Amazon PPC, System and Growth Hacks with Ryan Rigney.mp4
Amazon PPC, System and Growth Hacks
Tomer [00:00:04] Welcome, guys, to another guest show that we have on our Sourcing Monster YouTube channel today, I’m very interesting to guess that I was speaking to him maybe like two or three years ago trying to, you know, trying to get help from him. So welcome Ryan from software boosts rooster.
He is a really veteran Amazon seller 8-figure seller with the Shopify, you know, stores as well. He was an attorney and that is now focusing on buying-building brands for other people and cooperating with other businesses to grow them and make them better. So, this would be very exciting talk. Welcome, Ryan. Why don’t you tell more about yourself? Who you are, where you from and what you’re focusing on right now.
Ryan [00:00:56] Hey, Tomer, thanks for having me. So, yeah, I’m an Amazon seller full time, but I didn’t start out like that; I was working as a corporate lawyer and kind of getting burnt out, tired of doing that, and I built a business on the side. Got that to a point where I could leave, you know, being a lawyer and put my license on pause and through that process of learning, like how to sell on Amazon and be successful scaling, you know, past 7 figures on Amazon and on my site.
Some people wanted some advice on how to do that, different strategies. I was working on so I coached a couple of people, had like a info course and all this stuff, which I don’t do anymore. Also released software to help Amazon sellers launch products, which is called Boost Rooster, which I’m still an owner of the mask behind me if that doesn’t make any sense to anybody watching.
Tomer [00:01:44] Yes I saw some of the ads with this Rooster so yeah
Ryan [00:01:49] Right yeah, memorable. So yeah, and where I’m at now is running my econ brand, which is a supplement brand and also getting into a company called Five Rock with a couple of other partners, which is a brand accelerator where we partner with brands that are mid-stage looking to exit and we help them scale to seven or even eight figure exits, as is the goal and what we’re working on.
We have a couple of brands we’re going to partner with the next few months here, and that’s really where most of my focus is right now. And also have a YouTube channel, too and I think that’s where Tommy and I recently connected and had this idea to get on a podcast.
Ryan [00:02:24] And thank you for doing this. I’m sure that many people will learn some new stuff and things that they can take, including like a PPC spreadsheet that we’ll talk about later. But I want to start more from the beginning. A little more about yourself if it’s OK. So you started as a lawyer, like what year you graduated? And like, are you like a real estate lawyer or what kind of like lawyer?
Ryan [00:02:51] Yeah. I think I think the graduation year is 2015 or 16, hard to remember the exact year. I didn’t do it for that long because I’m 33 years old, so I didn’t have like 15, 20 years of experience, but I went straight out of law school into corporate law. I worked in house for a pharmaceutical company, basically managing their contracts and research agreements and IP and stuff like that so.
It was also like pretty useful for negotiating contracts in ecom and like in business in general so it taught me quite a bit about that and how to negotiate. So it was helpful but yeah, I was very repetitive and not like something I could really scale and very time intense and boring, to be honest so I wanted something where I could find things I’m passionate about, you know, do marketing strategies to grow them and scale and really like seeing brands like grow. That’s something I like doing and contracts, not so much.
Tomer [00:03:45] So that’s good. Before law school, did you have any experience with digital marketing or anything like that or how did you get the idea to start like Amazon?
Ryan [00:03:55] Yeah, I did. Yeah, after I graduated high school, it was like, you know, 2006 was a long time ago, I did some affiliate marketing and stuff, made some content sites, experimented with some like gray slash black hat stuff back then. A lot of like CPA offers, if you’re familiar with what that is, like getting people to submit zip codes and things like that.
Yeah, pretty much paid for my undergrad degree with CPA Offer Submits, but it was very temporary. I was a good influx of cash temporarily and then it just completely died off and I had to find like something else to pay the bills. And I was pretty good at writing and I critical thinking and stuff, and I thought being a lawyer made sense. I thought the marketing thing wasn’t something I could do.
Tomer [00:04:39] And then you went to like to school and then like because you had these background like you thought about doing some other stuff. But why particularly like Amazon? Did you have any, you did like your research before you went into Amazon?
