The David Aladdin Show - Building Billion Dollar e-Commerce Companies, Amazon Private Label, FBA, Shopify, Woo, Retail Products - AmzSecrets

The David Aladdin Show - Building Billion Dollar e-Commerce Companies, Amazon Private Label, FBA, Shopify, Woo, Retail Products - AmzSecrets

By David Aladdin: A fan of The Amazing Seller, Amazon Private Label Podcast, FBA Seller, Amazon, Silent Sales Machine, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Scott Voelker and you.Business
Download on the App Store

The David Aladdin Show - Building Billion Dollar e-Commerce Companies, Amazon Private Label, FBA, Shopify, Woo, Retail Products - AmzSecrets episodes

  • AS 89: Inside Nejc operation, 140K Euros/Month – Learning from mistakes
    Today I’ve got  Nedjc Voraic on the show, Nejc is an entrepreneur who started learning selling on Amazon about 1,5 years ago. With help of the knowledge of his mentors, mastermind group and a lot of trial and error, he managed to build a serious business. The beauty of his philosophy is that he does not put much focus on conversion, ranking and listing optimization. He has now scaled to over 140.000 € a month, mostly from selling in Europe.



    In this episode you'll learn:

    * Mistakes Nedjc made and how he pivoted
    * How much he started with
    * How he has grown his business
    * How he scales his business
    * How to build an amazon business
    * Tools Nedjc uses
    * Mentors Nedjc uses
    * What worked for Nedjc and what didn't
    * His morning routines
    * His business strategy
    * How to source outside of China
    * Tricks and secrets Nejc uses

    And lots more. Transcript coming soon

    How to Contact Nedjc:


    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nejcvolaric

    15 min free Skype call where I share our methods 1 on 1 and answer your questions
    https://calendly.com/nejcvolaric/15min

    DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Nejc.

    NEJC VOLARIC: Oh, thank you, David. Thank you. I am really, really honored to be here. I have listened to your podcasts and I have learned a lot and now I have the privilege to be here, to be speaking to you and sharing my knowledge and thank you for having me.

    DAVID ALADDIN:         Welcome. Can you take us at the beginning before your online success, where did your journey begin?

    NEJC VOLARIC: Ah, before the online success? Okay, I can just share a little bit of my background. I have opened a company in 2002, this was after my college. I have a Bachelors Degree in Economics and a Masters Degree in Psychotherapy. I wanted to be a psychotherapist but then I've decided this is not for me and I opened a company and I became a professional photographer. I was shooting mostly weddings and with that business or a job I should say, I started developing a statistical analysis business who does statistical analysis for students and companies. And this was one and a half year ago or maybe a little bit more, I've decided I want to do something more internationally, because statistical analysis business is only for—

    DAVID ALADDIN:         Right.

    NEJC VOLARIC: Slovenia and that’s what I've discovered Amazon, it was a promotion for ASM course and I've seen the results of people who’re getting and I've decided I wanted to give it a try so I outsourced my statistical analysis business completely or hire employees that I've set up systems, and you know, I had a little bit of spare capital and after I outsourced it and set up systems for the business, I had a lot of free time and then the learning process began.

    DAVID ALADDIN:         Hm. So you went to school for Economics? Looks like that has helped you out a lot and you did the statistical analysis for 13 years, is that correct?

    NEJC VOLARIC: Oh, no, no, no… I did this, I mean my staff, my employees are still doing it.

    DAVID ALADDIN:         Hm.

    NEJC VOLARIC: But I've started this in 2013.

    DAVID ALADDIN:         How many employees do you have doing that business?

    NEJC VOLARIC: In that business I have three employees.

    DAVID ALADDIN:         Very cool. And so compared to the Amazon business that you currently have is it doing better? Worse? What’s that look like?

    NEJC VOLARIC: Oh no,
    56 min
  • AS 88: Inside the mind of Kevin King who’s pulled 3 Million so far selling on Amazon FBA
    Kevin has been an entrepreneur his entire life. It's been 30 years since he last received a paycheck from someone else. He has created, developed and guided hundreds of products from inception to market. In 2015, he started five private label brands on Amazon. Together those brands have grossed more than $3,000,000.00. His goal is to reach $4,000,000.00 per year on Amazon alone by the end of 2017.



