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22 year old in college with a million dollar business. Ask me anything!

Jmadd95OE

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Didn't see page 2.

Anyway, Thanks for doing this - super cool to hear about you and dad working together. I used to dig holes for my father haha. Wasn't as fun as you're having but I learned a lot. Don't care what your product is but I'm interested in your process for finding a supplier. I know that you mentioned you deal with a US manufacturer. That's smart! Did you use any sites to help in finding them?

Thanks kid

We did a lot of google searches, and then talked to about 30 manufacturers until we figured out exactly what we were looking for. The hardest part is finding what exactly you are looking for a manufacturer. For example most people need an OTC manufacturer and they don't even know it!
 
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DVU

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Hi man,

Thanks for the info so far!

My question is how much did you spend on marketing online before you found the "right way" to do it.

By the right way I mean when you were comfortable with the result and were to improve from that point forward.
 
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Jmadd95OE

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Hi man,

Thanks for the info so far!

My question is how much did you spend on marketing online before you found the "right way" to do it.

By the right way I mean when you were comfortable with the result and were to improve from that point forward.

About 50K. Still have a lot to work on with it, but we got results we were ok with.
 

samuraijack

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Congrats! Im going to assume this is a consumable, within health/personal care niche. I'm recently seeing some success personally in the beauty niche (although not as much as you!). I started out with google shopping ads to my Shopify and then Amazon. Went from $3k monthly to $15k monthly now (1st month on amazon).

1)Whats your advice on building your brand through these two platforms?

2)google ads and Amazon places product in front of customers ready to buy. What was the process for you moving onto advertising methods that werent as targeted? Like instagram, email marketing, etc.. is this something worth the effort only after you master Amazon/shopify?
 

TreyAllDay

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I know I wanted to do the same. Parents wanted me to stay. Anyways it builds character having to do both school and work!

What are some the best books you can recommend on the subject, other than of course MFL.
 
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Jmadd95OE

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Congrats! Im going to assume this is a consumable, within health/personal care niche. I'm recently seeing some success personally in the beauty niche (although not as much as you!). I started out with google shopping ads to my Shopify and then Amazon. Went from $3k monthly to $15k monthly now (1st month on amazon).

1)Whats your advice on building your brand through these two platforms?

2)google ads and Amazon places product in front of customers ready to buy. What was the process for you moving onto advertising methods that werent as targeted? Like instagram, email marketing, etc.. is this something worth the effort only after you master Amazon/shopify?

Good Job. 15K is a good amount of advertising. On Amazon you should spend heavily on amazon ppc, and you need to get reviews. How many reviews do your competitors have? What is your conversion rate like?

On shopify- your website is very important, you need one that people inherently trust. This is a very hard topic for people to understand so I attached some websites that I like:

onnit.com
glossier.com
lola.com

2) Yes tackle the low hanging fruit first. Once you get over 50k/revenue a month I would say it would be worth it to go into social media advertising. You should be doing email marketing right now on your shopify website. It is important to develop an email list and will come to use in many ways.

I am interested in what you are doing. PM me and we can talk more!
 

Jmadd95OE

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What are some the best books you can recommend on the subject, other than of course MFL.

I don't really read many books. I only listen to podcasts while I am walking around in school.

Podcasts I recommend:
ecommercefuel
scott voelker
this week in start ups
ETl- Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
 

pds

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@Jmadd95OE Welcome to the forum and congrats on your success so far! Thanks for the value add with this thread.
 
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Miketing

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So you mentioned audience insights earlier for facebook ads targeting, how do you normally go about defining your target audience?

Also how does your strategy look for turning cold leads into hot leads with email marketing? Any tips for acquiring leads or turning them into customers? Do you just send out direct marketing and offers or more than that?
 

Jmadd95OE

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So you mentioned audience insights earlier for facebook ads targeting, how do you normally go about defining your target audience?

Also how does your strategy look for turning cold leads into hot leads with email marketing? Any tips for acquiring leads or turning them into customers? Do you just send out direct marketing and offers or more than that?

For Defining Target Audience: You have to immerse yourself in whatever field you are in. Example: If you are in the Natural Skin Care Business.
1) Find all competitors in skin care business
2) Plug in those competitors into Audience Insights
3) Look at Page Likes Tab and Facebook will tell you what the fans of your competitors page are interested in.
4) Put those results in Audience Insights and keep expanding it.

You can also do behavioral targeting- People who purchase skin care, purchase online, High Annual Income (If product is expensive)

After running ads for a bit you can create a lookalike audience. This has been successfull for many people.

I have a funnel. I have a interesting video that goes to a landing page that grabs an email address. I have an email marketing sequence that I send them, and eventually I am able to get a sale.