Ryan [00:04:56] it’s a good question. I was I was actually following Brian Daniel Moran back in 2007 or 8. And he was doing like content marketing and stuff, I learned some of that from him. And then one day, like a couple of years later, he had an email saying, I’m selling on Amazon. This is some opportunity I’m really pursuing and I never really had heard about that before, at that point when I started researching it and I kind of learned how to do it, you know, just by the way everybody does, like finding YouTube videos, finding blogs, reading his emails and just kind of trial and error over time.
There weren’t a lot of materials back then or even keyword tools for that matter; here was like none. And that’s kind of when I started figuring it out, and as time progressed, some new software came out. Things got a lot easier to make educated guesses, but also the competition gets higher when more people have access to that information and so it’s kind of a weird balancing of that, but that’s how I got into it. What about you? When did you start?
Tomer [00:05:53] So I started like 3 years ago, January 1st, 2018, that’s when my product landed in Amazon but prior to that, I was involved in the e-commerce like for 12 years. So I did have background with that; some things that they see with a lot of people in common that they look at other people so, for example, you would see someone that is selling for like, you hear those stories someone sells 14 months and exit for high 7 figure number.. And that’s usually not the full story. So usually people that have that like fast success, they usually have like a background behind them in what they do.
And I feel with what you said about affiliate marketing; those are the best marketing guys in the world. They have to be the best because they actually buy the traffic so people that come from affiliate marketing background, in my opinion, there are very good marketers and you can see that the transition to some other stuff they do and usually they’re very successful. So that’s really good, solid basis that you get because you do affiliate marketing. I also was doing some content websites, buying and flipping content websites before doing Amazon. But then it was a family business where I had the jewelry factory and then I decided to do something else before deciding on Amazon or some other adventures, I just did the research and like you said, and decided that Amazon will give me the best opportunity to scale it fast with, like, minimal operation.
Ryan [00:07:32] Yeah, yeah. Speaking on that, a lot of affiliate marketing, I feel like if you can.. it’s not a capital intense business, but you have to have a lot of strategy and execution. It’s really kind of hard to find different unique ways to get your links out there and find profitable ways to get to get referrals because they don’t pay you most the money, they keep a lot of it too. When you’re referring to somebody else’s business, unless you’re talking like Clickbank or something like that where you get like 75% of the commission and they get 25%; I did a lot of Clickbank back then too.
But selling things that you don’t really believe in to make money and it doesn’t feel good and it’s also I would notice when I stopped putting out effort, things just kind of gradually declined over time and I wanted to create products like that. I actually wanted to sell and I believed then that could be a more of a sustainable, like a flywheel system where people buy, they tell people and it grows on its own. I feel like I never thought I could do that with affiliate marketing.
Tomer [00:08:31] that’s true. Where do you see that that you know, you are kind of better and 2015-16 to start in Amazon were really like the good years because the competition wasn’t that big and it was quite easy to rank product. How you look at it from the perspective of doing business back then to today and maybe in the next, like the future of Amazon.
Ryan [00:08:54] Right. So, when I when I started back then, hard to believe, but people were saying that it was too late at that point to.
Tomer [00:09:03] They say it all the time
Ryan [00:09:04] They’ve been saying that forever, except maybe in 2012, when it was pretty hard to argue it was too late. Because I know a guy that started in 2011 or 12 and the first product he ever sold, he listed it and he started selling $10000 a day like day one. And then like the most competitive category, because you could pretty much launch anything and win back then. 2015, you had to have a little bit of strategy. There were a lot of gaps in the marketplace, like you could pretty much enter any market. And if you had some marketing background and creative eye, you could disrupt it.
Even if your product wasn’t really necessarily better, you can make it look better and you could turn on ads and you could take the market share. Now, you still have to do that. It’s not like the bar is ever going to lower, it just keeps going up. And you also have to find other creative ways to get people to find your products, I think. So either SEO out external or influencer track traffic or paid ads or a funnel or something, just I think you need to have at least one external source of customers coming in and you need to have everything right on Amazon if you’re going to, like, disrupt what’s already happening on Amazon and then the categories that are worth being in.
Tomer [00:10:14] So, you know, do you think that Amazon would become like the retail stores were like only the best of the top products will only be there, and people with actually with money could succeed there. Unlike even today, that with relatively low amount of money, you can be successful and start building yourself.
