Digital Social Hour - Making Millions off Amazon FBA, Best Winning Products & Scaling Company Zab Twins DSH #293 | Zab Twins DSH #306

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Arek Zabierek and Brian Zabierek aka the Zab Twins come on the show to discuss how they amde millions off Amazon, they announce the launch of their upcoming brand and where they see the future of Amazon FBA. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly Factor: Use code "DSH50" for 50% off your order at https://www.factormeals.com/dsh50 Digital Social Hour works with participants in sponsored media and stays compliant with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding sponsored media. #ad LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I wouldn't have changed it. Absolutely. You know, one of our goals is so that our kids don't have to feel that. But I think as we have kids and we grow our own family, it's going to be important to instill a lot of those things as well. Yeah. There's pros and cons to growing up with money and growing up without. 100%.

But that immigrant mentality is hard to transfer. For sure. Absolutely. That's something we won't be able to give our kids, you know? Yeah, 100%. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot.

Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys, we are here with Amazon experts, twin brothers, Eric and Brian, the Zap Twins. How's it going, guys? Doing well, man. How are you? I'm good. Can't complain. I'm doing amazing. Thanks for asking. It's the best quarter of the year for you guys, right? Yeah, 100%. Anybody in Ecom. Yeah.

Did you guys have a good Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Absolutely. Yeah, we crushed it, both on the digital side of things and service-based companies, but also on the product-based side of things as well. Nice. Dude, I went hard on Amazon those days. I spent the most I've ever spent. Same with me. Yeah, literally me as well. Dude, it's so funny because you see these TikToks

where it's like they barely even discount it. Yeah. It's just like psychological. 100%. They raise the price like 40%. And then they drop it. Yeah. Yeah, there's so many different ways

that you can get creative with pricing strategy for sure. But you can work on your first 30 days or the third days leading up to it and you can really creative with pricing strategy for sure. But, you know, you can work on your first 30 days or the third days leading up to it and you can really murk the system. But the intent to buy on Black Friday is just an absolute game changer. It's insane. You got to take advantage of it.

Yeah, people don't even go in stores anymore. No. I remember when we were kids growing up, people would go to Walmart, Target, the lines. Yeah, 100%. Even like back home in Canada, we have Boxing Day. Black Friday wasn't a thing in Canada in specific. It was a United States thing, but now it is in Canada.

And my family was big. We grew up poor, so we were all about getting the best deals possible. So my parents would go line up in stores and buy all of the gifts that they need for the next year. Not just that. Sometimes we would actually get a credit to pick our gift on Boxing Day instead of getting it on Christmas. Wow. Damn.

So you guys grew up kind of rough. Yeah. I wouldn't say rough per se because my parents, they worked their asses off for us. And we had a good lifestyle and we were very, very family based. But comparing to other people, yeah, we came up very, very moderate, low income. My mom grew up working in fast food and she ended up getting a job at the hospital. My dad ended up working the ranks through a union job and they hustled and they were able to build a great life for us by the end of it.

And now it's all about giving back. That's cool. They were immigrants? Immigrants, yeah. My mom's from the Philippines. Yeah. Oh, man. It's such a story because my mom's from the yeah oh man it's a it's

such a story because like my mom's from the philippines my dad's from poland and they had careers like my mom was going to be a nurse my dad was you know he went to school he had his or was just about to graduate and get his degree in mining engineering which is huge back in poland and to come out here and none of that be recognized it's like you got to start from something right and a typical filip Filipino family like how my mom came out here is she was sponsored she was a nanny she worked up in that and then you know she she finally met my my dad at the disco oh yeah so funny saying that but um yeah they started a life together and when they had kids it was all about the kids it was all about giving to them and

you know I think that's what instilled a lot of the, you know, features, not features, but like skills that we have today is like, we grew up and we were like, you always have to work for what you wanted, right? It was doing things around the house, getting a job as soon as you turn 15 in Canada. And, you know, we really embodied the element of hard work. And I think that's what made us entrepreneurs at the end of the day. So super grateful for how we grew up. I wouldn't have changed it, absolutely. One of our goals is so that our kids don't have to feel that. But I think as we have kids and we grow our own family,

