Podcasts about product research

Summary: In this episode, Beth Dodson and John Bodrozic explore the complexities of home improvement projects, focusing on the role of AI in remodeling. They discuss the challenges homeowners face in decision-making, budgeting, and material selection, emphasizing the importance of thorough research. The conversation highlights the potential of Home Zada's Shopping AI to simplify the shopping process and enhance the overall homeowner experience. In this episode, John Bodrozic and Beth Dodson discuss the transformative impact of AI on home shopping and remodeling processes. They explore how AI can streamline product research, enhance decision-making, and improve relationships with contractors. The conversation highlights the importance of organization and efficiency in managing home improvement projects, ultimately leading to better budgeting and informed choices for homeowners. Takeaways Home improvement involves extensive research and shopping. Larger projects require careful planning and budgeting. The variety of choices can lead to decision fatigue. Understanding product specifications is crucial for satisfaction. AI can assist in managing home improvement projects. Physical and online resources provide inspiration for projects. Budget constraints often dictate material choices. Homeowners should evaluate long-term maintenance of materials. The shopping process is about gathering data, not just buying. Home Zada's AI can streamline the shopping experience. AI shopping tools can save time and enhance efficiency. Homeowners can aggregate all shopping research in one place. Product research helps in understanding material options and pricing. Streamlined processes lead to better contractor relationships. Organizing choices aids in making informed decisions. AI can assist in managing budgets effectively. Home Zada combines photos and spreadsheets for better organization. Shopping AI can help first-time homeowners navigate choices. The importance of narrowing down options to avoid decision fatigue. Using AI tools can lead to a more enjoyable remodeling experience.  Sound Bites "Budget constraints often dictate material choices." "Making informed choices in home projects." "Transforming homeowner experiences with technology." "You can now say, I've looked at all these sinks." "You just created so much efficiency." "You just made it a lot easier." "This will serve me well." "It's a big endeavor." "This is a good one."   Chapters 0040 Introduction to Homeowner AI and Remodeling 03:35 Navigating Home Improvement Choices 06:31 Researching and Decision-Making in Home Projects 09:46 The Importance of Budgeting and Material Selection 12:34 Understanding the Shopping Process for Home Projects 15:41 Real-Life Experiences with Home Renovations 18:35 Introducing Home Zada's Shopping AI 21:39 Demonstration of Shopping AI Features 27:48 Revolutionizing Home Shopping with AI 31:20 Streamlining the Remodeling Process 34:01 Understanding Countertop Options 40:18 Enhancing Contractor Relationships 42:48 Balancing Budget and Choices

Summary: In this episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner, Beth Dodson and John Bodrozic tackle the world of home remodeling — and how Homeowner AI is making it easier, smarter, and far less overwhelming. From upgrading kitchens to redoing landscaping, remodeling is a massive industry filled with major decisions about budget, materials, and scope. Beth and John break down remodeling projects into four main categories: Big Systems (roofs, windows, HVAC) Lifestyle Upgrades (kitchen and bathroom remodels) Minor Projects (new flooring, painting, appliances) Outdoor Projects (landscaping, patios, outdoor kitchens) They explore the pros and cons of DIY vs hiring a contractor, and why being fully informed about your material and labor costs before starting is absolutely essential. Lack of preparation can easily cause delays, budget overruns, and even resentment over the final results. Enter HomeZada's Homeowner AI — a powerful tool that helps homeowners: Build detailed project plans Estimate realistic budgets in minutes Research material types and costs Plan projects smarter to avoid costly surprises John and Beth show how AI streamlines decision-making, saves time, and helps homeowners have clearer, more productive conversations with contractors — leading to better results and less stress. Their key takeaway: When you plan ahead with the right tools, you remodel smarter, stay on budget, and actually enjoy the process. Learn more about Homeowner AI at www.homezada.com! Takeaways Home remodeling is a multi-trillion dollar industry. There are different categories of remodeling projects: big systems, lifestyle desires, minor projects, and outdoor landscaping. Deciding between DIY and hiring a contractor depends on skills, tools, safety, and budget. Material costs can vary significantly between projects. Planning is crucial for a successful remodeling project. Homeowner AI can help streamline the budgeting process. Understanding the scope of a project can prevent budget overruns. Homeowners should be educated about the costs associated with remodeling. AI can assist in creating material lists for projects. Effective planning can lead to better project outcomes. The cost of materials can significantly impact project budgets. AI can quickly adjust estimates based on material choices. Preparation is key to successful home remodeling projects. Homeowners should do their research before contacting contractors. AI tools can save time compared to traditional budgeting methods. Informed homeowners can foster better relationships with contractors. Product research through AI helps eliminate overwhelming choices. AI can create custom project budgets based on user input. Understanding material costs is crucial for budget management. AI enhances efficiency in home improvement planning. Sound Bites "It's a huge business." "I had to pull back scope." "That's a huge difference." "This is preparation at its best." "It's a huge time saver." "This is efficiency." "It streamlined everything." Chapters 00:40 Introduction to Homeowner AI and Remodeling Projects 03:39 Categorizing Remodeling Projects 06:38 DIY vs Hiring a Contractor 09:38 Understanding Costs in Home Remodeling 12:45 The Importance of Planning and Budgeting 15:30 How Homeowner AI Streamlines the Remodeling Process 21:29 Understanding Budget Fluctuations in Home Remodeling 23:46 The Power of AI in Home Project Planning 26:34 Enhancing Contractor Relationships through Preparedness 30:51 Product Research: Making Informed Choices 36:03 Creating Custom Projects with AI 39:10 The Future of Home Improvement with AI    

Master product research with this chrome extension from sellersprite

Mike is the owner & founder of Bullseye Sellers.  Founder of Impression Check at market research survey tool, and 5 new Amazon brands. He started off selling products at trade shows and eventually transitioned into selling on Amazon. In 2 months, he was able to grow to $30,000 per month in sales. In the first year, he made $80,000 per month. In his second year, $100,000 per month, and he kept doubling it every year after that.> Here's a glimpse of what you would learn…. Strategies for identifying trending products on TikTok for e-commerce.The importance of adapting products based on social media trends.Utilizing surveys and AI tools for product validation and design insights.The shift from traditional Amazon product discovery to social media-driven approaches.Market verification processes for assessing product viability.The significance of effective packaging and marketing strategies.Building a loyal customer base through engagement and feedback.The role of social commerce and user-generated content in modern e-commerce.Common mistakes in product development and the need for market alignment.Leveraging technology and software tools to enhance business operations and presentations.In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Michael Estey, founder of Bulls Eye Sellers and Impressions Check. They discuss leveraging TikTok to identify trending products and adapting these trends for e-commerce success. Michael shares his strategies for spotting trends on social media, using surveys, and AI tools to refine products for his brands. He highlights the importance of evolving marketing strategies, building a loyal customer base, and utilizing AI-driven tools like Gamma for efficiency. The episode offers actionable insights for scaling e-commerce businesses by embracing social media trends and innovative technologies.Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:Leverage TikTok for Trend Discovery and Social CommerceStay updated on trending products by actively engaging with TikTok content.Encourage user-generated content and influencer collaborations to increase product visibility.Use TikTok as a primary marketing platform, not just for ads but for organic engagement and brand storytelling.Prioritize Strong Branding and Marketing InvestmentInvest in high-quality packaging and branding to make products stand out.Diversify marketing strategies beyond Amazon, utilizing platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.Be confident in your product by allocating a budget for strategic marketing rather than relying on PPC hacks.Analyze Market Demand and Adapt QuicklyConduct competitor analysis to understand why certain products succeed.Reevaluate and relaunch stagnant products with better marketing, packaging, or positioning.Build a direct relationship with customers through surveys, engagement, and community-building to sustain long-term growth.Resources mentioned in this episode:Ecomm BreakthroughPickFuTikTokClickFunnelsHelium 10Google AnalyticsKeyword PlannerAmazon ArchetypeBullseye SellersGammaMatt ClarkEzra FirestoneSpecial Mention(s):Adam “Heist” Runquist on LinkedInKevin King on LinkedInMichael E. Gerber on LinkedInRelated Episode(s):“Cracking the Amazon Code: Learn From Adam Heist's Brand Scaling Secrets” on the eComm Breakthrough Podcast“Kevin King's Wicked-Smart Tips for Building an Audience of Raving Fans” on the eComm Breakthrough Podcast“Unlocking Entrepreneurial Greatness | Insider Secrets With E-myth Author Michael Gerber” on the eComm Breakthrough PodcastEpisode SponsorSponsor for this episode...This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures. I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.If you've hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!Transcript AreaJosh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I'm your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Aaron Cordovez and Michael E Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I am speaking with Michael Estey, and he's going to be talking about how he finds trending products on TikTok, how he then is able to modify them using surveys and AI intelligence tools to be able to make them your own and your own brand, and how he's just seeing explosive success with those. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerc...

In this episode, the FBA University boys discuss how long the product research and sourcing process takes!

In this episode, the FBA University boys discuss the ways they find products in 2025 and how they can determine if a market is going to be viable for a profitable launch!

In this episode, we've got a couple of first-time guests. They started selling on Amazon in the last couple of years and are part of a community where thousands of moms have come together to learn how to sell online. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Join us for an exciting episode where we introduce two inspiring first-time guests, Laken Hardin-Is and Tiffany Nicholson, who have embarked on their e-commerce journeys with a community of entrepreneurial moms. Laken, an art major and graphic design enthusiast from South Carolina, shares her transition into the world of Amazon selling, blending her creative background with her newfound entrepreneurial spirit. Tiffany, from Akron, Ohio, narrates her path from communication studies and speech-language pathology to exploring e-commerce on Amazon. Both women discuss their unique paths and motivations, highlighting the blend of creativity and business acumen needed to succeed in the e-commerce world. Listen in as we explore the process of building a brand from scratch, moving from retail arbitrage to establishing a private label brand. We talk about the initial hurdles of managing logistics and inventory and the breakthrough moments that came with the guidance of the Rainmaker family. Discover how tools like Helium 10 play a pivotal role in identifying product niches and opportunities. We also touch on the innovative strategies Laken and Tiffany employed to overcome challenges, such as product dimension issues, and how they now manage five SKUs with improved inventory systems, including the use of a 3PL in China. The conversation underscores the significance of brand building, social media presence, and leveraging customer insights to stay competitive. This episode also highlights the importance of community and networking in the e-commerce industry, particularly for those entering a predominantly male space. The Amazon Influencer Program emerges as a potential entry point for generating additional income, utilizing everyday items to create engaging content. We discuss alternative avenues like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and digital products for those seeking initial capital. Laken and Tiffany's experiences illustrate how community support and shared learning can accelerate success, providing invaluable encouragement and guidance along the way. Finally, they invite listeners to connect with us and the Rainmaker Family community to further explore these insights and follow the journeys of our guests. In episode 639 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Laken, and Tiffany discuss: 00:00 - New Sellers Sharing Their Amazon-Selling Journeys 08:27 - Growing Sales Through Product Diversification 11:40 - Building a Brand is Important 17:09 - Product Research and Overcoming Competition 20:16 - Community Success in Amazon Selling 27:59 - Amazon Success Stories and Growth 31:04 - Connecting With Rainmaker Family Community

In this episode, the FBA University boys discuss the best ways to find products to launch in 2025!

In this episode, the FBA University boys discuss when

In this episode I walkthrough a full tutorial to conduct product and/or keyword research on Etsy in 2025 using EtsyHunt. Prepare to have your mind blown with potential!

This episode of The Clear the Shelf Podcast dives deep into the journey of Eric, aka The Reselling Teacher, who left his teaching career to build a thriving Amazon business. From starting with arbitrage to mastering wholesale and venturing into private label, Eric shares the strategies, challenges, and lessons that shaped his path to success.