I also do offers sometimes for amazon when I am launching a product.

For turning cold leads to hot leads: You have to give them constant inflow if information. This is the best way to develop trust, since they see you have good content. Also I recommend targeting a certain group with 4-5 different ads, with different copy. This is the best way to penetrate a market.
 

jarvisdiego

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Thanks for sharing all this information! It is great :D

How would you recommend starting?
I am a newbie and I would greatly appreciate any help...
 
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Tim Allen Jr.

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The "delete my account" says otherwise.



I seem to have missed the thread disclosing your multi-million dollar+ business, complete with the product you sell.



Sorry, but we're protective of real entrepreneurs who are doing stuff.

Too many cooks stealing from the chefs. And those cooks only care about "what do you sell?!?!" so they can quickly copy.

If that explanation upsets you, I'll be happy to delete your account.

FAACCKKKKK - Damn I love this forum and the understanding of what you and other have mentioned is why I love this forum.

Products come and go, but process, process, process is what can/will make shit happen..... Thanks to OP for insights, thanks to MJ (and others) for talking real shit, and thanks to the group for asking solid questions.

And again..... FACCKKKKK.... I love this forum :).
 
D

Deleted2BB3x9

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Best way to get ranked is a giveaway. Make sure you don't ask for reviews. There are Facebook Groups and a bunch of services (viral launch, zonblast, etc.) that do this. I personally don't use giveaways anymore because my brand is established, but its the fastest way to get it ranked if you don't want to do the whole organic and ppc thing.

Great thread! Just wondering, you mentioned not to ask for reviews. So how did you get reviews? If you don't mind me asking, what's your strategy?
It is now forbidden to offer a product in exchange for a review according to Amazon's TOS. But, I don't think that stops you from asking the customer to leave a review if they were satisfied with the product. Right? Correct me if i'm wrong.
 

MJ DeMarco

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I'm a 22 year old about to graduate from College with a million dollar business. I spend about 60 hours/ week working on my business, along with getting my degree. I do about 50k on Amazon FBA, and I also sell wholesale to other amazon companies, and Amazon itself (1P seller). I'll provide proof so you know I'm not Bsing you guys!

Can you please message me as I like to verify the AMA's -- not looking for income proof or anything, just a link to the product or something were I can get an indication of volume and/or market presence. To message me, just use the contact us link in the footer.

Thank you for sharing your experience and a big welcome to the forum (missed this thread for months, sorry) - tagged NOTABLE for now.
 
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MJ DeMarco

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Bump. This was accidentally moved to the INSIDE, now back OUTSIDE.
 

Arevico

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What would you're approach be to product validation? When developing a new product, would you keep people involved from the beginnen or how do you normally know that a idea is a good one?
 

johnp

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This is turning into a great thread so far. Thanks for doing this.

You're saying a lot of stuff that's kind of aligned with what I have been figuring out/noticing and myself, even right down to using Hotjar - which is an amazing tool. Anyway, I'm just getting started with my product and making some sales via Amazon & FB. Right now I manufacture all of my products at my house, I sell a certain type of body and dental spray. I have two questions. Don't feel compelled to answer if you think that I'm asking too much.

1. For Amazon ads - Not sure if I missed an answer to this, I'm just getting started here. Did you use any resources to learn Amazon ads? If so, then do you mind sharing? I'm just getting started with the Amz ads and learning by putting my own money into it. It seems pretty straight forward, but I feel like there has to be more to it. Somehow I'm profitable right out of the gate. I just can't imagine that it's really this easy.

2. Facebook Question
I have a funnel. I have a interesting video that goes to a landing page that grabs an email address. I have an email marketing sequence that I send them, and eventually I am able to get a sale.

I have tried a lot of different things on FB, except for video still. I basically discovered that it's really hard to get cold FB traffic to pull out their card. I'm not saying that it's not possible, I have seen people make millions driving traffic to offers, which hasn't worked for me yet. Anyway, here's what I have been doing lately.

- I go over to Buzzfeed and find an article that's popular in my niche, then rewrite it but better and in my own words.
- Then I add that article to a landing page (I call it a Dark Landing Page - only for cold traffic), but I make the landing page look like a native blog post, where I throw up ads to my product all over the place.
- Then I drive broad, cold traffic to the blog post.
- From there I build custom audiences and start to bucket and segment traffic traffic to offers that way.

I've been getting clicks for about $0.03 and really low CPAS overall with this strategy. But I'm wondering if I have over complicated things a bit too much, especially because I'm not grabbing the email of cold traffic. Based on what you have figured out so far, do you think that I'd be better off just driving cold traffic to a LM or some offer for their email address?