Speaker 2 [00:10:34] It could. I don’t think it’s going to be quite like retail because there’s always a there’s always a way to elevate what’s being done a little bit more and find it like a, you know, angle to come in and sometimes markets change too. With retail, there’s like contracts in place and you can’t like take somebody off the shelf and it’s a lot harder to do that. But on Amazon, it’s just algorithm based so it’s not based on somebody’s decision, it’s based on what you can do. So I don’t think it’s necessarily like apples to apples. Yeah.
Tomer [00:11:04] OK, now you said that before the call that you your plan is now building, you’re acquiring businesses with your partners and even at the beginning. Tell me more about this. Like, how did you start it? Did you exit some of your brands or were you using some other capital that you have to do this? How you started with this?
Ryan [00:11:26] Yeah, yeah. Getting initial traction is one of the hardest things in the space for me, I didn’t exit. I have my brand sort of running with my team in place, and I gradually scaled back my involvement as much as I could to where it’s just a couple of hours a week. Just check in meetings like two to three hours a week, and it can pretty much run itself and not die.
So when I get it to that point, I was like, “Okay, I can take on something else.” Getting to that point took a couple of years, though, so it’s not easy. My partners the CEO of the company that I’m with. He exited his brand in 2018, and his brand is called Caseology. It was the number two Amazon private label seller on the platform. Number one seller was Anchor and he exited that brand in 2018. So he has a lot of connections and I guess access to capital too and we’re raising we’re raising equity and debt for the company to fund things. And a lot of our value also just comes in like advising and consulting and growing the brand, too so it’s not just like we give you money, and that’s it. Like, there’s also.. we’re kind of like an agency to some extent where we take over a lot of the things that the brands don’t want to do and we let them do what they’re good at.
And then by doing that like that synergy of we’re really good at Amazon, we’re good at marketing, we’re going to ads are good at logistics. If they’re good at product, that’s like a good fit. They can keep doing the product and what they’re passionate about, and then we can raise awareness and get those things to rank and drive awareness. So that’s kind of how we got traction.
Tomer [00:12:56] That’s cool. I know that you also like focus on Shopify, do more like, well, what is the situation like you have like for your own brand and Shopify store that has a good percentage out of the sales or total revenue?
Ryan [00:13:15] Yeah, yeah. Well, for me personally, I started on Amazon. I did that for a couple of years without really focusing on anything else. So that still is majority. The ratio, I think it’s now like 15 or 20%, Shopify, the rest is Amazon. But when SKUs go down on Amazon and people go over, it’s really just like a preferred way for a lot of people that became aware of the brand to buy and have subscriptions to because it supplements.
So offsetting that balance is pretty hard in my case but I notice when I focus all my ad efforts on getting customers profitably on the site. And when I do that, the Amazon sales also go up and the rankings go up or they stay where they’re at. And as Amazon grows, the sales there continue to grow, too. So it’s really like finding consistent ways to get people to go over there and buy. That’s going to keep your ranks where they’re at over the long term, too.
Tomer [00:14:11] Do you have like a buy on Amazon button on your listing pages on Shopify, or you just don’t try to monetize it with them now?
Ryan [00:14:20] No, there are some tools, there’s some tools actually software tools coming out that help you do that and like put the Amazon link and link over there and put the Amazon referral tracking and all that. I don’t want to give people reasons to buy somewhere else and look at the competition. Keep it a closed ecosystem. They’re shopping my brand’s products, not everyone on Amazon. If I’m trying to acquire people, yeah, I’ll see. You can’t really track the ads on Amazon effectively.
Tomer [00:14:46] So yeah, that’s true. The distribution came, not now, but a year ago and evolving. And you have the brand, the referral program. So it’s gotten kind of better for sure, but it’s still not there. It’s not even close to what you can do on your own website with a pixel in all of that.
Ryan [00:15:06] One note on that, that’s kind of related. Google ads; If you’re driving Google ads to your site versus Amazon, if you drive a Google ad to Amazon, it’s going to be a much cheaper CPC because I don’t know authority score and click through rates of Amazon versus your site. People are more likely to click and it makes your costs go down. So you can use those brand referral links and get a 10% commission on those if you wanted to drive directly to Amazon. And kind of, that’s one easy way to use that brand referral link and also elevate your sales and keep your rankings high.