it's going to be important to instill a lot of those things as well. Yeah. There's pros and cons to growing up with money and growing up without. 100%. But that immigrant mentality is hard to transfer. For sure. Absolutely. That's something we won't be able to give our kids, you know?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, our parents came here, like Eric said, with absolutely nothing, to the point where we don't even have a single family member that is blood related. They're kind of just like in the second cousins kind of thing in Canada in specific. We're actually sponsoring our first cousin in the Philippines to come hopefully next year. Nice. It'll be cool to have someone close. But the reason I bring that up is they didn't have any support other than family, friends per se, good friends.

And for that reason, they couldn't take any risks. They couldn't make any investments. All they were doing their entire life was trading their time for money. And it was admiring to see the hard work that they put in. But it was also humbling to see that, hey, we don't want that for ourselves. And that's kind of what led us down the journey of Amazon and the journey of entrepreneurship. Yeah.

So when did that journey in Amazon start? Were you in high school or college? We were looking into e-commerce. Honestly, throughout high school, we always had the entrepreneur bug. We used to do crazy things to make money. We would go down to the States. We would buy stuff at Ross Dress for Less. And we were big crazy things to make money. We would go down to the States. We would buy stuff at Ross Dress for Less. We were big skater boys back then.

We would buy all of the skater gear like DGK shirts, Etni shirts, things like that. Then we would flip it for a profit inside of the skate park. We would also buy chewing tobacco and sell that for profit because it was good money. In the States you would buy it? You can buy logs for dirt cheap.

In Canada, it's hard, especially younger people in high school, they can't get their hands on that stuff. So you buy a log for $20 and you sell a can for $20. You make about $80 in profit. And you're allowed to go over the border with it? My dad was someone that was willing to take that risk and we would hide it. We would hide it. That's enough.

We also did one of our famous ones And probably made us the most money Well number one there was flipping cars Like buying and fixing and then flipping cars Oh you guys know how to fix cars? Yeah we were big under the hood guys for sure A lot of our friends too It was just how we grew up But we did a thing called the Zabloans as well

Where we would lend out money to friends At like 100% interest Here's 100 bucks they give us 200 bucks What? Who's doing that? Believe it or not, it was the thing back in high school, man. Like everybody, I don't know why they needed the money at the end of it,

but everybody would come to us. Even people we didn't know. It was crazy. That's insane ROIs. Yeah, yeah. You don't get those these days. Nah, close. People are complaining about 10% these days.

100% is just another level. Yeah, yeah. So it started started the bug, the entrepreneurial bug started in high school. But we heard about Amazon when we were in second year of college, through another gentleman in the Vancouver area as well. He came in, he took a very similar career path to us per se. And what he was pretty much doing was, he went to school and studied business, he got a sales job, was making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. Then he started something on the side

because he knew that he wanted to stop trading his time for money, but instead have something that could pay him 24 seven. And Amazon FBA makes a lot of sense because they deal with all of the fulfillment for you. They deal with storing, fulfillment, returns, customer service. It makes it extremely easy,

especially in a sales job where you want to trade your time for money because the more time that you work, the more money you could potentially make. So we heard about it in 2017. And then we, you know, had a beautiful salary that was disguising itself as these golden handcuffs. And we got caught up in this corporate rat race. And we didn't get started. Yeah, we didn't get started until 2019 in specific and, you know, made a couple hundred thousand dollars that year. And we're like, we made all this money. We have all this money. We're still not happy. Why? And then we went back to what could we do while still working 10 hours plus per day? And Amazon FBA was,

was the clear answer. And at that time we tried a bunch of different things as well, all of the online business models and we'll get into the details there, but Amazon FBA was the clear breadwinner for us. And that's where we put all of our focus. Nice. You guys both dropped out of your work? Yeah.