We have announced our first speaker, friend of the show Dylan Patel, and topic slates for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS. Sign up for IRL/Livestream and to debate!We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!The vibe shift we observed in July - in favor of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, first introduced in June — has been remarkably long lived and persistent, surviving multiple subsequent updates of 4o, o1 and Gemini versions, for Anthropic's Claude to end 2024 as the preferred model for AI Engineers and even being the exclusive choice for new code agents like bolt.new (our next guest on the pod!), which unlocked so much performance from Claude Sonnet that it went from $0 to $4m ARR in 4 weeks when it launched last month.Anthropic has now raised an additional $4b from Amazon and made an incredibly well received update of Claude 3.5 Sonnet (and Haiku), making significant improvements in performance over its predecessors:Solving SWE-BenchAs part of the October Sonnet release, Anthropic teased a blink-and-you'll miss it result:The updated Claude 3.5 Sonnet shows wide-ranging improvements on industry benchmarks, with particularly strong gains in agentic coding and tool use tasks. On coding, it improves performance on SWE-bench Verified from 33.4% to 49.0%, scoring higher than all publicly available models—including reasoning models like OpenAI o1-preview and specialized systems designed for agentic coding. It also improves performance on TAU-bench, an agentic tool use task, from 62.6% to 69.2% in the retail domain, and from 36.0% to 46.0% in the more challenging airline domain. The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet offers these advancements at the same price and speed as its predecessor.This was followed up by a blogpost a week later from today's guest, Erik Schluntz, the engineer who implemented and scored this SOTA result using a simple, non-overengineered version of the SWE-Agent framework (you can see the submissions here). We have previously covered the SWE-Bench story extensively:* Speaking with SWEBench/SWEAgent authors at ICLR* Speaking with Cosine Genie, the previous SOTA (43.8%) on SWEBench Verified (with brief update at DevDay 2024)* Speaking with Shunyu Yao on SWEBench and the ReAct paradigm driving SWE-AgentOne of the notable inclusions in this blogpost are the tools that Erik decided to give Claude, e.g. the “Edit Tool”:The tools teased in the SWEBench submission/blogpost were then polished up and released with Computer Use…And you can also see even more computer use tools given in the new Model Context Protocol servers:Claude Computer UseBecause it is one of the best received AI releases of the year, we recommend watching the 2 minute Computer Use intro (and related demos) in its entirety:Eric also worked on Claude's function calling, tool use, and computer use APIs, so we discuss that in the episode.Erik [00:53:39]: With computer use, just give the thing a browser that's logged into what you want to integrate with, and it's going to work immediately. And I see that reduction in friction as being incredibly exciting. Imagine a customer support team where, okay, hey, you got this customer support bot, but you need to go integrate it with all these things. And you don't have any engineers on your customer support team. But if you can just give the thing a browser that's logged into your systems that you need it to have access to, now, suddenly, in one day, you could be up and rolling with a fully integrated customer service bot that could go do all the actions you care about. So I think that's the most exciting thing for me about computer use, is reducing that friction of integrations to almost zero.As you'll see, this is very top of mind for Erik as a former Robotics founder who's company basically used robots to interface with human physical systems like elevators.Full Video episodePlease like and subscribe!Show Notes* Eric Schluntz* “Raising the bar on SWE-Bench Verified”* Cobalt Robotics* SWE-Bench* SWE-Bench Verified* Human Eval & other benchmarks* Anthropic Workbench* Aider* Cursor* Fireworks AI* E2B* Amanda Askell* Toyota Research* Physical Intelligence (Pi)* Chelsea Finn* Josh Albrecht* Eric Jang* 1X* Dust* Cosine Episode* Bolt* Adept Episode* TauBench* LMSys EpisodeTimestamps* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:03:39] What is SWE-Bench?* [00:12:22] SWE-Bench vs HumanEval vs others* [00:15:21] SWE-Agent architecture and runtime* [00:21:18] Do you need code indexing?* [00:24:50] Giving the agent tools* [00:27:47] Sandboxing for coding agents* [00:29:16] Why not write tests?* [00:30:31] Redesigning engineering tools for LLMs* [00:35:53] Multi-agent systems* [00:37:52] Why XML so good?* [00:42:57] Thoughts on agent frameworks* [00:45:12] How many turns can an agent do?* [00:47:12] Using multiple model types* [00:51:40] Computer use and agent use cases* [00:59:04] State of AI robotics* [01:04:24] Robotics in manufacturing* [01:05:01] Hardware challenges in robotics* [01:09:21] Is self-driving a good business?TranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners. And today we're in the new studio with my usual co-host, Shawn from Smol AI.Swyx [00:00:14]: Hey, and today we're very blessed to have Erik Schluntz from Anthropic with us. Welcome.Erik [00:00:19]: Hi, thanks very much. I'm Erik Schluntz. I'm a member of technical staff at Anthropic, working on tool use, computer use, and Swebench.Swyx [00:00:27]: Yeah. Well, how did you get into just the whole AI journey? I think you spent some time at SpaceX as well? Yeah. And robotics. Yeah. There's a lot of overlap between like the robotics people and the AI people, and maybe like there's some interlap or interest between language models for robots right now. Maybe just a little bit of background on how you got to where you are. Yeah, sure.Erik [00:00:50]: I was at SpaceX a long time ago, but before joining Anthropic, I was the CTO and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics. We built security and inspection robots. These are sort of five foot tall robots that would patrol through an office building or a warehouse looking for anything out of the ordinary. Very friendly, no tasers or anything. We would just sort of call a remote operator if we saw anything. We have about 100 of those out in the world, and had a team of about 100. We actually got acquired about six months ago, but I had left Cobalt about a year ago now, because I was starting to get a lot more excited about AI. I had been writing a lot of my code with things like Copilot, and I was like, wow, this is actually really cool. If you had told me 10 years ago that AI would be writing a lot of my code, I would say, hey, I think that's AGI. And so I kind of realized that we had passed this level, like, wow, this is actually really useful for engineering work. That got me a lot more excited about AI and learning about large language models. So I ended up taking a sabbatical and then doing a lot of reading and research myself and decided, hey, I want to go be at the core of this and joined Anthropic.Alessio [00:01:53]: And why Anthropic? Did you consider other labs? Did you consider maybe some of the robotics companies?Erik [00:02:00]: So I think at the time I was a little burnt out of robotics, and so also for the rest of this, any sort of negative things I say about robotics or hardware is coming from a place of burnout, and I reserve my right to change my opinion in a few years. Yeah, I looked around, but ultimately I knew a lot of people that I really trusted and I thought were incredibly smart at Anthropic, and I think that was the big deciding factor to come there. I was like, hey, this team's amazing. They're not just brilliant, but sort of like the most nice and kind people that I know, and so I just felt like I could be a really good culture fit. And ultimately, I do care a lot about AI safety and making sure that I don't want to build something that's used for bad purposes, and I felt like the best chance of that was joining Anthropic.Alessio [00:02:39]: And from the outside, these labs kind of look like huge organizations that have these obscureSwyx [00:02:44]: ways to organize.Alessio [00:02:45]: How did you get, you joined Anthropic, did you already know you were going to work on of the stuff you publish or you kind of join and then you figure out where you land? I think people are always curious to learn more.Erik [00:02:57]: Yeah, I've been very happy that Anthropic is very bottoms up and sort of very sort of receptive to whatever your interests are. And so I joined sort of being very transparent of like, hey, I'm most excited about code generation and AI that can actually go out and sort of touch the world or sort of help people build things. And, you know, those weren't my initial initial projects. I also came in and said, hey, I want to do the most valuable possible thing for this company and help Anthropic succeed. And, you know, like, let me find the balance of those. So I was working on lots of things at the beginning, you know, function calling, tool use. And then sort of as it became more and more relevant, I was like, oh, hey, like, let's it's time to go work on encoding agents and sort of started looking at SWE-Bench as sort of a really good benchmark for that.Swyx [00:03:39]: So let's get right into SWE-Bench. That's one of the many claims to fame. I feel like there's just been a series of releases related with Cloud 3.5 Sonnet around about two or three months ago, 3.5 Sonnet came out and it was it was a step ahead in terms of a lot of people immediately fell in love with it for coding. And then last month you released a new updated version of Cloud Sonnet. We're not going to talk about the training for that because that's still confidential. But I think Anthropic's done a really good job, like applying the model to different things. So you took the lead on SWE-Bench, but then also we're going to talk a little bit about computer use later on. So maybe just give us a context about why you looked at SWE-Bench Verified and you actually came up with a whole system for building agents that would maximally use the model well. Yeah.Erik [00:04:28]: So I'm on a sub team called Product Research. And basically the idea of product research is to really understand what end customers care about and want in the models and then work to try to make that happen. So we're not focused on sort of these more abstract general benchmarks like math problems or MMLU, but we really care about finding the things that are really valuable and making sure the models are great at those. And so because I've been interested in coding agents, I knew that this would be a really valuable thing. And I knew there were a lot of startups and our customers trying to build coding agents with our models. And so I said, hey, this is going to be a really good benchmark to be able to measure that and do well on it. And I wasn't the first person at Anthropic to find SWE-Bench, and there are lots of people that already knew about it and had done some internal efforts on it. It fell to me to sort of both implement the benchmark, which is very tricky, and then also to sort of make sure we had an agent and basically like a reference agent, maybe I'd call it, that could do very well on it. Ultimately, we want to provide how we implemented that reference agent so that people can build their own agents on top of our system and get sort of the most out of it as possible. So with this blog post we released on SWE-Bench, we released the exact tools and the prompt that we gave the model to be able to do well.Swyx [00:05:46]: For people who don't know, who maybe haven't dived into SWE-Bench, I think the general perception is they're like tasks that a software engineer could do. I feel like that's an inaccurate description because it is basically, one, it's a subset of like 12 repos. It's everything they could find that every issue with like a matching commit that could be tested. So that's not every commit. And then SWE-Bench verified is further manually filtered by OpenAI. Is that an accurate description and anything you'd change about that? Yes.Erik [00:06:14]: SWE-Bench is, it certainly is a subset of all tasks. It's first of all, it's only Python repos, so already fairly limited there. And it's just 12 of these popular open source repos. And yes, it's only ones where there were tests that passed at the beginning and also new tests that were introduced that test the new feature that's added. So it is, I think, a very limited subset of real engineering tasks. But I think it's also very valuable because even though it's a subset, it is true engineering tasks. And I think a lot of other benchmarks are really kind of these much more artificial setups of even if they're related to coding, they're more like coding interview style questions or puzzles that I think are very different from day-to-day what you end up doing. I don't know how frequently you all get to use recursion in your day-to-day job, but whenever I do, it's like a treat. And I think it's almost comical, and a lot of people joke about this in the industry, is how different interview questions are.Swyx [00:07:13]: Dynamic programming. Yeah, exactly.Erik [00:07:15]: Like, you code. From the day-to-day job. But I think one of the most interesting things about SWE-Bench is that all these other benchmarks are usually just isolated puzzles, and you're starting from scratch. Whereas SWE-Bench, you're starting in the context of an entire repository. And so it adds this entirely new dimension to the problem of finding the relevant files. And this is a huge part of real engineering, is it's actually pretty rare that you're starting something totally greenfield. You need to go and figure out where in a codebase you're going to make a change and understand how your work is going to interact with the rest of the systems. And I think SWE-Bench does a really good job of presenting that problem.Alessio [00:07:51]: Why do we still use human eval? It's like 92%, I think. I don't even know if you can actually get to 100% because some of the data is not actuallySwyx [00:07:59]: solvable.Alessio [00:08:00]: Do you see benchmarks like that, they should just get sunsetted? Because when you look at the model releases, it's like, oh, it's like 92% instead of like 89%, 90% on human eval versus, you know, SWE-Bench verified is you have 49%, right? Which is like, before 45% was state of the art, but maybe like six months ago it was like 30%, something like that. So is that a benchmark that you think is going to replace human eval, or do you think they're just going to run in parallel?Erik [00:08:27]: I think there's still need for sort of many different varied evals. Like sometimes you do really care about just sort of greenfield code generation. And so I don't think that everything needs to go to sort of an agentic setup.Swyx [00:08:39]: It would be very expensive to implement.Erik [00:08:41]: The other thing I was going to say is that SWE-Bench is certainly hard to implement and expensive to run because each task, you have to parse, you know, a lot of the repo to understand where to put your code. And a lot of times you take many tries of writing code, running it, editing it. It can use a lot of tokens compared to something like human eval. So I think there's definitely a space for these more traditional coding evals that are sort of easy to implement, quick to run, and do get you some signal. Maybe hopefully there's just sort of harder versions of human eval that get created.Alessio [00:09:14]: How do we get SWE-Bench verified to 92%? Do you think that's something where it's like line of sight to it, or it's like, you know, we need a whole lot of things to go right? Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:09:23]: And actually, maybe I'll start with SWE-Bench versus SWE-Bench verified, which is I think something I missed earlier. So SWE-Bench is, as we described, this big set of tasks that were scraped.Swyx [00:09:33]: Like 12,000 or something?Erik [00:09:34]: Yeah, I think it's 2,000 in the final set. But a lot of those, even though a human did them, they're actually impossible given the information that comes with the task. The most classic example of this is the test looks for a very specific error string. You know, like assert message equals error, something, something, something. And unless you know that's exactly what you're looking for, there's no way the model is going to write that exact same error message, and so the tests are going to fail. So SWE-Bench verified was actually made in partnership with OpenAI, and they hired humans to go review all these tasks and pick out a subset to try to remove any obstacle like this that would make the tasks impossible. So in theory, all of these tasks should be fully doable by the model. And they also had humans grade how difficult they thought the problems would be. Between less than 15 minutes, I think 15 minutes to an hour, an hour to four hours, and greater than four hours. So that's kind of this interesting sort of how big the problem is as well. To get to SWE-Bench verified to 90%, actually, maybe I'll also start off with some of the remaining failures that I see when running our model on SWE-Bench. I'd say the biggest cases are the model sort of operates at the wrong level of abstraction. And what I mean by that is the model puts in maybe a smaller band-aid when really the task is asking for a bigger refactor. And some of those, you know, is the model's fault, but a lot of times if you're just sort of seeing the GitHub issue, it's not exactly clear which way you should do. So even though these tasks are possible, there's still some ambiguity in how the tasks are described. That being said, I think in general, language models frequently will produce a smaller diff when possible, rather than trying to do a big refactor. I think another area, at least the agent we created, didn't have any multimodal abilities, even though our models are very good at vision. So I think that's just a missed opportunity. And if I read through some of the traces, there's some funny things where, especially the tasks on matplotlib, which is a graphing library, the test script will save an image and the model will just say, okay, it looks great, you know, without looking at it. So there's certainly extra juice to squeeze there of just making sure the model really understands all the sides of the input that it's given, including multimodal. But yeah, I think like getting to 92%. So this is something that I have not looked at, but I'm very curious about. I want someone to look at, like, what is the union of all of the different tasks that have been solved by at least one attempt at SWE-Bench Verified. There's a ton of submissions to the benchmark, and so I'd be really curious to see how many of those 500 tasks at least someone has solved. And I think, you know, there's probably a bunch that none of the attempts have ever solved. And I think it'd be interesting to look at those and say, hey, is there some problem with these? Like, are these impossible? Or are they just really hard and only a human could do them?Swyx [00:12:22]: Yeah, like specifically, is there a category of problems that are still unreachable by any LLM agent? Yeah, yeah. And I think there definitely are.Erik [00:12:28]: The question is, are those fairly inaccessible or are they just impossible because of the descriptions? But I think certainly some of the tasks, especially the ones that the human graders reviewed as like taking longer than four hours are extremely difficult. I think we got a few of them right, but not very many at all in the benchmark.Swyx [00:12:49]: And did those take less than four hours?Erik [00:12:51]: They certainly did less than, yeah, than four hours.Swyx [00:12:54]: Is there a correlation of length of time with like human estimated time? You know what I mean? Or do we have sort of more of X paradox type situations where it's something super easy for a model, but hard for a human?Erik [00:13:06]: I actually haven't done the stats on that, but I think that'd be really interesting to see of like how many tokens does it take and how is that correlated with difficulty? What is the likelihood of success with difficulty? I think actually a really interesting thing that I saw, one of my coworkers who was also working on this named Simon, he was focusing just specifically on the very hard problems, the ones that are said to take longer than four hours. And he ended up sort of creating a much more detailed prompt than I used. And he got a higher score on the most difficult subset of problems, but a lower score overall on the whole benchmark. And the prompt that I made, which is sort of much more simple and bare bones, got a higher score on the overall benchmark, but lower score on the really hard problems. And I think some of that is the really detailed prompt made the model sort of overcomplicate a lot of the easy problems, because honestly, a lot of the suite bench problems, they really do just ask for a bandaid where it's like, hey, this crashes if this is none, and really all you need to do is put a check if none. And so sometimes trying to make the model think really deeply, it'll think in circles and overcomplicate something, which certainly human engineers are capable of as well. But I think there's some interesting thing of the best prompt for hard problems might not be the best prompt for easy problems.Alessio [00:14:19]: How do we fix that? Are you supposed to fix it at the model level? How do I know what prompt I'm supposed to use?Swyx [00:14:25]: Yeah.Erik [00:14:26]: And I'll say this was a very small effect size, and so I think this isn't worth obsessing over. I would say that as people are building systems around agents, I think the more you can separate out the different kinds of work the agent needs to do, the better you can tailor a prompt for that task. And I think that also creates a lot of like, for instance, if you were trying to make an agent that could both solve hard programming tasks, and it could just write quick test files for something that someone else had already made, the best way to do those two tasks might be very different prompts. I see a lot of people build systems where they first sort of have a classification, and then route the problem to two different prompts. And that's sort of a very effective thing, because one, it makes the two different prompts much simpler and smaller, and it means you can have someone work on one of the prompts without any risk of affecting the other tasks. So it creates like a nice separation of concerns. Yeah.Alessio [00:15:21]: And the other model behavior thing you mentioned, they prefer to generate like shorter diffs. Why is that? Like, is there a way? I think that's maybe like the lazy model question that people have is like, why are you not just generating the whole code instead of telling me to implement it?Swyx [00:15:36]: Are you saving tokens? Yeah, exactly. It's like conspiracy theory. Yeah. Yeah.Erik [00:15:41]: Yeah. So there's two different things there. One is like the, I'd say maybe like doing the easier solution rather than the hard solution. And I'd say the second one, I think what you're talking about is like the lazy model is like when the model says like dot, dot, dot, code remains the same.Swyx [00:15:52]: Code goes here. Yeah. I'm like, thanks, dude.Erik [00:15:55]: But honestly, like that just comes as like people on the internet will do stuff like that. And like, dude, if you're talking to a friend and you ask them like to give you some example code, they would definitely do that. They're not going to reroll the whole thing. And so I think that's just a matter of like, you know, sometimes you actually do just, just want like the relevant changes. And so I think it's, this is something where a lot of times like, you know, the models aren't good at mind reading of like which one you want. So I think that like the more explicit you can be in prompting to say, Hey, you know, give me the entire thing, no, no elisions versus just give me the relevant changes. And that's something, you know, we want to make the models always better at following those kinds of instructions.Swyx [00:16:32]: I'll drop a couple of references here. We're recording this like a day after Dario, Lex Friedman just dropped his five hour pod with Dario and Amanda and the rest of the crew. And Dario actually made this interesting observation that like, we actually don't want, we complain about models being too chatty in text and then not chatty enough in code. And so like getting that right is kind of a awkward bar because, you know, you, you don't want it to yap in its responses, but then you also want it to be complete in, in code. And then sometimes it's not complete. Sometimes you just want it to diff, which is something that Enthopic has also released with a, you know, like the, the fast edit stuff that you guys did. And then the other thing I wanted to also double back on is the prompting stuff. You said, you said it was a small effect, but it was a noticeable effect in terms of like picking a prompt. I think we'll go into suite agent in a little bit, but I kind of reject the fact that, you know, you need to choose one prompt and like have your whole performance be predicated on that one prompt. I think something that Enthopic has done really well is meta prompting, prompting for a prompt. And so why can't you just develop a meta prompt for, for all the other prompts? And you know, if it's a simple task, make a simple prompt, if it's a hard task, make a hard prompt. Obviously I'm probably hand-waving a little bit, but I will definitely ask people to try the Enthopic Workbench meta prompting system if they haven't tried it yet. I went to the Build Day recently at Enthopic HQ, and it's the closest I've felt to an AGI, like learning how to operate itself that, yeah, it's, it's, it's really magical.Erik [00:17:57]: Yeah, no, Claude is great at writing prompts for Claude.Swyx [00:18:00]: Right, so meta prompting. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:18:02]: The way I think about this is that humans, even like very smart humans still use sort of checklists and use sort of scaffolding for themselves. Surgeons will still have checklists, even though they're incredible experts. And certainly, you know, a very senior engineer needs less structure than a junior engineer, but there still is some of that structure that you want to keep. And so I always try to anthropomorphize the models and try to think about for a human sort of what is the equivalent. And that's sort of, you know, how I think about these things is how much instruction would you give a human with the same task? And do you, would you need to give them a lot of instruction or a little bit of instruction?Alessio [00:18:36]: Let's talk about the agent architecture maybe. So first, runtime, you let it run until it thinks it's done or it reaches 200k context window.Swyx [00:18:45]: How did you come up? What's up with that?Erik [00:18:47]: Yeah.Swyx [00:18:48]: Yeah.Erik [00:18:49]: I mean, this, so I'd say that a lot of previous agent work built sort of these very hard coded and rigid workflows where the model is sort of pushed through certain flows of steps. And I think to some extent, you know, that's needed with smaller models and models that are less smart. But one of the things that we really wanted to explore was like, let's really give Claude the reins here and not force Claude to do anything, but let Claude decide, you know, how it should approach the problem, what steps it should do. And so really, you know, what we did is like the most extreme version of this is just give it some tools that it can call and it's able to keep calling the tools, keep thinking, and then yeah, keep doing that until it thinks it's done. And that's sort of the most, the most minimal agent framework that we came up with. And I think that works very well. I think especially the new Sonnet 3.5 is very, very good at self-correction, has a lot of like grit. Claude will try things that fail and then try, you know, come back and sort of try different approaches. And I think that's something that you didn't see in a lot of previous models. Some of the existing agent frameworks that I looked at, they had whole systems built to try to detect loops and see, oh, is the model doing the same thing, you know, more than three times, then we have to pull it out. And I think like the smarter the models are, the less you need that kind of extra scaffolding. So yeah, just giving the model tools and letting it keep sample and call tools until it thinks it's done was the most minimal framework that we could think of. And so that's what we did.Alessio [00:20:18]: So you're not pruning like bad paths from the context. If it tries to do something, it fails. You just burn all these tokens.Swyx [00:20:25]: Yes.Erik [00:20:26]: I would say the downside of this is that this is sort of a very token expensive way to doSwyx [00:20:29]: this. But still, it's very common to prune bad paths because models get stuck. Yeah.Erik [00:20:35]: But I'd say that, yeah, 3.5 is not getting stuck as much as previous models. And so, yeah, we wanted to at least just try the most minimal thing. Now, I would say that, you know, this is definitely an area of future research, especially if we talk about these problems that are going to take a human more than four hours. Those might be things where we're going to need to go prune bad paths to let the model be able to accomplish this task within 200k tokens. So certainly I think there's like future research to be done in that area, but it's not necessary to do well on these benchmarks.Swyx [00:21:06]: Another thing I always have questions about on context window things, there's a mini cottage industry of code indexers that have sprung up for large code bases, like the ones in SweetBench. You didn't need them? We didn't.Erik [00:21:18]: And I think I'd say there's like two reasons for this. One is like SweetBench specific and the other is a more general thing. The more general thing is that I think Sonnet is very good at what we call agentic search. And what this basically means is letting the model decide how to search for something. It gets the results and then it can decide, should it keep searching or is it done? Does it have everything it needs? So if you read through a lot of the traces of the SweetBench, the model is calling tools to view directories, list out things, view files. And it will do a few of those until it feels like it's found the file where the bug is. And then it will start working on that file. And I think like, again, this is all, everything we did was about just giving Claude the full reins. So there's no hard-coded system. There's no search system that you're relying on getting the correct files into context. This just totally lets Claude do it.Swyx [00:22:11]: Or embedding things into a vector database. Exactly. Oops. No, no.Erik [00:22:17]: This is very, very token expensive. And so certainly, and it also takes many, many turns. And so certainly if you want to do something in a single turn, you need to do RAG and just push stuff into the first prompt.Alessio [00:22:28]: And just to make it clear, it's using the Bash tool, basically doing LS, looking at files and then doing CAD for the following context. It can do that.Erik [00:22:35]: But it's file editing tool also has a command in it called view that can view a directory. It's very similar to LS, but it just sort of has some nice sort of quality of life improvements. So I think it'll only do an LS sort of two directories deep so that the model doesn't get overwhelmed if it does this on a huge file. I would say actually we did more engineering of the tools than the overall prompt. But the one other thing I want to say about this agentic search is that for SWE-Bench specifically, a lot of the tasks are bug reports, which means they have a stack trace in them. And that means right in that first prompt, it tells you where to go. And so I think this is a very easy case for the model to find the right files versus if you're using this as a general coding assistant where there isn't a stack trace or you're asking it to insert a new feature, I think there it's much harder to know which files to look at. And that might be an area where you would need to do more of this exhaustive search where an agentic search would take way too long.Swyx [00:23:33]: As someone who