    In this episode, you'll learn:

    How Kevin pulls 3 Million+ sales a year

    * How Kevin picks his products
    * Types of products Kevin has had success and failed with
    * What most sellers do and what not to do
    * How Kevin uses tools, strategies and knowledge to grow his business
    * How he is expanding outside of Amazon
    * Inner workings of his business, his execution and mindset
    * Why he has 5 brands
    * How he markets his products
    * What he did before selling on Amazon and e-Commerce
    * How he creates molds for products
    * How much he started with

    And much more! Stay tuned for transcript

    Notable notes:

    Link for how to add two products to cart:
    https://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/cart/add.html?ASIN.1=XXXXX&Quantity.1=1&ASIN.2=XXXXX&Quantity.2=1

    DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Kevin!

    KEVIN KING: Glad to be here, man!

    DAVID ALADDIN: Can you take us to the beginning before your first million, before Amazon? Where did it all begin?

    KEVIN KING: Well, like you said at intro there, I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. I think the last time I got a paycheck from someone I was like 17years old, and that was about thirty years ago. So, (inaudible) back when e-mail first started, so I’ve been involved in this for a long time running several different sites, e-commerce sites, fulfillment stuff. So, the Amazon stuff. I’ve been actually selling on Amazon for 12years. I was actually using Amazon almost like e-Bay in the beginning where I would just…I would be one of those high jackers.

    If I had something, some old DVD player, or something laying around the house that I was like just throwing it up on e-Bay, sometimes I would throw it up on Amazon, just jump on somebody’s listing and sold it as used. And then I’ve been also doing some wholesale to Amazon through the Amazon Advantage Program which is their program for DVDs, books and that kind of thing, and so audio tapes and stuff, it’s like a special program. So, I’ve been doing wholesale with them for almost 20years on a line of calendars that I do, it’s seasonal product.

    So, it’s almost like vendor central, but they issue purchase orders and then we ship them in. But then I started the private label stuff on Amazon in 2015 and like everybody else, I think I saw one of those AMS adds come across my e-mail. I was like "this looks interesting". So, I took a look at it, but…and then I said: “you know, I don’t need to take the course, I already kind of have this background, let me just jump right into it and do it”. And I started listening podcast and researching everything I could, and that’s where it went from there.

    DAVID ALADDIN: In 1997 you’ve started, kind of -ish?

    KEVIN KING: Yeah, ’95 I think it’s when I when I’ve sent my first e-mail. And I started my first selling online, first e-commerce sight, I think ’96/’97. It was in fact before there was a PayPal even, you know, people had to like…I think I used plug n pay or something back then. It’s still around today, but there were the first guys to actually take credit cards online. So, yeah, I go back. And I think Amazon was…I haven’t looked. I have daily withdraws on my Amazon account, so I am one of the…so, it’s an old school account, so I think maybe ’99 or 2000 probably is when I did my first Amazon stuff.
    59 min
  • AS 87: How I will save $40,000+/year by automating my customer service on Amazon, ebay, Walmart Jet and beyond.
    How I will save 40,000, by automating my customer service on Amazon, ebay, Walmart Jet and beyond.

    What’s up guys, today’s episode, episode 87, is on How I will save $40,000+ by automating the customer Service in my Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Jet, and website support tickets. Today’s episode brings a huge golden nugget so stay in.



    One of the hardest parts of running an e-commerce business is the customer support side. It’s not just a lot of work providing the best customer service possible, it takes a lot of the founders time, all the meanwhile you have to add more products, scale the marketing and grow to the moon.

    I believe, if it wasn’t for the AmzSecrets show, I wouldn’t have gone this far to force myself out of the trouble that I was in. I would wake up each day, spend 1-3 hours checking eBay, checking Amazon, checking facebook channel, and then checking my email inbox for my website.

    WHEW. It was a huge time waster in terms of founder energy. Every few months I would post in our facebook group, AmzSecrets.com/fb, how is everyone doing their customer support? And some people would say outsource, but not really go into detail.