Yeah. Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? Well, click the application link below in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below, and here's the episode, guys. Brian was actually on vacation when I quit. I was back at home,

and I'm like, I can't do another day. I was itching just to get out of there. And this was in the midst of and we were doing corporate recruitment sales. So you can imagine in the midst of that wasn't easy. Nobody was hiring anybody. It was all about just making conversation. It was, you know, we were, we were working from home. I actually liked working in the office in all honesty, but we were working from home. So like not having the office commodity that you typically have, the environment was just completely different. And it was, it was certainly very challenging. And at that same time, our Amazon businesses started completely taking off.

A lot of people in the Amazon space, some of their businesses didn't do as well during COVID. Ours, because our first brand was home storage and organization, everybody was at home. Everybody was buying things to make their house better and more unique and more spacious and whatnot. And we just started taking off. Once we started seeing the power of not being tied to anything and making more money, honestly, we were starting to make more money than we were getting from our corporate jobs.

We were like, heck, if I can spend 40 hours doing this every single week, I can make four times the amount that we're currently doing because we were spending five hours each every single week. That's not bad. Not bad at all. No. So so we did that took the plunge we both quit and started winning started going all in on it and

love that haven't looked back it's been amazing yeah dude I will say whenever I meet Amazon sellers they seem so happy so free

yeah like I went to an Amazon meetup like a year ago average revenue in the room was 5 million yep it was 200 people wow

and they all just seem so happy honestly yeah yeah again the Amazon FBA model in specific it's a beautiful thing was 5 million. Yep. It was 200 people. Wow. And they all just seem so happy, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Again, the Amazon FBA model in specific, it's a beautiful thing. I mean, you're leveraging a platform that has millions and millions of customers.

In fact, like over 300 million Prime users alone, let alone the people that come on that don't have Prime membership. So they're loyal. There are stats and facts out there that if someone sees a digital ad on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they'll most likely go to Amazon to see if it's available on there first, because

they're trusted on there. They can get it in two to three days instead of purchasing from that digital ad. So we took advantage of that. But the biggest thing is the fact that they deal with all of the overhead components. They deal with the warehouse workers. They deal with the actual fulfillment centers. They deal with fulfilling the actual orders to it. And on top of that, the returns in the customer service. So yeah, they deal with all of it. And that's why I actually, I think I read this in an article. They actually barely make money on Amazon. Yeah. Like most of their money comes from AWS. AWS. Yeah, exactly. Which is pretty wild because they're doing trillions of volume, right? Yeah. On Amazon. Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy to say the least. But with you guys, you're probably

able to make 20, 30%, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our average, so, you know, we have a few brands on Amazon right now, but collectively within them, last year it did 27%. Wow, that's solid. Which is solid.

And this year it's increased a lot more because we were focusing on more of the front end things. How could we decrease our cost of goods, which is a huge profit driver for us as well. Yeah. And I think this year we'll probably do about 32, 33% across the brands.

For e-commerce, that's really high. Yeah, really strong. Yeah, for sure. I don't think you could get those with dropshipping because you have to hire everyone for customer service, for fulfillment. Amazon, they do it all for you. Yeah, exactly. The one thing, we tried dropshipping and there was this one stint and we went like eight months, made about half a million in revenue. And the first couple of months we were caking in profit. And then by the end of it, we ended up taking home like less than 10 grand in profit.

And the reason why is I think with dropshipping, if you don't find a product that is sustainable, like you take advantage of the fads and the trends, they go up and they go down. If you don't know when to cut your losses and you get married to that product, that's when your profit starts to suffer and suffer. So the route, in my opinion, with dropshipping is you find a product and you find a product that you can build a brand around. So similar to what we do with Amazon FBA, but you do it through Shopify afterwards. You have to start purchasing the product, storing the product. But again, there's a lot more overhead with it for sure. Are you guys branding your own products on Amazon?