spent the last few years in the JS world, it'd be interesting to see SWE-Bench JS because these stack traces are useless because of so much virtualization that we do. So they're very, very disconnected with where the code problems are actually appearing.Erik [00:23:50]: That makes me feel better about my limited front-end experience, as I've always struggled with that problem.Swyx [00:23:55]: It's not your fault. We've gotten ourselves into a very, very complicated situation. And I'm not sure it's entirely needed. But if you talk to our friends at Vercel, they will say it is.Erik [00:24:04]: I will say SWE-Bench just released SWE-Bench Multimodal, which I believe is either entirely JavaScript or largely JavaScript. And it's entirely things that have visual components of them.Swyx [00:24:15]: Are you going to tackle that? We will see.Erik [00:24:17]: I think it's on the list and there's interest, but no guarantees yet.Swyx [00:24:20]: Just as a side note, it occurs to me that every model lab, including Enthopic, but the others as well, you should have your own SWE-Bench, whatever your bug tracker tool. This is a general methodology that you can use to track progress, I guess.Erik [00:24:34]: Yeah, sort of running on our own internal code base.Swyx [00:24:36]: Yeah, that's a fun idea.Alessio [00:24:37]: Since you spend so much time on the tool design, so you have this edit tool that can make changes and whatnot. Any learnings from that that you wish the AI IDEs would take in? Is there some special way to look at files, feed them in?Erik [00:24:50]: I would say the core of that tool is string replace. And so we did a few different experiments with different ways to specify how to edit a file. And string replace, basically, the model has to write out the existing version of the string and then a new version, and that just gets swapped in. We found that to be the most reliable way to do these edits. Other things that we tried were having the model directly write a diff, having the model fully regenerate files. That one is actually the most accurate, but it takes so many tokens, and if you're in a very big file, it's cost prohibitive. There's basically a lot of different ways to represent the same task. And they actually have pretty big differences in terms of model accuracy. I think Eider, they have a really good blog where they explore some of these different methods for editing files, and they post results about them, which I think is interesting. But I think this is a really good example of the broader idea that you need to iterate on tools rather than just a prompt. And I think a lot of people, when they make tools for an LLM, they kind of treat it like they're just writing an API for a computer, and it's sort of very minimal. It's sort of just the bare bones of what you'd need, and honestly, it's so hard for the models to use those. Again, I come back to anthropomorphizing these models. Imagine you're a developer, and you just read this for the very first time, and you're trying to use it. You can do so much better than just sort of the bare API spec of what you'd often see. Include examples in the description. Include really detailed explanations of how things work. And I think that, again, also think about what is the easiest way for the model to represent the change that it wants to make. For file editing, as an example, writing a diff is actually... Let's take the most extreme example. You want the model to literally write a patch file. I think patch files have at the very beginning numbers of how many total lines change. That means before the model has actually written the edit, it needs to decide how many numbers or how many lines are going to change.Swyx [00:26:52]: Don't quote me on that.Erik [00:26:54]: I think it's something like that, but I don't know if that's exactly the diff format. But you can certainly have formats that are much easier to express without messing up than others. And I like to think about how much human effort goes into designing human interfaces for things. It's incredible. This is entirely what FrontEnd is about, is creating better interfaces to kind of do the same things. And I think that same amount of attention and effort needs to go into creating agent computer interfaces.Swyx [00:27:19]: It's a topic we've discussed, ACI or whatever that looks like. I would also shout out that I think you released some of these toolings as part of computer use as well. And people really liked it. It's all open source if people want to check it out. I'm curious if there's an environment element that complements the tools. So how do you... Do you have a sandbox? Is it just Docker? Because that can be slow or resource intensive. Do you have anything else that you would recommend?Erik [00:27:47]: I don't think I can talk about sort of public details or about private details about how we implement our sandboxing. But obviously, we need to have sort of safe, secure, and fast sandboxes for training for the models to be able to practice writing code and working in an environment.Swyx [00:28:03]: I'm aware of a few startups working on agent sandboxing. E2B is a close friend of ours that Alessio has led around in, but also I think there's others where they're focusing on snapshotting memory so that it can do time travel for debugging. Computer use where you can control the mouse or keyboard or something like that. Whereas here, I think that the kinds of tools that we offer are very, very limited to coding agent work cases like bash, edit, you know, stuff like that. Yeah.Erik [00:28:30]: I think the computer use demo that we released is an extension of that. It has the same bash and edit tools, but it also has the computer tool that lets it get screenshots and move the mouse and keyboard. Yeah. So I definitely think there's sort of more general tools there. And again, the tools we released as part of SweetBench were, I'd say they're very specific for like editing files and doing bash, but at the same time, that's actually very general if you think about it. Like anything that you would do on a command line or like editing files, you can do with those tools. And so we do want those tools to feel like any sort of computer terminal work could be done with those same tools rather than making tools that were like very specific for SweetBench like run tests as its own tool, for instance. Yeah.Swyx [00:29:15]: You had a question about tests.Alessio [00:29:16]: Yeah, exactly. I saw there's no test writer tool. Is it because it generates the code and then you're running it against SweetBench anyway, so it doesn't really need to write the test or?Swyx [00:29:26]: Yeah.Erik [00:29:27]: So this is one of the interesting things about SweetBench is that the tests that the model's output is graded on are hidden from it. That's basically so that the model can't cheat by looking at the tests and writing the exact solution. And I'd say typically the model, the first thing it does is it usually writes a little script to reproduce the error. And again, most SweetBench tasks are like, hey, here's a bug that I found. I run this and I get this error. So the first thing the model does is try to reproduce that. So it's kind of been rerunning that script as a mini test. But yeah, sometimes the model will like accidentally introduce a bug that breaks some other tests and it doesn't know about that.Alessio [00:30:05]: And should we be redesigning any tools? We kind of talked about this and like having more examples, but I'm thinking even things of like Q as a query parameter in many APIs, it's like easier for the model to like re-query than read the Q. I'm sure it learned the Q by this point, but like, is there anything you've seen like building this where it's like, hey, if I were to redesign some CLI tools, some API tool, I would like change the way structure to make it better for LLMs?Erik [00:30:31]: I don't think I've thought enough about that off the top of my head, but certainly like just making everything more human friendly, like having like more detailed documentation and examples. I think examples are really good in things like descriptions, like so many, like just using the Linux command line, like how many times I do like dash dash help or look at the man page or something. It's like, just give me one example of like how I actually use this. Like I don't want to go read through a hundred flags. Just give me the most common example. But again, so you know, things that would be useful for a human, I think are also very useful for a model.Swyx [00:31:03]: Yeah. I mean, there's one thing that you cannot give to code agents that is useful for human is this access to the internet. I wonder how to design that in, because one of the issues that I also had with just the idea of a suite bench is that you can't do follow up questions. You can't like look around for similar implementations. These are all things that I do when I try to fix code and we don't do that. It's not, it wouldn't be fair, like it'd be too easy to cheat, but then also it's kind of not being fair to these agents because they're not operating in a real world situation. Like if I had a real world agent, of course I'm giving it access to the internet because I'm not trying to pass a benchmark. I don't have a question in there more, more just like, I feel like the most obvious tool access to the internet is not being used.Erik [00:31:47]: I think that that's really important for humans, but honestly the models have so much general knowledge from pre-training that it's, it's like less important for them. I feel like versioning, you know, if you're working on a newer thing that was like, they came after the knowledge cutoff, then yes, I think that's very important. I think actually this, this is like a broader problem that there is a divergence between Sweebench and like what customers will actually care about who are working on a coding agent for real use. And I think one of those there is like internet access and being able to like, how do you pull in outside information? I think another one is like, if you have a real coding agent, you don't want to have it start on a task and like spin its wheels for hours because you gave it a bad prompt. You want it to come back immediately and ask follow up questions and like really make sure it has a very detailed understanding of what to do, then go off for a few hours and do work. So I think that like real tasks are going to be much more interactive with the agent rather than this kind of like one shot system. And right now there's no benchmark that, that measures that. And maybe I think it'd be interesting to have some benchmark that is more interactive. I don't know if you're familiar with TauBench, but it's a, it's a customer service benchmark where there's basically one LLM that's playing the user or the customer that's getting support and another LLM that's playing the support agent and they interact and try to resolve the issue.Swyx [00:33:08]: Yeah. We talked to the LMSIS guys. Awesome. And they also did MTBench for people listening along. So maybe we need MTSWE-Bench. Sure. Yeah.Erik [00:33:16]: So maybe, you know, you could have something where like before the SWE-Bench task starts, you have like a few back and forths with kind of like the, the author who can answer follow up questions about what they want the task to do. And of course you'd need to do that where it doesn't cheat and like just get the exact, the exact thing out of the human or out of the sort of user. But I think that would be a really interesting thing to see. If you look at sort of existing agent work, like a Repl.it's coding agent, I think one of the really great UX things they do is like first having the agent create a plan and then having the human approve that plan or give feedback. I think for agents in general, like having a planning step at the beginning, one, just having that plan will improve performance on the downstream task just because it's kind of like a bigger chain of thought, but also it's just such a better UX. It's way easier for a human to iterate on a plan with a model rather than iterating on the full task that sort of has a much slower time through each loop. If the human has approved this implementation plan, I think it makes the end result a lot more sort of auditable and trustable. So I think there's a lot of things sort of outside of SweetBench that will be very important for real agent usage in the world. Yeah.Swyx [00:34:27]: I will say also, there's a couple of comments on names that you dropped. Copilot also does the plan stage before it writes code. I feel like those approaches have generally been less Twitter successful because it's not prompt to code, it's prompt plan code. You know, so there's a little bit of friction in there, but it's not much. Like it's, it actually, it's, it, you get a lot for what it's worth. I also like the way that Devin does it, where you can sort of edit the plan as it goes along. And then the other thing with Repl.it, we had a, we hosted a sort of dev day pregame with Repl.it and they also commented about multi-agents. So like having two agents kind of bounce off of each other. I think it's a similar approach to what you're talking about with kind of the few shot example, just as in the prompts of clarifying what the agent wants. But typically I think this would be implemented as a tool calling another agent, like a sub-agent I don't know if you explored that, do you like that idea?Erik [00:35:20]: I haven't explored this enough, but I've definitely heard of people having good success with this. Of almost like basically having a few different sort of personas of agents, even if they're all the same LLM. I think this is one thing with multi-agent that a lot of people will kind of get confused by is they think it has to be different models behind each thing. But really it's sort of usually the same, the same model with different prompts. And yet having one, having them have different personas to kind of bring different sort of thoughts and priorities to the table. I've seen that work very well and sort of create a much more thorough and thought outSwyx [00:35:53]: response.Erik [00:35:53]: I think the downside is just that it adds a lot of complexity and it adds a lot of extra tokens. So I think it depends what you care about. If you want a plan that's very thorough and detailed, I think it's great. If you want a really quick, just like write this function, you know, you probably don't want to do that and have like a bunch of different calls before it does this.Alessio [00:36:11]: And just talking about the prompt, why are XML tags so good in Cloud? I think initially people were like, oh, maybe you're just getting lucky with XML. But I saw obviously you use them in your own agent prompts, so they must work. And why is it so model specific to your family?Erik [00:36:26]: Yeah, I think that there's, again, I'm not sure how much I can say, but I think there's historical reasons that internally we've preferred XML. I think also the one broader thing I'll say is that if you look at certain kinds of outputs, there is overhead to outputting in JSON. If you're trying to output code in JSON, there's a lot of extra escaping that needs to be done, and that actually hurts model performance across the board. Versus if you're in just a single XML tag, there's none of that sort of escaping thatSwyx [00:36:58]: needs to happen.Erik [00:36:58]: That being said, I haven't tried having it write HTML and XML, which maybe then you start running into weird escaping things there. I'm not sure. But yeah, I'd say that's some historical reasons, and there's less overhead of escaping.Swyx [00:37:12]: I use XML in other models as well, and it's just a really nice way to make sure that the thing that ends is tied to the thing that starts. That's the only way to do code fences where you're pretty sure example one start, example one end, that is one cohesive unit.Alessio [00:37:30]: Because the braces are nondescriptive. Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:37:33]: That would be my simple reason. XML is good for everyone, not just Cloud. Cloud was just the first one to popularize it, I think.Erik [00:37:39]: I do definitely prefer to read XML than read JSON.Alessio [00:37:43]: Any other details that are maybe underappreciated? I know, for example, you had the absolute paths versus relative. Any other fun nuggets?Erik [00:37:52]: I think that's a good sort of anecdote to mention about iterating on tools. Like I said, spend time prompt engineering your tools, and don't just write the prompt, but write the tool, and then actually give it to the model and read a bunch of transcripts about how the model tries to use the tool. I think by doing that, you will find areas where the model misunderstands a tool or makes mistakes, and then basically change the tool to make it foolproof. There's this Japanese term, pokayoke, about making tools mistake-proof. You know, the classic idea is you can have a plug that can fit either way, and that's dangerous, or you can make it asymmetric so that it can't fit this way, it has to go like this, and that's a better tool because you can't use it the wrong way. So for this example of absolute paths, one of the things that we saw while testing these tools is, oh, if the model has done CD and moved to a different directory, it would often get confused when trying to use the tool because it's now in a different directory, and so the paths aren't lining up. So we said, oh, well, let's just force the tool to always require an absolute path, and then that's easy for the model to understand. It knows sort of where it is. It knows where the files are. And then once we have it always giving absolute paths, it never messes up even, like, no matter where it is because it just, if you're using an absolute path, it doesn't matter whereSwyx [00:39:13]: you are.Erik [00:39:13]: So iterations like that, you know, let us make the tool foolproof for the model. I'd say there's other categories of things where we see, oh, if the model, you know, opens vim, like, you know, it's never going to return. And so the tool is stuck.Swyx [00:39:28]: Did it get stuck? Yeah. Get out of vim. What?Erik [00:39:31]: Well, because the tool is, like, it just text in, text out. It's not interactive. So it's not like the model doesn't know how to get out of vim. It's that the way that the tool is, like, hooked up to the computer is not interactive. Yes, I mean, there is the meme of no one knows how to get out of vim. You know, basically, we just added instructions in the tool of, like, hey, don't launch commands that don't return.Swyx [00:39:54]: Yeah, like, don't launch vim.Erik [00:39:55]: Don't launch whatever. If you do need to do something, you know, put an ampersand after it to launch it in the background. And so, like, just, you know, putting kind of instructions like that just right in the description for the tool really helps the model. And I think, like, that's an underutilized space of prompt engineering, where, like, people might try to do that in the overall prompt, but just put that in the tool itself so the model knows that it's, like, for this tool, this is what's relevant.Swyx [00:40:20]: You said you worked on the function calling and tool use before you actually started this vBench work, right? Was there any surprises? Because you basically went from creator of that API to user of that API. Any surprises or changes you would make now that you have extensively dog-fooded in a state-of-the-art agent?Erik [00:40:39]: I want us to make, like, maybe, like, a little bit less verbose SDK. I think some way, like, right now, it just takes, I think we sort of force people to do the best practices of writing out sort of these full JSON schemas, but it would be really nice if you could just pass in a Python function as a tool. I think that could be something nice.Swyx [00:40:58]: I think that there's a lot of, like, Python- There's helper libraries. ... structure, you know. I don't know if there's anyone else that is specializing for Anthropic. Maybe Jeremy Howard's and Simon Willis's stuff. They all have Cloud-specific stuff that they are working on. Cloudette. Cloudette, exactly. I also wanted to spend a little bit of time with SuiteAgent. It seems like a very general framework. Like, is there a reason you picked it apart from it's the same authors as vBench, or?Erik [00:41:21]: The main thing we wanted to go with was the same authors as vBench, so it just felt sort of like the safest, most neutral option. And it was, you know, very high quality. It was very easy to modify, to work with. I would say it also actually, their underlying framework is sort of this, it's like, youSwyx [00:41:39]: know, think, act, observe.Erik [00:41:40]: That they kind of go through this loop, which is like a little bit more hard-coded than what we wanted to do, but it's still very close. That's still very general. So it felt like a good match as sort of the starting point for our agent. And we had already sort of worked with and talked with the SWE-Bench people directly, so it felt nice to just have, you know, we already know the authors. This will be easy to work with.Swyx [00:42:00]: I'll share a little bit of like, this all seems disconnected, but once you figure out the people and where they go to school, it all makes sense. So it's all Princeton. Yeah, the SWE-Bench and SuiteAgent.Erik [00:42:11]: It's a group out of Princeton.Swyx [00:42:12]: Yeah, and we had Shun Yu on the pod, and he came up with the React paradigm, and that's think, act, observe. That's all React. So they're all friends. Yep, yeah, exactly.Erik [00:42:22]: And you know, if you actually read our traces of our submission, you can actually see like think, act, observe in our logs. And we just didn't even change the printing code. So it's like doing still function calls under the hood, and the model can do sort of multiple function calls in a row without thinking in between if it wants to. But yeah, so a lot of similarities and a lot of things we inherited from SuiteAgent just as a starting point for the framework.Alessio [00:42:47]: Any thoughts about other agent frameworks? I think there's, you know, the whole gamut from very simple to like very complex.Swyx [00:42:53]: Autogen, CooEI, LandGraph. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:42:56]: I think I haven't explored a lot of them in detail. I would say with agent frameworks in general, they can certainly save you some like boilerplate. But I think there's actually this like downside of making agents too easy, where you end up very quickly like building a much more complex system than you need. And suddenly, you know, instead of having one prompt, you have five agents that are talking to each other and doing a dialogue. And it's like, because the framework made that 10 lines to do, you end up building something that's way too complex. So I think I would actually caution people to like try to start without these frameworks if you can, because you'll be closer to the raw prompts and be able to sort of directly understand what's going on. I think a lot of times these frameworks also, by trying to make everything feel really magical, you end up sort of really hiding what the actual prompt and output of the model is, and that can make it much harder to debug. So certainly these things have a place, and I think they do really help at getting rid of boilerplate, but they come with this cost of obfuscating what's really happening and making it too easy to very quickly add a lot of complexity. So yeah, I would recommend people to like try it from scratch, and it's like not that bad.Alessio [00:44:08]: Would you rather have like a framework of tools? Do you almost see like, hey, it's maybe easier to get tools that are already well curated, like the ones that you build, if I had an easy way to get the best tool from you, andSwyx [00:44:21]: like you maintain the definition?Alessio [00:44:22]: Or yeah, any thoughts on how you want to formalize tool sharing?Erik [00:44:26]: Yeah, I think that's something that we're certainly interested in exploring, and I think there is space for sort of these general tools that will be very broadly applicable. But at the same time, most people that are building on these, they do have much more specific things that they're trying to do. You know, I think that might be useful for hobbyists and demos, but the ultimate end applications are going to be bespoke. And so we just want to make sure that the model's great at any tool that it uses. But certainly something we're exploring.Alessio [00:44:52]: So everything bespoke, no frameworks, no anything.Swyx [00:44:55]: Just for now, for now.Erik [00:44:56]: Yeah, I would say that like the best thing I've seen is people building up from like, build some good util functions, and then you can use those as building blocks. Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:45:05]: I have a utils folder, or like all these scripts. My framework is like def, call, and tropic. And then I just put all the defaults.Swyx [00:45:12]: Yeah, exactly. There's a startup hidden in every utils folder, you know? No, totally not. Like, if you use it enough, like it's a startup, you know? At some point. I'm kind of curious, is there a maximum length of turns that it took? Like, what was the longest run? I actually don't.Erik [00:45:27]: I mean, it had basically infinite turns until it ran into a 200k context. I should have looked this up. I don't know. And so for some of those failed cases where it eventually ran out of context, I mean, it was over 100 turns. I'm trying to remember like the longest successful run, but I think it was definitely over 100 turns that some of the times.Swyx [00:45:48]: Which is not that much. It's a coffee break. Yeah.Erik [00:45:52]: But certainly, you know, these things can be a lot of turns. And I think that's because some of these things are really hard, where it's going to take, you know, many tries to do it. And if you think about like, think about a task that takes a human four hours to do. Think about how many different files you read, and like times you edit a file in four hours. That's a lot more than 100.Alessio [00:46:10]: How many times you open Twitter because you get distracted. But if you had a lot more compute, what's kind of like the return on the extra compute now? So like, you know, if you had thousands of turns or like whatever, like how much better would it get?Erik [00:46:23]: Yeah, this I don't know. And I think this is, I think sort of one of the open areas of research in general with agents is memory and sort of how do you have something that can do work beyond its context length where you're just purely appending. So you mentioned earlier things like pruning bad paths. I think there's a lot of interesting work around there. Can you just roll back but summarize, hey, don't go down this path? There be dragons. Yeah, I think that's very interesting that you could have something that that uses way more tokens without ever using at a time more than 200k. So I think that's very interesting. I think the biggest thing is like, can you make the model sort of losslessly summarize what it's learned from trying different approaches and bring things back? I think that's sort of the big challenge.Swyx [00:47:11]: What about different models?Alessio [00:47:12]: So you have Haiku, which is like, you know, cheaper. So you're like, well, what if I have a Haiku to do a lot of these smaller things and then put it back up?Erik [00:47:20]: I think Cursor might have said that they actually have a separate model for file editing.Swyx [00:47:25]: I'm trying to remember.Erik [00:47:25]: I think they were on maybe the Lex Fridman podcast where they said they have a bigger model, like write what the code should be and then a different model, like apply it. So I think there's a lot of interesting room for stuff like that. Yeah, fast supply.Swyx [00:47:37]: We actually did a pod with Fireworks that they worked with on. It's speculative decoding.Erik [00:47:41]: But I think there's also really interesting things about like, you know, paring down input tokens as well, especially sometimes the models trying to read like a 10,000 line file. That's a lot of tokens. And most of it is actually not going to be relevant. I think it'd be really interesting to like delegate that to Haiku. Haiku read this file and just pull out the most relevant functions. And then, you know, Sonnet reads just those and you save 90% on tokens. I think there's a lot of really interesting room for things like that. And again, we were just trying to do sort of the simplest, most minimal thing and show that it works. I'm really hoping that people, sort of the agent community builds things like that on top of our models. That's, again, why we released these tools. We're not going to go and do lots more submissions to SWE-Bench and try to prompt engineer this and build a bigger system. We want people to like the ecosystem to do that on top of our models. But yeah, so I think that's a really interesting one.Swyx [00:48:32]: It turns out, I think you did do 3.5 Haiku with your tools and it scored a 40.6. Yes.Erik [00:48:38]: So it did very well. It itself is actually very smart, which is great. But we haven't done any experiments with this combination of the two models. But yeah, I think that's one of the exciting things is that how well Haiku 3.5 did on SWE-Bench shows that sort of even our smallest, fastest model is very good at sort of thinking agentically and working on hard problems. Like it's not just sort of for writing simple text anymore.Alessio [00:49:02]: And I know you're not going to talk about it, but like Sonnet is not even supposed to be the best model, you know? Like Opus, it's kind of like we left it at three back in the corner intro. At some point, I'm sure the new Opus will come out. And if you had Opus Plus on it, that sounds very, very good.Swyx [00:49:19]: There's a run with SuiteAgent plus Opus, but that's the official SWE-Bench guys doing it.Erik [00:49:24]: That was the older, you know, 3.0.Swyx [00:49:25]: You didn't do yours. Yeah. Okay. Did you want to? I mean, you could just change the model name.Erik [00:49:31]: I think we didn't submit it, but I think we included it in our model card.Swyx [00:49:35]: Okay.Erik [00:49:35]: We included the score as a comparison. Yeah.Swyx [00:49:38]: Yeah.Erik [00:49:38]: And Sonnet and Haiku, actually, I think the new ones, they both outperformed the original Opus. Yeah. I did see that.Swyx [00:49:44]: Yeah. It's a little bit hard to find. Yeah.Erik [00:49:47]: It's not an exciting score, so we didn't feel like they need to submit it to the benchmark.Swyx [00:49:52]: We can cut over to computer use if we're okay with moving on to topics on this, if anything else. I think we're good.Erik [00:49:58]: I'm trying to think if there's anything else SWE-Bench related.Swyx [00:50:02]: It doesn't have to be also just specifically SWE-Bench, but just your thoughts on building agents, because you are one of the few people that have reached this leaderboard on building a coding agent. This is the state of the art. It's surprisingly not that hard to reach with some good principles. Right. There's obviously a ton of low-hanging fruit that we covered. Your thoughts on if you were to build a coding agent startup, what next?Erik [00:50:24]: I think the really interesting question for me, for all the startups out there, is this kind of divergence between the benchmarks and what real customers will want. So I'm curious, maybe the next time you have a coding agent startup on the podcast, you should ask them that. What are the differences that they're starting to make? Tomorrow.Swyx [00:50:40]: Oh, perfect, perfect. Yeah.Erik [00:50:41]: I'm actually very curious what they will see, because I also have seen, I feel like it's slowed down a little bit if I don't see the startups submitting to SWE-Bench that much anymore.Swyx [00:50:52]: Because of the traces, the trace. So we had Cosign on, they had a 50-something on full, on SWE-Bench full, which is the hardest one, and they were rejected because they didn't want to submit their traces. Yep. IP, you know? Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. Actually, tomorrow we're talking to Bolt, which is a cloud customer. You guys actually published a case study with them. I assume you weren't involved with that, but they were very happy with Cloud. Cool. One of the biggest launches of the year. Yeah, totally. We actually happened to b