    The problem with spending even 1 hour per day on customer service is you really don’t know how those hours would be spent differently if you otherwise had them. Before this episode, I had hot-keyed customer responses directly into my keyboard. It was pretty awesome. It saved 10 minutes per response, and gave the perfect response. It was pretty optimized, it was cool.

    And then recently I spoke to John Jonas, who has outsourced every task to 17 different virtual assistants, in episode 86.

    This really changed my perspective and evolved my business a major step further. I probably wouldn’t be spending time doing this podcast right now, if I hadn’t built out my customer support. I’d be answering tickets, and closing out those spam ticket responses.

    I started looking at FreshDesk…

    I created an account, setup my email forwarding, It was very solid, however I realized it still had one major issue:

    How do I have customer support answer questions everyday without giving them access to my account’s sensitive data?

    Now that is a golden question. And it took me over 10 months to figure out.

    Freshdesk was great, because it offered centralized support tickets. I could thus forward emails all to one spot, and freshdesk would create support tickets out of each one.

    The problem however was freshdesk was too general. It didn’t pull order information from Amazon or eBay. So I canceled my free trial of freshdesk and when onto querying e-commerce support desks, which led me to xSellco. And no this is  not a promotion of xSellco, or affiliated to them in any way.

    XSellco is pretty awesome, it pulls e-commerce data from both the e-commerce channels and aggregates them all into one spot. It’s like a freshdesk or helpdesk but for e-commerce.

    Now that I have pulled the order # per email coming in, and the customer address, I can now get a virtual assistant to assist per customer order.

    Now this led to the next part, and I really owe thanks and gratitude to John Jonas from episode 86, who mentioned to “create videos step by step on how you currently do customer service.”

    It takes a lot of upfront work, but after that it gets easier.

    Yes that is really time consuming. And a pain in the butt.  But once you get it done, you have opened 2-3 hours per day every day. You have also untied yourself from the desk of the computer to do the brain thinking part of your business.

    Once I had xSellco,
    19 min
  • AS 86: How to Outsource Better – John Jonas uses 17 Virtual Assistants to Grow His Kingdom – CEO of OnlineJobs.ph
    Today we're going learn how to outsource our businesses so we can take it to the next level. I’ve got  John Jonas on the show, He’s the CEO of OnlineJobs.ph, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers, with over 250,000 Filipino resumes and over 100,000 employers from around the world using it. He works about 17 hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working.



    What you'll learn:

    * How to outsource tedious, repetitive tasks
    * How John Jonas build his foundational framework to grow his businesses
    * Strategies and plans he executes on
    * How much it costs to outsource
    * The country he uses to outsource work
    * Why to outsource to the Philippines
    * What John worries about
    * What led him to outsourcing
    * How he has grown his company and only works 17 hours a week

    And much more!

    Contact John:
    http://onlinejobs.ph

    DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, John!

    JOHN JONAS: Yeah, thanks for having me!

    DAVID ALADDIN: So, can you take us to the beginning before your online successes, where did your journey begin?

    JOHN JONAS: I graduated from college in 2004 and I had a job out of school for ten months. And I am a terrible employee. My only goal at that time was to quit my job, that was all I wanted! Because my wife, we had our little boy, he was about a year old, and my wife would call me while I was at work and just…she would say: oh, you just missed what he did, and this was so cute! And I hated it! I hated being away! And then I…working the job for me it doesn’t work super well. Like when there’s not an incentive to do good work, if I don’t make more money for doing good work, then I just don’t do good work. So…

    DAVID ALADDIN: What job were you doing, if you don’t mind me asking?

    JOHN JONAS: So, I graduated from college in computer science. I was doing programming.

    DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool!

    JOHN JONAS: It was fine. It was fine, whatever!

    DAVID ALADDIN: So, that, you know, like… I went into engineering and I don’t do that anymore. And so, you know, those types of degrees take a lot of work and effort. Did you have any regrets going into college for all that and then just quitting?