Tomer [00:15:41] Yeah, I just recently made a video about it, like sending external traffic using the brand control like that the attribution link and why they made the video. I downloaded the Brand referral report and I saw that the conditions that I get are actually covering for the PPC costs from Google ads, so it’s going to break even. And that’s fine because I’m not just getting those sales, it’s also helping me with the rankings.
Ryan [00:16:07] if you break even on that, like you’re winning.
Tomer [00:16:11] For sure, yeah, because it’s also not like I wasn’t updated. Yeah, but yeah, why don’t you tell us? I saw recently I think it was two or three months ago a video from you on your YouTube channel where you actually show a technique that helps you like looking back in a minute, create one keyword campaigns on Amazon PPC platform. Why don’t you say or explain why one keyword campaigns are good? I’m also a big believer that you get much more control and exposure doing or working with one keyword campaigns where they let you explain about the script and how people can get it if you can get it if you can share it.
Ryan [00:16:56] So the easiest way to set up a campaign is using the user interface and seller central, and you create a campaign, create an ad that, you know, add a couple dozen or a couple of hundred keywords and just like, let it rip; that’s going to tell Amazon like, they’re going to look at that. They’re going to say which keyword is most likely to get, get us some money consistently and they’re going to allocate spend there but there’s a lot of keywords, if you look at your reports that will get zero impressions over the entire course of the campaign, you could let that thing run five years and a lot of these keywords, they’ll never even give them a shot.
Once they find one that they want to allocate spend to, they’ll just do that. But if you do a one keyword campaign, you are guaranteed that they’re going to allocate spend there. The problem is, if you have 100 an exact match keywords for, say, like lavender essential oil like maybe you want to test a lot of the long tail keywords. And Amazon just isn’t giving them any impressions to do a single keyword campaign manually and create all those in the user interface that could take you hours to do might not even get any return from it.
But it’s something worth testing at least and trying because there are a long tail keywords that will get really good returns that Amazon never gives any spend to. So my tool, the script that I made what it does is in a Google Sheet, you can just upload the list of keywords that you want to create campaigns for, and it will create a bulk csv file that I think at CSV or Excel or whatever it is, the one that you upload to Amazon and it’s going to create all these campaigns for you, so when you upload, it saves you hours of work just by uploading. And if you see that those don’t work, you could go in the user interface or you could upload the bulk file and disable them, that gives you a lot of control over which where your spends going.
Tomer [00:18:38] Yeah, yeah. I guess the easiest way for people that are interested in getting this and learning more about this is that by just watching your video. So I’ll put a link to that video and the description for everyone that is interested, know after you create those campaigns, we all know that it’s all nice and cool, but their actual work starts after that after a few days. What is the optimization process for like 300 campaigns? How you actually manage this?
Ryan [00:19:06] Yes, yes. CSV Or using the user interface to sort by spend. So once you reach a certain amount of spend, if you don’t have the return, you’re looking for either decrease the beds or just turn it off. I have another entire hour long video on how to optimize with rules based on performance. That’s a whole other topic, but in general, like you set an ACoS course target of for a new campaign, maybe it’s like 50 percent.
And as long as you have 50 percent ACoS with a $10 spend, then you keep it running for a little bit longer but if it’s anything worse than that, just set a hard line and turn them off to stop the bleeding as soon as you can. So like, say, for example, you spent $10 and you had zero sales, you could keep testing that, but it could also spend 20, 30, 40 dollars with zero sales. And if you do this 100 times, it’s going to be very expensive. So just that what you’re comfortable with losing? And I’d say, like just kind of like what I said, if it’s $10 with zero sales, like you could turn that off or you go up to 20, it just kind of like risk tolerance.
And it depends how, how many clicks and how competitive your space is to like, I’m willing to gamble a couple thousand dollars like just to see what’s going to work too. And a lot of these keywords, you can check your reports, historic performance and maybe your auto campaigns or something will give you some insight into which keywords have worked. But it might make sense to separate those out into a single keyword campaign, too. So that that’s an easy way to start if you just want to start with things that have historically worked, great; see how that works. And then you could get more experimental.