No one seems to be slowing down yet before the end of the year -- if anything, organizations are in full blown strategy and execution mode while they sort out investments and priorities for 2025. We had a fun week on the road, including time spent with UKG Labs. What a cool concept: an in-house virtual laboratory and startup ecosystem to identify and nurture early stage technologies helping to advance the future of work. Today you'll meet Colin Horsford, MBA, CPA, Co-Founder of Muse and Brent Filson, Director, Product Research & Innovation at UKG Labs.

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Listen in as California dairy farmer and United Dairy Industry Association board member Arlene Vander Eyk has a conversation with Mike Ciresi, Vice President and On-site Dairy Scientist for Dairy Management Inc. about working at Taco Bell's test kitchen. They discuss into Taco Bell's approach to dairy product innovation, the performance of dairy products since partnering, and what future dairy offerings may look like. Tune in to find out! To learn more about the national dairy checkoff and your local dairy checkoffs, please visit www.usdairy.com. Host & Guest: ·        Host: Arlene Vander Eyk, California Dairy Farmer and United Dairy Industry Association Board Member ·        Guest: Mike Ciresi, Vice President of Product Research for Dairy Management Inc. and On-Site Dairy Scientist at Taco Bell

Join us as we welcome back Steve Simonson, a renowned expert on sourcing and leveraging AI technology for Amazon sellers. This episode is packed with insights on a wide range of topics, from managing remote teams to the innovative use of voice AI in customer service. Steve shares his experiences over the past year, highlighting the rapid advancements in AI technology and how his team has been integrating these updates into their processes. We also discuss effective strategies for managing remote teams, emphasizing the importance of building management skills, fostering online collaboration, and maintaining team morale through regular communication and celebrations. Listen in as we explore the evolving role of AI in enhancing workflows and customer interactions, particularly for Amazon sellers. Steve sheds light on how major companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta are advancing AI technologies, with mentions of Meta's open-source Lama model and Amazon's AI applications like Rufus. Despite ongoing concerns about AI accuracy, Steve assures us that issues like hallucinations are gradually diminishing. We discuss the successful deployment of AI chatbots in customer service and the growing importance of AI in managing brand websites and internal company processes, with specific resources within the Helium 10 software highlighted for deeper insights. We also address the challenges facing Amazon sellers, including new fees, profitability issues, and competition. Steve offers reassurance by drawing parallels to past economic cycles and emphasizing persistence, sharing insights from Jeff Bezos' relentless approach. Additionally, we tackle the complexities of modern supply chain disruptions, offering practical tips for short-term problem-solving and long-term strategies such as resourcing and nearshoring. Finally, we highlight the significant opportunities that AI presents for small brands, encouraging businesses to embrace AI tools and look forward to upcoming events like Amazon Accelerate in Seattle. In episode 586 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Steve discuss: 00:00 - Managing Remote Teams and Leveraging AI For Amazon Sellers 03:53 - International Team Leadership Reflection 10:27 - Emerging AI Tools for Ecommerce Sellers 16:05 - Accessing Freedom Ticket for Amazon Sellers 19:09 - AI Video Creation for Beginners 20:46 - Leveraging AI for Listing Generation 22:56 - Navigating Challenges in E-Commerce Business 28:24 - Talking About Retirement 31:29 - Navigating Supply Chain Disruptions 34:09 - Enterprise Software and AI Integration Advice 35:32 - Small Brands Embracing AI Opportunities ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got Steve Simonson back on the show, one of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to leveraging AI for Amazon sellers. He's going to talk about a wide variety of topics, such as running remote teams, to sourcing, to voice AI that can actually be your customer service rep. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or maybe you're on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses or even cost you storage fees? Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your 3PL inventory, create POs for your suppliers, create replenishment shipments and more all from inside Inventory Management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me. Forward slash inventory management. Forward slash inventory management. And don't forget, you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there, or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code SSP10.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. You know, here at Helium 10, I don't know how this happened but we have a lot of S things. You know, we've got the Serious Sellers podcast, we did the Sell and Scale Summit. Now we've got Steve Simonson here and so I did have a hat with an S. This is actually a unique minor league baseball Sacramento hat here, but we're trying to keep the S theme together here. Steve, how's it going?   Steve: Boy, I'm well, I love it. The alliteration does not stop. That is really impressive. If you look closely at my forehead, you'll see a giant S carved into the forehead. So everybody, get out your inspection equipment. But it's there, you can rest assured.   Bradley Sutton: I love it. I love it All right, guys. Well, this is not the first rodeo of Steve here. He's been on the podcast before, so if you want to get back into a little bit more of his backstory and different things, some of the episodes he's been on is episode 38, episode 459. And we're going to talk a lot about AI today because I think that's what Steve is known for and that's what his module on Freedom Ticket is also about. But before I even, I just wanted to just see what you've been up to like the last year. It's been a year or so since you've been on the podcast. How's the back end of 2023 and 2024 been for you?   Steve: Yeah, it's been good. I tell you it's a very fast-paced world we live in, and particularly as I focus on AI and how we integrate that into some of our enterprise-level software, it is just an endless train of upgrades, like every week somebody's got a new model and some new AI breakthrough has happened, and so we've been really quite busy at trying to figure out how to support these future frameworks within the same context of how can you build it once but allow it to be upgradable. So it's been exciting, it's been fun, but, no, no short of challenges as well.   Bradley Sutton: Sure, sure, absolutely, absolutely. Now, one place in the last year or so that we caught up was in Bali. We went and spoke at this event and that was an amazing event. So anybody who has a chance to attend an event that Regina organizes, you should definitely, you should definitely try. We even had mud wrestling and everything. And I remember one thing you were talking about there. It's funny. I don't remember what I did yesterday, but then I'll just remember the strangest things or the most random things. I remember you had a big team across different countries and you were talking a little bit about that and it just, you know, across. You know across different countries, and you were talking a little bit about that. And it just got me thinking too. You know, as entrepreneurs most of us we don't have like an office and we've got, you know, in-office employees. You know we might start out hiring a VA here or there, and then you know the team scale. So you know somebody like yourself with experience, you know managing scores of employees at the same time. What are some tips you can give Amazon sellers out there or just entrepreneurs who have remote teams Like how do you, first of all, just what are some tips on managing a remote team where you're not there in person?   Steve: Well, the first thing is it is. It's a skill that you have to learn right. So a lot of us think that somehow management is just built into all of us. I don't believe it is, and I think entrepreneurs are some of the worst at it, myself included, maybe first and foremost terrible manager, but I think you've got to build the skills, and so one of the things that we try to do is find ways of collaborating online that would be similar to an office environment. So, you know, our HR folks will have, you know, birthday celebrations or, you know, have monthly meetings to celebrate everybody's birthday or those types of things. We also have other things systemically that try to help, you know, remind everybody. Hey, celebrate your Wednesday weekly win. Everybody has at least one win every week, so let's share those amongst the company, because there's a lot of people in the company who may not know each other different locations, different parts of the world but I do want to just remind people that the basics really matter, like how you talk to people, you know understanding, you know where they're coming from, do they have the essentials that they need to, you know, perform the job.   Steve: And the biggest I don't know revelation, especially dealing in the Amazon world is everybody expects a VA to be a unicorn. It's like you can do everything as the entrepreneur, so you just think you're going to delegate everything over to this unicorn. That's not going to happen. It's unfair, it's unrealistic and it shows that you're not yet a competent manager. And so my advice is you know, start slow, give very specific, task oriented things that have a beginning and an end, and then you know kind of work up from there and, as the internet says, educate yourself right. There's lots of books. One of my favorites is it's. It's the book name is called it's the manager. People don't quit jobs, they quit managers, and the faster we, as entrepreneurs, learn that, the better off we'll be.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah for sure. Now, speaking of managers, you know, once you get more than a few employees in a foreign location, you know you might make some kind of managerial structure. So for the subordinates, hey, you know performance management, things like that, you know it's probably handled by the manager. But how do you, kind of like you know performance, evaluate the managers themselves? You know, because you don't have really a middleman, they're directly reporting to you. How do you know who's your stars? And then how do you know when you need to take, perhaps corrective action?   Steve: Well, the number one thing that leads our decision making and I recommend this for anybody is data right. Let's start with what are the responsibilities this particular section manager, right? Are they in charge of marketing? All right, how are the leads going? What are the KPIs related to this? And people have a lot of trouble coming up. They ask all the time what are the KPIs? What are the KPIs? And you know we talk about AI a lot. Go ask ChatGPT. Here's the position. Give me a you know, general position description and give me good KPIs and then massage it right. It can't read your mind, but it can, you know, kind of move and groove with the suggestions you give it. So KPIs are absolutely doable. Now, sometimes getting the data is a little harder than you want it to be, but once you overcome that hurdle or at least come up with an alternative, then data should drive those conversations. And the question is like hey, you're doing really well this week. What's going right? Why is this going so well? We want to be able to understand and replicate it. Or hey, you're behind your numbers. What are the challenges you're facing? Maybe they got a bunch of people on vacation or maybe the Google credit card stopped charging. There's all kinds of things that happen in business, but numbers drive decisions and we like to say what's broken in the system, not what's broken in the people. The people want to do a good job In general. If you manage them and you're fair with them, then you're going to find that they want to perform well. They want to do a good job.   Bradley Sutton: I'm sure we talked about more things. We had a good time there at the Balinese massage. That was my first one. I don't like those rough, those really rough ones. The Thai massages Guys, don't get Thai massages unless you like pain, oh my goodness. But I think they put you and Leo like in a couple's massage.   Steve: Yeah, Leo, and I decided that you have the romantic couple's massage. Yeah, it was lovely.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah like I had my room all to myself and then you're like oh, okay, well, I guess we're going to be here in this room.   Steve: How did he get the room? Although we all had the room with no walls, which is like you know bugs and everything else but yeah, it was pretty neat. I think all of the you know for an hour it was nine bucks or something and it was a joy.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, you can't beat that.   Steve: Yeah, it was a delight.   Bradley Sutton: Can't beat that. Great food and everything else. All right. Now switching back to you know, one thing you talked about there and you've been known for the last couple of years is at the forefront of how Amazon sellers and e-commerce entrepreneurs should be leveraging AI, and so that's something that's changing on a weekly, monthly basis. The last year, what are some of the most notable advancements or differences in the world of AI as it relates to Amazon sellers?   Steve: Well, first of all, you know, last year it was kind of the year of ChatGPT, right, everybody heard ChatGPT and this became a synonymous term with AI. But they're just one company. ChatGPT is led by OpenAI, which is ironically not open now. It's closed source, and over that they kind of led the tip of the spear into this new world of AI. There are plenty of others trying to get things done. Google has tried and has had a couple flubs. Amazon itself is now deploying AI for the customer-facing side, as I'm sure many sellers are recognizing. And then there's so many others, including Meta, which has allowed their stuff to go actually open source. The Lama model, which is a large language model built on, like you know, 400 billion or 40 billion, I can't even remember. The numbers get so insane. I think it's 400 billion data points in the Lama 3.1, which is as good as any closed source or paid service, and that is exciting. Groq is exciting. So there's a lot of these engines coming out. For sellers, what they, in my opinion, should be focused on is like how do I make my workflow today better, right, whether it's my own personal workflow which I use AI all the time, or the work, you know process of my colleagues. And it's really important to tell your team this is not to replace you, this is to enhance you. The AI will not replace you, but somebody who uses AI will replace you if you don't get your act together. Like this is really, really an important message. And so you know, the first step is just how do you improve those workflows, and then there are many other exciting steps coming up down the line. You know almost immediately.   Bradley Sutton: Maybe it's because I'm an old fogey, as it were, as far as adopting new things sometimes, but a problem with AI I've had in the past is a similar one, which I remember you kind of talked about in some of your presentations. How you asked AI last year like who is Steve Simonson? And it had your birth date wrong and it said you had done this when you were some author or something like that and this and that. And so you know like, hey, you know, I guess we call those hallucinations. But then, like, you know somebody even you know we're a year later and I'm still seeing similar things like for example you mentioned the Amazon AI you know there's Rufus and then there's ones that summarize reviews and stuff like that, and some of it's just absolutely useless. You know like, no, yeah, customers love how large this seems and they also love how small it seems. I'm like, come on, like this doesn't even help me. So like, is that an accurate assessment or am I being biased? Like, say, hey, why is it taking so long to fix a lot of these hallucinations, or are you seeing a macro? Uh an improvement on those kinds of things?   Steve: Yeah, no question it is improving. So if you start comparing you know ChatGPT three and a half to ChatGPT four to you know 4.0 and some of these other evolving models the hallucinations are shrinking. They won't go away until there's a large enough data set that is just more robust, honestly. So we should understand that it's still lying to you 20% to 25% of the time, just making stuff up out of thin air, and so that should be a real staunch warning to everybody. When you see the thing, tell you something. In my case it had the several book titles that I had written, that I had not written, and no one's written right. So, like I was very impressed with what it wrote, but it was unfortunately it was not me. So expect that hallucinations will continue, but they will continue to reduce over time as well. So don't use that as your obstacle. That ain't going to work. There's so much positive, good stuff. Now some of it has to do with how you structure the prompt or how you use the ins and outs of the data, and it's certainly not flawless. But you know, every day it's getting better, and I've seen like the voice stuff is incredibly good now and I suspect within, let's say, 12 months, all the early adopters will have on their their brand website. They'll have a brand, you know, a message bot that is completely trained on their stuff, right? So all your PDFs, all your products, all your company policies, return policies, shipping, whatever and it will be able to perform chats better than a human on average, right? And, by the way, this has already been proven.   Steve: This year, a company sent 2 million live customers to their new AI chatbot and it had more first touch resolutions, it had higher customer satisfaction and obviously, the cost was less and it was the equivalent of 700 full-time people. So what we want is we want better customer experience and if you can do that with AI, people will come to expect that to be available. So, early adopters within 12 months, you know, and then other people over time, for sure. Message bot chat, you know, 24, seven live, educated bots about your stuff. We're doing this now. It's very powerful. By the way, the larger your company is, sometimes you need this internally, right? Hey, what's the HR policy? What's the vacation and where it can actually interact and go? Oh well, can I get this vacation off? And it will allow it to schedule and do other things. So very powerful stuff that's coming real quick.   Bradley Sutton: We're not going to go into everything he talked about in our module, but just for those who have access to Freedom Ticket, which is pretty much any Helium 10 member let me just show you, guys, where you can go to see his information. Go into Freedom Ticket 4.0 under the module Product Research and Sourcing. Click on the Power of AI for Amazon. We got you in a very flattering screenshot right there.   Steve: That's actually how I talk. My eyes are closed.   Bradley Sutton: Love it, but, hey guys, he goes in-depth there on how it can help Amazon sellers. But let's just stay on this subject and talk about some specific use cases. I think one of the things that was terrible maybe a year and a half ago or a year ago that has gotten a lot better, in my opinion is images. You know, um, and obviously Helium 10 has integrated some things Amazon has integrated into their advertising. They actually require, um, you know, sellers to have a custom images now for, like, sponsored brand ads and things like that. So if you're not, if you don't have this humongous repertoire of, or a repository, I should say, of, all these images, well, AI is kind of like the only way to go. So what kind of different AI tools should Amazon sellers be using now as far as imagery? And then, what are the use cases that you see most useful?   Steve: Well, the first is the idea of simply being able to scale up your images. Right? You can upscale images with very high fidelity that you could not do in the old days, right? I remember watching shows, you know, maybe as far back as the 80s, you know, and the cop shows like, zoom in and enhance, and it's like anybody's ever worked with photos or videos. It's like you could zoom in all you want. You're going to see giant pixels. There's no enhance available, right? But today you actually can upscale those images. So anybody who doesn't have giant zoomable images, I think that's a lost opportunity and within that module, I put in a couple options that will do that upscaling for you. The other thing is coming very fast down the line is, you know, beautiful room scenes or lifestyle shots. They might be called with your product in the shot itself, and so that gives you just unending abilities to position your product in natural life. You know style images. There's any number of other ways you can do it. You know we use, uh, AI images to make themes, right, so you may say well, gosh, I want to have my I don't know my little travel bag and I want to show it with a, a Washington state theme or a, you know, a California theme, and AI will make beautiful, beautiful background imagery. And there's your social media right. You can just do that for every single day or multiple per day. Really incredible. The ideation that this AI brings to the table, I think, is worthwhile, and the quality, as you said, Bradley, incredibly advanced compared to how it was, you know, even a year ago, especially two years ago. So really, really, you know, images should be a high priority for everybody.   Bradley Sutton: I forgot it was a webinar. I was watching Kevin King. He showed some kind of like I'm not sure if it was released yet, but some previews of different AIs for video and it looked real. I was like, how is this not real? So what is available out there that you're not having to pay thousands, you know? Uh, obviously you can get super advanced stuff and you can make movies and everything you know with it, but something that's accessible to like Joe Amazon seller, um, who could you know, perhaps you know, make make a product video with just uploading an image or a short video and then and then make that into a nice video ad or something.   Steve: Yeah, so one of my favorites for this type of purpose is called Invideo.io, and I believe I highlight it in the Helium 10 presentation. But basically you can either just give it a text prompt, right, and it'll make an entire video for you. You say how long do you want it? What's your? You know, are you going on a vertical short format or a horizontal long video format? Right, so you know, one might be more appropriate for TikTok and the other one for LinkedIn or YouTube. And then you can even upload images of your product or videos that you may already have, and it can incorporate those and it will do the music, it'll do the voiceover, it'll do the pulling in a bunch of videos around it, and it can be very, very effective. And so you'll. You know, we use that every single day to make videos that are mostly good quality. There's a couple little pieces. It's like I basically told my marketing folks. It's like it's more important to have the video and get it out there and show some content and then have the final little you know accent or the little you know relic that's on the screen solved, but in video is very, very powerful, and that's just one example. There are many like it.   Bradley Sutton: What else. As far as you know, I think the number one thing for me that even I'm using AI and like even six months ago I probably still hadn't really used AI, but now I use it for almost every single one of my listings is like listing generation. You know, obviously, since Helium 10 has it, I get access to it for free. But hey, you know people, you know you can get free versions of ChatGPT. But that one is really powerful to me because I'm not just for you know, I'm, I'm obviously a native English speaker. I don't need help writing an English listing. But then sometimes I have writer's block and I'm like, hey, let me go ahead and say, hey, make a listing here's, here's my keywords, and I want it like in a funny tone. And then it's not the listing I end up with. But then I'm like, oh, this is a great direction. Let me just, you know, tweak a couple of things. But for me the power is like, hey, I'm going to make a listing in in UK and hey, I need to make one with British. You know English. Hey, I need to make a listing in Spanish. I can kind of speak Spanish, but I'm not a native speaker. So, uh, I can write all my prompts in English and then it'll go ahead and, and you know, make a listing in Spanish what. What are some things that you maybe think that sellers might be leaving money on the table as far as leveraging AI when it comes to their actual copy that they're doing, whether it's listings, whether it's, you know, blogs, et cetera.   Steve: Well, the first thing is I believe that because AI is so new as a tool and a lot of people, myself included, we had negative experiences right. I would generate an image on mid-journey and the guy would have nine fingers right and I'm like so the clear thing that a lot of us said is this stuff is crap, it'll never work, I'm out right. And if you had hallucinations or you had kind of weird images and you haven't revisited it, you're making a mistake. So when you get in there, the next most common mistake is single dimension thinking. Right, you say I need a listing for Amazon for this product and it writes out something that's, you know, relatively generic because you gave it one single dimension listing Amazon, this product. But if you say you know I'm, I want to add a language, like you talked about Bradley, or I want to write this like Dan Kennedy, You know one of the you know very, very best copywriters, or maybe you don't know the name of great copywriters. You go who are the top five copywriters, right, that are direct response copywriters, or who's the best you know, fantasy writers, whatever and then write it in whatever style that you're looking for. So, having a writing style, having an audience that you're trying to reach, is just adding extra dimensions to that. You know, first, single dimension concept right, I just need a listing. No, you need a listing written in a style for a platform to an audience, in a tone, right. And the more of these dimensions you add and there are far more that you could go the more personality comes out of that and that's really what you're looking for. You want the AI to help bring forward your own personality and I highly recommend people add additional dimensional layers and they will have better results.   Bradley Sutton: Switching gears a little bit and, who knows, maybe this conversation will, or the answer might be some version of AI. But you are in, you know you network a lot, you go to events, you talk to a lot of Amazon sellers and I'm sure you have felt the sentiment this year. It's probably, I would say, the most negative it's been in a while as far as new fees and profitability and competition. And hey, now there might be almost like Teemu-ish thing going on where Chinese sellers can sell directly and ship directly and stuff. And so what is your advice to those people who maybe have a little bit negative connotation compared to before as far as selling on Amazon, not sure how they're going to proceed?   Steve: Well, the first is, if they can get on the screen, I'll just pat them on the head. Hey, little buddy, it's going to be okay. So you guys can line yourself up if you're feeling down, and go in for the pat. Listen, I've been around a long time, right? Dinosaur is you know? They're the young upstarts compared to me. So I've seen these patterns happen for multiple generations of e-com. Right, believe me, back in 99, 2000,. It was the glory days. Then 2001, 9-11 happened and it was a nightmare and everyone hated everything. And the dot-com crash happened. And then it got really good again in the mid-2000s and everybody's flying high. And then the housing crisis and financial crisis globally happened and everybody hates everything again. Right and so and again, these continue to happen. And so my, my mission for true entrepreneurs is if you're going to be persistent, if you're going to be in the game, expect ups and downs. Do not play that just straight up line. There is no line that looks like that, even those crazy hockey sticks that you see. That you know from companies there were little iterations of up and down all the way, and I just want people to know that. You know, persistence is really part of the game and you know if you go to relentless.com. Do you know where that goes, Bradley? I do not. It goes to Amazon. And the reason why is because Jeff Bezos said if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you better be relentless so you can check it out right now, relentless.com for anybody out there. That's what you got to be. And so listen, it's okay to. I always say take one lap and go. This sucks, I wish this didn't exist. These fees, this competition, this problem, this whatever. And then get to work and try to solve it or come up with a strategy to get over the obstacle. That's your choice deal with it or get out of the business, and I think serious people have to get serious about business, so they should listen to a podcast for serious sellers. I don't know. There you go.   Bradley Sutton: Double clicking on your little dinosaur comment. You know, if I'm not mistaken, you even at one point kind of retired and got out of the game and then you got back in. How does somebody know when it's time to? You know, I'm not talking about the, you know long sail into the sunset or anything, but hey, it's time to just relax and enjoy life, or no, you know what? I still need something that drives me. You know, because it's not an age thing. You know like, I know people in their late 20s who retire because they've had enough success and they've accomplished what they want to. I know people in their 80s who are still working strong. So how does the entrepreneur get to a point where it's like you know what I'm ready to, kind of like, relax a little bit.   Steve: Well, the first thing is, you know, everybody's got their own context of where they came from and where they want to go. So don't let me project my stuff onto you guys. But I can tell you retirement 1.0 sucked right. It was awful, and it's not a question of you know. Could I do anything I want? Yes, I could, but my friends couldn't come out and play right, and my family got tired of being on vacation. My kids were tired of being on vacation. Now people can go oh, crying me a river. What kind of first world problem is that? But it's still a real problem, right? Because I did not enjoy it. And then I felt guilty, because I'm living a life that anybody would kill for and that doesn't make you feel good. So my brain is not wired to kind of check out. And so retirement 2.0, which I've recently begun testing we're in beta is basically just trying to say well, listen, I don't want to work 80 hours and I don't want to work any hours on things that I don't like. So over time you'll find things that you like or don't like and start positioning even your role within your current company on the things that you like to do. By the way, somebody loves to do the thing that you hate the most. Right, and I had this realization. One of my finest team members she's been with me gosh, it's probably coming up on, you know, 25 or 30 years she loves the thing that I hate the most. So I kept doing the details and very complex Excel sheets and forecasts and inventory and things that I hated doing far too long. When I was able to turn it over to her kind of an exasperation because I'm a terrible manager and I don't know anything. She's like, oh, thank God, I've been dreaming about this and I just couldn't imagine in my own small brain that, like somebody else, would love to do this thing. So remember that there's so many different people. Somebody wants to do the things that you hate to do. So please, the faster you can excuse yourself from the things you hate, get the people who love to do those things and then you'll start to chart. You know, chart your course, whether it is a financial course or a lifestyle course or whatever it is, towards, you know that, that bright future. Me, I, I have to do stuff. My brain will not allow it to stop and you know, that's why I try to spend so much time helping entrepreneurs. I want them to come on vacation with me and let's go play.   Bradley Sutton: That's good advice. You know I asked myself this question. You know, sometime of wondering, hey, well, when is it time to? You know, to hang it up, as it were. But I wouldn't be doing what I do if I wasn't feeling, you know, fulfillment and motivation from it. So as long as I still can, I'm still going to keep on trucking. Now, speaking of pre-retirement 1.0, one of your previous lives you were heavy into sourcing and things like that. I'm sure you keep your pulse on that industry as well. What should Amazon sellers these days be thinking about when it comes to, hey, I'm competing sometimes with Chinese factories. Now, hey, there's tariffs, you know, should I be considering India and Pakistan and Vietnam? Hey, you know, shipping prices are fluctuating like ridiculousness, you know, like as if it were still COVID. You know what's some just general advice you can give sellers who are, you know, thinking about those kinds of issues.   Steve: General advice get in the bunker and prepare for war. It is yeah, it's we still the companies I sold, we still have me and my team still have some supply chain responsibilities. So we're interacting frequently in this space and I just got off the call with some sourcing folks I have in Pakistan just before our conversation, and all of the things you just brought up are annoyances. They're just part of the thing. I did not predict shipping getting spicy again, but I did predict some of what I call kinetic action over the last couple of years. We've said the people who follow geopolitics. We've said there's going to be more kinetic action, which is a nice way of saying people are shooting stuff at each other, which is terrible. What that means is these supply chain disruptions are unexpected. The fact that the Red Sea is kind of closed for business is insane. Nobody had that on the bingo card, right. So everybody's going around the South African. I just saw two ships going around the Arctic on their way to Holland. So from China around the Arctic to Holland, and at some point they'll need icebreakers there. So there are unique things and unique challenges that we face, but it's kind of like take a beat, look at the immediate picture. Right, you have your short term. I got a ship product. Now deal with that, overcome whatever the obstacles, pay what you have to, and then think about all right now, in six months, what does it look like? And is there a way I can avoid this, whether it's resourcing elsewhere, nearshoring or onshoring.   Steve: But I can tell you like right now we have a very complex project and I've got people in Pakistan and India and it is very difficult to solve this problem. But that's why there's a moat right, and everybody who's complaining about how difficult or hard or whatever all of those are moats right. This is your advantage. We're, ultimately, most Amazon sellers are not manufacturing the product ourselves. We have somebody else do that. So what value do we add? We add all the value of solving the problems throughout that supply chain and then into the marketing side, like all of that is our value add, and we either add value and deserve what we make or we don't. And we deserve what we make right, and this is a very important point Our value that we're adding is overcoming all of these problems. So guess what? That's why they you know you get paid. You got to deal with the trouble.   Bradley Sutton: All right, before we get into your final strategies of the day. How can people find you reach out to you on the interwebs out there?   Steve: The awesomeers.com podcast still records videos from time to time and I have a whole founder series directed at folks. Just, it's almost like a little mini course for you. It's free, it doesn't, you know, doesn't take anything to do it. You can find me at parsimony.com just steve at parsimony.com. I spend most of my time on software and AI, trying to smash those things together in an enterprise way, right? So anybody who's doing you know 5 million, 10 million. If you're doing 10 million or more and you don't know what ERP is, you are unnecessarily driving yourself insane. But I recommend not going insane. Systems are better.   Bradley Sutton: Usually better not to. Yeah, yeah, you know.   Steve: I'm not a doctor, I'm just thinking.   Bradley Sutton: There you go, all right. Now, you know, can you give us a couple of 30 or 60 second tips? Could be about traveling, could be about AI, could be about sourcing, anything you want.   Steve: Well, one thing, I mentioned earlier that chat bots are going to be a big thing for early adopters in the next 12 months. But I want to call out one of my favorites, bland.AI is a voice customer service tool. And that company is an example of it. I'm saying this concept is coming to a voice line near you, and especially for brands who have the capacity to pay nine cents a minute to interact with customers. You train it on your own data and then this bot can be a sales person for you, a customer service person, and it's really really good. Bland.ai, amazing types of technology. I'm not suggesting this is the only company. There are many and many more.   Bradley Sutton: Is that the one that at Billion Dollar Seller Summit we were waiting for the helicopter, and then you're like here I'm going to call this, Okay, yeah, yeah, I remember that. I remember that it was kind of it kind of blew me away, yeah.   Steve: It's still the great example of what if you could just call a number and talk to a AI like a human, which is the ironic twist, and stop yelling representative a thousand times right, which is the ultimate nightmare. So all the big companies are moving this direction. I think small brands have this opportunity to, in the same way that AI can supercharge you know, a non-English speaker into beautiful English language listings, which should be a warning to everybody. Small guys can do what big guys do, right, whether it's video, voice messaging, AI levels of playing field. That is the most important point. So if you feel scared, if you feel nervous, talk to your friends, figure out those easy use cases, but don't be afraid of it. Embrace the fear and get to it.   Bradley Sutton: Thank you so much for joining us. We're definitely going to have you back. You know, unless you're on retirement 3.0 and full launch mode, we'd love to have you back next year to see what you've been up to, and I'm sure I'll be seeing you at an event. Are you going to Amazon Accelerate?   Steve: Yeah, yeah that one. I actually live in Seattle, so a good chance   Bradley Sutton: I know, I was like about to say just maybe walk there, ride a bike or something.   Steve: Yeah.   Bradley Sutton: All right, well, I'll be seeing you at Amazon Accelerate along with everybody else and thanks a lot for joining us again.

Product research can be overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be! In this episode, we're diving into the top tools that will make your product research easier and more effective. We've got you covered whether you're looking to spot trending items or dig up your competitors' suppliers.What You'll Learn:

In this episode, the FBA University boys discuss whether outsourcing product research is feasible and why!

