audience beforehand. All things that I think are necessities now with the competition being so much higher than it was then. Joe V.: Yeah. Joe C.: But yeah, at the time it was not a super sophisticated launch. Essentially what drove the revenue was the Amazon ads in their network just going direct to my page. Joe V.: And in a not necessarily highly competitive space at the time; it is now because you created the niche or the better niche as you will. All right, let's talk about your goal. You and I, I want to say we first chatted in 2018 and you were living not in Raleigh at that time, but you were living on the coast of North Carolina. How important is it in your opinion for an entrepreneur to learn about again, get trained on what it takes to sell your business; that exit path, and to set goals? How important was it for you and how important is it on the priority list of things to do for entrepreneurs, in your opinion? Joe C.: Yeah, so I think the best time to think about when you're going to sell your business is the day you start planning to launch a business. And the second-best time to do that is right now if you haven't done that. So the earlier you can start the better. And a lot of people, in the beginning, it's difficult because you have so many other fears; fears that the business isn't going to be successful, I'm going to launch it, and I'm going to get traffic and so many other things in your mind that's taking up space. It's hard to think about how I am going to sell this business down the road but you don't have to put a lot of time in the beginning, you just have to know that eventually, that's where you want to go. And so when you know that and if you know how to structure that business for sale then you're just going to be starting off on a much better place. So I got the privilege of watching my dad go through a sale and I did get to listen to him complain about all the things that were going on with the sale like oh we had to clean up the books. And that took three months to get the books cleaned before they can even move forward with the due diligence properly. And there were so many aspects that were kind of snags for him to actually get that exit. So I kind of have the benefit of watching what he went through and realized day one, I need a CPA. I need somebody who's going to watch this money because I know I'm not organized enough to do it. So literally, I launched the business within the first couple of weeks when I saw I was going to be a successful product I hired a CPA. Could I afford to? Not really but I knew I had to do and I know I really couldn't afford much. Joe V.: What did the CPA do for you? Because I always say the bookkeeper manages your books on a monthly basis, the CPA files your taxes. In this situation what did the CPA do for you? Joe C.: Yes, so the CPA did a combination. My wife ended up eventually taking over the books when she was able to leave her job. Joe V.: Did you use QuickBooks or Xero? Joe C.: QuickBooks. Joe V.: Okay. Joe C.: Yeah, and we kept pretty simple. So it was the CPA was more important of just setting up QuickBooks for me so when they charged the fee it was ridiculously cheap, really. They charged a fee to just set up QuickBooks and then once it was set up, my wife could do the bookkeeping. So they weren't expensive in the beginning. I still couldn't afford them but it wasn't expensive. And so I remember like literally at that time I was like whoa they're going to charge me 50 bucks a month or something. I don't know if this is a good idea we can't afford that. We have to go elsewhere when I say we can't afford it. That was my mindset, my frame of mind. But I was happy I did it. It helped us get started on the right foot. The QuickBooks was really pretty clean from day one. The business was not complex anyways so it was I think a good move. But the more complex you are the more important that is. And just those small things like planning to be successful is hard when you're not successful yet. But it certainly, I think in my case, paid off to start that way. So a CPA or a bookkeeper or somebody that can help you if you're not good with it was important. If you're great with it, you can do it all yourself. That's fine. But you're going to be doing many other things you got to figure out where it makes sense to spend your time. Joe V.: Yeah, I think it's really important to do that bookkeeping part because like you say it snags at the end. If you wake up one day and decide, okay I'm ready I want to sell my business but you haven't done your bookkeeping, guess what? You're not ready to sell your business. You've got to do that bookkeeping and get it done right in order to exit the business. Joe C.: You might be ready to sell but your business isn't. Joe V.: Right. Yeah, so if you've got a seven-figure business, even if it's six figures, if it's only $100,000, there's someone out there in the world that has worked very hard to save $100,000 and they are going to buy your business. They're not simply going to look at your merchant processing account or your seller account and say okay, yeah, here's the money. You really need to have your financials together; vendor invoices, cost of goods sold, all of this stuff, cost of goods sold on an accrual basis people, really, really important stuff that has to be done in order to exit without those snags. You can always sell, but you're going to be able to sell for more if you do what you did which is 18, 24 months in advance we started having conversations. And each time the value kept going up that we had conversations. Let's talk about that for a minute because I always say let's reverse engineer your path to success. Set a financial goal and a happiness goal; happiness goals and setting financial goals. Thank you, David Wood, for the happiness goal. I think it's really important. Yours, Joe, was a huge burden off your back that made you happy and you go fishing now and enjoy it without thinking about the debt that you had because you don't have any. So happiness goal, financial goal, and then reverse engineer a path to that. Sometimes it's 12 months, sometimes it's 24. You can't do that successfully without knowing the value of your business today. You can't do that without having good financials. So it all is interwoven together. But your financial goal, if I recall, moved. You set that goal and then you moved that goalpost a little higher or further down the road. Can you talk about that path? Because you had I think you said $40,000 in debt when you started this business and then you took more debt out eventually. Did you pay off your debt while the business is growing and that's the money maybe you shouldn't have taken out because you followed Dave Ramsey's program, which I think is brilliant too, by the way, and then what was your mental process for setting that exit financial goal and once the value of the business was there did we list it or did you move that goalpost further down the road? I honestly don't recall the details. Joe C.: Yeah. So starting the business, the goal was man this would be cool if I could pay a car payment or something like that and we got to that part pretty quickly. And then, of course, again, you move the goalposts constantly, right? So, man, it'd be cool if we could make a house payment. And then it became, man, it'd be cool if we could pay these cars off and pay off our credit cards and boy it'd be really cool if we could pay off our mortgage and over that first two-year span, we accomplished that. And so when I started talking to you, I don't think we can quite pay off our mortgage yet but we were debt-free otherwise. We were just working on our mortgage and that is the money that I was pulling out of the business. And so when I started talking to you and started talking about exit, it was actually during the time that we had had a big hiccup in the business, a big stumbling point and I was frustrated and I just wanted to be done and I didn't know how I was going to do it. But after speaking with Mike first, he recommended I speak with you. And so that was kind of our first introduction and you stomped on my heart. You said you're not ready. Your business is in a very bad position right now. Joe V.: It must have been trending down at the time. Joe C.: It was trending way down. This was essentially right when the mass competition came on board. I went from having no competitors to one or two to hundreds. And I've come to find out a big part of the reason for that is that Amazing Selling Machine used my product as an example in their course. Joe V.: Oh wow. Joe C.: And I reached out to them and said, hey, what the hell, guys? You know I'm one of your students, right? And they were like, oh, we didn't have any idea you were a student of ours, sorry, we won't do that in future releases but what's done is done, you know. And so they're like the biggest Amazon selling training course out there. Joe V.: Yeah. Joe C.: Literally overnight we just had hundreds of people copy our product and hit Amazon. And the business started to tank as far as our revenues it really started to go down. I was burned out at this point. I was frustrated. And I was hopeful for whatever reason, I was going to be able to still sell for some big number. And you were like no, it's not going to happen. If you sell right now, you're going to give it to somebody. Joe V.: Yeah. Joe C.: What you told me was you'd be better running it into the ground then you're just not going to get what you want for yourself. Joe V.: That's right. Take as much money out as you can and let it inaudible[00:38:34.4] Yeah, those are hard conversations when I'm telling you that, being relentlessly honest as we say at Quiet Light and not tell you what you want to hear. Joe C.: But you know what if someone was my, I guess, drive that was what I needed to hear because I realized again if I wanted to hit my goals of having that financial security, I couldn't just give up. And so that turned me around. That turned me from being down and being depressed to being pissed off and realizing you know what, you've gotten this far, you can beat these guys that are just starting and you've got two years off. Figure it out, quit worrying about what everybody else is doing, and figure out how you can win. And so, I mean, it was literally I think we hung up the phone and that shift in my mindset happened and I just went right to work on how am I going to fix this, how am I going to beat these guys? I'm very competitive. I played hockey my whole life growing up. I'm just super competitive. So when that shift happened from kind of loser to, hey figure it out; yeah, we were able to turn it around. And so it took about six months to get back to that number one position and back to where the revenue was decent. That took about another six months before we were where I felt we should be in terms of the revenue. And to your credit, you reached out every quarter or so to check in on me and that was always super helpful because it just reminded me of the goal. And so sometimes it's just so easy to get caught up in everything that's going on in your business that it was great to feel like I had some people in my core. Mike was another one that I could reach out to at any time and he would jump on a call and talk me off a ledge or give me some input. So having those resources to be able to reach out to when things aren't going well is just; I don't know how else to put it, it's just super valuable. Yeah, so it took about a full year to really; it took six months to basically turn things around, it took another six months to gain back what we had lost in sales and get back to where it felt like we could potentially exit. Then we had another call and you said okay, good, now you need to run it for another year. Because I was like oh great, we're back, now we can sell it and you're like hey man, you need a trailing 12 months at this level if you really want to sell it. So you crushed my heart again. Joe V.: I am sorry about that. Joe C.: But the reality was; no, it's fine because things were good. And so I was up and I was just like oh yeah okay, fine. I can run it for another year. Maybe I can even grow it a little bit. So that's what we really focused on and pushed through. And so you started that question really with what kind of got you there and what made the decision to actually sell? And that was literally hitting like the 10 month part period where for 10 months nothing went well. That's literally what made me realize we need to list this in because you told me, hey, you need a trailing 12 months of solid numbers and then you're good. At 10 months I was like, holy crap we're two months away from that. There's nothing in the forefront that makes me believe that we won't hit that. Let's call Joe. So I reached out to you and boy, what an interesting time to make that decision, right? Because look what happened just a few months later. Joe V.: Yeah, we closed; we're recording today on April 13th, 2020 folks and we ended up listing the business in mid-November, headed under LOI within two or three weeks, chose to close in January for tax purposes. Good for you, Joe, because you had moved to Florida, partial tax year down there, no taxes on state level and then, a grace period of another 15 months before you had to pay your taxes for the sale. Yeah, and then COVID hit. So I think in your niche sales probably went up though but still, the world is incredibly unstable and maybe better of peace of mind that you sold versus holding on. There are a lot of folks that waited and now have to wait even longer to see relatives come back. It's a tough situation all around. Joe C.: And you know it doesn't matter that your business does well in these times because if you can't get inventory or you can't get inventory on Amazon, you're still not making sales so there are so many challenges. And the other challenge is that I lived with; lived and breathed every day, day and night I mean, so that decision to sell was based on a lot of things. But yeah, it was definitely the right time and it worked out well for me and it gave me the freedom to now look back and say okay, what did I do, what made that successful, how can I repeat that in my next business, and how can I do it even better maybe? For me better means a better lifestyle. I don't want to do it again and work the way that I worked and worry the way that I worried before. And surprisingly when you have some money in the bank, a lot of those worries do go away. A lot of things do get easier and so now the big thing is make sure you don't make a big, stupid mistake because you've got money to spend and go about it like a clean start up again and remember what it takes to do that and then start from that. Joe V.: Great advice all around, I love your story, Joe. What is your next adventure, any clues or hints that you can give us? Because if anybody out there is in the audience that might have an interest in it or can contribute to it in any way maybe they'll reach out. Joe C.: Yeah. So what I kind of took away from my last business is that being passionate about the products for me is important. Some people are just passionate about business and so they don't have to really be passionate about the product so much. In my last business, I was passionate about the business, but I was also passionate about the product. And even more importantly, and this is just through self-reflection that I kind of realized recently I was passionate about my customer and I was passionate about that customer getting success. And so for me, it was realizing that it's not just the business, it's not just the product, and it's not just the customer. It was kind of a combination of those three things that I think helped push me through the hard times. Because there were so many more ups and downs that we didn't even get into that if you're not passionate about something within that, you're going to struggle. And for me, if I wasn't passionate about all three of those things, I might have faltered. So as you said I'm a fisherman and I'm looking in that market and seeing where I can contribute my value. And so I just registered a new trademark last week and we're starting on working on those offers and seeing where we can beat the competition. Joe V.: Excellent. Well, I look forward to having you back on the podcast and telling that story of your next exit although you've just started; you've just begun. Thanks for sharing your story, Joe. It's amazing going from being a dad at the age of 17, 17 in two days, if you will, to a seven-figure exit 24 years later, supporting your family and getting a big burden off your back and living debt-free. Congratulations. It's been a privilege working with you and an honor to know you. I look forward to getting out of Florida and maybe go fishing with you someday personally. Joe C.: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate all your help as well and I look forward to being back. Joe V.: All right man, talk to you soon. Resources:Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com