Yep. Oh, that's cool. So you're taking the extra step to build a brand out of it. I think that's what Amazon... I mean, there's a lot of people who go onto Amazon these days and you can still make a quick buck and sell something that's already selling, not do anything with it, but that's not what is going to be sustainable. I think nowadays it's, and with what we do at the FBA startup and all of our students that we coach is we really focus on them creating something unique and bringing something unique that solves a problem for, you know, customers. If I'm selling this product, well, can I be unique and stand out amongst all of the competitors out there? And if you can't,

then don't sell that product because you're going to eventually get swamped out through competition. Chinese sellers are going to come in and start cutting price and you just can't withstand it. So it's all about building a brand and launching products to a customer, solving a customer need. And then for Amazon, I think the secret to Amazon, and you probably heard this before as well, it's just launching more products. And if you can launch more products to the same customer. So we spent a lot of time like crafting out the brand archetype and who we're actually targeting or targeting personas. That's so important these days. A lot of people forget about that. And I think in the next six to 12 months, the people who are not doing that on Amazon are 100% going to start getting pushed under the rug and they're

going to stop selling because things are getting more expensive. Advertising is more challenging. More people want to sell. It's all about sustainability and creating a brand that actually means something these days yeah they'll separate you guys are you running paid ads or is it all organic yeah so we run amazon has a platform um just amazon ppc we don't do a lot of paid ads off of the platform we do organic content um that drives to our amazon listing and whatnot we've experimented a lot with paid advertising as well it depends on the the product. It's, you know, if there's an emotional attachment to it and you can, you know, go onto Facebook, I dictate Facebook as an emotional based market because you can really

sell something to somebody that doesn't think they need it because you can talk to their emotion. On Facebook? Yeah, exactly. You're like, you're scrolling like, oh my God, like I need that product. Where Amazon, the cool thing about Amazon is it's a search engine, right? I dictate that as an intent-based market, right? You're going onto Amazon. You said you bought a lot of things on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Well, okay, I need a new mic. I need a new stand for the mic. I'm going in, I'm typing the exact keyword I want. At that point, you know somebody's searching for it. And the cool thing with all the tools nowadays on Amazon or for Amazon,

you can dictate all of the traffic that is going to those keywords. It's now just a matter of how you get them to click your listing as opposed to everybody else. Yeah, that makes sense. They blend in their sponsored listings really naturally, honestly. Yeah, 100%. Like it's hard to even tell.

Yeah, yeah. It looks just like it. Are you guys doing anything with TikTok shop yet? I just bought some stuff off there like a few days ago. Yeah, so in Canada, we don't actually have access to TikTok shop. Oh, really? Yeah. It's not rolled out there yet, but I'm learning it. I'm spending the time to learn it and trying to figure out ways. I think it's as simple as, to be honest with you, getting someone in America to make your account for you and have them manage it. I think there's loopholes. And soon enough, I imagine in the new year, they're going to take advantage of it. But I have friends

that are doing TikTok shop and they know, they're doing millions of dollars per month and 70% of it is coming from TikTok. Yeah. They're crushing it. They're really trying to compete with Amazon. So I think that is by like in 2024, I think it's going to be the next big thing. We're launching a new brand that is going to be very UGC focused, meaning it's going to kill it on TikTok. And we need to implement TikTok shop for that for sure. Yeah. Seems like they've really cracked the code on like just shopping without like feeling bad about it. Yeah.

Like it's so natural. That's exactly it. It's like we're, you know, I think about customers, where are they spending their time and content? The cool thing with content these days is like, you can show so much more than looking at an Amazon listing and looking at images. Like you can show how the product is being used. You can show, you can ride a trend on TikTok and then, you know, filter in your product. And it looks super organic, right? It's like, how do we make it as easy as possible for people to buy?

And that's really what Amazon is. It's like, it's so easy now to go on Amazon. We order something in the morning and sometimes it's there at the end of the night. People want convenience. Same day. I live right next to one dude. I guess within four hours. It's crazy. You probably have someone just walk over from the warehouse and knock on your door. Dude, now they're using AI

to sort your orders. It's crazy. I think it's rolled out in certain states, but drones will start dropping off orders for you. Groceries, yeah. I get groceries in like two hours. It's actually nuts. Yeah. It's crazy. We are so spoiled. Yeah. A hundred percent. I think, I think did that to us, to be honest with you. I think our business blew up in, but I think that a lot of people were just traditionally accustomed to going into retail stores to purchase all of your goods.