Tomer [00:20:41] Do you add them as negatives in the other campaigns like the minimal targeting and auto campaigns?
Ryan [00:20:48] Yeah. Yeah. If you’re going to create the best practice to negative it, yeah.
Tomer [00:20:53] Yeah, so it doesn’t really compete with the others. Now you as someone that really touched like everything in the, you know, the related dramas on whether it’s PPC listing optimization, sourcing, all of that; what is the one of your strength or the area or category that you’re like shining and doing the best work and like more than other stuff?
Like for me, I love PPC; that’s something that is kind of what I need for like 12 years, and it’s natural for me, so I tend to focus on that but some people good with some AB testing and listing optimization, CRO those kind of things. But I’m curious to hear more about your favorite thing.
Ryan [00:21:36] I don’t do any sourcing, I haven’t for four years. I have team members that do that. So sourcing, logistics, shipping, I don’t want to touch it as soon as I could get rid of that and have it so I don’t run out of stock; predictably, I completely got out of that and let my team do that. Pay-per-click, I have that managed by somebody as well; I did do that myself and I do stay like I have a call every week with them just to kind of make sure that the strategies are aligned.
What I do best, I think, is overall brand vision and strategy for products that are coming out. That’s those are the decisions that have the biggest impact and scale the revenue of the business the most. And then I take those decisions and I say, you know, sourcing logistics team, go make this product design team design this ads team, those products coming out next month get the campaigns ready. Whoever’s running the external traffic, I say make a funnel page for this; creative team also go make some videos, go make some static. Cue it up. So planning like two or three months out and just telling people to do stuff that’s really just delegation and trying.
Yeah, because like, I’m pretty protective of my time and I’m just like, maybe once a month, I’ll like, look more seriously and be like, which product are we going to launch like next month or next quarter. How much budget do we have to do that. And then I just connect, connect the people and tell them, like, Go make it happen, and then I go back and I check in. So, yeah, that’s what I like doing that.
Tomer [00:23:10] That’s really interesting. And I feel that, you know, we share the same kind of principles in the way of thinking and correct me if I’m wrong but you’re like kind of a logic person, protect your time. This requires like which systems you delegate and I love it. That’s how I try to operate as well but how your day looks like, how you get decisions, how you decide to delegate, where you focus on these are things that not too many people are talking about. But in my opinion, that’s what are the things that set you up for success. Because once you have a good system that you can use other people resources and you could focus on the things that actually matter, but how you actually like, like building?
Ryan [00:23:51] Yeah, really good thing to learn, I’d say for anyone who wants to build like a large organization with systems as US system, you’re familiar with that entrepreneurial operating system and there’s a audible book you can listen to start and kind of figure out how it works. It’s called traction. I think that’s a good place to start. You don’t need to do everything that they say, but I think the big thing is like predictability and systems around meetings and accountability.
If you have a consistent meeting schedule and everybody shows up and they’re accountable for their better items that you need to follow their system, exactly. But I was doing something kind of similar to that system before I learned about it. And then I saw like, Oh, this is actually like something a lot of people have figured out and systematized, like a lot better than I could. And taking things from that and using it.
Yeah. So I think a lot of people that are in the startup phase where they’re kind of handling everything and they don’t have overhead to have a whole team like this might not make sense to fully implement this. But usually when you’re at the point we have like one or two people that you’re delegating stuff to, it’s probably a good idea to like, figure out how large organizations do it so you can scale it.
Tomer [00:25:01] Yeah. Yeah, I read the book and I, you know, part of the newsletters, I would like to follow their emails, but I didn’t really focus on, you know, really implementing the us system. I know they have been conference in Orlando, I think in a few months beginning of next year, so maybe a visit, then you know, you learn more about the US because you see, like, really like everyone that I talk with that.
Yeah, they are big believers in the US system. So that’s really like giving you a good base to scale and being organized in your life and your business, most importantly. What are your goals like where you are like trying to get in five years? Like, do you want to really build something awesome? Or just want to create, you know, a nice, comfortable life for yourself? What motivates you?