Last week I sat down with Andrew Youderian to talk about his new investment venture called ECF Capital. You might also recall me mentioning that I’m on the lookout for my next ecommerce business. If you own an ecommerce business, the Covid-19 crisis probably made you feel uneasy as many ecommerce entrepreneurs surely do. And hearing about these investment and buyout ventures might have led you to think that it might be a good idea to sell your business these days. But is now really a good time to sell? Or would it be worth it to wait out the storm, do your best to stay alive, and then sell when things settle back down and you have a shot at a better multiple? This episode with Joe Cochran could give you some insights.  Joe had entertained the idea of selling for years and he almost pulled the trigger a year ago. But even though he’d been having panic attacks and multiple sleepless nights, he ultimately decided to postpone the sale. A year later, Joe finally sold his business for 7 figures, and he’s here today to share that experience. Want to access our Secret Sauce video classes but you’re not a Premium member? No problem! We’re opening access to 10 of our most popular Secret Sauce videos for just $99. We want you to see one of the best EcomCrew Premium perks without paying the Premium price. Click here to see the 10 videos you get in this $99 bundle. Thanks for listening to this episode! Until the next one, happy selling and stay safe out there.

Happy Monday! I hope that you’re doing well and staying safe in these crazy times.  Keeping an ecommerce business afloat while also going through a pandemic is quite the challenge. With the borders closed, Amazon FBA services delayed and most 3PLs either closed or working at low capacity, it’s definitely a challenging start to the year for most, if not all of us entrepreneurs.  One thing that’s going to help some of these businesses stay afloat is looking for investors.  So in today’s episode, I sit down and talk to Andrew Youderian, a friend of the show who just recently launched a new project: Ecommerce Fuel Capital, and how it can help some businesses stay afloat in these hard times. We talk about what Ecommerce Fuel Capital exactly is, the people who’ve partnered up with Andrew, and specifically, the characteristics that Andrew’s looking for in a business to invest in.  I’ve done an episode on the Podcast before about the criteria I’m looking for, but in this episode, Andrew and I discuss in-depth about the several factors that both of us chose.  I think that today’s episode will definitely be insightful. People who are new to the industry will know about the characteristics that their businesses should strive for, while seasoned entrepreneurs can take a peek into what Andrew and I are thinking of when looking at businesses to acquire.  If you’re looking to sell your business, and you feel like your business fits these categories, feel free to message me at support@ecomcrew.com.  Are you an ecommerce seller that’s hit the million dollar revenue mark? Through Ecommerce Fuel, you’ll be able to find and talk to several other experienced sellers to discuss strategies, share Amazon woes, and learn several tips to edge out your competition. Find out more here!  Keeping track of your Amazon business doesn’t have to be difficult. Through JungleScout, you can find everything you need in one place! JungleScout is the all-in-one tool to use when keeping track of your brands, and is something we still use today. You can learn more about JungleScout in this course where Greg Mercer and I go over product, keyword AND supplier research for all of those that wish to start entering a new niche, along with so much more. Sign up to learn more. Thanks for listening to this episode! Until the next one, Stay Safe!