But there is that inability to go into certain stores, right? And for that reason, Amazon blew up because of the fact that you can get stuff same day. Yeah. Right. So I think from a psychological standpoint, buyers just want more ease

and Amazon is the easiest platform to get purchases. Yeah. So how much, for people watching this, how much would you say they need to get started on average? Yeah. So we have students that start with like five grand.

I always like to recommend you start with like 10 grand at least to get started and up and running because I feel that the more money that you put in, the easier it's going to be. You can explore more ways to drive traffic. You can run more advertisements. But realistically, it's all dependent on your goal. Like what do you want to achieve? And then let's reverse engineer those numbers. And what it's going to take from an inventory standpoint. What is that product going to look like? What's the cost of goods going to look like? And you

know, it's all budgeting when it comes down to it. And you guys help them throughout that process. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. We spend a lot of, a lot of time there for sure. Honestly, like there's some people that come to us and they have a big budget, like 10 K, but a lot of, a lot of people, when it comes to business and entrepreneurship they're scared like a lot of people are in a corporate job they have a safety net they're like i just want to like make sure this works first so you know a big strategy that a lot of our students actually do even if they have a budget is they start small maybe they only order 50 or 100 units they go through the process there's a lot of little steps in and along the way that's important to understand.

So they want to just get like one under their belt, make sure they feel confident, make sure that, hey, this is actually legitimate. And once they get that belief, then they're like, okay, let's go place a 10 grand order or let's go place a five grand order. So some of our students start off with as low as a thousand bucks, sometimes 2000 bucks, just getting that small test order going, getting the belief, and then doubling down the second time around. Completely depends on the person at the end of the day. Nowadays for us, we don't launch products that most of our first orders

for new products are between 10 and 15 grand, sometimes even more with this new brand, Modern, that we're launching. It's much more. We've been going through so much testing to get brand modern that we're launching um it's much more we've been going through so much testing um to get the the quantities that we want yeah at the scale that we want we need to order a lot and and that's just the reality of it so so you guys are stacking credit card points yeah tons of points bro i haven't paid for travel and i don't know how long that's the best part about stacking points yeah flights hotels all comped yeah for sure comped. Yeah, for sure. You guys get it better out here, though. In Canada, we don't get a lot.

Oh, you don't get the Forex? You get the Forex on an Amex Platinum for marketing. We get 1.2. Oh, that's it? So they're pocketing the rest, Canada's? I don't know what it is with Canada. Like, our credit facilities aren't there. Damn.

The banks of Canada are not very strong. Yeah. Yeah, I heard U.S. is one of the best at loans. One of the best, 100%. To even give you some perspective, Amazon has a loan program. When they start to see some of your numbers and you're making them money, they're going to pitch on the platform directly on your dashboard.

Shopify does that too. Here's money. Do you want it? On Canada, they don't even have that because of our credit facilities. That actually saved me one time when I was on Shopify. They'll give you a lot of money. For sure, 100%. I mean, the interest is high, but granted, if your product's killing it,

like it's worth it. Yeah, it all comes down to planning. You know, we've leveraged line of credits on big orders to, you know, fulfill Q4, for example. And we know with the right planning and the right strategy that we're going to make that money back in 10 full

and be able to pay that off sooner than later. So were you guys ever underprepared for Q4? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Many times. You know, there's a couple of different things. We have like our home storage and organization brand is,

it's not a very Q4 brand. And we realized that after our first Q4 in it, there is a term in the Amazon space called giftable, right? So is your product giftable? And that's how you should prepare for it. The cool thing with all the tools these days is you can look at all the past data and make that decision. But us being naive, we're like, oh, man, like we're going to go double down and order all this inventory.