Cutting-Edge Product Research in 2024 with Isabella Ritz   In this episode of Seller Sessions, Adam Heist welcomes Isabella Ritz, an expert in Amazon product research and development. They delve into the crucial aspects of launching and selling products on Amazon, sharing insights on leveraging AI, optimizing product listings, and finding the right factories.   Key Discussion Points:   Importance of Product Research: Isabella emphasizes the foundation of successful Amazon selling lies in robust product research and development. The pitfalls of cheap products and the challenges in maintaining margins with high PPC costs are discussed. Using AI for Product Development: Isabella outlines the steps to use tools like Smart Scout and ChatGPT for product research. The significance of analyzing customer reviews and sentiments using AI to tailor product features and marketing strategies. Approach to Budget Allocation: A balanced approach towards inventory and marketing budget is recommended. Investing in higher ticket products (e.g., $69.99 and above) can lead to better margins and less competition. Sourcing and Working with Factories: The challenges in finding reliable factories are addressed, with a recommendation to use brokers for better negotiation and quality assurance. Isabella shares her experience with sourcing agents who provide significant cost benefits over direct communication with suppliers on platforms like Alibaba. Product Launch Strategy: The necessity of programs like Vine for early reviews and the importance of a solid PPC strategy. Utilizing external traffic sources such as Google blogs, Join Brands Live, and social listening tools for comprehensive market penetration. Creating Effective Listings: The shift from feature-based to experience-based product descriptions to enhance customer engagement and align with Amazon's evolving algorithms. The use of tools like ChatGPT to craft compelling and SEO-optimized product listings based on customer feedback and competitive analysis. Pricing and Margin Strategy: Emphasis on higher-priced, differentiated products to maintain profitability amidst rising costs. Detailed approach to calculating cost of goods, shipping, and ensuring a healthy profit margin post all expenses.

In Episode 69 of The Amazon Hustle, I break down Amazon FBA fees, including fulfillment, storage, and referral fees, and share tips on managing these costs effectively. I also dive into setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to keep your Amazon business on track. Tune in for practical advice, real-life examples, and answers to listener questions. Don't miss this essential episode for every Amazon seller! #AmazonFBA #Ecommerce #FinancialFreedom #SuccessStory ————————————————————

In this episode I'm sharing a real-time Amazon FBA product research tutorial for 2024 using my favorite tool: SellerSprite

In this insightful episode, Oksana Khrupa, Chief Product Solution Officer at Linkup Studio, explains the key product design stages. She shares important stages in the product design process and describes some common pitfalls. If you want to create a design for your product successfully, then you may find this advice helpful.    Based on the extensive experience of Linkup Studio's designers and especially our Chief Design Officer, Nataliya Sambir, Oksana covers everything from the crucial initial steps to understanding customer needs in the design process steps and the importance of maintaining flexibility and agility in product design phases. Oksana also shared the vital role of communication and collaboration in these these design process steps. She stressed how important it is to stick to iterative testing and validation in the stages of the product design process. She gave an example of how Linkup Studio navigates this landscape of product design. Join us for an instructive talk about the product design stages and comprehend how to apply these principles. Connect with Oksana Khrupa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khrupaoksana/?originalSubdomain=ua Learn more about Linkup Studio: https://linkupst.com/ Episode Timeline: 00:34 Defining the Product Vision and Business Goals 01:15 Product Research and Analysis 04:07 Ideation 04:52 Design Execution 08:30 Post-launch You may also the episode on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Get to know how to manage the design process steps to ensure each step leads to a successful digital product. Do you want to transform your ideas into impactful digital solutions? Reach out to our team at Linkup Studio for expert guidance in every product design phase. Collaborate with Linkup Studio's Designers:  https://linkupst.com/services/hire-product-designers Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for more updates on the stages of product design and design process steps, along with insights into the latest trends in digital product development. Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Linkupst/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/linkupst  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/linkup-studio/mycompany/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/linkupst/ Visit Us: Website: https://linkupst.com/ Contact Us: info@linkupst.com

In this episode of the Amazon Hustle Podcast, we're focusing on a practical and achievable goal: making your first $1,000 in sales on Amazon in just 30 days. Here's what to expect: Step-by-Step Blueprint: A detailed guide on how to achieve this milestone using retail and online arbitrage. We cover the essential tools, budgeting tips, and sourcing strategies. Mindset for Success: Tips on maintaining realistic expectations and a strong work ethic to ensure you stay committed and overcome common pitfalls. Controversial Insights on Money and Happiness: We explore the idea that money can indeed bring you happiness. I share personal anecdotes and discuss how financial security can reduce stress, provide freedom, and contribute to overall happiness. Personal Journey: Learn how I transitioned from a stressful job to achieving financial independence through Amazon FBA, and how it transformed my life. Tune in to Episode 65 for actionable advice, personal stories, and insights on how financial stability can enhance your happiness. Don't miss out on these valuable tips that can help you reach your first sales milestone and beyond! ————————————————————

Why would the checkoff be involved in dairy food safety? How does this help dairy farmers sell more dairy? Listen as Scott Wallin, Vice President of Farmer Communications, discusses how the checkoff is helping the dairy industry increase food safety education with Tim Stubbs, Senior Vice President of Food Safety and Product Research for Dairy Management Inc. They also chat about the food safety resources available to processors and dairy farmers who are interested in creating their own dairy products, such as artisan cheese making and ice cream.  Tune in to find out! To learn more about the national dairy checkoff and your local dairy checkoffs, please visit www.usdairy.com. Host & Guest: ·         Host: Scott Wallin, Vice President of Farmer Communications, Dairy Management Inc. ·          Guest: Tim Stubbs, Senior Vice President of Food Safety and Product Research, Dairy Management Inc.

In this week's episode, we explore the world of innovation excellence in production. Our guest, Huub Rutten, has been at the forefront of innovation in production, working with numerous companies to advance their production methodologies. As companies navigate the increasing complexities of manufacturing and production, Huub Rutten provides valuable insights into the challenges, advancements, and opportunities in this often-overlooked aspect of innovation.   Huub Rutten is the co-founder and Vice President of Product Research and Design at Sopheon. With over 20 years of experience in language management and a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from Radboud University in the Netherlands, Huub is at the forefront of developing Sopheon's linguistics and knowledge management technologies. He's been leading the charge into solutions for innovation and has even created a deep dive course on innovation portfolio management.   "You need a strategy; you need a standard way of managing your initiatives. And the programs of initiatives should have a discipline to produce data in a certain way."  - Huub Rutten   Today on Innovation Talks: ·     The link between portfolio management and innovation in production is critical for the overall success of a company's product portfolio. ·     Geopolitical changes drive the urgency for modernization and innovation in production processes, making sustainability and independence from external factors more essential than ever. ·     The implementation of professional innovation management is urgently required to address the challenges and complexities of production innovation. ·     The need for business management principles in manufacturing innovation to effectively drive production process improvements. ·     Transparency and collaboration between the product and production sides are crucial to driving innovations that serve the business as a whole. ·     Successful production innovation requires a strategic roadmap and disciplined portfolio management to steer initiatives in the right direction. ·     The intersection of Industry 4.0 and production processes opens up opportunities for automation, digitization, and smarter manufacturing practices. ·     The growing urgency for independence from geopolitical factors is accelerating the need for modernization and innovation in production processes.   Connect with Huub Rutten: ●     Huub Rutten on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/huub-rutten-9958136/?originalSubdomain=nl)       This Podcast is brought to you by Sopheon Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Innovation Talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.   Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/innovation-talks/id1555857396) | TuneIn (https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/Innovation-Talks-p1412337/) | GooglePlay (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9pbm5vdmF0aW9udGFsa3MubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M%3D) | Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=614195) | Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/1dX5b8tWI29YbgeMwZF5Uh) | iHeart (https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-innovation-talks-82985745/)   Be sure to connect with us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SopheonCorp/) , Twitter (https://twitter.com/sopheon) , and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sopheon/) , and share your favorite episodes on social media to help us reach more listeners, like you.   For additional information around new product development or corporate innovation, sign up for Sopheon's newsletter where we share news and industry best practices monthly! The fastest way to do this is to go to sopheon.com (https://www.sopheon.com/) and click here (https://info.sopheon.com/subscribe) .

Huub Rutten is the co-founder and Vice President of Product Research and Design at Sopheon. Huub has over 20 years of experience in language management and holds a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from Radboud University in the Netherlands. He plays a pivotal role in developing Sopheon's linguistics and knowledge management technologies and leads the organization into solutions for innovation. Huub integrates his expertise in linguistics and information technology to innovate language management technology within knowledge-intensive business processes and has recently created an in-depth course on innovation portfolio management. Huub joins me today to discuss managing, governing, and balancing an innovation portfolio. He explains why there is no “ideal” portfolio and how the most desirable portfolio is relative to the regional market sector someone is going for. He describes why developing and investing in production and manufacturing plants is as critical in innovation as product research and development. He underscores why larger companies need to create an innovation management council within their organization. Huub also highlights the importance of bridging the gaps between product portfolios and production portfolios and understanding how they impact each other.   “The simplicity of looking at a portfolio as a series of projects is ridiculous. If you want to add value from a portfolio management perspective, you have to connect with its complexity.” - Huub Rutten This week on Innovation Talks: ●     Huub's thoughts on innovation portfolio balance ●     Thinking about an innovation portfolio as a “living” business object in itself ●     How the direction of a company's innovation portfolio demands a continued SWOT analysis ●     Innovation management in production processes and technology ●     Investing in manufacturing and production plants ●     Balancing a portfolio of portfolios ●     Bridging product and production portfolios ●     Creating an innovation management council within a large company ●     How people are reacting to Huub's courses on portfolio management   Related Episodes: ●     The Importance of Sprint Portfolios with Huub Rutten (https://www.sopheon.com/podcasts-audio/the-importance-of-sprint-portfolios-with-huub-rutten) ●     Pillars of Portfolio Management with Huub Rutten (https://www.sopheon.com/podcasts-audio/pillars-of-portfolio-management-with-huub-rutten)   Connect with Huub Rutten: ●     Huub Rutten on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/huub-rutten-9958136/?originalSubdomain=nl)   This Podcast is brought to you by Sopheon   Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Innovation Talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.   Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/innovation-talks/id1555857396) | TuneIn (https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/Innovation-Talks-p1412337/) | GooglePlay (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ibHVicnJ5LmNvbS9mZWVkcy8xNDY1ODg1LnhtbA) | Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=614195) | Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/1dX5b8tWI29YbgeMwZF5Uh) | iHeart (https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-innovation-talks-82985745/) | Amazon (https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6e12f112-fdc6-499e-be27-bcdd18505859/innovation-talks)   Be sure to connect with us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SopheonCorp/) , Twitter (https://twitter.com/sopheon) , and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sopheon/) , and share your favorite episodes on social media to help us reach more listeners, like you.   For additional information around new product development or corporate innovation, sign up for Sopheon's newsletter where we share news and industry best practices monthly! The fastest way to do this is to go to sopheon.com (https://www.sopheon.com/) and click here (https://info.sopheon.com/subscribe) .

Huub Rutten is the Co-Founder and Vice President for Product Research and Design at Sopheon. With over two decades of experience in language management and a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from Radboud University in the Netherlands, Huub is instrumental in developing Sopheon's linguistics and knowledge management technologies and continues to lead the organization into solutions for innovation. Huub integrates his expertise in linguistics and information technology to innovate language management technology within knowledge-intensive business processes and, recently, has created an in-depth course on portfolio management. Huub joins me today to discuss why, when it comes to innovation portfolio management, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He explains why the front-end of a portfolio needs to be separated from the ‘realization' end of a portfolio. He discusses why the launch strategy of a new product is as important as its development. He also highlights why companies need to focus on establishing the value of realization instead of the value of the front-end of a portfolio, describes why the portfolio leader needs to ensure a portfolio's balance and direction, and underscores why portfolio management has to be executed in combination with concrete decision-making.   “Look at a portfolio—and portfolio management—as a business object in itself, a collection of things, of products, of projects that have value, business cases, and risk.” - Huub Rutten   “Companies who look at portfolio management as a tool for change, transformation, and modernization of a company will be more mature.” - Huub Rutten   “Innovation management is about making promises for the future, and you have to believe in the promise of the whole thing.” - Huub Rutten   This week on Innovation Talks:   ●     The tendency of people to look at portfolios as reports instead of a business object ●     The fundamentals and foundations of innovation portfolio management ●     Distinguishing the difference between the ‘front end' and ‘realization' parts of a portfolio ●     Separating the front end innovation portfolio from your ‘realization' portfolio ●     Feature development and its prototyping ●     Examples of features and components in different products ●     Considering the pipeline value of a portfolio ●     How a portfolio's front end is an important knowledge base ●     Portfolio management as an organizational transformation tool ●     Portfolio leadership and why companies struggle to transform their organization ●     Theory versus practice in portfolio management   Related Episode: ●     AI and machine learning in innovation with Huub Rutten (https://www.sopheon.com/podcasts-audio/ai-and-machine-learning-in-innovation-with-huub-rutten)   Connect with Huub Rutten: ●     Huub Rutten on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/huub-rutten-9958136/?originalSubdomain=nl) This Podcast is brought to you by Sopheon   Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Innovation Talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.   Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/innovation-talks/id1555857396) | TuneIn (https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/Innovation-Talks-p1412337/) | GooglePlay (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ibHVicnJ5LmNvbS9mZWVkcy8xNDY1ODg1LnhtbA) | Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=614195) | Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/1dX5b8tWI29YbgeMwZF5Uh) | iHeart (https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-innovation-talks-82985745/) | Amazon (https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6e12f112-fdc6-499e-be27-bcdd18505859/innovation-talks)   Be sure to connect with us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SopheonCorp/) , Twitter (https://twitter.com/sopheon) , and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sopheon/) , and share your favorite episodes on social media to help us reach more listeners, like you.   For additional information around new product development or corporate innovation, sign up for Sopheon's newsletter where we share news and industry best practices monthly! The fastest way to do this is to go to sopheon.com (https://www.sopheon.com/) and click here (https://info.sopheon.com/subscribe) .

Ever felt like you were just one product away from striking it rich on Amazon? That's the tantalizing possibility we explore as we dive into the art of Amazon product research using Helium 10's Blackbox tool. This episode is your compass to navigate the e-commerce landscape, offering a masterclass on seizing those elusive product opportunities that could propel your financial success to new heights. We're not just talking theory here; Our host, Bradley Sutton is pulling back the curtain on Black Box's massive database, its different keyword and niche exploration tools, and the game-changing impact of Amazon's Brand Analytics data mixed into it. Picture yourself uncovering hidden gems among Amazon's top sellers, skillfully leveraging competitor data like a seasoned pro. That's exactly what we're tackling in this episode, where he breaks down how to analyze a rival's portfolio of products to inspire your own potential Amazon product innovations. We're diving into the deep end of keyword searches, emphasizing those potent long-tail phrases with great search volume. With Bradley's guidance, you'll be equipped to expand your product line strategically, positioning yourself to tap into Amazon's competitive marketplace and watch those sales figures soar. As the journey wraps up, we don't just leave you with a map—we hand you the spyglass to zoom in on niche markets calling out for exploration. Discover how title density can catapult you to the top of Amazon's search results or how a strategic Amazon PPC campaign can breathe new life into your selling strategies. Whether you're a newcomer to the Amazon selling scene or an old hand looking to sharpen your edge, this episode is packed with wisdom that could see your profits skyrocket thanks to Helium 10's arsenal of tools. So buckle up and get ready to transform your approach to Amazon product research!   In episode 553 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses: 01:25 - Amazon Product Research With Helium 10's BlackBox Tool 02:08 - Introduction and Overview To Black Box by Helium 10 05:06 - How To Find Potential Products with Opportunity To Sell 12:41 - How To Research a Brand's or Seller's Top Products 14:59 - How To Find Product Opportunity by Searching for Keywords 21:40 - How To Find Product Opportunity by Looking at the Top 10 Search Results 24:46 - How To Find Product Opportunity Using Amazon Brand Analytics 29:09 - How To Search And Filter Amazon Brand Analytics Keywords 31:48 - How To Find Competitors For Any Amazon Product 35:04 - How To Hyper-Filter Amazon Search Results Without Being on Amazon 37:44 - How To View the History of Items Frequently Bought Together With Other Amazon Products 41:55 - Helium 10 Seller Connect Forum ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

In this episode of the Player Engage podcast, host Greg Posner and guest Erik Ashby, Senior Director and Head of Product Research at Helpshift, delve into the evolving landscape of gaming technology and player experiences. They kick off the discussion with the buzz around GDC, sharing their excitement for the event and the latest trends in the gaming industry. Erik, with his extensive background at Microsoft and Helpshift, brings a wealth of knowledge to the table, particularly in the realm of AI and its integration into customer service, as highlighted by the recent developments at Klarna.The conversation then shifts to the future of gaming, exploring the dynamics of games as a service, the impact of subscription models, and the potential shift in gaming experiences with the rise of personal screens within homes. They also tackle the contentious issue of walled gardens in the tech industry, focusing on the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit and its implications for app marketplaces and consumer choice.Key takeaways from this episode include: The transformative role of AI in customer service and its potential to redefine the industry. The shifting trends in gaming consumption, from big screens to personal devices. The ongoing battle between open ecosystems and walled gardens, with a spotlight on the Epic vs. Apple case.

Give us a call - 888-723-4630 Send us an email - podcast@ebay.com visit us at ebay.com/podcast    Welcome to eBay for Business! This week, Shelley Ball, eBay Product Manager for the Seller Experience Team, brings news of the coming release of the  mobile app version of eBay Product Research (aka, Terapeak) and how ePR can help you source and price smart. Kayomi and Griff answer your questions about a Reserve For Buyer format, Authenticity Guarantee rejection, and how to find accounting for eBay for Charity sales.  To have your questions answered on our eBay for Business podcast, call us at 888 723-4630 or email us at podcast@ebay.com.  To give us feedback, please take our podcast listener survey at (https://connect.ebay.com/srv/survey/a/sellerops.podcast)   00:01 - Intro 06:11 - eBay Product Research For The eBay Mobile App 24:47 - Q&A and Outro   New links for Ep 284 New Feature: Send Automated Offers To Buyers! - https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/Save-time-by-automating-your-offers-to-buyers/ba-p/34329455 eBay Research Tools (Terapeak) - https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/growth/ebay-research-tools eBay Authenticity Guarantee Program - https://www.ebay.com/authenticity-guarantee eBay for Charity - https://www.charity.ebay.com/ eBay for Charity Dashboard - https://www.donation.ebay.com/dashboard     Recurring Links / Phone Numbers / Hashtags Mentioned: 888-723-4630 - Call in Line  eBay Seller News Announcements - ebay.com/announcements eBay Community - ebay.com/community eBay Weekly Community Chat - ebay.com/communitychat eBay Help - ebay.com/help/home eBay Meetups - ebay.com/meetups Managed Payments on eBay - ebay.com/payments eBay for Business Podcast - ebay.com/podcast eBay Seller Center - ebay.com/sellercenter eBay Seller Hub - ebay.com/sh eBay System Status - ebay.com/sts explore.ebay.com facebook.com/eBayForBusiness eBay for Business Podcast Listener Survey - https://connect.ebay.com/srv/survey/a/sellerops.podcast #ebaypodcast