Also, great to see you using email marketing. My day job is at an email company that sends billions of emails per month. Email is powerful when used the right way, I see it first hand every single day. If you ever have an email deliverability question then feel free to PM me.
 
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Jmadd95OE I've been for the past two days looking for ways to build a landing page considering I know that this is the best way to go.
I was wondering under the situation that I can make a professional landing pages for as little cost as possible i'll do anything it takes to get it done . If I can't do that I was wondering should I pay someone to design my website? and if so who would you reccomend?
 

qaerst

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Do people treat you differently ?
Do they even know that you're running a business and how do they react if they find out?

Congratulations on your achievement BTW !

(I know it's not important what other people think but it's an impressive thing for someone at the age of 22! :D
And just want to know how people at the same age react.)
 

Gwenqou

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Inspiring Post!

How do you go about finding US manufacturers?

I'm interested in the process of finding US manufacturers. I've been sick of importing products and dealing with suppliers from oversea and have been thinking about moving the production to US. I've been using ThomasNet but could only find two manufacturers for my niche, and they don't seem to make similar product as the one that I want to manufacture. You mentioned that you talked to 30 manufacturers, how did you go about to discover and select manufacturers?
 
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GMSI7D

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Ask me anything you want! I'll give you my advice... Shoot!!


ok, do you think you are an average guy and anyone can do the same

or do you think you are an isolated case and nobody here will do the same ?


what are you trying to prove ? an isolated case does not prove that anyone here can and will do the same


it only proves that one guy managed to do it . there is no value from a global point of view and for the masses

this is like the news on TV

we see bad things happening but this is not the actual reality of most people.

this is not reality for 99.99 % of people

most people don't die in hurricane disaster or in afghanistan war

the news are not the global reality

same thing with your case



.
 

Josh Chingas

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Bro.. I’m 19. I’m trying to learn from you so bad. Lol. I want to connect with you bc I’m trying to be a solopreneur through college with digital marketing. Hopefully I can grow it enough to where it will leave me debt free. Seriously man I’d love to connect with you. You are where I want to get at this point in life and I want to give you what I know this far. Reply back brother!
 

Scot

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Bro.. I’m 19. I’m trying to learn from you so bad. Lol. I want to connect with you bc I’m trying to be a solopreneur through college with digital marketing. Hopefully I can grow it enough to where it will leave me debt free. Seriously man I’d love to connect with you. You are where I want to get at this point in life and I want to give you what I know this far. Reply back brother!


Try again with less “bros” and “lol”.

Would you reply to this message if you got it?
 
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The Abundant Man

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What is the meaning of life?


If all forces acting on an object are balanced (i.e their sum is equal to zero), then the object will either be at rest or moving with constant velocity.
Another way of stating the law:
If the sum of all forces acting on an object is equal to zero, then the acceleration of that object is equal to 0 and therefore its velocity does not change. If it is rest it says at rest and if it is moving a constant velocity it stays at that same velocity.
Example
What force is needed so that a 100 Kg box moving on a frictionless floor on a straight line at the speed of 1 m/s keeps moving for another 100 minutes in the same direction at the same speed?
 
D

Deleted48496

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AMAZING THREAD!

The amount of value here is insane.

Thank you for sharing all this!
 

AyanBHC$

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Could yo
Best way to get ranked is a giveaway. Make sure you don't ask for reviews. There are Facebook Groups and a bunch of services (viral launch, zonblast, etc.) that do this. I personally don't use giveaways anymore because my brand is established, but its the fastest way to get it ranked if you don't want to do the whole organic and ppc thing.

Facebook Ads is a crabshoot. I wasted about 30k before I figured out what works. I would not recommend sending a Facebook ad directly to amazon. The conversion rate will be too low and will negatively affect your ranking. The best way to use Facebook for amazon, is to collect emails, run an email campaign, and then send them to the listing. You have to turn them from a cold lead into a hot lead essentially.

Sending Facebook to Shopify is the best way since you can see how they interact with your website using (Google Analytics, HotJar, etc.). It is also very tough to succeed using Facebook Ads to shopify too. You have to do a lot of A/B Testing and figure out your targeting group. I have seen a lot of people spend thousands of dollars on Facebook without any sales.

My Facebook Ads Method is:

5 Dollars a Day for 5 Days= 25 Dollars spent on one Ad
Low CTR (Under 1%)= Change Ad Copy or Picture (Pictures are a very important part of Facebook Ads)
No Conversions=( Change Landing Page)- Look at HotJar/Crazyegg or Heatmap to see where people are leaving

I recommend doing Facebook ads as well. CPC is much cheaper and high interaction!

For Targeting using Audience Insights. I can go more into this if you like

Hope that Helps!
Could you please explain me the email thing you mentioned? like How to do it.

Thanks
 
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