What is one of the surest paths to substantial wealth? Grow and sell a business. Today's episode is all about Joe's book project, “The Exitpreneurs Playbook.” Joe has over 8000 stories to tell about what it's like to buy, what it is like to sell, and ways to outsmart the typical entrepreneur process. Mark is interviewing Joe about this upcoming project, his motivations behind creating it, and how getting to the writing process carried its share of challenges. Joe believes that an exitpreneur should have the tools in hand to start, run, and grow their business for better decision making later on. He is not telling anyone to sell, he is offering them the strategies they need in order to be ready if they do. Episode Highlights: Joe's idea and the process of putting it into book format. Why he wanted to write the book. Reasons exit planning can be challenging for the business owner. The differences between an entrepreneur who is considering a sale versus one who has actually prepared an exit. How businesses often outgrow the founder and smart moves to make before that happens. The importance of reverse engineering to the goal for a better exit strategy. The difference between the entrepreneur and an exitpreneur. How Joe came up with the book title. Transcription: Mark: So Joe I was at an event recently in Salt Lake City and it was in just general kind of a conference meeting room for about 50 people or so and they had a lot of books in this place. And I was intrigued to just kind of look around and see what was there and you'll never guess what book was up on the shelf. Actually, do you want to guess? Joe: Yeah I want to guess. I'm looking around my office, Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss? Mark: You know what? It actually was in there. Joe: It was in there. Mark: Not the one I'm referring to. Joe: The ONE Thing by John Keller? Now, wait let's call out one of our friends; Superfans by Pat Flynn? Mark: You know I don't know. There were a lot of entrepreneurial focused books so maybe that one was there; I don't know. Joe: Okay. Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel? Mark: Buy Then Build by Walker Deibel; yeah absolutely, that was on the shelf. In fact, they had multiple copies of it. They were giving that book away. And today; what is it? It's February 11th so we're a little bit past a year since Walker launched that book and it spent a year as number one on Amazon Bestseller in this category which is pretty fantastic. I mean obviously, we're super happy for Walker. He won an award for being the thought leader of the year through a major alliance of mergers and acquisition advisors. Joe: Huge. Mark: That is huge. He's had professors from Ivy League colleges come up and talk to him about the book. All of this leads me to something beyond just the accolades and that is the information that's out there in this space about what it's like to sell, what it's like to buy. Walker is talking on specifically which is the buy-side and how to use this as an investment vehicle, how to outsmart the Startup Game as he says and reduce some of that risk. But there's also a whole on the sell-side as well where people don't really know that their business is sellable or they don't think about it. But just yesterday I was reading something on the fastest way to build wealth; what is the fastest way to build wealth? And the conclusion that they had is the fastest way to build wealth is through building a business and selling it. This is one of the quickest ways to actually building wealth. And I know you've had guests on the podcast here who have talked about this process or you call it your Incredible Exits series. I'm really, really excited that you're writing a book on this and you're not calling it Incredible Exits despite everybody else's opinions that you should but it's these stories behind the scenes. Joe: Yeah I'm excited to be writing it finally. I sat down with some friends a year ago probably around a fire pit; maybe a year and a half ago because it was summertime. We're recording this in February of 2020 and I said look I'm making an announcement, I'm writing a book, I'm telling you guys to call me out on it and then I didn't do anything but I tried. I tried to write it. I tried to outline chapters. I tried to follow up… Mark: Hold on one second. You made this promise right on a fire pit with friends? Joe: Yes. Mark: How much did you consume before you made this promise? Joe: I'm a 2-drink maximum kind of guy, that's just the way I am. Mark: Okay. Joe: It's like giving myself an injection of the flu when I have more so it wasn't much. But I didn't get it done. It's a lot of work. So I followed the original book in a box method and didn't get it done at the scheduled time. I was at Brand Accelerator Live with our friend Scott Voelker last September and one of big Scott's announcements was that he actually wrote a book. And it is also here on my desk somewhere; where is it Scott? It's the Take Action Effect. I just turned my head away from the microphone, sorry folks. And I met his scribe; a young lady by the name of Brennan and I connected with her during the event and talked with her and said okay this is it I'm done. I'm hiring a scribe and I'm going to write the book. And I've talked to a number of people about it and let me just cover the process and then answer the question as to why the heck I'm doing this because it's a massive undertaking. The process is instead of actually writing a book myself with written words and a keyboard I get interviewed for I think it was 8 2-hour sessions; so 16 hours in interviews. First, we outlined the chapters and go through the whole process and instead of talking about; I mean writing an article or a chapter on seller's discretionary earnings and add-backs and the three levels of add-backs and all the different things that we talk about on a regular basis Brennan interviewed me. She transcribes the entire interview through UberConference and Rev.com for those that really want great transcription services. And now we're in the sort of lull between all of those interviews and me getting my first draft. They're going to give it to me in thirds. So the first one I will get will probably be I want to say mid to late March and then they'll drip it out in thirds every week for 3 weeks. They want to overwhelm me in terms of reviewing and editing. I still have a lot of technical stuff to add to it but it's really kicked the process into high gear. It's not cheap, let me tell you that. It's an expensive undertaking but I think given what we do for a living and how many people we're trying to help I think it's well worth it. Why am I writing a book? Walker's been an inspiration, very successful with Buy Then Build and the amount of people that he's been able to reach and help on the buy-side. We work with sell-side brokers or sell-side clients for the most part and I've done the math Mark, does it sound inconceivable that I've talked to 8,000 entrepreneurs over the last 8 years? Mark: Not at all. Joe: Yeah and that's probably a conservative number. I'm not saying I've had an in-depth evaluation with 8,000 of them but I have without a doubt talked to 8,000 and that does not count standing in front of a room with 3, 4, 500 people. And the challenge has been we've got to reach them one by one and I know that Walker's book has been as you said best seller. I think it's probably sold over 10,000 copies at this point. Mark: It's over 15 at least. Joe: 15,000 copies? Mark: Yeah, I actually talked to Walker about it a while ago. Joe: I think he told me something like 99% of books sells less than a hundred copies that are published. Now Walker, correct me if I'm wrong but it's pretty impressive. So to get what we share on those valuation calls into somebodies hands before, during, and after they have a valuation call and when they're in an audience that will give them every possible detail that we've developed over the last 8 plus years of doing what we do and sharing that in writing so that they can essentially change their mindset. And that's the goal of the book, it's to change their mindset from reaching out to us when they're sick and tired of running their business or they've had a bump where things get tougher and they say Gosh how can I sell this business? A buddy of mine told me I can get X multiple. I'm going to call Mark and say Mark how much can I sell my business for? I want to change people's mindsets. Instead of saying how much can I sell my business or more often they say how much is my business worth, I want them to say I want to build wealth like you said at the beginning and I want to sell my business for X dollars. I want to do that in 4 years. In order to do that, they need to understand where they are today. And the book is going to help them reverse engineer the path from where they are today to that exit so that they can do a partial valuation, get comfortable with brokers, and drive that path. I had a conversation with Mike Jackness recently and Mike talked about the fact that about what we do sometimes entrepreneurs just don't want to hear it because the idea of exit planning is so beyond what they're trying to do when they're just trying to keep the wheels on the bus, right? They're running out of inventory, they've got competitors coming at them from every angle, they're trying to do cash flow planning and it's just so hard that they can't see out the front window. The objective of the book is to sort of clear that window, have a clear path to an exit that they understand and it's a much better ride. I've been through it myself personally. You did it for me back in 2010. I could see nothing, understood nothing, we had a call, we had several calls and the light bulbs went off and I knew exactly the path to take and I'll tell you what operating my business became a lot more fun and exciting even though I was sick and tired of it after 5 years. Mark: You know the more I experience the business and grow as an entrepreneur the more I'm learning. With anything dealing with a goal really the best way to achieve these things is what you've said, reverse engineer it. Rather than just kind of impulsively decide that I'm going to do something figure out where you want to be and then reverse engineer. But in order to reverse engineer it, you need to understand the mechanisms that are going on to create that value. You're trying with this book to create a shift in the mindset of entrepreneurs, right? By the way, folks if you haven't figured this out we don't have a guest; Joe is the guest. I'm going to interview Joe about the book and maybe we'll talk a little bit about what it is like to do what Joe and I've been doing and everyone else at Quiet Light. Joe: Right, we're co-guests. We're co-hosts and co-guests today because I want to grill you too. Mark: Very good. Alright, I want to start out by saying okay let's talk about your experience. You've been doing this for 8 years. You've done literally tens of millions of dollars of transactions on your own within Quiet Light Brokerage. Joe: I'm fastly closing in on 100 million. Mark: That's right you are. You are; absolutely. Joe: Inaudible[0:11:17.8] 12 to 18 months; pretty shocking. That's amazing. Mark: Absolutely amazing. Talk to me about the mindset that you often see or most naturally see in an entrepreneur that comes to us to sell versus those rare cases of somebody who has planned to sell and what is the difference in the actual process value and stress levels I would say for everyone involved. Joe: Yeah. Look all the success stories that you guys hear about on the Incredible Exits for the most part those are people that had the mindset that they wanted to determine and plan out their exit. They got an education, they figured out what their exit goal was and they called Mark, myself, Jason, Amanda, Chuck, anyone of us and reverse engineer the path to that. They didn't call and say what's your fee, okay I want to list. It was this how does this whole thing work and then we worked with them over a 6, 12, or 18 month period sometimes even more. Those are the success stories that you're hearing about. The people you're not hearing about never sell their business because they call. They might have a call like this or I was just at eCommerceFuel last week as an event and kudos to Andrew Youderian and all the guests and all the people that are there; brilliant, so many smart folks. But even with that high level of entrepreneurial success and drive I still get e-mails like I've gotten this week which is a great chat last week, great presentation. I did a presentation with Mike about the sales of ColorIt. You've really inspired me to sort of try this path to an exit. And then I said okay well this is what I need. Yeah, I don't know I'm so busy with adding SKUs and I'm not really there yet. I'm not ready to sell yet. I'm not ready to think about selling yet. Whereas the yet it should be now regardless of where you are in the business. These people are already doing; the 2 that I'm thinking about where I got the e-mails like the one I don't know his growth. Well, I could do the math on his growth but the discretionary stands out that he's close to 600,000 in discretionary earnings and it is 5 to 6 times more than he ever made in his prior day job. And so he's trying to work towards an exit and retirement. The other was doing nearly 10 million in revenue and had a 25% decline. He's young, he's under 30 years old. And neither of these guys are really ready to exit. Of course, they're not ready to exit but I want them to set a financial goal. I don't care if it's 3 to 5 years from now. Set that goal. I need to exit for X in order to exit. And then figure out where they are, get the education, and work towards that. In 5 years if they're not ready to sell then move the goal post, move it 6 years down the road or 7 years down the road. That is as you said at the beginning the surest way to real financial wealth. But we're not talking about them yet because they're pausing, they're hesitating, they're not going to do it. Those are the stories that I talk about a little bit in the book. There's somebody that was my first million-dollar listing back in the day at Quiet Light. I remember it well. I'm not going to name names. We'll call him Big Mike. That's not his name but we'll call him Big Mike. He had no financials; none whatsoever. And I remember sitting over Christmas break taking all of his bank statements and I actually created the profit and loss statement myself. That is a no-no. We do not do that anymore. No. But I did it. I got it all detailed and accurate and listed the business for 1.1 million. I got an offer for 800 from the gentleman that you sold his business once upon a time. It was actually a good offer because the revenue trends were in decline. And Big Mike said to me well why would I accept it all I have to do is XYZ over the next 12 months and I'll make a quarter of a million dollars and then we can sell the business for 1.2, 1.3 million. And I had a great deal of experience in paid advertising at the time as you know because I just sold my business. This was probably 2012 or early '13. And so we walked through all the possibilities, what to do and how to do it and off he went. The problem was that Big Mike's heart was not in it anymore. He had run up all of his personal debt and personal expenses; his overhead was very high. He lived the life of a very, very successful entrepreneur and his business was no longer trending that way so money was getting tight. He didn't have the ability to pull money from the business and put it into the ad spend that he needed to to reverse it. And so every year for the following 3 years I got any mail from Big Mike that said something along the lines of hey my revenue and profit is at XYZ, can we sell the business for this? And each year it went from that offer from Tony of 800 to the value really was in about 600 the next year. And then the next year he sent me an e-mail it was really based upon what he had given me, about 500. The last time he sent me an e-mail it was about 400. Every single time I replied with based upon what you've given me which is just an email with numbers and I'd say your business value was probably X. Please run a profit and loss statement out of Quickbooks or Xero and export it to Excel with a monthly view. Silence, nothing for 12 more months because he didn't take the necessary steps to do what you have to do in protecting your most valuable asset, in his case his business. And so he's probably got a job, unfortunately. And that's the path unfortunately too many people go down or they learn from the mistakes and they hang up their hat on this particular business. They can't sell it and they move on to another one and hopefully learn from that mistake but it's a painful one. I just want to see people learn from that and therefore the painful process of writing a book. Mark: You know it's great to focus on the success stories. We like success stories. I like talking about success stories that make me happy. But for all these success stories that you have shared so far through the podcast that you'll be sharing through this book we also have the stories like that. And I could probably rattle off a number as well. Maybe I'll start a new podcast or write a book called Unincredible Exits or Nasty Exits or something like that. It will be real depressing and no one will ever want to read it. But you're absolutely right in; that example is really good. That example shows what we see so often from entrepreneurs where they're running; they're used to the hustle, they're used to the grind, they're used to being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to be able to correct something but sometimes when a business gets mature especially after you've run it for a while doing that can be really, really difficult. I also think it's; I want to re-emphasize something you said which is the picking number, reverse engineering, and getting to that number doesn't mean that you have to sell at that point. We've been pretty public and I will continue to be public by saying that the best scenario for you is to create