Join us as we explore the intricate art of keyword research with Jason Mclellan, the mastermind behind Vitacup's impressive $20 million e-commerce achievement. This episode is a great resource for anyone looking to enhance their Amazon selling skills, where we unravel sophisticated strategies to optimize your Amazon product's online presence. With tools like Helium 10, Amazon's Brand Analytics, and Product Opportunity Explorer at our disposal, we dissect the methodologies that lead to keyword research excellence, pinpoint niche markets, and boost your brand's visibility. This is not just another chat about keywords—it's an immersive experience of how big sellers operate their Amazon business. We navigate through the ever-changing landscape of consumer trends, driven by the influence of social media platforms like TikTok, to keep your listings fresh and relevant. Together with Jason, we dissect the strategies that make products rank for the keyword "extra shot coffee" stand out in a crowded space. It's about refining, optimizing, and capturing the essence of what your customer is looking for, turning clicks into conversions, and conversions into Subscribe and Save loyal customers. Wrapping up the conversation, we dive into actionable insights for harnessing the full potential of keyword strategies on Amazon and Walmart. It's about more than just being seen—it's about resonating with your audience. We share how to weave the benefits of your products into descriptions that speak directly to your niche and discuss the significant impact of organic search success on platforms like Amazon. So pour yourself a cup of Rapid Fire Protein Coffee, pull up a chair, and let's unlock the secrets to catapulting your products to the top of the search results.   In episode 540 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss: 00:00 - Deep Dive Into Advanced Keyword Research 00:50 - Keyword Research Strategies for E-Commerce Sellers  04:44 - Learning From Successful Amazon Sellers  06:45 - Product Research and Optimization Methodology 07:20 - Product Refinement for Increased Sales  14:38 - Identifying Top Search Terms for Niche  20:37 - Understanding Product Placement Strategies 22:57 - Amazon Keyword Strategy for Coffee Products 24:26 - Amazon Seller Keyword Strategies Training 28:56 - Advanced Keyword Research Strategies for Amazon 34:52 - Top Keywords for Platinum Account Success 40:33 - Keyword Research Strategy Discussion 43:02 - Importance of High Search Volume Keywords 44:27 - Optimizing Amazon Listing for Spanish Keywords ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript   Bradley Sutton: Today, we're going to have an advanced deep dive into some of the top keyword research strategies for 2024, including some strategies from a seller who does over $20 million on e-commerce per year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton and this is the show. It's a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're going to be talking today about Keyword Research. And just like last time, I'm not going to have a bunch of slides that I'm going to be showing. Basically, what we want to do is show you real life examples of how we have done keyword research for some of our products, how we would do keyword research in 2024, and not just in Helium 10, but also we're going to be showing you some things for those who have brand registry and are able to access search query performance. Okay, we're going to be showing you some things that even if you don't have brand registry, a way you can find good keywords for your listing using something called product opportunity explore. Now, a couple of things just really quick. I want you guys to bookmark this one page. I want you guys to go to forum.helium10.com. And that is our new Seller Connect Forum where you're going to be able to interact with different helium 10 members in addition to our Facebook groups that we've already had, we're going to have one where it's right inside of Helium 10. Okay. And so we've got some information already there. I posted some blogs, but make sure to bookmark that guys. And I want you to regularly connect. So before we get started into, I want to go ahead and introduce a special guest that we had teased on today, a real live person who is going to show us his products and his keywords and his keyword research too. You know, how many of you Amazon sellers out there, if I ask you in the chat, what is your product? That's how it is. People usually don't want, the majority don't wanna sell their product. Show their product. Today, we don't have that. So Jason, go ahead and come on and let's introduce Jason. He has been on the podcast before, but for those who haven't met you Jason or haven't seen your podcast episode, go ahead and introduce yourself, please, and brief history on Amazon and what company you work for. Jason: Hi, my name is Jason McCallum. I've been with the last five years of the company called VitaCup. We are a vitamin and superfood -infused coffee and tea. We're probably the number one functional coffee on Amazon right now, a wide variety of modalities. So, there's just always keeping us busy between the K -Cup format, instant copy and ground. So I've been in this market space since the early 2000, starting off in eBay. So I've kind of seen the evolution of the place from eBay to Amazon and where we're kind of going in the future with some other things that are developing on other marketplaces. And just... love online marketplaces. Bradley Sutton: All right, so I take his products too. Here's his VitaCup Extra Shot. This is very important for the morning. So I am running a little bit on empty. So we are gonna test this now because I've stayed up most of last night and then this morning, like I said, did back to back webinars. So I am actually taking this product and we are going to go ahead and I'm going to be drinking it live right here. First of all, stir it. Hold on. This is one of my tests for if products are good or not, like how easy it is to open this. How am I supposed to open this there? Oh, look at that. Easy, easy, open, easy, open.   Jason: Much better than the other one you try..   Bradley Sutton: Last year, I didn't like how to open it. It was like impossible. And it's sprayed all over my face. We won't mention it.   Jason: And we're changing it just for you. No one asked for. Just for you. Yeah, Just for you.   Bradley Sutton: All right. So now I'm making my instant coffee and stirring it up. So again, like I said, the reason why I'm just going overboard here in this product is like I said, hey, Jason is somebody who has opened up his product and listings to us before. And although most Amazon sellers don't want to do that, he is doing that. So we thank him. And now Jason, just as you know, you're kind of a humble guy. So people won't, you know it just by the way you talk. But what kind of gross revenue is your, is VitaCup doing on Amazon and Walmart, if you were to combine both of those marketplaces per year about?   Jason: Around 20 million. Bradley Sutton: About 20 million dollars, all right? So, you know, there might be a couple of people here on the call or on this call who do a little bit more, but I would say most of us, including myself, don't, aren't at that level. And that means we can probably learn a thing or two from Jason. Now, Jason does a lot of the same strategies, maybe that are common practice as far as finding new keywords for listings. But he also has got some unique things that he does as well on and off of Helium 10 on and off of Amazon. So I would like to I would like to go ahead and turn the stage a little bit over to you. What is the first keyword research strategy that you are going to help us? Give us the background first. Like, is this something that helps you find a product? Is it something that you already had the product and now you are like, all right, I got to find this, some keywords that are going to convert for me. Set up the stage here for this first one. Jason: So great question. The first thing I'm going to start off with is product opportunity, explore something that's been released for around the last four years. It's been evolving. I really call it at this point, the Swiss army knife of Seller Central. There's a wide variety of uses you can use for it. We look at it and research it for when we're developing new functional blends and flavors. I try and keep my process simple. A lot of people you know the more complex you get, the harder it is. Starting with product opportunity explore, we're researching and launching a new product. It's great to see what the market potential is, what customers like, what they don't like, sort of those keywords that are driving sales can start doing some research on what's the average CPC projected for those. Is it going to be something that we think we can do some conquesting on keywords and how much is it going to cost and is it even worth it? We started hitting over X amount of dollars for keywords. It really is not that viable. So, and then we also use for refinement, and the example I'm going to show right now is we start off in product opportunity explore and we're continually doing improvements and testing new things on our products and just how we go through and find those keywords and then the competing products on it we're going to be using. We'll use the extra shot coffee as example and then Bradley Sutton: What do you mean by refinement? Jason: Because we're continually refining your content and your images and we utilize the data to improve our images, which improves your conversion and increases your sales dramatically at this point, you got to consider 70, 80% of all Amazon shopping today is done via mobile experience. Your hero and your secondary images are actually more important than your product description, your bullet points and your A plus content at this point because of how everything's delivered. I mean, if everyone has their phone there, you can pull it out and at some point you can get ready by the cup, extra shot K Cups and we can take a look at that as we're going through and why. And so we're utilizing the keywords. We're pulling a product opportunity explorer and the keywords we're pulling in refinement. We're pulling out of Cerebro and we're directly addressing the data that we learned from that into our images, not just our bullet points, not just our titles, and because of that we're seeing a great conversion like extra shot. We just ran this through where we've seen it wasn't one of our stronger performing products, but we've seen in the last 30 days we've seen basically doubling the sales on that my lead, my number one product. In my rolling 30 day sales average over the last two weeks I'm up 16% on sales because we applied the same methodology. You continually have to be updating content. New words enter the ecosystem, Amazon new consumer trends are going on. TikTok drives a lot of different trends depending on the categories you're in, and that introduces a lot of search relevancy. People see things on TikTok or other social media forums. and they come to Amazon looking for it and necessarily you're not just trying to compete for your own space, but when these new trends come on board, sometimes that product isn't there and Amazon will see for those terms that your product is really relevant. And if you've been running for a while and you have some relevancy, you'll start getting delivery. And if you have sharp titles, bullet points and images, your conversion will be great and you'll continue to grow and accumulate on these new trends that are just kind of ancillary to what you're doing. So we see a lot of growth in that. So we're always just in a constant rotation of just testing out all content, all aspects, and then kind of refining and judging, through catalog performance, what your different points in the chain through click through to purchase, conversion, our improvements being made.   Bradley Sutton: Now, a lot of your sales comes from subscribing, save and maybe certain things like sponsor display ads and a lot of other ways. Now, have you ever looked at search career performance for a week and looked at your brand's overall search career performance attributed sales, which is very limited? As far as hey, it has to be from a search, it can't be sponsored brand or sponsor display ad. They have to have clicked it, they have to have purchased it within 24 hours. Have you ever compared the amount of sales for a week that came through search career performance with your overall unit sales to see, like, hey, how much of your keywords or how much of your sales are coming from the normalized searches, which for some people it's 15%, some people it's 50%, some people more.   Jason: You know I haven't broken it down that more when I generally start, because where I generally start to look at what branded searches and everything is what we're running off Amazon. Amazon, there's no like. Amazon actually is great, but if you use it for a while you understand that it's not capturing the full thing. Or if you're just doing, especially doing stuff on TikTok, it's not capturing hardly any of it. So I track by week, by month on branded searches to see if there's any spikes in overall, like wide a cup searched terms, and then we can start to correlate. And if there's a spike in sales we can start correlating. It is what we're running off traffic to educate the consumer about a particular blend or a particular product. Is that having a positive impact in customers coming back and searching for it? Because, as you're saying, like you know, we're running a lot of DSP, we're on search display and so we have all these lovers we're pulling. So we want consumers to touch our page, because we want to get them in the flow, because we want to acquire a new customer and move them to subscribe and save, and that's the way you kind of take the approach on it. So first one is is you're finding the niche in which your product exists, and so mine is looking at extra shot. I know it's already strong coffee. You can search by ASIN and the ASIN will generally allow you to select it. So you pin your product ASIN and sometimes there's enough affiliation. Where it can drive up. So two niches under strong coffee is for the K-Cups and the high caffeine coffee. I've already been through both these. The keywords are kind of similar. We're selling in a K-Cup format so I wanted to focus on that one Initially. You kind of can see the total search volume over the last three, 60 days, kind of how the product niche has been growing, the estimated unit sales on an annualized basis. What we're starting to see more and more is really kind of interesting. Is this return rate percentage. So for other, this is a consumable item and you're not technically supposed to be even be able to return it, so it's always going to be pretty low. But if you're looking at researching products that you're going to potentially get into, you can say, hey, does this statistically have a very high return rate, or does it have very low return rate? Because you're going to want to build that into your business model for the product. It gives the price range and then the kind of that sweet spot, the average price. So you know, from a pricing point of view, when you're thinking about pricing it, where do you fall in line? So we're going to select strong coffee K-Cups and then just there's such. They keep adding a wealth of information to this. What you're going to see on the first tab for products is all the ASINs that make up 90% of the volume that are associated with this strong coffee K-Cups. The second portion is the search term. These are going to be your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can come up with a search term. So you can come up with a search term, your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can kind of start getting an understanding of 90% of the volume that has been driven by the volume that's being driven by 90% of the search terms. So I tend to look at, what are the search terms that are non branded? so definitely, which I'd kind of ignore. But you know high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups. So everyone remember that term high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups, strong coffee K-Cups, extra caffeine coffee K-Cups, double caffeine coffee K-Cups, and then you start seeing some variations. So we've got strong coffee pods search less than strong coffee K-Cups, but still has relevancy. So you know that when people are coming to search they're not always necessarily searching for K-Cups, but they're also searching for coffee pods in some form or another High caffeine K-Cups, double caffeine K-Cups and etc. Also, it's really interesting as you can use this as a tool to monitor how you're performing within a product niche. So for this instance, if you're interested in going after high caffeine coffee K-Cups, this need. All the niches are updated once a week, so over time you can start seeing am I making headway into being one of the number one top click product on it, which is Deathwish, the number two, which is a variety pack of high caffeine coffee pods, or the number three clicked on is Wake the Hell Up, dark Roast. Keep that in mind. Like these are your top keywords. This is where I start with. I get my top keywords and then I'll eventually be going over Cerebro to find out what are those medium to low end keywords, and you're also gonna see these. The beauty of Cerebro is when we run the top three, our product with the top two products in it, we're gonna see a lot of the same keywords. It's gonna give a lot of validity. This real data that we're getting out of Amazon live, from the source, is being mirrored what's coming out of Cerebro, and so it's giving validity to Helium 10's authenticity, to those lower and mid keywords. You can then trust the data that, hey, for long tail keywords, I'm gonna grab these and build them into the text. For just some organic ranking. I wanna run some long tail keyword strategies on my Amazon PPC. I wanna build some of this content into my images. The next thing I go through and I look for keywords customer sentiment is on Customer Review Insights. This is amazing. So what it does, it takes all these products and starts aggregating that. We're on the product page. It starts aggregating the reviews together and looks for themes and looks for what consumers want. So the first one is aggregated haste. We can start seeing what customers are saying, and I love when I see things like just delicious, or the coffee is delicious. That tells me when we're communicating to the end consumer, we have to be communicating in the text, in the imagery, in the bullet points, in the A plus content that it's gonna be a delicious cup of coffee, so talks about flavor quality and we start smooth, so we start stripping this information out and that's what we're gonna use to help build. So in Cerebro what I do is I take my product extra shot plus two or three of the leading ASINs and I run it in Cerebro to get my top keywords.   Bradley Sutton: And for those who aren't familiar with Cerebro, what this is doing is it's pulling up all the keywords where, in the last 30 days, any of these three products have shown up in the organic search results. They have shown up in sponsored search results or that, according to the Amazon algorithm, it suggests is relevant for the keywords, regardless if it's in organic or ranking. And so you know there's what? Oh my goodness, 24,000. 24,000.   Jason: So we don't want yeah, that's pretty Two of the keywords. So, honestly, one of my favorite like filters is just the quick top keywords filter that's built into Cerebro, this, you know it at down to 83 filtered keywords. I do a little bit more refinement. I wanna exclude phrases like death, death wish, black rifle, pistachio and wake. For what I'm trying to do, regardless. This bumps it down to 59. So, and we'll search by search volume, things that are gonna be important we have a shot of espresso in our, so the espresso K cups, that's a great one. Blackout coffee I'm still trying to figure out how do you work out blackout within the text, cause blackout is a branded term, so utilizing it within blackout coffee Same as danger coffee. You're picking up a lot of these things, but then you start seeing like hey, strong coffee, k cups, high caffeine coffee, dark magic I know dark roast is really important to this, so that dark magic is a blend and so on. So you know, I'll go through and I'll delete out the ones that I don't like from this. I'll pull these out and I'll start using both these sets of data, to start building out what this should look like in as far as new content for both imagery and bullet points, and I-.   Bradley Sutton: Now one cool thing. You know you might not have been looking at it, but just in this sense, guys, they're the column on. You guys see on the very right hand side, a match type. This also kind of shows you where if we have seen one of these products doing other placements. You know I said that Cerebro's showing keywords where you have shown up in organic results and sponsor results, but it's not just those two. If they're coming up in one of those widgets that says Amazon recommended, if you see something that says SBV, that means a Sponsored Brand video. So now you can know where your competitors are advertising in the video sections. Maybe the Sponsored Brand ad at the top, maybe if it comes up in highly recommended. So these are other ways where you can kind of look for holes in the market on the keyword side. So right now Jason just showed us two ways. Hey, look at Product Opportunity Explorer. Look at which products are dominating the niche. Remember, like he said, Product Opportunity Explorer isn't the products that make up 90% of the clicks and also the keywords that make up 90% of the clicks of that market. Here he can round out his strategy, using Cerebro to find other keywords that maybe aren't part of that Product Opportunity Explorer niche, but the competitors are probably getting some sales here or there. Do you have anything else for us today, Jason?   Jason: Yeah, I could run through how we're using manager experiments, where we popped it in that we're running experiment now on this board.   Bradley Sutton: Oh yeah, why don't you show that to close things out, and then I'm gonna show some more strategies and then maybe we'll bring it back here for some Q&A.   Jason: Right now we do take that details and we're running on through manager experiments and anyone who is brand registry has the ability to access and manage experiments and you can run A-B testing on titles, bullet points, A plus content and images. So right now we're running one for title and bullet points. As you can see, I totally just deconstructed my listing for this so you'll notice I've started to put in high caffeine coffee pods. Espresso shot. Through some other research I saw not just espresso but espresso shot was very important. Dark roast, strong coffee, espresso powder once again because powder it's a little bit different. People could have used espresso shot and espresso powder, but I saw, just because we had that included in it, there was actually some relevant high volume search relevancy on it. And then you start lacing some of these key words into your introduction double caffeine, strong, smooth and robust. We picked up on strong, smooth and robust dark roast all in like flavor profiles through product opportunity explorer. Customers were specifically using these keywords, so why not use them? They identify with them. It has meaning for them. Then we always have like a functional benefit to our. So we talk about our vitamin B12, there's a sub niche called healthy coffee that we dominate. So I always like layering in healthy coffee, and then we talk about our pods. All this is going to be baked in. It's going to start as we start driving advertising more and more focused on it, on these keywords. We're doubling down to try and gain organic relevancy. Amazon will pick on it, our AI will pick up on it, and this is kind of the process we use.   Bradley Sutton: Love it. All right, Jason, thank you so much for sharing that. I want it. Instead of just being like, oh, this is going to be a Helium 10 training where just Helium 10 employees are showing stuff, I want to show, hey, Jason is a real live Amazon seller with a real live product, and these are the strategies that he's using to get ahead. You don't just randomly achieve the success of making 20 million a year on Amazon and Walmart without some solid keyword strategies, and those are some of the things that he has. Now I want to show you guys some common and some also maybe off the wall keyword research strategies in the next 10 minutes and then we'll open it up for Q&A. One of the things I want to show you and this I mentioned before some things you have to have a brand registry for the first thing that Jason was talking about Product Opportunity Explore. You don't need brand registry for the thing that he showed about how to use the experiments with his manager experiments and showing the alternate kinds of titles and bullet points that had different keywords in it. You need brand registry for that. This next one I'm going to show you also requires brand registry and it's because it's utilizing brand analytics. Now I could do this inside of Amazon, but it's much easier to do it inside of Helium 10, because I can search multiple weeks a lot faster. So let me go ahead and share my screen and while he was talking I just loaded up that search for one of the keywords yeah, strong coffee K cups. So I'm just going to take and look at VitaCup. Right here at the very top is advertising. Let's say I'm not VitaCup and I'm just going to copy him and copy his ASIN, and I want to go ahead and see where he is, has been ranking or one of the top three clicked. All right, now. What I want everybody to do is, right now, go into Black Box inside of Helium 10. And then, if you have a Diamond account, all right. I don't think it is available for Platinum just yet, hit this new tool called ABA top search terms. ABA stands for Amazon Brand Analytics and I'm going to be pasting in a few ASIN. So let's go ahead and put that ASIN in here. Did I copy it? I must not have copied it. Oh, there, it is. Okay, I pasted it and let's go ahead and take in the red alert coffee. This guy is selling about a thousand units a month and maybe a couple more ASIN'S here. Death wish, he was mentioning death wish, or there we got three ASIN's from the top ones. All right, so now what I can do is I'm going to look, let's just say, going to February 4 to February 10. I'm going to hit apply filters and now what is going to come up is where any one of these products was one of the top three clicked products for that keyword. Now, not that many keywords came up, only 17, because I only put in three. But imagine I could have put here maybe 20 or 30 products and then for any week or any month I can say hey, show me where these are these products. At least one of them was one of the top three clicked and I could say I want to see the ones where at least maybe one ASIN had more than 1% of the conversions, meaning that there's got to be some conversions on there and theoretically, all keywords said have that, but there might be some like lower level keywords that have no conversion. Sure enough, there was one, because now there's only 16 keywords left here. But look at this I am now looking at any keyword where at least one of these products is one of the top three clicked, and I could start going in deep here and seeing all right, what is the history of how this product, who are the top three clicked? Like, for example, look at this one protein coffee K cups. All right, protein coffee k cups is not a branded term, and so I'm looking at the Search Volume All right, 735. This is not that much search volume. Is this something that's newer or is it trending? I personally have not seen this keyword before and I'm looking at the last year on Amazon and I could see that, hey, it's actually gone up from like in the 200s and 300s and slowly it's on the rise. So, right off the bat, you know this is not some crazy amazing keyword 735 searches but it's on the upper trending. You know I'm probably one of the ones who's trying to search for out because I'm looking for like hey, is it? Is there a chance to get some protein when I'm drinking coffee, you know? So I would keep looking at this keyword. Now I'm like all right, well, who has been some of the ones who are converting for this keyword? So I click the total click share chart in Helium 10 for the keyword. And now, if I'm looking on a month to month basis, I just put my mouse over and I could see who are the top three clicked products and are they similar to my product? Right, like, for example, look at here in the month of December, VitaCup Keto Coffee Pods was the top the sick, the third most clicked product. Now who is dominating, though? The rapid fire protein coffee. Right, they've got protein in their title of their product, so it's no doubt that somebody searching this is actually a great example. I completely just by chance, found this is a perfect example of keyword research and how it's important and how it actually kind of like will give you an idea about who's going to be one of the best products here. Think of somebody who is actually typing in protein coffee, k cups. All right, I look at the search results and I see all three of these products this Corelatte one, the VitaCup Keto one and the Rapid Fire Protein one. But just the fact that in their title and the name it just so happens to be the name of the product is protein coffee, it's going to get them a lot more clicks. And then, look at that. I don't have to guess if it did or not. Look, amazon is telling me this product got 28% of the clicks right and total makes total sense. The VitaCup one is just a keto. One might give some protein but it only got 6% of the click. It's still top three. But you can understand now all of a sudden why this product is dominating. So that means if I really wanted to dominate this product I might have to think I can just make up protein and say, oh yeah, my product is. You know, this extra shot. VitaCup is a protein coffee. If it's not a protein coffee, that's false advertising, right. But if I'm developing a product I really got to take that in consideration. Now this is how Keyword Research ties in even to your product development. Right, I've got to think about putting that keyword in my title if I want a chance at kind of like busting into this rapid fire proteins market share here. I can also see the history here on the right hand side about how organic and sponsored rank ties in to being one of the top three clicked. For example, this protein coffee in December, in January, in November, they, for this keyword, were not running any sponsored ads. Nowadays, you know, somebody might think you know you got to be running, you got to be having a high bid on this, on any keyword that you want to have a big sales, but for whatever reason, this protein coffee comes like nah, I'm good, I don't need to do sponsored after this keyword because I'm dominating without it right Now. What about VitaCup? VitaCup here in December. This is pretty cool, guys. All right, this is exactly why combining Helium 10 data with Amazon data is so cool. VitaCup was one of the top three clicked ASIN's, right. The number one clicked ASIN was this protein coffee. Rapid Fire All these brands are really great, right,Rapid Fire. And then you're looking oh, no wonder they're the top click ASIN. They were Organic Rank one. Now, if you were just looking on Cerebro, right, and you saw our Keyword Tracker and you saw that VitaCup Genius Coffee was ranked 12th, you might think, oh, there's no way it's one of the top three clicked because it's kind of like towards the middle of page one. But this is one of the top three clicked and you don't have to wonder why or how. Look at the sponsored rank average. So in December of this month, this variation family was showing up on average right there on the top. So you see how, in some situations, organic rank is all is all that's needed, but if VitaCup was relying on their organic rank only to get clicks for this keyword, would they be one of the top three clicked? Absolutely not, because their organic rank is all the way down here, but they were able to be one of the top three clicked because of their high sponsored rank. So this is, guys, this is like not your grandfather's keyword research strategy we're talking about today. This is like next, next, next level, where you're going into seeing who are the top click to try and like, understand, buy your intent, and then now you're reverse engineering the strategy with how these different companies were able to dominate this keyword. For this company, it's a matter of hey, they named this product after this keyword. It's in their title, right there at the beginning. They're able to dominate this. For VitaCup, it's completely opposite. Their path to being one of the top three clicked was through sponsored ads. So for every product there's always going to be different strategies, but this is the once you guys are experienced sellers, this is kind of the level of keyword research you need to do. It's not just hey, let me throw in an ASIN and a group of ASINs in a Cerebro. You obviously have to do that, exactly what Jason showed and find those 24,000 keywords and then whittle that down into what are the most important ones. But you also need to take a step farther and start using Product Opportunity Explorer and the Brand Analytics Data to kind of understand, well, what are companies doing after they find that keyword and how are they getting their sales. So that's Brand Analytics. For anybody that has the Diamond plan, I highly recommend it. Now let's say you're on the newer side and you just have a Platinum account, which is totally fine. What is the easiest way to get the top keywords? Let me just show that. Let's go back to that page that's Coffin shelves. Where are we at More Coffin shelves? Where's my coffee one? Here we go, all right. So I'm going to choose the top products on this page that I just want to go ahead and measure my success and my keywords versus them. Or maybe I'm just I don't have my own coffee product yet and I want to know what are the top products here. And, by the way, you can still see there's VitaCup still right there with their Genius Cup right there as one of the top three sponsored ranks, and this is kind of cool. I bet that Jason is actually spending slightly less than Deathwish Coffee and what is his wake the hell up Dark Roast, but he's probably getting a very similar click-through rate. You don't have to be position one or two on sponsored to be one of the top clicked or sponsored Dial back that spend, be the number three or number four and you'll still get almost the same kind of click-through rate and clicks. Let's go ahead and hit Red Alert. I got the Deathwish and I don't want to do Pete's. Let's do community coffee, right. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit run Cerebro. Now this is going to open up in Cerebro, kind of like just what he showed. Now I wasn't paying attention to. If these products are all pods and if they're definitely competitors I'm assuming they are. But you guys need to really take a closer look at who you are putting into Cerebro and make sure that you're doing very similar competitors or that, like Jason was talking about, you're pulling it from Product Opportunity Explorer and you know by definition they're in the same niche. But I just picked four random ones just from the search results, but within seconds here, or a minute or so, I'm going to be able to get where all of these keywords or all of these products, the keywords that they are ranking for and that they're doing sponsored ads. The very first thing that I'm going to do once this shows up is I'm going to hit the button top keyword right here, top keywords so everybody can do this anytime they run Cerebro, and basically what it's doing is it's like hey, where are most of these keywords are ranking for, or most of these products ranking for on these keywords very highly? And look at that. I came up with 24 keywords and a lot of these are branded. But, just like Jason showed, there's a lot of non-branded keywords here as well, like, for example, high caffeine coffee cake. I'm almost positive. He literally found that in Product Opportunity Explorer and I guess randomly guys, this is the first time I've ever searched these things in my life. It just shows how Helium 10 is validated by the Amazon data. That exact keyword that he found is showing up right here Strong coffee. There's the other keyword that he found that came up right here Protein coffee K cups. That's the keyword that I had found just on my own that I put up here. So these are the top keywords. Another thing, though I like to do, this obviously, is going to just show tons and tons of branded ones. I like hitting this button Opportunity Keywords, because, instead of looking at the products or the keywords that everybody is ranking highly for, this button allows me to see, in seconds, products where only one or two of these competitors are ranking high and, by definition, of course, the majority of those are going to be branded. But every now and then I'm going to be able to see unique keywords that other competitors might not be able to see, they might not be paying attention to. Like here, instead of k cups, here's a keyword that I didn't realize. Some people are typing in kpods. Now why did this kpods keyword come up here? Let's take a look at the Relative Rank here. All right, perfect, look at this. I don't know who is who, but look at this Of these top competitors. Let's say these guys are all kind of equal, competing with each other. Do you see where everybody is ranked here on this page? One of them is 78, one is 107, 241, 245. There is only one of these competitors getting sales from this keyword cake pods with no spaces, and they're ranked on page one, position 12. What does that mean? That means that if I were to kind of like, do a campaign on this keyword. It potentially could be easier for me to rank for this because I'm not having to go up against all of my main competitors. So that's why this button, guys, is a sleeping giant of a button right here. Opportunity keywords let's see if we can find any of the hidden gems in here that aren't branded keywords. Let's take a look here: Coffee pod, bulk k cups. Maybe some of these products think, well, we're not really bulk so we don't think we should put that in our listing. But there are some people, for one of these products at least, where they are heavily ranked for bulk k cups, even though they're not really a bulk and they're actually getting sales from it. So this is just another way to get some keywords that can help you. I want to give you guys some deep dive strategy sessions on keyword research. To kind of round out your on Amazon and off Amazon, your on Helium 10 and off Helium 10 strategy. So let me go pull up those episodes right now. We did a three-part keyword research series on Helium 10 a few months ago. That really is going to help you, in about three hours of time, get all of the keyword research tips that you need. So you guys got a pen handy, write this down. And the way you can find this is everybody, go ahead and pull out your phone. If you have an iPhone, type in podcast and open up the podcast app. Or Spotify if you have a Spotify and type in Serious Sellers Podcast, all right, type in serious sellers podcast, and then go ahead and hit subscribe. And then the ones I want you guys to look at are these three episodes here keyword research masterclass 100% free, doesn't it? And you don't have to be a Helium 10 member to listen to these. All right. Episode 506, 507, and 508. All right, so again, go to the podcast, Serious Sellers Podcast. Type in episode 506, 507, and 508. If you guys are more visual, it's h10.me/506 , h10.me/507, and h10.me/508 . If you go to those links you'll go to a page where you can actually even see the video too of it. But either way, subscribe to the podcast and go to those episodes and maybe next time you're on your treadmill or you're taking a drive or a run, listen to those and then go back later to the video to kind of like have the overview. But what Jason gave and what I gave are maybe only like six or seven different research strategies. We have over 33 in those videos that will help round out your knowledge, and not everything is Helium 10. Half of them just have to do with Seller Central. Liz says I'm a newbie to Helium 10. I want to know where to start. All right, the podcast is a great way to start. If you don't have your first product yet, product research is what you want to get into. I would go and go into Blackbox and look at hit the Learn button, Liz, and watch all the videos there. And definitely, if you're brand new to Amazon altogether, don't even go there first. Go into the Freedom Ticket, go into the Learning Hub. At the very top of your Helium 10 dashboard you'll see a button called Learning Hub or Freedom Ticket. Hit that and start going through the training there. That'll give you a good way to start. So, Jason, are you looking at what's more important that, a high search volume or not a high search volume, a trending up search volume, kind of like that protein K Cup, or a keyword that already has like 3000 searches? Compared to that one only had 700 and thus has a lot more sales. Which one is more important for you?   Jason: It depends. So let's if we take protein. We actually released a protein coffee slim protein coffee back in December. That's because of the AI and the way Amazon runs broad and other campaigns, it started picking up on that search term. So it started delivering on Genius. Genius gets delivered on every new search term that gets in. It's trying to find relevancy just beyond what other one product you're carrying. So we developed slim protein coffee because we saw a high search increase on protein coffee in general, which was a trend off Amazon as well. So but I also have baked into our slim protein coffee high search terms such as instant coffee and some other ones. So it's kind of a mixture of both. I always like high search term keywords built into titles and bullet points because it's going to bake in some organic relevancy that it's gonna be cheaper for me to try and build long-term. That it is versus advertising on.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent. Does Amazon auto translate keywords from different languages? One of my organic ranked keywords is Spanish, but I never added to my listening Great question, and the answer is yes. So in America and different countries, it's different languages. In America, Spanish is the main second language that Amazon is on, and if you turn your Amazon browser into Spanish, it automatically translate your listening and then those keywords a lot of them you are already indexed for, and so sometimes, if it doesn't, I highly recommend looking for organic keywords that you're ranking for, and then what you might have to do is adjust your listing optimization, because the Amazon auto translator sometimes doesn't use the exact phrases, and so you might not be that relevant to the Amazon algorithm, even though you're indexed for it. So definitely look at what are the top Spanish keywords and then, if your translation is not good, talk to Amazon and see if you can get your translation updated with better keywords. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the extra shot I had today, and thanks to everybody for joining us today. Hope you guys enjoyed this session. We'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye now. I'll see you guys next time.  