Ryan [00:25:53] Yeah. Well, for my supplement brand, like my goal was to kind of be the category leader and the few products we sell, it looks like we’re gradually getting closer and closer to that. But maybe we need to bring in somebody to acquire us at some point. I haven’t decided on that yet. I haven’t found the right person, so I’m just kind of letting that go as it is for four for five rock, which what we’re working on is, I think, five to seven brands per year that we want to partner with, at least to start.
And the goal is to kind of just be known as the company that can help people scale to exit a brand accelerator. And maybe we keep these brands in our portfolio, maybe we help them exit; it’s going to be kind of up to the founders and a lot of those cases. But really, yeah, actually building brands that are well-known and iconic, I guess, is the focus, not just we’re kind of talking before we started about a lot of the aggregator companies in the space just kind of buying whatever is out there because they have a lot of money. We want to build brands that actually have an impact and have longevity and staying power.
So, you know, I see some of these brands, like for sale, either through brokers are just being acquired that it’s like, you know, this blanket or something, it’s like no brand, no branding, really. It just happens to be ranking because it was one of the first ones there, like nobody knows about the brand. Like, how are you going to scale that? And what happens if somebody comes in with a cheaper price blanket that copies all your images and they have a big budget, like what’s going to happen to you? So I think like building brand awareness, building a company that has a system for building brands like, that’s my focus.
Tomer [00:27:34] That’s cool. And thank you for sharing this. You know, I you like when you mentioned that like five brands a year, that’s your plan to partner with. Do you guys just come and help them with your knowledge, or you also come and bring money to the table.
Ryan [00:27:52] Knowledge, capital operators. So, it’s kind of a combination of everything there. Each case is going to be different. Some people don’t need the capital as much as they need the operators. So, so yes, some of the brands like that we’re looking at. They are doing like four or five million already on Shopify, and they have no Amazon store and they don’t know what to do with like they’re talking with agencies that charge, you know, ten thousand a month to put the products on there and pretty much do no strategic work. And sometimes I see these listings that they put up and it’s like you basically have no chance of succeeding over there.
You have to take it seriously and like have people that actually have built from zero to seven figures plus on Amazon to know like how hard to push it. Where do you need to push which keywords to focus on? Which ad how to use the ad campaigns properly. It’s not just turn on a button and then send an email with a report every week. There’s more to it than that. So as an equity partner in these companies, we’re incentivized like with we have the same incentives as the brand to scale it. So bringing an operator strategy and that sort of thing, is it going to make a huge difference in all these cases.
Tomer [00:29:00] Yeah. I’m curious to hear from you in the future like how it goes because you know, a lot of times the partners have their own way of operating and then bringing people from outside. Usually, I’m not sure how you’re going to implement this, it will create these clashes and one guy think like that and one guy like the others. So I guess for you guys, you’re going to really pick the brands that you think that you can like, work together, but curious to know how it’s going to work and like in reality, you know?
Speaker 2 [00:29:35] Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely more to do with like the core values of the people and whether we feel like they’re open to our way of doing things too before we start. I think that you have have a really good point. It’s not just looking at like a email distribution list of revenue and picking somebody like that. It has to be alignment of core values like what their vision is for the brand and whether they see the value that we can add before we start.
Tomer [00:30:00] Yeah. So for sure, for sure. I have one more question because I like to keep the, you know, the interviews, they kind of not that long because people lose retention. You know, for people that are selling successfully, they have like two or three products and want to scale to the next level. What are your best advice to them as far as like their resources, like how much time that within the business and what will take them faster to become a seven or eight figure sellers?
Ryan [00:30:35] Two or three products. I mean, most of your time, I would say all of your time should be focused on figuring out ways to drive awareness to the one that’s getting most of the sales. If you have two or three products, it really depends on how your catalog is organized. Some people will launch three micro brands, or they’ll launch three products that are related or three products in different categories.
For me, I have 17 SKUs in my brand, but only about five or six of them drive like the majority of the traffic, and they’re all pretty much related to one or two types of product and the two products that are very popular they provide value to the same customer. So, identifying who your target customer is, what they’re already buying. Finding new products that you can launch that are related to what you’re already successful with or things of that customer wants. Instead of trying to mine Helium 10 or other Amazon softwares for new ideas like if you have something that’s working and you can take more market share there, like I would say, focus on ways you can do that maybe innovating more or investing in R&D, getting proprietary things to make a bigger moat around that market.
