[Progress Thread] Starting an Amazon Brand Management Agency - Profity Media

[Saad Khan]

Hi Fastlaners,

Those who follow my progress thread know that I've been an Amazon Ads manager for well over an year now. I and one of my connections have both decided to structure the work that we do in the form of an agency and develop the capacity to serve bigger clients. I keep hearing from people in local Facebook groups that you should partner with a person who has opposite traits when creating an agency, but in this case, I'm able to identify similar things more than different traits. We both acknowledged our passion for sales, studied similar books, gurus and have the same vision. Time will tell what happens down the road.

With that out of the way, here's what we both will be doing. We're gonna bootstrap this agency and I'm going all in on this one (putting all my resources, no plan B). He just got out of uni while I'm in my 2nd semester. He'll be the guy who'll be dealing with sales and front end of the agency while I'm going to be working in the backend of the agency, managing operations, creating systems, dividing teams, SOPs, documentation and all that stuff. I'm also passionate for sales and in this case I'm going to let him take the lead because this guy has sold a course to 80 people with a considerable price tag, so he clearly knows his stuff.

I, on the other hand, have been working in agencies for the most part of my journey. I have learned some things from working in previous agencies such as tracking systems and best practices when working in a team. He doesn't have that experience of working in an agency with well developed systems that divorce the time of the owner from the day to day operations while I've observed those things myself. Plus the agencies I've been working with were fully remote, so it definitely helps to know how the others do it.

Goal?
To flip the agency after establishing solid systems in place that give us a predictable income, sell it and make our exits. Then use the money from the exit to gain bigger leverage in the form of capital and go into a high entry barrier CENTS product-based business which a normal guy doesn't have access to.

What have we done so far?

20 guys interviewed, assigned them tasks on the basis of which we'll shortlist around 5 people as interns
Domain and hosting purchased

What are our next 5 steps?

Train the 5 interns further
Develop website
Start led gen process
Register business and sign a contract
Make business bank account

 

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[xShepherdx]

Awesome job stepping out into your own. I'm excited to follow along with your progress!

 

[Saad Khan]

Progress for our agency:

One of my partners who's focused on the sales/lead gen side of the agency has reviewed the work of 8 submissions out of 20 participants. We shortlisted 5 of them as internees. We will be going forward with them and arranging a 90 days bootcamp for them in which we'll train them on our systems. Then we'll hire some of them.

Regarding case studies, I opened up my tracking sheet of PPC clients I've worked with and after spending all night going through 45 accounts, I'll be now shortlisting 10 potential accounts whose stats will serve as a case study. It was also a great opportunity to study some trends and my PPC intuition improved massively due to common trends being engraved into my mind.

We signed the contract. It took us 1 week to draft it lol. We've agreed to register the business in the US when we hit $5k/mo in profit

Plus I have a real email now. The web dev guys are slow but I won't complain since we getting the site built for like $100. Not a bad idea to befriend a Pakistani freelancer after all haha!

Shoot me an email for a free cookie at:

saad@profitymedia.com

 

[biophase]

Progress for our agency:

One of my partners who's focused on the sales/lead gen side of the agency has reviewed the work of 8 submissions out of 20 participants. We shortlisted 5 of them as internees. We will be going forward with them and arranging a 90 days bootcamp for them in which we'll train them on our systems. Then we'll hire some of them.

Regarding case studies, I opened up my tracking sheet of PPC clients I've worked with and after spending all night going through 45 accounts, I'll be now shortlisting 10 potential accounts whose stats will serve as a case study. It was also a great opportunity to study some trends and my PPC intuition improved massively due to common trends being engraved into my mind.

We signed the contract. It took us 1 week to draft it lol. We've agreed to register the business in the US when we hit $5k/mo in profit

Plus I have a real email now. The web dev guys are slow but I won't complain since we getting the site built for like $100. Not a bad idea to befriend a Pakistani freelancer after all haha!

Shoot me an email for a free cookie at:

saad@profitymedia.com

Are you going to be running ppc for Amazon sellers?

Are you manually managing the campaigns?

 

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[Saad Khan]

Are you going to be running ppc for Amazon sellers?

Are you manually managing the campaigns?

Yes. Running PPC is a part of the service, although if someone is only interested in PPC, we can help them as well. We not only run ppc for Amazon sellers manually (no AI automation), we also take charge of their listings and regularly run A/B tests on the best main image and different elements of the listing for maximum CVR and ranking juice. We also handle the cases with Amazon so the entrepreneur's time is spent on growing the business/product instead of wresting with seller support.

Combine it all and other nuanced aspects, and essentially this service gives you the freedom to get out of daily operations of the account. This is called brand management.

Then we pitch them on expanding onto other channels like walmart but that comes later.

Plus we know who we are targeting. Brands doing $20k-50k/mo and are in the 20-25th spot in their niche in terms of market share and revenue. That's our dream client. And we know we can deliver for this demographic.

 

[Saad Khan]

I have been updating the progress for Profity Media in my personal thread, but here's the summary.

August 2023

Partnered up with another PPC agency and signed an MOU (which was more mature than us) as a delivery and marketing partner. They set up a 30 day deadline which we didn't meet. The deadline was that we had to onboard clients. My partner recorded training sessions for the newly recruited team from his paid community. We did extract the info of 500-600 brands and messaged them, but I think we made the biggest mistake by not pumping content, the site profitymedia.com wasn't live as well, so we had 0 presence. And on top of that, we only messaged them via linkedin, instagram and email (basically all public channels where we could reach out to them)

September 2023

After that letdown, I was pretty upset. We needed to fix the content problem. So I messaged people in my network and recorded 5 podcasts in this month. Now the challenge was to edit them. So I got myself a gaming PC. That was not a good decision. Now, remember that I'm a former hardcore FPS gamer, so getting the PC because I wanted to edit wasn't a main reason, it was a scapegoat.

24th September - January 2024

I got addicted to Counterstrike again. I did get better but at what cost? Everything I worked hard to build up. Also, we 3 guys went silent.

February 2024

I was in touch with a few members outside the TFLF and with their encouragement, I got over my guilt on myself (for wasting those months). It really F*cked with me mentally and I was looking for people and myself to blame (there was no one to blame). I learned how to edit. Let me be honest, we spent all our money paying for instantly's subscription. At this point we had spent $500 on the agency and had nothing to show for it. So I quit Counter-Strike (once and for all).

March 2024

I converted those podcasts into short form videos and scheduled them on my content calendar. Finally working towards (and not action faking) building a credible profile for Profity Media. I learned the hard way that I can't rely on others for sales (atleast not the people who tell me they're onboarding me to be an "executing" partner).

Time for a rant...

Now I've been messaging in the core team that we need to kickstart the sales process again. He told me 3 days ago that we will start tomorrow. It's been 3 days and he hasn't even read my recent messages. Actually, I have been giving friendly reminders since February.

We will message new 500 brands again amd apply the same stuff we did. And if that doesn't work, I'll be booting them out and develop my personal brand strong enough so that Profity Media's source of clients is through me.

I don't wanna admit it but a part of me wants to pay both of them to get out of this partnership and take charge myself. But then again, I don't wanna be the one man show. I want to onboard a guy similar to me (preferably someone from the US), who can contribute much more in sales while I run the operations and marketing.

Goals:

Make money (To reinvest into Profity Media and my workstation)
Pivot core service from PPC & brand management to PPC, brand management and short video ads production.
Brand my agency as a means for Amazon brands to expand outside Amazon. Amazon's recent fees update has destroyed many sellers's profitability. If this keeps on, Amazon will no longer be FBA friendly.