    JOHN JONAS: No, I don’t, because it set me up really well. I don’t do any programming now. When I quit my job, I still did programming for myself. It just wasn’t…it wasn’t until I realized…it wasn’t until I learned I can hire someone else to do it for me for very, very reasonable cost, that I realized that programming doesn’t make money. Marketing and sales make money. And if you do programming, you can’t do marketing and sales. It just…programming is just too consuming to allow you to do other stuff.

    DAVID ALADDIN: It’s interesting that you said it because, you know, programming takes intense amount of time, and it’s not even…it doesn’t even lead up to the sale actually. And it seems like you figured that out right away, and you went straight to the sales. So, what sales did you go into?

    JOHN JONAS: So, I’ve been running online businesses since I quit my job. And the stuff that I was doing twelve years ago, it doesn’t work today.

    DAVID ALADDIN: What was that?

    JOHN JONAS: It was kind of giving out schemes that actually worked. And I didn’t get rich with it, but at least I saw. I started making money with it pretty quickly. It was building websites and getting them into Google, and getting them to the top of Google, and…

    DAVID ALADDIN: That was a big thing.

    JOHN JONAS: Yeah, it was.

    DAVID ALADDIN: Create a lot of neat sites and ranks for those keywords,
    48 min
  • AS 85: These CEOs are disrupting Amazon PPC by Fully Automating it – Prestozon
    Forget excel sheets! Ben, Chris, and Dana are Amazon sellers from San Francisco who got frustrated managing PPC by hand and set out to automate the whole process with Prestozon. The founders met at our last company which was a supply chain finance and einvoicing company targeting large enterprises. As the company grew we decided we wanted to be on a smaller team again and set out to sell on Amazon and use our software and data backgrounds to automate the process where possible. We launched our first product ASAP (and made a bunch of mistakes) so we wrote software to help us find a better product to launch. Once we started doing PPC for our products we were amazed nobody had a good solution for handling it, so we set out to write Prestozon to automate the whole process. We did this while Dana and I were traveling in Asia (China, Sri Lanka, Bali, and Thailand) and Europe and we're 100% bootstrapped.



    What you'll learn:

     

    * How Prestozon was founded
    * Why they started Prestozon
    * How to optimize your Amazon PPC
    * How to decrease Amazon ACOS
    * How to increase ad spend and profits
    * How to tweak product advertising settings
    * Techniques to improve your Amazon advertisements
    * Negative keywords and how they affect Amazon ppc

    And much more. Show notes coming shortly.

    Get in touch with Dana,Ben and Chris and learn more:
    http://prestozon.com
    https://www.facebook.com/prestozon/


    DAVID: Great to have you on the show, guys.

    BEN:    Thanks.

    CHRIS:  Thanks. Good to be here.

    DAVID: Can you guys take us in the beginning before Amazon, where did each of your journeys start?

    BEN:    We actually all met at the same company building Enterprise Finance Software and we wanted to do another kind of smaller thing and we all decided to get into Amazon FBA.

    DANA:            Yeah, we’ve all worked in software for most of our careers. All that you…

    CHRIS:            Yeah.

    DANA:            And we started in Amazon and then we then realized that Amazon software space is… there’s a lot of tools that weren’t available yet, so were like, all right, sound great. Like, we need these tools as sellers and we love building software so it’s kind of natural fit.

    CHRIS:            Actually, we started from a different perspective first, so in FBA. We actually have this idea, like we want to start it automating from the scratch, so we actually built a market analyzer to figure out like if we start like what would be the best products to go with and that was kind of like our first attempt. But then, pretty soon, after we’ve figured out that there are a lot of other steps in between too that have gaps in how the tools work right now over this availability to make it easier for you as a seller. So we basically just started working our way through that.

    DAVID: At this enterprise companies, I'm guessing it was a corporate sell company. How many employees were, was in that company?

    BEN:    Actually it was a start up. We… I joined when there were 60 people.

    CHRIS:            I joined when there were 30, but when we left it was…

    DANA:            Yeah.

    BEN:    200?

    CHRIS:            ... 250 or more?

    BEN:    Yes. It was still a small company but…

    DAVID: Right.

    DANA:            The Company’s name was Taulia and it’s enterprise because we built software for the largest companies in the world. So, Coca-Cola, like Home Depot, I don’t know.