And the first time around, we were overstacked. Now, last year and the year before, we have another brand that is specifically in, it's like gift packaging supplies. So you can imagine it's crazy. Last year, we ran out of stock from basically all of our inventory and we ordered a lot, but we went hard. We went real hard. So that's tough because you're losing all that potential revenue. Yeah. Which is tough pill to swallow, but this year it's the matter of the correction. I think in business, it's all about learning, right? It's like, what works, what doesn't. I live by a philosophy and it's either you win or you learn. I love that.

And that scenario, we learned. So at the end of the day, I don't believe in failure, to be honest with you. Like if you can learn from something and implement your learnings into the next time you do it, I also don't believe in giving up

after the first time. So taking those learnings, bringing them into this scenario again, you will most likely be successful or at least have a better go at it compared to the first time. And these days there's probably AI that can help with inventory planning. Are you guys dabbling with any AI? Yeah, we do a ton of it. We actually hired, he's kind of like a silent in a way. When it comes to AI, he's just like this big nerd

and we hired him one-on-one. We've been working with him for the past six months and we pretty much crafted the entire Amazon process with prompts with him. Wow. So it's something that we haven't rolled out to our students just yet because we're firm believers of testing or creating, testing in our own brands, making sure everything's viable, and then rolling it out to students. Yeah, that's cool. So in the next year, yeah, we're going to be launching a 3.0 of our program. And that's going to be very AI-driven. And it cuts down the time by like 20, 30% at the bare minimum.

But on top of that, it gives you the insights that you don't typically see by looking at the current tools that are out there. Yeah. Some of the current tools can like predict revenues.

I saw how accurate are those though? Cause yeah, I'd say give or take 20 to 30%. Okay. Yeah. It's not bad. Yeah. I used to use Unicorn Smasher. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It would always fascinate me how they knew like, oh, that product does 100K a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to kind of give you some perspective, a lot of the tools out there, what they do is they base it off of like a three-month average

to kind of give some numbers. So a three-month average, and then some tools will look off of history, and then some will give you numbers based off of projections, based off of even annual data. So they're all different per se. And you kind of just look at them. At the end of it, having that data to look at helps you still make educated decisions. Yeah. Right. If you didn't have that data, you're kind of going in there blind. Yeah. So that's why

I think testing is such a huge component to it because when you start to test and you start to, you know, start off with a smaller inventory order and then you actually see what your product can do. Because sometimes those numbers can be subjective because you could have a great way that you're positioning your product. It's being attracted to a lot more customers compared to your competitors. And you could blow those numbers out of the water. So that first inventory order is really just this trial to be like, okay, I know what this product can do. What can this do for me on my next orders moving forward? That makes sense. How long does it take to rank on the first page? to be like, okay, I know what this product can do. What can this do for me on my next orders moving forward? That makes sense.

How long does it take to rank on the first page? We can get ranked within a seven-day period sometimes. Oh, really? Sometimes sooner. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer. I think you're going to put in a system, you're going to rank. And the whole goal around Amazon is trying to get as much, I look at Amazon as real estate, really.

It's like, how do I get here, here, here, here, here? And the more you have there, the more the system's going to work for you. So you can get ranked in seven days. We've had products where within a three-day period, it's been ranked as well. It's still about maintaining. When you start getting reviews, it becomes easier and easier. Nowadays, what we always say is the first 30 days is your opportunity to rank. There's a thing called the honeymoon period that everybody talks about in the Amazon world.

People say it's 30 days. People say it's 60 days, but it's your opportunity to prove to Amazon what you got as a seller, right? There's no history. You create your own future in that. So for us, even though we might get ranked to the first page for all of our keywords

in let's say two weeks, we're still going and trying to push as many units and as many sales and get as many keywords under our belt as we possibly can within the first two months, you know, 30, 60 days. And again, that's what paints the future for your product. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Have you guys ever left a review on a product? I actually haven't. I'm wondering. It's funny how that works because like Amazon is such a social proof driven market and we want to do our best to try and get as much reviews as possible, having different strategies in place. But the funny thing is I will never leave a positive review, but I'll always leave negative reviews. Oh, you're that guy?