a business that you can own for your life, right? Because it's difficult to start a business; the cash flow that they build is great, the value that is in them as assets is also fantastic. So I'm a big believer in building and holding or buying and holding and growing but that doesn't mean that exiting shouldn't be an option. And so when you hit that number, if you're not ready to sell you can always move the goalposts as you suggested or create a new goal. But something that I know you've told me in an email where we were discussing this book is you said one of the goals is to not allow the business to outgrow its founder. And boy this is an issue that comes up time and time again that we see and that is business owners were really good at starting, really good at founding something and even growing it to a certain extent getting to a point where making that next shift is difficult. I always describe that the growth path of a business is a series of climbs and plateaus. You climb to a point and it starts to plateau and then you have to change the business a little bit. Maybe you have to add new people; maybe you have to add a different structure to the business. And once you do then hopefully you start climbing again and then you hit another plateau and then it's another shift or another restructuring of the company or maybe a new initiative. What point and is there any examples that you've seen where somebody has hit that point where business is just about to outgrow them and they were smart enough to be able to not let it do that? Joe: Yeah the climbing the plateaus, by the way, let's not forget the valleys, right? Yes, my name is Joe Valley but… Mark: Don't forget the valley. Joe: There are two valleys here, right? It's a climb, it's a plateau, and then boom there's a really nasty valley right there and you're in it. You got to climb out of it. That's why I think it's important to actually do something that you like; something that you enjoy a little bit. It could be something that you're passionate about because when those tough times come and as an entrepreneur they will unless I'm unique and nobody else has tough times. I don't think I'm unique. You're going to have to fight and climb back out of that valley and on the other side there's a mountain, a peak; not a plateau hopefully. And those are great success stories to tell and very sellable businesses. But the idea of a business outgrowing the founder is not original, right? I mean this is something I've seen throughout my own entrepreneurial life where I used to do radio advertising. I owned a radio direct response media buying agency back when there were 800 numbers associated with 60-second spot ads. I could have held that business and grown it but it would have required more and more overhead in terms of people. I don't like managing a lot of people. I tell you what your job is and how to do it and I expect that you're going to work hard and do the best you can. If you don't I'm kind of blunt unfortunately and fortunately in some ways. So if you're in a situation and I see this a lot where buyers sometimes naively say well if it's so great why are they selling it? And it is because the business more often than not has outgrown them. They wanted to live the 4-hour workweek. It turned into 30 and that's okay. And they've got 5 VA's and that's okay. But in order to take it beyond just a SaaS business that's doing 2 million in revenue, they need to hire 3 more developers. They don't want to go through the headache and hassle of that. Or to take it off of Amazon they need to learn SEO offline or email marketing or whatever it might be and that's not their skill set. Or it's hiring people and that's not their skill set. And they learned that one of the greatest ways to earn wealth is to sell a business. Now people that buy Walker's book have learned that they can; a different breed, a different mentality of an entrepreneur comes in. They're not the startup entrepreneurs. They come in and they take over where that startup entrepreneur left off. The business has outgrown them and they hand it off to somebody like Matt Howeth who can. He comes from the corporate world. He's always had lots of travel, lots of staff, and lots of hours. He gets it. He can take it and bring that business in and have a team of employees, a team of VA's and manage it and take it up to the next level because that's his passion. That's what he does. He gets it. The startup is not his passion. It's not his skill set. So one of the things that I think is critically important and sometimes this only comes with age and mistakes and failures and successes and that is to figure out who the hell you are. What kind of entrepreneur are you? Mark: That brings in mind 2 clients I've worked with in the past 14 years now. And one of them; I've quoted this story before but he came to me with a business, I've never talked to him about sharing his story so I won't say what he was selling. But he was selling a physical product. He had initially acquired this business for 5 figures, like a mid-5 figure level and immediately grew the business significantly to the point where it was doing 7 figures in top-line revenue, mid-6 figures in discretionary earnings and so when he gave it to me to sell one of my very first questions was why are you selling? You've been growing year over year, you're only adding value to the business, this looks like a fantastic business, you've got great rankings, great positioning great pricing; all these things working in your favor and he said well right now I store all of the inventory in an external garage on my property. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my son and I go out and we fill orders. It's really nice. It's like I don't have any more room for inventory and if I wanted to get another space I'm going to have to hire somebody and then I'm going to have to hire more people to handle the marketing. I just don't want to do that. I would rather cash out and move on. Meanwhile, another entrepreneur that I've dealt with, he was a CPA by trade and loved being on the buy-side and what he really, really enjoyed was taking a business that was somewhat complex, somewhat messy, somewhat inefficient in the way it was run and simplifying it. And I love; I've sold a couple of businesses for him, I love taking a look at where his businesses started. Their P&Ls were these super long crazy messes and by the time that he was ready to sell they were consolidated down into less than 30 lines because he simplified these businesses, really focused on this principle of 80:20 and said I'm going to just focus on what really makes sense and I'm going to get rid of all the rest of it. For him the act of cleaning it up was great but he would; unlike with Walker's book which is a lot of buy, build, and grow, his was I'm going to buy make more efficient and then I'm going to sell. And he did this several times and it was really fun to watch because he knew who he was. That first seller that I had, he knew who he was. He knew he didn't want to have a staff he had done that and didn't want to do it again. He loved running the business with his son. The second entrepreneur, he was a buyer, he knew what he liked, he also didn't want to have a large staff. There are other people out there that do want to build that team. There are people out there that say I want to have 100 million dollar exit so I'm going to buy a bunch of these businesses and build something or I'm going to acquire 15. They're all different types of entrepreneurs and everyone has different skill sets. Knowing who you are I think that right there is a great bit of advice but going back to what you were saying earlier Joe if you're so busy and in the weeds constantly and just running and hustling and hustling and hustling and never taking a moment to step back and to think about either the exit or about maybe this topic here of what type of entrepreneur are you, where do you want to see yourself in the next 5 years, what type of business operation do you want to have it's really hard to know where you're going and then your business drives you instead of driving your business and your career drives you instead of you driving your career. Joe: Yeah. Walker's book takes the mystery out of buying a business and the how-to and building it beyond that hence the title Buy Then Build or what he coined as acquisition entrepreneurship. My book The Exitpreneurs Playbook is going to take the mystery out of selling your business and setting those goals on what your exit is and reverse engineering a path to that. Now that I've said the title can we make fun of me in terms of predicting I don't know the future doom and gloom of this title because I did the opposite of what everybody told me to do? Mark: You know what? I like it. I remember doing this when I picked the Quiet Light Brokerage logo. I did 99 designs and I had everyone vote on different types and I hated what everybody chose. So I'm like well it's my business so I'm going to do my own thing. Joe: And you know it's a check, check, send something; I don't know, it must've been fall of last year and email out something about the Quiet Light logo and how it has stood the test of time so kudos to you. Yeah so I sent an e-mail out to a couple of dozen past clients that I sold their businesses and they're going to be part of the book. So part of the book is education and part inspiration; inspiration with them sharing some golden nuggets, wisdom, experience things that they wish they did differently. So I sent it out to them and then another say dozen of influencers that are in the space. People that we know well like Mike Jackness, Greg Mercer, Andrew Youderian, Ezra Firestone, things of that nature; people of that nature. And I think out of roughly 25 people Jason Yellowitz is the only one who said he liked Exitpreneur. Everyone else said Incredible Exits, Joe, it just rings, it rings. And there's been something about the term Exitpreneur that has stuck with me during the interview process and the more I said it out loud the more Brennan and I, and again she's my scribe, the more it just felt natural. Because that's what people are becoming when they sell their business, they're exitpreneurs. The difference between an entrepreneur and an exitpreneur is an entrepreneur is somebody that runs their own business but an exitpreneur is somebody that runs their own business and they have the knowledge and a plan. And I want to give them that knowledge in order to devise a plan and become one of those people that generate most of their wealth from an exit. So fingers crossed on that. Can I do a shameless plug right now for the Quiet Light Podcast where I think we're about 25 minutes in and just a little bit of a shameless plug? I have to tell you… Mark: I felt like this whole thing was a shameless plug for your upcoming book. Joe: I know but I don't even; I haven't even put up a website yet. There's no Facebook group. Really what it is, is a plug for education because part; in truth, I've said the same thing 8,000 times over and over. Maybe I'm just tired of saying it so I'm… Mark: With that Joe when I was on this trip recently I was in the airport and thinking about Mission, Vision, Values for Quiet Light Brokerage and I don't have the vision statement out yet but this component of education, if it's not part of our main vision it's definitely one of our core values and really something that I've built up. I was speaking to somebody just this morning before we recorded this about one of the goals or one of the mission; I'm sorry one of the core values of Quiet Light is to give entrepreneurs the right education and the right set of tools to be able to make good informed decisions. Because when I sold my business I didn't feel like I had that. I felt like I was misled. I felt like I was put in a position where somebody wanted to get me in an exclusive contract, promised me big bucks, and then when I went to go sell I was completely unprepared. I didn't know what was happening and so when I started Quiet Light the goal has been from day one not to tell anyone to sell but to give them the tools so that they know what their business is worth today, what it could be worth in the future, what's driving its value so that you can just make a good decision. That's your decision. So the education piece and I joke about this being a shameless plug; the reason that I'm excited about this, and I genuinely am excited that you're writing this book is because that education piece needs to be out there. And I love the idea; more than the idea, love the opportunity that we have to educate entrepreneurs of what's available to them if they transition from an entrepreneur to exitpreneur, understanding that, the bulk of the wealth that you build in your lifetime for most entrepreneurs will be at that exit. That might be 2 years from now, that might be 20 years from now, either case it's fine but having that plan to maximize that value and keeping the process smooth is important. Sorry, I totally cut you off of that but I want to emphasize that the education piece is really what I'm super excited about. Joe: Now we were going to do 2 parts of this podcast, a little bit on the book and a little bit about the philosophy behind Quiet Light's foundation and how you built the company and the entrepreneurial approach. So let's do a; I think we should do an entire podcast on this business and how it's built with entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs just to educate people more about who we are, what we do, and why we do it because I think it's necessary and you've done an incredible job with the model. But in terms of the education, I got a voicemail yesterday and this is the type of thing I want everybody out there that thinks they don't have time to do it and they're just keeping the wheels on the bus so to speak, take the time to make time for planning your exit using the educational tools that we provide whether it's this podcast or articles or Walker's book on my eventual book or having a conversation because that's an education tool. Have a conversation with an adviser at Quiet Light. Really do it. But I got a voicemail from somebody who I sold businesses for, very, very well off financially, runs a family office now, bought a business from Walker for around 8 million dollars in 2019. And he heard the podcast on product innovation, product development with Zack at Gembah. And he just left a voicemail yesterday saying hey man I just want to let you know on the way back home from Austin I got a chance to meet with Zack and we're going to go ahead and do some product innovation, product expansion, adding a number of new SKUs and accessories to the brand. I really appreciate it. I don't know if enough people tell you that we actually use the tools that you share so thank you. It's great to hear that. So thank you sir; I'm not going to say your first name, for reaching out and letting us know. For the rest of us this is the shameless plug part and I've said this, I said this at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and I said it in eCommerceFuel, Mark you and I have done now I think it was 114; I checked this morning, podcasts. So that's how many are up on iTunes. We've got a total of 31 reviews. They're all huge close to 5-star reviews. Thank you, everyone, who has given us reviews. I wasn't aware that we had any at all because we hardly ever plug it. And so I was at Blue Ribbon Mastermind talking to David Wood who will be a guest on the podcast in a few weeks. He's a personal coach and a good friend of Ezra's and he said something about he was on 70 podcasts last year and he chose which ones to go on based upon the number of reviews. So I checked ours. We have 31; pleasantly surprised. I checked the EcomCrew, Mike Jackness and he's got 81. So I stood on stage at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and I said everybody come on now Mike's not here, I want one more reviews than Mike has. He's been doing; I think he's done 3 times as many podcasts as us so we're doing okay. But please if you enjoy the podcast, if you like the podcast take a minute and go to iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you're listening and pop in a review. We greatly appreciate it and share the information and wealth with all the others that need it. Mark: Yeah. There's a video out there and I don't know if we're going to be posting it on our YouTube channel but there's a video out there of you making this plug at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and Ezra is standing there with you and he's thinking this is what you're using the stage time for? Like you have the opportunity to talk about what Quiet Light does and all you're doing is trying to beat Mike Jackness and like absolutely I'm trying to beat Mike Jackness that's it. Joe: We won't be sharing that video. That's not ours to share but I shared it with the team and had a good laugh at myself because of it so no doubt about it. Mike's a great guy. Ezra is a great guy. We don't mention people that we don't like obviously so if we've never mentioned you oh boy that's a long list; oh no, I can't say that. Let's just say thanks; final thanks, Mike Nuñez. Thank you, Mike. Mark: Yeah, Mike Nuñez, absolutely. I think that's a great way to end up this episode here. Let's do one in the future about the building of Quiet Light Brokerage and I'd also love to get feedback from people that have listened this far through this episode and are listening right now. Are there topics that you'd like to hear us talk about outside of bringing guests in? And we can bring on people within Quiet Light Brokerage, bring in Walker on the podcast again or Chuck or Brad or any of the many entrepreneurs that are working with Quiet Light Brokerage. Anything you want us to talk about specifically when it comes to buying or selling? We'd love to know, we want to produce content that you guys wanted to hear so feel free to hit me up Mark@QuietLightBrokerage or Inquiries@QuietLightBrokerage as well. Joe: Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Links and Resources: Quiet Light Brokerage