In this episode, host Joie Roberts interviews Lauren Payne, an aspiring seller who has successfully launched her first product on Amazon. They discuss Lauren's background in real estate and her decision to venture into Amazon FBA. Lauren shares her experience in building her brand and listing, including the challenges and successes she encountered. They also talk about the importance of reviews and the strategies Lauren used to obtain them. The conversation covers product research and selection, as well as the balance between real estate and Amazon FBA. Lauren emphasizes the value of continued learning and training, and the significance of keyword research and optimization. Finally, Lauren offers advice for aspiring sellers and shares her plans for the future.   Takeaways Building a brand and listing on Amazon requires attention to detail and a focus on quality. Obtaining reviews is crucial for success on Amazon, and strategies like the Vine program and automated review requests can be effective. Product research and selection should be driven by personal passion and interest, as well as market demand. Balancing a side hustle like Amazon FBA with other commitments, such as a full-time job or family, requires careful time management and prioritization. Continued learning and training are essential for staying up-to-date with the latest strategies and techniques in the Amazon FBA space. Keyword research and optimization are key to improving visibility and driving organic traffic to Amazon listings. Aspiring sellers should be fearless and willing to take risks, while also seeking guidance and support from experienced sellers. Success on Amazon is a journey, and it's important to stay motivated and keep pushing forward.   Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Background 03:21 Building a Brand and Listing 05:11 Launching and Reviews 06:09 Product Research and Selection 09:18 Balancing Real Estate and Amazon FBA 11:10 Continued Learning and Training 12:20 Keyword Research and Optimization 16:48 Advice for Aspiring Sellers 17:33 Conclusion and Future Plans   For Helium 10 discount:  www.AMZProductSpotter.com   Contact Joie on Instagram:@JoieRoberts.official Interested in learning how to build your own Amazon business from the leaders in the Amazon industry? Book your free consultation with Joie and team at www.CallAMZ.com

In this episode, we're speaking with Cody McGuffie. Cody is the host of the Etsy Seller Podcast and creator of EverBee, a powerful product analytics tool for Etsy and Shopify sellers. Join us as we discuss all things product research, design research, and leveraging powerful tools to sky rocket your print on demand and apparel sales. Let's go! #printondemandplaybook LINKS: Try EverBee for free, ecomlegendsacademy.com/everbee - The product research tool used by 6 and 7 figure sellers to find out what products are trending and to uncover bestsellers right now. Join the waitlist for 6 Figure Founder, 6figurefounder.com/coaching - The #1 community for ambitious t-shirt and apparel brand owners who are serious about building a profitable online business. THANK YOU FOR SUBSCRIBING .. AND YOU CAN DO MORE! Here's how you can make a huge difference: Leave us a review on Apple Podcast Share your favorite episodes with others Repost this episode to your social media Tag us in your posts with #printondemandplaybook Invest in yourself and you'll never lose. Have questions? Please send us an email at support@6figurefounder.com FOLLOW: Cody McGuffie:- Podcast: The Etsy Seller Podcast - Instagram: @everbee.io- TikTok: @everbee.io Adrian:- Instagram: @ecomlegendsacademy- TikTok: @adrianvonarx- YouTube: @adrianvonarx8513 Kerry:- Instagram: @kerryegeler- YouTube: @kerryegeler

Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and eCommerce. He started his first eCommerce business out of his college dorm room and has sold over $30 million online. He is now the co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre-vetted freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing, and much more. He regularly appears on leading podcasts, such as Entrepreneur on Fire, and speaks at live events about online hiring tactics. Nathan Hirsch also founded Ecombalance.com, a monthly bookkeeping service for Ecommerce Sellers/agencies, and OutsourceSchool.com, where he teaches his hiring processes. We will be talking about mindset of a successful entrepreneur.  Let us pick his mind on becoming an entrepreneur. Connect with Nathan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathan.hirsch/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathanhirsch99/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/NathanHirsch99   Connect with Nathan's Free Resources: https://www.outsourceschool.com/nathan/ Connect with TrioSEO: https://trioseo.com/ Connect with Outsource School: https://www.outsourceschool.com/     Want to sit down with Anatoly 1 on 1? Even though I keep saying I AM NOT A GURU, many of you ask to sit down and pick my brain. I have decided to do a 1h HELP calls. There are 2 purposes: 1st to support you in your journey and second also to be able to break even on the production of this podcast (each episode editing, marketing, guest research etc takes about $60 - $150 to produce). Now you can schedule 1h with me, and we can talk about launching products, hiring, product research, keywords, mindset, how I did an Ironman or anything at all. Link is here: https://calendly.com/anatolyspektor/anatoly-connsulting-1h?month=2022-08   ANATOLY's TOOLS:   Product Development: Helium10 - I use it for Product Research, Keyword tracking and Listing Optimization . SPECIAL DEAL: Get 50% your first month or 10% every month: http://bit.ly/CORNERSIIH10 Pickfu - I use it for split testing all of my products and for validation ideas . SPECIAL DEAL: First split test 50% 0ff  https://www.pickfu.com/10mj   Trademarking: Trademark Angels - For all my trademarking needs. SPECIAL: Mention Anatoly and 10MJ podcast and get 10% Off your trademark.   Fiverr - I hire my 3dMockup person and images label designer here on Fiverr - http://bit.ly/10mjFIVERR Upwork - I hire people long term on Upwork - upwork.com Loom.com - for creating SOP's, I record everything on Loom and give to my VA's Keepa.com - to track historical data such as prices   ANATOLY's 3 Favorite Business Books: DotCom Secrets by Russel Brunson - I think this is a must read for every online entrepreneurs - http://bit.ly/10MJDotCom 4 hours work week by Tim Ferriss - This book changed my life and made me become an entrepreneur - http://bit.ly/10MJ4WW The Greatest Salesman In The World by Og Mandino - Old book but it goes to the core of selling -  http://bit.ly/10MJGREATSM   DISCLAIMER: Some Links are affiliate, it costs you nothing, but helps to keep this podcast on the float   Have questions? Go to https://www.10millionjourney.com   Follow us on: Instagram: @10millionjourney Twitter: @10miljourney

This powerful clip from THINK Business LIVE with Jon Dwoskin and Cory Hymel, VP of Product & Research at Gigster, identifies and provides insight into overcoming “stuck” points in business. Get real-time, relatable coaching and practical advice for navigating hurdles to boost business growth. Watch the full episode Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big!   Connect with Cory Hymel: Website: https://gigster.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/coryhymel Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coryhymel/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-hymel/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TryGigster/   *E – explicit language may be used in this podcast.

Digital Dropshipping Product Research STEP - BY - STEP (How To Start A Digital Store)" is your ultimate guide to mastering the art of finding the perfect digital products for your dropshipping business. Whether you're just beginning your journey in the digital commerce space or looking to refine your product selection process, this video is packed with actionable insights and step-by-step instructions to set you on the path to success.We cover everything from understanding market demands to evaluating potential products, ensuring you have the tools needed to make informed decisions. In this detailed guide, we dive deep into the strategies and techniques for effective product research in the digital dropshipping realm. Learn how to analyze trends, use research tools, and identify profitable niches that align with your business goals.Plus, we'll walk you through setting up your digital store, optimizing your product listings, and marketing your digital products to the right audience. If you're serious about starting or scaling a digital dropshipping business, this video will provide you with a solid foundation to build upon.#DigitalDropshipping #ProductResearch #OnlineStoreTips

Reed Larsen has been in commercial and residential real estate finance, development, construction and management for more than 20 years. Owner of multiple successful businesses and real estate projects. Manager of several multi-million dollar development and construction projects around the country He is a seasoned executive overseeing HR, IT, marketing and web design, bookkeeping and accounting, private and institutional finance, investor relations, and product development. Reed's expertise includes Japanese language skills, owners association management, non-profit association management, real estate paper and portfolio management, commercial real estate project development and management   Connect with Reed: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedlarsen/ Email: reed@voltagedm.com   Connect with Voltage Digital Marketing:  Website: https://www.voltagedm.com/   Want to sit down with Anatoly 1 on 1? Even though I keep saying I AM NOT A GURU, many of you ask to sit down and pick my brain. I have decided to do a 1h HELP calls. There are 2 purposes: 1st to support you in your journey and second also to be able to break even on the production of this podcast (each episode editing, marketing, guest research etc takes about $60 - $150 to produce). Now you can schedule 1h with me, and we can talk about launching products, hiring, product research, keywords, mindset, how I did an Ironman or anything at all. Link is here: https://calendly.com/anatolyspektor/anatoly-connsulting-1h?month=2022-08   ANATOLY's TOOLS:   Product Development: Helium10 - I use it for Product Research, Keyword tracking and Listing Optimization . SPECIAL DEAL: Get 50% your first month or 10% every month: http://bit.ly/CORNERSIIH10 Pickfu - I use it for split testing all of my products and for validation ideas . SPECIAL DEAL: First split test 50% 0ff  https://www.pickfu.com/10mj   Trademarking: Trademark Angels - For all my trademarking needs. SPECIAL: Mention Anatoly and 10MJ podcast and get 10% Off your trademark.   Fiverr - I hire my 3dMockup person and images label designer here on Fiverr - http://bit.ly/10mjFIVERR Upwork - I hire people long term on Upwork - upwork.com Loom.com - for creating SOP's, I record everything on Loom and give to my VA's Keepa.com - to track historical data such as prices   ANATOLY's 3 Favorite Business Books: DotCom Secrets by Russel Brunson - I think this is a must read for every online entrepreneurs - http://bit.ly/10MJDotCom 4 hours work week by Tim Ferriss - This book changed my life and made me become an entrepreneur - http://bit.ly/10MJ4WW The Greatest Salesman In The World by Og Mandino - Old book but it goes to the core of selling -  http://bit.ly/10MJGREATSM   DISCLAIMER: Some Links are affiliate, it costs you nothing, but helps to keep this podcast on the float   Have questions? Go to https://www.10millionjourney.com   Follow us on: Instagram: @10millionjourney Twitter: @10miljourney

Vince Montero is the Senior Marketing Manager for Helium 10's PPC platform, Adtomic. During his 16 year career, he worked in digital marketing as a consultant, salesperson, business development director, and marketing manager. He built his expertise around the latest ad-tech in both the US and the UK. As a Digital Advertising consultant since 2016, he's focused on helping sellers of all stages advertise more effectively on Amazon and brought that experience to Helium to design the ultimate PPC management solution.   Connect with Vince: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmontero Website: https://www.helium10.com Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/helium10/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Helium10Software/ Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpBvckYg2UXArcfzRcjpPjw/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/helium_10 FREE PPC AUDIT: https://www.helium10.com/tools/free/ppc-audit/   Want to sit down with Anatoly 1 on 1? Even though I keep saying I AM NOT A GURU, many of you ask to sit down and pick my brain. I have decided to do a 1h HELP calls. There are 2 purposes: 1st to support you in your journey and second also to be able to break even on the production of this podcast (each episode editing, marketing, guest research etc takes about $60 - $150 to produce). Now you can schedule 1h with me, and we can talk about launching products, hiring, product research, keywords, mindset, how I did an Ironman or anything at all. Link is here: https://calendly.com/anatolyspektor/anatoly-connsulting-1h?month=2022-08   ANATOLY's TOOLS:   Product Development: Helium10 - I use it for Product Research, Keyword tracking and Listing Optimization . SPECIAL DEAL: Get 50% your first month or 10% every month: http://bit.ly/CORNERSIIH10 Pickfu - I use it for split testing all of my products and for validation ideas . SPECIAL DEAL: First split test 50% 0ff  https://www.pickfu.com/10mj   Trademarking: Trademark Angels - For all my trademarking needs. SPECIAL: Mention Anatoly and 10MJ podcast and get 10% Off your trademark.   Fiverr - I hire my 3dMockup person and images label designer here on Fiverr - http://bit.ly/10mjFIVERR Upwork - I hire people long term on Upwork - upwork.com Loom.com - for creating SOP's, I record everything on Loom and give to my VA's Keepa.com - to track historical data such as prices   ANATOLY's 3 Favorite Business Books: DotCom Secrets by Russel Brunson - I think this is a must read for every online entrepreneurs - http://bit.ly/10MJDotCom 4 hours work week by Tim Ferriss - This book changed my life and made me become an entrepreneur - http://bit.ly/10MJ4WW The Greatest Salesman In The World by Og Mandino - Old book but it goes to the core of selling -  http://bit.ly/10MJGREATSM   DISCLAIMER: Some Links are affiliate, it costs you nothing, but helps to keep this podcast on the float   Have questions? Go to https://www.10millionjourney.com   Follow us on: Instagram: @10millionjourney Twitter: @10miljourney

Dive into an engaging speed round from THINK Business LIVE with Jon Dwoskin and Cory Hymel, VP of Product & Research at Gigster. These quick-fire questions and candid answers reveal best advice, favorite books, and personal insights. Watch the full episode Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big!   Connect with Cory Hymel: Website: https://gigster.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/coryhymel Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coryhymel/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-hymel/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TryGigster/   *E – explicit language may be used in this podcast.

This powerful clip from THINK Business LIVE with Jon Dwoskin and Cory Hymel, VP of Product & Research at Gigster, identifies and provides insight into overcoming “stuck” points in business. Get real-time, relatable coaching and practical advice for navigating hurdles to boost business growth. Watch the full episode Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big!   Connect with Cory Hymel: Website: https://gigster.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/coryhymel Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coryhymel/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-hymel/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TryGigster/   *E – explicit language may be used in this podcast.