I just keep launching new variations related to what works and finding new angles at it to take more market share. Because I really have awareness there and it’s easier to launch something where you already have awareness than it is to enter a brand new market. And I found that out the hard way. I kept trying to make these things work and they’re still there, and I’m gradually killing off the ones that don’t produce a lot of return but then I was I found like about one or two that really work like, let’s invest in R&D and making new products that I really like provide value to that specific customer. And all your time needs to be focused on it until you get to a point where you can outsource or higher.
Tomer [00:32:22] What about like focusing also on like building like infrastructure with like SOPs and hiring more people before, like you launch more products and stuff like that? How did you do it? How early did you hire people like to help you?
Ryan [00:32:41] Logistics, I think a lot of the logistics work was like 60 to 70K a month, that’s when most of that was I wasn’t doing any more shipments at that point. You could do it sooner, but I was really like trying to make sure that we had the cash flow and like the order timing and lead times all kind of down. And that’s still a struggle as things change with COVID, of course but as far as like learning how to do this, like eos things I mentioned are good start finding a software to use to manage every body’s tasks is pretty good too. Like click up, I would suggest .
Tomer [00:33:18] you guys got Trello. It’s free and it works fine for me.
Ryan [00:33:24] Right clickup, also free. I think they’ve got a lot of features that Trello doesn’t, but you can. You can make Trello work too, even asana; I think asana is kind of clunky, clunky. But like clickup’s solid, if you guys haven’t picked one yet, I’d say I would recommend click up, trello’s good too though. For SOPs right so, how do you create those that scale? I find that Loom is really valuable. Like when I do something, I record a loom video. I put it in a word doc, and then I put like some steps or links and the word docs.
So it’s like a combination of a video and a doc. And it’s just like, this is the process for doing this and then you put it in and click pop or in a Google drive somewhere in that category. So, when you hire like a sourcing manager, you can just say, watch all these videos and we have like a weekly meeting; we can we can go over what you need to do and then eventually it becomes where they just are telling you what they’re doing and you’re just kind of keeping them moving. And you’re not actually like making the hard decisions yourself. Taking the mental strain off you, making the decisions is it’s hard to let go.
Tomer [00:34:32] That’s right.
Ryan [00:34:33] But as you as you build the systems and you can kind of like just let them make some decisions and have the final say at first, but then eventually they can make the decisions on their own.
Tomer [00:34:43] I know I said it’s the last question, but one more question. As a lawyer, did you ever use that to help be in your Amazon business? Because I always like thinking that I need to find like just a lawyer that would just sign and send like send letters to people to scare them out. But are you using this?
Ryan [00:35:05] I actually still hire all legal work out, I could do it myself, but I do like a sanity check on it. I don’t want to do the research to make sure I’m doing it right. I’d rather pay like a 1000, 2000 to write a letter. Just make sure like, you know, there’s a litigator behind that because I’m not going to litigate the case. I don’t want and I don’t want my name attached to it anyway, it’s less scary if the owner is writing it versus like a law firm. But that’s kind of the perception is like if I’m writing the letter, they think I don’t have a budget for legal and then they’re not as scared. But if I have budget for legal, they’re more scared.
Tomer [00:35:39] Yeah, that makes sense. That’s cool. Thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate you taking the time to really share your knowledge and your story. It’s inspiring, and I hope to connect with you in the future again and maybe you can come again as a guest. I’ll put links to the two videos you mentioned in the earlier in the description section. And for anyone who wants to learn more about you, what is your YouTube channel name?
Ryan [00:36:10] Ryan Rigney, R Y A N Rigney. And I’m not super active on there, but I have some PPC related videos might be interesting to people who want more on that. Yeah, I’m from way back. And also the boosterooster.com for the software, which is related to ranking and product and search. We have some trained things on there, too.
Tomer [00:36:30] Yeah, check it out if you’re interested. And thank you, Ryan. Again, I wish you success in your new company and your new partnerships that your guy is doing and in Q4 for your supplements brand. And thank you again.
Ryan [00:36:45] Thanks for having me. Great. Thanks. All right.