Yeah. And it's weird how it works, but it's because we've got bitten in the ass with negative reviews. So maybe it's like this kind of like trauma that I have to pull into the market. But I think it's also helping buyers. Like sometimes I get products, I'm like, this is nothing. Like, and as an Amazon seller, like we do our,

like we put in so much time and effort into making sure what we say our product is, is exactly that. We're sampling the products. We're split testing all of our images to make sure the communication is all correct. And you get a product sometimes, you're like, oh man, this looks amazing.

And it's nothing like that. It's almost a service to buyers out there that you got to know what's going on here. That's so funny. That reminds me of those commercials back in the day, those 1-800 commercials. You remember those like moonsand products and all that stuff.

You would get it in the mail and it'd be terrible. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And that's what, and that's what, that's why I also think Amazon's a unique opportunity because if you do a bad job communicating what your product is, and this comes from like, Hey, you need to understand who your customer is. You need to understand what your product is going to do for that customer. And it goes back to that archetype and understanding their needs and their wants and desires. If you do a bad job doing that, then you are going to get flushed out. You're going to get negative reviews

and you probably won't even do a reorder. This is why I like essentially teaching people, especially in North America or the big five, let's call it, because they can take a philosophy and understand that where the people in China, they got the money,

but they'll go launch anything, anything within their product line. They'll launch it and they'll just like, they got the money, but they'll go launch anything, anything within their product line. They'll launch it and they'll just like spend a ton of money, but they're probably going to get terrible reviews and they get flushed out. But then again, they launch. Yeah. I see them pop up, but then I see the shipping time. I'm like, I'd rather just prime it for like five bucks extra. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Actually, I saw the cool thing with Amazon is they're, they're always changing and adapting to the market. And that's one of the biggest and most important things for anybody looking to get into Amazon. Like there's so many changes.

Like you can't just set it and forget it. The system is always going to be there. It's always going to work. But there's always something that you need to adapt. I saw recently that Amazon started taking down reviews because of, I can't remember the exact word, but it was a bad reviewer effectively. Oh, wow. So they're actually taking action. I know that there was like a big lawsuit

about their credibility on the reviews and whatnot. I did see that, yeah. People were like asking for reviews. Yeah, but that helps us because like there's times I can't imagine, like there's times where we get negative reviews and we're like, there is no way that this person

actually bought our product or this person is likely a competitor of some sort. And especially early stages, like we've had product launches not go as planned because it's going really well. And then we get a negative review and we're like, how is this even possible? Wow. So you could leave a review even if you didn't buy it? No, no. They likely had bought it, but it's like, what we always assume is that it was one of our competitors that was like sour that we were doing so well, taking a lot of their sales. Yeah. I feel like that's so easily, like you could easily do that to anyone.

Yeah. They need to figure out how to fix that, I guess. Yeah. A hundred percent. And they have taken some corrective actions. Like there's a, in your health dashboard, you can, you can actually message those bad reviewers and try to resolve the issue. Yeah.

If you're registered, if you're a registered brand, so you have a trademark, they give you access to communicate on those negative reviews. Sometimes like it's as simple as getting, you know, giving them a refund or sending them a replacement order and they'll change it. You can't ask them to change it, but you can take the right actions to assume that they would change it. But the ones that don't change it are most likely the ones that are malicious. Yeah. At that point, if you're getting a brand new product or a refund and you're still not changing it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That makes sense. So part of the game for sure. What are you guys working on next? We have a, I mean, so to kind of give some perspective, um, he deals with more of our digital service-based side of things.

And I'm, I'm, I call myself the brand builder. Um, and, uh, we're working on two new brands right now. I'm very bullish on the fact that, hey, I've learned Amazon once. I'm going to go and keep doing this continuously again and again. So we're launching a bath bomb brand. Nice. Specifically for men though. Okay.