Today I'll be talking about the cost of paid advertising for eCommerce businesses and how they might translate for Amazon only eCommerce businesses. Quite often when trying to establish a strategy the most difficult thing can be estimating performance especially in terms of cost So it's really useful when somebody like Andrew Youderian from e-commerce fuel publishes his yearly report of data collected from hundreds of of high performance e-commerce entrepreneurs and businesses - The State Of The Merchant Report 2019 Return On Ad Spend RoAS Statistics From The Report Looking at Return on Ad Spend - which is Ad spend divided by revenue (not profit).So if you paid $50 in advertising and generated $100 in revenue, that would be a 2 x return on ad spend as you generated 2 times as much revenue as you spent on Ads. (this doesn't account for profit in any way) So Facebook was surveyed at an average of 3.4 x RoASAnd a median of 3.0x RoAS - so there were some outliers in that data that skewed the average towards a higher RoAS - the median is a better demonstration of performance of the data set Google came in at an average of 5.1 X RoAS - now we're talkingBut again, there must have been some serious high performing outliers in the surveyed companies as the median was at 4.0 x RoAS still better than Facebook Then finally on to Amazon Ads at 4.6X RoAS averageAnd a 4.0 x median RoAS - once again, showing the presence of some high performing outliers skewing the average upwards. Facebook and Google Ads Return On Ad Spend So let's talk about the Facebook Ads and Google Ads numbers for a secondThese return on ad spend numbers are based primarily on e-commerce businesses with the three pillars of profitability being used - they have their own stores that their driving cold traffic to, retargeting warm traffic and then up-selling hot traffic in the loyalty pillar So those numbers take into account high profitability campaigns and retargeting campaigns and low profitability if not loss making awareness and acquisition campaigns If you've already listened to the Ezra Firestone three pillars of profitability for Amazon sellers episode you'll know that as an Amazon Seller you don't have access to the higher profitability pillars in the same way as e-commerce store owners and as a result can't achieve the same levels of return on ad spend. Where do Google and Facebook Ads actually appear? If you've not done a tremendous amount of work with Facebook Advertising or Google Advertising, I might be doing you a disservice here in not going into more detail about the types of Ads I'm talking about.When I say Facebook, I of course also mean Instagram - as Instagram Advertising is controlled under the Facebook platform.But more than that, this will include Facebook messenger ads, in Facebook and Instagram stories, in mid-stream of videos, Facebook search, Ads on the Facebook Audience network - that's right, you'll get little display Ads when you're on certain apps and websites that monetise their traffic with Facebook display ads - you're seeing Facebook Ads when you're not even on Facebook. It's less surprising to know it's the same for Google.Google have a display network of websites that show Ads for Google as well as Apps just like FacebookThere's obviously top of search Ads, but that's the very thin end of the wedge or tip of the iceberg.There's shopping ads in searchShopping ads on YouTubeYouTube video Ads So when I say Facebook Ads, I don't just mean the one's you see in your feed.And when I say Google Ads I don't just mean the top of search ads - there's a WHOLE WORLD out there to go and waste a tonne of money discovering! What These RoAS Numbers Mean For Amazon Sellers Back to the numbers then and what those RoAS numbers mean for Amazon sellers So maybe as an Amazon Seller, someone driving traffic to Amazon without access to the high profitability campaigns you...

