Post Purchase PRO Podcast - Episode Twenty Two - The Origin Story 2 Of 5

Post Purchase PRO - Profitable Email Marketing For Amazon Sellers

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This is the post purchase Pro podcast, episode 22.

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And our very first year we launched 90 products, did $3 million in sales on Amazon.

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Shawn Hart here, with Seth Stevens. Welcome to the Post purchase podcast.

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In this episode, we're going to continue the origin story.

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When Seth and I first began our Amazon careers, I guess you would call it, back in 2014 and January 2014.

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The first year, we had a lot of fun.

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It was a roller coaster ride ups and downs and all around, but we were able to launch 90 products in that first year of Amazon. Now, of course, as you know, not all products were successful.

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But what I really liked about our strategy back in 20 14 was that we had a wide diversification of product offerings and we would launch products, if you'll remember, until we found an obvious winner.

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Then we would build a brand around that winter using what we now call creative cloning, which is, You'll find out shortly, But it's how we would take a winter and expanded beyond, you know, to the point where we couldn't get any more low hanging fruit or easy sales. And then we will move on to another one.

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Yeah, in our very first year, we launched 90 products. I did $3 million in sales on Amazon now.

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Sean, when we talked to people over the years, it became kind of obvious that we did stuff backwards.

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And by backwards, I mean, like most sellers that we ran across would pick a product, spend a long time on packaging, spend a long time on branding. Spend the longtime on, ordering, manufacturing, negotiating all of that stuff. And then they would finally do a launch and see if what they had picked out was going to be received by the market.

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Where we kind of fell into it backwards was, we would pick a product and then launch it immediately just for a test and see if the product that we picked would sell in the market easily. And then if we found that it would, we would call it a winter, and then we would go back and do all that work that a lot of sellers spent a lot of time doing before they even launched. So we had an advantage that we didn't really know that we have that advantage early on, Sean. I mean, we would just find a winter, prove that it could be successful. And then go back and do all the branding work. So we did it backwards from most sellers. So knowing that we launched ...

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products in year one, well that doesn't really tell the whole story because like you said, Sean, we would only keep the ones that we deemed winners. And then we would build a brand around those winners. So, out of the 90 products, a lot of them we actually, you know, sold out, just quit selling almost immediately.

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But the core of it is test the product, find an opportunity, then build a brand around the opportunity shaan.

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Exactly, and you kinda hit the nail on the head there.

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Reminds me of, you know, whenever we would identify a hot market because of the product launch.

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For us, it was never, the product was just a means to find the market. Once we find a hot market and a niche on Amazon.

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Then we would use what I called earlier, creative cloning to take the product that was successful and clone that into multiple iterations. And I'll give you some examples, some of the items that we sold in the beginning set and let me know if you remember, some of these, Remember, the loop band bracelet, making kids where you would take actual tiny rubber bands and use allude to to make bracelets for your f