In episode 502 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Swapneel discuss: 00:00 - Selling on Amazon And Scaling Rapidly 14:18 - Product Launch Strategies and International Market Approaches 12:47 - Scaling a Multimillion-Dollar Business Solo 17:52 - Product Research and Potential Products 20:39 - Issues With Suppliers and Product Lifespan 23:42 - Product Launch and Maintenance Strategies 34:40 - What's Next For Swapneel? 38:52 - Swapneel's 60-Second Tip ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got a very unique seller. He sold over $10 million over the last couple of years, has 60 products in over 10 marketplaces and launches a new product every month. Guess how many employees he has? Zero. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Black Box by Helium 10 houses the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world. Outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash black box. Don't forget you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and from the other side of the world. We've got a serious seller here that is joining us for the first time in the show. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, since it's your first time on the show. Swapneel: Hi, my name is Swapneel and I'm from India. Been selling on Amazon from the year 2014 and, as a full term, from last four years. Bradley Sutton: So yeah, were you born and raised in India? Swapneel: Yeah. What part Rajasthan, Jodhpur. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. And have you lived all your life there or have you moved around at all? Swapneel: Yeah, so when I was like 19 years old I went to New Delhi like for my university for five years and then right now I'm like kind of digital nominate, so I don't really live here anymore, but just maybe like two, three months a year just to visit my family, because my family still live here. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Well, what did you go to a university for? Swapneel: I did law so. Bradley Sutton: I wanted to be a lawyer. Swapneel: Yeah, so I did law for five years and I specialized in intellectual property rights. Bradley Sutton: How does one go from five years studying law and then all of a sudden, e-commerce? Not a natural transition there? Swapneel: No, I was doing part time, like other than focusing at university. I was working as well All my university years. Any commerce yes, I was selling on Amazon from 2014. And yeah, so, and I did. Well, how did that? Bradley Sutton: happen, though, because that's still not typical. It's not like okay, yeah, during the day I'm going to study law, during the night I'm going to sell on Amazon. I mean like especially in 2014, when hardly anybody was doing it, so how did Amazon even get on your radar? Swapneel: So, even before Amazon, I was doing a lot of other platforms like eBay, and there are some other local marketplaces like traders shop clothes, so, and you know, in 2013, amazon entered in India, but in 2014, they opened for everyone, and I knew that Amazon is a really big e-commerce company and I should be there and yeah. So, but, like, even before I went to university, I was making, you know, some money like some, doing some other stuff like flipping goods from online to offline. Bradley Sutton: So, like you've always been like kind of like I had an entrepreneurial mindset in one of those early age. You trying to make some action, okay, now it's making a little bit more, a little bit more sense, okay. And then things started getting bigger so that when you graduated from university, did you just go full time into into e-commerce then yeah. Swapneel: So that that time, like for me the money was pretty big motivation thing. So in my first year of the university I wasn't sure how much I would be making as a lawyer. But on the second and third year I got to know from my seniors like what is the actual situation and I realized that man like I need to put like at least 10 years in law if I really want to make some serious money in this field. Bradley Sutton: Now back in 2014,. I'm assuming you were selling an Amazon USA. Swapneel: No, I just did in India. That's where Amazon. Bradley Sutton: India was active in 2014. Yes, yes, I didn't even know that. Okay. Swapneel: Interesting, yeah, but it was very new. It was really new they didn't do reselling or private label. Yeah, so I was just doing reselling. I used to buy a lot of stuff from USA, mainly from Amazon.com, and then selling in Amazon India. Yeah, Interesting. Bradley Sutton: Okay, yeah, at what year did you first hit the seven figures? Swapneel: The 2021, yes. Bradley Sutton: 2021  okay, and at that point were you one hundred percent private label or were you still doing like some reselling and things? Swapneel: I was doing both and like I feel like so, in 2020 I launched a lot of private label products. During all the, like you know, doing the first lockdown, I was just focusing on all the products launches I will be making, doing product research and my first product has really contributed a lot for my private label journey, like I started with one product and then just my. Bradley Sutton: You're still selling that product now. Swapneel: Not anymore, because the demand is okay. Bradley Sutton: Can you tell us? Swapneel: what it is, then, yeah, sure. Bradley Sutton: I can show. Go ahead and send me the link over in the chat and let me pull it up on my screen. Let's see here. Okay, I see what this is, so let's pull it up here so everybody else can see. There we go, all right. So this is like a, like a USB capture card I'm looking at here. And how did you find this Like? How did you even decide that this was going to be your product? You just got it randomly, or? Swapneel: what. So for me, like one of the criteria to search the product is checking the new launches of my competitor or and see like if I can have that same product in a very less turn around and can enjoy the party. So that's what's my like, I mainly do. And during that time I saw like a lot of people were seeing selling this product but they were doing MFF, like they were not doing full fill by Amazon and like, even though the product demand was there, but they were, I don't know why they didn't did FPA. And I knew one thing like as soon as I will do this FPA, the product doesn't have any. Like you know, any of my computer doesn't have a lot of reviews and if I will do full fill by Amazon, then I can, you know, sell a lot of goods as well. So how many? Bradley Sutton: how many at the peak? Like? How many units of this were you selling a month or a day? Swapneel: I was selling like I was selling like a month I was selling more than 1500 units in India. Bradley Sutton: Wow, wow In Amazon India. And yeah, okay. All right so then you're like, okay, wow, yeah, this is definitely better than reselling, or I have to get a little bit and stuff you could just Well. Did you manufi, did you get it from China, or did you get it from there in India? Swapneel: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, I got through some of the suppliers in China. Yeah, but the best thing about this product is not just selling, but the margin I had. So I was buying this product like for $5 and was selling for like this product for around $40. Bradley Sutton: Wow, very nice. Yeah especially in India you're still living in India that the money goes even farther. Swapneel: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Bradley Sutton: How long until you bought your parents a house? Swapneel: So I bought the like. You know, as soon as my business started picking up in doing COVID, my family was already super excited. So they already finalized, you know, like don't worry about being a lawyer anymore. Bradley Sutton: No, forget that you know like, hey, this Amazon is good, huh, okay. Swapneel: Yeah, but that you know definitely I was in a bit of stress situation. It's a really big thing, you know so, but that stress really motivated me to push myself further and focusing every small details of my finance, my product. So, yeah, I was a stress, but at the same time I was able to, you know, do better in those situations. Bradley Sutton: So 2021 hit that $1 million mark. How much did you sell last year in 2022? Swapneel: I did $5.4 million. Bradley Sutton: I mean, getting to $1 million is impressive enough. How did you go from $1 million to $5 million just in one year? We're just launching tons of products, or you had some products go viral Were you launching to other marketplaces. How did you increase so fast? Swapneel: So, like I was doing some international markets before in and out, like you know, kind of drop shipping back in 2018 in UK and some EU market also in USA but it was not, like you know, full time or doing throughout the year. Sometimes my accounts were also suspended because of drop shipping. But back in 2021, I started again focusing on the international markets, but still was not doing like a full-fledged business. And back in like 2022, I expanded my business in a very serious manner, like in whole of EU UK, Canada, USA. I know everything how to do an average because I had a lot of experience. And also in 2020, I did my business in Austria as well. So that has really helped me a lot. You know, like provided me enough money to expand in those other markets. Yeah, so that was one of the things like really helped me. And like I was just using my suppliers, which I'm already using in India, and I know that, whatever I would be selling the same product in USA, I would be doing 10X more at least. So that has changed a lot. And also my negotiation skills really helped me because a lot of my suppliers started giving me credit and I utilized those that credit in a very efficient manner like, yeah, you get loan and if you just spend on yourself, then it's not a good idea, but if you utilize pretty well in the business, then definitely it helps. So that's what helped me in 2022. Okay, All right. Bradley Sutton: Now it's coming up. We're now here in Q4 in 2023. Are you going to do better than last year? Same Worse. What do you think you're going to end up with this year? Swapneel: So this year it would be exactly the same what I did last year, because the situation has changed a lot this year. Firstly, I'm traveling whole of this year and it's just maybe like 40-50 days. That was in India. Other than that, I was traveling full time. I was just came, like three, four days ago, from like a four month of trip. I was in North and South America. So this year I was like pretty relaxed and also a lot of things happened at Amazon as well. So Amazon is, I think, are really not smooth at Amazon, so trying to fix those things as well, all right, so now you've got this five months, you've got this five, six million dollar business. Bradley Sutton: You're traveling, enjoying yourself, not working like 100 hours a week, so you must have 20 employees supporting you, huh. Swapneel: Oh, not at all. Bradley Sutton: How many total employees have you had the last few years? Swapneel: So in India I just had one accountant and one person who manages, and then there is one guy from at Veros. That's it in India. But I never had any employee anywhere else, even though my Indian business is not even like 7%. If I compare to my last year's sales revenue, my Indian business was just 7%, but for the rest 93% revenue, I never had any employee. So for your Amazon. Bradley Sutton: USA business and in Europe you have zero employees, just you. Swapneel: Yes, yes. Bradley Sutton: Well. So I mean, people listening to this might ask a question well, like, maybe that makes sense. You know, like if you're working like 90 hours a week and have no life and just stay in your basement and work all day, but how in the world do you scale a business so much? And you're the one who has to answer the customer service, you're the one who has to find a line of their products, you're the one who has to do the keyword research, you're the one who has to make the listing, you're the one who has to fight with Amazon if customer support, if something happens, how in the world can you run a five, six million dollar business just by yourself and not even working really full time? Swapneel: So the one of the best thing with Amazon is their FPModels. So a lot of customers, don't you know, reach out to you if they have any issues with the delivery and all the stuff, and that is one of the reasons why customers, you know, contact to the seller at first place, other than the warranty and all the stuff. And also I was doing a lot of reselling as well in US market, so the brand has to take care of those stuff. So a lot of time was saved for sure, yeah, so, and I had really good partners, for example, with the Logistic thing. I have a really nice shipping agent and that really, like you know, eases my work a lot, just sending the details of the labels and everything and just telling you where to ship which market. They take care of everything. So for me, the main goal was just to, like you know what I can do to improve my revenue, and also sometimes I used to use some freelancers if I was not really good with something. So, yeah, that's it. Bradley Sutton: So how many marketplaces now are you in? So right now I'm in USA, Canada, UK, whole of the EU, UAE, Japan, Australia, India, but more than 10 marketplaces, probably, and are you selling the same products across the board, or, like, some products are only sold in EU, or some products only in USA? Swapneel: Each market is different. For example, in India I can sell mostly a lot of products, but not very high end products and which are technical. Each country the situation is really different. Sometimes there is a really low like maybe a local company who is doing really good and have a lot of reviews, and maybe you don't have any kind of competitive advantage, even though I will try or push, try to push. So for me it's more like market specific strategies, because not all markets are same and every market is completely different. Bradley Sutton: Okay, now what's your, what's your process? Like, how many products are you launching or actually until now active? Approximately how many skews, different skews, you know, like if you're selling the same one product in USA and Canada and Europe, just count that as one. But just roughly, like you know, 20 skews in all marketplaces, 100, 300, like roughly. What do you think? Swapneel: So, like beginning of this year, I was also doing a lot of reselling, but now I'm not doing business with one of the company I used to do and that has definitely contributed a lot to my last year's venue. But things have changed. Bradley Sutton: So private label. Then how, yeah, how many skews are you doing? Swapneel: So currently I'm launching like every month at least one new product in private label and so and some I also take off the old you know, which are not really performing really nice and not what my efforts or the you know margin is shrinking a lot, so I just cut off, you know, those products. So right now maybe like 60, 70 products 60 or 70 products. Bradley Sutton: All right, walk me through. Have in mind your last product you launched. Like, when was the last product you launched this month? Last month? So have one product in mind. You have it in mind? Mm? Hmm, you got it in mind. Ready, yeah, yeah. Swapneel: Okay. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, Now was it July that you launched it. Swapneel: Yeah, oh. Bradley Sutton: I guess that one product you have in mind. What month did you discover it, or what month are you like? All right, this is what I'm going to plan to launch. You know we talking January last year. You know what was it? Spring when was it? Swapneel: So in April and May I was in China and I was looking around some products and then I found some product which is doing good in the US market and I contacted some suppliers. When I was in China I visited the factory. So it was in May, in the month of May. Bradley Sutton: But which came first. You found the product, or, like you found the idea in China, or you had done some research when you were still in the USA and then went to China. Which one was first? Swapneel: Sometimes, you know, because of some advertisement or anything if I find I just keep on. Like you know, at least every day when I'm doing product research I spend at least one hour on Amazon just browsing and doing really nothing, checking what's going on and if I can add something value on that product. So then I just found one product and I was doing more and more research and then seeing like I do check, like you know, if any product is launched recently and the rank is going crazy, it means this product could be a potential. So this is one of the reasons. And then to validate, I check the data how much volume it says in a month and other than that. Bradley Sutton: What are you looking for? Like are you checking how many do you have, like a limit? Like oh no, there's already 30 people selling this, so it's too late. Or like what's your what are some criteria? Is that you're looking for when you're doing your validation? Swapneel: So I check if this product is a really advanced, then how the product you know like before generation did, for example, like which was not that innovative enough. It was a basic product, but how much that product was doing, how much is the reviews for that product. Is a really really established and do I have chances of getting success or not? So I do check all these things and I also do the search result how much is a search volume for this particular product? And to check whether this product is seasonal or not. Bradley Sutton: So okay, so, so then you did all that with this product, and then your next step was you actually went to China to like check some suppliers for it, or what was the next step after you're like you know what, this looks really good, it passes my test. What was the next step for you? Swapneel: So I was already in China during those time in April and May and I felt like visiting the factories and you know it's a really good idea rather than just chatting them. I visited factory and I did all the customization with them and, yeah, so ordered like I can also negotiate better. For example, they gave me a price for 10,000 units but I said, hey, it's a new launch and you know, then I try to get the same price for like maybe four, five thousand units and at the same time I make sure that if this product is not really doing good or it's very new in already UK or the U market, then I make sure that I launch the same product in all across the market places all at once. Bradley Sutton: So this one product that you launched in July, the one that you have in mind was that only for USA, or was that one that you had launched in other places? Swapneel: Yeah, at the same time I was launching UK and U for that product it was Enslafrom. Bradley Sutton: On the subject of suppliers, have you ever had issue with your suppliers where they sell your product to other people? Swapneel: Oh, A lot of suppliers do that a lot of if not that, then how do you handle that? That is one of the reason, like why a lot of my products don't have a long life long life in case. Like you know, like people do a lot of drop shipping like tick tock products and Instagram, really, you may see so most of my products are also related to that as well. Not all, but at least 30% of the product. So I sell it. The trend is going on and, yes, then eventually the trend dies, or so it's not like I can sell the same product for another 10 years as well. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Yeah, so you. So you don't get really emotionally attached to the product because you know that. You know, like now are all these products you're launching similar brands, or or you always starting just different, random brands. Swapneel: So I have some products, specific brands, and some brands are just used for any miscellaneous products. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. So then, this product. You were there in April and May. You happen to be in China. You were browsing Amazon. You found it. You found a new supplier for it, got it ready, 4,000, 5,000 units, shipped to Europe and to US. What's your, what's your launch strategy? Like, like, like, how do you, how do you what some techniques use? Like, how are you getting to page one? Are you just using, you know, ppc? You have any special techniques that you can share? I? Swapneel: Use very basic first of all. Obviously, your product should have really nice photos, should classify why your product is better than any other product in the market. Bradley Sutton: How do you get nice photos? Do you have like a studio? Swapneel: You do business with or what. So I first will try to work directly with the supplier so that I don't have to spend a lot of money upfront For these photos, even because I'm not sure whether how the product will gonna do. And then, if I cannot get anything, then I try to look at fiber to find some people who can do for me, and Then also do the nice a plus content, make sure the bullet points are really good, everything this is a really basic thing to start with, and then, since I launch a lot of products and a lot of market, I Utilize one of the best tool of Amazon, that is, amazon wine, because that really help you. And If you will launch a product in a lot of market, then you get a lot of reviews as well, for example, in the US. Bradley Sutton: My view just oh and all the reviews are stacked together, then you be Like you get 20 vine reviews in USA, 20 vine reviews in UK in the same ascent. Now you've got 40 reviews instead of I mean, I'm sure many people do that, but you know, it's just kind of just dawned on me like that's a good, that's a good strategy to have and another reason why you should launch on the the same ascent, okay. And then you find the keywords from helium 10, like you use Cerebro or what tool are using. Swapneel: So for me, because some of the products are really new in the market, there are no competitors as well, so it's really difficult to focus. You know which would be the keyword. So I just use Amazon automatic ads to check all the keywords which are performing and by or but. Maybe every week I try to optimize and seeing if some of the keywords are element, trying to put in the negative list, so, and trying to make sure that those keywords are on the product title bullet points. Yeah, yeah, to improve, to improve, so like just very basic, to like no things I use. And Once, like initially, you always get very good reviews because of the wine, because normally people don't put a lot of negative reviews, they leave mostly positive reviews. So you already got initial pull, you know, for your product. Yeah and Then it is totally depends upon the actual customers reviews. If the actual customers are Giving me good reviews, then I can be sure that this product is really doing good and Then I can have that as a long-term product as long as there is a sale for this product. And then I started improving more of my ASIN by putting videos, doing, you know, whatever things I can improve for this product, then putting some Warranty-related things, making sure the customer is always happy. Yeah, I feel like if you sit on Amazon, you should always align your values with what the values of Amazon are. Yeah, so I just make sure that and I take every detail of the customer to further improve the product as well, like checking voice, you know, a voice of customers. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, so now you know, thinking back then, from April, your product research phase to Negotiating, negotiating with suppliers, you know, getting samples and doing your customization, like you said, sending it to the marketplaces, creating the listing in the different marketplaces, managing those PPC campaigns in the first few weeks to launch that product that you launch in July, up until, let's just say, august. You know, so one month into the launch Approximately, how many hours do you think that you spent doing all those things? Swapneel: Oh, one of the so one of the most interesting time for me when I launch the product is the first sale. I look at the velocity of then another cell, how fast I can. I'm getting another cell. Then you know, checking the performance each day and whether it's improving or not. And, yeah, I closely check every detail during those time and for me, whenever it's my first launch, my goal is not to make profit at all and I will focus on that. Yeah, for me, the main focus is just to see how good is the product and how is the demand actually, because if your product reviews are good and you are early, more Than you can make money for years for sure for this just one product. Bradley Sutton: Okay so, but then how? Same question like the how long do you think you spent up until you know, after those first few weeks of spending a lot of time checking the sales? You know like, do you think it took you 50 hours from April to July or to August for that product? Was it 10 only, or or approximately? How long did, uh, did you actually put actual work into that product? I must say like maybe, yeah, for 30 hours at least okay, so about 30 hours of work for the one product, and then now, like, let's say, a product gets mature. You know, now you are making profit. Now it's kind of taking care of itself. Like how much time in a month do you spend on that product, would you say you know because I'm you know, you're probably having to do your ppc and, and you know, check reviews, customer service. Is it like one hour a month because you almost have nothing to do? Is it five hours a month for that one product? What would you say? Swapneel: so if the product is really doing good, then the first important thing is to make sure that I have stock for this product, sure? So I negotiate with the supplier and, you know, try to to make sure that I have stock, and then I'll look at the competitors if there is something innovating they are trying to do and if I can implement the same as well, you know, as soon as possible, maybe one of my suppliers putting some new product as a free or, you know, trying to value add, then I also make sure that I do some value addition as well, because, just because of this stuff, I don't want my product rank to go down yeah, so how long does it take? Bradley Sutton: you know, like, what is your maintenance phase for a product? For that, for that? We're talking about that same product, you know. Now you know it's October, that product you launch in July. Thank you, how much time are you spending on that product? Swapneel: so right now I felt that this product reviews are not really doing great and I'm not motivated enough right now to do further, even though even without advertisement right now I'm getting sales for those products. But if I'm trying, this is a low value product. So if I'm trying to invest a lot in the advertisement it's not really giving me a lot of fruitful results. So right now I'm like, okay, once this product is sold I will not start again, but then, but, but still. Bradley Sutton: How much time is it are you spending on so? Swapneel: every day. I always wait for the helium, then emailed about my performance, and it gives me all the units I sold in each of the market and that really give me a lot of idea. If something is going interesting, then I try to figure out why it's going like that. And, for example, yesterday I definitely checked on that product and I was saying like, okay, I'm getting sales, not doing anything. And then I checked the reviews are there any improvement in the reviews or is there a possibility of me I take that as a possibility if I can, you know, sell this product for a long time. But yeah, I see that I still have some stock left and the other variation is that really go good, I didn't have that, but I'm still wait and watch. Right now I'm not trying to buy something. You know more from us at first yeah, let's see. Bradley Sutton: So you think maybe less than one hour a month you spend on it now yeah, maybe two hours yeah, so so now we can, we're getting a little bit clearer picture of how you, you know scaled up and still can be by yourself. Is, you know, like, hey, maybe to find and and vet the product and and all the work to launch it only took you 30 or 40 hours, and now that it's in maintenance mode maybe you're only spending one or two hours, you know, per per product a month but, I remember you telling me you know that you're leaving money on the table, probably because you're not using, like, all of the tools, or you're not doing all of that, the analytics, since you're by yourself. But still, even with not doing everything that you could be doing, you're, you're, you're doing millions of dollars. And then what? What is your like profit margin, would you say, after your expenses for for your business? At least 15, 15, 20 percent so always want to make 15, 20 percent. If it dips lower then then you go ahead and cancel that product. Swapneel: If it goes less than 8%, then definitely not worth it at all. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. So what's the future hold for you? Are you just going to keep doing what you're doing, like this, and just do stuff by yourself, launch a product once a month and things like that and then put on maintenance mode, or are you going to like you know what? It's time that I need to start delegating some of my tasks and maybe take some employees on? What are you going to do next year, in 2024? Swapneel: So ever since I was at our BDSS event, that has completely transformed how I see things and how better I can do, and from that time on was obviously I was struggling, so not focusing a lot during all those months, but right now I'm just thinking like every day. Once in a while I have thought about the delegation and what all things I expect from someone, and I'm right now in phase of hiring people, because I know one thing that I can do a lot better what I'm doing right now If I have people. For example, I have a lot of products in Australia. They do really good for me, but I feel I'm so stupid that I'm not sending the inventory on time there. A lot of my products are mostly on outdoor stock and if some market is doing really good, then I don't focus a lot on the market which don't perform well. For example, my USA and UK and EU market do such so better especially Germany, UK and USA that I don't put a lot of efforts in Canada, Australia, Japan, India and also I feel it's really bad because I have all the resources, all the infrastructure. All I need to make sure is ordering the right quantity and making sure that I have stock for those products. That's it. Yeah, so I'm losing just that. Bradley Sutton: That's the first thing that you're probably going to want to hire for is like, hey, I need somebody just 100% managing my supply chain, making sure that I'm not running out of stock anywhere. Okay, All right. So what would you say is your I mean, I'm assuming USA is your number one marketplace what would you say is your number two, three and four marketplaces out of all those that are going on UK? Swapneel: UK, I feel, can do a lot better as well. I really I'm very happy with UK market, a lot better than US market, because I feel the competition is less, the margin is a lot better than US, but overall sales it's number two. Bradley Sutton: You're saying next to USA. Swapneel: Yeah, yeah, right, okay, so far. Yes, so UK would do better than US maybe for me. Bradley Sutton: Oh really, wow, that's pretty impressive. Okay, interesting, all right. So, yeah, you got inspired by going to Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You can see all the strategies that people are using, and these are strategies probably your competitors are using and you're not you know. So, yeah, it's like when you go to events like this, it can open your mind as far as as you know, seeing what, what is possible out there. Okay, so, other than hiring, finally, some help. What are some other goals for you for next year? Swapneel: Focusing on external traffic, because this is a huge thing, really really huge thing, because I see a lot of products on Amazon having 30, 40 reviews and then there's a competitor having 20,000 reviews and they are on the top five products. Why? Because they're getting external traffic. So external traffic is a really huge thing and I think I should have some strategies to work on that thing. Maybe TikTok release, Instagram release, and I'm really like focusing a lot to get some people on board related to marketing, because that's where I feel I'm really not good at all. So, trying to work on that and, yeah, I think that can be really big thing for sure. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Well, I wish you all the best of success. You know I've seen you already at a couple events this past year and hope to see you again at some other local events. And yes, please definitely start hiring people and get some help that you need, and then you'll be able to travel even more, you'll have some more time on your hand and you can enjoy what's your favorite place that you or craziest thing that you have done living as a digital nomad the last couple of years. Swapneel: So I'm kind of and really in juggy right now. So I do skydiving, mostly a lot of sports, mostly a lot of sports related to air, you know. So when I was in like just a few weeks ago, I was in north of Washington and I did some being walking on a plane, like almost eight years old plane. I was walking on that plane and that was one of the craziest thing. Bradley Sutton: Like on the wings and stuff. Swapneel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was really a show. Bradley Sutton: No, thank you, thank you. Swapneel: For me, like selling on Amazon is just giving me freedom to do what I love the most. I just need financial freedom. That's it, Because that's it Like it. And such a beautiful thing like selling on Amazon you can work and travel at the same time. Bradley Sutton: Yeah Swapneel: Whenever I'm traveling still not many people very rarely meet someone who is selling on Amazon, to be honest, especially of my age group and they're traveling because either they quit the job or they just got two weeks off from office. Bradley Sutton: That's yeah, yeah. And they have to go back to work but not you yeah. Swapneel: So, yeah, this is a really like, really nice life, you know as a digital moment. But only bad thing is that when I'm traveling, I cannot focus a lot on my work. So I feel like, from going forward, maybe next few months or years, I would like to live at one place a lot more so that my work doesn't hinder. And obviously, if you will, if I want to approach eight or nine figure in coming years, then I cannot do by just one or two hours a day. I need to put more efforts and really need to be very cease at work, because big money comes with big responsibilities as well, I guess. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, all right. So why don't you leave us with a 30 second tip or 60 second tip? It could be either like an Amazon strategy, or maybe it's a strategy for traveling, for how to live as a digital nomad, a strategy for Amazon India. It could be about anything, so go ahead and give us your strategy. Swapneel: So I feel like there would be always a stress when you are selling on Amazon and you always need to have a patience, because Amazon will not fix your stuff in five minutes, even if your listing is gone, your account is gone or whatever. So the most important thing you can focus is on your mental health and you should prioritize that thing, because in life you may make a lot of money you can on the other day, if your account is suspended, you are bringing your nothing. So, but one thing can always help you is your mental health, and I think exercising is one of the best things, because that has changed completely me. I still remember how I was doing the first lockdown and how the journey from last three was not at all smooth at all, but not at all, like you know, not very smooth at all, but going workout and not stressing that helped me to not to stress. So I think, yeah, everyone should do this if you are especially selling on Amazon, because you don't have a lot of social life as well when you're selling on Amazon, except traveling, Okay, all right. Bradley Sutton: Well, that's good for everybody to follow. I wouldn't follow the having zero employees for $6 million business, but everything else is kind of you know, something that I think a lot of people can do Well. Again, thank you so much for joining us and I hope to see you in person sometime next year. Swapneel: Absolutely Can't wait to see you again. Thank you so much, Bradley.