In this weeks episode, Peter talks with eCommerce expert and founder of eCommerceFuel, Andrew Youderian. Andrew talks about what the delicate balance between work and life is like and why he ultimately left his job for his family.  Plus, stick around for the Reaper Round where Andrew talks about how he was arrested in college sneaking into a tunnel system Time Stamps: (0:00) Intro to our conversation with Andrew Youderian // Mission Meats updates and shoutouts to Abigail and Maria! (5:43) Welcome to the show, Andrew! (7:20) Andrew’s three-fold mission (9:05) Refining the niche as an eCommerce entrepreneur (12:15) A deeper dive into Andrew’s beginnings  (15:21) Sacrifices & the long-term approach (17:13) Appreciative moments in the eCommerceFuel “ECF” journey (19:55) Why eCommerce is important (23:49) The complexities of leadership (26:50) “Capitalisthippie”, and the “Slow Hustle” approach (31:13) REST (33:50) Practical advice for your mission-driven journey (38:25) THE REAPER ROUND (47:20) Thanks for tuning in!   Get in touch with Andrew! Website: https://www.ecommercefuel.com/ Facebook: facebook.com/andrew.youderian Instagram: @capitalisthippie Twitter: @youderian   Quote to live by: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" -T. Roosevelt   Andrew's book of choice: The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy   Think you’re ready to try our Carolina Reaper Jerky? Hashtag #MissionReaper for a chance to be featured + win $100 in snacks!   If you have a topic or person of interest you would like to know more about, email me at peter@missionmeats.co