    CHRIS:            Pfizer.

    DANA:            Pfizer.  So we built software to handle their financial electronic invoicing. Payment.
    54 min
  • AS 84: This Former IBM Employee Now Pulls 8 Figures Annually In E-Commerce – Bernie Thompson CEO of Plugable
    Bernie built an 8-figure electronics business, wrote the book "Flywheels and Feedback Loops: A Guide to Success for Amazon Private-Label Sellers", and released the tools he used to automate the building of his own brand on Amazon. These tools are available at efficientera.com



    In this episode, you'll learn:

    * How Bernie grew his team
    * When to add team members to your growing amazon business
    * When to buy and puchase more inventory
    * Critical decisions that led Bernie to where he is today
    * Payroll, accounting
    * Why he started his e-commerce company, and where he is taking it to
    * Hiring decisions
    * Inventory control and strategic advice
    * Where he see's the e-commerce space going
    * How he's up against massive corporations
    * His customer support is killer

    And much more!

    DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Bernie!

    BERNIE THOMPSON: Oh, thanks David! Glad to be on!

    DAVID ALADDIN: Can you take us to the beginning before pluggable, before everything? Where did your journey begin?

    BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, you know, actually, I have actually always been interested in technology, so, I got a computer science degree, worked at IBM in the 1990s, and worked at Microsoft in the 2000s, and started an electronics company in 2009 selling on Amazon. And that’s led to that being a pretty successful business and also we developed a lot of tools to make that business successful and now I’ve got a second business offering that tools to other Amazon sellers.

    DAVID ALADDIN: So, why did you decide to leave IBM and Microsoft in the first place?

    BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, yeah, you know, I think, you know, every job has its pros and cons. Actually, I love big companies. Big companies are cool. You know, you’ve got a big support structure around you. You know, at IBM I worked on OS2 which is an operating system that probably everybody’s forgotten about at this point. And at Microsoft I worked on tail end Windows NT and Windows 98, and worked on tail end Windows XP and Vista. So, you know, I was a cog in a pretty large machine, but I got…my stuff got seen by a lot of people. But I love small companies. Especially when small companies are successful there’s nothing that beats it in terms of good experience.

    DAVID ALADDIN: So, in 2009 you decided to quit and you started a startup that just started launching products on Amazon, is that before FBA was launched? I believe so, right?

    BERNIE THOMPSON: No, actually FBA had already kind of been opened up at that point. So, we were able to bet on FBA from day 1, which was a key part of it. You know, I really wanted to focus on the technology, on the customer support, and not have to think about the other things. You know, frankly I am terrible at sales marketing. And so, being able to, you know, kind of hand that off to Amazon and the significant part of the logistics which is something I had really no experience in physical goods. I am a software guy. So, being able to handle in most of that physical goods aspect to Amazon, you know, it was a big deal. I mean, it really enabled me to focus on what I was good at and that probably made the difference in terms of the business being successful.

    DAVID ALADDIN: And when you left your job, did you just put everything behind you and you just moved forward with the startup, and how much…how much capital did you have when you started the startup?

    BERNIE THOMPSON: Yeah, you know, electronics is a pretty brutal category. You know, if you are going to do anything interesting or you know, even kind of innovative a little bit, you need to have pretty high MOQs and the average price that you are paying is pretty high. So, yeah, I mean, you know,
    54 min
  • AS 83: The Battle for Dominance – Amazon vs Shopify vs FB – Interview w/ Jonathan Foltz
    Jonathan Foltz shared tons of golden nuggets. This is a definite listen for those who want to explode their business off the Amazon channel and diversify their business. He leverages the Facebook Advertising platform and pulls millions. I will probably be re-watching this a few times.

    He is a digital entrepreneur that has started 16 companies and does not intend on stopping.

    He has built a couple million dollar companies and his marketing agency, Digital Age Business, runs 4 separate Shopify stores of their own.

    As a philosopher and futurist, he has been speaking around the country about the new Digital Revolution that is upon us and how we can take advantage of it.