I haven't seen that for men. Exactly. I go to Lush and I feel kind of weird. Like it's all girls. It's very feminine. That's exactly it. This bath bomb is, just think of the bath bomb as a vessel

to deliver actually supplements. So they're specifically for sleep. Baths already help a ton with sleep. They're very similar. You talked about saunas. They're very similar benefits to taking and going into the sauna. So we infuse these with supplements that aid sleep and they're just a vessel. Like if you put them in, let's say your partner was drawn a bath for you and she put in the bath bomb and then you came in, you went into the bath.

You wouldn't actually see anything in terms of a color change in the water oh wow yeah it's just a non-invasive bath bomb that's you know having good supplements in if you are uh coming through your skin yeah because your skin absorbs everything right yeah yeah there's no actual testing per se but like here it's that we've been building this for about a year now. We have done like five rounds of samples. We sent them out to hundreds of samplers as well. And we have like that amount of confidence from the people and ourselves that this

product works. Like if you throw yourself into a bath with this, you will have an amazing sleep. Dude, I'll try it. I love baths. We'll definitely send you some for sure. So we're launching that in, I would say February probably around that. February. Yeah. So really, launching that in, I would say February, probably around that. February. Yeah.

So really, really cool. And what Brian was talking about, like us actually going and understanding that this actually does well, like I'll come off of a bad sleep. For instance, I'll take a bath with our bath bomb and I'll look at my aura stats as my aura ring the night before that I had that bad sleep. And then going into the next sleep,

like I'll have an incredible sleep every single time. Like, I mean, 90% of the time, let's say there's never a hundred percent certainty, but the fact that you're tracking it is cool though. Cause it's not just like you're saying it, like you have some data to back it up. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Exactly. I mean, I would love to do a, you know, some form of case study or, or test, uh, in some capacity where we actually have like documentation with social proof, social proof. But that's a big focus. That's finally getting up and running and off the ground, like Eric said, in February. And then we have another project that we're working on.

We're in a mastermind. There's about 15 of us in that mastermind, and we're collectively building a brand. One thing I have found in the Amazon space is a lot of people are very unvocal about what they're doing. They like to be secretive. I noticed that. They never tell you their products.

They never tell you their products. They never tell you their products. But what we're doing is we're completely case studying everything. So we're launching a brand called Voyage. And it's going to be a travel-based brand specifically for people like ourselves, people that are on the go and they want travel efficiency without the headache of living out of their closets, for example. And we have literally documented every single step. It's completely backed by sponsors as well.

So we're utilizing your tools and things along those lines. And the goal there is really just to kind of break that myth of like, hey, stop being secretive about your product. But here are the strategies that we're taking in order to build a million dollar brand. And that's cool. That's also like that authenticity because dropshippers and Amazon people are so secretive.

Yeah. And it makes it tough to believe certain people. Yeah, yeah. And I think that kind of goes back to the fact that nowadays, if you take the time to build something that is an actual good product for a market, it doesn't matter. Somebody can come and try to copy you, but nobody's going to do it better than the person that started the trend. Yeah. Right? So you can take your time to build that out.

Like with Modern, which is the bath bomb brand, there's tons of people selling bath bombs. But the reason why we went specifically men is completely against the norm of, I think men are scared to say that they take baths because it's very feminine, right? Going into Lush, I go into Lush all the time. That's where I used to buy all my bath bombs. We had this idea like three, four years ago.

And it's like, who the hell is going to go do that? Nobody's as passionate about taking baths as Brian and I. Every time I talk about it, I get roasted. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, I mean, the personality you bring, the effort you take into launching products these days will go a really long way. And if you are, the cool thing with Amazon

is you can get started with a product that you're not passionate about. But as you get better, the goal is to start doing more of those passion projects like Modern. It's like we we now know like this is going to be a hundred million dollar brand hands down like i'm very confident in that because of what we are doing with it but how confident we are with our skill set as a whole so yeah that's awesome where can uh people find you guys yeah on any social media yeah the zab twins uh the zab twins on youtube tick tock um instagram and then you'll see our social handles yeah we'll link in the video yeah thanks

for coming on guys yeah absolutely appreciate it yeah great episode i'll see you guys tomorrow cool