In this episode, Drew talks with Andrew Youderian on the  eCommerceFuel.com podcast to explain how to leverage post cards in your business, how his companies are gearing up for Black Friday, and more.  Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Highlights The best way to utilize post cards for a significantly higher return on investment than other marketing outlets (i.e. Facebook) What to focus on when gearing up for Black Friday How to use post cards for your business Links / Resources PostPilot’s On-Boarding Concierge  Ramit’s Copywriting Course NerdMarketing.com AutoAnything.com RightMessage.com Klayvio’s Holiday Guide Klaviyo Liquid Web eCommerceFuel Job Boards eCommerceFuel Forum

Andrew Youderian built and sold numerous eCommerce stores. He now runs eCommerceFuel, a highly curated community of 7-figure+ eCommerce merchants. Over the years, he’s seen what works, and what doesn’t in terms of growth strategies, and what opportunities lie ahead for merchants in the coming year. He's also recently released his State of the Merchant Report, and he'll share with us the top insights. In this episode, you'll learn who should sell on Amazon (and why you may not want to), the top marketing opportunities for the coming year, and much more.

Do you dream about hitting 7-Figures with your eCommerce business? Andrew Youderian shares his lessons from building and selling multiple e-commerce businesses. >> Listen now.

Greetings from Jackson, Wyoming! I'm out on the road doing some roadshow stuff for EcomCrew but will be making a side trip to Montana to visit my good friend Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel. Spoiler alert! If you haven't seen the 5 Minute Pitch, I'd tell you to stop reading and head over to watch a couple of episodes, especially the finale, on the official YouTube channel. There you'll see Kim Meckwood, owner and inventor of Click and Carry,  in action.  Kim is the season 1 winner of 5 Minute Pitch. Along with the $50K prize money, all of the judges will be giving her a week-long mentorship session at the end of July. I caught up with her after she won and we had a very insightful discussion, particularly on overcoming and learning from past business struggles. In this episode, you'll learn: Kim's experience as a woman entrepreneur How she got her start in business  How she and her business has been since winning the 5 Minute Pitch Her early struggles (using her 401K to pay for a surge of orders from QVC contract) This episode is part of our Women's Month celebration. We'd love to see more women in the ecommerce industry, so if you are a female business owner, head over to www.ecomcrew.com/underthehood and tell us your story. We'd love to feature you on the podcast. Watch Kim's winning pitch on Season 1 of the 5 Minute Pitch. Or subscribe to the podcast to listen to all the pitches and deliberations while in the car or at the gym. Join season two of the 5 Minute Pitch by filling out and submitting the application form. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!

Every year Andrew Youderian of EcommerceFuel surveys hundreds of store owners to better understand the trends in the ecommerce industry. Today Andrew and I review the report of last year's survey and make predictions for the future of ecommerce based on this data. If you're also an ecommerce store owner, we'd like to invite you to help us better understand the ecommerce landscape by answering next year's survey. Why participate? Andrew is shamelessly bribing you and me to participate in the survey--called State of the Merchant--by giving one lucky participant a roundtrip plane ticket to anywhere in the world. Last year's winner used his ticket for an epic 15 day, 6 country trip to Europe. More importantly though, you'll be participating in a research that's not done anywhere else. Your participation will give us a much clearer insight into what really goes on in the ecommerce jungle. Predictions for the future Below are predictions, some pretty bold, about the future of ecommerce based on this year's State of the Merchant data: Amazon will lose its spot as the number 1 go-to place for online shopping Facebook ads will get more expensive as more and more users leave the platform Conversion rate for dropshipping will decrease UPS and FedEx will offer Sunday deliveries for Amazon Amazon will launch their own delivery service to rival UPS and FedEx There will be a major legislation about sales tax Full Report You can view the full report in the infographic below. Click here to participate in next year's State of the Merchant Survey. Thanks for listening to this episode! Until the next one, happy selling.

Hey everyone! If you went to the EcommerceFuel Live event in January and got shoved a microphone in the face by me, then this is the episode you've been waiting for :) You might have forgotten what transpired during the event (especially if you got drunk during the party) but this episode, with all the snippets I recorded both sober and drunk, will surely remind you what an awesome event ECF Live is. If you didn't go, I am pretty sure you're going to want to go next time. This episode is long overdue considering how long it's been since January but this is the first time in EcomCrew history that we're doing something this different. And in light of new and different things, we're doing something that's another first: we will be raffling off an EcomCrew mug for those who comment below. That's right, just comment anything about the episode down below (for example, let me know if you think Andrew Youderian's prank is mean) and you get a chance to win an EcomCrew mug, shipped to you for free, anywhere in the world. Special thanks to Andrew for making ECF Live possible. Make sure to check out this awesome community here. Thanks also to those who put up with me during these interviews, and to the cop who was Andrew's accomplice. I hope you read this and know you're awesome :D Resources mentioned: E114: Chasing Retail Dreams with Bill D'Alessandro E95: Growing and Selling Drop Shipping Businesses with Andrew Youderian E99: An 18-year Ecommerce Journey with Kevin Stecko E91: Ecommerce Growth and Profitability With Dana Jaunzemis EcommerceFuel E94: On the Road with David Couillard: How to Run an Ecommerce Business while Traveling with Family Thanks as always for listening, let me know if you like this episode, and until the next one, happy selling!