    In this episode, you'll learn:


    * How to create successful Facebook campaigns
    * Strategies that Jonathan leverages with Facebook Ads
    * The future of technology
    * Futurism & singularity discussion
    * Step by step Facebook strategies that work today
    * Testing Facebook campaigns and ad sets
    * How much money to spend when testing
    * What works better, video ads or image ads

    And much more. Transcript coming soon.

    Get in touch with Jonathan:
    Digital Frontiersmen

    DAVID ALADDIN:                Great to have you on the show, Jon.

    JONATHAN FOLTZ:   What’s going on, brother. How are you? How’s everything?

    DAVID ALADDIN:                Good. Good. Take us to the beginning before things got crazy. Where did your journey begin?

    JONATHAN FOLTZ:   Well, my journey definitely has been pretty crazy. But I think it first started off when I was a kid, you know, like I think when I was like 14-15 years old that was when entrepreneurship started to come into play. I was lucky enough that I got my father to buy us a computer that had like a CD burner in it, and what I was doing back in that day, just like a lot of kids were I just happen to be one of the first ones to do it. We’re making CDs for other people.

    We’re just like download stuff in the internet. At that time, obviously, it wasn’t the right thing to do but like, this was before everything started coming down. Kids didn’t know better. I was 14-15 years old, downloading music and then selling it to our friends for 5 – 10 bucks. Little CDs. And then I was selling baseball cards, basketball cards, and I had a little bit of success then. I had made one specific CD and I brought it to school, and I think this was around 9th grade or something like that, and I brought a boot bag full of CDs to the school and I literally sold out every single one.

    Very next day every single kid in school was like going after something that I did, and it showed me like that was my first step of like, man, you know, entrepreneurship is bad a**. You know, like I don’t have to rely upon my parents now for money. I can do this on my own. So that started the whole entire journey that I was on. So, that’s just one thing and as soon as I got in high school, I graduated at Palmetto High School which is the same high school that actually Amazon, what’s his name, Jeff Bezos do. Believe it or not, there’s a lot, it’s crazy because it makes me feel good too about the trajectory because we’ve had actually some incredible technological entrepreneurs come out of Palmetto High School.

    There have been a lot of them. So you know, that’s something like, man, that’s pretty amazing. Is it something in the water?

    DAVID ALADDIN:                What are they feeding you?

    JONATHAN FOLTZ:   What do they feed us, you know, like what the … is in those? There’s some nuclear water in the system or something, but yeah. Anyway, it’s just, it could also be coincidence at the end of the day,
    1 hr 8 min
  • AS 82: Selling Your Amazon FBA Business for Millions with MindBay
    Today I’ve got two invincible kings on the show – Wilson who is the founder of Mindbay, a specialized Amazon brokerage firm who has handled over 50 transactions in the last 3 years. Wilson has been an online entrepreneur for over 20 years and has operated an Amazon shop himself.

    Hameed Hemmat, also a partner in Mindbay, has a background in App development specifically with iOS apps. He sold his app business recently that he was running for 5 years. He also operates a successful eComm store in the indoor grow space.



    In this episode, you'll learn:

    * How to sell your Amazon FBA Business
    * How Mindbay sells Amazon and App businesses
    * When to sell your Amazon FBA Business
    * Why to sell your Amazon business
    * Best practices for selling your Amazon Business
    * Getting acquired
    * What you need to do before getting acquired
    * A very detailed step by step process that is involved

    And much more!

    Mindbay Exclusive - Free quote on your Amazon FBA Business
    http://amzsecrets.com/82

     

    DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, guys!

     

    HAMEED HEMMAT: Thank you for having us!

     

    WILSON: Thank you! Nice to meet you, Dave!

     

    DAVID ALADDIN: By the way, this is the first episode where we’ve had two guests on the show at the same time. Can you guys take us to the beginning before Mind Bay? Where did your journey begin?

     

    WILSON: Hameed, I’ll let you start there.

     

    HAMEED: Yeah, let’s see… Well, I started in the app business… I am going to get to how me and Wilson met… But I started in the app business about five years ago. This was during I guess you can call the gold rush of the risk-in era where anyone who’s somewhat familiar with app development started in 2011/2012. Me and a friend of mine, we partnered up, we built about seven portfolios, meaning seven developer portfolios with over 400apps. Just recently… The way I met Wilson actually was through a brokerage because I was looking to sell my business over the past year. And Wilson ended up buying my business, so…which ended working out great, and then we became really good friends. And then we saw, you know, I guess you can say a gap in the marketplace with brokerages. And no disrespect to the brokerages, I worked with these guys, they are great. But we just saw that we could offer a better service and help other business being able exit their businesses. So, we decided to partner up, plus we became good friends and that’s kind of how we got to where we are at today.

     

    DAVID ALADDIN: What about you, Wilson?

     

    WILSON: Okay, so yeah, my background…well, my educational background is in engineering, so I have a system based background. But my career really started to focus on entrepreneurship and so I’ve been involved in probably over fifty different businesses at different level ranging from the CEO of one billion dollar plus firm to a total startup. So, I’ve done a lot of different things. Really my strengths are really systems based implementation, so, picking a business and scaling it, specifically in the sectors of ecommerce, Software and also marketplaces. So this is kind of where I’ve dedicated my focus. Mind-Bay was founded because I realized at one point that in order to sort of find business opportunities. Building it was why I started it, but it was hard to do because I guess setup of any business takes time. So, I just decided that the best way to approach being a serial entrepreneur is to acquire the business. And what I did was I created Mind-Bay primarily as an acquisition for acquisition.
    54 min
  • AS 81: How Ed Kohler built a 7 Figure Amazon Wholesale Business
    Today I’ve got an invincible king on the show, coming live is Ed Kohler, who’s 43 years old  has been selling on Amazon for 3 years and is now doing 7 digit sales for more than a year.



    What you'll learn:

    * How Ed built his 7 figure amazon business
    * Channels he uses including one big golden nugget
    * How he expanded into office space
    * Multi-Channel Fulfilment
    * Wholesale strategies
    * Wholesale problems Ed faces
    * Predictions and analysis of Amazon landscape
    * Amazon wholesale strategies

    And much more!

    DAVID ALADDIN:    Great to have you on the show, Ed.

    ED KOHLER: Thanks, David.

    DAVID ALADDIN:    So, can you take us to the beginning before Amazon, where did your journey begin?

    ED KOHLER: Well, I guess as far as songs of our line it goes back quite a ways. That should have, I think I’ve set up for eBay at around 10 years ago, so I’ve sold stuff online for least that long. I think that’s a lot more tedious at that time because you’d have an auction closed and then you’d have to wait for a check to arrive in the mail, wait for the check to clear before you ship stuff out so that was pretty slow. But actually back then I also ran a small sporting goods software clothing company, where I’d sell stuff for a cross-country ski racers. I’m up in Minnesota. We have snow and so I built my first website around ’97 and actually I think I built it using the Aishima editing within Office ’97 which is tedious, but you know I learned something from that. But didn’t go into ecommerce in any larger way until recently. But it was still pretty fun at that time.

    DAVID ALADDIN:    Did you get like www.ski.com, or one of those crazy domain?

    ED KOHLER: That would have been awesome, but yeah, I somehow missed the land grab-on on domains. That would have been cool. But actually, the product I sold was pretty fun. It was called the hand, and it was wind proof jockstrap for cross country ski racers because when you’re skiing wearing lycra ski suits and it’s 10 degrees or colder outside, there can be some issues for guys. So this product was four fleece jockstrap. Basically they had like a soft flex shell on top of it so it cut down on the wind. So anyways, it was called the hand because it was black with a white handprint on the front of it. So it made it kind of fun. But I’d get emails from moms of high school cross country skiers saying, can you make this without the handprint on. Yeah, yeah. Of course the kids want it with, because it was cool.

    DAVID ALADDIN:    So how much did that like retail for?

    ED KOHLER: Like 17 bucks.

    DAVID ALADDIN:    Pretty good.

    ED KOHLER: Yeah.

    DAVID ALADDIN:    It was a one product website?

    ED KOHLER: Yeah.

    DAVID ALADDIN:    That how it started?

    ED KOHLER: Yeah. I’m creating a bra.  A sports bra called, The Hug.