"Part of the hard part of selling a business is not just all the mechanics behind the scene, but finding a good buyer who is honest, and who has money, and who isn't pulling your chain and can actually close the deal. And is reasonable. Those are not inconsequential things to find in a buyer." -Andrew Youderian, eCommerceFuel founder I have an exciting episode today as I am interviewing one of the most awesome people I know, not just in ecommerce but in life in general. Andrew Youderian is the founder of eCommerceFuel, a vetted community of high 6 and 7 figure ecommerce store owners who help each other grow their ecommerce businesses. The community hosts the annual eCommerceFuel Live event where members get to meet each other in person and share tips and actionable advice on how to successfully run their businesses. It's one of the events I absolutely love attending and it seems I'm not the only one who shares this sentiment -- event tickets sold out hours after the event was publicly announced. Andrew launched and sold numerous successful drop shipping ecommerce stores over the years. In this episode we talk about two stores he sold -- TrollingMotors.net and Right Channel Radios -- and a behind-the-scenes conversation about possibly the most interesting ecommerce store sale he made. Other things we talked about: What eCommerceFuel is and how it started A look back on Andrew's successful drop shipping businesses What triggered him to sell his businesses His reverse auction sale of TrollingMotors.net Finding a good buyer Insights about the sale of Right Channel Radios and whether he regretted it or not Is it still possible to succeed in drop shipping today? SEO strategy tips We hope you enjoy this episode. If you own a store with a minimum of $250K in annual revenue and want access to a treasure trove of information to help grow your business, apply for eCommerceFuel membership here! Resources mentioned today: eCommerceFuel eCommerceFuel Live Stamped.io AsiaInspection How to Sell a Business: The Open-Book Sale of My $600K Store (With Complete Financials) You'll notice we have a different podcast format -- it's just one of the changes we are adopting moving forward. We've committed to release two episodes per week, plus we will be bring you a weekly news roundup so you don't miss anything important in ecommerce land. Thanks for listening to Episode 95! Please leave us an honest review on iTunes; it will really help us out. You can also reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com for any comments or suggestions. Happy selling!

This is Jeff Bezos' world…we're just living in it.  Or at least, that's how it feels for an eCommerce merchant.  It's hard to overstate the continued growth, innovation, and reach of Amazon.  With 214 distribution centers and growing.  Sales growing at 20-30% per year.  Forays into apparel, electronics (Kindle and the Echo family of products), batteries, and several other categories.  It's hard not to look at Amazon with awe and wonder.  So, what's a merchant to do in light of Amazon's dominance?  Is Amazon friend or foe, or somewhere in between?   Andrew Youderian knows the world of independent eCommerce store owners better than arguably anyone on the planet.  He started the eCommerce Fuel podcast in 2014 and the eCommerce Fuel private forum shortly thereafter.  He's bought, grown and sold several eCommerce businesses and he interacts regularly with top independent merchants on a monthly basis.  When it comes to eCommerce Andrew has done and seen it all.   In this episode, we look at how you as a merchant can stay relevant and thrive in the shadow of Amazon…and how to benefit from Amazon without “making a deal with the devil” so to speak.   He dives into detail on: - What factors to consider when forming your Amazon strategy - What merchants are most at risk to face irrelevance and extinction as Amazon continues to grow and innovate - Andrews 4 Musts for thriving in an Amazon World - When to “blitz” Amazon vs. when to back off - Top takeaways from some of the best independent merchants on the planet…tips and ideas for you to steal and deploy

Enter part 4 of our web design series, Managing the Fifty-Thousand Dollar Web Project. The Matt Report Web Design Series Part 1: Discovery Process Part 2: Setting the budget & expectation  Part 3: Managing the $5 – $15k web project I'm stoked for this episode, not just because of the size budget we're discussing, but because we aren't focusing on WordPress. Carson McComas is founder of Shopify Custom, a (you guessed it) custom Shopify agency. He recently re-designed Andrew Youderian's e-commerce site, which included a $50k budget. He's joining Matt Report today to discuss that project and others that move through the pipeline at his agency. Why you should listen if you're a client: At first the budget might scare you, but you will quickly realize there's a lot more value included in a project of this size than just pushing pixels. We explore how we focus on your business goals and put a plan in place to reach them. Why you should listen if you're an agency: Carson brings a healthy perspective on delivering the value our clients want. We explore the best phases to invest time and money into, with all roads leading back to a solid ROI. By the way, if you're not just a little attracted to the Shopify ecosystem after this interview — you might need to check your pulse. ★ Support this podcast ★

I don't recall exactly how I stumbled across Andrew's podcast, eCommerceFuel, but when I did I was hooked. Here's an entrepreneur talking strictly about the e-commerce market, with a strong focus on physical goods. Normally in our space, we're hearing all about the ins and outs of digital product sales, so it was refreshing to hear how traditional store-fronts are doing this. All the while, he's not even a WordPress user! Hard to imagine right? In today's discussion, we'll cover why Andrew has recently switched to Shopify from Magento and his thoughts on WordPress as an e-commerce platform. As a Youderian fan, I was really excited to record this episode so I hope you really get something out of it. Listening options Itunes:subscribe to MattReport Stitcher:subscribe to MattReport   Viewing options Stay connected w/ my YouTube channel Feedback welcome What are your thoughts on e-commerce? Which platforms or plugins do you prefer? Previous Matt Report Episode mentioned Zoe Rooney ★ Support this podcast ★

Long hours and inflexibility at his corporate job drove Andrew Youderian to quitting his job and starting an ecommerce business, and another one a couple of years later. Both businesses together ended up generating $1 million+ in annual revenues. In this case study, Andrew talks about how he did it. You will also learn: Two contrasting approaches Andrew took to build each of his businesses, and the results that followed. Should you start a business based on a product you're passionate about? The top 3 key success factors for building a profitable ecommerce business.  How to beat Amazon.com, an e-retailer that sells almost everything under the sun.  The pricing sweetspot: the ideal price point you should aim for.  3 key actions you can start taking today to start and build a profitable ecommerce business. Go to radicaltribe.com/episode25 for a detailed summary of the entire episode. 

Inge Geerdens founder of CV Warehouse and started 2 other companies before that. First called Executive Research and sold this company in 2008 to a major HR service provider. The other company is called Your Next Move and with this company they are promoting chess towards all children in primary schools in very close collaboration with Garry Kasparov.  Vince Stanzoine UK born self-made multimillionaire high school dropout active in telecommunications and financial trading. He is the former CEO of TV Commerce Holdings PLC, a media and entertainment company specializing in TV and mobile entertainment content and broadcasting services. He has been featured in media outlets including CNBC, Yahoo! Finance, MarketWatch, the Guardian, and the New York Times.   Mary Pat Whaley FACMPE, CPC Co-Founder and President, Manage My Practice. She is one of the preeminent practice management consultants in the United States today. In addition to her Board Certification in Medical Practice Management, she is also a Certified Professional Coder and a Fellow in the American College of Medical Practice Executives. She is widely quoted in national practice management magazines including Medical Economics, Physicians Practice, the Journal of Medical Practice Management, Physicians Digest, and Outpatient Surgery Magazine  Andrew Youderian eCommerce entrepreneur who runs run a seven-figure online business. He also blogs about his experiences - and how to grow profitable online stores - at eCommerceFuel.com.  Don Yaeger  7-Time NY Times Best Selling Author and Keynote Speaker