    DAVID ALADDIN:    How did you get into that?

    ED KOHLER: So, well, when I was into cross country skiers this is like the product to have. And I…

    DAVID ALADDIN:    Oh.

    ED KOHLER: I don’t know. I have always been a little bit unto girls so I called up the guy that, who happen to create the product. He happens to live not too far from me. And I asked him if he wanted someone to be a rep for him because I travel around the country racing a lot. And he said, you know actually, I’d be pleased if you’d buy the company from me. I’ll just sell it to you if you’d like, because it started to come a little bit of a hassle for him so this is before things like [Inaudible] existed and so you’d have like the biggest holiday rushes like red roll on a holidays and so it’s like,
    1 hr 1 min
  • AS 80: How Brandon built two 6 figure monthly businesses, in under 2 years
    Coming live from StarBucks his name is Brandon Young,  who has not one, but two amazon businesses that pull over a million dollars yearly. He does cross platform, and is international. In advanced, our audio had some background noise and was not 100% perfect, but the amount of golden nuggets and insights in this episode is invaluable to all amazon sellers and e-commerce sellers.

     



     

    In this episode, you'll learn:

    * How to build brands into the future
    * How to scale your amazon business
    * How Brandon dealt with multiple amazon suspensions
    * How persistence is key
    * Strategies to selling on Amazon
    * Diversifying your Amazon business into Walmart, Wish, and Wholesale
    * Many of the ways about navigating an Amazon suspension
    * Confusion with Amazon suspensions
    * Our frustration with Amazon suspensions
    * Growing an Amazon Business to newer heights

    And lots more!

    DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Brandon!

    BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, thanks for having me, I appreciate it! It’s a little bit of an awkward day, because, you know, Fridays what I do is I take my son down to school in Miami and I usually work remotely down there, but today he had the day off because we have a few doctor appointments, so he’s hang out with me.

    DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool!

    BRANDON'S SON: Hi!

    DAVID ALADDIN: How is it going? So, you are live from Hollywood, Florida or Hollywood, California?

    BRANDON YOUNG: Hollywood, Florida!

    DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool! I am from Naples by the way. Can you take us to the beginning, before your first company? Where did your journey begin?

    BRANDON YOUNG: Well, I mean… So, for the few years before I started ecommerce and online, I was doing consulting for startups, so I would help people that had ideas formulate those ideas into viable businesses. So, a buddy of mine actually reached out, said that he wanted to get started with a business, leave his job. He had some job insecurity issues and told me that he was very interested in doing the Amazon thing. We had a couple of buddies that were doing Amazon and doing really well for, you know, previous year or two. And so, you know, the two of us started looking into it, I started doing some research and we would share some ideas back and forth. And they were doing retail arbitrage stuff.

    At that time I, you know, I was looking at more of a way to make it a sustainable business and scale it rather than, you know, doing retail arbitrage. Just simply because, to me, RA is more of a job than a business, if you are not out there sourcing and you are not home processing things, then you are, you know, you are not making money. And so, I started looking at wholesale, liquidation, private label. I realized that private labels are a little bit further down the growth curve, but we started pretty much with liquidation and, you know, finding some sources. We get a little bit of online retail arbitrage.

    We reached out to some brands. I used some of my previous contacts within the, you know, an industry that my parents had a business when I was growing up to reach directly out to manufactures and directly to suppliers and seeing whatever their own margins are. And so we started growing the business from there. So, that was about July of 2015.

    DAVID ALADDIN: Oh, very cool! So, two years into this, right?

    BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, not even two full years into it now. And at the time I was, you know, dating my now wife (poor Audio) actually from China. When we were looking at the private label side everyone was like: China, China, China! You know, to quote Trump, right? And so, we decided to start looking at what connection we could make there w...
    53 min

About The David Aladdin Show - Building Billion Dollar e-Commerce Companies, Amazon Private Label, FBA, Shopify, Woo, Retail Products - AmzSecrets

From the publisher's feed

We interviews top notch guests on his quest to build a billion dollar e-commerce business, Amazon Fba, private label, Woocommerce, Shopify, retail, private label bus